Month: June 2019

Music

Zep’s Immigrant Song and D-Day

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It’s been bugging me for a while, so I’ll just say it… I think Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song is about Operation Overload, the 1944 allied invasion of Normandy — the beginning of the end of World War 2.

At first glance, this song seems like it’s just about Vikings discovering Canada, or about Iceland, or maybe Thor. But that’s just an obvious conclusion from the opening line, “We come from the land of the ice and snow.”

This song is about a mighty sea-bound army bringing “peace and trust” to a green land of fields, calming the war, and rebuilding. And the clincher is that they say “We are your overlords.” Come on! This is 1944 France, people!

How soft your fields so green
Can whisper tales of gore
Of how we calmed the tides of war
We are your overlords


On we sweep with threshing oar
Our only goal will be the western shore


So now you’d better stop and rebuild all your ruins
For peace and trust can win the day despite of all your losing

Well done on a historical rock epic that covers a lot of territory in just over two minutes, Zep. 👍

You

Under Pressure

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The Savvy Psychologist, one of my favorite podcasts, recently posted a great episode on performance anxiety.

👉 Savvy Psychologist: 3 Secrets to Beat Performance Anxiety

As always, she keeps it simple, concise, and practical.

  1. Get excited to create a feeling of opportunity
  2. Use a ritual to ground yourself and help with focus
  3. Practice self-affirmation

As a bonus, I also came across this one in my Medium feed.

👉 6 Science-Backed Strategies to Avoid Choking Under Pressure

I might be imagining this, but I think this one only has five techniques. 🤦🏻‍♂️. And they seem to focus mostly on positive thinking. And they overlap a bit.

  1. Don’t think too hard
  2. Practice under pressure
  3. Pretend like you’ve already won
  4. Tell yourself that you’re in control
  5. Give yourself a pep talk

Kind of a muddled article. If nothing else, it helps me appreciate the Savvy Psychologist!

Software Dev

Anxious Offline

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I make apps for a living. And one of the things that annoys me most is when an app just can’t handle being offline. It needs to be connected or else it acts unhappy or sick. I love apps that are offline first and silently sync with the network whenever they can. Some examples are Things, 1Password, or the stock iOS Calendar app. I know it isn’t always possible for an app to work offline. You can’t have all the movies on your device, after all. But a non-anxious offline app is a worthy goal that we app developers often forget about as we work through the endless details of making something work at all.

👉 My Apps Have an Anxiety Problem

Above is a great article kind of about offline apps. It’s not a UX article and not a software development article. But it does give a very human-centered perspective on “offline mode” and why it can be so agitating when it’s half-baked or too needy. 😆

My favorite quote from the article…

We often speculate the end of computing looks like an all-knowing orb or a Skynet spawning android super-soldiers to murder us. But maybe it just looks like a beachball that never stops spinning, never lets us open our apps because they are always fetching the latest data. Wouldn’t that be funny?