ThinkFlood Blog

I have always found it hard to buy presents for my parents. After all, they are a couple of decades ahead of me, and they have pretty much everything they want, right?

In fact, my parents even have a hard time buying presents for each other. My mother struggled for years to find a unique and interesting Christmas present for my father. The problem was, whenever he saw something that he wanted, he went ahead and bought it for himself. Growing up, it seemed that the only one who ever got anything from Santa was Dad.

I remember one year when my mother thought she had found him the perfect gift. This was about the time that some of the Midwestern meat packing houses began offering premium steaks through mail order. My father loves a good steak, so my mother ordered him a case of prime New York strips. Amazingly, a case arrived the next day. “What service!” she thought. Then she looked at the packing list and realized that my father had ordered the same thing for himself about a week earlier.

Anyway, for a long time I found it tough to play in this game. Then a couple of years ago I realized that there is something that I have that they want and cannot get for themselves: pictures of their grandchildren. I decided I would do more than send them a few prints every now and then. Instead, I went out and splurged on a few digital picture frames. I bought the biggest ones I could afford, and sent them to my parents and grandparents, along with SD memory cards full of pictures from the past year. I told them that going forward I would send them additional memory cards to plug in. If they wanted, they could also use the files off the cards to order prints.

Last year was my first chance to send them fresh memory cards. Since the cards are only about the size of postage stamps, I decided I would tape each one to the inside of a greeting card and include a note of explanation. Wanting to send something more, I also designed a wall calendar using family pictures and had copies professionally printed for each of them.

I was not worried that my parents would have a problem with the memory card, but my grandparents are well into their eighties, and I wanted to make sure that they knew what to do. So, when I called my grandmother in Florida to wish her a Merry Christmas, I asked if she had figured out how to view the pictures.

“Oh yes, the pictures are lovely, thank you.”

“Great – I’m glad you figured out how to put the memory card in the picture frame,” I sighed, relieved.

“What’s a memory card?” she asked.

After a little more discussion, I realized that she was referring to the pictures in the printed calendar. She had thrown out the memory card – in spite of the note, she had not realized what it was, and did not know how to use it. I learned how hard it is to explain these things over the phone.

In fact, the whole idea has not turned out to be what I first anticipated. In spite of my budget-busting Christmas a couple of years ago, the 7″ screens on those digital picture frames just don’t do the photos justice. And preparing the SD memory cards has turned out to be quite time consuming — at least a couple of hours of going through all of last year’s photos to pick out the good ones, and then as much as 10 minutes or more to copy them to each 1 GB card — even over USB 2.0. Of course there was the experience with my grandmother in Florida. And then I learned from my grandfather in Virginia that he has not even bothered to open the box, because his eyesight is so poor that a 7″ picture does not mean anything to him.

There’s got to be a better way, right? Alas, after much study I found that there isn’t – at least not yet. But it is coming. Like a rolling stone. Like a flood…

Do you have young kids? Do they like to draw? Do they draw a lot? Here’s an idea: scan their drawings into your computer and then play them back on a digital picture frame.

Our oldest daughter is seven, and when she sets her mind to it, she churns out a new drawing every couple of minutes. The paper piles up fast. Sometimes, it reminds me of the piles of newspapers we used to keep in the corner of our dorm in college — the ones for which the school fire marshals used to fine us whenever they came around for an inspection.

My wife does not like clutter (bless her soul). I knew this long before we got married, so I guess I should not have been surprised when one day I discovered that she was going around after our children and throwing their drawings in the trash.

“Wait — how will we remember what they did? How they improved?” I agonized.

“Well, we can’t keep all this,” she replied, holding up a half-inch thick stack of paper.

She was right, of course, we couldn’t keep all that paper. But I was right, too. If we threw it away, there would be no record of their progress, no opportunity to embarrass them on prom nights by dragging out books full of their artwork to show to their dates.

Then we hit upon an idea: why not scan the pictures and save them to disk? Then we could trash the originals, but we would still have a record of their work.

We had just bought one of those multifunction printers – the kind with the built-in fax machine/scanner/copier. The sheet feeder on top made it easy to scan in several drawings at once – just smooth out the pages, drop a stack on the scanner, hit the button, and come back in a half hour to save them all. Storing in JPEG format made it easy to import them to our photo organizer, where we could manage them right alongside our digital pictures.

Soon, we had the kids trained to deposit all of their drawings on top of the scanner – no more need for us to clean up. About once a week I take the pile and scan them, and then I recycle the originals. Perhaps one of the best things is that the files go onto the computer with a timestamp, so as long as I keep relatively current with the scanning, we have a general idea of when each drawing was done – something we would not have with paper copies unless we went to a lot of extra trouble to label them. And given the price of hard disks today (~$0.50 per gigabyte), storage costs about one hundredth of a cent per drawing – less than the cost of paper.

We had been going like this for a couple of months when, one day, our son discovered that we were throwing away his pictures. He was visibly hurt. “Wait a minute,” I said. Opening up the photo organizer, I quickly located a copy of the picture he had found in the recycle bin, and pulled it up on the screen for him. It was a lion he had imagined in a cage at the circus. Then I showed him a few other drawings that he had made – older ones that he had forgotten. Soon, his sisters were over at the computer and we were flipping through all of their artwork – and they were having a blast. No one ever worried about us throwing away their pictures again.

What’s in a name?

Juliet may wish away the significance that we tie to names, but Shakespeare does not comply. By the end of the play, both she and her lover are dead – and looking back on this verse, we can only wonder if it is because they have the wrong surnames.

That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Would it really? If we renamed them “skunk flowers” (though I think that one is already taken), would they be nearly as romantic? Would we perceive the smell as we do today? Marketers say no, software engineers say yes. I’ve worked as both, so I guess I’m just confused.

Here’s one for the software engineers out there to consider: through their seminal book Design Patterns, Gamma et al described a set of software patterns and subsequently triggered a mini-revolution in object oriented design. However, by their own admission many of these patterns were not new. What seems to matter most is that they introduced names for the patterns – giving us a common language for identifying and discussing different approaches to solving problems with software.

(BTW, the authors of Design Patterns have somehow earned the title of “Gang of Four.” But, being first a student of East Asian history and only later coming to software development, I have a hard time with this name. To me, the “Gang of Four” will always be the four communist party cadres blamed for the woes of China’s Cultural Revolution.)

Okay, so maybe names matter. Why, then, did we name our company after a natural disaster?

Actually, we have something else in mind. The concept we are driving for is more about the flood of memories we have when we see a picture, or the flood of thoughts that comes to us when we are exposed to a novel way of doing things. In our name, we want to capture that overwhelming moment of inspiration that rushes over us when we experience something new and exciting for the first time. We want to capture this moment, and infuse our products with it. In other words, our products are about enlivening and experiencing memories, and about a new, elegant way of doing so.

Of course it helps that the domain name was available. And that ThinkFlood is easy to pronounce, to spell and to type. (Which makes me wonder – why are so many company names so hard to figure out?)