A Guy's Guide to Pinterest

In recent months Pinterest has blown up as the new social media space with some uninformed tech journalists going as far as calling it the new Facebook. That is an overstatement but it is an interesting new Social Media space. This article isn't an introduction to Pinterest per say, there are plenty of those around, but I will just say, if you haven't tried Pinterest out it is worth a visit. Pinterest is your categorize-able, mood-board. If you see something you like on the web; you pin it and an image, your description and a link to the source is added to your board. It's that simple.

But Pinterest does have a reputation as girly hangout. I don't think anyone really knows and that people are guessing but you read pundits saying that 87% of active users are women. At first blush this statistic could be believable. Certainly the most popular pins do feature a disproportionately large number of interior design, sappy wedding and child photography, hair and nail styles, outfit and shoe options, too-cute-pets, recipes, diet tips, Ryan Gosling portraits, platitudes in text, book storage havens, etc. If you're a guy, don't let this put you off. There is plenty at Pinterest for you too.

Since when has making lists for fun being a predominantly female activity? Men grow up making lists (ref "High Fidelity"). "What is your top five dream cars?" "I really like that album but it isn't in my top 10. Top 50, maybe." When I grew up the Top Trumps card games were a huge craze in the playground among boys. You had to remember huge lists of esoteric facts about super-cars or footballers to be able to be able to win. Can't you boil sports down to huge lists of stats? Isn't fantasy football just pitting one man's list against another's? Don't men out number women with Asperger Syndrome 4 to 1? It's men who catalog their record, CD, comic collections - women have better things to do (like hanging out on Pinterest).

Companies are springing up trying to be the Pinterest for men (Manteresting and Gentlemint). Do we really need our own man cave for creating mood-boards? Some forum with a "Smelly Girls Keep Out!" sign on the club house door? Wasn't this just about any forum on any subject a decade ago? I'm not sure I want to go back to the internet that smelt like a men's locker room so I'm no hurry to leave Pinterest for an all male preserve. Pinterest is the market leader with the best features and the most traffic so why go off into some male ghetto? 

If you have slightly OCD tendencies Pinterest may be your idea of heaven, be you male or female. If you are male and find Pinterest appealing what might you use it for? Any of the previously mentioned male lists would be at home on Pinterest: your favorite album covers, sports personalities, movie posters etc. Personally I find Pinterest a great way to collect things with out bringing more crap into the house. Last week, for example, I went on a nostalgia trip remembering my childhood in the late 70's early 80's (yes, I am old, thanks for asking.) I stumbled upon toys, candy, TV shows, music, etc from those days and I created a board to store it all of course. This board may be uninteresting to anyone but me or maybe other 40-something Brits but now, when I want to stroll down memory lane, all this stuff is in one place. In the past I might have gone on a spending binge trying to find a Six Million Dollar Man doll on eBay, candy from the time at some specialty store and horrible music I won't actually listen to again from iTunes. Pinterest let me indulge in nostalgia without the cost or clutter and it allowed me to share some strange stuff from my childhood with my wife. In the future, when someone kick-starts my failing memory with a "Do you remember ....?" I'll have a place to store that if I want to.

In a more obvious vein, I don't lust after clothes or storage solutions in the way many Pinterest users seem to but I have an obsession with cars and guitars. Pinterest allows me to collect rare guitars like a rock star and to stock my fantasy garage like a CEO. 

But the boards you create don't have to be about things you aspire to or want. Continuing with my petrol-head tendencies I created a board of the worst cars ever made. Not only does it counterpoint my fantasy garage nicely but where would I store this list otherwise? Here on my blog perhaps? Maybe, but Pinterest boards become a living document rather than a static list. You can leave them for a awhile and them come back and add to them when inspiration strikes. You can leave them for a awhile and them come back and add to them when inspiration strikes. Creating boards is so easy, if while I'm nerding out, creating my list of the Greatest Fictional Spacecraft, I come across the inspiration to start a list of Iconic Movie Props it is the work of a little extra tying and a click.

'Isn't Pinterest about community?' I hear you ask. Where do you go to find other dudes on Pinterest? There are the obvious places like the Cars and Motorcycles, Sports and Geek sections among others. There are various people who have curated lists of men to follow on Pinterest (Sean Percival, Joe, etc). Beyond that you just have to keep you eyes open for stuff that interests you. Try to search for boards, people or pins tagged with a subject you're interested in. When you find good boards, follow them. When you find pins you like, take a moment to comment. 

I was never any good at the whole 'popular' thing in High School so it should be no surprise that I am the wrong person to ask about playing this game on Social Media sites. There are plenty of articles telling you how to get more followers on Pinterest: this isn't one of them. I follow boards rather than people that I find interesting. The problem with following a person is whenever they create a new board you will automatically be following it weather it is of interest to you or not (often not). I only follow people I actually know because they will be pissed at me otherwise. I don't repin things very often but I tend to find my own content while I'm out and about on the web. 

Other technicalities about pinning that I've noticed: 

• If you pin three new cars to your fantasy car garage at one only the first one is likely to be see in the Cars and Motorcycles section. When you don't many followers getting pins into those sections is the only way you will get more eyes on your pins. 
• Portrait ratio photos get more physical space than landscape one. Bigger images have more impact. Tall, skinny images will get the most physical space (hence those really long, skinny graphics people are making and posting (spamming) specifically for Pinterest. When you are looking for an image to pin on a subject try to find a portrait ratio image though.
• Pinterest isn't purely visual: you do get chance to write something about your pin. This is your chance to express yourself. I find pins without a personal comment dull: I want to know what the thing is and why a person pinned it.

Curation may be the next artistic activity that has been democratized. Previously you had to be a magazine editor or art gallery manager to have this kind of power. Of course, these professionals are still going to have more influence and have a greater effect that you but Pinterest does give you a taste of this kind of task. I definitely have pride of ownership of my boards. I do feel like they partly describe who I am. Curation is not the exclusive preserve of women so I am encouraging you, especially if you are a guy, to get out there and to start pinning.

Links

• 6 Ways Video and Filmmakers Can Use Pinterest
• A Guy's Guide to Pinterest
• Searching Pinterest for guy things returns a mixed bag
• Is Pinterest a man-free zone?
• Pinterest and Men: The less fair sex is alive and (starting to) pin
• Men are from Google+, Women are from Pinretest
• Hello from 'The Only Guy on Pinterest'
• The Bro's Guide to Pinterest

Real Geeks Don't Read Dwell

Like a lot of geeks (but not all) I love good design. That I'm a sucker for well designed tech goes without saying; the iPad, the Fuji X100, La Clie Hard-drive Cases all float my boat. But outside of tech, Fender Stratocasters, Pininfarina cars and Eames furniture are also a turn on. I want to live a Jetson-esque house that Architectural Digest want to feature, to wit, I read a few interior design blogs for inspiration and also for the voyeuristic thrill of seeing how other people live.

Which is how I came to read this article: 10 Steps to a Home Office You'll Love. Let me give you the executive summary: hide all your tech and buy expensive, designer office furniture. In other words, if you're a geek, be ashamed, send your toys and action figures to Goodwill, and compromise what you need to work and create so that some architect wannabee in stupid glasses will approve of your work-space.

We take it as read that the iMac looks amazing in the Apple collateral when it is photographed in a staged office that is devoid of cables, peripherals, paper or anything personal. When we get it home, if you're anything more than the most casual of users, it doesn't look nearly as clinically clean once you get it connected to the network, and hooked up to a couple of backup drives, and connected to a second monitor, and your Wacom tablet. If you're a digital creative these things are not tech clutter you can just hide away; they are daily necessities you need to work.

When you dive deeper into digital multimedia creation there are other things you can't live without that are hard to sweep under the designer carpet. If you're into music creation (as I am) and you don't live in the elite world where you can afford to have a dedicated studio, there are mixers, microphones, keyboards, guitars and rack mounted effects. If you have to hide these things away in the closet after every session to maintain some zen ideal of what your work space should look like, the next time inspiration strikes, you face so much setup and breakdown time the barrier to starting creating is too high. If these things are setup and to-hand, when inspiration strikes it's a simple matter of flipping a few switches to get from the point of inspiration to getting that idea recorded.

Likewise, if you podcast or make videos and you don't have a dedicated studio, with all your equipment broken down in the garage how much more motivation do you need to create your next episode or masterpiece if there's all that setup to go through before you can even start to create?

Real geeks also need more than one computer. What are you going to do while your code is compiling or your video is rendering on your main work station if you don't have another machine to work on? Real geeks don't use laptops as their main workstations: laptops are great but we need the power and flexibility only a tower provides and when was the last time you saw a hulking tower workstation in any of the offices featured as role models on Apartment Therapy? For real geeks technology isn't static - we are constantly switching in and out hardware; cycling external hard drives; changing out network hardware; bringing a new laptop into the room for testing or review. Real geeks keep their cables tidy but accessible and that doesn't mean hog-tied to the back of a cabinet you can't get to without a flashlight, crawling on the floor and banging your head on furniture.

This is one geek who has had enough of trying to live up to some Hollywood interior designer's idea of what my work space should look like. To do so is to deny my geekness and inhibits the creative process. There are no action figures anywhere else in the house other than in my office. I still need some very uncool looking paper manuals to get some tasks done. I love my Nerf gun and I need a guitar close at hand to bang out some frustration on. I need the speed and reliability of a wired network and if the router and network switch are in  the basement how can I read the status lights when something periodically goes wrong?

I'm tired of apologizing for my man-cave. We keep the rest of the house pretty grown-up and tidy so I'm going to put a sign on my office door: "Interior Designers: Keep Out!"

In Paise of the Cheap, Black, Plastic G-Shock

I have a confession to make: I used to be something of a watch snob. That's not so unusual for a guy as we only really get to wear one piece of 'jewelry'. I love mechanical, military style watches which are pretty understated and the opposite of hip-hop bling but the good, collectible ones can be pricey nonetheless. I have one or two nice watches that I like to wear for special occasions but even these ostensibly utilitarian timepieces require some care and maintenance. The most obvious issue is if they're not worn and/or wound regularly they don't even run. If they are not run regularly they tend to be less accurate and when they need to be restarted setting the time and date is a pain. There's nothing defines 'pointless' better than putting a watch on when you get up and looking at your wrist to see when the train is coming to find the hands haven't even started to move yet or it's obviously at least two hours off.

Watches I own don't cost thousands but they do cost hundreds which means I'm a little precious about them when I go to the gym or work on my car and, no matter how careful I am, they do occasionally collect scratches to their case or glass that no one but I will notice but it drives me crazy anyway. So what is the point of a watch you're afraid to wear and isn't as accurate as your cell phone anyway?

I do like to wear a watch. It feels natural to me when I want to know the time to refer to my wrist. I come from a generation where learning to tell the time and getting your first watch were rights of passage. I still remember every detail of my first watch, a child sized mechanical Timex I still have in the back of a drawer somewhere. I want to wear a watch but I want to bow out of the escalating horological arms race with my richer, more successful friends (I am the Miata to their 911s). I want it to work unconditionally, be cheap, unremarkable and tough. So, of course, there is only one choice; the G-Shock DW-5600E.

I'm not talking about the collectable original version with the screw-down back and the Keanu-Speed association. I'm talking about the current version that costs less the $40 on Amazon. The watch that G-Shock aficionados deride and no one else even notices you're wearing. The watch that was one of four timepieces approved to go into space on the wrists of Shuttle astronauts. The watch you can bash into the wall and the wall will come off worse. A watch you put on and forget and abuse and it just keeps on going and looking exactly the same. I'm not talking about any of the limited edition versions in 'look at me me!' primary colors, or with reversed faces that look cool put are impossible to read, or advanced features to charge themselves from the sun or automatically set themselves.

I'm talking about the cheapest G-Shock out there. The poor imitation (in collector's minds) and successor to the original G-Shock. The ultimate cheap, black plastic watch.

It's a watch that draws no attention to itself but if you look at it closely has a rugged, utilitarian charm. It is chunky and substantial without being heavy or cumbersome.  Its recessed face is protected and intuitive to read. Its integrated strap is supremely comfortable. The recessed buttons are protected from accidental use but responsive enough to work with work-gloves on when you need to. Its one flashy feature is its back light which works just long enough for you to read the time without compromising the long battery life. When the time finally comes to replace the battery it is almost a shock to the system that this watch needs any attention at all but removing the back just needs a common jeweler's screwdriver not a specialized watch back opener and it is the work of a couple of minutes to do the job.

This watch is the antithesis of a fashion statement and so has a charm all of its own. There's a reason this watch is used and abused by astronauts, military personal, first responders, law enforcement etc. If you want to know what the toughest, most comfortable shoes are to wear all day are look at the feet of police people, nurses or chefs. They won't be the prettiest shoes but they will be practical to a fault.  That should be the DW-5600E motto as well: practical to a fault.

So why have I wasted so many words not reviewing a product that doesn't require another review anyway? Let's just say I am a fan. In a world that can be expensive and complicated it is what is is - I usually hate that conversation-killing statement but it seems totally apropos for the DW-5600E. There is nothing ironic, or political, or elitist, or hipster-cool, or over-sized machismo about this watch. It's more watch than 99% of us will ever need for much less money than we deserve to pay.

So it bears repeating:

... it is what it is.