Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is? (1999)

Great piece! A bit OT, but the black text on grey bg was VERY hard to read.

would a mod mind changing the URL to http://white.bikeshed.com/ ? It's the same content but much easier to read (sorry about that...)

Modern communication is broken. We think we're just getting tools to be reachable by people of interest. Instead we're just giving the world a way of spamming us. Constantly.

Phones are the worst. Excluding the few times I'm actually expecting a call, every time my phone rings it inevitably interrupts something I am doing. It's almost never urgent. I am basically spending hundreds (if not thousands by now) of dollars to get a mobile device to allow the world to interrupt me at any time. And there's very little I can do about it.

* I often ignore it on purpose, set it to "silent" mode or simply refuse answering (an act now commonly seen as rude by most). 9 times out of 10 I get the notoriously useless voicemail: "Hey it's me, call me back when you can".

* Last year I was victim of what can only be described as a phone spam technique from my ISP. In the course of 10 days, I received over 25 calls (most of which I intentionally refused to answer) from commercial representative trying to sell me an "upgrade" to my subscription. They were calling from a private number. Short of completely changing ISPs (particularly difficult to do in my area) or going through legal channels, there was nothing I can do to protect myself from the spam attack. The phone system didn't let me, by design.

* In my home country, SMS spamming is beyond insane. I mean 5 to 10 daily promotional SMS. That's me paying money to get something in my pocket that vibrates to give me advertisements, 5 to 10 times a day.

Email, and online communication, are a _little bit_ better in that aspect. You usually have an inbox that you can check at your convenience. Unfortunately, even these inboxes get flooded with volumes of info you don't necessarily want in there. There's a very particular kind of spam, the one that doesn't (and shouldn't) be removed by commercial filters, that pollute our stream of info. The flooded mailing-lists mentioned in PHK's email is an example. The photo album of my dad's second cousin's niece is another one.

On top of all this, modern trend is to add "instant notifications" to your phone, so that even email (or Facebook/Twitter/your-favorite-website messages) will interrupt you several times a day.

And looking forward (a bit), it does seem that phones and emails are going to be outdated at some point. The current trend is to have these "Feeds". I distinctly remember closing my Facebook account, the day they switched the landing page from my wall to my "Feed". All of a sudden, Facebook was not a tool I use anymore, it's a data stream I consume.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that unsolicited interruptions irritate me. They irritate everyone when done physically. To me a phone ring is equivalent to someone poking me on the shoulder when I'm in the middle of something.

I had never read the Bikeshed email, although I was familiar with the story. I always heard it in the context of project management "we didn't deliver on time because we lost our time bikeshedding". It's actually about spamming and unsolicited communication. Don't pollute my stream of info.

And get off my lawn.

http://grey.bikeshed.com/ is a good middle ground and definitely better than the linked.

You're nuts. OBVIOUSLY http://orange.bikeshed.com is the correct URL for reading this on HN.