D for Effort

Setting Up an iPad 2 at Christmas

2011-12-27T10:36:00.001-08:00

My father-in-law got an iPad 2 as a surprise gift from my mother-in-law this year. I was excited for him, because I really do think the iPad 2 is an excellent device. I usually recommend Apple stuff to my friends and family, but this is what setup was like yesterday. I realize that half of this is getting a Google account, but still, anyone who is not a super-nerd would probably not make it through this gauntlet!

Go to Settings to create a new Apple ID
Agree to the Apple terms of service.
Decide not to use his UTSA email address, since he might not have it for long
Let’s create a Google account
“an account is already associated with that email” Send a reset email
Go upstairs to boot up the Windows laptop
Connect to VPN. Crazy password.
Open a terminal for some reason. Crazy password again.
Open Outlook. Crazy password for a third time.
Find account reset email, follow link.
Fill out new password form
We still don’t have Gmail. Click the Gmail tab for a new account form.
Try and fail three times to choose an ID which isn’t taken. Finally go with an ugly suggestion from Google.
Agree to the Gmail terms of service.
Put in phone number so Google’s robot lady can call us(!) and read a verification number over the phone.
Enter verification code into the form. Gmail, finally!
Back to the iPad. Use new Gmail address to create an Apple ID.
Agree to the Apple terms of service again.
Apple sends a verification email to the Gmail address. Back to the laptop.
Go to Gmail inbox, follow verification link in the Apple email.
Enter Apple password to finish verification.
Back to iPad. Can’t proceed without credit card information on file.
Enter credit card information, but the fields have scrolled off screen, so we’re typing blind.
Mistyped security code. Try again.
Failed again. Can’t submit form without a Mr. Ms. or Dr. on your name.
Now we have an Apple ID. Go to App Store to try it out.
Download free Netflix app, type Apple ID and password.
Open Netflix app to have a look. What is your Netflix username and password?
No idea. We’ll skip this for now.
Back to the App Store for what he really wants: Pages.
Ready to spend $9.99. Tap Buy. “this app requires iOS 5.0 or later” WTF x10!
We need iTunes on a PC to update the system. Do you have iTunes on your laptop? Of course not.
Head downstairs. Peggy’s PC has iTunes.
Open iTunes, connect iPad.
Please register your product. Another form: name, occupation, age.
Agree to more terms of service.
Can’t update without synching first. Synching…
An update is available! Start the 758 Mb download.
When the download is complete, the update will be installed.
Baby needs her nap, we gotta go home. Hope everything is ok!

Life Lessons

2011-12-13T12:09:00.001-08:00

I’m still figuring this out at 36 years old:

Don’t combine single malt scotch and karaoke in one party.

The Primal Blueprint

2010-12-28T20:13:00.001-08:00

I just finished reading Mark Sisson’s two books, “The Primal Blueprint” and “The Primal Blueprint Cookbook.” I stumbled across these at Amazon and found that my public library had just ordered them. I’ll cut to the chase: I loved these books and have been inspired to make some radical lifestyle changes.

My doctor had recommended the paleo diet to me four years ago, and at first I expected the Primal Blueprint to be a simple rehash of those ideas. It’s true that the Primal Blueprint closely resembles the paleo diet, but it offers more and addresses some of the problems I had with the paleo diet.

The best overview of what the Primal Blueprint is about is available in this post at Mark’s website.

Mark Sisson advocates a number of things that already been kicking around in my head. Here are a few points that I had already sensed were true, and Mark hammered them home:

if you’re eating the right foods, there is no need to count calories.
your body will tell you when to drink water, so you needn’t robotically consume eight glasses a day.
some people are adapted to digest dairy products. If you are one of these, and you have access to high-quality sources of dairy, these are good foods.
fat is not the enemy. If you are eating whole, unprocessed food, the fat is a great benefit.
you cannot leave your life and your health in the hands of Big Pharma and Big Agra.
body composition is more important to your health than your weight.

I loved the information about the importance of insulin and how the Standard American Diet overburdens our insulin response. The culprits are (refined) sugar and grain, which were not foods that were ever available to people before the advent of agriculture.

Mark’s program doesn’t only deal with diet, but describes a whole spectrum of lifestyle choices, like making sure you get enough sleep, and getting regular exposure to the sun.

As of yesterday, I am giving up refined sugar and grain. To the extent that I can, I am also giving up factory farming, especially grain-fed, confinement meat operations. Although these are not easy rules to follow, I am confident they’re in the best interest of my energy, health, vitality, and longevity.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Learning to Live to a Hundred

2010-04-06T08:49:00.001-07:00

I very much enjoyed Dan Buettner’s TED talk, How to live to be 100+. He is a National Geographic writer and explorer who has searched around the world for cultures that produce the most centenarians, in the hopes of learning what they have to teach about long and prosperous life.

He found five remarkable communities: Sardinia in Italy, Ikaria in Greece, Okinawa in Japan, Nicoya in Costa Rica, and California’s Seventh Day Adventists. Though these cultures are dramatically different from each other, he was able to isolate what they have in common. In all these communities, they:

Move Naturally - physical activity is a regular part of their daily lives. They don’t have to go to the gym; They are naturally in motion throughout the day.
Right Outlook - they feel a deep sense of purpose in their lives, and they experience periods of calm in every day.
Eat Wisely - they don’t have a special diet. They eat the foods that come from their community. What they don’t have is anything processed, anything made in a factory.
Connect - they keep themselves surrounded by family and best friends. They belong to a community of faith.

While I am fascinated by his adventure, and his findings make intuitive sense to me, there is one thing he didn’t mention that I feel is critically important: none of these people needed to be taught to live this way. They didn’t see Dan’s talk, or read his book, nor did they hear about his prescriptions for long life on Oprah. In other words, far from heaving a set of rules upon themselves, the good life, for them, was automatic, a natural consequence of living the only way they know how.

This next bit may sound a bit heretical to an American audience: the true gift of these cultures to their people is that they were freed from the burden of choosing. In the U.S.A., we take pride in fitting ourselves out with an individualized life: what kind of food we’ll eat, what kind of home we’ll have, what we’ll be “into,” what we do for fun. The trouble is, we, as a culture, traded the effortlessness of being with the unending chore of knowing. We have to know everything all the time. Is there lead in the paint? Are there hormones in the milk? What are the seven secrets that will drive him crazy in bed? We can never know enough, we can never finish choosing. And a by-product of such determined individualism is that you are personally to blame if you fail. So is it any wonder we have a society which is wracked with anxiety?

Perhaps a culture may be judged by what sort of lives people live by default. Our growing crisis in the U.S. is that the default is the polar opposite of the principles Dan Buettner learned on his travels: we don’t move naturally, we have the wrong outlook, we eat unwisely (to put it mildly), and we are increasingly disconnected from family and friends. I don’t mean to suggest that there is nothing we can do, just that the problem runs very deep, and if you want to make a difference for yourself and the people you care about, you will need to dig deep for an answer as well.

Getting Started in Software Engineering

2009-05-11T10:04:00.001-07:00

Since I wrote an essay about how to become a software engineer, people regularly email me for more advice. Here is a reply I wrote this morning:

The great thing about working in software engineering is that you only need three things:

a computer
reliable Internet access
the will to learn and expand your skills every day

The bad news is, #3 cannot be bought, and it cannot be given to you. But, assuming you have those three things taken care of, you get started by choosing a platform, downloading (in some cases, purchasing) your development tools, and seeking out some tutorials.

When I say choose a platform, I mean the kind of system that your software will run on. All the tools you use, tutorials you follow, books you read, and conferences you attend will be relative to the platform. Right now, there are only a handful of real choices: the Web, Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and maybe soon the Palm Pre.

Often, these platforms overlap. For instance, I develop Web applications on a Mac with Java, but the finished software runs on Linux servers.

If you haven't already chosen a platform, and you want to see the quickest results with the least hassle, use Google App Engine. It's a framework for hosting web applications which takes care of all of the infrastructure effortlessly. In other words, you don't have worry about setting up a server or figuring out to get everything online. You just write the code, and Google ensures that it will run on the Web.

And here's a book about it that will come out later this month. Charles Severance is a friend of mine: Using Google App Engine

Before you can begin programming for a career, you need to get some code under your belt. There's no time like the present.

Kindle 2, also WTF?!

2009-02-10T07:35:00.001-08:00

Amazon just announced the Kindle 2, and I’m pretty sure there’s going to be one in my house at some point. It looks awesome.

On the other hand, feast your eyes on this “Kindle exclusive” Stephen King opus they’re hawking for merely $2.99:

Written exclusively for Kindle, Stephen King reminds us why he’s still the master at the top of his game. In his new novella, UR, King is at his unsettling best as he examines the future of the written word—for better or worse. Following a nasty break-up, lovelorn college English instructor Wesley Smith can’t seem to get his ex-girlfriend’s parting shot out of his head: “Why can’t you just read off the computer like the rest of us?” Egged on by her question and piqued by a student’s suggestion, Wesley places an order for a Kindle. The device that arrives in a box stamped with the smile logo—via one-day delivery that he hadn’t requested—unlocks a literary world that even the most avid of book lovers could never imagine. Get it only on Kindle.

Um, yeah … I’ll get back to you on that one.

Overheard (2)

2008-11-19T08:16:00.001-08:00

Overheard in the corridor at the San Marcos Activity Center:

He’s really not a bad president — he’s just stupid.

Nebraska Woman Needs Better Coffee

2008-10-07T09:36:00.001-07:00

This photo appears on nytimes.com today with this caption:

Chris Kouba, the owner of the Downtown Coffee Shop, expressed frustration with the bailout: “Do you see my restaurant filled? Is anyone going to come save me?”

I think I can help. The problem may be the Folgers you’ve got behind the counter there:

Photo: Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Google Chrome

2008-09-02T09:10:00.001-07:00

Zowie! Google has published a technical document all about their new web browser, drawn by Scott McCloud of “Understanding Comics” fame.

Google Chrome: Behind the Open Source Browser Project

A beta of the browser for Windows is supposed to be available today!

Productivity Manifesto

2008-08-27T10:09:00.001-07:00

I have begun distilling and synthesizing approaches to productivity (also known as “effectiveness”) from various sources into a structure that makes sense for me. I have a lot more to learn on this subject, but I’m starting to see the framework.

I have learned a lot from Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits” and David Allen’s “Getting things Done.” If I had to boil it all down to two pithy lines, they would be these:

Decide what is important
Nurture the important

Ok, but maybe that’s a little too pithy. Here are some more specific guidelines I’m trying on for size. Notice that the scope for everything is a day. This is really a manifesto about how to run a day:

Whatever else has to give, you will not sacrifice your diet, exercise, and sleep.
Every day, you will decide what deserves doing and honor that choice.
You will fight the twin productivity gremlins: Fake Urgency and Fake Industry.
With the understanding that to achieve something dazzling takes more than a day, take a step toward dazzling every day.

I’ll have more to say about each of these in turn in future posts.

Greatest New York Times Headline Ever

2008-05-28T22:27:00.001-07:00

“Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts”

Flying (And Landing) in Google Earth

2008-05-28T12:43:00.001-07:00

I feel like I was the last to know: Google Earth 4 has a built-in flight simulator.

Here’s a page with all the controls.

But as soon as I figured out how to fly, I wanted to land! I made a tutorial showing how to make it much easier and more fun. If the idea of pretending to land an airplane in exotic locales around the globe appeals to you, bon appetit:

ASUS Eee PC, First Impressions

2008-04-26T10:53:00.001-07:00

I took the plunge and bought an ASUS Eee PC, mainly for the option to take a very small, very light laptop with us to Costa Rica. I have read a lot about this new crop of mini-notebooks (I call it a knee-top!) and the top contenders of the moment seem to be the HP mini-note and the Eee PC 900 (with the larger 8.9” screen). I ended up getting the cheepy cheap Eee PC 701 because it’s a full $200 cheaper than its more impressive brothers. $341 for a refurbished model is down in impulse-purchase territory, whereas the $550 versions make me want to wait until the processors get faster and the batteries last longer.

I thought I knew everything about this machine when I bought it, so here is the list of things that I hadn’t already gleaned from the interwebs:

It was not really usable out-of-the-box. The trackpad was set to minimum sensitivity, and before I figured that out, I was afraid I had a lemon; the trackpad basically would not work at this setting.
The mouse button looks like one smooth button, but is in fact a rocker-switch, meaning that you push on the left side for a left click, and the right side for a right click. If you press in the center, you get nothing. This confounded both my four-year-old and my wife.
Unlike the various MacBooks in my life which renew my love every day, the Eee PC does not instantly wake from sleep when you open it. It’s a minor thing, but it’s a refinement I have come to take for granted.
It does not close Firefox gracefully when you shutdown or restart, which means you are frequently looking at the “Restore Last Session?” dialog. Luckily, Firefox allows disabling it like this.
The default terminal application is pretty lousy, but it includes a better one called konsole. Making konsole the default (among other things) is described here.
It took some doing, but I learned how to customize the menu screens. I made a special page for Graham with all his favorite movies, web sites, and of course, Tux Paint. You can learn about customizing your Eee PC desktop over here.
Unfortunately, some of Graham’s favorite web games use Adobe Shockwave, which does not have a Linux version, and probably never will. The Eee PC does have the Flash player, but not the latest version, so I had to do an upgrade.

In short, the Eee PC demands tweaks before it will purr like a kitten. Lucky for me and about ten million other geek dads, tweaking is fun! Still, it makes me wonder how this is supposed to be a computer for children and seniors who don’t have a Linux-mad nerd standing by to recompile the kernel for them.

Overheard

2008-04-22T08:31:00.001-07:00

Actual overheard snippet of conversation. Two little old ladies at the San Marcos Activity Center.

…daughters, really pretty daughters. One of ’em has a, a wooden leg…

Your Financial Freedom: the Crossover Point

2008-04-15T07:52:00.001-07:00

When my first son was born almost four years ago, I started to reexamine my priorities and my life choices. Elizabeth and I had to decide whether she was going back to work after her maternity leave, or staying home to raise Graham. Choosing the latter meant losing almost half of our income overnight, so we had to seriously reconsider many of our habits. It turns out this is not such a bad thing.

Around this time, I read a great book that changed things for me in a big way. “Your Money or Your Life” is about how to prioritize your financial choices to align with your life’s priorities. The basic idea is that since it takes time to earn money to buy things, you are trading away a little piece of your life for each thingamabob you get. The book makes a strong case for frugality, but not deprivation. It’s ok to make the trade after you’ve determined that it really truly improves your life to do so.

Another important lesson from the book is the idea of the crossover point. The crossover point is the moment when income from your savings and investments is enough to pay your living expenses. From then on, you can continue to work, but only because you want to, not because you need to.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of Americans assume that they will be punching the clock until full retirement age (67 for me) and only then begin to enjoy the fruits of their labor. “Your Money or Your Life” puts a totally different spin on work and retirement. The crossover point means you can begin to get serious about the question, “If I didn’t have to earn a living, what would I do?” The answer tells you a lot about yourself. Get busy!

Here’s a short screencast I made with Apple Numbers to illustrate the crossover point:

Daddy, How About…

2008-04-10T10:12:00.001-07:00

Last night as I was driving three-year-old Graham around, he said the words that gladden the heart of any proud father:

“Daddy, how about I listen to Radiohead?”

Update: here’s further proof that Graham is his daddy’s son. http://youtube.com/watch?v=ux5xeSac8wE

Mini Notebooks: Not for "Real" Work?

2008-04-09T11:14:00.001-07:00

I have been eyeing the new mini notebook computers from ASUS and HP. We are online all the time at my house, including our 3-year-old. It may be hard to believe, but it’s hard for us to share two computers, let alone one.

In general, both of these machines are very favorably reviewed. The HP seems to be a better choice for adults if for no other reason than that the keyboard is very close to full-size. I’m thinking of the ASUS for my kids though, and the nerd in me delights in setting them down in front of Linux before they can potty without help.

I have noticed a pattern in the reviews for these machines that I consider bizarre: people will happily say, “Oh, this is a great computer, but it’s only good for writing or using the Net. For serious work, you’ll need a real PC.” Sometimes instead of saying “for serious work,” they’ll say “for anything complex.” Ok, maybe I have an English-major-cum-computer-programmer bias, but do we know of anything more complex than the Internet and writing the English language?

Wait a hundred years and then test this prediction: empires will be built and destroyed, fortunes will be won and lost and won again, and countless human beings will have found love, God, and life’s purpose by “writing and using the Net.”

Also, you can get a great deal on socks at Overstock.com.

Friends of Obama

2008-03-01T08:24:00.001-08:00

I went to see the Obama rally in San Marcos on Wednesday night. It was a big deal for our sleepy town and oft-overlooked university, so everybody who was anybody was there, to the tune of around fifteen thousand warm bodies.

They set up a weird pair of barricades though, for security purposes, which meant that the direct path from the university to the park was unavailable. Since there’s also a river to contend with, the alternative was to walk a mile up river to the bridge at the golf course and then a mile back down river to the rally. I was in a posse of around two hundred and fifty doing just that. It’s a dark back road that not many people know about, though I’ve been down it many many times as it’s in my neighborhood and I have a three-year-old son who only falls asleep if he’s riding in the car.

Girl #1: Where the hell are we? This is some Texas Chainsaw Massacre shit right here!
Girl #2: I know where this is. We go here in my jogging class. This is going to come out over by the golf course.
— long pause —
Girl #1: Why did you take a jogging class?!
Girl #2: Because it said “emphasis on walking!”

MacBook Pro!

2008-02-29T08:41:00.001-08:00

The Headlines are Orwellian

2008-02-28T09:20:00.001-08:00

Look at this snip from today’s news:

Oy, if that isn’t dystopian, then I don’t deserve my high school diploma.

Spy Hunter in Real Life

2008-02-20T10:32:00.001-08:00

Via Geek Brief’s Big Trip blog:

Travel Supreme has a new model that includes a nifty little garage designed to fit a Smart Car. A lift mechanically extends out of the enclosure. You park on the lift and it pulls the smart car inside the cavity of the RV.

Oh, sign me up!

Rock the Mike

2008-02-20T10:22:00.001-08:00

I have been watching a lot of TED talks lately (highly recommended!), and I have been dying to know who makes the sexy little headset all the speakers are wearing.

Thanks to this Guy Kawasaki post I finally have my answer. It’s the Countryman E6i. By the way, the talk whose virtues Guy is extolling is truly inspirational. Majora Carter made me cry three separate times in the space of 19 minutes.

Ten Years of “Aeroplane.”

2008-02-10T07:05:00.000-08:00

Ten years ago today, the greatest album I've ever heard was born into the world. It would be hard to overstate the influence of "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea," Neutral Milk Hotel's second, and last, record. It's a curious masterpiece, at once obscure and legendary, depending on whom you ask.

1998 was a big year for me personally; I finished my bachelor's and went out into the real world. My dad gave me a memorable speech in which he laid out just how "cut off" I was. My best friends were also finishing school, and somehow I convinced them to move to Austin and get a house with me. That was in the Fall, and Seth drove down with a cassette copy of Aeroplane. It was like nothing I had ever heard. It was like nothing any of us had ever heard. It's a cathartic, metaphysical, deeply spiritual concept record about reaching out to Anne Frank through the shroud of space and time.

If it sounds heavy, well — it is. But in the face of the horrors that men do, there is an awe-inspiring redemption, the certainty that love and beauty are invincible though our bodies are as momentary as candle flame.

Aeroplane was more or less our soundtrack as we started our own band, Okkervil River, of which I am enormously proud. We certainly don't sound like Neutral Milk Hotel; we sound like ourselves. But we did all we could to preserve the spirit, the essential qualities that we admired so profoundly. What is the essence? Passion, the idea that when you play you ought to put yourself on the line, the idea that darkness and light are two sides of the same coin, the sense that experiencing music, both as a musician and in the audience, can be an act of defying mortality.

Anyway, I owe a debt of gratitude to Jeff Mangum, Jeremy Barnes, Scott Spillane, and Julian Koster. I have waited ten years for a more important record to materialize, and I'm still waiting!

And one day we will die / and our ashes will fly / from the aeroplane over the sea / but for now we are young / let us lay in the sun / and count every beautiful thing we can see

Recording Skype

2008-01-30T09:40:00.001-08:00

If you record the output from Skype, unfortunately you only get their end of the conversation, because the audio signal does not include the input from your microphone.

It is straightforward to use Soundflower to combine signals from multiple inputs into a recording that includes both sides of the conversation. I started playing around with doing this in GarageBand’s podcast studio.

What is decidedly not straightforward is separating the two sides of the conversation into separate tracks, so they can be mixed after the fact. I finally figured it out, and here’s what I did:

My audio interface has two channels in and out. The basic idea behind what I wanted to do was to get my voice onto channel 1, and Skype onto channel 2, and then record those onto separate tracks in GarageBand.

The basic problem is that Skype output (indeed output from just about anything) is 2-channel stereo, so if I use that as the input to GarageBand, I’ve blown my chance to separate Skype onto one track.

Soundflowerbed to the rescue. This is a simple utility that lives in your OS X menu bar and lets you route channels from Soundflower to any channels you like on any of your output devices.

Soundflowerbed:
Soundflower (2ch) Channel 1 -> M-Audio Fast Track Channel 2 Soundflower (2ch) Channel 2 -> M-Audio Fast Track Channel 2

By sending both channels of Soundflower to channel 2 of the M-Audio Fast Track, I have a realtime mixdown to mono.

The next challenge is that while the Skype audio is now on the Fast Track Output Channel 2, we still don’t have anything on the Fast Track Input Channel 2. The fix for that is a TRS patch cable from the balanced channel 2 output on the back of the Fast Track to the channel 2 input jack.

The last hurdle is that you can’t try to monitor GarageBand with the Fast Track, because then you’ll be adding more signal to the Channel 2 output which is just going to turn right back around and be recorded on the Channel 2 input. Make sure you use the Mac’s built-in headphone output for GarageBand.

An optional step: you’ll notice that if you try to monitor your voice in GarageBand by turning track monitoring on, the latency is too long, and messes with your head (you hear your own voice about a quarter second after you speak, which will make you think maybe you’re drunk). You probably don’t need to monitor your voice, but if you want to, download a free app from Rogue Amoeba called LineIn, and set input to M-Audio Fast Track Pro and output to Built-in Output. You can still hear latency, but much much less. Just to be clear: you will have GarageBand monitoring off on your microphone track, and on for the Skype audio track.

Skype Audio output: Soundflower (2ch)
Skype Audio input: M-Audio Fast Track Pro
Skype Ringing: Soundflower (2ch)

GarageBand Audio Output: Built-in Output
GarageBand Audio Input: M-Audio Fast Track Pro

Optional:
LineIn input: M-Audio Fast Track Pro
LineIn output: Built-in Output

The Footprint and the Cloud

2008-01-12T00:20:00.001-08:00

I have always loved the idea of doing a lot with a little, of a small footprint, of compact elegance. When I was little, my dad had a sporting goods store (literally, a Mom ‘n’ Pop store) and I used to obsess about backpacking equipment. I was transfixed by the idea of being able to carry everything you need on your back — food, clothing, shelter, tools, maybe even a deck of cards, the whole of Maslow’s hierarchy in a bag. Not that I ever actually went backpacking; I was into the idea of it, not the physical labor, and certainly not sleeping on the ground! I used to load and unload a frame pack with gear, and make lists of everything you could need.

Later, I entered a phase of designing tree houses. This was funny because I lived in the Texas panhandle, one of the most treeless wastes in America, a tabletop of spiky mesquite. I was fascinated by the idea of building all the comforts of home into a space the size of a bathroom. I studied techniques for constructing platforms that fold up into a wall. I dreamed about how to save space without compromising on amenities.

After spending some time in Europe as a young adult, I realized one of things I loved about it was the care that Europeans take in conserving space, energy, materials. Here is a place where they know how to embrace constraints. I think what excites me about this is the idea that ingenuity can overcome scarcity, that better design can turn less into more.

In 2003 I bought my first Mac, a 12” PowerBook G4, because I saw it as the first portable computer that perfected a tiny footprint without compromises. In particular, before that time any laptop that small had opted to leave out the CD/DVD drive, with an optional external drive dangling from it in a rude display of poor taste. Apple’s designers had conquered scarcity with ingenuity. Five years later, our PowerBook has been battered almost beyond recognition, but we still use it every day and I still consider it one of the best-made machines of any type I’ve ever seen.

Rumor has it that Apple is going to unveil an ultra-portable computer next week at the Macworld expo[1]. If the pundits are right, this one will not only forgo the optical drive, but the standard mechanical hard drive as well, opting for a flash-only drive like this 32GB model from Samsung.

32GB? No DVD drive? Isn’t that going to suck? My money says it will rule. Don’t forget that when Apple introduced the first iMac in 1998, it had no floppy drive, and people thought this was insane. But Steve Jobs knew then what we eventually all came to know: floppy disks are lame. Today, the number of applications on my MacBook that I installed from a disc is exactly one (QuickBooks Pro, the only vestige of software’s shrink-wrapped legacy I use), and thanks to the iTunes music store, it’s been a loooong time since I ripped a CD. This means that most of the time I’m carrying around my MacBook’s DVD-ROM drive as dead weight.

But what about that (relatively) tiny flash hard drive? After all, I’ve got 150GB on my lap right now. The secret is the network. Our drives can shrink now because more and more of the data we care about is in the cloud. The new way to think of desktop storage is as a local cache of the things you need right now. Apple is betting that once we can rent movies straight to the Mac, we won’t need to keep a library of them on disk. With all kinds of documents and affordable storage moving online, and the growing ubiquity of high-speed net access, we can live with a smaller, faster, sturdier, noiseless hard drive.

If this new machine is what I hope it is, I’m all over it like white on rice. Less is more, baby.

IKEA makes me swoon. I fantasize about having my office in an Airstream trailer. Sometimes I imagine I’m still a bachelor (no offense, honey) and my only possessions are a few changes of clothes and some toiletries in a bag, my computer, my phone, my mandolin, and the book I’m currently reading.

As the network grows, my computer can shrink. Bring it!

[1] My thanks to Daring Fireball, for setting me straight on the correct spelling of “Macworld”.

Cabel Sasser is Like Unto a God

2008-01-07T23:40:00.001-08:00

Can I have a boyfriend even if I'm not gay? If yes, then Cabel Sasser wins! I only hope I didn't wake up my loved ones with my uncontrollable paroxysm of laughter. I cried real tears: http://www.cabel.name/2008/01/2007-cabel-yay-awards-addendum.html

That's My Boy

2008-01-04T14:33:00.001-08:00

Yes, that's my own flesh and blood with a pair of underwear on his head.

Expert Dabbler

2007-12-09T12:40:00.001-08:00

Since I started my own business close to a year ago, I have wanted to play to my strengths, and I've been doing a lot of thinking about what my strengths are. I recently finished reading Sir Ken Robinson's book, "Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative." One of the things that stood out for me in the book is that he said great artists aren't great by birth. In addition to their considerable talents, they have achieved technical mastery of their medium, after a considerable amount of blood, sweat, and tears. I have always been afraid to commit myself completely to any endeavor, from a fear of learning what my limitations are. I can see of course that this has to change in order for me to grow into the best me I can be. So I've been trying to figure out what my medium is. Some people are exceptionally lucky to find their medium at an early age and to never look back. Robinson tells an anecdote about Leonard Bernstein touching a piano for the first time when he was about 8 years old and just being immediately transformed by it. Some people slog through an entire lifetime doing what they think they ought to be doing, while their medium is waiting for them, just hanging out off to one side. So what is it that I do better than anything else? I have concluded that what I do best is dabble. Here is an almost complete list in no particular order of what I have "shown promise" doing:

Writing
Stage Acting
Foreign Language (acquisition and imitation)
Teaching
Competitive Horseback Riding
Storytelling
Building (birdhouses, PCs, etc.)
Drawing
Sculpting
Computer Programming
Dreaming (literally, dreams while I sleep)
Juggling
Dancing
Performing Music
Driving
Video Editing
Money Management
Cooking
Parenting

I feel truly blessed with these aptitudes, but at the same time, I am paralyzed with indecision about what to do with myself. I am growing up to the point of realizing that my lack of focus has held me back. Now that I want to be focused, it's harder than it's ever been because my responsibilities keep growing. I don't mind the responsibility, but oh what I would give to play the piano ten hours a day for a year in a country where nobody speaks English! The serious question for me right now is if somehow dabbling itself is my medium. If I can figure out how to take advantage of this, the sky is the limit.

Lessons from India

2007-08-21T10:09:00.001-07:00

I took a trip to India this Spring on a lark. I was resolved to find out what India has to teach me about life.

There were so many sights and sounds and experiences that it has been hard to distill it down to one pearl of wisdom, but I think I’ve finally got it, in all its pithy glory:

“When you are shitting blood, you just have to laugh.”

There is a corollary to this that goes something like, “When you are shitting blood, you are probably better off seeking medical attention.”

I’m sure India has much much more to teach me, and I hope to be a receptive student for the rest of my life. But for now at least, this will do.

the Stage Names

2007-08-06T09:01:00.001-07:00

Rapturous review. I am thrilled to my gills: Pitchfork Media: the Stage Names

Graham Time

2007-07-22T12:45:00.001-07:00

I’m heading out to go pick up Graham from my mother-in-law’s in San Antonio and head over to Kerrville to visit my parents. I really miss him! It turns out solitude is lonely.

I have gotten a fair amount of work done, but I wasn’t the ironman of productivity I imagined. I made significant headway on two out of three projects. It’s not bad. I’ve got a ton of ideas kicking around in my head for what to do with this itty bitty company I seem to have started. I’m being suffocated by options!

Thinking About a Night On the Town

2007-07-21T17:29:00.001-07:00

I’ve gotten a good amount of work done today, and I’m starting to think I will go to Austin to see HP5 at the Alamo Drafthouse. Food and beer and cinema! Dare I get an iPhone while I’m in town?

OMG WTF

2007-07-21T10:24:00.001-07:00

Did I really stay up until 5am watching the 2002 remake of Carrie on USA? Yeah, I did.

Awful Quiet Around Here

2007-07-20T21:01:00.001-07:00

I don’t think I’ve ever been alone in this house for more than a couple of hours before. The marathon continues. I’ll be working on three separate projects, and I have just switched contexts. I also took a break to eat dinner, feed the dogs, and watch a few minutes of “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”

48 hour "Rock Star"

2007-07-20T13:44:00.001-07:00

Elizabeth and Dean are in Chicago for a conference, and Graham is with my mother-in-law for the next 48 hours, which means I have a short chance to see what it’s like to work like Ralph Nader, or a surgical intern.

I’ll update here every couple of hours to let you know how it’s going.

Letter to Myself 20 Years Ago

2007-06-09T14:39:00.001-07:00

Letter to myself 20 years ago

Dear Zach, You’re probably curious about what happens to you when you grow up. I don’t want to go through a history; It’s probably not a good idea to know everything that’s going to happen to you over the next 20 years. I’ll just give you some pointers, and if it doesn’t help you it’s probably your own damn fault.

Failure

The most important thing I’ve learned in the last 20 years is that it’s ok to try something even if you’re afraid it won’t work out or you’ll fuck it up or something. In fact, every time you go out on a limb that makes you uncomfortable, you’re going to grow as a person. Here’s an example: you’re going to co-found a very good rock band. What’s the best preparation for playing live music on a stage in front of thousands of people? You think practice? Wrong. It’s playing on a stage in front of people. That’s right, even when you’re quite sure you don’t know what you’re doing and it scares the shit out of you, just doing the damn thing is the surest way to get any good at it.

Failure is normal. Natural selection works by trying a million variations until one succeeds. No one remembers or cares about the failures: they are part of the process. The key point here is that you are trying to do something. Caveat: not all failures are created equal. Dropping out of school and sitting on your ass is not ok.

Women (Sex)

I wish someone had given me this advice: obsessing about women and sex is the biggest waste of time in your life. It doesn’t sound romantic, but this is true: one of the best things about marriage is that you can divert all the energy you spent worrying about sex toward something useful.

Ok, this is not going to be easy for you to hear: your philosophy of exalting women does not work. Women are not exalted or sacred. They are people, same as anyone. Some are smart, some are stupid. Some are kind, some are mean. They will not love you more because you worship them. In fact, the opposite is true. If you look at it, you will see that it’s actually insulting to a woman to treat her like she needs some kind of special protection. You are not going to be rewarded for being the most reverent and deferential person in your class. You are not worthy of praise because you try to come off as selfless. Your fixation on being morally superior to your peers makes you an asshole. If you want to be a good person, forget about having the appearance of goodness, and instead do some nice things for some people for a change.

Anyway, back to the girls. My advice to you is to find a young lady with a loose reputation and convince her to do you in her canopy bed while her parents are out of the house. You can pretend to be studying! You don’t have to be in love. At this early stage, it’s better if you aren’t. You are going to be tempted not to believe me, but I’m you for chrissakes, I should know. As long as I’m giving you such startling advice, I may as well say the responsible thing as well: don’t have any unprotected sex. You might think you’re so smart you would never have unprotected sex, but actually you would, dumbass.

In a larger sense, your issues with women are actually self-confidence problems. And I know that you can’t just hear someone say, “Be more confident,” and you will be. I hate to tell you this, but even 20 years later, you don’t have the self-confidence problem licked, but you’re making a lot of progress. Maybe it would help you to just acknowledge that your first impulse about how people think of you may not be correct. Example: when you’re a junior in high school and Deana Townes invites you spend the weekend with her on Cape Cod, it’s because she likes you and not some kind of scam calculated to humiliate you. Jesus, snap out of it.

College

I want to say a few words about college because if you don’t make some changes, you’re going to have a miserable time. You are accustomed to succeeding in school without much effort. This will not continue to be the case. I suspect that when you run up against your limitations you actually don’t want to try because it will mean that you know what your limitations are. Please try to accept that you aren’t smart enough to ace everything, and that you will need discipline to do a halfway decent job. Please do at least this: drum up the discipline to attend all your classes. The rest is not that hard, but you will go a long way just by showing up over and over like clockwork.

Here is something that really surprised me: the subjects you study are not remotely as important as the quality of the instructors you get. Use the instructor surveys and choose the best professors, no matter what they’re teaching!

College is not a place to learn a trade, even though they try to make you think it is. College is a chance to learn how to think. In order to get the most out of it, you should take exciting classes in as many disciplines as you can. And just as importantly, get as many social experiences as you can. This is how you grow. And it can be a lot of fun. When you enter the working world, you’re not going to have nearly as many chances to make friends, so take advantage of it.

Miscellaneous

Those are the biggies, but I should tell you a handful of other things. I apologize if I’m coming across as a prick. Don’t worry, you don’t become some kind of monster. I’m being harsher on you that I would be with anyone else, because you’re me. I feel like I shouldn’t have to candy coat anything with you, you know?

Your taste in music isn’t any good. Here’s something you can take to the fucking bank: the top 40 is awful. Stay away. Try listening to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by the Beatles about two dozen times. Try the Zombies, Bob Dylan, Talking Heads, the Cure, Joy Division, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Nina Simone, the Pixies, “Pet Sounds” by the Beach Boys, in no particular order. Country music is turning to shit, but you can take comfort in Johnny Cash, the Stanley Brothers, and Bob Wills, among others, but I’m not really in that world these days.

Trust your instincts. You’re not too young to do something no one’s ever done before. Go find out what the Internet is; It’s gonna be huge!

Life Hack #159

2007-05-23T13:54:00.001-07:00

My office building restroom has the world's cheapest paper towels. So cheap that if you try to pull one out with wet hands, your fingers pass through it like so much cotton candy.

It took me a while to train myself, but the solution is to grab one or two paper towels while my hands are still dry and set them on the counter, ready for action!

My degree in engineering had to come in handy at some point!

Dean Atwood Thomas

2007-05-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

April 24, 2007
8 pounds, 8 ounces

Thawing Out

2007-04-16T10:16:00.001-07:00

I've been incommunicado for a while. I'm slowing coming back into public life. More soon. P.S. Props to MarsEdit!

Why I Am an Un-Reformed Apple Fanboy

2007-01-10T11:10:00.000-08:00

Everyone loves a winner. Did you ever notice that your local football team gets a lot more popular the closer they get to the championship? So what makes someone love a company? It seems like it should be the one that makes the most money, but that doesn’t appear to be it. What explains the passion that surrounds Apple, Inc.?

I think it has a lot to do with how personal these products are. MacBooks and iPods inspire such devotion because they get inside our lives and change us. Apple is famous for blowing right past the status quo. Where another company would think they have a winner if their product is 20% smaller or 10% cheaper, Apple has a habit of saying, “Forget about the state of the art. It just isn’t nearly good enough.” The underlying message is that we, their customers, deserve something we haven’t even dared to dream of yet. The new iPhone is a prime example of this. For better or for worse, this product puts a groundswell of emotion in me. What’s the emotion? It’s gratitude. I am grateful that someone stood up and said “Adequate isn’t.”

There is a contagious pride in a category-smashing Apple product. It’s the same pride you feel in your football team. When Apple is at their best, they are not producing just any old thing, they are producing the best that has ever been made. People love to see someone take a million-to-one shot and just nail it. Again, I’m getting back to emotions. As social creatures, we have a deep desire to be part of something greater than ourselves.

The vast majority of companies or organizations of any kind are only seeking to produce something of value. But when your standard is much higher than that, when your standard is the best that has ever been, you enter into the realm of passion, into something deep inside of every human being that usually lies dormant. The difference between passion-off and passion-on is not just a difference of degree; it is a difference of kind. Passionate people aren’t just more productive (though they are that). Passion reconfigures what is even possible.

I have only worked for one organization where passion was normal, a small company called Human Code in Austin, Texas, that was acquired and dismantled during the dotcom boom and bust. Now, I’m starting my own company, and I don’t even know what we’re going to build yet. But I know that whatever it is, whether it’s a product or a service, our vision will be to build the best that has ever been made. It sounds like the height of hubris to even say that, but it is ok with me to strive and fail, if there is passion in the striving.

So yes, I am an Apple fanboy, and I make no apologies. I may have to buy two iPhones: one to use and one to eat.

12#

2006-11-19T17:45:00.000-08:00

As I write this, I’m wrapping up my eighth week on the Paleo diet. I am twelve pounds lighter. I think it’s safe to say that this has as much to do with being calorie-deprived as with any unique properties of the “Paleo way.” My goal with the diet is not to lose weight, but to control my cholesterol without statin drugs. I won’t know how I’m doing on that score until I get my next blood test, which I will probably schedule for sometime this week.

I have not been a perfect Paleo dieter, but I have had better-than-average self discipline. When I take the trouble to plan ahead, I’m eating very well. When I don’t, I scarcely eat at all. At the sophisticated end of the spectrum, you’re supposed to fill a lot of time with planning, shopping, cooking, storing, and transporting your ideal Paleo food. At the other extreme, you can do this diet in two laughably simple steps:

Sit down to a meal.
If your food has sugar, salt, grains, legumes, dairy, corn, or potatoes in it, don’t put it in your mouth.

Will you be hungry? Oh yes, you will. Will you be jealous when your wife prepares quiche? Affirmative.

You’re allowed to eat as much lean meat as you can choke down. I was a vegetarian before this, because I think factory farming is bad for people, animals, and the environment. Since I went Paleo, I have only purchased organic, vegetarian-fed meat, which is a half-measure at best. I still don’t know where this meat comes from. I do not have a clear conscience about this, and I’m not sure what to do long-term. If it turns out this diet is doing nothing for my blood, I’ll be a vegetarian again in a New York minute. But what if it turns out I’m in the best health of my life? I’ll have a dilemma on my hands.

More on this developing story as it — develops.

Waking Up

2006-11-11T09:55:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth and I were trying to figure out why we’re not more excited by the historic power shift in Washington this week. I said, “Well, the good news is we have finally woken up from the nightmare. The bad news is that while we were sleeping, we did, in fact, shit the bed.”

Poverty is Better than Regret

2006-10-25T13:37:00.000-07:00

I'm going to India in March. Yeah, it's funny how things work. Just a week ago, spending 17 days in India soaking up the culture couldn't have been further from my mind. But then I got a surprise email from my high school. They're organizing a trip to India for spring break (I know, much cooler than South Padre, right?) and they decided to extend the invitation to alums. The best thing about this is that it's being led by my favorite teacher, David Weidman. He was the theatre director back when theatre was the best thing in my life, and he was an indispensable mentor. For the purposes of this trip, it doesn't hurt that he was raised in India. I was conflicted, because the trip costs $3500, which is about $3500 more than I can afford for a trip of this kind. After considering it from a dozen sides, I decided I'd be crazy not to go. I asked my friend Mike for advice, and he said, “Poverty is better than regret.” Fuckin’ a.

Ass-First Programming

2006-10-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

Full disclosure: I was an English major. As a programmer, I am one hell of a faker. I even wrote an essay about it a few years ago. I am not sure when I will ever live this down. I like to read about software, and I find plenty of things to remind me how far short I fall.

My new favorite blog is by Steve Yegge. He writes so well, he makes it look easy.

When I read The Truth About Interviewing he really struck a nerve. This part in particular:

If you want a job at a company like Microsoft, Yahoo!, Apple, or Amazon.com, they’re going to have high standards. It doesn’t matter if you “know how to program”. They’re going to test you on algorithmic complexity analysis, advanced data structures, algorithm design, searching and sorting, internationalization techniques, network protocols, OS-level memory management, parsing and semantic analysis, recursion and mathematical induction, graph theory, combinatorics, programming language theory, machine architecture, discrete math and logic, graphics and window systems, fonts and typesetting, color spaces and representations, databases and query languages, filesystems and storage, embedded systems, device drivers, mobile and wireless protocols, and internet standards and technologies.

If you’re lucky, that is.

If you’re unlucky, they’ll ask you to derive the outline of their Ph.D. thesis on fault-tolerant massively parallel machine-learning systems. Or to solve a grand-unification style computation problem involving telephone switches, grid networks, and third-degree differential equations. Or, God forbid, they’ll ask you about the darkest corners of C++ syntax.

And you want to know why they’ll ask you about that stuff? Because they’re using it every day. They’ve tried hiring people who don’t know this stuff. Believe me, they try all the time. They want to hire more programmers, and they’re out there on the constant lookout for new meat. But when they lower their standards, they get burned.…the service goes down for days, losing them millions; the project gets delivered late or even not at all, losing them contracts and customers; they lose the business battle to competitors who hired better engineers.

Putting together a pretty Ruby on Rails site is no small feat. Learning to program is no small feat. Many people try and fail to get even that far. But it’s 3- to 5-ball juggling, and it just doesn’t cut it for the Cirque du Soleils and private hospitals of the software industry. I’m sure you want to be a racecar driver, a hang-gliding instructor, a corporate lawyer, a movie sound editor, a rocket scientist. But you know you don’t have the requisite training or experience. Why do you think knowing a little (or even a lot) about programming automatically qualifies you to get hired at Microsoft?

Software companies have excruciatingly high standards, just like any other profession. Those that don’t get eaten up by those that do.

He mentions this idea again in passing in Dreaming in Browser Swamp

One cause [of disrespect for web programming], and let’s be honest here, is that a lot of web developers were self-taught, weaned from text to HTML to onclick=”foo.hide()” and onwards to CSS and DOM and more complex JavaScript, and thence on to CGI and PHP and VB and ActiveX and SVG and Flash and the rest…

This is exactly how I came to be a programmer (although in my case it was Java instead of VB and ActiveX). It hurts to be pegged.

Sigh, this is a long-lived meme. Here’s Philip Greenspun from the introduction to SQL for Web Nerds:

That doesn’t sound too tough to implement, does it? And, after all, one of the most refreshing things about the Web is how it encourages people without formal computer science backgrounds to program. So why not build your Internet bank on a transaction system implemented by an English major who has just discovered Perl?

And Joel Spolsky, from the forward to Mike Gunderloy’s “Coder to Developer:”

There’s something weird about software development, some mystical quality, that makes all kinds of people think they know how to do it. I’ve worked at dotcom-type companies full of liberal arts majors with no software experience or training who nevertheless were convinced that they knew how to manage software teams and design user interfaces. This is weird, because nobody thinks they know how to remove a burst appendix, or rebuild a car engine, unless they actually know how to do it, but for some reason there are all these people floating around who think they know everything there is to know about software development.

The thing is, I have high standards too. I’m not satisfied with the status quo. My wife and my (non-technical) co-workers are always telling me not to be so hard on myself. In their opinion, I’m a good engineer. While that feels nice, and I appreciate their support, it lures me into a false sense of security, because they don’t know anything about software development. I try to learn all the time, but it always feels like I’m putting lipstick on a pig, because I don’t know jack about pointer arithmetic, discrete math, number theory, compiler design, multi-threading, and on and on. Perhaps one day I’ll cave to my mediocrity and phone it in for the rest of my life, but by God I hope not. Until then, I stubbornly refuse to accept that I cannot be a good programmer just because I didn’t go to MIT. I’m trying to be very pragmatic and systematic about this: I will put the full light of day on my ignorance and chip away at it in the right places until I like the shape I’m taking. Which is not to say that it will ever be finished. I have to accept the fact that I have limitations — every human being does. But I don’t have to accept that my life is not up to me.

In a perfectly painful synergy, this is also the story of how I became a “musician.” I will not rest until I can play piano like a cross between Reuben Gonzales and Count Basie. I hope you’re willing to wait, because this is going to take a while.

the Paleo Diet, day 3

2006-09-27T16:18:00.000-07:00

I got the book and as of Sunday evening I'm officially on the Paleo Diet. I've done some crazy things, folks. I've done detox diets, I've been vegetarian. But this really takes the cake. Scratch that; Cake is not allowed. Here is a brief summary of what is not allowed on the Paleo Diet: dairy, beans, corn, potatoes, grains, sugar, and salt. This lays devastating waste to the food guide pyramid. Strangely, beer and wine are not prohibited, even though Paleo Man could not have had them. Loren Cordain PhD recommends moderation, of course! I'm only on the third full day, and this is hard. Basically, you can only have lean, fresh meat, fruit, and most vegetables (legumes and the starchy ones excluded). My fervent hope is that once I figure out how to shop for these things and how to make a few delicious meals under these restrictions, that I'll be happy again. I want to give this a good college try, because it promises to bring out the caveman in me!

Paleo Man!

2006-09-07T12:23:00.000-07:00

I did not care for my primary care physician at all, so I followed a recommendation from the fine folks at our local natural food store and switched to a very, um, different sort of doctor. Lane Sebring, M.D. spent more time with me in our initial consult than anybody I've ever gone to see before. Here are some highpoints of our visit:

He extolled the virtues of hunting and gathering.
Vegetarianism and low-cholesterol diets are both vile propaganda.
I can choose to juice up my libido with a liberal course of testosterone.
His favorite breakfast: a 6 or 8 ounce buffalo steak with a side of spinach.

So he's taking me off statins ("What are they for? Certainly not for your health!") and putting me on the Paleo Diet and I'm going to turn into some kind of primal man. Now we're talking!

SOCI 3307

2006-08-23T13:27:00.000-07:00

I started auditing a statistics class today, from Dr. Sally Caldwell who is “the best stat teacher in the world.” [1] This is gonna rock. [1] Sally Caldwell, PhD. August 23, 2006

Better Living Through Numbers

2006-07-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

If you have 20 minutes to have your mind blown and your old assumptions about the world re-programmed, then watch this video of Swedish public health expert Hans Rosling at this year's TED conference.

Among the surprises: measured by the rate of child survival to the age of 5, Mao Tse Tung figures as one of the great humanitarians of all time.

Oh, Glorious Day!

2006-06-27T12:10:00.000-07:00

Everyone buy this book immediately.

Edward Tufte (pronounced “tufty”) is one of my intellectual role models, right up there with Christopher Alexander. Tufte is for information what Alexander is for buildings. When I was in college, in a rut of non-inspiration, I took a gamble on an odd little course from the Division of Rhetoric and Composition called “Information Architecture,” for which Tufte's “Envisioning Information” was one of the texts. It was one of only two times in college I was awestruck (the other was an introduction to ancient Greek and Roman art). Granted, this tells you as much about my difficulties as an undergrad as it does about Tufte, but there you have it.

I went on to be riveted by the rest of his books. I can honestly say that post-Tufte I see the world in an entirely different light. A new book is like a national holiday. Imagine getting Harry Potter #7 delivered to your door out of nowhere by surprise. Times bajillion!

Post-Cartesian Objectivity

2006-06-26T07:50:00.000-07:00

The older I get, the less of a relativist I become. I hope this trajectory does not lead to close-minded dogmatism, but I can at least flirt with it, right?

I'm near the end of a magnificent book called "The Nature of Order: the Phenomenon of Life," by architect Christopher Alexander. I learned about him from software engineering, weirdly enough; He's the pioneer of a system of problem-solving by codifying the essence of common problems and describing a generic solution taken from accepted wisdom. He writes about it from the point of view of buildings, but it turns out to be a wonderful device for talking about software problems as well.

"The Nature of Order" is a four-volume magnum opus that strives to do no less than codify beauty in objective terms. In order to do this, he first has to re-cast the very meaning of objectivity away from 17th century mechanistic scientific objectivity. Alexander blames this impersonal worldview for the cold, lifeless, and even hostile architecture of 20th century. In the Alexandrian model of life and beauty in the world, beauty is objective from the frame of reference of our shared humanity; it is a deeply-felt, profoundly human experience. What he describes is not so much an approach to the built environment as it is a philosophy by which we aim to make ourselves more truly alive.

I can't wait to start volume two!

“Overwhelming Response”

2006-06-23T08:40:00.000-07:00

I just dialed 1-800-MY-APPLE and got this:

Due to overwhelming response to our products and services, we are unable to take your call.…

Notice how they spin that to make it sound like a good thing.

MacBook Review

2006-06-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

I'm loving my new Apple MacBook. I've got the white one, because I couldn't see why I should want to pay more to get the color of almost every other portable computer on earth. I ordered it with the minimum RAM configuration and bought 2GB from Newegg right away. Apple must be smoking drugs to charge $500 for the same upgrade: Newegg's was around $180. I'm thrilled that the MacBook's RAM and hard drive are user-swappable, but there's a pitfall when installing the memory: shoving the memory modules in takes a good deal more force than anyone would reasonably expect. You don't usually want to be subjecting an expensive piece of equipment to brute force only a few minutes after you lift it out of the box. And it's a beautiful box, by the way. Apple has a knack for achieving obsessive levels of refinement, and you can see it right down to the museum-of-modern-art packaging. The MacBook has a new and different keyboard, and since I bought this machine sight unseen, I didn't know if I was going to like it. Well, I love it. It has a very crisp action that doesn't feel notebook-y at all. The key caps have a very subtle texture on them that makes them more tactile. The surface of the trackpad has the same texture, which makes it very nice to touch. If you put two fingers on the trackpad, you can scroll the active window. Remarkably, it's smart enough that if you have a window with multiple panes and multiple scrollbars, it scrolls the one your pointer is over even if if that pane does not have keyboard focus. Trackpad scrolling is so nice, I hope I never have to click a scroll button again. Speaking of clicking, the MacBook trackpad button is unfortunately a little mushy. My previous machine was a G4 PowerBook, so I am enjoying a big speed boost. I can build Sakai from scratch in four minutes instead of twelve. I've never had a computer with dual processor cores, let alone a "low end" consumer laptop like this one. Oh, I just misspoke. A lot of hay has been made about how the MacBook and MacBook Pro are too hot to sit comfortably on your lap. It is absolutely true. It's fine for a few minutes, but only if you're wearing pants. ;-) For extended use on your couch or in your bed, you are going to want some kind of tray to set it on. In spite of the dual cores, the heat, and the fact that it has a brighter screen and 25% more pixels than my old PowerBook, battery life is about a third longer. Since I like to be mobile, that's a lovely surprise. The MacBook has a new high-gloss screen. I wasn't excited about this, but it turns out that in most lighting conditions you won't notice it. In one case, reflections were obvious and I just had to adjust the angle a little bit. I personally don't buy the claim that this glossy screen is going to make video look better. That sounds like pseudoscience to me. The complement of software that comes bundled is pretty amazing. OS X is an entire universe all by itself, but you also get iLife '06, PhotoBooth, FrontRow, and full versions of ComicLife, OmniOutliner, and 7 classic board games from Freeverse. By surprise, there's also a full version of Quicken 2006 on here, which I could find no mention of on Apple's website. That's about it for my first impressions. The built-in iSight camera is nice, as is the ability to boot into Windows, should that need ever arise (I'm not holding my breath).

MacBook Cometh

2006-06-14T14:18:00.000-07:00

I'm taking delivery of a rawkin' MacBook tomorrow. Thanks to the international date line, my package can depart China and arrive in Alaska in the past.

I Will Eat My Socks…

2006-06-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

… if all the 5-star reviews for this course on DVD were not written by the author himself! His style is — how shall we say &mdash distinctive? Viral marketing on the very cheap. Hey Boris, next time you should mix up your capitalization and punctuation a little bit.

Windows Genuine Advantage

2006-06-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

The last time my Windows machine downloaded updates, I got this gem:

The Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool notifies you if your copy of Windows is not genuine. If your system is found to be non-genuine, the tool will help you obtain a licensed copy of Windows.

How stupid does Microsoft really think its customers are? As a software company, they're well within their rights to do what they feel is necessary to stem the tide of piracy, but they're pitching it like they're doing all of us a magnificent favor. They even have a slick website about it. I don't know about you, but I doubt those that are using Windows for free are going to feel the "genuine advantage" vibe.

Maybe I'm Too Well Paid?

2006-05-26T09:35:00.000-07:00

I have yet to work for an employer who will buy software tools for the team when we ask for them. The beautiful side of this is that it drove me to pursue open source alternatives, which has proved to be a very good thing. One of the ways a state agency is ill-equipped to produce great software is that their byzantine purchasing process makes it very difficult to get development tools. Apparently the only place we can easily purchase from is shi. If shi doesn't carry it, then for all practical purposes, it doesn't exist for us. I guess no one has explained to the state agencies that we're entering a new golden age of independent software development. Software in boxes is so last century. I have been using a trial version of TextMate, a fabulous text editor for developers on the mac. Its entire development is the work of one nice young man from Copenhagen. This software is worth more than the asking price (around $50), and Allan deserves our money, so I approached my boss, gave him a flashy demo, and asked him if he can get it. After explaining the near-impossibility of fulfilling this request, he offered me an intriguing organizational hack: "If you pay for it with your own money, I'll reimburse you in time off." By the way, this is the officially-supported means of compensating for overtime, which when you think about it is not really a benefit ("You get to work on Saturday instead of Monday!"). At first, I was excited. A solution! I can get all the software I want! "See you in a couple of weeks boss, there's lots of stuff I wanna get." But then I started wishing I wasn't paid quite so well. If only I made minimum wage, I would get to take more than a day off in compensation for buying TextMate. As it is, though, I only get two and a half hours. Sheesh, that's only a long lunch. It's funny, ever since my son was born I have become very philosophical about time, about how I should value my time ever more highly. When faced with the chance to pay money for time, it suddenly feels like a different equation. In this particular case, it's a no-brainer, because not only do I get two and a half hours back, I get some great software! I guess the problem in general with being compensated in time, is that just like that, it's gone. There's a larger lesson here, isn't there? Time, she is a cruel mistress.

Flirtation with MacBook Pro

2006-05-19T19:19:00.000-07:00

I'm borrowing a shiney 15" MacBook Pro from work. First impression? It's cooking my lap! I had heard that these guys run hot, but it's leaving a MacBook-shaped mark on my body. My other impression is that you can sort of tell that the Intel machines aren't as reliable (yet) as their PowerPC brothers. One of the first things I tried to do was download the new Intel compatible version of Eclipse, and on two attempts Firefox would only download the first 75% or so, and then StuffIt Expander would try to expand the incomplete file, hang and eat one of the CPU cores until I opened Activity Monitor to force it to quit. I'm sure there is an Intel mac in my future, but playing with one rubs off some of the mystique. It's still just a computer. It's good for me to learn not to covet.

Brainless Stock Photography

2006-05-17T09:15:00.000-07:00

Part one of a new series.

This woman loves her computer so much, she'll sit in front of it even when it's not on!

Update: the series began unofficially last October with this beauty from Apple.

Zach Thomas: Browser Maverick!

2006-05-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

I guess Firefox is just too popular for my taste. I'm switching to Camino! Actually, I'm just giving Camino a test drive. After all, Greasemonkey contributes a great deal to making Firefox the coolest browser in the world. We'll see where this goes. Heck, I could still wind up with OmniWeb or Opera.

Impactful Website

2006-05-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

Thank goodness. Apparently I'm not the only one who despises the use of the word "impact" as a verb.

Bubble or No?

2006-05-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

In a new article at BusinessWeek (apparently it was written in the future — it's dated seven days from now), they consider the question of whether we're in the midst of another tech bubble, headed for another crash.

The authors say probably not, and I agree with them. While it's true that many new companies are starting up with copycat ideas and little real value, the difference this time is that they are spending next to no money to get started. Innovation in business is just like innovation in nature: a thousand ideas must perish to find one that will propagate to future generations. In this era of cheap startups, there is very little harm in failure. This may prove to be an ideal environment for creating wealth in the Paul Graham sense of the word.

You Know You're Having a Rough Week When…

2006-05-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

…it's Friday and you have your first chance to open your email, read your RSS feeds, and walk over to the vending machine to buy a Coke™.

Skype + WiFi + Itty Bitty Phone

2006-05-09T11:51:00.000-07:00

As a sometime rock star, I can attest to the difficulty of making and receiving phone calls while touring the globe. My cell phone won't work overseas. Every country has its own version of pre-paid phone cards. They're expensive (the last time I was in Europe, I racked up more than $300 in phone calls to Elizabeth). And they're complicated: Every country has its own arcane formula of prefixes, country codes, area codes, exchanges, and extensions. The friendly robotic instructions will often not be in the language of your choice.

Those days are over. SMC has announced a WiFi phone with embedded Skype. Skype is a popular software system for making free calls over the Internet. They have a service for making calls to other Skype users and to regular telephones, and they have a service that gives your Skype account an ordinary phone number that people can use to call you from any phone. To this point, Skype has been a tool for nerds who like to keep their laptop computers around them at all times. With the advent of SMC's new phone, you won't need a computer at all to make and receive calls from anywhere.

There is a major caveat, of course: you have to have access to a WiFi network to make or receive calls. This isn't so bad, especially with the proliferation of Internet cafés worldwide. And it's only a matter of time before ubiquitous wireless Internet access blankets the earth.

You Know Someone is a Bad Software Manager When…

2006-05-08T08:11:00.000-07:00

A software project manager who shall remain nameless was staffing up a new team. We were standing in line together at a hamburger cookout and after some small talk he asked me if I knew any software engineers looking for work.

“I know of one, but he is really unlikable,” I said.

Said the manager, “If he’s good, his personality doesn’t matter.”

He went on to drive his project into the ground. I wish I was making this up.

Screencast: Adding a Drawer to a Window

2006-05-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

I've been having a lot of fun with Cocoa all weekend. Inspired by Apple's Core Data movie (which I found out was done by "Wolf" Rentzsch), I decided to make a short movie to share a little of what I learned recently: How to Add a Drawer to a Window with Cocoa.

Rocking with Core Data

2006-05-06T14:06:00.000-07:00

My wife and child are in San Antonio for the weekend, so I'm left alone to — what else? — write code! I have embarked on a 36-hour code jam with Objective-C and Cocoa. I'm attempting to build a personal finance application for my own use that may turn into something more.

If you want to write apps for OS X and you'd like to be productive in a hurry, I super highly recommend watching this video tutorial from Apple that demonstrates building an application with a technology called Core Data. Core Data was introduced with Tiger (aka OS X 10.4) and is just monstrously useful. With the information in the tutorial alone, you can write a zillion simple, handy apps.

Improv Everywhere Mission: Best Buy

2006-05-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

Oh, the glory. This is my kind of civil disobedience.

Backyard Veggies

2006-05-05T15:36:00.000-07:00

Let's check in on my garden! I am a complete beginner using Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot method. The basic idea is that you plant in boxes filled up with ideal soil, and that you put each crop into one square foot, marked off by a grid. Here's the box I planted mid-March. It's four feet on a side, for a total of 16 square feet. I've got pole beans, purple bush beans, cucumbers, scallop summer squash, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, New Zealand spinach, parsley, two kinds of beets, and four kinds of lettuce. Waiting for my cherry tomatoes to turn ripe is hard work. This is a variety of Romaine lettuce called "Freckles." Here's another box ready for planting.

Venture Voice

2006-05-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

Greg Galant at the entrepreneurship podcast Venture Voice has a remarkable talent for conducting interviews. He's a great listener, and he has a knack for asking questions that make it easy for his subjects to talk, unlike this bozo who, in his interview with Paul Graham, barely lets him get a word in edgewise. Great work, Greg. I always look forward to the next interview.

Feel Like Going to Berkeley?

2006-05-03T22:57:00.000-07:00

Here is an embarrassment of riches: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/ I just watched a couple of videos of Alan Kay, inventor of Smalltalk and most of the user interface innovations we take for granted in contemporary graphical operating systems. Here are parts one and two. Not only will you be amazed again and again while watching these lectures, you will become convinced that computer science has been at a virtual stand-still since around 1976. I can hardly believe how much milk Berkeley is giving away for free. My son is growing up with a wealth of resources at his stubby fingertips.

Simple Productivity

2006-05-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

I came up with a technique for my whiteboard that is working really well for me:

I have a list of the major tasks that still need doing, the ones that would take more than a day to complete. Right next to it on the same whiteboard, I put a list of little things that I would like to complete today. Every morning when you're ready to get to work, you mentally decompose the big items into a handful of next actions and put them on your TODAY list. Ask yourself the following question: "What is the list of accomplishments that I could truly feel good about having finished by the end of the day?" Like you, I am easily distracted, but now when I catch myself being swallowed by NetNewsWire (thanks Brent!) or http://developer.apple.com/documentation/, I just turn my head a few degrees and look at my list. Then I latch onto something and grind through it.

It has been really important for me to have this list on a whiteboard staring me in the face. I have tried Trac and some other software tools, but I find it's far too easy to drop a ticket into the system and let it languish indefinitely. Physically crossing things off feels good, especially the big ticket items.

I have read David Allen's "Getting Things Done," and I recommend it highly. You can get a lot out of it even if you don't implement the full system, which requires a ton of discipline, and I haven't ventured that far yet. The book reinforces a lot of ideas that weren't new to me, but what was new to me was the idea that we can free ourselves from the nagging and stressful voice inside our heads that is constantly inducing us to panic because the library books are overdue and the gutters are clogged and the car needs an oil change and your son's 2nd birthday is in two weeks and on and on. I have always taken this voice for granted, a necessary evil of complicated times. The prospect of gaining back all the energy you waste worrying about 150 things at once is truly liberating.

Archaeology of an Obsession

2006-04-04T12:30:00.000-07:00

I know you probably won't believe me, but I've been a fan of Ruby on Rails since before it was cool. In this age of information overload, have you ever noticed that it can be really hard to remember how you first heard about something, or when? For me, Rails is a rare example of a case in which I know exactly when and how I first came in contact with it. I had been using a really cool project collaboration system called Trac, and on their project wiki, they have a page called TracUsers where you're supposed to write a blurb about your organization and how you're using Trac. After I wrote my two lines about Texas State, I couldn't help but see "Rails is an open source web-application framework for Ruby." Thanks to how awesome Trac is, the version history tells the story. My edit was #33, on December 28, 2004. David HH's edit was 7 weeks before on November 10. I was into Rails before there was a slick website design, before the swooping logo, before any of the books had been published. Incredibly, it was still two months before Jesse James Garrett coined the term "AJAX."

Hello Ranchero

2006-03-29T22:33:00.000-08:00

Ranchero is running a promotion on NetNewsWire and MarsEdit, and I couldn't resist any longer. I'm now a bona fide, license-carrying Ranchero software (er, I mean NewsGator) customer.

And writing this on MarsEdit. See you around!

The Slow Demise of the Page

2006-02-25T12:28:00.000-08:00

The world wide web was designed with a powerful metaphor: pages. It's powerful because anyone can grasp the idea in an instant, and at the same time its scope encompasses no less than the entirety of accumulated human knowledge. Of course, we already had pages for centuries on paper. The web's contribution is not its concept, but its scale; I estimate that it has already expanded the publishing privilege by three orders of magnitude, and I believe it's got at least another two up its serpentine fiber optic sleeve.

Ok, so the web is breathtaking, no argument there. The page metaphor has been wildly successful by any measure, except maybe one.

I saw my first cgi script in the spring of 1995. It was a page (there's that word again) that displayed the current date and time whenever it was requested. Some alpha geeks were huddled around a mac on the showroom floor of the campus computer store where I worked part-time. I was not yet an alpha geek, so the significance of this demonstration was lost on me. Of course the true ramifications of this development are so great that we'll have to wait a generation or so for the historians to sort it out. The browser had become a medium for delivering software instantaneously anywhere in the world.

Web applications are amazing. I owe my career to them. Incidentally, I also owe my blog and the editor I'm writing this in to them. The trouble is it's just so darn hard to shoehorn a software application into the page metaphor. Those of us who develop web applications are so used to taking this paradigm for granted that we forget how weird it is until we have to explain it to someone else.

At long last, change is in the air. With the advent of AJAX, the idea of a web application as interconnected pages is going to become rather antiquated. The correct way to think of a web application is as a DOM that can be updated in whole or in part by events from both the client and the server. In this brave new world, a URL is no longer a “location,” but a message from the client to the server.

Yes, the interface of the application is still a document (that's what the “D” in DOM is for), but the document is just an abstraction that permits you to describe a user interface in plain ol' text. Ok, maybe it's still a little strange, but it's a breath of fresh air for developers and a sea change for the world wide web.

On New Ways to Get Hired

2006-02-21T13:45:00.000-08:00

I just saw this story at 37Signals about how someone recently created a blog all about Gawker in an effort to convince Gawker to hire him. I expect this trend to thrive, and I hope that it will.

Résumés and the traditional job interview are a terrible way to learn about someone. What businesses and prospective employees really want is to know each other, and everyone knows the standard hiring tools are pretty thin and pretty fake. That's why it's so much easier to get a job when someone introduces you. There is tremendous value in the relationship that a referral represents. Human beings are experts at relationships (even if it doesn't always seem that way). Have you ever hated someone who looked good on paper, and even interviewed well? I have. I believe there is a better way.

The Information Age offers us some nice alternatives. I'm currently a lower-tier committer on an open source project called Sakai. I've been working with people from around the country and around the world for close to two years. Some of the contributors are volunteers, and some (like me) are paid by their institutions to help out, but no one has to pass an interview to start working. Let me tell you something: the cream rises to the top. There are 1,318 people on the developer mailing list, and if you asked everyone to name the best 1%, the same names would appear again and again. When my institution came up with some extra money for new staff, I emailed the person I wanted the most and offered him a job. Of course we still have to negotiate the details, but I know his personality and I know his work, and I can bring him into the team with complete confidence.

The rise of web publishing also plays a huge part in this new way to get hired. If we know how to write, we can learn a lot more about each other than we can get from a résumé. And the best part is, we are free to express our true selves online, not the perfect-employee version that we pretend to be in an interview. From now on, I hope anyone who hires me knows I'm mercurial, distractible, idiosyncratic, and a dozen other adjectives you would never find on a job application. My wife knew all those things about me before we got married. She still loves me, even!

This new brand of getting-to-know-you doesn't only extend to the prospective employee. Increasingly, it is possible to learn enough about a company to get a clear idea of whether you will fit in there before you ever approach someone there. There are around a hundred employees at ThoughtWorks who keep a weblog. If you follow http://blogs.thoughtworks.com/ for a couple of days, you will feel like you've actually worked there for a while. It is such a refreshing change from the galling bullshit that passes for information at most corporate websites.

Lately I've been lurking on the Ruby on Rails core developers mailing list. I don't have anything to contribute just yet, but I might in the not-too-distant future. Every time a fellow by the name of Michael Koziarski posts something on that list, I think "Holy crap, that guy really knows what he is talking about." You can't fake this stuff. I went looking for more information about his company , because anyplace that hires people like Koz has got something going for it.

In the 37Signals story cited above, they suggest that the blogger-turned-Gawker remained anonymous while he was gathering the necessary attention to land a job. I don't believe it's necessary to be covert. I think it's perfectly acceptable to make your intentions known. It's like applying for a job, but instead of insisting that they make up their minds about you right away, you take as much time as you need to make it self-evident that you should work there. If you don't make the grade, then why not improve yourself until you cross the threshold?

I like the new way of landing your dream job. Instead of pretending to be what your employer wants, you use all the information at your disposal to become what your employer wants. It's elegant in its simplicity: you see the path, you follow it.

SICP = Rad

2006-01-27T11:17:00.000-08:00

One of the things I decided I would finally do this year is self-study "6.001: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," which is MIT's classic undergrad introduction to computer science. I have been hearing about this course and its accompanying textbook since I started getting seriously interested in software systems around 1998. There are video lectures available here.

I always assumed this would be really dry subject matter, and that it would be good medicine, but not actually enjoyable. To paraphrase Mark Twain, I figured it was something I wanted to have done, but not something I wanted to do.

I've seen three weeks of lectures now, and I can honestly say it is blowing my mind. Since I came to software from the top down and not from the ground up, I've never had an opportunity to contemplate computer programming from first principles. For that matter, most computer science curricula don't do this either, but rather introduce you to the minutiae of some programming language, be it Pascal, C++, or (lately) Java. SICP is astonishingly refreshing and illuminating. I've managed to learn a few things about software already, but this course is revealing the why of software design.

The video lectures were done in 1986 for employees of Hewlett Packard. One of the great side-effects of this is that the students in this class are asking really good questions, usually the questions that I wish I could ask.

Will this course turn me into a Lisp hacker? Paul Graham and Philip Greenspun are convincing advocates, but the pudding in which the proof really is is Andy Gavin of Naughty Dog. If Lisp is good enough for Jak and Daxter, it is freakin' good enough for me.

Learning to Do Things

2006-01-06T09:25:00.000-08:00

I am a lazy thinker. When I'm trying to solve a problem, I think about it until I find a way to solve it. The glitch is, I use the first solution I find.

The trick to truly understanding how to do something is to know many ways to solve the problem, to understand the permutations of each, and to be able to evaluate them against the priorities of your situation.

I'm gonna try, honest I am.

Detox Made Easy

2006-01-05T10:44:00.000-08:00

I've started the new year on a detoxification regime. In a nutshell, this means that I stop putting various poisons into my body to give my organs a chance to clean out the gutters.

You can find a lot of information about detox on the web, and a lot of people who would like you to pay them for advice about detox. My program is a bastard version I invented myself. I just follow a simple mantra: no sugar, no wheat, no dairy, no meat. I also give up drugs*, but that doesn't fit nicely into the rhyme.

The first couple of times I did this, I had no idea what to eat, and it was pretty painful. It's amazing how many foods in the standard American diet are ruled out. But this time, I've been a vegetarian for almost a year, and I am much more comfortable with the kind of menus I can prepare. I just finished a bowl of chili so good that you don't even realize it's vegetarian, let alone detoxifying. My wife made cornbread that I can't eat because it's got wheat flour in it, but I figured out that I can sauté some slices of polenta and it's just as good as cornbread.

The other thing that's better this time around is that vegetarian and all-natural alternatives to many standard foods are more plentiful. I made Rick Bayless's Oaxacan Black Bean Soup, with onions, toasted avocado leaves, and chorizo. God bless you, Soyrizo! Since I won't be having any flour tortillas for a while, I bought a tortilla press, and learned how to make my own tortillas from fresh corn masa. This is the Genius of the And in action: My homemade corn tortillas are worlds better than anything I used to buy at the store. In the quest for healthier food, I'm getting better-tasting food to boot. Granted, the soup is a lot better with a mound of queso fresco crumbled on it, but that's why detox doesn't last forever. ;-)

In the past, I've been on detox for about 3 weeks. I'm planning to double it this time. I'll let you know how it goes.

* I'm talking about alcohol and caffeine. Jeez, people!

What's Up with SAP?

2006-01-04T08:13:00.000-08:00

Last year, Texas State University completed a painful migration of all its HR systems to SAP. I had heard about SAP before, but I had never had any interactions with it. They are well known as one of the top dogs (if not the top dog) in so-called enterprise resource planning. I don't have any knowledge of how it works behind the scenes, but I can't begin to tell you how bad their web user interface is. I'd better just show you a sample:

It may be a little difficult to see, but there are three vertical scroll bars and two horizontal scroll bars!!

The red warning at the top reads:
If you experience a blank screen while working in the SAP Portal, press the Enter key on your keyboard to continue through the blank screen.

Nice.

But here's the really cool part. When I upgraded my browser to Firefox 1.5, all hell broke loose in SAP. Each button is now a sliver one pixel wide. While I can still click them, I have to hover over each button until the tool tip tells me what it is. And the paycheck report is completely broken.

I can access the paycheck report in Safari, but not the timesheet entry.

SAP's revenues in Q3 2005 were €2.01 billion.

If you can be so well paid for such crap, break me off a piece of that!

Things to Do Before You Die

2006-01-03T15:22:00.000-08:00

Here's a good list of things to do before you die:

Get some grandchildren
Become fluent in another language
Travel around the world
Publish a book
Achieve financial independence

Homemade Zen Alarm

2005-11-22T13:25:00.000-08:00

I don't know who coined the phrase "life hack," but the idea is that you apply the aesthetic of hacking -- solving problems with a focused ingenuity -- to your everyday life. Here's one I just came up with: I have been interested in the Zen Alarm Clock since I first saw one six months ago. Instead of punishing your mind and body with an irritating noise in the morning, it strikes a pleasant chime. The part I really like is that it starts out with a long pause between the chimes, and over the course of ten minutes, the chimes get closer and closer together until they sound every five seconds. It gradually brings your sleeping mind around to the idea of waking up, which is good for me because my mind is particularly spiteful in this regard. The only trouble is, they want $110 for it. Absolutely out of nowhere, I had the idea to make a CD that sounds just like a Zen Alarm. I've already got a CD player in my bedroom that can be programmed to start at any time I like. I downloaded a sample chime from Now & Zen and used Audacity on my mac to boost the signal and place the tones in the prescribed sequence: Then I exported the 12-minute sequence to iTunes and burned a disc. If you don't count the CD player and the PowerBook, the total cost of my project was around a dollar.

Events Aggregator

2005-11-02T15:29:00.000-08:00

There ought to be a way to subscribe to upcoming events in the same way that you subscribe to RSS feeds. Your aggregator would just be a calendar that knows about event feeds. Ideally, you can also see events that your social network flags as interesting. I would be interested in any events that my friends and my friends’ friends are interested in. The events should be location aware, so that you can filter out events that aren’t happening anywhere near you. The reason this hasn’t taken off before is that it only gets really useful when there is a critical mass of venues and artists and organizations using the event format. The conclusion we draw from that is that there has to be a killer application to create the critical mass of adoption. I think the killer app could be a free, hosted event calendar that is just as easy to embed as Google Ads.

Zach Facts

2005-10-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

More OCD: When I get a Coke from the fountain machine (Diet Coke lately), I have to push down those little plastic buttons in the configuration that corresponds to my drink. So for example just now, the buttons on my lid say COLA, DIET, RB, and OTHER. I pushed down COLA and DIET, because that's what I have. I suppose I don't have to push down the buttons, I just like to.

Diminishing Returns, Local Maxima, & Saying Yes to Life

2005-10-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

I've always been interested in how judge the goodness of something, and how we learn how to turn up the goodness knob. Like when you see a bag of snack chips that says, "Now, better tasting!" I think, "Really? How would I judge that for myself? What did they learn that made them able to produce a better-tasting chip? What secrets remain buried that will someday enable even better-tasting chips? Can chips taste 10 times better? How about 100 times?" It may sound like I'm over-thinking something that is really just a calculated bid to make a lot of gullible consumers buy their product. But there is an important phenomenon illustrated here: it's easy to tell the difference between something that's terrible and something that's kind of good. But it turns out to be extremely difficult to tell the difference between something that's very very good and something that's merely very good. As you near the asymptotic top of the curve, pouring more and more effort into goodness yields less and less perceptible benefit. This is what's known as diminishing returns. It's important because you want to realize when benefits no longer justify costs. Also, being able to distinguish between things at the top is the essence of taste. Examples abound: Is a $200 bottle of wine really twice as good as a $100 bottle? That's a tough sell. On the other hand, it will not be hard to find a $12 bottle that's much more than twice as good as a $6 bottle. Businesses need to recognize diminishing returns because if you don't, you can start working too hard to distinguish yourself not very much. What's needed in this situation is to change tracks completely, to put yourself at the bottom of a new curve. Businesses are reluctant to make this decision because it's risky. But risk is the harbinger of reward. This is important in life as well as business, by the way. More on that in a couple of paragraphs. When you get stuck working hard near the top of the quality curve, it's what mathematicians call a local maximum. It means that you may not be able to do much better where you are, but you may be able to start over and climb higher. The classic metaphor is mountain climbing: When you climb to the top of a peak, you may be able to see higher peaks around you. You will only be able to reach those higher peaks by climbing down first. People are reluctant to do this, because at first, it looks like you're doing worse. The PC started out worse that the mainframe, but ended up climbing higher. Japanese cars started out worse than American cars, but ended up dominating. We see this over and over. This is the phenomenon that makes startups powerful in the aggregate, and makes nations that encourage entrepreneurship end up doing better than the totalitarian regimes. Artists are among the people who are able to bring about the difference between good work and very good work. And while merely good artists compete for space at the top of well-known local maxima, great artists push right on through to something profoundly different. I just finished reading "Beyond Java" by a well-known Java author, speaker, and consultant name Bruce Tate. It takes a lot of courage for him to write about a sea change in the technology that has become his bread and butter. Even more so, because the prospect of such a change is going to be extremely unpopular to the very audience he's writing for. I, on the other hand, couldn't be more excited. Shakeups are always exciting (granted, though not always beneficial). They are the very shape of opportunity. And besides, the status quo is lame and boring. People tend to be very comfortable with the status quo because it's well-known and safe, but I believe strongly that safety is overrated, and that it is not consistent with being fully alive. Why is great art so invigorating? Because it demolishes our comfort zone. This is analogous to life itself: a cycle of destruction and renewal, of constantly learning, adapting, and innovating.

Text-To-Speech Rulez

2005-10-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

Having recently failed to find a book I was interested in either in the university library or the local public library, I decided to look for it in an online book service called Safari. I had tried this a couple of years ago and wasn't too impressed with the selection. This time, not only did I find the book I was looking for, but half the books on my tech books wish list. I was like a kid in a candy store. Reading books on a computer screen is sort of hard, and Safari doesn't really make it easy to print, so I selected a page of text and invoked OS X's text-to-speech feature to have the computer read it to me. In so doing, I discovered a marvelous synergy. Allow me to set this up for you: I have two serious problems with books. The first is that while I'm reading, my train of thought is very easily disrupted. Either some external thing inteferes, or my brain wanders off on its own to think about something shiny. This tends to slow me down a lot, and I was never that fast to begin with. The second problem is that I also get distracted while I'm not reading. That is, I tend not to finish the books I start because I get interested in something else and start a half dozen more books along the way. Back to the crazy talking computer: I would not consider the computer's staccato robotic cadence a good substitute for reading the book for myself. But if I read along with the crazy robot voice, something magical happens. The voice keeps a dogmatic pace. I can adjust the speed, and in fact I have found that I can follow along faster than I would read on my own. Also, the machine doesn't permit my mind to wander. If I'm wearing headphones, external distractions are shut out and my brain locks in on the words. On top of everything, I find that combining the visual part of my brain with the auditory really saturates my mind with the ideas and improves my comprehension and retention. Best of all, being able to push through a book at a good, guaranteed rate keeps up my momentum and dramatically improves the odds that I will read all the way to the end. Give this a shot. It's weird at first, but not after you've burned through a couple hundred pages. On OS X, I recommend the voice called Bruce. He sounds the most like a person. And if you are willing to spend a little bit of money, you can do much better. Go over to Cepstral and try the demos. I think you will be amazed how far this technology has come.

Divided Attention

2005-10-24T14:43:00.000-07:00

I think it was John Udell who said that in an age of blossoming abundance (albeit unevenly distributed), attention is the new scarcity. And there certainly are a lot of things competing for my attention. Lately I have been dreaming of working at something -- anything -- where I could go more than 30 minutes without an interruption. Some people would probably say, "30 minutes? You're lucky to get that!" Precisely my point. Elizabeth and I went to Garden-Ville yesterday, and what we thought was going to be a chore (whith Graham in tow) turned out to be a warm and meditative delight. Plants grow at their pace, never faster. There was dappled shade and living things, and Graham had dirt and a wagon and a cat and dog to play with. Just writing about it, I feel that goodness again. On the way home, Elizabeth and I agreed that there is more to this than meets the eye; that there are ways to live that feel truly alive. This is the Quality Without a Name. I think we're learning to know it when we see it.

Strange Facts about Zach

2005-10-19T10:47:00.000-07:00

From the "More evidence that I probably have OCD" file: Lately when I'm operating a microwave oven, I only want to stop it on a prime number of seconds. I don't like it to go all the way down to zero because of the irritating beeps. So when I stop it, it has to be one of the primes: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, you get the idea.

This Photo is a Mistake

2005-10-18T15:13:00.000-07:00

Apple is usually very saavy when it comes to design. So why is it no one noticed that this photo looks like a burn victim's mangled stump with an iPod strapped onto it?

Within Procrastination's Icy Grip

2005-10-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

Bleh. I am easily distracted. At the moment, I am interested in so many things that I can't focus on anything in particular. Of course, the Internet only fuels my mania. I should be thrilled that I have the opportunity at Texas State to throw myself full-time into all things Sakai. But I am easily seduced by shiny things. And right now Cocoa and Ruby are competing with each other over who will distract me the most. I really really want to start a software company as soon as possible. But I have to ask myself whether I will ever be able to concentrate on one thing long enough to finish it.

Pox on Acrobat Reader

2005-09-29T17:14:00.000-07:00

This is what you have to do to install the latest version of Acrobat Reader on a mac:

Go to adobe.com and download the download manager (!)
Go through the download manager installer wizard.
Download the actual reader through the handy download manager.
Go through the Acrobat Reader installer wizard.
Open the Help menu and ask Acrobat Reader to check for updates.
Authorize some form of Safari repair, whatever that means.
Download the 7.0.1 update and authorize it to be installed.
Download the 7.0.2 update and authorize it to be installed.
Download the 7.0.3 update and authorize it to be installed.

Whew. And then you're all set, until the next update. Give us a break, Adobe!

The Times They Are A'Changin'

2005-09-28T09:22:00.001-07:00

I was just doing a mental inventory of all the cool technology I wish I was a master of, and I realized that my inventory is very different than just a couple years ago: A Couple Years Ago

Java
Linux
Oracle

I was convinced that this technology stack was the key to my fortune. You can still probably make a fortune this way, but I'm convinced now that my heart lies elsewhere: Today's Inventory

Cocoa / Objective-C
Mac OS X
Ruby
Ruby On Rails

What's the essential difference? I'm choosing smaller, more thoughtful communities, and more elegant, more beautiful techniques. Speaking of community, Martin Fowler has this to say about what makes Ruby special.

The 7 Spheres of Influence

2005-06-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

* self * family * friends * colleagues * community * society * the Universe In order to grow as human beings, we should strive to expand and enrich our influence at these seven levels. The last one, Universe, is the metaphysical catchall. It includes nature, God, the Infinite, the All. Whatever you like to call it, a growing person cultivates a relationship with it.

The 7 Spinning Plates of Well-Being

2005-06-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

* health * relationships * space * work * play * contemplation * personal finance In short, these are the seven aspects of your life you need to pay regular attention to. They are like plates spinning at the top of seven sticks. If you neglect one, it may fall and break. In life, we almost always pay close attention to some of these plates at the expense of others. What can I say? I'm turning 30 in three days. I feel the need to introspect.

Software is an Alien Artifact

2005-03-01T12:27:00.000-08:00

I have thought of an analogy that helps to explain why estimating software tasks can be so difficult. Imagine you work for the FBI or some such agency, and you recover an alien artifact from a UFO crash site. It's a seamless chrome box with no identifying marks or salient features of any kind. It doesn't rattle, it doesn't appear to do anything. Your task is to open this box, and your boss's boss wants it yesterday. How would you estimate this task? It might be efforless: grasp one end of the box and pull a little bit and it just swings right open. But what if that doesn't work? You might try hitting it with a hammer. You might run over it with your car. Let's say you spend a week and you've tried everything from bullets to high explosive and nothing even makes a mark. Then your buddy from down the hall walks in and goes, "You wanna go for sushi?" And the box just swings open on its own like that thing from "Hellraiser." Who knew that was the passphrase? And on a bad week, writing software is just like that.

Yearning to Simplify

2005-02-22T09:47:00.000-08:00

This may sound like a cliché, but ever since my son was born nine short months ago, my priorities have shifted into sharp focus. It helps that I read a book called "Living Simply with Children" that in turn led me to read "Your Money or Your Life." I find that I don't care about surrounding myself with stuff I bought. We moved to a smaller, less expensive town. My wife quit her job because we consider it more important for her to be a full time parent than a full time marketing writer. And this aesthetic is beginning to show itself in my work. I'm getting sick of stack traces forty calls deep. The Java world is rife with complexity. There's a ton of great work out there, but once you've incorporated all the cool stuff into your app, you find you're dependent on twenty libraries which are each dependent on twenty libraries and so on. I love the elegant simplicity of Ruby on Rails. I love the ethic of Unix tools: do one thing well. I love the clean lines of a well-made OS X application. All this compels me to cut the crap out of my life. Maybe plant a garden.

The Value of Software

2005-01-17T01:53:00.000-08:00

Joel Spolsky is well-known for his personal blog devoted to software and the challenges of running a small software company. Nearly five years ago, he posted an entry characterizing his company as a machine for "converting capital into software that works." He compares building great software to running a great restaurant or making a great movie. I'm interested in this idea because I still see a lot of potential in mom n' pop software shops running in someone's garage, and I'd like to run one myself. One of the great things about building software as a business is that the margins can be so high. Since I'm not interested in scaling mediocrity up to epic proportions to make a ton of money, I wanna know how much value one or a few programmers can generate. Thing is, valuing software is tricky. It's not like a commodity you can put on a scale and determine it's value by simple arithmetic. Plenty of studies have been done to find out how many thousands of lines of code a typical programmer can churn out in a month or a year, or whatever. This is sort of interesting, but on the other hand I could write a script that generates reams of syntactically correct code in moments. It's a case where quality is much more important than quantity. Since I can only slam out so many lines of code, how do I maximize the average value-per-line? And what might that number be in a best-case scenario? How about an average-case? I've got a family to feed!

The Great American Lie

2005-01-16T22:03:00.000-08:00

Something that never fails to stun me is every time someone makes it obvious that they believe the meritocracy myth: an underlying assumption that whatever succeeds in America does so because it is good, because it is better than the ones that didn't make it. In fact, the meritocracy myth seems so woven into the fabric of American culture that people are often irritated and defensive if you should suggest that it is a lie. It's such a serious and pervasive lie, that I've come to think of it as the Great American Lie. Little kids hear in school, "If you work hard, you could be president of the United Sates!" You know what? Bullshit. It's sad, because if you believe the lie, you're forced to conclude that wealthy white men are better than everyone else, because that's who becomes president time and time again. In the music business, it's amazing how bad much of the best selling stuff is. I'm so glad I have an economic justification for this in Chris Anderson's excellent article. We're starting to see a glimmer of hope that maybe people are figuring out that obscure stuff can be good, too. I was talking about all of this with a friend of mine, and he reminded me that people like to conform. We're social creatures, and we love hits because they are something we can share. So the demand curve is not going to go flat, nor should it, but it will be wonderful if we can learn to judge for ourselves what should go to the "short head" of the curve, instead of believing the great lie as told by by radio, magazines, and TV.

What's it mean to be a badass?

2005-01-13T12:56:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to figure out the difference between plain ol' developers and architects. It's supposed to be obvious that architects are better, but I want to put my finger on just how.

So I was listening to Jeffrey Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com) give his keynote address at the Web Design World conference, and he was talking about Eric Meyer, who is a badass in all things to do with Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). He said, "Eric is the kind of guy you really want on your staff when you don't know how to do something with CSS, because he'll know. And not only will he know how to do it, he'll know seven ways to do it and what's wrong with six of them."

That struck a chord with me. A developer should be able to solve a problem, but an architect can describe a half-dozen approaches to the problem and what's right and what's wrong with each of them. I hasten to add that what's right and/or wrong with an approach will always depend on the context in which the problem is situated. That's why you can't replace a good architect/designer with a shelf full of books, or a small army of interns.

the Long Tail

2005-01-12T11:08:00.000-08:00

Here is one of those things that sneaks up on you and then just changes the whole damn world. Chris Anderson's article in Wired magazine is the best I've ever seen on the economics of the entertainment industry, including concrete reasons why we're saddled with the likes of Ashlee Simpson.

The "long tail" refers to the shape of the graph of the quantity of success of a thing (a book or a movie or a record etc.) vs. its rank in the popularity pecking order. It looks like this (from Chris's blog):

That big spike at the front represents the megahits. In music, these are the records at the top of the Billboard chart. The Y axis represents how many copies they sold. The long tail is the area in yellow. This is the obscure stuff. But the significant thing is that there is at least some audience for it. In an age when production costs are plunging, and distribution costs are approaching zero, this means the market for niche products will soon be larger than the market for hits. Not only is this a major disruptive phenomenon for life as we know it, it is wonderful news to these tired ears.

When people ask me what kind of success I want for my band I always tell them, "I want to reach all the people who stand a chance of loving it." The concept of the long tail articulates this beautifully. There are potentially a lot of people buying their records in the "red zone" who would really be into our music. We stand a fighting chance of coaxing them down the curve over to where we are.

2005-01-12T07:12:00.000-08:00

I'm trying out Ranchero Software's MarsEdit blog editor. Ranchero is a mom n' pop OS X software company operated by Brent Simmons. I'm currently trying to figure out everything I need to do to copy his life. Actually, that's going a little far; I don't know much about his life. But I do want to copy his work life: creates his own vision, sets his own priorities and schedule, takes all the risks, reaps all the rewards. I'm a big fan of his other product, NetNewsWire (though I admit I've only got the Lite version). It's obvious he takes pride in his work. Bravo.