At the end of the day, you’re either motivated to work on Progressing Forward or you’re not.  In a comment on the last article, Jared Axelrod put it this way:

Seriously, though, one of the most encouraging words I’ve ever heard is the phrase “If you really want to do something, nothing can stop you; if you don’t want to do something, anything can stop you.” Which has had an effect on me. Now, whenever I feel something pulling my attention away from the project at hand, I say “No, I really want to do this,” and I snap back to what I was doing. Or, it’s clear that what I am doing isn’t something I really want to do, and then I am content to let it fall by the wayside.

He makes three excellent points:

1. Know what you want to do.
2. Do it.
3. If you get distracted by something else, see point #1.

I think that Jared’s comment strikes at the core of the problem. Progressing Forward requires Motivation.  The word means progression, coming from the Latin movere,  ”to move.”

So how do we move ourselves? It’s too easy to say we are motivated by something interests us; an interesting project is one thing, but it needs to go deeper than that.

Motivation is born of Aspiration, which is born of Fascination.

You can find something interesting, then pass it by. It will not hold you.  Something that fascinates you, that hooks into your psyche and will not let go…now that’s the stuff from which great things are created. You aspire to do something with the fascination, and that is the motivation to work. While it is possible to work on a project that does not fascinate you in some way, keeping the motivation will be more difficult¹.

A Fascination is a tricky thing: they come in all sizes and shapes. some might be good for a single song, shortstory or painting. Others grow to become something epic. Most fall somewhere in between. All of them resonate. All of them have an authenticity to them that cannot be faked.

What subjects fascinate you?  Have you worked them into a project?  If you’ve worked on a fascinating vs. non-fascinating project, how did the two compare, and what did you learn from them?

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1. Money, of course, can help with this…we’re all fascinated with the possibilities of having extra cash on hand.Freelance work, anyone?

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I drove to a neighborhood called Glenville on the east side of Cleveland.  There, at 10622 Kimberly Ave, is former home of one Jerry Siegel. It was in this house where he and his buddy Joe Shuster created on of the greatest icons in world culture.

This is the place where Superman was born.

Last year, author Brad Meltzer and a group of comic fans raised over $100,000 to renovate the birthplace of the most famous fictional character of the twentieth century. He pointed out, quite fairly, the City of Cleveland was letting the house rot, and that it was going to come down to the fans to save it.

And save it, they did.

Now, there’s a sign out front, and a plaque that tells you what you’re looking it.  But unless you knew to come here, you’d never know it existed.

The house is both inspirational and heartbreaking at the same time.  It’s wonderful that a bunch of people pitched in to raise money to save it. At the same time, the neighborhood is a mess. The vacant, boarded-up houses nearby are rotting; one had a sign to ward off looters: “NO COPPER. PVC PLUMBING ONLY.”

There are no fast food joints here. No large-chain gas stations. No Seven-Elevens. Hardly any business at all.

If there was ever a place that needed a hero, Glenville is it.

And yet, sitting there in my car, looking at the house, I was inspired. Two kids, two poor, frustrated, hormone-addled high-school kids created something wonderful there. That deserves some respect. That deserves some homage; some reverence.

Superman’s fame isn’t tawdy; it isn’t cheap. Unlike Batman, it isn’t born from angst and darkness. Superman is one of the most rare creations, he’s famous for being the Good Guy. There’s a purity to Superman that is utterly lacking in in most pop culture icons. It’s his signature, his staying power; it’s why people still look to this fictional character with hope.

These two kids took a man and gave him three things: 1) Morals, 2) Strength, and 3) Bulletproof Skin¹.  That’s it. That was the formula. Hardly original. in fact, other parts of the Superman myth were cribbed entirely from other sources. Doc Savage, for instance, was known as the Man of Bronze and had a Fortress of Solitude. Superman was not created in a vacuum…he was a mashup of things that came before, and he is greater than the sum of his parts.

As a creative guy, this gives me hope. There is a myth of originality that creative folks cling to, as if there is anything new under the yellow sun. All we can do is remix and recast not only without shame, but also without guile.

And greatness? Superman achieved worldwide acclaim and recognition. The Siegel and Shuster families, however, have been fighting for the rights to Superman for years.

And the house in Glenville, where the two boys drew on old pieces of wallpaper, nearly passed away entirely.

The house serves as both inspiration and cautionary tale. It is both despair and hope, both dread and faith.

And between those, it endures.

Just like all of us.

(Click below to read the plaque)

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1. In the beginning, he couldn’t fly. He could only leap.

1. I use Facebook to keep in touch with a number of my old friends.
2. Facebook keeps sharing more and more of my previously private data without my permission by making things public and then expecting me to find the place in the settings where I can make it private again.
3. If I leave Facebook, the chances are good that I will completely lose touch with many of my friends, but I am very uncomfortable with my data being sold off, piece by piece.

On Privacy

I joined Facebook when my updates were kept private between myself and my friends. Now, unless I hunt down and change the privacy settings with each “feature” that Facebook decides to add, everything I say or have ever said could be made public. There are things in those updates I would prefer stay between friends; not because they could be damaging to me, but because I do not want advetisers keying on the words and offering me services I do not want. I do not want to be datamined and marketed to¹ based on things I say to my friends. This may sound quaint, but I believe a person has a right not to be pestered constantly to buy things.

For those who want to get a simpler view of how Facebook privacy has changed over the last five years, Matt McKeon has put together an excellent graphical representation of that evolution. Check it out, and realize just how much the general public and marketers can know about you now, as opposed to five years ago.

I’m not beating the drum for a mass exodus from Facebook. I do believe that ordinary, non-tech-blog-reading folks should be aware of what’s happening. There is a slow bait-and-switch occuring, where we are allowing Facebook to define what privacy means.  From Mr. Singel’s article:

Facebook thinks that your notions of privacy — meaning your ability to control information about yourself — are just plain old-fashioned. Head honcho Zuckerberg told a live audience in January that Facebook is simply responding to changes in privacy mores, not changing them — a convenient, but frankly untrue, statement. In Facebook’s view, everything (save perhaps your e-mail address) should be public. Funny too about that e-mail address, for Facebook would prefer you to use its e-mail–like system that censors the messages sent between users. Ingram goes onto say, “And perhaps Facebook doesn’t make it as clear as it could what is involved, or how to fine-tune its privacy controls — but at the same time, some of the onus for doing these things has to fall to users.” What? How can it fall to users when most of the choices don’t’ actually exist? I’d like to make my friend list private. Cannot. I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot. I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing. Cannot.

I walked up to you and said that I would be happy to let you communicate with everyone you’ve every cared even the slighest bit about, but the only catch is that I can repeat what you said to whomever asks and I can sell what you are saying to businesses so they can come to your front door and try to sell you things, you would likely tell me to get the hell out of your face.

And yet, the vast majority of people seem to be willing to make this bargain with Facebook.

I am on the fence about this. The propostion of Facebook is compelling. There are a great number of past friends that I keep in touch with on the service. I do get value out of it. Additionally, my daughter just got her first account, because this is how her friends are communicating.  Is it reasonable to expect that I would lock out new features because they open up things which I would prefer stay private?  What responsibility does the the company have to keep my information private?

Sadly, I think the answer to that last question is “none at all.”  Perhaps someone with more insight into privacy law could educate me on this, but I’m fairly certain that, unlike doctors and lawyers, there is no expectation of privacy with an online service. Facebook could sell the entire corpus of their data and there is next to nothing a normal citizen could do about it other than getting the EFF and other such groups involved. I do not believe there’s any precedent for this, but again, I’m no lawyer.

If this is the case, the best we can do is raise a ruckus or leave the service. And as long as Facebook is making money from the sale of our data and as long as the courts do not stop them, they will ignore us. As long as people are willing to feed the beast, the beast will keep eating.

On Alternatives

Mr. Singel also puts out a call for an open alternative:

It’s time for the best of the tech community to find a way to let people control what and how they’d like to share. Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish. Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking. You’d get to control what unknown people get to see, while the people you befriend see a different, more intimate page. They could be using a free service that’s ad-supported, which could be offered by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, a bevy of startups or web-hosting services like Dreamhost. “Like” buttons around the web could be configured to do exactly what you want them to — add them to a protected profile or get added to a wish list on your site or broadcast by your micro-blogging service of choice. You’d be able to control your presentation of self — and as in the real world, compartmentalize your life. People who just don’t want to leave Facebook could play along as well — so long as Facebook doesn’t continue creepy data practices like turning your info over to third parties, just because one of your contacts takes the “Which Gilligan Island character are you?” quiz? (Yes, that currently happens)

I would love to see this happen, but I do not think it would succeed.

Case in point: Identi.ca. Idenit.ca is an open alternative Twitter. In many ways, it is superior. Who is on Identi.ca?  Techies. That’s pretty much it. It has gained no strong following outside of the tech community because Twitter has the celebs, and Twitter is ubiquitous.  Yes, you can integrate them. Yes, you can syndicate from one to the other. And yet…if you want to only use the open alternative, say goodbye to the non-techie friends you have on Twitter…you’ll never see them on the open service.

An open alternative to Facebook is doomed to fail because it will only capture the imagination of techies. The vast majority of Facebook users simply will not care.  For the techies, this might be just fine. Identi.ca has become a little tech oasis, and most folks like it that way. But do not think that somehow an open alternative will frighten Facebook in any way or cause a significant change in behavior.

What’s the real alternative?

Facebook makes it so slick and so easy to keep in touch with people that going without would pose a significant challenge. How would you keep in touch with your friends? To those of us who remember a world without the Internet, the obvious answer is that some friends would inevitably drift away, and those we truly cared about would get phone calls or letters from us. In this modern age, we would read their blogs and comment, if they have them. We could send emails or instant messages. If nothing else, the time-honored Year End Holiday Letter has worked for years.

The truth of the matter is that few of these feed the real driver for updates in your social network; the powerful compulsion that causes your to refresh your email constantly, or monitor your Twitter stream to see who responded to the last clever thing you said. It’s the little shot of joy and ego you get when you finally have someone talking directly to you. It’s the attention. We all crave it, even in small doses. Since the dawn of social services, this drive has become the background hum of our lives. It takes effort not to check every minute or so to see who is paying attention to us now, or worse, to miss something “important” in the information stream. We do this in meetings on our iPhones and Droids, at our desks when we are between tasks, at home in the morning or before we go to bed.

Do we love the connection with our friends because they are our friends, or because we love the thrill of a new update? Do we really need to sell information about ourselves to keep in touch with friends, or is it simply too much effort and the ease of use makes the sale worth it? How would you function without Twitter and Facebook?

And, as a final question where is the tipping point for you? What would be the point where you would give up the ease of the connection and leave the service?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

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1. Yes. I’m aware that, for the most part, that ship has sailed. But that does not blunt my desire the thwart the bottomfeeders who pursue me for my money.

Writing fiction is a focus of much discussion. Books, podcasts, workshop, college classes, whole degrees are focused on it. The place of tale-telling in human society has been a treasured one since the dawn of time, even before we knew to call it fiction, back when the words were myths to explain the will of the gods. It is time-honored, and some would argue, it is indispensable.

Fiction is also difficult. It takes a vivid and robust imagination to dream the dreams that lead to good fiction, and it takes even more perspiration to get the right words on the page in the right order. The agony of fiction is that the right words will refuse you, your muse will go on vacation, or you’ll lack the requisite enthusiasm to push through and complete what you have started.

It’s safe to say that 80% of the people I know have told me they want to write fiction. Less than 5% of them ever produce. Less than 5% of those ever finish a first draft. Of the last group, even fewer send their work to a publisher.

We read the writing advice blogs. We listen to the writing podcasts. We feel guilty because we do not produce. We feel like we’re falling behind, like we are not living up to our own dreams.

I submit that, maybe, just maybe, this isn’t a race. The plain truth is that many people like to write.  Writing fiction is not the only sort of writing there is.

In this age of bread and circuses where entertainment is king, we are drowning in fiction. Think of the subcultures that develop around popular fiction franchises like Firefly, Star Wars, Lost, and Harry Potter. With the dawn of computer games, interactive fiction has crossed into more people’s lives. Ask yourself, how much fiction takes up my attention per week?  I think you’ll be surprised by the answer. There’s no shame in this: fiction is, at its most basic, a useful and necessary escape from the mundane, and at it’s best, a transcendent experience which reveals something about the nature of the universe.  Fiction serves the function of dreams; release, reflection, and renewal.

And yet…it is not the only sort of writing there is.  This sounds obvious, of course. After all, we define all that is not fiction in the terms of its relationship to fiction: the word we use to describe it reflects which value more on a psychological level. We do not call it “fact” or “reality,” we call it “non-fiction.”

I have loved writing since I was a child. I have been complemented on my ability to put words together. I have been published here and there over the years, and yet, like many, fiction eludes me. I have read a great many books on the subject. I, too, have listened to the podcasts, taken the classes, gone to the workshops.  Still, I find actually writing it a chore. I do not care deeply for the characters. The situations are interesting, but only in the abstract, as facts about a world, not in relation to the human beings in the story.  In short, I care less about the writing of my fiction than I do about being known as one who writes.

There are two ways I can think to deal with this.  The first is to do what I have done for years; continue to push at it, to flog it, to to pick at it. The second is to simply admit that I enjoy writing non-fiction more, and to walk away from the fiction for now.

It is a maddening paradox: I love reading fiction and shy away from reading non-fiction for pleasure, yet I find writing non-fiction fascinating and fulfilling.  I love telling stories about real events, exploring the world around us and relaying it for those who may never experience it. I have a passion for talking about the inner lives of we humans, about how we grow, about how we find ways to carry on.  The real world, the world of human interaction and history…this is what I love to talk about.  What I love to explore. What I love to write.

I came to realize this while writing TRICKSTERS. You’ll notice there has not been a new installment for a while. I have blamed this on a number things: being busy, not known where to go next, trying to plan an interesting next step, etc.  This is, of course, crap. When I am truly honest, I know it is because I just do not care where the story goes next. I do not say this to be cruel, nor to  be a jerk. I say it because it is the truth, and I think that if a person is going to take on or continue a project, they need to be very, very honest with themselves. If you are working on a project, especially a project you hope people will read and enjoy, it behooves you to be brutally honest with yourself and, if you are not able to find the enjoyment in it, put it away for a while or stop entirely. Don’t waste your time, and do not waste your audience’s time. They will not thank you for it.

I wonder how many of you are in the same position?  I have been trying to write fiction for years because I see it all around me, because reading it makes me happy, and because, like all of us, I want to take some of the qualities of the people I admire who do write and adopt them as part of my own personality.  This works for some. For some, it is mere mimicry.

Mimicking someone you admire can serve as a good starting point, but the goal of any creative person is to find their own means of expression, their own medium, tone…voice.  Many teenagers start bands because they are inspired by an artist, and in the beginning, they sound like that artist. Eventually, the sound needs to evolve. If it does not, the band will be an also-ran, just a faded copy of someone greater. But it is also possible that the band will find something in themselves that is more fulfilling than copying someone else. This may take them out of one genre and into another, and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s a natural evolution, the discovery of their voice.

If you are a frustrated fiction writer, perhaps it’s because you need to look at other purposes for putting the words on the pages. There is nothing wrong with this. It is far, far better to find what kind of writing you are truly passionate about than to walk away completely, feeling crushed because you gave up on your dream. Your means and medium are fluid, and should change as you change.

We are writers. Go love something, then write about it.

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I hear the healthcare reform bill has passed.  I have mixed feelings about this, mostly stemming from not being sure what will come next. We’ve had heated debate, stone-throwing, mudslinging and outright lies by both sides…so much so that I’m not entirely sure what’s in the bill and what is not anymore.

I’m feeling a bit like Fox Mulder. Despite all the evidence, I want to believe that some good will come of this.  Parts of me shouts that this will be gutted after the elections, if/when the Democrats lose their majority. Part of me wonders if this isn’t too much government control in our everyday lives; wondering how badly will they screw it up. And yet, I’m choosing to hold out hope. I have to believe that we’re not a nation of fuck-ups who couldn’t find our ass with both hands. I have to believe we can make some progress on this system which is (by admission of doctors, insurance companies, and patients alike) terminally broken.

I want to believe. Please, congress-critters: find a way to pull your heads from your asses and come to some consensus on this. Make it work. Push it forward instead of kneecapping behind closed doors. Stop playing chicken with people’s health.

That is all.

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Good night.

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• We had three excellent keynotes, but the one that stood out was Mark Shuttleworth’s discussion of Cadence, Quality, and Design, in which he discussed the discipline of development on a timed schedule, and how it has helped the Ubuntu teams.
• David Beazley’s Understanding the Python GIL was as crunchy as I’d hoped. He did a series of tests on how the Global Interpreter Lock acts when dealing with threads on a single or and then on multicore machines. It was outstanding.
• Catherine Devlin gave a talk about how to build command-line interpreters using cmd and cmd2, then as a bonus explained how SQLPython can make your life better. A commandline shell that allows you to interface with Oracle, MySQL, or PostGRes as if you were in a Unix shell?  Yes please!¹
• C. Titus Brown’s discussion of implementing different continuous integration packages was as entertaining as could be, and brought home several good points (mostly, just use Hudson. Really.).
• Finally, Ned Batchelder demystified several layers of confusion during his talk on Tests and Testability.  I’m looking forward to playing around with his ideas at work this week.

I’m beat. There’s one more day of talks, then I’m on my way back home. Not sure when I’ll be able to get my Day Five post up, but I’ll try to do it before I fly out.

Thanks for reading!

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1. This talk completely blew me away, and I’m wondering if she accepts sacrifices or tribute.

1. Van Lindberg formally opened the convention.
2. Steve Holden¹ gave an overview of what’s new at the Python Software Foundation, and what’s coming down the pike. THere was a strong emphasis on diversity as a key goal for the next year. These was also discussion about the possible creation of an Associate membership in the PSF wheere people could donate money and become a member. Nothing definitive on the latter yet, but it is under consideration.
3. Finally, Guido van Rossum put the twitterstream of #pycon tweets on the screen behind him and took questions from the stream for about 40 minutes. Of special note was his comment on Django vs. Turbogears (“Django. Sorry, Turbogears guys.”), Django in general (“Django sucks. But they all suck.”) and vim vs. emacs. (“I use emacs. I also use vim. I’m not very good at either.”)  In all fairness, it was hard to delve deeply into any one topic, so discussion was light and all in good fun.

After a short coffee break the various tracks started up. While everyone seemed to be getting something out the talks they attended, my personal experience was that it was rather it and miss. The single outstanding talk was an exploration of the Python Dictionary, explaining how it allocates memory, resizes itself, and assigns addresses in RAM. It sounds dry but Brandon Craig Rhodes did an excellent job, and was easily the best speaker of the my day. A close second was Grig Gheorghiu‘s discussion of RESTful web services and how to construct them using restish.

The day finished off with a set of lightning talks, the highlights of which were Greg Wilson’s request for articles for his next book entitled Beautiful Software Architecture, Ned Batchelder’s report on recent changes to coverage.py, and David Huggins-Daines’s demonstration of PocketSphinx, a speech recognition engine which will transcribe .wav formatted audio to text.

By then end of the day, most of the folks I was hanging with were beat, so we split up and grabbed dinner. Some of us walked back to my hotel and hacked on code for two or three hours, which was fun. I haven’t been able to hack with a team since I left Mahalo, and I do miss it.

Tomorrow looks to be another full day. Check in late in the evening for a recap of Day 4.

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1. Chairman of the Python Software Foundation

1. The talk started 30 minutes late.
2. We spent the first hour configuring our computers, something we could have done before the talk if there had been any notes circulated.
3. Even once we got there, there were no notes. The speaker would add the commands he was running to a notes.txt file, then we would go download it from his computer via HTTP.
4. When asked how to configure Firefox profiles on Windows, the answer was “I don’t know.” The Windows folks banded together to solve the issue, but…I mean…come on. You’re presenting to a multi-OS room. It’s your responsibility to understand the material.
   

<snip…>

Rather than get all frothy and unkind, I will only say that an ounce of preparation goes a long way. I did learn a few things, but the talk was so much less informative than yesterday’s tutorial that I left feeling that I would have done better just reading the docs on my own.

Now, that being said, this is not a problem with PyCon, just this one tutorial. I still have very high hopes for PyCon in general. Tomorrow is the first day of the formal conference, and I look forward to seeing what it holds.

Stay tuned for Day Three.

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You’re not at DragonCon anymore, Mr. Miller.

The Regency is a very different place when not festooned with cosplaying geekazoids¹. That’s not to say there are no geeks, just that colorful superhero and anime costumes have switched to black shirts/hoodies and blue jeans. It’s not full the full-on stereotype, mind you: there are enough hipster-coders in the mix to break up the monotony.

At the time I write this, it’s 8:42 am and I’m waiting to filter in for the first tutorial I signed up for: Faster Python Through Optimization. This is after my first choice, Test Driven Web Development, was canceled due to the speaker’s business life stomping down on his lecturing life.

I’ve just been asked where the registration desk is again. Again, unlike DragonCon, there’s more than one convention in the hotel this weekend. People are confusing one with the other. It’s easy to tell the between the participants: khakis and colored oxford shirt? Manufacturing conference. Black Tee with laptop bag? PyCon.

So far, the wifi is…minimal. This is disappointing, but it’s still very early: I’m willing to bet they just haven’t gotten there yet.² The staff peoples are working hard this morning…I’m watching them lay powerstrips and set up cameras. It looks like there will be an archive of all the talks. This is great: I can use them for review later if my own notes are lacking.

Time to go. More later.

I must steal a line from my friend Kris Johnson to describe the Optimization talk. It was like a toasted wheat bagel: good for me, but very dry.

The speaker was well prepared: sample code was burned to CDs and a fifty-three page handout that contained all the information for the course. Any worries I had about not having complete notes are now gone.

(This is where the non-programmers can skip to the end. The rest of you, read on.)

The information was excellent. We started off looking at how to use cProfile and Guppy to benchmark and profile code. From there we wrote several tests for comparing operations on various data structures: finding the intersection of two lists vs. two sets, Slicing off pieces of a large list vs. using a deque. From there, looked at how to speed up various math functions with NumPy, using psyco for JIT optimization, then finally moved on to using the multiprocessing module to make the best use of multicore systems.  Finally, we looked at how to combine strategies to get the most bang for your buck.

While I was pleased with the content, the presentation was a little lackluster only for the reason that most programming presentations are challenged: the instructor mostly read from his notes. To be fair, he seemed a little nervous, and the fact that some of his examples failed because of configuration issues did not help the poor guy. I felt for him.  The interesting that happened was that people paired up when things went awry to solve the issues. I worked with a woman named Ada³ to figure out the problem with some of the timing functions in the code. The pair programming enhanced the talk, and I feel like I got more out of it.

(Welcome back, non-programmers.)

All in all, I’m pleased. I’ve already learned some new concepts and they are spawning new ideas that I’ll probably play with over the weekend. Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Testing Websites With Python and Selenium, which looks promising.

See you tomorrow for Day Two.

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1. This is a term of endearment. I count some of those cosplayers as friends.
2. This was, in fact, the case. The hardworking staff fired up the internet connection, and everyone logged on at once, flooding it. About 15 minutes into the tutorial, the internet returned, and several gasping programmers logged in to Twitter. Myself included.
3. This flipped my geek bit a little.

If you head over to The Secret Lair, you will find the first episode of a work of serialized fiction called Tricksters.  It’s based on a writing prompt from two years ago, when Kris and I were meeting each morning at a local coffee shop to write. The ideas implied by the original piece have been lurking around in my head since then, and as one of my big goals for the year is to work on my practice of writing, I decided to jump in with both feet.

I freely admit that this a novice effort: I’ve long talked about writing fiction, and like many people, I’ve gotten caught up in buying books, reading blogs, listening to podcasts…doing anything but the actual work. That ends now.

Please check out the story. I welcome your thoughts.

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What I Learned In 2009

• It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there: Yes, Los Angeles. Everyone who knows me is sick to death about hearing about this by now, but it is worth marking the lesson learned. There were a number of good and bad things about the move to and from L.A.  We still miss the scenery, the weather, and the friends we made out there. I miss my team at Mahalo, and the challenge of the work at the company. I do not miss the long, long hours, the constant conflict between work and family time, watching my children struggle in a school system riddled with major problems, living in a shoebox, and watching cops chase armed felons through our housing complex.  This leads to the next point…
• Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home: Being back in Cleveland is a relief, a joy, and terribly  frustrating at the same time. We love being back with family and old friends. We love the familiar places, but with returning comes the familiar problems, the things we disliked enough to try moving to another city to escape. The entire family has felt it, and we’re working through dealing with them day by day.
• Thing that change you do not change others: We went to California as one group of people, we returned as another. We learned, we grew, we changed. But…for folks back in Cleveland, we were not gone all that long; how much could have happened?  Just because you change, don’t expect that others will understand or even recognize the changes.
• All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy: Not long ago, I ended nearly all of my personal projects. This was liberating. I’m able to concentrate on my family, and not on who needs what from me out there on the Interwebs. There’s no pressure to constantly be checking email, Twitter, message boards, etc to get ahead, make a name, swimming upstream ceaselessly. Projects are only worthwhile when you are passionate about them. After that, they’re just baggage. Best to leave them to the passionate people, and move on to new vistas.
• Disconnect: I ditched my G1 (Android Phone) this month and went back to a normal phone. I’ve stopped tweeting other than when I post a new entry on this blog. I read my email once every couple of days. Living offline is much more interesting and vibrant than constantly watching a screen, be it on a laptop, television, or cell phone. The reality is, none of you need to know every 140 character thought that enters my brain. I’m not promoting anything other than asking that you make time to be out of touch for a while this year. The “social” part of the current Internet vibe is more than a little creepy. There needs to be room for silence, isolation, contemplation, and introspection. No one needs to know where you are at all times. Relax. Cut yourself loose.
• They aren’t here to make your life better: Think about how much information Google and Facebook and other sites know about you. Google, for instance, knows what you are searching. If you have Gmail, they can read all your email. If you use Google Voice, they have your voice mail messages. If you are using Android, they know your contacts and their information, and depending on the apps you use, they can know where you are, where you’re going, what you are listening to, and who you talk to the most. Now…I admit I sound a little paranoid when I talk about this, but is it really a good thing for any business entity to know that much about you?  If it came out tomorrow that the government was keeping track of your calls, eavesdropping on your email, and monitoring your web searching habits, would you be pleased with it?  Why are we so trusting of a business, which has less oversight and less accountability that the government? The simple truth is this: a business is not providing services to be nice to you. It is not trying to help you. It is trying to find a way to make money for its shareholders. That’s the point of a business: making money — maximizing value.  Ask yourself, it if were suddenly in Google’s best interest to build a map of your life using the data they have and sell it to a third party, what would stop them?  Or, more interestingly, how comfortable would you be walking into a mall and having the billboard change and address you by name, because they could read the RFID in your ID or credit card, then hit a database service exposing data about your searching and buying habits, creating a custom message just for you?  Perhaps I’m just getting old, but I find that incredibly creepy, and since I take a dim view of marketers to begin with¹, I want no part of it. I’m opting out.
• In the silence, there is Truth: One of my favorite stories comes from the Old Testament of the Bible. From I Kings 19:11-12, when Elijah is looking for the Lord:

  And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still, small voice…

  After this tumultuous year, I have taken time away from everything. In that silence, I have found parts of myself I thought lost. That is what the New Year has brought me: the voice in the silence, reminding me than I am more than the code I write, more than the sites I create. There is that stillness in all of us, reminding us of the important things, giving us creative vision that spawn great passions, leading us to places we need to go to grow and develop as healthy human beings. I have spent the last decade chasing technology. The silence reminds of what I loved before the tech, before the storm of activity that carried me to where I am now. The silence shows me that now is the time to revisit these older things, to rekindle fires which once burned brightly.

Unlike past entries, I will not venture to say what the next year holds. The best that I can do right now is hold fast to what I have learned this past year, to make it part of myself, and then to move on, one step at a time.  Just like you, and just like the rest of the world.

I wish you a Happy New Year. May you find what you are looking for.

-Chris

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1. How can you trust anyone whose job is to create a false need where none currently exists?  Isn’t that just…dishonest?  To convince people to buy thing they don’t need?

Looking back on the increase of digitally-available content in the last five years has caused me to reflect upon the concept of Value.

Debating the relative worth of anything is a tricky business: it is both subjective both on a personal level (the worth or importance of a friendship, a job, etc), and subjective on a societal level (the worth or importance of a book, a college education, etc).

What is the relative worth of a digital work?  What is the importance?   Does the fact that it is digital affect it’s value?  How does time figure into the equation? For instance, is Tee Morris’s Morevi or Scott Sigler’s Earthcore more valuable than Nathan Lowell’s Captain’s Share or J.C. Hutchins’ 7th Son: Deceit because the former are two of the first podcast novels?  Is NIN’s Ghosts albums more valuable than the CDs released before he went for releasing digital copies on the Internet?

How does obtaining digital works for free affect how we value the work?  For instance, is an album of songs that you purchase from iTunes as important to you as the albums you buy on CD or the free version you get direct from the artist?  Is the podiobook of Matt Selznick’s Brave Men Run as important to you as the hard copy you purchased?

Perhaps a more accurate way to measure the value of a digital work is to ask about the effect of loss. Which would trouble you more, the loss of Mur Lafferty’s podcasted or PDF version of Playing For Keeps, or the loss of the hard copy you bought?

Personal Value vs. Monetary Value

Digital content has zero material production cost, and because of that, it is possible to offer it for sale at a much lower cost than a physical production. Because it is digital, in general, you can also replace it easily, if not instantly. The same cannot be said for physical goods…even next-day shipping is not instant gratification for most Internet dwellers.

How does that instant gratification change the way we make purchases, and conversely, how does it change how we budget money? Do you, personally, have a budget for online, instant purchases? Or are digital products an impulse buy?  If so, what does that say about the product’s value to you?

Because we can purchase digital products instantly, and because they can be replaced easily, I think we value them less. The relative pain of replacing them if lost is so low that we do not think about the purchase critically in the terms of the relative value to us.  We function much more on the instinctual than the reasonable level when buying digital goods.  It can be summed up in two words. WANT. CLICK.

We have the potential to consume digital products like locusts consume crops.  And like the majority of impulse buys, the majority of those purchases (iPhone games, iTunes singles, etc) transition quickly from something shiny to kipple¹ in a matter of days, sometimes even hours.

Think back. What percentage of the digital content that you have downloaded have you kept? How much have you lost track of? How much do you back up, just in case of a hard drive crash?

Capitalism is, by it’s nature, driven by consumption. There is nothing wrong with that when we apply rational critical thinking to the process of purchasing an item. My question is: has the advent of digital content fundamentally changed they way we think about purchasing goods, and if so, is that change for the better?  Or, has this change made consumption a reflex, a non-thought? In both cases, what does that say about the bond we have with the content, what is it’s relative value to us when compared to a real-world physical product?

(Note:  I edited this post after the original release, due to a mistake…edits I had made did not take the first time for whatever reason. I apologize for any confusion this may cause.)

Responses to this post:

• Considering the Value of Digital Goods @ thecommandline.net
• Value, Worth, Merit and Intangible Goods @mattselznick.com

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1. [coined by Philip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?] the collection of useless bits of trash we wallow in; all the paper and junk that is not recycled; decaying entropic trash

Buying grape jam is even easier. Run out to the store, deal with the crowds, find the brand of grape jam you want, wait in line, pay, walk out, drive home, and enjoy.

Cost-wise, it’s all about the same.  There’s no huge savings in doing it yourself.

So why bother to do it yourself? With making jam, or with anything else?

Satisfaction When done well, the homemade jam tastes so much better than the stuff from the store. Part of this is physical and real: using fresher ingredients in a small setting, you can achieve  better results. The other part is psychological: you took the time and did it yourself with your own two hands.  There are few better feelings than knowing you have learned a new useful skill.

Do you remember being surprised or even amazed at all the things your grandparents or your parents knew how to do? How one or more of them know some trick or some way to handle a situation, be it home repair or cooking?  Where do you think those skills came from?  They came from learning how to do it themselves.

Passionate Experimentation It is very convenient to be able to pick up whatever you want from the grocery whenever you want/need it. But the product is bland, it’s uniform, it’s designed to appeal to the most people it possibly can.  When you do it yourself, you can make adjustments for your own palate. Not satisfied with how Smucker’s jam tastes? You can work to improve upon it.  Maybe you want to try a flavor that you’ve never been able to find before, like a clove-spiced apple jelly. Once you know the basics, you can start to experiment and improvise. You can try new things, and the thrill of discovery is a wonderful feeling. Learn the simplest form, then write your own recipe.  Record it, pass it down.

When The Revolution Comes… This is a joke between my wife and me. In the back of our minds, we’ve always wanted to know that if our lives were to change radically we would have the skills to pick up and carry on. It’s something that also plays off of seeking simplicity and eating real food, as well: when we make things ourselves, we know what’s going into them, and we know we can repeat the process however many times we like.  Knowing how things actually work is useful, whether you’re speaking of machinery, or ingredients in a recipe.  There are skills we use in business, then there are, in my opinion, Real World skills. Skills that you need to survive. I recommend learning a few of the latter.

At the end of the day, do you have actual, useful skills?  If you were lost, who would you want with you?  The guy who spends his weekends hiking, or the one who understands how to use social media to build trust networks?

The Concern and the Challenge No generation in the history of the world has lived more in it’s mind the current one. We live our lives being spoon-fed stories via movies, television, the Internet. We play long and involved games sitting on our couches staring at illuminated screens. We flit, digesting information from RSS feeds to Twitter to NPR to Podcasts.  My great concern is that, in time,  we will live our lives in our minds — we will cease doing things in favor of watching and/or reading about things.

Creativity and passion are not something you can experience by observing, not something can get from an illuminated screen. Watching someone chop wood does not make it possible for you to swing an axe. The goal of doing it yourself is just that most simple of verbs: TO DO. Act. Create. Participate and engage in the world around you instead watching in fly by on someone else’s Twitterstream.

I challenge you to do something new this week. Cook a new meal, walk a new route, seek out a new experience. Find something beyond the words to occupy yourself. Embrace an experience. Do it yourself.

(Update: People have asked for more detail about the jam-making process itself. That’s coming in a mid-week article, complete with pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.)

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I spent the day outdoors, helping my father-in-law clean out his woodshop, ridding it of all the old scrap wood. After unloading it all, we sat on their porch in a pair of amish adirondack chairs, sipping root beer and watching the bees working to get all the remaining goodness from my mother-in-law’s garden before it dies off.  I sat there, in the sunlight, just chatting away with him. Not about anything specific. Just resting and watching the world go by.

There is a lot of data in what happened to me today. I could sit, tell you all about it, go look up the exact weather, the barometric pressure, all the dry details. It would be factually true, and yet it would miss something. The soul of it would be gone. The thing that makes it an experience, and not just a recording, would be missing.

One of the comments I got from last week’s essay was from Matt Wilson. He said:

I grow vegetables in a small plot in my backyard for a lot of the same reasons. After work, getting my fingers dirty by doing some weeding reintroduces me to the real world.

I started to think about that phrase, The Real World.  It’s not the first time I’ve heard a person use it when separating their offline activities from their online activities.  I find it curious because so many of us spend so much time online these days. We enjoy it, revel in the information, the connectedness, the geekiness of some things, the banality of others. We swim through streams of data all day long. Email, podcasts, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.

And yet, how many of us feel that, for all the glory that is the data, there is something missing?  That it’s all virtual, that it’s removed from The Real World, somehow?

Curious.

How does this thinking affect basic human relationships?  I know, for my part, that I have met a great many people online, yet the ones I am closest to I go out of my way to seek out in a more sensory, or Real, manner. Phone calls, meeting at cons, meeting for lunch, etc. While, intellectually, I know the reailty of all the people out there, unless I make a connection with them beyond the bits and bytes, it is hard to cultivate a friendship with them. It can be a simple as a Skype call in real-time (there’s that word, REAL, again), but that small thing gives me something to relate to that email or chat or Twitter will never provide.

So, dear reader, I am curious to hear your side of things. Do you draw the distinction between the real world and virtual space?  How does it affect your relationships, your interactions, your daily routine? If you were to shut off the computer, how many of those relationships would survive, and why?

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I’ve had people tell me about using air poppers and other more expensive devices to make “the perfect roast.”  I’m grateful for the advice, but I’m not doing this for perfection. I’m doing it because I wanted to cultivate a non-digital skill, and because the act of the work itself makes me happy.

A few weeks ago, my family and I visited Roscoe Village in Coshocton, Ohio. Roscoe Village is a combination town center and historical reenactment village, where you can learn how people originally lived when settling, attend an old-style school lesson in the original school house, learn about period medical practices, etc. It might be the fact that I enjoy studying history, or it might be that I went on one too many medievalist camp-outs in my youth, but I’m always drawn to the craftsmen doing their work by hand. The term “honest work” comes to mind, as does the realization that I might be able to do similar work, if only I spent the time to learn.  When I was younger, I enjoyed woodworking, though I never pursued it. I enjoyed music, but did not pursue it. I enjoyed brewing, and did not…you see the pattern here. Everyday life will overwhelm you if you let it, and for the past fifteen years, I’ve been building a career in software development, which makes all manner of odd demands on one’s time. There are all kinds of excuses for not pursuing our interests, and all seem equally valid at the time.

As we walked around the village, I began to think about this I.O.U. I’d written to myself.  I’ve spent the better part of fifteen years staring at a computer screen.  The aversion to it started about three years ago, but I worked hard to bury that feeling when I started at Mahalo, where my screen time on a weekly basis would shoot through the roof. For years I’ve been craving time away from the screen, and this reminder was just what I needed to get the ball rolling.

It must seem strange to many of you that I would need a reason to shut the computer off. Understand that I’ve been enamored with computers since I was 15, and this was my hobby long before it was my career.  Converting that hobby into a career was at once a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because I was doing something that interested me, but a curse because I did not cultivate other interests outside of the glow of a computer monitor.  When I started to resent the time I spent online outside of the office, it caused a real problem.

While walking down the streets of Roscoe Village, I had time to reflect on this.  I had other interests, but I tossed them aside for writing code, both on work time and off.  I got involved with communities of people online, spent time in virtual space with them, but back in realspace my relationships and interests were lacking.

We were standing in the basement kitchen of one of the houses, listening to a woman speak about how they would cook in the old days. She was in front of a stone fireplace, showing the tools of the trade, offering some freshly-baked bread and churned butter to taste. Then she pointed at an odd looking tool: it looks like a coffee can on a long rod with a little door cut into the side. She said that this was a coffee roaster, and people used to roast their own coffee over the fire each morning, then store it for a few days, grinding it as they needed it.

It was like a warm sun ignited in my chest. There was a sense of realization that here was something that interested me, something that I could do, hands on, for the sheer joy of doing it.  The next morning, I drove down to the local grocery, picked up a pound of green Colombian beans, and started to roast my own coffee.

I discovered that the joy I feel while working out a problem in code is the same joy I feel when working on a new roast. The realization that I was, as a good friend puts it, hacking my world was like a TNT for my brain. The experimentation and process of roasting coffee, or cooking, or brewing ignites the same fire in my mind that working through a code problem does: it’s all hacking, and it feels great.

The best part is that I can more readily share to fruits of my labor with my friends and family. The biggest drawback to my career is that if I do my job well, no one can see the craft, the reasons for things working the way they do, the very things that makes the work itself beautiful. It’s hard for people to gain an appreciation for well-crafted code, but a good cup of coffee goes a long way. They can savor and appreciate it, they can revel in the aesthetic that I felt when I was roasting it.

This has been a revelation to me. It pleases me to no end. It makes me happy.

I’m planning to go beyond roasting coffee, getting back into brewing beers and making liquors. It’s not for a business, it’s not for money, it’s for the sheer joy of doing something with my hands that both makes me feel happy and fulfilled, and that I can share with others.

To conclude: roasting coffee became a symbol to me, a process toward finding enjoyment outside of the laptop screen. It’s why I’ve been talking about it so much both in realspace and on Twitter, with my friends out there. Like all worthwhile things, it is bigger than the words I use to describe it, because the meaning is greater than the meager descriptions I can hobble together. It is joy, and joy is a rare thing in life. We need to embrace it, however we find it, whenever we are lucky enough to do so.

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Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines Hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way The time is gone, the song is over, thought Id something more to say

But I pulled it from the older source, Henry David Thoreau, in Walden:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

In Max’s words: “God… Thoreau’s writing is often like being punched in the brain.”

Yep. Sure is. I hope, one day, to have the wisdom not to do desperate things.

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If you’ve met me, you’ll know that I’m fat. No, not just fat…obese. I have a definite problem with seeing food as a reward, something to be an emotional comfort, instead as a source of nutrition.  When I was commuting to work a few years ago, I would stop for two bagels with cream cheese on the way to work, and pick up two McDonald’s double cheeseburgers on the way home every day, but then I would have my normal meal with the family on top of it. Why?  It’s the same reason some folks have a drink after work, it made me feel better, allowed me to de-stress.

I went vegetarian because it sets up a strong and clear line for me and forces me to think about everything I shove into my face. It has eliminated any stopping at all at fast food places, because if I cannot get the fat and salt of the meat, there’s no real reward. At parties and gatherings, it helps me moderate my food intake because I need to think about what I want to eat, not just fall into the flow and grab whatever is in front of me. I’ll admit, I’ve fallen off the wagon, but when I have done so, I’ve come to regret it².

I’ve been reading about the science of food a lot over the last few months as well, about how different things foods cause our brains to feel comfort, happiness, even something similar to mini-orgasms with the right combination of chemicals.  This report from CNN was interesting:

This is not a pity party, and this is not an attempt to blame the food industry for my problem. It’s my personal responsibility to stand for myself again the tide, and I strongly believe that. However, I do find it interesting and disturbing just how the food industry, like the cigarette companies before them, use marketing and chemistry to create a social norm and provide an emotional experience regardless of consequence. Food can become the ultimate addiction, especially when specifically engineered to provide an emotional response. You can give up cigarettes, but how do you give up food? I think there is a discussion to be had there, and I think that’s fodder for a future essay.

I’m not telling you this so you can hear the strains of violins and weep for my unfortunate condition.. Far from it. I bring this up because I know there are lots of other people out there like me. I’m hoping that by talking about this, I can bring some of the issues out into the open. It’s one thing to sit in a theatre and watch Super Size Me, but it’s another to be sitting in the car, driving home, resisting the strong urge to stop and get something to eat  because it’s been a hard day, and by god, you deserve it.

Expect more from me on this topic. They say to write what you know, and food issues…well…yeah. I know those all too well.

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1. God, I hate how fluffy that sounds. But I cannot find another way to put it. Bear with me.
2. Going to Schmidt’s while at Origins was not the brightest move.

photo credit: Jonathan D. Blundell

Working as a team lead in any company is especially challenging. A lead developer straddles the gap between the coders and management, forced to take communication from one side and relay it in a manner the other can understand. It’s tricky business, and it’s not something you learn in school.

Here are a few tips I’ve picked up in the last few years, some of them learned the hard way. I hope they’ll serve you well.

1. Provide Solutions: Management is looking for your expertise, even when they think they know better. Temper your speech. It’s easy to get into the habit of saying “No, that won’t work because…” Don’t throw up barriers. You’ve gotten this far in your career because you’re good at what you do, so use your experience to find the creative solution.
2. Accept Input: Listen to your developers. There are days that they’ll know more about the current state of the codebase than you well. If you are lucky, you are leading people who are talented in disciplines that you are not. Listen to these people, accept their input.
3. Make The Call: Eventually, the discussion has to end. Take the data and make the best decision you can. That’s your job.
4. Play It Straight: Be honest. When you screw up, take the blame. When it’s your team, deal with it.  Trying to hide errors just compounds the problem. Without honesty there can be no trust.
5. Share Knowledge: The most fun I have with my team at Mahalo is when we are talking about tech, sharing ideas, new code, and new methods of getting the job done. This is real team-building. As developer, we prize knowledge above most other things. Share it with your team. Learn from them as well. Don’t be afraid to ask someone to teach you a skill you’ve wanted to learn.
6. Keep It Short: Management doesn’t really care how an HTTP Request Handler works.  Keep your explanations short and to the point. Ask if they want more detail. Understand that speaking techie will alienate non-techies, and will cause a slight distrust of what you’re saying. If you cannot avoid giving a technical answer, keep it short and sweet.  It’s not their job to know how it works, they just want to know it works.
7. Choose Your Battles: Your development team will inevitably want things that management cannot provide, and management will always mandate things that are not easy to do. It’s your job to find the middle ground. That will usually mean compromise, and while it’s not pretty, it’s how the sausage is made.  Save the digging in of heels for when you really need it.  An extra button or a different way of processing a form is not worth the trouble, in general, but a new form that causes the entire database to change is worth the fight. You’re not just there to take orders…you’re the caretaker of the project. Give feedback, and if you are overruled, determine how far you’re willing to take it. Be realistic in your assessment: is it a true battle to be fought or merely an inconvenience?
8. Keep A Journal: Keep a journal of the projects you run. Take notes, so you can remember why decisions were made. There will be times that you’ll look at some piece of code and you’ll have no idea why it’s doing what it’s doing. Your journal will save you from the ever-embarrassing “I dunno.”

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