Well, my personal 2009 Pair Programming Tour has kicked off with a bang! After my recent plea for pairing, my friend @jeremymcanally hooked me up with the guys at OG Consulting, who agreed to take me in for a day.

I drove up Thursday morning and got to @vinbarnes‘ house around 10. From there it was a whirlwind of new info for me til around 5 (with a lunch break for excellent burritos).

I think we were working on some kind of Doomsday web app with which they will soon take over the world. While I don’t get to be part of the New Ruling Order, I do get a pretty low MindlessPeon number thanks for my pre-alpha invite. So that should at least give me some additional social standing among the other Mindless Peons. So that rocks.

And I got to meet Abby, who appears to me the real heart and soul of the OG operation.

Seriously, there was so much to learn it was amazing. The glimmer has begun glimming in my head about how this BDD stuff works. And I’m very taken with RSpec, whereas before I had no clue what the big deal was, and I couldn’t even figure out where the spec files went.

The most important things were unexpected little things, though. I paired with Yossef in the morning, and Rick after lunch. (When I say “paired”, what I mean is really “huffed along trying to keep up as best I could while they tried to go slow on my account”.)

And I learned so much stuff.

I have made the mistake of seeing competing tools and strategies for testing or development as more or less complete solutions. And if I looked at one, and couldn’t see how it made some edge case easier, that made me think I was missing something. But as Yossef pointed out, there are things about RSpec, or BDD, that can be frustrating or limiting once in a while. That doesn’t make them bad, it just means they’re not perfect. But neither are any of the alternatives. The key is finding methods — and tools — that offer the right mix for you, and your current projects, at your current stage of development.

When prominent people in a community advocate this or that methodology, it’s easy to assume their personal practices sprang from their heads like Athena from Zeus, full-grown and already armed. While it never worked like that with me, I thought perhaps it was so for some people. But the craft of programming is an ongoing thing: Yossef mentioned more than once how he used to do this or that, but that “right now” he did it this way. It seemed clear to me that none of these guys had settled on the One True Way, but had found “the Best Way We Know Right Now”. A small thing, perhaps, but still helpful in reminding me there are no permanent “always do it this way” solutions to everything.

There was much more, though. A couple of times during the day, somebody would ask, “What’s the incantation to make X do Y?” The first time it happened, I thought, “Why not just Google it?” But for several things, just asking was faster than Google would have found it. But here’s the much more important thing: by not stopping to go Google it, nobody lost context — not the asker, not the answerer, not the hearer. I hadn’t expected that, but it’s true: it was a better way to find it out without losing context.

This whole “not losing context” thing leads me to the single most amazing part of the experience: I didn’t want to go check my email all the time. I can’t tell you how profound a difference this is for me, personally. I have the attention span of a hyperactive fruit fly. On crack. Normally it’s pretty much impossible for me to sit in front of a single project, working on one thing, for more than a few minutes at a time. But yesterday, it wasn’t even a problem. It’s not that I felt embarrassed, so I just resisted the urge. No, it’s that it was easy to keep focused, because we were doing it together. I didn’t want to miss anything, and I was enjoying it, so why would I want to do something else?

There was so much more: Yossef does an enormous amount without having very much code on-screen at any given time; Rick seems to group his stories differently than Yossef; a good team leapfrogs through the process by borrowing code almost in real-time, giving them a great multiplier on their efforts; after using emacs for almost 20 years, I learned new emacs tricks just by watching; the flaming bird of failure; the 80s-rock < => coding velocity equation; hack and ship; tool-building for speed. It just goes on an on.

While I hope this doesn’t come across as flattery, I’m willing to take the chance. Yossef, Kevin, and Rick were unfailingly gracious and patient and friendly hosts. I’m telling you, these guys are not only extremely smart, they’re really nice guys. It was great just getting a chance to hang out and get to know them.

And man, do they know their stuff. It’s a testament to how good they are at what they do that even with my vigorous and frequent application of the Dumb Question Stick, I was unable to prevent them from getting work done. I did all I could, but they still made it happen.

I’ll stop for now; the #nashdl meetup was great, too, and I met some “old” Twitter friends (hi, @levicole!) and made some new ones.

p.s. – I was kidding about the Doomsday app. I think. Though they did open Pandora’s box and just leave the lid off most of the day.

Update (2009-01-16): You can read about my first tour stop here. I’m fired up now, so I’m looking far and wide for more folks with which to do this.

I’d like to do some pair programming. The problem is, you can’t exactly do that by yourself. At least, not if you’re reasonably healthy of mind, as I understand it.

I’m looking for someone willing to let me come to your place and “pair up” with you for at least a day. I can’t promise how useful I’ll be, but I’m a reasonably pleasant guy, I bathe every month whether I need it or not, and I’ll buy you lunch.

My only requirements are:

1. Gotta be within an hour or so of Huntsville, Alabama. I need to be able to drive there and back on the same day. That basically means anywhere from Nashville, TN to Birmingham, AL, and from Florence, AL to maybe Scottsboro, AL.
2. Gotta be Ruby. Rails is even better, but I’d go hang out with a pure Ruby hacker. This isn’t because other languages and contexts sux0r. It’s just that Ruby (and Rails) is what I’m doing right now, and where I’m hoping to ramp up my level of mastery quickly.
3. You have to have done Pair Programming before, and can show me at least your way that works best. How do we set up our work space? Do we use two computers, linked up? One? Where do we sit? I don’t want to spend the day figuring it out with another Pair noob.

That’s it. I have a few preferences, but they’re not essential: I’d like to work with someone who does BDD/TDD so I can see it in action. I’d strongly prefer if whatever project we worked on was git-based (even better if it’s on github) for the same reason: I’d like to see how real work gets done in this mode. But honestly, any experienced Pair Programmer doing Ruby that will have me will work fine.

I don’t want money or credit or co-copyright or anything. I don’t care what the project you’re working on is. Anything is fine. I just want to learn, and hopefully contribute a little. If it works out, I’d like to do it some more, though no one should feel the slightest compunction against telling me, “Get lost, you bum!” after the first day.

I was inspired by Corey Haines’ Pair Programming Tour 2008. While I can’t travel around the country pairing up with awesome programmers, I’m free to travel around a little bit, and I know there are some good Ruby+Rails folks not too far away.

I’ve been programming more or less steadily for almost 30 years. I’ve been working with Rails for over 3 years, but only for private projects (one large one for one of my companies). In my career I’ve worked in a lot of different platforms, quite a few languages, and at various levels of OS, from a tiny bit of device drivers all the way out to user interfaces. I know a little about a lot of things, and a lot about a few things.

But the discipline of writing software moves very fast, and I’ve not been as deeply involved in programming as I’d like in the past few years, and frankly, there’s a lot of cool stuff I feel like I’ve missed. And one of those is the emergence of pair programming, and the BDD/TDD paradigm.

So…anyone willing to take me in and show me the ropes? Email me at rew@erebor.com, find me on Twitter, or call or text me at 256-777-7650.

FreeWisdom has an excellent guide to backing up to an Amazon Elastic Block Store volume using rsync and an EC2 instance. I’m not going to copy the whole thing here, so for this post to make much sense, you’ll need to go read that first. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Back already? OK, good.

The guide is very thorough, and I love the idea. It’s just so refreshing to think of “let’s create an entire Ubuntu machine just to temporarily mount a drive long enough to rsync to it, then we’ll get rid of it.” And what’s more, you can automate the whole process via a shell script. It’s a great example of how things change with easily-accessible virtualization.

So I like the FreeWisdom piece, but here are a couple of changes there were helpful for me.

First, when I ran the script from anywhere other than the directory where the id_rsa-gsg-keypair live (~/ec2/ or wherever you have it), ssh couldn’t find it. And if I specified the path as -i ~/ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair, then the ssh command passed to rsync failed (I presume because the shell environment under which rsync runs it doesn’t have ‘~/’ setup; I once knew off-hand which part of the shell startup did this, but I’ve flushed it to disk somewhere). You could pass the full path name of your id_rsa-gsg-keypair, but I prefer to just cd there to start with. Keep in mind this means that the output of the rsync command, redirected to ‘out.txt’ in the script, will actually go in this same directory. If that’s not what you want, redirect the output of rsync with a more suitable filename.

The second thing I did was a little more complicated. I have StrictHostKeyChecking turned on, which means that every time I run this against a new instance, ssh asks whether to accept the remote hosts keys as valid. This means I can’t schedule this script to run unattended.

ssh allows some configuration options to be set on the command line. So I’ve added two ssh options to get around this problem.

The first option only has to be added on the first call to ssh. By passing -o “StrictHostKeyChecking no” to the first ssh call, I tell it to automatically accept the remote host key, adding it to the known_hosts file without asking.

This gets rid of the prompting problem, but introduces another: each time this script is run, it’s going to drop another IP/key pair into our known_hosts file, and eventually that will have to be cleaned up. Besides, we only want to accept the key during the time that it’s our instance.

So I add this second option to every ssh call in the script. First, get a reasonably likely unique temporary name (yes, I know there are more rigorous ways to do this; feel free to expand as you have time and interest):

KNOWN_HOSTS=”/tmp/known_hosts.$$”

Then tell ssh to use this temporary file to store the key file from the temporary instance by using the -o “UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS” option.

So the initial ssh call in the FreeWisdom script (line 16 or thereabouts in the original) becomes:

ssh -i id_rsa-gsg-keypair -o “StrictHostKeyChecking no” -o “UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS” root@$EC2_HOST “mkdir /mnt/samba && mount /dev/sdh /mnt/samba”

Once we’ve connected to the instance once with StrictHostKeyChecking turned off, its key will be in our temporary known_hosts file. Thus, we don’t need the -o “StrictHostKeyChecking no” option in any future ssh commands.

The rsync command then becomes:

rsync -e “ssh -i id_rsa-gsg-keypair -o ‘UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS’” -avz /Users/rew/Documents root@$EC2_HOST:/mnt/samba/ > out.txt

And the ssh command to umount the volume:

ssh -i id_rsa-gsg-keypair -o “UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS” root@$EC2_HOST “umount /mnt/samba”

Remove the temporary known_hosts file at the end:

rm $KNOWN_HOSTS

and it’s all cleaned up.

Give it a try, and let me know of any clever extensions you make.

A few months ago, I had a brief Twitter exchange with a prominent tech blogger (whom I won’t name so nobody thinks I’m link-baiting here). We’ll call him Fred (not his real name). It started with a comment he’d made about the political bias of Fox News.

I took him up on the issue, and said I didn’t believe their reporting (as opposed to their opinion shows) is any more biased than the other networks, but since it leans the other way than the other networks, by comparison they seem more biased than they are.

Put another way, if you’re standing at a 15-degree angle to the left of vertical, and you think you’re standing up straight, then people who aren’t leaning at all will seem to you to be leaning to the right.

If you encounter someone who’s leaning 15 degrees to the right of vertical, then to your perspective they’re practically falling over. But it’s not the magnitude of their bias that you’re seeing; it’s the magnitude of the difference between yours and theirs.

So it is (I posit) between Fox and pretty much the entirety of the other other televised news outlets. (MSNBC is an outlier which actually HAS fallen over after leaning too far left, and it can’t get up and wouldn’t want to if it could, so let’s just quietly move on and let it lie there peacefully.)

Now, “Fred” is a smart guy, and a compelling writer. He’s also quite liberal in his politics (from all the indications I’ve ever seen from him). He may, in fact, be considerably more liberal than he realizes, simply because of his peer group.

I’m a techie, and I’ve been roaming around the Interwebs since before Al Gore invented them, and I’ve noticed something over the 20 years or so I’ve been soaking up the culture: people in the major tech centers (the sort of places Paul Graham says you can’t just create) are overwhelmingly, breathtakingly liberal as a group. That doesn’t mean you won’t find there individuals of tremendously varying political positions. But the median tech-head from Silicon Valley, SF, Portland, Redmond, MIT, Caltech, or Stanford is so far to the left of the country-wide median, they may not even know anyone as far right as what passes for “the middle” in modern American politics.

That’s a long way around to saying this: I know people whom I consider friends in the tech world who will (I think) be both shocked and a little ashamed for me to know I voted for George W. Bush not once, but twice, and would again over either of the two clowns currently running. They’d be shocked because I had not previously given them indications of being either brain-damaged or an evil minion of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton Cabal. And they’d be a little ashamed for me (and probably of me) because they’d know that all right-thinking people were appalled at my lack of clue and lack of class. It would be like my vomiting in the punchbowl at a wedding and then passing out and falling on the wedding cake. It’s a faux pas, unheard-of in any polite circle they can imagine.

And it’s the “circle that they can imagine” part that’s oddly childlike. Their political spectrum has a left and a right, and they argue with great passion against those on the “other side”. It’s just that their entire spectrum, if translated to the color spectrum, would fit between Angry, Pulsating All-War-Is-Wrong Violet and Indigo-tinted CO2-Covered Global-Warming-Death Blue. The very existence of an all-out Green is but a rumor, and no one — except the insane and those in tune with the Dark Arts — even speaks of Yellow. Red and Orange are simply inconceivable to them. If there were a Yellow, surely there could be nothing beyond it but utter madness.

I’m overdrawing it a tad. But the fact is, someone sitting comfortably in the middle of the spectrum would see them all as about as purple as they could be, with no difference worth commenting on among the lot of them.

In the same way, someone sitting deep in the Red area wouldn’t be able to see much past the “left-wing nutjob” sitting at Green, and would dismiss anything insufficiently red as a “bunch of hippies anyway” and not think more about it.

Now, in this maelstrom of provincial cluelessness, what would an ‘unbiased’ news network look like if we had one? What would they say? And if they said it, who would like it? Is the middle of the political spectrum even very populated? Is that even a fair question? Many people have pointed out that most of our politics don’t line up in a linear fashion at all. There are at least two dimensions in the political grid, as our Libertarian friends are fond of pointing out. I think there are many more than that.

This brings me back (at long last) to Fox. I don’t think that Fox is conservative, though they lean to the right compared to the other networks. However, compared to a legitimately conservative outfit like National Review, Fox is hardly conservative. (Keep in mind, I’m only talking about the “news”, not the various opinion-tainment shows on Fox).

What they are is populist, and wildly so. There are political issues where populists graze freely among the fields of conservative ideas (but without ever knowing whose land they’re on). On others, they wander happily among the poppies of liberalism (again, blissfully ignorant of the fact). But Fox, I think, doesn’t care, as long as their audience is engaged and growing.

The funny thing is that, for both Left and Right, typically populism is seen as a sort of “politics for stupid people”. It’s a different beast than Conservatism, which is “politics for evil, greedy people” and Liberalism, which is “politics for narcissists and commies” (depending on who you ask). Everybody hates everybody, and everybody thinks everybody else is evil, stupid, ignorant, or all three.

Fox, I think, noticed that nobody was serving the populist herd in the news game. The liberal wing had pretty much locked down control of major media, and the conservatives had gone a different route, with think tanks, foundations, magazines and so on. Fox jumped in and fed the masses the sort of news the masses like.

To conservatives (and I know whereof I speak), Fox is an occasionally welcome relief from the relentless agenda of liberally slanted major news networks. But it’s hardly conservative, and is sometimes maddeningly obtuse about issues that (conservatives think) shouldn’t even be debatable.

To liberals (and I have observed this as an almost unanimous reaction), Fox is a hideous conservative menace, an aberration that does not deserve to exist and is corrupting and destroying All That Is Good in the Universe (sort of Dick Cheney if he were a news network instead of a Sith Lord).

But it’s ironic that so many people, particularly people from my professional herd, genuinely believe that Fox is pretty much the house organ of the Republican Party, and can’t conceive of the notion that it could be anything else.

Update: Seth Godin has the same idea.

[I actually drafted this post about a week ago, when Mama Fu's was still open; I just found out this week that they've closed down. I don't think that this post would have made much difference for them by itself; it was likely too late. But still, I shouldn't have waited. I'm telling you, "too late" can sneak up on you in a hurry. If there's a place you like, don't wait around.]

The other day at Mama Fu’s, I talked to one of the owners for a few minutes while she folded napkins and I ate Honey Glazed Chicken.

She said things were rough, though they had picked up a little in the last few days. The Bridge Street opening has hurt them badly. She said it has always been brutal, but now it’s “doubly brutal.” I feel really bad for her, because I know what it’s like. I’ve been there, but I didn’t know what to say.

The truth is I hadn’t eaten at Mama Fu’s in a couple of months. I like the place; no, I love the place. I talk to people about how I like Mama Fu’s, and take people there. I can’t think of anywhere else in Huntsville that I enjoy as much for the price as Mama Fu’s. There are places I prefer to eat, but they all cost more. It’s convenient for me; I drive by it all the time. But for various reasons I just hadn’t made it there.

I wanted to tell her, “Hang in there, it will get better,” but I don’t know if it will or not. I wanted to say something to encourage her, but it occurred to me that it won’t help. What she needs, as the owner, is not encouragement; she needs customers.

Unless you’ve owned a retail establishment, you may not understand that the way to express appreciation for it is to go there and spend money as often as possible, and encourage your friends to do the same. Everything else – compliments, encouragement, smiles – is just a packet of sweetener for whatever the owner is having to drink.

My wife and I had a lovely bookstore and coffee shop a few years ago. It was a fantastic place – I still miss it to this day – but it was never profitable, not for a month, hardly ever for even a week. We stuck it out for 3 years before finally shutting it down.

When we closed the store, we had people come by in tears. They were so upset, but yet they were often people we hadn’t seen in weeks. We had people going on about how much they missed us, how much they’d loved us, who came in once a month and hardly spent anything. They couldn’t imagine why we would close: “It was such a lovely place, and it was always so busy!” Well, it wasn’t busy enough, and too many people just came there to mill around and talk, and didn’t buy anything. If half the people that said they loved it had supported it the way they say they loved it, we wouldn’t have had to close.

I don’t say this to whine, because by now I know it’s probably good that we did close. But I learned this then, and had forgotten it. Mama Fu’s has reminded me, and I’m sharing it with you: it won’t do you much good to be standing outside the shuttered front door saying, “I loved this place! Oh, my goodness! Why did they go out of business?” Usually, the store went out of business because I, and people like me, didn’t spend enough money there. We got bored, we got distracted, we didn’t think about it, and we didn’t patronize them enough.

It’s hard to be in business, and it’s especially hard to be in a food business. It’s a lot like the music business, but without the glamour and riches. it’s vicious and cut-throat, expensive and difficult, capricious and terrible, and almost everyone fails at it sooner or later.

So here is a warning to you: if there is a place that you like to eat and it’s not a big successful money-printing chain like McDonald’s (they’re like roaches, you can’t kill them) – if it’s an independent place that you like, go there as often as you can.

But what’s more important, urge other people to go there. Sell for them. Not in an annoying-salesman way, but by telling people, “I went there, it was great, you have to go try it.” And then ask them, “Have you gone? Have you had the mushu pork? Have you had the Philly cheese-steak? Did you try that chicken sandwich I told you about?” Grab them by the collar and say, “Oh, let’s go there for lunch!” Go spend money and encourage other people to go and spend money. That’s how you support places you like, and that’s how you keep them in business.

You will be surprised how much difference a single person shopping or eating at your place regularly can make to a small store.

Update (2008-11-28): Seth Godin has the same idea.

When Apple introduced the new iPhone 3G on Monday, they changed more than the hardware. They changed their deal with AT&T, giving up the cut of monthly revenue from iPhone users. Instead, AT&T will “buy” iPhones from Apple, and then sell them at a lower price to customers to get them into a 2-year contract, and (hopefully) hooked.

This is, after all, how it’s usually done in cellular-land. But Apple had gotten a lot of press for their “game-changing” deal with AT&T (and AT&T had gotten a lot of criticism). So did AT&T suddenly gain the upper hand? Did they outsmart El Jobso? Did Apple stumble here?

Hardly.

According to this Marketwatch piece, the iPhone 3G subsidies are expected to cost AT&T around $1 billion this year.

The new entry price point for the 3G iPhone – $199 – is killer, and is going to move a lot of the devices to customers who’d been unable or unwilling to part with $399 or higher before. And a lot of that difference is coming out of AT&T’s pockets. AT&T, for their part, has a plan here; cellular companies have this game worked out pretty well, having subsidized cell phones nearly since their introduction in order to lock-in long-term revenue.

But back to the original question: was Apple willing to give up their monthly cut of all those locked-in customers just to move more hardware? Did they give up on trying to carve out a recurring revenue stream from their ground-breaking phone?

No, they just moved on to the next phase of their plan.

The key is the App Store. Apple has created a new market for software applications – the iPhone – and has made itself the single retail outlet for selling software into that environment. There are some exceptions – you can deploy apps within your own organization, or to a hundred or so iPhones ‘ad hoc’ – but for pretty much everyone else, if you develop an iPhone app, you’re going to sell it through Apple’s App Store or not at all. And there are going to be a lot of iPhone apps sold.

Steve Jobs spent twice as long during his keynote talking about the App Store, and applications available for the iPhone, as about the new iPhone itself. Including the enterprise elements and the SDK, it was almost 4 times as long. Clearly, this is a big deal to Apple.

Having unleashed the iPhone as a target platform for 3rd-party developers, and then set themselves up to take a cut of every application sold for it, Apple wants as many iPhones in the field as possible. So they’re letting AT&T keep all the monthly revenue in exchange for subsidizing the rollout of the new iPhones to millions of new subscribers (I predict they easily beat their 10-million-iPhone target for 2008), all of whom will be hungry for new apps for their new toys.

And Apple stands to profit from every single one.

“Skate to where the puck is going to be,” indeed.

Update:Reuters reports that “some estimates” put the impact of the lost monthly revenue from AT&T at 3c/share.

But Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster projects hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the Apple Store, which would dwarf the lost revenue from AT&T, even by his “conservative” estimates.

Why are people so disturbed by the occasionally remarkable relevance of Gmail’s ads? It seems the better Google (and advertisers) get at matching key phrases to context ads, the more it makes some folks think something scary is going on.

I saw this on a mailing list recently (paraphrased to protect the worried):

I like gmail too, but lately they’re starting to scare me lately. The amount of information they collect and how they use it is startling.

I e-mailed a friend talking about some symptoms of a medical condition, and Gmail served up a sponsored ad offering a diagnosis and selling a solution for the condition.

So this puzzles me a little.

First, GMail has done this since day 1. And people have been worried about this since before it launched.

But why is this so troubling to people? This recent email was just one example; I read lots of people who seem bothered by this. It’s often occasioned by an ad that seemed to “know” about a recent email conversation the user had.

I don’t know what nefarious things Google may be doing with my Gmail behind my back; I can’t say that they’re not doing something wrong.

But all they’re doing with the ads is keyword-matching, just like they do with Adsense on a web page.

Companies “bid” on words and phrases, and when those show up in a context where Google serves ads, by some magic algorithm (Google for “how does adsense select ads”) Google serves up matching ads from its pool of bidders.

If an ad appears on your Gmail page, it’s not because Google is matching your *identity* and then notifying some other company that “Hey, Ryan was talking to Joe about spontaneously erupting super-vision-itis” so they can jump in and prepare an ad for you personally, cackling maniacally. It’s because the magic matching key-phrase is somewhere in that web page, and that ad was automatically chosen from the pool of available ones that matched *some* text in your current page.

Keep in mind that the page loaded by Gmail is huge; there’s a lot more text transferred to your browser than what you see on your screen at any given moment.

Gmail pre-fetches a lot of stuff to make the Javascript-based navigation smoother and faster. So just because you don’t see anything about that message you just sent on your screen doesn’t mean
that message is not in the window.

Now, for all I know, Google may be wiretapping our cell phones and selling the content to the North Koreans to kill puppies with. But highly relevant contextual ads on Gmail don’t seem to me very strong evidence of anything alarming.

Or maybe I’m just insufficiently paranoid.

My friend Keith told me something that’s helped him write more lately:

[...]for the past few days I’ve really tried to write at least 15 minutes every day. Once I get started, I just crank it out. [...] In the past month I’ve thought about it and opened Marsedit over and over, looked over my drafts, and not wanted to write on any particular one, so I didn’t that day. But when I have to do 15 minutes, I find that I can pick any of my drafts, and when I force the words out, suddenly I do want to write on that topic. [Emphasis mine - rew]

The idea that simply committing beforehand to write for X minutes creates the desire to write more seems counterintuitive (to me, anyway). Yet there are certainly a lot of good writers who say that’s the secret (or the main part of it). Yet it seems so hard, if you’re not doing it right then to believe that it could be so simple. I guess it’s because, while simple, it’s not easy. It’s doubly pernicious because the whole reason I can’t seem to get started is that I don’t want to right now. The fact that if I’d get started, then I’d want to is sort of beside the point.

There are other things besides writing that work that way for me. For instance, some days I really, really don’t want to work out. Yet even on those days, the moment after I start, I no longer want to quit until I’ve done every single rep of every single exercise. It’s not some great expenditure of will power at that point; finishing every step is what I want to do. The critical moments all are in the lead-up to the one where I actually begin.

Right up to very first step on the stepper or first lift, my brain is all abuzz with excellent reasons this would be a good day to skip it.

Now there’s no reason at all why the first rep of the first exercise should change my state of mind. If it was a good day to skip before, it should be a good day to skip after the first step. I’m not jacked up on endorphins, I’m not tired or sweating yet, not pumped up or let down or anything. Yet the moment I’ve started, I no longer want to quit. To get finished, sure, but not to quit.

Now, it’s possible that’s deeply-ingrained training from way back in some day when I had coaches who beat that into my head. If so, I’m grateful (again) for having had people teach me that. But I think it may be something more fundamentally human and psychological. I don’t think I’m alone in it, and I don’t think it’s purely the outcome of someone yelling at me regularly not to quit many years ago. I dunno.

The thing that seems to change is whether it’s hard to do something. Keith said that once he gets started writing, the desire to keep writing follows on its own. I find the same thing with my workout. The fact that I don’t want to right now doesn’t mean that I won’t want to once I get started.

The trick seems to be training my rational mind enough to force my emotional mind to just have a little faith that once I start, I’ll be doing what I want to do if I’ll just dive in.

Mack Collier’s Are You Curious was uncannily timely for me. I’ve been thinking a good bit lately about fear and new trends and the pace of technology.

It feels like things move so fast that there’s simply not time to take a week, or a month, or a year, off. We worry that we’ll get left behind if we slack off for a bit, that technology will move on and we’ll never catch up.

Even if we’re trying to keep up it can feel like things are moving ahead faster than we can move ourselves. But it’s not true; there’s always room for good work and good observations.

Pick something and start talking about it. Say something stupid: it’s okay. You’ll find out more by getting involved in the conversation (even by being clueless) than by sitting on the sidelines wondering if you know enough to contribute anything.

Talk to people, learn stuff, get on board and move. You can always catch up, you can always contribute. You just can’t sit there on your butt, paralyzed by fear of irrelevance, and let the world move away from you and leave you behind. If you want to do the work, there’s always something new that you can become an expert in that no one else has done before and so no else has known before.

There’s always a new trend, there’s always a new revolution around the corner in technology or business. There’s never one last chance.

After the bubble burst in 2000, there were a lot of gloomy voices acting like that was the end. Technology was gonna be a commodity. The land grab was over, the dot com rush was finished, blah, blah, blah. There was a great malaise for a few years for a lot of people who didn’t know what to do.

Of course, some people just kept on working. Too young or too dumb or too focused on their work or plans or dreams to be put off, they were too busy creating interesting things to bother with joining the Malaise.

So they created the current revolution, and sure enough, a lot like before, the money and buzz have returned. This one will crash too, eventually, but there will be another one after that.

So don’t sweat it. It’s OK to miss out on things, especially if you’re doing other worthwhile things with your life. There will be another exciting train along shortly to hop aboard. In fact, one’s usually at the station just waiting for another clever passenger.

“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” – Ephesians 5:16 (ESV)

“Are you reeling in the years? Stowing away the time?” – Steely Dan

Is the work you’re doing right now worth what you are getting for it? It’s not just a question of money; does your work reward you in all ways enough to compensate for what it costs you?

Is it worth the time that you spend on it? The parts of your life that you trade for it? What’s the impact on your family, or your friends? Is it worth it?

If it’s not, you need to sit down today and make a plan for finding other work that is. Life is far too short to spend doing work that’s not worth the time. It’s easier to contemplate the cost of changing your life when you see clearly the cost of keeping it the same.

Seth Godin wrote about Borders (referencing a post by John Moore):

It turns out that cutting inventory by 10% and facing books out (instead of just showing spines) increased their sales by 9%. This is counter to Long Tail thinking, which says that more choices and more inventory tend to increase sales.

I don’t think that’s what the Long Tail suggests. In fact, part of its premise means it can’t apply to a brick-and-mortar store, where display space is fixed (and expensive).

The key conditions are well-summarized in the Wikipedia entry:

The key supply-side factor that determines whether a sales distribution has a Long Tail is the cost of inventory storage and distribution. Where inventory storage and distribution costs are insignificant, it becomes economically viable to sell relatively unpopular products; however, when storage and distribution costs are high, only the most popular products can be sold.

Borders’ action here, instead of being “against Long Tail thinking” is actually perfectly aligned with it: they realize that their sales distribution does not have a long tail, because their customer base is too small and their cost of additional inventory is relatively high. So they have taken steps to increase the popularity slightly of a slightly smaller number of items.

Seth’s a very smart guy; it’s hard for me to tell if he’s misrepresenting the long-tail on purpose for something, or if he actually missed it on this one. I’m guessing the former, since the real point he seemed to be making in his post was a good one. Or am I the one missing the boat here?

While reading Dan Poynter’s excellent piece on storyboarding, I was struck by the resemblance of Gay Talese’s storyboard to _why the lucky stiff’s Poignant Guide to Ruby.

Maybe it’s just me.

Quoting a book review by J. Peter Pham in National Review, 31 Dec 2005:

Historian Robert Conquest recently pondered why so many of his fellow scholars had been for so long incapable of grasping the true nature of the Soviet regime. He concluded by blaming “a clerisy that has hardly heard of opinions other than those appearing to be…the acceptable expression of concern for humanity” and that has demonstrated “a strong tendency to silence those who disagree with one or another of the accepted beliefs.”

Can you think of an issue about which people pretend that there exists no “other” side, or that anyone who says, “Wait, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, this evidence here suggests otherwise,” is a lunatic, or out to destroy humanity, the world, decency, puppies?

It’s so easy to slide into this kind of closed-mindedness. I believe what I believe, and I think I have good reasons for it. I enjoy finding other people who seem intelligent and well-spoken who share that belief. But from there it’s only a lazy little slip over into “ALL people who are intelligent and well-spoken WILL share this belief; everyone else is an evil slug.”

I suspect many readers not only thought of a great example of such narrow-minded idea bigots, but also assume that most smart, “good”, and well-informed people would agree.

So, for instance, if you believe “Bush lied, kids died” is an accurate and pithy explanation of the current conflict in and over Iraq, you thought “stupid/evil neocon warmongers”. If, on the other hand, you think “Global warming is a Commie plot”, you thought “stupid/evil Gore-cult worshipers”.

But the point I’m trying to make here is that if I (or you) begin to think that nobody in their right mind could disagree with my example “clerisy of narrow minds”, then I’ve slipped into the same mindset, thus joining one myself.

p.s. – I know that I’m a card-carrying member of about 14 different “clerisies” myself. But I’m working on escaping. Are you?

While looking for this Fast Company article, I ran across someone named ‘Miro Slodki’ asking for a link to this very article. Since I had the link handy, I pasted it into the ‘Comment’ field and hit ‘Submit’, and was sent to FC’s “Here, create an account and tell us lots about yourself, agree to our ToS, etc.”

I just wanted answer Miro’s question. So I googled ‘Miro Slodki’ and found his blog. “A-ha!” I thought. “I’ll just zip over and email him directly, and in less time than it would take to fill out FC’s ‘new user’ form. Take that, Fast Company!”

Only…I couldn’t find an email link. Now stubbornly in pursuit of my prey, I spent 5 minutes wandering around the site, even visiting his LinkedIn profile, only to by stymied. Nowhere on the site (that I could find) was there any way to just contact Miro directly (even via a web form), other than posting comments on actual posts.

I even found that Miro is looking for interesting work:

PS. At the moment I find myself seeking new challenges and contracting assignments. I would appreciate if you could extend a kind word on my behalf and send the referrals my way.

But how could I do that if I can’t find how to contact him?

I searched for a while, but Google and I couldn’t find him. I found other places that Miro had joined and commented, all of which jealously guarded any way to contact him directly. So eventually I gave up. We’ll see if, in an amusing irony, the linkback to his blog that Wordpress will auto-generate will draw him here to see the link he’d asked for a week or so ago.

Hey, I’m not picking on Miro, by any means. I don’t even know him (though I know him better than I did 20 minutes ago, that’s for sure). I’m just pointing out what I think are two serious problems companies and people share when trying to use the web to achieve their goals:

• Trying to enforce behavior on people that I have no relationship with, and to whom I offer no benefit. I wasn’t trying to get something from Fast Company; I was trying to help out one of their readers, on their site, by linking to one of their articles.
• Seeking visibility and opportunity without giving it a way to knock. I know spam is a problem, but being permanently incommunicado is worse. You don’t have to go as far as Scoble. But if you want contact, you have to throw me a bone.

Man, this has been a bad couple of weeks for influential people in my formative years. Gary Gygax, RIP, and happy adventuring!

“Good writing is partly a matter of character. Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader.” – Michael Covington (slide 8, “The unselfish perspective”)

It seems the collective heart of the social media crowd has been stolen away by video blogging, which appears to them more or less The Ultimate Tool. I can see why some might think that. But I hate it, and you should, too.

With some great bloggers, like Jeff Atwood and Steve Yegge and Marc Andreesson and even Mark Cuban (who’s a great blogger w/o being a particularly good writer), I know what they do. Their ability to blog intensely interesting pieces is just part of the unfair measure of talent they’ve been given in a field other than their primary one.

But there are lots of people making lots of social media noise whose actual profession I cannot figure out. I enjoy reading Chris Brogan, Andrew Chen, Kevin Lim, etc. – I just can’t for the life of me figure out what they get paid to do, and by whom. (OK, I think Kevin’s a grad student, but the others – no idea).

And they’re the tip of the iceberg. There’s apparently a semi-closed system of maybe a hundred or more of nearly-A-level social media butterflies out there blogging and twitting and flickring and who-knows-what-else-ing each other, all while getting more and more excited about the “possibilities”. But possibilities for what?

My impression is that right now it’s sort of a blogorrheic derby, to see who can output the fastest, most nearly stream-of-consciousness flow of stuff, to “make people think” and “examine the issues in social media”. Right. Make noise, get attention. I have a 3-year-old. Some of this is not unfamiliar to me.

That brings us to video blogging. When someone sits down to write a blog, unless they’re just compulsive, they have to at least be aware of the idea of editing or re-reading before posting. They may not do it much, but at least the idea’s there. Most people, even in the blogosphere, still seem to at least recognize the notion that ‘better’ writing is something different than ‘first draft’ writing.

But this doesn’t seem to be the case with video blogging, where immediacy seems to be one of the Primary Virtues, and where editing, even cutting out sections altogether, is verboten.

Most video is like bad writing: lazy, self-indulgent, flabby, poorly arranged, flaccid and pointless. Bad writing used to be much easier to make than bad video. But suddenly it’s vastly easier to produce video than to write. After all, you only have to manage to get the button pushed to make video; you don’t even have to type words. But good video production is much harder than it looks. It’s tempting to confuse visual quality with content quality.

When I’m reading a great post, I don’t have to read through 47 lines of “um…um…um…um…” that were auto-generated while the author was gathering his thoughts. But when I’m watching (heaven help me) a video, all those stay in. Each little 3-second pause, or 2-second nervous laugh, or irrelevant aside that seemed funny at the time, but, well, you had to be there, is left in, and then you and I and every other poor sap trying to extract value from it has to sit through them.

Look, it’s no accident that Scoble, the human content cataract, has moved so eagerly from written blogging (which at least allowed him the *opportunity* to gather and edit his thoughts before publishing) to twitter/pownce (which actively discourages either gathering OR editing of thoughts) to audio (which lets you just conveniently babble) to video (which is just audio with more let’s-face-it-do-we-really-need-to-see-that video of the mugs of the babblers).

Just click, chatter for a while, and upload! Woot! I’m adding content, I’m creating value, I’m re-conceptualizing our paradigms! Except I’m not. What I’m doing is blowing out 20 minute chunks of crap with an occasional nugget of goodness buried inside. Then I’m asking thousands or millions of people who want the nuggets to go spend 20 minutes each to find it, rather than doing the work once, digging out the nuggets, cutting out the extraneous and self-indulgent stuff, properly framing the remaining pieces so that the nuggets are presented in a reasonably fair way, and saving (18 minutes) X (however many viewers) = a lot of time.

It gets worse with every shiny new VC-backed way for people to put up endless video streams of the minutiae of their lives. Think about this: how many live-action 24×7 streams of video can you watch? The answer is 1. Only one. And you can only do that by expending an exactly equivalent stretch of your own life.

And here we come to the fatal flaw of web video (and audio; let’s not forget audio, though it seems to be passing away as passe so quickly that it’s barely worth mentioning): you can’t scan or compress it very much.

Now, you have to understand, I read fast. Not as in “fast for a trained speed reader”, but much faster than an average reader. That includes many of you who think that you’re fast readers, but are really only high-functioning average ones. But while I read pretty fast, I scan like a demon. If it’s in text that I don’t need to absorb in detail, I can move through it at a scorching pace, and generally catch and either slow down and “zoom in” on, or revisit later, most of the important stuff. And it makes yummy things like Google Reader a veritable buffet of information and knowledge and (mostly) reading pleasure.

But what happens when I see a blog entry in Google Reader that consists of “Hey, this is great, watch this” and an embedded video (or worse, a link to a video)? What are my choices? For many of the various sucky video services on the web, it’s not even readily apparent how long this piece of crap is going to be before I start.

Apparently, it’s the purpose in life of a lot of the chuckleheads who write these players to keep you from skipping even one second of the Blessed Incarnation of Video that is this particular video. These brain-dead Flash-based players that can’t even do basic things like FF and REW usably. Pausing, while iffy, at least works more than not. But fast-forwarding or skipping to specific points in the video? Right. So it’s either press play and stare for however long it drags on and hope that somewhere in there is a payoff, or skip it.

So most of the time, I skip video posts to written blogs, and ignore “vblogs” entirely. And the more people post video instead of taking the time to write the #*&$#*&% essay so I can read it (quickly) or scan it (ridiculously quickly) and get what I need, the more I ignore them.

What’s needed is for people to compress and edit and excise and eliminate and then post it. Just like with your blog. Don’t make me watch what wasn’t useful. Only show me what was good. Cut it down to size. Then re-arrange it so it’s better organized. Then cut it down some more.

Do the hard work once, at your end, on behalf of every consumer of it. Don’t make your many viewers each duplicate the work or spend the time that you should have invested once for everybody. Don’t think that because you’re slamming out hours of video and audio that you’re adding any value to the world or the lives of those trying to pan through your stream of nonsense for the elusive golden nugget.

I may be in the minority. I suspect that I am, at least amongst a populace with a demonstrated affinity for “less reading, more video”. But I’m guessing that my view is more common among influencers or any people whose time is more valuable than pretty much any other commodity (note: I’m not claiming here to be an influencer, only that I suspect that we share this view of reading vs. video).

And that’s the thing video abuses: my time, and yours.

I wish I could see what sort of an obit he’d have written about a guy like him. But alas, there was only one. RIP.

This past weekend I finally got my hands on a MacBook Air. I wasn’t prepared. I thought I’d like it; I thought I’d be impressed; I assumed that I’d want one. But wow – I had no idea how utterly attractive the thing would be. I didn’t realize just how light 3 lbs is, or how thin the thing is, or how fantastically it all works together.

There are so many little, tiny design choices that are just sooo correct, and that I wouldn’t have known I wanted until I saw them, that it’s just amazing.

Now, I’m not about to give up my MacBook Pro for the little guy. I love screen real estate (lots of it) and while the MBA keyboard is spifftacular, it’s not the perfect laptop keyboard that the MBP’s is. Still, it was an incredible piece of hardware, and I want one. Or two. It’s much more impressive in person than in any ads for it, which is saying a lot. If you haven’t touched one, held one, then you don’t really know what the thing is like.

This morning I read Wil Shipley’s first impressions. They’re very Shipley-esque (read: funny and interesting), but the first one was exactly the feeling that I got when I saw it up close:

It feels really nice, like a pebble. A large, smooth pebble, from a stream. This shape speaks to me, like the MOTOPEBL did, except that was a crappy phone and not a really nice computer.

He also says this, which is not really MBA-specific, but certainly a problem I’ve love to see solved:

Jonathan Ive should design a laptop bag as beautiful as the Air, that just can contain the machine, a power cord, and a Wireless Mighty Mouse. I’d be in heaven. Nobody seems to have addressed the “I want a small, slim bag that can still hold a power cord without having a giant wart in the side” market. Like, duh, bag designers, STOW THE POWER CORD ABOVE OR BELOW THE LAPTOP, not STICKING OUT THE SIDE WHERE IT CREATES A TENT AND LOOKS UGLY AND BANGS MY KNEE.

To that I’d like to add a hearty “Amen!”

You may or may not have heard of the Laffer Curve. It’s a theory that decreasing tax rates may, under some circumstances, increase tax revenue (and vice versa).

Now, you don’t have to accept that the Laffer Curve is true if you don’t want. You don’t have to accept that the earth is round, or that the sun goes around the moon, or that the Washington Redskins are evil, no matter who coaches them. Facts don’t care if you believe them, and you certainly don’t have to believe them.

Still, it’s just willfully ignorant to go around trumpeting that you reject the “Laffer Curve Theory” if you don’t even know what it is. And most of the people I’ve heard take issue with it clearly didn’t know what it actually says. I’m not saying that, “They disagreed with me, so they were wrong.” I’m saying that they were busy disagreeing with some straw man they’d concocted that had hardly any resemblance to the Laffer Curve itself.

So, if you want to know what the Laffer Curve is about, Larry Kudlow pointed to this terrific video a few days ago, from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. It’s only around 7 minutes long, and moves quickly, and is quite clear. Just don’t get distracted by the short appeal for a flat tax toward the end; the Laffer Curve is not connected to any particular means of taxation.

p.s. – I’m not a flat-tax proponent myself, largely for pragmatic reasons, namely, I don’t think it would remain transparently applied, and would quickly turn into a bureaucratically-managed VAT nightmare. But that’s another story.