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.

[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.

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.

[...]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.

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.

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?

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.

When it’s your turn, you are not “next on line”; you are “next in line”. It doesn’t matter that (1) all your friends say it this way, (2) you’ve never heard of “in line”, (3) you don’t get what the difference is, or (4) you don’t care. It’s still wrong, and you’re wrong if you talk that way.

One day, long ages hence, the language may have become so permanently mutilated that “online” will be the correct way to say “waiting in a queue arranged linearly”. But that day is not today, nor will it be tomorrow, and if I have anything to say about it, will be never.

I wonder sometimes where this abomination comes from. I don’t know, really, but I have a couple of guesses which do not exclude one another. The correct term — “in line”, in case you forgot — comes from the simple fact that you are, in fact, in a line with the people in front of and behind you. Even if that line curves or turns back (as around crowd-control barriers at an airport), it’s still a continuous line from front to back. It’s not a metaphorical line, it’s a real one, made up of people.

Now, to say that you’re “on line”, assuming that it’s not just completely stupid (let’s don’t rule that out, but perhaps there’s a quasi-sensible origin somewhere), must have originally meant something to the first bonehead to use the phrase to mean “standing in a line”. My current theories are these:

1. In some elementary schools, I have seen actual lines painted along corridors or in lunchrooms, presumably to give the little blighters a physical reference for what standing “in line” might look like. In their case, they would actually be “on line” when standing “in line”, and I suspect that careless or worn-out teachers quickly abandoned the pretext of a semantic difference, and just took to screeching, “Billy, get back on line before I put you in double-secret timeout for another 15 seconds!”
2. Some person whose grasp of the art of speech was only the barest, whilst grasping for the complicated phrase “in line” to indicate that they were currently “in a line”, stumbled upon the phrase “on line”, and since it had in their confused mental state a vaguely good association (after all, the cool kids are all online these days), they chose it as the best they could do and just went with it.
3. Others, either linguistically careless or semantically clueless, heard this usage and managed to go so far as to invent a metaphoric line on the floor on which all of the people “in line” were standing, thus making the “on line” a harmless, perhaps even clever, variation. Seeking novelty over clarity, or just not caring enough to say anything right in the first place, they, too, just went with it.

Hence, perhaps, is the language further debased.

I welcome other theories, or better yet, reasonably well-supported evidence, indicating how “on line” came to muscle out its correct cousin and perch now insolently atop the pile of juvenile misolinguism.

It ain’t over yet; so far everything’s been pretty good, and I think the new Apple TV 2 is going to be big. I know the chances of us buying a big ol’ flat-screen HD box just went up a good bit. But we’re all waiting for the “one more thing”.