10 posts from July 2008

1. Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be skeptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2. Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3. It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4. Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5. Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6. Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7. Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8. Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9. Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10. Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

From the end of this article, "Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom".   Nassim Nicholas Taleb is one of my heros.  I've only read Fooled By Randomness, the book before Black Swan, but the ideas have been resonating with me for years.  Basically, embrace randomness, accept big failure, focus on how you do things not necessarily whether they have immediate results.  Living with good intentions is really about the only thing we can really control. 

I also love his new emphasis on social interaction as the only primary filter on the world's information.  Go to lots of parties and listen.  Dress well for your own execution.

I was gonna include some more excerpts but there are too many good ones.  Just read the whole thing.

Speaking of slicing life, part of the reason the 8:36pm project excites me right now is because new tools are becoming available that make slicing life a whole lot easier than it used to be.  Twitter makes it easy to create a quick sentence about what you're doing.  But I've always been more interested in the photo aspect of the project, about taking the picture that captures the moment.  30 years from now, the pictures are going to tell a better story about the life I was living than a sentence will.

So, obviously, having a camera phone and a way to send it directly to Flickr is really useful for this purpose.  My original inspiration, Jamie Livingston's Photo of the Day project from 1979-1997, were Polaroids.  That's obviously a lot more work to have to carry a Poloroid camera with you every day, and then carry the photos, sort them, and save them. 

The new iPhone also has the ability to detect your location, and attach this information to the photos that you take.  And, theoretically, Flickr could take this information and put the photo on a map.  Unfortunately, the current implementation doesn't seem to do this, and I hear that it's because the iPhone's email application strips the data of photos out before it sends them.  Why?

In any case, this is where Air Me (iTunes link) comes in.  They seem to be on the same wavelength as me in regards to finding a way to transport as much data about the slice of life a photo captures as possible.  Already, their app will attach your geo-location to the photo, and tag it with the city, state, and country you're in.  Also, magically, it will tag the photo with the current temperature (73 degrees) and weather description (Mostly Sunny) of that city.  Pretty awesome. 

Only problem, at the moment, they don't allow you to specify a title for the photo in question before it automatically uploads.  When I emailed support, Phil Easter, their CTO, responded within 5 minutes saying that they'd have these things fixed within the week.  Also, they are planning on adding more automatic tagging options as well. 

Here's my wishlist of features to make this work even better with my project (and I acknowledge that they might not all be features that are in the best interest of their product, but I think most of them are):

1. In addition to each kind of tag they automatically add to the photo, they should also add a corresponding machine tag, so that I can programatically extract the information from the photo as well.  Basically, in addition to "Mostly Sunny" they should add "airme:weathername=Mostly Sunny".  Flickr hides them, but gives access to them programatically so that it's easy to extract the data from the photo via their API.
2. A headline and link to the top news article on CNN or NY Times?  I was planning on doing this myself for each day, finding the top news items of the day to go with the photo, but if they did it then I wouldn't have to!
3. Option to post the subject line of the photo to Twitter, along with a tinyurl link to the Flickr photo.  I currently use Twittergram to do this, but they seem to be a little flaky with getting the Twitter posted with any expediency and consistency.
4. Option to add the photo to a photo set of my choosing.  I'm currently manually adding them to my 8:36pm photo set, and they currently have an option to automatically create a set for the photos.  They would just have to let me select the set rather than have it default to a "Seattle" set automatically.

I could come up with more, but these are the ones that are most important and exciting to me. 

I'm looking forward to their next few releases, and have high hopes for using the new features for this project.

I've been taking a picture of whatever I'm doing at 8:36pm every day now for almost 2 months now, and I'm still just as excited about it as ever.  Actually, a few things that'll be happening soon with a new iPhone app called Air Me will take this project to the next level.

When I was taking a picture at 8:36pm last night while having a catch-up-with-everything dinner with Kindra, she asked how long I plan on doing this project.  FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.  Which is a pretty ambitious goal, considering that there are very few things we plan on doing for the rest of our lives, and most of them are pretty serious habits, like eating, drinking, sleeping.  Things that aren't required for survival include brushing teeth, getting dressed, hygenic things.  Getting married is a promise to do something every day for the rest of your life too, and therefore carries a huge weight of importance with it.

I love the 8:36pm project because it has constraints.  It's one picture a day.  It's at the same time every day.  It's a slice of life that I don't have much editorial control over.  Sure I could try to do something interesting at 8:36pm every day, but that's gonna require more energy than I have.  It's the every day that I want to capture, anyway, the act of living rather than the act of projecting a cool or interesting life to the Internet.  And it's interesting because when I tell people about this project the first response is also, "I could never do that because I'm never doing anything interesting at 8:36pm."  Exactly.  Or, maybe once in a while you are.  But in any case, we of the Internet Age are so used to filtering our experiences and only expressing the highs and lows for the most part.  Of course, even our highs and lows will bore most people, since we have such a high bar for being interested in anything, but I think it's interesting to go the other route.  Capture the ordinary, the repetitive, the mundane, the fact that you eat the same thing every day or see the same people.  Because there's something beautiful about not editorializing everything. 

It's a relief of sorts to not worry about being interesting.  Since the constraint is forced by a particular minute of the day, it's also not necessarily "your fault" for not being interesting.  Instructions on how to play are here, if you feel like joining up.

Had a fantastic weekend of sparkly birthdays, island bike rides, and general iPhone mania.

It's one year minus one day since Kellianne and I got engaged.  But we didn't post about it publicly for another 2 months.

The bike ride through and around Bainbridge Island was amazing.  It was a perfect day.  I can still summon the smell of nature and plants and water and air, and remember the quiet quiet.

Everything always seems to be happening so fast that it's good to be able to appreciate a moment unconnected from all the rest every once in a while. 

I've noticed a lot of different reactions to what can be vaguely labeled as "the future".  Obama, the gas problem, global warming, overpopulation, and, most recently, the path of technology and communication most easily pinned to the iPhone.

The anxiety comes from not knowing how we each fit in.  How does our own identity mix with the future?  Does it repel it?  Does it mix into it seemlessly?  Do you urge the future to arrive or push it away?

The younger generation is usually eager to bring the future into the present, and the older generation is usually eager to hold on to a concept of older days.  It's a generalization, but even when younger people push away whatever concept of the future exists, it's labeled as old fashioned.

What is the future, in a nutshell?  Change.

A new personality sees the world of change as a land grab, a place where old personalities haven't yet taken root, and where they can stake their own ground.  An old personality feel grounded in the present (or the past) and has more to lose by giving up that ground and rushing forward. 

There's always the chance that "the future" will be a fad, and people will need to rush back to the tried and true, where things were already well tested for security and stability.

Most of the time though, the future marches on, and the new becomes old and a new new becomes new.  And the old old is even older.

As each of us gets older, we should keep an eye on this.  When I was younger, I scoffed at the older generation that refused to learn about answering machines, computers, video games, movies, etc.  At some point, they had stopped rushing forward and had decided, I'm gonna live in 1975 for the rest of my life.  Sometimes they changed their minds and decided to catch up (maybe finally getting an email account, for example) but those of the older generation that continued forward are now on to Myspace, text messaging, and listening to Girl Talk.

Soon, these will be old and we'll be on to something new.

I want to keep rushing towards the future for as long as my bendy brain can handle it.  The future is exciting.  Even if it means giving up our cars and learning to ride bikes again.  Even if it means growing a garden and eating locally instead of eating mass produced food again.  Sure, the people who never bought into the car fad in 1910 might be able to scoff at us now for putting our hopes in such a futile movement, but they're dead.  And sure, the people who never bought refined or widely distributed food can scoff at us too, but is there really a joy in that?  Isn't it more of a sadness?  Life is a process of change, rushing forward, stepping back, and rushing forward again.  It's a dance, and just because the dance has a few missteps doesn't mean that the dance should never have been danced.

This week is the first week in human history that a beautiful computer has been available in our pockets, with access to satelites for location, beautiful interactive maps, every person we know, several ways to communicate with individuals and groups by voice, text, and email, a camera, access to the entire internet, a search engine to make it all easily navigated, and an excitement that this is the branch of the future that excites the people.  An idea masterfully executed to the scale of the Model T.

Can you imagine what it must've felt like when the everyday American realized that he could now cover hundreds of miles in a single day?  How about when they realized that they could now travel with their entire family to the other side of the world?  How about when they realized that we could call someone and talk to them from anywhere in the world?  How about when they realized that they didn't even have to be home to do it?  How about when they realized that all of the world's knowledge was available at their fingertips?  How about when they realized that they didn't even have to be home to access it? 

I bet they felt anxious.  Was this really happening?  How did they fit into these changes?  Did they accept them or reject them?

I think this is how we all feel now.  And how we'll feel for the rest of our lives.  But it's a rush.  Let's go towards it.

Wedding planning is coming into a new phase.  The first phase: location, date, caterer, florist, photographer, dj, and all that has been masterfully executed by Kellianne, and the second phase of finishing invitations, finding/making the right clothes, writing vows, and putting together a few special touches is now well under way.  I think phase two is where we really make sure the meaning of what we're doing is clear.  Pulling together traditions, families, friends, and lifestyles into a single event that has individual and powerful meaning is really important to us.  It's the whole point really.

And working on this now for several weeks (months to a lesser extent) is a really valuable meditation on love and the secret lives of relationships. 

I think this would be the great title of a book, "Why Things Don't Work."  And it would explain why advice, knowledge, wisdom, tricks, tips, and best intentions don't work.

To write it, first I would have to figure out why, exactly, things don't work.  It might have something to do with homeostasis, and the tendency for things to stay the same.  It might have something to do with entropy, and the tendency for things to fall apart.  It might have something to do with laziness, and the tendency to not have enough energy to do the thing that you want to do.  Because wanting doesn't really take as much energy as getting.  It might have something to do with ignorance, and not knowing how to make them work.

Who knows.  That's why there would be a book about it.  But who would read a book about something that seems so defeatist? 

We're trapped in our minds.  I researched the internet today for remedies for a bad mood.  I consolidated about 25 different lists of things, that all talked about how to get out of a bad mood.  The lists were highly redundant. 

Exercise, get enough sleep, talk to a loved one, read, listen to music, have sex, drink alcohol or caffeine, take a walk, eat a piece of chocolate (yes, this was on several lists), make something, wait for it to pass, take a shower, meditate, do yoga, make a list of things you're grateful for, play with pets and children, do someone a favor, clean, cry, take a day off or go on a vacation, avoid mood vampires, change your body posture, get off the internet.

Of course, there are key items missing.  The more self-indulgent ones, like:

Have sex, do drugs, drink alcohol, drink coffee, eat something filling, scream, quit your job, break up, get in an argument, move to a new city, shop, socialize with strangers, watch television, play video games, surf the internet, write in a journal, mope, complain, fidget, multitask, go skydiving, cut yourself, jump in a lake, blow something up.

There's more to say about this but I'm out of time for now...