Photo: Steve Jurvetson

A while back, there was a TV commercial (for a product/service I can't recall)¹ that showed a group of businessmen having a meeting in a shower. They were there because the executive that called the meeting wanted to leverage the fact that his best ideas came to him in the shower.

That commercial hits us as relevant because nearly everyone has had the experience of being in the shower and having that thought, solution or idea completely come out of "nowhere" that is exactly what we want.

Of course, the commercial takes that experience and attempts to apply it in a way that obviously won't work. It's obvious to pretty much everyone. But, why?

It's because it's not about the shower. It's actually about the "slack" time and is key to innovative thinking. The beauty is that, while gathering your team into the shower won't foster this innovative thinking, it *is* possible to deliberately make these moments happen and is a topic I've been looking at quite a bit lately.

Lots of people develop their own ways to manufacture these moment. I like to think that I did a reasonable job at it myself. However, my recent interest in the junction of economics, neurology, psychology, self-improvement and my longstanding interest in cross disciplinary learning have been coming together to better understand and debug my own brain. Deeper understanding of how my own neurons are working can lead to better decisions and more effective practices.

On this particular topic, recent interest was sparked by an EconTalk episode with William Duggan. He was talking about his book: Strategic Intuition.

The conversation was very enlightening and I bought and subsequently read the book. While I've got lots I could say about the book (it really resonated with me), what's really worth taking away from it is the core idea of what exactly "strategic intuition" is.
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After some recent restructuring of my business (I'm now 100% owner of Pragmapool) and ongoing problems with the server that this and my other sites sit on, I'm migrating all of my sites over to Mosso. I'll probably go into why I chose them and why I'm willing to recommend them even before I've moved all of my sites over at a later date. What's relevant for today is that one more than one of those domains, the email is actually more important than the site on that domain.

With several accounts that average 2000-3000+ spam messages a day, dealing with the email on the new server didn't exactly appeal to me. Having heard about how some plenty smart people enjoyed the switch over to outsourcing their email to Google, I figured I'd give it a shot.

The thing about Gmail (and Yahoo mail and Hotmail) is that lots of large companies actually block them. When you do the contract development gig like I do, that can get in the way of actually doing your job. None of those companies block any of my domain names.

So, I followed all of the instructions for changing the MX DNS entries to point things over, set up the email accounts and was able to send and receive email. However, even when setting up webmail.example.com, the browser still gets forwarded to Google's domain.

Fortunately, Google recently added IMAP access. When you combine that IMAP access with a copy of Squirrelmail installed directly on the domain, you can use any of:

• The GMail interface that many know and love
• IMAP access using Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.
• Squirrelmail access

A few weeks ago, I saw a notice that there was a security flaw in Wordpress that needed patching. Unfortunately, I've been dealing with lots of stuff that trumps site maintenance and I didn't get to it until last week.

Apparently that was too late because as I sat down to upgrade/patch Wordpress, I saw that one of the most recent posts (one on the front page) had tons of spammy text hidden from view with CSS. As that was a telltale sign of having the site exploited.

So, I quickly changed a bunch of passwords and went looking for other posts that had similar text in them and found none. Having cleaned up the mess, changed passwords and upgraded Wordpress, I moved on.

Then, yesterday, I checked in on my Adsense revenue. I only do that once every couple of weeks as it's pretty consistent. What I saw was disturbing. The number of page impressions was WAY down. As I had more pressing matters to look at (it's tax season, ya know), I made a mental note to check it out in more detail this morning.

It was then that I found that the drop in traffic actually dated back to April 3. On every day since then, the traffic was a fraction of normal. Instead of hanging out just south of 3000 page views a day, it was closer to 500. Uh oh.

I headed to the normal site stats and noticed that somehow, MSN's Live.com was now the highest source of referrals. Hmm. Where were the Google links?

Sure enough, a search for "site:wynia.org" returned absolutely no results. Yikes.

I went looking for an explanation and discovered that I wasn't alone. Others had been booted from Google because of their Wordpress installation getting hacked. A few more searches and the comments on that past revealed that I needed to use the Google Webmaster Tools to resubmit the site.

I did that, but am uncertain exactly when or if the 1000+ pages of this site will reappear in Google. That's because there's no way to actually test whether you got all of the offending content. They just give you an "example" of the kind of thing that got you de-listed.

They just point you to the webmaster guidelines. That's all fine and good if the reason you were removed was deliberate action. However, in this case, even Google indicates that they know it wasn't a result of my actually building the pages this way:

"This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party."

Beyond that, from what I can see, it was that single post on the front page of the site that triggered the blacklisting. A single page out of 1000+ (that was up in it's incorrect form for less than 48 hours) causing the complete removal from the index is something that strikes me as not exactly in keeping with the motto "don't be evil".

So, I guess what I'd really like is if anyone sees this problem here on the site, PLEASE let me know so I can get this all cleaned up.

Every Sunday morning, give or take a few, for the past couple of years, I have breakfast with my good friend Aaron (who I met 20 years ago in junior high). It's always an interesting conversation that covers lots of topics.

This morning, I came away with more notes than average, so I thought I'd share some of the stuff we talked about.

A lot of the conversation revolved around Aaron's master's thesis/project: Complexity Machine 1. He's doing some really interesting stuff that deals with the intersection of emergent behavior, simulated flocking behavior, generative architecture and computer science. Complexity Machine 1 is the software that's the result of his research, where he's asking:

My question to those of you who are willing to explore is: how can you imagine this software could be used to create architecture? Consider it a kind of speculative Rorschach test. Perhaps you don't consider it useful at all, or feel it needs some some vital piece of functionality before it's useful.

Along the way, Aaron mentioned that he'd picked up a copy of Seed Magazine (due to an article related to his research) and found it to be a really decent magazine. When I got home, I hit the website and think I might subscribe.

At one point, the conversation turned to non-textbook books that help in the understanding of how computers work. I mentioned that I think that anyone with an interest in the workings of computers should read the novel: The Diamond Age.

He seconded that recommendation and also through out The Advent of the Algorithm from David Berlinski as worth reading along with Berlinski's A Tour of the Calculus. Both were critical to his actual "getting" the topics.

I mentioned that I had a copy of The Turing Omnibus sitting on my shelf that I've been wanting to get a chance to dig into.

On my way to drop him off back at home, the topic of my quest to find a better way to create presentations that are destined for online distribution rather than live presentation.

Powerpoint, Keynote, S5 and others all frustrate me in some way and what I really want is something that makes it much easier to focus on the content of the presentation and still generate something that fits with the aesthetic that Presentation Zen is pointing toward.

Aaron mentioned that he'd messed with Quartz Composer, Soundslides and Quicktime for what I described. And, of course, with most of his thesis research being done in Processing, he sees some serious promise for a nice presentation system.

About a year ago, I articulated my upgrade cycle for laptops. Then, last summer, most of that criteria was met and I rushed to order a new one. However, when Dell reported delays of up to 2 months to ship that particular laptop, I reconsidered my impulsiveness and cancelled.

I've since gone 8 full months with the laptop setup I already had: the Dell 700m running Ubuntu, the Mac Powerbook G4 and a client-owned laptop for project work. The fact that the extra time went by just fine points to a change that's necessary in my cycle. I really do need to move to a 3 year laptop replacement cycle instead of the shorter 18-24 months that I've been thinking.

Regardless, that actually puts right now as either right on time on the new schedule or overdue on the old, so I'm looking to buy a laptop before we leave for Ireland in July. I'm trying to make sure I haven't missed any hidden gems out there, so here's a quick rundown of the specs I'm looking for right now.

• Ideally in the $1500 ballpark, but up to $2000.
• 13" or 14" screen.
• 4GB of RAM
• 7200 RPM hard drive, preferably the 200GB that's out.
• Real video card
• DVD burner
• Intel Core2 Duo T7000 or better
• Bluetooth
• Webcam
• Extended battery. The longer the life the better.
• Wireless N if possible
• Pre-installed OS doesn't matter as Ubuntu will be installed

Beyond that list, the overall plan for the machine is that it will run Ubuntu64 (falling back to 32 if I just can't get along with 64). Layered on that will be VMWare Workstation, to hopefully take advantage of the new Unity features for Linux/Windows. Windows Vista Ultimate (and my Visual Studio dev environment) will then be in a VM (hence the large fast hard drive) and I can get to individual applications and windows on the Ubuntu desktop.

So, who's selling such a beast at the moment?

Oh, and for the record, I am also considering a parallel track wherein the base hardware is, indeed, a MacBook with VMWare hosting Ubuntu and Windows, but am not 100% convinced.