It's been clear to me that the era of the lifelong job with bi-directional loyalty was a historical fluke that died years ago, but not everyone noticed. Linchpin just spells out the logical conclusions of that reality and offers some guidance for what to do about it if you're on the short end of that particular shift.

At any rate, you'll find much more articulate reviews of the book elsewhere. What prompted this post, however, is a reference Godin makes repeatedly that struck me oddly. He refers regularly to "The American Dream", using the following definition:

"Do you remember the old American Dream?

It struck a chord with millions of people (in the United States and in the rest of the world, too). Here's how it goes:

Keep your head down
Follow instructions
Show up on time
Work hard
Suck it up

… you will be rewarded. As we've seen, that dream is over."

The reason is that I've never heard "The American Dream" described that way. Sure, I've heard the social contract he's talking about articulated by many people, but never with that label slapped on it.

The social contract he's talking about is one of those weird mid-20th century flukes that only really existed from the 1940's until the 1970's. Yes, that means that an entire generation or 2 of Baby Boomers and their kids saw their parents covered by that arrangement only to have it disappear as they entered the workforce.

But, I am one of them and always heard The American Dream articulated and described very differently. The understanding I've always had is far more entrepreneurial in nature. It frames America as a land of opportunity, where, despite where you come from, your social standing, your ethnicity (with some shameful exceptions), how much money you came from, etc. you can make something of yourself.

I'm curious if Seth's definition and understanding is now the prevailing understanding of the term. If so, that ambiguity in the meaning might say a lot about why many people claim to have lost faith in the idea.

However, I think that "The American Dream" is one of a class of phrases that are troublesome in a particular way.

They're common to the point of cliche, but loaded with meaning and critical to identity. As such, people all have an immediate concept or set of concepts that pop into their heads when they hear these phrases. Because they're so common, however, everyone also assumes that everyone shares their definition. That's where the trouble starts because the actual definitions vary wildly, but you'd only know that if you ask people.

I think this is what's going on here. So, I'm curious what your definition is of "The American Dream". Here's mine.

America is a land of opportunity where someone can start with nothing: no social standing, no money, not speaking the language. That person can, through hard work, build a life for themselves and their family. They can own their own home, run a business and otherwise enjoy the prosperity that this country has to offer. And, that while pursuing that dream, the playing field will be kept level.

Is my definition the same as yours?

The result of that whole process turns into one number representing the profit or loss for my consulting company. And, in turn, that’s the amount I pay federal and state taxes on.

Planning for that is one of the biggest concerns people have when they ask me questions about being self-employed for consulting/contracting work (along with “stability” and what to do about health insurance). I have a very basic approach to the whole thing that ensures I always have enough funds to pay the taxes comfortably.

First, since I do run my consulting as an “S corporation”, the finances are completely separate. If you hire me to do some work, you’ll be paying my company. I have checking accounts and credit cards specifically for the business and never, under ANY circumstances, use those for personal use.

When it comes to business expenses, I only ever spend in completely above board ways. I will stand behind every business expense as being ethical to anyone who needs to care. That’s a much higher standard than is generally required, but it means I never have to worry about it.

I’m sure I’m missing out on some things I could expense, but as far as I’m concerned it’s not worth it. So, when money comes into the company, I pay for things like the web hosting, hardware (laptops, etc.), MSDN subscription and other software expenses, cell phone, etc.

What’s left over is destined for our household. Here’s where you’ve got to be careful. I’ve seen more than a few people just write themselves a check for everything and move on, only to seriously regret it come tax time.

The basic rule here is that every single dollar that goes from your company to you needs to go through one of 3 channels and taxes set aside. Either you pay it to yourself as a salary, you reimburse yourself for expenses or you pay it out as profit.

For the salary payments, regular payroll taxes will apply and payroll services are usually the best way to handle it. The IRS requires that for businesses like mine you pay yourself a “reasonable salary”. I know of people who do software consulting and pay themselves $12,000 a year. That’s not “reasonable” and, while they may have gotten away with it, it’s not something I’m willing to risk.

However, dollars paid out as profit aren’t subject to Medicare/Social Security withholding, so there’s an incentive to minimize the portion that goes through as salary. I base my own salary on whatever a developer here on an H1B Visa would get paid. That’s “reasonable” for one federal program, so it’s good enough for me, despite typically being lower than the job pays a citizen (a topic for a whole other post).

Using a payroll service, you get a regular W-2 at the end of the year, which also makes things like applying for mortgages much easier than other forms of self-employment (it’s stupid that paying myself as an employee makes it easier to get a loan, but reality is what it is). They’ll send the money to the feds and any state entity that needs it.

For the reimbursement, I usually only pay for my car mileage and health insurance (since Blue Cross insists it’s paid by me as an individual and not by a business). Since those reimbursements go on the corporate books as expenses, this is the only money I pay myself that I don’t set tax money aside, though for 2010, I’m changing that behavior.

For any other money I pay out, I take 40% of it and put it into a specific personal savings account that I call “Tax Savings”. That is its ONLY purpose. Why 40% instead of the 28% that my tax bracket calls for? Partly because I also will have to pay MN state taxes. However, this also works really well as a buffer in case I miscalculated something somewhere along the way and as a pretty good forced retirement savings plan.

When I go to pay my taxes on April 15 (and working this way, you’ll always owe), I get to write a check on funds that have been earning interest instead of sitting in Uncle Sam’s accounts all year. Any extra can be considered my “refund” and I usually contribute it to my retirement accounts for the previous year. Because you can make those contributions up until April 15, this also lets me reduce the amount I owe.

So, while I hate doing all of the paperwork and am never thrilled to send Uncle Sam that check, it’s never a panic to figure out how to pay it and along the way I am helping out my retirement savings. Overall, I think it’s a pretty good approach. Since it has those secondary benefits, I’m going to start doing the 40% on the reimbursement money too.

Since that 40% comes out immediately when I receive the money, I never really miss it, making the savings automatic and it adds up to more than you might think.

In that argument, not a week goes by without hearing from a high-profile someone in one of those industries lashing out against the Internet, "kids today", lack of respect for their creative work, and otherwise bemoaning their situation to a journalist or just any microphone within earshot.

While I have plenty of opinions about the substance of those arguments (think much more Larry Lessig than Michael Eisner if you want to know), what strikes me about nearly every one of those "creatives" is the sense of entitlement that underlies their argument.

One such incident came from the widow of a 70's rock icon who was complaining that she was having a hard time making ends meet from the sales of his CD's, some 10+ years after his death. While I always find the loss of a spouse and parent from a family a tragedy, the fact that she *has* income other than a life insurance settlement puts her in some pretty privileged company.

Every single day in this country, regular working people who put in 2000+ hours a year doing things like building houses, cooking in restaurants, managing software projects, etc. have their lives tragically ended much sooner than their years dictate. They leave behind families who may get a small sum from life insurance (after expenses and debt are covered) and face the rest of their lives with no further income from that family member.

In nearly none of those situations (union or pension situations aside) is the remaining family going to the employer and saying, "Joe worked here for 10 years, putting in fulltime effort, so you need to keep paying us his salary for the next 90 years". If they did, they'd be laughed out of the office.

I'm curious how these specific kinds of work came to be privileged above all others. Why is a poem jotted on a napkin protected for decades after I die, but if I design and commission the construction of a building, it's not in the same way? It's all so odd.

A few days ago, I was having a conversation about entrepreneurship with someone and they suggested that schools (as in middle and high schools) should teach kids how to run a business. I couldn't resist sharing a story with him on what I learned about running a business from my school in 7th grade.

Like many kids then and today, I came into 7th grade an involuntary veteran salesperson, having been shoved out on a door-to-door sales route for years selling expensive candy bars to my parent's friends, extended family and neighbors.

My school was actually fairly practical in its curriculum, including home economics and industrial arts classes that actually taught real skills. They even paid lip service to entrepreneurship in the form of organizing student fundraisers at events like basketball games and during homecoming week.

Personally, at that point in my life, I'd actually seen very little of normal "jobs" modeled in my parents and extended family. Nearly every adult I knew was self-employed in some way: farmers, taxidermist, auto body shop, carpenter, etc.

So, when I decided I wanted some extra money at the age of 13, my first instinct was to look around for an opportunity to leverage the laws of supply and demand to make a profit.

Whether I took the school bus or rode my bike, I was used to being to school quite a while before the first bell rang for class. What I saw was a bunch of kids milling around before school, and many of them complaining about not having had breakfast.

So, one morning, I rode my bike past the school to the New London bakery and bought a bag of a dozen assorted donuts at $0.35 or $0.50 a piece or so, packed them in my school bag and rode up the hill to the school. I unloaded and sold those donuts for $1 a piece, selling out in about 10 minutes.

Clearly I was onto something.

The next day, I repeated the procedure, doubling the number of donuts and pushing the boundaries of what I could easily carry on my bike. I sold out in 15 minutes.

Having outstripped my delivery capacity, I offered my dad a cut if he'd drive me to the bakery the next morning, thus boosting my transport capacity from Schwinn to Ford Bronco. I don't remember how many I bought that day, but I do remember needing to make several trips to my locker with boxes of donuts.

I was half-way through selling through the donut supply in my locker when the principal came by and shut me down. I wasn't really given much of a reason why, just that I couldn't continue selling tasty pastries out of my locker.

Because of the few days I had sold, I had a bit of capital that I rolled into my next venture: being a loan shark. In those days, school lunch cost exactly $1 (or $0.40 if you were on gov't subsidized lunch like I was). People often forgot their money for lunch. So, I offered loans at what the adult me sees as abusive interest. The terms were no interest if you paid back the next day. Otherwise, it was $1/day in interest.

While that lasted longer, I was still admonished several times and told to stop.

I believe if you had asked every teacher and administrator in that school if they thought students should be taught how to run a business, you'd have gotten a unanimous "yes". Yet, when at least one student actually started a business on school grounds (with no illegal activity. I never physically threatened or hurt anyone even as a loan shark), they shut it down with no hesitation.

I suspect the lesson I learned wasn't the one they intended to teach.

Unfortunately, not everyone in our household is OK with just eating pulled pork sandwiches all week (I'd be OK with it for a few months). And, since I enjoy making my own pulled pork in bulk quantities, this isn't a problem unique to this week. I've got several dishes I like making that make use of leftover pulled pork:

• Mexican Burrito Bowls
• Carnitas Omelets
• Taco Salads
• Nachos
• On Top of Baked Potatoes
• Breakfast hash
• Cubano sandwich

I could have made any one of those tonight, but I recently changed how I make brown rice (the Alton Brown way (which is also my new favorite way to cook rice destined for fried rice)) and wondered about leveraging that in some way.

Having looked at a recipe for Hoppin' John and having been introduced to chicken bog last year, I threw something together that's at the intersection of all of those meals.

Here's what I made:

1 1/2 cups of brown rice
2 1/2 cups chicken broth
1 T unsalted butter
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 a huge green pepper diced
1 can of black eyed peas
1 onion diced
2 heaping T of chopped garlic
1/2 pound of the pulled pork (didn't really measure)

Preheat oven to 375F.
Boil the chicken broth, salt and butter.
Put the rest in a oval stoneware casserole dish.
Pour the boiling broth mixture over the top.
Bake for 45 minutes.

It's a fairly basic start that could easily be seasoned spicy with pepper flake or smoked adobo peppers, etc. It'd also be fairly easy to add some other vegetables to it. However, when coming up with something like this, I like to start simple to get an idea of what it tastes like without the extras. Also, with the smoked pulled pork, I didn't want to cover that too much.

Overall, it was pretty tasty. It does taste like a "base" recipe that needs punching up the next time, but a decent start that took very little prep time (which makes it good for weeknights).

I attended mostly out of curiosity but also because I miss making music. It's a complicated history, for a few years in college and a bit thereafter, I was involved in playing guitar and singing in a religious context. Shifts in my religious beliefs (which aren't something I'm looking to talk about on this site) and changes in life in general eventually separated me from those religious communities. Along the way, I completely stopped playing music.

What was once a fixture in my life became something relegated to my past. As soon as I sat down and listened to the impromptu session that happened at the open house, I realized how much I missed social music and making music in general.

Before I left that day, I was sure I at least wanted to give music another shot and, 6 months later, I'm sure I want it to be a permanent part of my life.

My observation about cyclical enthusiasm has deepened and I see it more clearly now. My enthusiasm and attention are still cyclical, but I see a much more complex system at play now. Certain elements genuinely cycle completely on independent orbits, but others have a cycle within a fixture.

One such sub-cycle within a fixture is my love of building software. A part of nearly every day for the past 15 years has been spent at the computer building or solving something. That is a fixture. However, within that fixture, I tend to cycle between building web apps, scripting Linux, data classification, and 1000 other software topics. While the specific area of software development cycles, software development itself is a fixture in my life.

Much of my thinking about this topic since writing my original post on cyclical enthusiasm has been on where the fixtures are and what cycles in interest are outside fixtures. This is because I see that the cycles within a fixture tend to feed on each other and create a weird specialization of sorts and the cycles from the outside bring in serendipity and new ideas. However, the non-fixture cycles also tend to be the home to frustrations I've heard from many generalists.

In enough conversations to form a pattern, I've heard generalists express both their love of dabbling and their jealousy of people who can dive into a single topic with all of their heart and be happy. Of course, many have tried to specialize, only to hear the siren's song everywhere they look. If one is a dyed in the wool generalist, the world is just too full of interesting stuff.

I believe that maturity is largely wrapped up in realizing what we are and we are not and accepting that reality. As such, I'm curious if there's a way to embrace the generalist reality that my nature has presented me without feeling forever frustrated. I think that working with the cycles and fixtures might be the key.

Cycles that happen within a fixture offer the opportunities of specialization. Things learned in one area of the fixture often help out and expand expertise in interesting ways. Things learned in non-fixture cycles offer opportunities for serendipity and cross-disciplinary connections that specialization doesn't afford.

With a mix of both, I'm finding the balance leaves me more "settled" than I used to feel. I include things outside the fixtures, but acknowledge that if it's outside of my fixtures, missing an opportunity is no big deal. I refuse to feel bad about not completing a project, particularly outside of my fixtures. And, within my fixtures, I can feel free to dig a little deeper without worrying that I'm missing out on something else because these areas are important to me, even if not in the same way as those who forsake all other interests for the one.

So, what are my fixtures as I see them?

• Software development – at work, at home, wherever I am, every problem I see, suggests software.
• Food – I love to eat and I love to cook. That love clearly goes beyond basic need or even common interest.
• Movies/TV – I know that there are plenty of people who look down on TV in particular and consider their lack of ownership of a TV a morally superior position. However, I enjoy movies and good serial video entertainment and will not apologize for that love.
• Music – I've always loved listening to music, buy a lot of it, listen to it through most of my day. At various points in the past, this fixture has included making music and from here forward I'm making sure it does.

As I look at opportunities for activities and topics for learning, I'm going to give extra points to those that relate to my fixtures. Someone mentions a class to become a certified BBQ judge? More interested than someone offering a class to become a certified dog trainer, despite both being interesting opportunities.

Over the top of those fixtures, several activities and skills keep coming up. Getting better at those skills by using them in one cycle (fixture or not) makes them more useful in others.

• Writing – while I haven't done nearly as much recently as in the past, it's clear that writing about a topic is the fastest path to deeper understanding for me.
• Reading – fairly obvious, but I read a LOT of information. The research skills I've honed serve me well whenever I dive into a new topic for a cycle.
• Teaching – whether one-on-one or at code camps, etc. similar to the writing, teaching helps me learn and I really enjoy seeing other people leave a conversation able to do something they couldn't before.

Hopefully, this makes some sort of coherent sense (it came out fairly "stream of consciousness"). But, even if it doesn't, I'm now a long-term student at The Center For Irish Music and enjoying every bit of it. At the moment, it's guitar and singing that I'm studying and I'm thinking about learning the bodhran (goatskin drum) and accordion.

I'm also curious if those of you who know me see other fixtures that I'm blind to or agree/disagree with my self-reflection.

That fits in well with how I've long handled even longer-form blogging. I gather flotsam and jetsam from my own thoughts as well as my input streams, sort and ruminate on it and share the result.

However, when your notes are scattered across notebooks, Kindle clippings, Twitter postings, Delicious bookmarks, saved RSS items from Google Reader, etc, gathering that all together in one place to digest and transform becomes a challenge.

To that end, I've been slowly building up prototype code to gather each of those sources. A few months ago, I took care of gathering up my eBook notes via the Kindle. Today, I used TweetSharp to grab both my own Twitter postings as well as those that I marked as "favorites". So, I'm sharing that prototype with you.

Overview

Like nearly all of my prototypes, it's a basic console app. The structure was to grab a given number of days worth of Twitter "statuses" and "favorites" as an IEnumerable.

Because I wanted the last 7, 10, 14, etc. days, and there is no longer a date query in the Twitter API (I know, right?), I wrote code to grab pages of tweets until the oldest one in a page crosses the date line. I toss out those few that are too old, leaving those in the date range.

I did talk with the guys who wrote TweetSharp about whether this was the optimal way to do such a query. They said the other main way you could do it would be to go off of the tweet id and use that as the boundaries. Since I'd already written this approach, I kept it, but it's worth knowing the other option is out there.

Anyway, because my primary purpose is HTML for things like blog posts, I turn those collections over to an NVelocity template for rendering to HTML.

While I generally prefer Spark for templating, NVelocity brings less baggage to a prototype like this and I've just done WAY more work with it than with Spark.

Details

This project includes a "Settings" class that I use in a lot of my projects. It basically serves as a code wrapper around a standard config file and throws exceptions if the requested setting isn't available. It provides an Intellisense way to use your settings elsewhere in your code.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using Dimebrain.TweetSharp.Fluent;

namespace TwitterWeeklyDump
{
    public class Settings
    {
        public static String TwitterUsername
        {
            get
            {
               return getConfigSetting("TwitterUsername");
            }
        }
        public static String TwitterPassword
        {
            get
            {
                return getConfigSetting("TwitterPassword");
            }
        }

        private static string getConfigSetting(string settingName)
        {
            if ((ConfigurationManager.AppSettings != null) && (ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Count != 0))
            {
                try
                {
                    var _value = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get(settingName);
                    if (_value == null)
                    {
                        throw new ConfigurationException("Invalid configuration setting: " + settingName);
                    }
                    return _value;
                }
                catch (Exception e)
                {
                    throw new ConfigurationException("Invalid configuration setting: " + settingName);
                }
            }
            else
            {
                throw new ConfigurationException("Invalid configuration. Required AppSettings section is missing.");
            }
        }
    }
}

That class is used to get the Twitter username and password.

The rest of the console app sits in the main Program.cs file as a set of methods.

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using Dimebrain.TweetSharp.Extensions;
using Dimebrain.TweetSharp.Fluent;
using Dimebrain.TweetSharp.Model;
using NVelocityTemplateEngine;

namespace TwitterWeeklyDump
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            IEnumerable<TwitterStatus> statuses = getDaysForSelf(7);
            IEnumerable<TwitterStatus> favorites = getDaysOfFavorites(7);

            var viewDataObject =  new
                    {
                        favorites = favorites,
                        statuses = statuses
                    };
            var template = File.OpenText("Templates/TwitterWeeklyDump.nvelocity").ReadToEnd();

            NVelocityTemplateEngine.Interfaces.INVelocityEngine memoryEngine =
               NVelocityEngineFactory.CreateNVelocityMemoryEngine(true);
            System.Collections.IDictionary context = new Hashtable();
            context.Add("Context", viewDataObject);
            var output = memoryEngine.Process(context, template);
            using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter("Output/TwitterWeeklyDump.html"))
            {
                sw.Write(output);
            }

        }

        private static IEnumerable<TwitterStatus> getDaysOfFavorites(int numberOfDays)
        {
            List<TwitterStatus> _favorites = new List<TwitterStatus>();
            int pageCounter = 0;

            _favorites.AddRange(getPageOfFavorites(pageCounter));
            while (_favorites.Last().CreatedDate > DateTime.Now.AddDays(numberOfDays * -1))
            {
                pageCounter++;
                _favorites.AddRange(getPageOfFavorites(pageCounter));
            }

            var lastSevenDaysStatuses = from status in _favorites
                                        where status.CreatedDate > DateTime.Now.AddDays(numberOfDays * -1)
                                        select status;

            return lastSevenDaysStatuses;
        }
        private static IEnumerable<TwitterStatus> getPageOfFavorites(int pageCounter)
        {
            var _recentStatuses = FluentTwitter.CreateRequest()
              .AuthenticateAs(Settings.TwitterUsername, Settings.TwitterPassword)
              .Favorites().GetFavorites().Skip(pageCounter).AsJson();
            var response = _recentStatuses.Request();
            return response.AsStatuses();
        }

        private static IEnumerable<TwitterStatus> getDaysForSelf(int numberOfDays)
        {
            List<TwitterStatus> statuses = new List<TwitterStatus>();
            int pageCounter = 0;

            statuses.AddRange(getPageOfStatusesForSelf(pageCounter));
            while (statuses.Last().CreatedDate > DateTime.Now.AddDays(numberOfDays * -1))
            {
                pageCounter++;
                statuses.AddRange(getPageOfStatusesForSelf(pageCounter));
            }

            var lastSevenDaysStatuses = from status in statuses
                                        where status.CreatedDate > DateTime.Now.AddDays(numberOfDays * -1)
                                select status;

            return lastSevenDaysStatuses;
        }
        private static IEnumerable<TwitterStatus> getPageOfStatusesForSelf(int pageCounter)
        {
            var _recentStatuses = FluentTwitter.CreateRequest()
              .AuthenticateAs(Settings.TwitterUsername, Settings.TwitterPassword)
              .Statuses().OnUserTimeline().Skip(pageCounter).Take(20).AsJson();
            var response = _recentStatuses.Request();
            return response.AsStatuses();
        }
    }
}

While it could clearly be refactored a few more steps to remove some duplicated code (like the re-authenticating), it's fairly straightforward for fetching from Twitter.

What I want to highlight is how to use the NVelocity memory engine. I've been using that in-memory version/tweak from CodeProject for the last 18 months or so and it works fairly well.

To use it, you need to get your NVelocity template into a string. For this prototype, I'm just reading in a file. However, in other projects, I've done much more processing (including nested subtemplates) to gather the whole template.

Then, that string and an IDictionary object are handed off to NVelocity for processing. My convention is to build up my own object (just an anonymous object) and then passing that in to NVelocity as an object named "Context". That means I can write my templates in the same kind of way.

NVelocity's template language can take a bit of getting used to and there are some tricks with certain data types. However, if you're using much more than foreach, if/else, and variables, you should probably be doing more prep work in .NET before handing the object to NVelocity to render.

The in memory engine returns another string, which you can do whatever you want with. I just dump it out to a file.

My plan is eventually to put the tweets into a database instead of fetching them live, but since I'm only running this once a week, I'm not in a rush.

Any other questions you may have should be pretty easy to see in the code. Otherwise, post a comment.

Download the Solution and take a look.

There were quite a few factors, but one stands out above the rest. The experience just didn't add enough value any more. Some of that is because I've got a fairly nice home theater.

That home theater easily surpasses the experience at the bottom 1/3 of movie theaters out there in all of the ways that matter to me: screen quality, seating options, snacks, the people in the theater with me, etc.

Basically, good home theaters with Blu-Ray or HD streaming rentals have completely leapfrogged the bottom end of the movie theater business.

The problem's been that there hasn't been anything added at the top to compensate (at least where I live). Until recently that is.

A few weeks ago, I heard about a new theater that Kerasotes was opening in St. Louis Park that stepped into that gap. Here's a list in their own words about what makes this theater different:

• NO pre-show advertising.
• NO lobby video games.
• Cease seating after films commence.
• Enforce policies that will encourage courteous behavior.
• No one under 17 admitted without an adult or guardian after 7:00PM.
• Infants (2 & Under) ticketed at adult price.
• Provide covered, free parking with direct access from the parking deck.
• VIP Premium Seating for guests 21+ with custom-designed oversized loveseats separated by personal tables.
• The Lobby Lounge for guests 21+ to enjoy cocktails, wine, or beer with savory food made from fresh ingredients.
• Reserved seating with print at home ticketing powered by Fandango.com.
• Total Stadium Seating in every auditorium.

We've now been to see several movies in this theater, particularly in the VIP balcony, where we sit in the front row, dead center, in what are the best seats in the house.

There's no problem with people wandering in 15 minutes late, no problem with people talking on their phone (actual ushers take care of such problems) and the first 20 minutes of what's on the screen is actually just a few previews and actual movie.

In short, this new take on theaters has us actually going back to the movies and doing so, willing to pay more than we did before. My biggest question is why it took them so long.

Of course, what's at home is the giant cookie exchange, so I shall escape to my refuge in the basement.

I should clarify that the exchange is giant, not the cookies.

Before bed, we have to go through the house and make sure all edible items are out of basset reach. Like with bears and camping.

You'd think, having spent an evening in jail over a paperwork mixup related to car license plates, I'd renew them on time. You'd be wrong.

Irritating sales guy who keeps calling, but never leaves a voicemail? Meet "send all calls for this contact to voicemail". I love tech.

Yea though I modify data live in production, I will fear no evil, for I made backups.

As distasteful as the task is, I'd still rather deal with cleaning up the snow than mowing the lawn in the summer.

Winter really hit all at once. I usually don't get full mustache-cicles while shoveling until January or so.

If a boat is sinking, do you spend your time arguing about who cut the holes in the bottom of the boat, or do you try to patch the holes?

If you claim not to lie, yet use the phrase "I don't have time", you lie.

Today continued my long streak of being entirely unable to assemble Ikea-style furniture without at least one piece being backward.

I can choose to buy or rent (and SD vs HD) for movies on Amazon VOD. Why is my only choice for TV series/episodes to buy (SD or HD)?

I discover a new topic or hobby and dive in enthusiastically. That enthusiasm is arguably the very definition of geekiness and the antithesis of cool. Adam Savage recently articulated that dichotomy in an interview with MAKE magazine (I read it in print).

I think of enthusiasm as the opposite of coolness and adolescence is a turning point for this.

Savage's claim about the turning point is that when you get into junior high, it starts being "cool" not to be really in to something. Geeks and nerds are one of the few groups of people where that enthusiasm survives well into adulthood.

For me, as that enthusiasm blooms, I tend to find communities (some real, some online) of others who share my enthusiasm along with new resources, books, tools, websites, etc. I engage in conversations and generally enjoy spending time with my newfound enthusiastic compatriots. Then, a few months later, a problem arrives: my enthusiasm shifts to something else.

This almost always leads to someone from one of those communities inviting me to an event or asking for me to continue my contributions and I say, "No". Sometimes people are perfectly OK with that. However, enough "No's" and eventually, I see a reaction familiar to those on this side of serial enthusiasm. It's a puzzled look (or its online equivalent).

A similar look comes when I run into someone I know, but haven't seen in a while. They ask about something they saw on this site or heard me talk about the last time we spoke and ask how that project is going. I find myself feeling a bit sheepish when I have to admit that I haven't thought about or done anything on it in months (or even years).

For a long time, this trend bothered me. Was I doomed to jump into topic after topic and never get any depth? But then I started paying attention to my own past and watching this serial enthusiasm play out in my day to day life.

What I noticed was that "serial enthusiast" wasn't really the best description of my behavior. Instead, I've come to describe it as "cyclical". That's because I tend to actually return to areas of interest over and over again, in a cycle.

In those areas, my interest has deepened over the years and it's clear to me that I'll be returning to those in the future. Like an old friend that doesn't live next door, I don't visit them every day, but when you do, the experience is familiar and plays off of the depth of previous experiences.

For some of those interests, like BBQ, my return is tied directly to actual physical seasons. As much as I love smoking a pork shoulder in my smoker, doing so when it's -20F while wading through 2 feet of snow doesn't really make for a relaxing and fun Saturday.

For others, the cycles are ongoing, but shift in their flavor. I love listening to music. However, if you were to grab my iPod on any given day, the genre of music I'm listening to would be subject to a cycle that I haven't ever charted, but definitely see. I'll listen to nothing but punk for a week or two and then spend a week listening to rockabilly and maybe a week with Irish folk.

All the while, I'm listening to giant piles of music. I've got headphones on for at least 8 hours a day. It's not like I ever give that up.

Software development is another one of those ongoing interests where the cycle is actually within the interest. I might be digging deep into LINQ or learning Ruby or front end template development, but, except for vacation, I build or study some aspect of software development every day.

Still other interests are more straighforward cycles. I tend to listen to podcasts for a while and then none for weeks or months at a time. The same is true of audiobooks. And making stuff.

What it boils down to is that I'm getting a gradually clearer picture of what these cycles look like and how to embrace them.

I'm identifying the things that are steadfast in their presence, if cyclical in their form or flavor. And, I'm becoming OK with the ebb and flow of those things that are more transient in my life.

I'm going to try to organize this site and other communications to be in harmony with this reality and align my projects to make sense with it. Committing to a long-term project or a deep dive into a topic that isn't in my list of ongoing interest is likely to end in frustration for either me or other interested parties.

I'm interested in knowing if this self-observation lines up with how other people perceive me and if aligning my activities to work with, rather than against, this reality will improve my day-to-day.

Regardless, it combined with several conversations I’ve been having with someone I work with. See, this co-worker (who is in what nearly everyone would call good shape) regularly goes close to 24 hours without eating while just “not hungry”. It all made me curious about the effects of fasting on the human body.

What I found was really interesting and sparked a short-term experiment carried out last week and a longer-term one starting this week. I read a few articles, a ton of medical journal abstracts and a few things became very clear along the way.

Rather than there being dangerous side effects for short term fasting (1-3 days), the benefits kept stacking up as I kept reading. However, one particular study’s conclusion really struck me. When subjects did a 24 hour fast for one day per month, heart disease in the group went down DRAMATICALLY (think 40%).

That struck me because of the health problems that my mom has and, in all likelihood, I inherited. My grandfather died before I was born of a heart attack before turning 60. My mom has had high blood pressure for as long as I can remember and, a few years ago, had a coronary blockage. My own cholesterol and blood pressure numbers indicate that it’s pretty likely that I am on track for the same problems.

As I continued reading and more and more benefits related to cardiac health were described, I became simultaneously intrigued and apprehensive. Clearly a lot of science was adding up to point to a clear way to improve my health and possibly even lose the weight that’s been stubbornly clinging to my mid-section, but the 24 hour fasts that were in the literature and used for intermittent fasting seemed like an impossibility for me.

I’ve lost, at various times 20-60 pounds, with the help of appetite suppressants (only to regain some of it back). The biggest problem I faced (and continue to face) regarding my weight is that I am so constantly hungry. When I eat “proper” meals, I am nearly never full at the end and am almost always hungry an hour or 2 later.

When on the appetite suppressants, I manage to knock back the hunger enough to make reasonably good decisions. However, once I’m off of them (and they won’t let you stay on them for the 50+ weeks I’d need them to lose the weight I need to), I struggle with the hunger in major ways.

After looking at all of this information, I am convinced that intermittent fasting is something that is likely to help both my health in general and make it easier to lose the weight I need to in order to make *that* part of my health come in line too.

However, all of that would be entirely moot if my intuition about my own hunger was true. I imagined the hunger during a 24 hour fast as horribly difficult. Fortunately, I’ve read enough books like Predictably Irrational to know better than to trusty my intuition.

So, last week, I attempted my first 24 hour fast. From 1pm on Thursday to 1pm on Friday, I consumed no calories. No food, no juice, no milk, no sugar in beverages, nothing. And, it was much easier than I thought. Yes, I was hungry. However, it wasn’t much worse than when I am leading up to a slightly delayed meal. For instance, if I normally eat lunch at 11:30, but have to wait until 1pm because of a meeting. It never got any worse than that.

I had no dizziness, no light-headedness, wasn’t any more tired or weak, etc. In short, a 24 hour fast is very do-able for me.

As this is rambling on longer than I intended, I’ll get to the point. All of my reading and my small experiment set up what I’m planning over the next 12 weeks or so.

The studies indicate that it takes about 18 hours of fasting before the benefits kick in. At about 30 hours, the benefits start slowing down, pointing to an 18-30 hour fast being a good length. Note that the science says that there is NO slow down in base metabolic rate out to 72 hours of fasting and I have no intention of going that long.

While some people have gone to a completely alternating days schedule, the benefits are achievable with far fewer fasting days, so I’m aiming for 2 days a week of between 24 and 30 hours of fasting. To still be able to eat something every day, I’m going to be starting the fast after lunch on a given day, skipping the following dinner, breakfast and lunch and starting back on food the next afternoon or dinner.

I’ve also recently started back at the gym, so will be doing weight training 3 days a week plus some days walking/treadmill.

I need to set an appointment with my doctor and at the gym too to get base numbers for things like cholesterol and triglycerides. I’ll be taking waist, hip, arm, leg and neck measurements and weight. I hope to get a basal metabolic measurements as well. Even though this is just one person, and so anecdotal, I want as much data as I can to know what the actual results are. I’ll also be taking pictures, though I probably won’t share them publicly (I trust you understand).

The reality is that going without food for periods like this was the normal state of things for the entire history of humanity for all but the last 60 years of 1st world history. The science all says there is very little risk here. However, I will be paying very close attention and working with my doctor to mitigate any risk that is present.

This is gonna be interesting.

That failed communication can prevent your project from getting funding, result in the wrong technology being chosen and, well, can make you look like an idiot.

For a variety of reasons, many developers struggle with this particular skill. For most, their college communication classes consisted of a semester or 2 their freshman year writing a few 2 page “response” papers and that’s about it. This can leave them completely comfortable digging through SQL dumps, but uncomfortable with non-technical people who have questions.

On the job, I’ve got a reputation as an analogy guy. In a meeting, when I can tell that one side of the conversation doesn’t seem to be understanding what the other is saying, I jump in and try to bridge the gap. Often, a really well stated analogy does so just right (though my colleagues will attest to my not exactly batting 1000).

After I’ve been at a gig for a while, this approach tends to catch on with other developers when they see that being able to get a complex idea across can make their day go so much smoother. Analogies are one critical piece of that strategy. However, 2 other pieces make up the complete picture of how I structure my explanations of complex ideas.

Depending on the audience, the ratios between the 3 change, but it nearly always requires all 3 to get the idea across.

Explanation

The approach that most developers seem to default to is to just plain describe the complex idea or concept. This often places the new bits in direct relation to other pieces. Often, this looks like a dictionary definition or a Wikipedia entry’s first paragraph and consists of a straightforward description of the technology or idea.

For instance, here’s the first paragraph of the HTML article at Wikipedia:

HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items. It allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content. It can include or can load scripts in languages such as JavaScript, which affect the behavior of HTML processors like Web browsers, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both HTML and CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicit presentational markup.

Example

A well-chosen example is almost always necessary when explaining something complicated. While the above explanation of HTML is accurate, and may be enough for someone who was just looking to fill in their gaps in understanding, a few samples often go a long way to clarify things. For our HTML topic, we could go on to say:

For instance, to make text bold, you surround it with <b> tags like <b>this</b>.

Analogy or Dramatization

Comparing the new complex ideas to something else is immensely powerful. There’s a reason that this is the part of my communication strategy that people latch onto and remember. That’s because the analogy is a bridge from something your audience DOES understand to the thing you’re trying to tell them about.

I won’t lie. This also makes it the hardest portion to come up with. Doing this well requires thinking like your audience and understanding where they come from. Good listening skills help out a lot here.

For most audiences, comparing to every day things like: household appliances, cars, retail stores, the IRS, etc. work out well. The better you know your audience, the more appropriate you can make your analogy.

For things like HTML/HTTP, I tend to put the components like web servers and web browsers into roles as people and have them “act out” the interchange.

The web client asks the web server, "Do you have a document called index.html?"

The web server goes into the back room and looks through the files and comes up with a matching document and hands it over.

It’s in a binder (the HTTP header) that describes the contents as being a text/html document and it’s got a Post-It note on it that says there were no problems finding it.

The web client opens the binder and reads the document before going to the whiteboard to draw out what the document describes. When it includes a <b> tag, he draws the text inside of it a bit darker, etc.

Sum Up

I keep finding that when I combine all 3, deliberately, I get WAY more nods of understanding. And, the feedback I’ve gotten is that non-technical audiences thank me for “finally” explaining complex topics in a way that they understand.

It’s worth thinking about and using the next time you’re faced with puzzled faces after you mention a term or technology.

You search for a term like "sad" and get some photos. However, none of the options really strike you. So you move on to search for "depressed", "morose", "frown", etc. and eventually come up with a photo you like. That's fine if that second list of words pops out at you, but even those with great vocabularies sometimes need the help of a thesaurus to come up with such a list.

So, last night, I was wondering if there's an easy web API to a thesaurus out there that I could hook up to my photo tools. While I'm sure there are probably others, the first one I ran across was Big Huge Labs (where you should go to get an API key if you want to use this code). A few lines of C# using LINQ to XML later and I had a basic thesaurus class that I can bring into my project. The free API key is good for 10,000 requests per day. With a bit of dynamic caching, that is probably enough for even a fairly busy site using this API.

I hard-coded the API key into the class itself for the example because every project seems to have a different way of storing and passing that kind of information. Otherwise, it's fairly straightforward. Pass in your original word into the constructor and 3 List collections contain the synonyms, antonyms and any "related" words.

Here's a sample of the usage:

Thesaurus _thesaurus = new Thesaurus("expensive");
foreach (var _synonym in _thesaurus.Synonyms)
{
     Console.WriteLine(_synonym);
}

The full code for the class is after the break. Make sure to change the namespace if you include it wholesale in your project. No license applies. I consider this to be obvious enough that it's public domain.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml.Linq;
namespace Sandbox
{
    public class Thesaurus
    {
        public Thesaurus(String baseWord)
        {
            var _apiKey = "YOURAPIKEY";
            var xmlSource = XDocument.Load(@"http://words.bighugelabs.com/api/2/" + _apiKey + "/" + baseWord + "/xml");
            var _synonymQuery = from _word in xmlSource.Descendants("w")
                           where (string)_word.Attribute("r").Value == "sim"
                           select (string)_word;
            Synonyms = _synonymQuery.ToList();
            var _antonymQuery = from _word in xmlSource.Descendants("w")
                           where (string)_word.Attribute("r").Value == "ant"
                           select (string)_word;
            Antonyms = _antonymQuery.ToList();
            var _relatedQuery = from _word in xmlSource.Descendants("w")
                           where (string)_word.Attribute("r").Value == "rel"
                           select (string) _word;
            RelatedWords = _relatedQuery.ToList();
        }
        public List<String> Synonyms { get; set; }
        public List<String> Antonyms { get; set; }
        public List<String> RelatedWords { get; set; }
    }
}

It's probably a natural reaction because blogs, Facebook and Twitter are presented in a features-first approach, with no description of the benefits anywhere to be seen. So, rather than describing the benefits in a compelling way, people are just told, "You should be on Twitter" or "You should have a blog".

Imagine you've never seen a telephone and someone puts a cell phone in front of you. "You talk into it on this end and hear the other person in this end." It'd be perfectly reasonable to respond that you'd rather talk to them in person. If you have to concept of "calling someone", you can't see all of the reasons why you'd want to call someone.

More importantly however, is how strange it would sound if you started giving advice on how to integrate the phone into your life. No talking about business or no talking about personal matters. You must start the call with "hello" and end with "goodbye".

The simple reality is that the phone becomes a vehicle for any remote, synchronous verbal communication you might want to have. Teenagers chatting all day long about who likes or doesn't like whom use the phone very differently from those who spend their days negotiating business deals. To say nothing of 911 dispatchers and customer service call centers.

The simple reality is that, as long as you can make use of the benefits of the telephone within the constraints it provides, the rest is pretty much wide open. There are ways to use it that are more effective for a given set of goals than others (telemarketing, even when it works, tends to piss the recipients of the calls off). It doesn't work well for single-direction communication and requires that the recipient participate in real-time (voicemail aside).

So, to me, if you don't have any problem, desire or need that a blog or Twitter or Facebook satisfies, there's no reason for you to use them.

All anyone can tell you is how they use it or how they observe people using it. I can say from my own observations that other people use these tools in completely different ways from the way I do. My own personal use has been driven by some pretty basic ideas.

I view both this site and Twitter/Friendfeed both as a place to express whatever is on my mind. The desire to have such an outlet has always been there for me. I have a thought that I'd like to share and, looking around my physical surroundings, there's no one present or no one who would care in the least.

So, I can say it out into the ether. And, whomever is listening can join in. The Open Space Technology people talk about how "Whoever comes is the right people". I say, whomever listens and sticks around is "the right people". Combine that with a desire to capture my thoughts and opinions for later and you've got a good picture of my motivations.

As far as the social aspects, I imagine a giant pub/bar where you can tell what's being talked about at every table and if you know anyone sitting at that table. You can sit down at one or many of those tables at once and can skip out on others. And, you can leave a pager on the table in case anyone mentions your name.

I have heard since the Internet first started popping into the public consciousness about how people who are socializing online are forsaking "real" conversation. Yet, I've watched lots of people like me who are socializing online as an alternative to sitting at home by themselves or going to the bar and sitting in the corner alone.

Are these channels full of inane chatter and people talking about their cat or eating a sandwich? Sure. However, as a near-professional eavesdropper, I can tell you that that's true of 90% of ALL communication. People talk about stupid stuff.

So, I've participated in inane chatter. For example, last night, I watched the movie Strange Brew at home by myself, but chatted online with half a dozen people about what made the movie funny. However, I've also had pub-style conversations with people living in Iran during the recent unrest. I've gotten answers to technical questions for professional projects and have discussed my teenage attempt at suicide.

Other people tend to have those conversations via the phone, email, or another site like Facebook. For me, it's just turned out that Facebook is mostly where my past is. Nearly everyone I've connected with there is a connection in my pre-digital world: high school, college, family, etc.

However, what it really comes down to for me is 2 things: people and ideas. There are people I want to talk to and I go where they are. And, there are ideas I want to be exposed to (articles, links, quotes, etc.) and I look for sources. If you flip both around, I want to share things with specific people and kinds of people, and I want to share my ideas and thoughts. I'll use whatever tools make sense in that pursuit.

I liked hers so much that I ordered one for myself shortly thereafter and it's gone with me nearly every day, everywhere. You can read any of several hundred online reviews of the device itself. Of course, most of those will either recommend or pan the device on its own, with no real consideration of how you read.

Lots of the stuff that I saw in reviews before I bought mine goes on a list of features I couldn't care less about. For instance, in the 4 months I've had mine, I've wanted to look up precisely 5 words in the dictionary and NONE of them was in there.

At any rate, I like it and my use probably isn't exactly what people think of when the Kindle gets mentioned. See, for me, the killer feature is the ability to highlight a sentence or paragraph or entire page and save it for later. Most of what I read on it is non-fiction: technical books and stuff like Curious? and Ratio.

In print books, I've always dog-eared pages and taken notes, but retrieving that information is always less than convenient. So, when I found out that the Kindle makes clipping text from books easy, I was excited. After clipping a couple of things, I went looking at the file format. All of the clippings get dumped into a single .txt file.

While that's fine for opening and looking through or even searching through directly on the Kindle, I wanted something that made it a little more organized. So, I wrote a quick proof of concept app to parse the file and put its contents into SQL Server and thought I'd share it with you.

I'd been wanting to do a little more with Subsonic 3.x's new feature SimpleRepository, which functions somewhat similar to db4o, but still SQL underneath. It strikes me as particularly suited to quick prototyping applications just like this one.

Rather than setting up the database schema, you just create your plain old C# objects (POCO) and SimpleRepository takes care of creating the tables as well as retrieving and storing your objects.

My POC app puts each clipping/quote into the database once and avoids duplication on subsequent runs. The result is much easier to, for instance, pull together everything from one book. The Kindle stores the clippings in the order they were clipped, making a mess if you don't read books linearly. Once written, I can easily keep my database up to date with anything I want to save from anything I'm reading on the device. Now that it's in that form, it could easily sit behind a web front end or be re-mixed in other interesting ways.

Anyway, on to the sample console app. I named it IpseDixit, which is Latin for "he himself said it".

You need a connection string to your database server. The database name in the connection string needs to exist and your Windows account needs access, but you don't have to create any tables in it.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <connectionStrings>
    <add name="IpseDixit" connectionString="Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=IpseDixit;Integrated Security=True" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
  </connectionStrings>
</configuration>

I created a simple class for a Quotation. Here's the entire source to the console application itself. I put multiple classes into the one file for example purposes. You need a reference to Subsonic.Core.dll from the Subsonic 3.x download. Comments in the code itself explain what's going on and why.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using SubSonic.Repository;
using SubSonic.SqlGeneration.Schema;

namespace IpseDixit
{

    public class Quotation
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public string Source { get; set; }
        public string SourceLocation { get; set; }

        [SubSonicLongString]
        public string Text { get; set; }
        public DateTime DateClipped { get; set; }
    }
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            //Set up a Subsonic SimpleRepository
            var _repo = new SimpleRepository("IpseDixit", SimpleRepositoryOptions.RunMigrations);
            //Open the Kindle clippings file. Obviously, moving this to the config file would make sense when turning this example into your own "real" app.
            var _kindleClippingsFile = new FileStream(@"E:\documents\My Clippings.txt", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);
            StreamReader _streamReader = new StreamReader(_kindleClippingsFile);
            //Get the complete contents of the Kindle clippings into a string
            string _kindleClippingsString = _streamReader.ReadToEnd();
            _streamReader.Close();
            _kindleClippingsFile.Close();
            //The individual clippings are split up by a "=====" kind of seperator, so we split it into records on that "seam".
            var _kindleClippings = SplitByString(_kindleClippingsString, "==========");
            foreach (var _clipping in _kindleClippings)
            {
                try
                {
                    //A basic property bag object called Quotation provides a container for all of the bits.
                    Quotation _newQuote = new Quotation();
                    //More splitting by line breaks to get the individual bits of a given quote
                    var _clippingElements = SplitByString(_clipping, "\r\n");
                    //The title of the book/magazine/etc is one of the basic bits
                    _newQuote.Source = _clippingElements[1];
                    //Because bookmarks are kept in this same file, we check only for those called "Highlight"
                    //which is Amazon's term for a quote.
                    if (_clippingElements[2].Contains("Highlight"))
                    {
                        //The date the quote was added and the digital equiv of a page number are on the same line
                        //so we split that up too.
                        var _quoteDateAndLocation = _clippingElements[2].Split('|');
                        //I haven't found a reasonable way to use the location outside of the Kindle, but I figured it
                        //made sense to store it anyway.
                        _newQuote.SourceLocation = _quoteDateAndLocation[0];
                        //I wanted the date the quote was added as a DateTime, so parse that out.
                        var _quoteDateAddedString = _quoteDateAndLocation[1];
                        if (_quoteDateAddedString.Length > 0)
                        {
                            _quoteDateAddedString = _quoteDateAddedString.Replace("Added on", "").Trim();
                            DateTime _quoteDateAdded = DateTime.Parse(_quoteDateAddedString);
                            _newQuote.DateClipped = _quoteDateAdded;
                        }
                        //Finally, what was the highlighted text of the quote.
                        _newQuote.Text = _clippingElements[4];
                        //Let's check the SimpleRepository for whether this quote's already been added.
                        //Since the Kindle keeps adding to this file, it's going to have all of the quotes
                        //from the last import on it. Check if we've already stored this one.
                        //I used the full text of the quote for comparison, which is slower than other comparisons,
                        //but more likely to catch collisions.
                        if (_repo.Exists<Quotation>(x => x.Text == _newQuote.Text)){}
                        else
                        {
                            //Add the quote to the database via the SimpleRepository
                            _repo.Add(_newQuote);
                        }
                    }
                } catch (Exception e)
                {
                    //Since this is just a blog post sample, I'm not handling the exceptions. You should.
                }

            }
        }
        private static string[] SplitByString(string testString, string split) {
           int offset = 0;
           int index = 0;
           int[] offsets = new int[testString.Length + 1]; 

           while(index < testString.Length) {
              int indexOf = testString.IndexOf(split, index);
              if ( indexOf != -1 )  {
                 offsets[offset++] = indexOf;
                 index = (indexOf + split.Length);
              } else {
                 index = testString.Length;
              }
           }

           string[] final = new string[offset+1];
           if (offset == 0 ) {
              final[0] = testString;
           } else {
              offset--;
              final[0] = testString.Substring(0, offsets[0]);
              for(int i = 0; i < offset; i++) {
                 final[i + 1] = testString.Substring(offsets[i] + split.Length, offsets[i+1] - offsets[i] - split.Length);
              }
              final[offset + 1] = testString.Substring(offsets[offset] + split.Length);
           }
           return final;
        }
    }
}

So, last Wednesday, the first deployment of the platform I’ve been designing and working on since October went live. That project has been an intense scramble to basically build the plane in the air.

Projects like that are like hurricanes. While you’re racing to get things built, the wind is raging, rain comes in at you sideways and if you aren’t careful, you can watch a 2×4 go through your window.

Like many previous hurricane projects, this one consumed nights and weekends, and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy the rush of taking on this kind of challenge.

But it wears on you and then, one day, the sky clears. Sometimes it’s the actual day of the launch (if things go well) and sometimes it comes after, but you can recognize it most easily by the absence of anyone standing in your cubicle asking when Feature XYZ will be finished.

When it hits, I often only realize just how intense it’s been leading up to the stillness by discovering that I’m leaning into the wind with my eyes squinted shut. With the sun shining, that suddenly feels absurd.

And, that moment is the time to take advantage of the clear skies. Just like a hurricane, the other side of the storm is coming. If you don’t take a bit of the time to re-stock supplies, clean up a little bit and relax, the back half of the storm is WAY worse.

So, that’s exactly what I took a 4 day break this past weekend and doing things like lots of payback of technical debt on the project before the wind and rain kick back in.

It’s probably obvious that this level of intensity in my professional life has it’s impact on projects like this site. It’s also hard to attribute whether the lack of writing here is 100% related to being in the project hurricane or the degree of impact of things like posting on Twitter. Who knows.

So, if you’re curious what’s actually going on with me, you should follow me on Twitter here.

It was just the beginning because

• July 4 is the day it went to the printer. It wasn’t read out loud until 4 days later.
• 7 years of battles, defeats and victories, starving in the cold, lost lives, cities burned and following through on the consequences of signing that document were between July 4 and the end of the war.
• 4 more years of bureaucracy, political wrangling and revising before the Constitution is written.
• 1 more year before it gets ratified.
• 1 more year before George Washington is elected president and Congress meets.
• 1 more year before The Supreme Court is convened.
• still 1 more year before the Bill of Rights is added to the constitution.
• yet another 9 years before the capital settles into Washington DC.

In short, it took 24 (yes, twenty four) years from the time that document got signed until the thing we celebrate as having been “born” really reached the starting line.

There’s a story like this behind every “overnight” success I can think of. It’s exceedingly rare for big things to happen overnight. Too often, people act like just coming up with the idea, even if you write it out as a detailed plan, that somehow the difficult work is done.

People act like having the idea was the big breakthrough. The Declaration of Independence took just about a month to write and 24 years to get the initial version “out the door”. Many would say the 200+ years since has been continually working on implementing the idea behind that document.

I love coming up with ideas. But the real proving ground of an idea is the months and years of hard work that turn that idea into a reality.

I posted a comment on the followup, but thought I'd take a few minutes to tinker with doing some video as a response as well. Steve Borsch suggested that I should start video blogging and I figured I'd give it a shot. So, here's the video version.

I spent a good portion of the Memorial Day Weekend cooking. Lots of BBQ outside and a fair bit of time in the kitchen too. Quite a bit of what I made was actually experimental. Among those experiments was an attempt to do something about our Chipotle addiction (and the "methadone" of said addiction: QDoba) by coming up with a reasonable facsimile out of our own kitchen.

While not all of the experiments turned out like I wanted (the meatloaf had WAY too much Italian seasoning), the Chipotle analog turned out really good. So, I figured I'd share it with all of you.

We generally get the bowls (sans tortilla) when we go to either place. So, we started with the lime rice (the cilantro is optional and subject to whatever side of the cilantro wars your loyalties lie). Basic Basmati rice with lime juice worked out great.

On top of that, I threw together a black bean concoction with black beans, onions, garlic, tomatoes with chiles, and a splash of white wine.

Since I BBQ'ed a pork shoulder (see video below), we went with that for the meat, but clearly this recipe works just fine without it, making it a really decent thing to make if there's a mix of vegetarians and carnivores at a party or social dinner, without having to make 2 separate meals for the different groups.

Top with salsa, sour cream, cheese, cilantro (again, skip it if appropriate), etc. and we ate it using chips as utensils (like we usually do with Chipotle). I won't pretend that it's a clone (because it's not), but it definitely fits that same niche and might work out if you've got a Chipotle craving.

Download the recipe as PDF

First is that I take a slightly broader view of the definition of “polymath” than many people seem to. It’s telling that many of the online discussions about being a polymath seem to center around a definition in the vicinity of “someone who knows everything”.

This shows up nearly immediately in the conversation, along with mentions of “Renaissance Man”, followed shortly by “Leonardo Da Vinci” and one of several people nominated as having been the “last person who could know everything”. Unfortunately, that series of predictable topical shifts is almost inevitably followed by either a declaration that being a polymath is impossible or a resignation to such a fate, depending on whether one considers oneself to be a polymath prior to the conversation.

The thing is, that the word comes from the Greek polymath?s, ?????????, meaning "having learned much". It doesn’t mean having learned everything. It’s actually a pretty ambiguous term, leaving it open to interpretation rather than some list of specific bodies of knowledge.

Beyond even that, these conversations always seem to put Da Vinci’s entire life into the “polymath” category. However, he clearly pursued a path of learning and exploration for his entire life. So, as a youth, he couldn’t have known even the definition of “everything” used in this context.

Further, he obviously didn’t know all of the stuff we’ve come to learn since his death. That makes the derivation’s definition make more sense to me than the colloquial one used in such arguments. It’s more about infinite curiosity and a lifelong quest to learn more and improve oneself.

By that definition, every one of the people usually brought up still qualifies. But, so do countless others. I consider myself a polymath in the same way I consider myself a software journeyman. It’s not a destination, it’s a path. There’s a huge difference between spending the day looking for a needle in a haystack and spending the day exploring a haystack and happening to find a needle.

The second of the topics is basically another branch of the “what is a polymath” conversation. When it doesn’t center on Renaissance gentlemen, literary canon and the extent to which the body of scientific knowledge exceeds the human memory capacity, it tends to find a topical home in an argument about “generalization” vs “specialization”.

It’s an argument I’ve been dragged into more than a few times myself. One of the problems with it is that I don’t think they’re actually antonyms.  They’re both relative terms. One person may consider my professional niche as “specializing” because I do work in information technology, building web applications on the x86/x64 PC platform while others would veto my membership in the “specialist” camp because I’ve done that work in PHP, Java, and C# on MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server, insisting that to *actually* specialize, I’d have to further refine my focus.

The other big problem with this oppositional thinking is that it presumes that one is better than the other, not that having both is often the recipe for greatest success. The “box” we often ask people to think outside of pretty much IS specialization and most generalists don’t need trite advice to see connections between disparate things.

Third and finally is the frequent citation of both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin. Both are trotted out, pointing out how both economics and evolution describe the march toward specialization. That’s followed with the “inevitable” conclusion that we must specialize or die.

Too bad that both of those disciplines also describe the benefits of “just enough” specialization and the pitfalls of going too far. The most obvious example to me is the human species itself. It’s clear that our widespread population distribution and our insistence on living in EVERY ecosystem on this planet makes it clear that if we’d been hyper-specialized to one ecosystem, things would be very different.

If we’d specialized to only be able to live in the Fertile Crescent, we’d have died off when much of that area turned to desert. The Inuit wouldn’t be hunting reindeer and surviving bitter cold. The people of the Himalayas wouldn’t be perfectly happy living in much thinner air than the rest of us.

Simply put, the capacity TO specialize requires generalization. They’re symbiotic. There’s a balance between them that’s necessary (though that balance can be societal and not made real in each and every person) in order to both survive and thrive.

If a mechanic in 1970 were to specialize in working on AMC cars, further working to become the #1 authority on performance tuning the Gremlin, he’d probably be well paid in 1978, but the 1980’s would have been fairly unpleasant.

That’s because while specialization makes the thriving work when the environment and conditions match the specialization, shifts in the ecosystem can result in disaster for that specialist. Imagine what happens to the giant panda if bamboo were to stop growing or the koala if eucalyptus were to die off because of a pesticide of some sort.

Compare that with the rabbit, the rat and tilapia (take a look at a film called Darwin’s Nightmare) for how survival and specialization/generalization relate.

OK, now that I’ve been enough of a downer to bring up the extinction of pandas and koalas, I want to finish on a lighter note.

For the tone of the podcast, rather than trying to decide whether one needs to be Da Vinci in order to be a polymath, I’d like to shift away from him and the rest of the canonical examples and toward the one that always comes to mind for me: The Doctor. From the TV show Doctor Who.

If you aren’t a fan, The Doctor is a 900+ year old Time Lord who travels with a companion in a space-and-time ship called the TARDIS. The Doctor has traveled the depth and breadth of the Universe and the vastness of time. He has staggering knowledge of alien cultures, technology, literature, etc.

But, seeing the entirety of space and time in front of him, he, better than we, knows that it’s not even remotely possible to know everything.

Despite that, The Doctor has that spark of infinite curiosity, constantly saying things like, “Huh, that’s never happened before.”  and “Don’t know what we’re going to do, but we’ll figure it out” with a joy and zest that’s infectious.

He doesn’t seek out knowledge and experience as though there’s some cosmic scoreboard out there where someone’s keeping track of whether he knows it “all” yet or not. He learns and seeks out new experiences simply for the joy inherent in the process. Most importantly, he doesn’t take himself nearly as seriously as most of the participants of the conversations I’ve read on these topics.

It’s that approach to life that I want the podcast to be about and is how I try to approach life and learning. I am far more likely to say, “Ooh. Now THAT’s interesting” than “Will this be on the test?”. More likely to say, “Did you ever wonder?” than “Why do you know that?”.

If this sounds like paradise to you, the show’s likely to work for you. That’s both as a listener and I’m still looking for a co-host or 2. Now, I’m going to go because I’ve got 28 tabs open in Firefox full of interesting stuff to be read.

On the campus where I spent most of my college career, the English department was housed in one of the oldest buildings there. It featured stone-surfaced stairs with grooves worn into them from thousands of students trudging up them with the grit of salt and sand of a Minnesota winter on their shoes.

Because I majored in English, I practically lived in Riverview and grew to love it in its neglected charm. I still associate that musty smell and the clunking of radiators with 19th century British literature and it’s drafty windows distorting the sun with forcing the angst-ridden poetry that only a 19 year old can write into sonnets and pantoums.

And, in nearly every one of those memories is one of my favorite professors and my advisor: Steve Klepetar. Wildy gesturing, his curly dark hair flopping about onto his dark-rimmed glasses which slid down his nose as he explained for the 1000th time how the English ballad’s meter combines iambic tetrameter together with iambic trimeter.

He’d climb on the desk in the front of the room and sit, cross-legged as he’d expound on the deep significance of early 20th century poetry, clearly as excited to be talking about it as he had been the previous semester and the semesters before that.

Dr. Klepetar is the kind of professor I can only hope for other college students to have somewhere along their journey. I was blessed to benefit by spending 3 years taking classes from him regularly.

While lots of things from those classes have stuck with me, one thing has come up over and over on the job and elsewhere in my life.

See, Dr. Klepetar had a novel way of approaching written assignments. While the assignment itself was typed, students could add the kinds of notes that he would be adding later himself to the margins before handing it in.

One of the things that was to go in those margins, if you felt it was appropriate, was a series of capital letters: JJDIATT. It stood for “James Joyce Did It All The Time”.

If the last time you saw an English class was in the rear view mirror after your freshman year as you ran away, that may make absolutely no sense.

James Joyce is an Irish author who’s most famous book, Ulysses, is a shining example of someone breaking the rules. Grammar, punctuation, and literary convention were all open to some breakage when Joyce put pen to paper.

The most obvious example is that Joyce has run-on sentences that go on for PAGES (including the ending, which is a sentence that goes on for 40 pages). Yet, despite (and some would say because of) that rule-breaking, it’s considered one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century.

Thus, Dr. Klepetar advised us that we were free to break the rules. Start a sentence with “And” or “But”. Slap Grammar across the face. Make up our own spelling of a word. But, you had to put JJDIATT in the margin to indicate that you did it on purpose.

If you started a sentence with “But” or “And” (one of my favorite things to do, by the way) out of ignorance, you weren’t some rebel out to make an artistic statement. Rebellion isn’t something you do accidentally. You need to actually know what rule you’re breaking and have some goal in mind for it to “count”.

To do that, you need to actually have an understanding of the rules in the first place.

When students were bristling at the rigid structure of the sonnet, and would ask to be allowed to write free verse instead, he’d point out that your free verse gets considerably better when you have mastered writing within the confines of the rules. The confinement of 140 characters on Twitter has spurred some of the biggest growth in my ability to write since those English classes in college.

Beginners always seem to want to leap right past the rules without learning them. Yet the Dreyfus Model makes it clear that rigid following of rules is exactly what you need to do when you are new to something. Only when you move into competency and into proficiency does the rule breaking become a viable strategy.

Many people who haven’t studied art look at one of the cubist paintings of Picasso and comment something along the lines of how it’s too bad he couldn’t paint things the way they actually look. However, if you go and look at Picasso’s earliest work, it’s clear that he actually learned the techniques in drawing and painting representationally. He then spent the rest of his life breaking those rules in an effort to discover the essence of how images work and are recognized.

If JJDIATT ended there, it would be a worthwhile technique. However, Dr. Klepetar took it one step further and here’s where I think his technique was genius. Putting JJDIATT in the margin wasn’t a “get out of jail free” card you could use to write a sloppy paper. If you wrote a bad paper, had your friend proofread it and just slapped JJDIATT next to all of the mistakes, that wouldn’t fly.

That’s because JJDIATT was actually an invitation to Dr. Klepetar to have a conversation. It was waving the cape at him to examine what you were trying to accomplish in that instance of breaking the rules. And, he wasn’t one to hold back when he thought that the result didn’t accomplish the goals that launched the rebellion.

In this whole process, he taught me the importance of understanding the rules, recognizing when they are in the way of my vision, breaking them and evaluating whether the result was actually better than if I’d followed the rules in the first place.

For that, Dr. Klepetar, I am deeply grateful.

PS: It looks like I’m not the only one of his students who has a high opinion of Dr. Klepetar. His ratings on one of those "rate your professor” sites is nearly 100% positive, despite his “easiness” indicating he isn’t handing out A’s like candy.

• A DirectTV Tivo
• A Roku box
• A Vudu box
• A computer running Boxee.

Independent of each other, I would recommend each and every one of those devices to anyone interested in buying one. The problem is that no one of those is likely to actually give me or anyone else the actual mix of video entertainment that they’re after.

That’s because we’re in the middle of one of those nasty transitional phases of media. It’s nasty because it’s a much bigger shift than the last several in video distribution (broadcast to cable, VHS to DVD, etc). It’s nasty because

The things I want to watch are produced by a variety of entities. From independent movie producers to TV companies to online podcast producers to subsidized gov’t projects (BBC & CBC). And, where they’ve decided to distribute video outside of the existing cable/satellite/broadcast TV setup (not all of them have), they have chosen a seriously fractured approach.

If the content I watch is a serial video series produced by a traditional TV company, here’s the current situation.

If I use the Vudu box, I can watch a few old seasons of shows, a few that are a full season behind and that’s about it and each episode is $2.

The Roku box has a bunch of CBS stuff and lots of old shows (without extra charges on top of my Netflix subscription), but nothing to speak of from ABC, NBC, FX, FOX, HBO or AMC in that bundle. Lots of that stuff is available via the Amazon partnership, again at $2 an episode.

The Boxee is making valiant efforts, including working hard to get Hulu support. However, most of the TV on Boxee is actually coming in via web streaming and looks far better on a 9” netbook than in a 52” HDTV. Of course, the Boxee will also play anything that is downloaded via Bittorrent, in full HD, but NONE of the producers of this content will provide it that way, even *with* commercials embedded.

As an aside, if TV producers put up full-resolution video downloads (including a reasonable number of ads) via Bittorrent, I would be first in line and would ensure that the torrent was seeded for a good long while.

Anyway, the Boxee will also handle anything iTunes sells, for, again, $2 an episode. I detect a trend.

And, if these were the only options for TV, it’d be no big deal. However, for about $90 a month, I have 250+ channels (including HBO/SHO) and the Tivo capacity to record 6 channels simultaneously. While much of that content would be recorded with commercials, some (the aforementioned HBO/SHO shows), that content is delivered MUCH cheaper than $2 an episode.

Unfortunately, that lower price means I have to know that I will want to watch that content in advance of a specific “airing time” (a distinct legacy of the synchronous nature of over-the-air television). Imagine if, in order to get a copy of a musical album required setting your audio Tivo so it gets recorded on Thursday, when it’s “on”.

The problem with that is that nearly half of the shows I really enjoy are shows I discovered long after they originally aired, making the Tivo an inadequate solution.

Movies are a bit better, with most of the rentals at about the cost of what a DVD new release rental would be. I also have done my fair share of buying DVD’s on Amazon, watching them and selling them back on Amazon, which puts TV seasons WAY below $2 an episode and movies pretty cheap too.

As far as podcast/videocast/etc. content, there isn’t much of an edge to any of them. All but the Tivo have TED videos, for instance, and most have some form of “The Best of YouTube”. Of course, they all act like this is a major accomplishment, but whatever.

The real problem, as I see it, is that nearly all of the options for video delivery are distributor-focused. Boxee is the one exception (which is probably why it’s the one I’m most optimistic of) in that if you can give it an RSS feed with video files or torrents and I don’t have to care about who’s distributing it.

I wish this was a technical problem. I wish that this was about bandwidth or codecs. Instead, it’s about whether Viacom’s lawyers have worked out a deal with Amazon or Disney’s lawyers have worked out a deal with Vudu. And, in the mean time, my ideal scenario seems lifetimes away.

I’d absolutely love to be able to take the $200+ a month (between everything) I pay for video entertainment and just get access to watch stuff: old or new, TV or movie, but there’s no sign of it happening. I’m really getting sick of cobbling together a legal solution.

That’s because the illegal solution for exactly this desire is really easy. An installation of uTorrent and a list of TV shows you want gets you automatic delivery of shows to the directory of your choice, ready for Boxee to display in beautifully-encoded video on the big screen TV, complete with subtitles in the language of your choice, even if the original producer didn’t include them.

Please, content producers, quickly figure out how to solve this problem, because the grass is looking pretty lush and green on the other side. I’m not a broke college student and am willing to pay a fair price. However, $52 per season ($2 x 26 episodes without a seasonal discount) isn’t fair.

I’m far happier with my eMusic subscription (more like $0.30/track instead of $1+ for iTunes) and many of the $6.99 albums I buy on Amazon than I am with $15 for a CD. Note that I’m not a freeloader looking for a free buffet. I’d just like better options.

In the mean time, if you’re looking for a demo of any one of the half-solutions currently available, let me know.

I've owned far too many different grills and smokers over the years. Big and small, gas and electric and charcoal, I've owned most kinds at some point. Except for one: the ceramic cooker often called a Kamado.

The most famous of these is the Big Green Egg, which bills itself as the “World’s Best Smoker and Grill”. The basic idea is a thick ceramic container to contain and control the fire, smoothing out the temperature and moisture, resulting in amazing food.

The thing about them is that, no matter the brand, they’re expensive. Sure, all of the information points to how great they are, that they last a long time, that they’re versatile, give you charcoal/wood flavor in the same kind of time as gas, etc.

I just couldn’t bring myself to pay for one. Until a few weeks ago.

I went out to the big, 3 burner gas grill on the deck to give it a quick once-over, clean it up and fire it up for the spring. I opened it up, pulled out the grates, and looked at the burners. Apparently, in the 4 years we’ve owned it, it’s completely fallen apart.

The burners were corroded to the point I wouldn’t feel safe lighting them, the grates themselves are falling apart, etc. Sure, the exterior is still shiny stainless steel, but if the insides rot out from within, what good is it?

This isn’t the first grill I’ve had to dump. Plus, unless it’s augmented, gas grilling doesn’t really make me as happy as real BBQ and charcoal grilling. That’s when I started thinking about the Kamado cookers and everything lined up: long-lasting, convenient, amazing food, etc.

Combine that with tons of overtime pay from the last few months and I decided it was time to give them a shot. I bought one from GrillDome. So far, we’ve had chicken and brats on it, and it’s living up to expectations. And, today, I’ve got 12 pounds of pork shoulder that’s been in there since 8 this morning, meaning my favorite food is on its way to my plate.

Pulled pork sandwiches are as good as it gets as far as I’m concerned.

That journey covered 3200 miles through 15 of these United States over the course of those 7 days. I saw a wide variety of terrain, a fairly complete survey of changing regional cuisine, a sampling of how the economy is doing in 1/3 of the country, had interesting conversations, met people I’d previously only met online (great to see all of those people in person), drove along winding country roads, left outrageous tips at restaurants across the country, bought hot dogs for a shared meal with a homeless guy in St. Louis and ate fried creamed corn just outside the World’s Largest Truckstop.

.

I listened to a lot of podcasts, a few audiobooks, lots of music and some contemplative silence. I spent time reading, reflecting, talking through ideas, and generally getting away from the stress that the last 6 months has piled on to me.

I returned refreshed (which will hopefully last more than a few days), with a renewed desire to take on the challenges in front of me.

One of the things I’ve learned about myself over the past few years is my natural tendency toward imbalance and how that can end up doing a lot of harm to the attributes of my skills portfolio and personality that people enjoy and sometimes pay for.

I’m good at what I do because I combine various disciplines and perspectives and apply them to situations in unique ways. That comes from being deeply interested in the world around me and curious about nearly every topic I can think of. However, when I let myself, I skew toward a single endeavor, like the big project I’m working on now.

In doing so, I actually injure my ability to do that project to the best of my ability. That became clear again as I was traveling. As I thought about working on other projects, podcasts, and just let my mind wander on whatever topic was in front of me, I found myself coming up with good ideas for the billable project along the way.

That goes right along with everything I’ve read in book after book about how the mind works for lateral thinking and strategic intuition. The conference itself challenged me to do something about it and carve out the necessary variety I need to be at my best.

So, I’m setting out on a deliberate process to make sure that I engage in several areas on a regular basis to keep that equilibrium. I’ll keep charging ahead on my billable project and probably keep above 40 hours a week. But, I’ll also be making sure I put in time working on my writing, working on my non-billable software projects, some art, music, reading books, doing something with the 3 hours of video I captured on the trip and getting back into podcasting.

On that last item, I’ve got 2 main ideas that I’m moving forward on, one more solid than the other. That “more solid” idea is a podcast that embraces the multi-disciplinary lifestyle, called the Polymath Podcast. I’m looking for a couple of co-hosts to get this thing off the ground, so if you’re interested, let me know.

I know that for many of those endeavors I won’t be getting very far in a given week.  However, a slow and steady investment is what I’m aiming for: one that’s sustainable. I want to leverage the benefits I’ve seen come from that cross-cutting approach and feel challenged to kick it up a notch.

We’ll see where things go from here. Regardless of the destination, the journey is its own reward.

The weeks fell away remarkably fast, and, on Tuesday, I’m off. I’ve got a few things to tie off (gotta get an oil change) and hand off before falling off the grid and onto America’s highways and byways.

In the spirit of the conference, I’m not going to be entirely off the grid (just off the billable one). I’ll be posting my progress, anything interesting I see, photos, my location on a map (Indiana Jones style) etc. and will be keeping a video camera in the car with me as my companion.

You can keep up on my trip on my CREATE South 2009 Road Trip Page.

A person does a bunch of reading, often of pre-release information, about the product. They place an order and anxiously hit F5 on UPS.com for 2-3 days watching their package bounce around the country until the doorbell rings and they scrawl their unrecognizable John Hancock on with that plastic pen.

As they take the package into the house, they reach for the digital camera and a box cutter and tear open the brown shell to document the technological goo within. They push the buttons, flip the switches, glance through the menus and, about 10 minutes later, they start writing their review, which often consists of them going over the marketing materials and checking features off as they find them on the device.

I think that’s a problem.

I’ve got more gadgets than the average bear and have had my fair share of “normal” stuff like cars, houses, lawn mowers, etc. And, without exception, those products were VERY different a few weeks, few months and few years after I first got them.

Some gadgets that I wasn’t entirely sure about turned out to be some of my absolute favorite. Worse however, were the gadgets, devices, luggage, and other stuff that I was thrilled to have bought only to discover the problems later. When I read a review or someone’s summary of getting the item, I want to know what those downsides are, because EVERYTHING has them.

So, I’m not really a fan of the whole genre of “unboxing” articles/videos/etc. They’re fine for what they are, but they focus exclusively on the first impression, which is, by definition, a small part of your total experience with a product or service.

That’s why, a while back, I promised myself I wouldn’t jump in with my assessment of any particular technology until I’d lived with it for a while. And, after installing the Windows 7 beta a month ago on my laptop, Windows 7 is something I’ve lived with for a while, so here are my impressions.

I’ve been running “Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit Build 7000” on my Thinkpad R61 laptop with 4GB of RAM, a 200GB 7200RPM primary hard drive, and a 320GB 5400RPM secondary hard drive.

For the most part, it contains my normal daily stack of software: Visual Studio 2008, XMind, E Text Editor, the developer browser cluster (IE/Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera), Windows Live Writer, OpenOffice.org (instead of MSOffice 2007, due to not wanting to deal with activation on what’s a temporary setup), my giant pile of utilities, etc. The only “big” thing missing from what I’d consider a normal workstation is a regular install of SQL Server 2008.

Overall, my impression is that this release will fit into Microsoft’s existing pattern of Windows versions.

1. A version that makes some major changes. People generally end up disliking or hating these versions. Windows 3.0, Windows 95, Windows 2000 (as a workstation) and Vista.
2. A matching version that smooths out the kinks and ends up being the version that people hold on to for several years. Windows 3.1, 98, XP and, now, Windows 7.

Some of the refinements are pretty handy:

• The thing that I am genuinely most impressed with is its handling of hardware. This is particularly noteable given that this is a pre-release version of a 64-bit edition of Windows. It picked up and installed, without me having to search for drivers the following:
• The internal bluetooth adapter, WiFi card, webcam, sound card, SD card reader, etc. If you take retail versions of XP or Vista and install them on your HP, Dell, Toshiba or Thinkpad, without those vendor’s install discs, you’ll note how big of a shift this is.
• The WiFi Epson inkjet printer on my network, including remote scanning.
• My bluetooth mouse.
• My projector. It’s now just as easy to use a Windows laptop with a projector as it is to use a Mac, if not easier. Given the number of times I’ve suffered through Fn-F5 button smashing myself and watching others as 10 people watch on, if you use a Windows laptop to give presentations, this alone is worth the upgrade price when it’s released.
• The task bar “pinning” of applications and the context menu, clustering and “recent items” that are all part of the retooling of the task bar are a distinct shift in the right direction. Lots of this stuff is reminiscent of the Mac dock, but without grafting a Mac metaphor where it wouldn’t fit.
• The searching of the “Start” menu (which is now just a circular Windows® logo, so it’s not really a “Start” menu anymore) that showed up in Vista (and was one of my favorite Vista features) is spread through much more of the OS. This is particularly handy since they have re-organized the Control Panel YET AGAIN.

  I discovered that feature when I looked to the search area in exasperation after not being able to find something like “Administrative Tools”. Subsequently, I heard on a podcast about how much work went into “regular” language search for things like “How do I change my wallpaper?” which gives you the right Control Panel entry.

• Speed. A lot of work supposedly went into making Windows 7 run leaner on the same hardware. Given the hardware that this laptop contains and the hardware in my day-to-day Vista64 machines, Windows 7 is noticeably faster.

  My Vista64 boxes, with 8GB of RAM, typically idle at about 5.5GB used when I’ve got everything open. The laptop is more like 2.2GB. That’s not apples to apples, due in large part to not running SQL Server on the laptop. However, given that the number one negative against Vista when it came out was that none of the PC’s in the stores could supply enough horsepower, this is a great improvement.

• Networking has gotten a bit smoother. The VPN connection is now in the system tray by the wireless. It also has fewer problems with going to sleep on one network and waking up on another, something Vista wasn’t ever really very good at.
• The Remote Desktop Client has a few nice tweaks. My favorite is in full-screen mode. That little menu that pops down when you hover at the top can now be dragged to a position other than centered. Given how often I’m 2-3 levels deep in Remote Desktop sessions, this has proven very useful.
• I haven’t run into anything that I can recall where the install complained about not having the right version of Windows. This happened to me CONSTANTLY when I switched from XP to Vista, so this is a welcome pattern.
• Also in Remote Desktop (though this was in Server 2008 and downloadable independently as well) is font-smoothing, which makes remote-work much more pleasant.

What’s not so great

• There are some bugs in that improved Remote Desktop. It doesn’t seem to want to close down well, whether because the connection died or because you’re trying to kill it yourself. I’ve had to kill the process WAY too many times.
• Shutting down Windows itself is horrible. 75% of the time when I try to physically shut it off, I end up killing power because I can’t wait for it anymore. Fortunately, I put it to sleep most of the time, but this must be fixed before the final release.
• After logging in, it can sometimes take up to 2 minutes before I get anything other than a black screen with the build number in the bottom-right corner.
• Google’s Chrome, which runs fine in 64 bit Vista, needs to be set to run in backward-compatibility mode in order to run under Windows 7 64. No idea why.

I Don’t Care

You’re going to see reviews all over the place about things like the Aero glass, desktop gadgets, wallpaper that shuffles,improved Paint, rebuilt calculator, how “slick” and “smooth” it is, heck, even the improvements to security. I, personally don’t care about most of that. It’s all stuff I never use, turn off, etc.

Like I’ve told 1000 salespeople over the years. If it’s not a feature I use, it’s not actually a benefit you can convince me is worth paying for. All of that stuff fits there for me.

Overall

I know that lots of people either love or hate Windows. The same is true of Mac and Linux. I *like* them all. I still like Linux and I still like Mac. And, this release makes me like Windows a little morstronge than I did before.

While I’ll keep Vista around for testing purposes, as soon as Windows 7 goes gold, I’ll be upgrading any machine I can.

Every time, there was something that kept me from adopting it: the state of Windows support. And, after this past week, I think that my focus on the msysGit version was part of the problem. I have been reluctant to use the Cygwin version. That is mostly because I didn’t want to *have* to install all of cygwin on any workstation where I want git support and the pile of files that adds.

The thing is, though, that when I took a good look last week, I already had cygwin running on every single Windows machine I’ve got, INCLUDING virtual machines. Never one to cling to a supposition after evidence invalidates it, I gave git on cygwin a shot.

Because I still have lots of Subversion repositories and am likely to continue using it on lots of projects, I insisted on getting the git/Subversion integration working. Also, I use a Dreamhost account to host my repositories and any project-related forums, project tracking, etc., as a sort of private Sourceforge/Codeplex/Google Code without any licensing issues to deal with. I wanted to add git support to that existing project space.

It turned out like most projects of this sort. The stuff I thought would be a pain (like getting git running on the Dreamhost account) turned out to be documented and straightforward, while stuff like getting the “git svn” command to work (which should just work off the cygwin install) thwarted me for far too long.

However, after I worked out the kinks, I was able to get it working and pointed at some of my Subversion repositories on several of my workstations. After cloning those repositories, what I'm most suprised by (even though I was told to expect it) is how git manages to copy ALL of the version history for the entire repository into a single .git directory (instead of hundreds or thousands of .svn directories) and end up with something SMALLER than the single version checkout of Subversion for the same source tree.

As an example, one of my repositories had 440 revisions across 10 branches. A checked out copy from Subversion of the current release branch is 2.51GB in 43,655 files across 23,361 folders.

After moving it to git, the checked out copy, which now includes the ENTIRE 440 revision archive of project history is 1.51GB in 15,356 files and 2,233 folders.

As far as the hiccups, it boiled down to a couple of things:

1. Make sure to install all of the “git” related packages in cygwin.
2. Install the subversion libraries for perl (they’re not anywhere near the “git” packages in the cygwin installer). This took care of it complaining about the SVN CPAN Perl library.
3. Be prepared to have to run “rebaseall” on the cygwin installation.  This took care of a LOT of cygwin complaints about various DLL’s.
4. Running “git svn clone http://example.com/repos/” can be agonizingly slow on large repositories. It’s not an issue if you’re working off of a tiny project, but that 1.5GB project took all night and then some. Ongoing work is quite fast, so I’m hoping they work the kinks out of this going forward or that they’ll ditch the tagline “The fast version control system”.

Given how efficient it is with storage, I’m interested in experimenting with running it in the background on my development directories and having a FileSystemWatcher commit whenever things change. I’d like to see how long it takes before things get out of control.

I’m also hoping that the GUI tools catch up. That’s not so much because I want them for myself (I prefer commandline for SVN as well), but because TortoiseSVN has been key in getting SVN adopted on projects and flushing SourceSafe on several of my projects.

One of my “rules” of software development on any project where I have a say in such matters is “You don’t get to rewrite it unless you understand it.”

That one made it on my list because of how common it is to watch software developers take a look at code some other developer write for 15 minutes only to declare it “crap” and in need of a complete rewrite. When challenged to explain what the offending library/package/application does, most can’t. That leads to a near 100% certainty that the rewrite will miss some large requirement or miss something subtle but important in how the original works.

So, as we set out to rewrite this mess, we wanted to make sure we understood what those older platforms do. We read all of the original requirements, dug through data structures and code, talked to the people who helped define the requirements on the original, etc.

One of the common threads that went through everything related to all of the implementations was the overly complicated ways that things were done in an obvious attempt to accommodate a wide variety of permutations. However, the complexity actually got in the way of accommodating those same permutations.

As we worked through the features that would be in the initial version of version 4, we pushed back on every assumption we could, hard. It’s something I’ve always done to one degree or another. On this project it’s been with more discipline than in the past.

Now, 4 months later, that has proven to be a critical strategy. That’s because optimizing your thinking about the problem and how you’ll solve it leads to orders of magnitude more productivity than most software tools.

If you add up the time spent actually typing code into an editor or IDE, compared with time spent trying to figure stuff out and otherwise spent thinking, it’s probably 30/70. That means that even if you had tools that could read your mind and instantly do exactly what you wanted, you’d only speed things up by 30%.

In trying to get other people to push back the same way, I’ve struggled to describe it in the kinds of rules that people un-used to doing this kind of thing (beginners in the Dreyfus Model). This week, one common factor in many of these situations popped out at me (Strategic Intuition at work). When subject matter experts asked us questions that would have led to complicated messes, they were almost always expecting a boolean answer.

They were questions like:

• Can this new platform do X?
• Will it have feature Y?
• As a user of this system will I be able to do this specific task?
• Can you guys make it do Z?

While those questions can be answered, often easily, doing so almost universally is the wrong thing to do.  Under those kinds of questions are giant piles of assumptions. When you answer these questions without probing deeper, you validate ALL of those assumptions without ever knowing what they are.

If, instead, you play the 3-year-old and ask “Why”, you can drill down into those assumptions. You can discover that many of them can be set aside or rendered moot by a much simpler design. And those that stand up to the incessant “Why” are worth keeping and now you have a much deeper understanding of what’s driving the feature request.

Of course, it’s an added perk that rejecting a black/white view of an issue fits in well with the Glass Too Big philosophy too.

Zeroth, I’m fully aware of the irony of an article like this not “practicing what it preaches”. Note that creating an engaging presentation full of lively slides is more work than quickly writing up a few points. This article is the latter because of the effort involved in the former when faced with my current work queue.

First, is that I do use both Powerpoint and Keynote and go back and forth, even on the same presentation. That’s due in large part to the fact that I don’t actually use either one when it comes time to fire up the projector. Rather, I use both (and quite a few other tools) as mechanisms for creating slides/graphs/infographics, etc.

The final result of the computer side of a presentation for me is actually a PDF. PDF turns out to be a great format for actually delivering the presentation. You can throw the PDF on a memory stick and it’s almost a universal certainty that you’ll be able to open it using whatever machine you’re expected to use.

Given the number of people I’ve seen show up with Keynote only to discover a PC, hard-wired to the projector, I think this is a sound strategy. Acrobat Reader handles full-screen just fine and also includes the only transition I ever use: fade. You don’t get the fancy “builds” where text comes flying in from the back of the room, does a little dance around your pie chart and then settles into your bullet point ranks. And, I’ll go on record that that’s a good thing.

So, basically, I use whatever makes sense to get a series of PNG slides that I turn into the final PDF presentation. However, before diving into how I build those slides…

Before Creating Slides

I think the most important presentation habit I picked up was to start working on the presentation somewhere other than *in* Powerpoint or Keynote. Both of those tools encourage a pattern that I think is the number one cause of the bullet-point onslaught.

What I see people do is File->New Presentation and they start by filling in the title and adding a new slide. That slide is always the Title/Bullet Points layout and they start filling in those boxes and just keep right on going.

If you start away from the presentation editor and organize your thoughts and ideas into the points you want to make, the things you want to convince your audience of, the things you want to be sure you communicate, etc.

This is where good old fashioned note-taking, outlining, and mind-mapping come in. Capture the ideas so you can cut out the crap that doesn’t belong. Even if you take a bunch of notes, throw them all away and go to Powerpoint “fresh”, your thinking will be clearer and the presentation better for it.

Slide Design

As I’ve been working on improving my own presentation techniques, reading books like Presentation Zen and slideology looking at the best of Slideshare, I’ve seen lots of “named” styles and varying sets of rules. Rather than getting hung up on the details of whether one of those sets of rules is “better” than another, I have boiled it down to my own guidelines/principles that are common to most such recommendations:

1. The fewer words on a slide the better.
2. The words on the slide shouldn’t be the same as the words you say.
   • While Larry Lessig seems to be able to pull off a really sophisticated style where he phases in and out of sync with the text on his slides, I am not Larry Lessig. I just find my presentations working better when I don’t say the words on the slide.
3. The slides are a side dish, not the entree.
   • The things I’ve actually got to say are what I’m there for, otherwise, why bother doing it in person?
4. Let the slides deliver the joke.
   • When you’re nervous, the timing of humor can be difficult. If, however, you insert little jokes into the slides, as though your “assistant” was messing with you, etc. you can still use humor, without the stress of having to hit the punchline.
5. A picture is worth a cup of coffee.
   • Whether it’s a graph or a photo of a screaming monkey, a picture will keep people awake and engaged more than text.

To those ends, I basically have a handful of slide layouts that I use, none of which are in the default layouts from EITHER Powerpoint or Keynote.

• Basic Text – this is the headline font, smack in the middle of the page. More than about 5-6 words and this layout stops working.
• Quote – this is the subheading font smack in the middle for quotes of 1-2 sentences. I avoid using this for anything but a quote.
• Fullscreen image – this is usually just the default “blank” with the image dropped in.
• Graph/Chart – again based on blank with just the graph itself and maybe a small caption. The graphs/diagrams need to be simple, but then they can be really useful.

That’s it. If I am concerned about people “catching up” later, I publish a different document or record the presentation. For URL’s and links to resources, etc. I’ve been leaning more and more on a handout that I give out at the end rather than trying to include that stuff directly in the slides and hoping people will note down the info.

Finding Images

So, where do I find images and how do I keep track of them? This tends to be one of the most common questions I get.

First is that I always save a copy of the page where I find an image online as a way of taking a snapshot of the permissions it was marked with when I downloaded it. To that end, I use the MHT format to save the entire page, including the photo itself, into one file, which I name according to a description of the photo.

All MHT is as a format is MIME-encoded HTML. That’s what is used for email attachments. So, don’t let anyone tell you that it’s a “Microsoft proprietary” format. It’s not. Internet Explorer, does, however, support it out of the box, while Firefox requires the UnMHT extension to be able to save or open the format.

Then, where to get the images. I get 90%+ of them from Flickr’s Creative Commons section. My site used to have an app that helped search through those, but it’s been down for a while and I’m not sure when/if I’ll put it back up. In the mean time, I actually use a simple bookmarklet that prompts for a term and then searches for photos based on that.

Flickr Search Bookmarklet

Put the following into a new bookmark as the URL, putting it all on one line.

javascript:Qr=prompt('Tag...','');if(Qr)location.href='http://www.flickr.com/search/?q='+escape(Qr)+'&l=commderiv&ss=0&ct=0&s=int&m=tags'

Thesaurus Search Bookmarklet

And, since it can be a trick to figure out which term to actually search for in order to get something you want on a slide, I’ve got a similar bookmarklet for a Thesaurus search.

javascript:Qr=document.getSelection();if(!Qr){void(Qr=prompt('Enter%20word%20to%20find%20in%20Merriam-Webster%20Thesaurus:',''))}if(Qr)location.href='http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/'+escape(Qr)+'%20'

I tend to cycle through those, fairly quickly coming up with stuff I can use. It generally works well to search for abstract terms like “fast”, “angry”, “calm”, etc. to get good slide material and tends to cut down on the tendency to have slides made up of images of the exact words you’re using, which feels weird to the audience.

Overall, this set of tools lets me work on multiple presentations at once, throw one together fairly quickly and has generally gotten me quite a few compliments when given in places where the bullet-point brigade is the norm. Hopefully, they can help you too.

The first one was from Lenovo (formerly IBM), from whom I bought the ThinkPad laptop I’m using to write this post. What the email contained was a list of laptops from the mid-level to high end. Given that the existing laptop is 9 months into my normal 24 month replacement cycle, I’m a solid 15 months from buying a new laptop.

I am, however, ripe for some new accessories. I’ve been thinking about getting a docking station, just had my thumb drive die and would like a larger travel mouse. Given that they know EXACTLY which laptop I have, mentioning any one of those items would have had a pretty good chance of getting me to spend a little.

The second was from MacMall. I bought a Mac mini from them a couple of months ago for web testing and iPhone development. Guess what they’re ad was selling? The great deal they’re running on Mac mini’s. Exactly how many Mac mini’s does the average customer buy in a 2 month period? I have, however, contemplated whether I want to upgrade iLife from ‘08 (which I had from last year) to ‘09.

And, finally was the one from the car dealership. Back in December, I bought a 2006 Chrysler 300. The ad went on and on about their new promotion for people to lower their payments by trading their used car in on a new one (aside: these kinds of deals are usually done by getting you a loan where you owe more than the car is worth and not exactly the deals they sound like). They specifically mentioned trading in my “2006 Chrysler 300”, clearly an attempt at customizing the marketing message. But, I don’t WANT to trade this car in.

What approach would I have taken if I worked for the car dealer? Any of the following:

• It’s been about 3 months since you bought that Chrysler 300. Keep it running smoothly by having our guys handle your scheduled maintenance. Because of the harsh MN winter, Chrysler’s recommendations mean you are probably due for an oil change. Schedule one today.
• We hope you’re enjoying the car you bought from us a while back. We also know that a lot of households have more than one car and you may have been thinking of trading in your other car. Now’s a great time to do that because…
• Now that the snow has melted, is that Chrysler 300 you bought back in December covered in salt and looking a little less shiny than it used to? Have the guys in our detailing shop clean it up and make it look just like it did when you bought it.

When you’ve got data available like exactly what I bought and when, combined with things like cars needing oil changes every 3000-5000 miles and knowing where I live, etc., you ought to be able to do some really specific targeting of your message, especially when we’re talking about email. However, given how nearly everything that gets sent out these days is embedding at the very least my name, you might as well make the entire message tailored to my situation.

Of course, if your marketing team doesn’t have access to that kind of data, I *ahem* know of some good people who can help with reporting, business intelligence and building web applications to help do a better job.