Embracing Chaos

Here’s the scene: It’s 1:30 PM. In 30 minutes the CEO of your company starts a conference call with analysts to announce quarterly earnings. PR told you he is going to tell the Wall Street analysts how cool your team’s website is. It is quite a success — in 18 months it has rocketed from non-existence to the world’s fourth most popular site in a very competitive industry. Sounds great to get some recognition, right? Only problem is, today your site’s kinda broken. The night before a database upgrade got confused half-way through with no possibility to roll back. One…

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First, I’d like to welcome everybody landing here after searching for something on Google. I hope you find what you’re looking for. I know Google has been crawling my site nearly since its launch, and I’ve been passively wondering when would this site show up in Google’s search index. It’s been in Yahoo and MSN for ages, and getting more and more links from high profile sites all the time. Well I just got the answer: as soon as I gave Google money. Surprised? As a birthday present to myself, I bought a few adwords like: Your Brain in a…

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I am both proud and awed by the productivity of the rhapsody.com development team. Just two months after Rhapsody.com added playlists, a huge new feature has been added: a personal music library for bookmarking your favorite content. Along with it is a fabulous new AJAX library manager which gives users quick visual access to a large collection of music in their web browser. What makes this even more impressive is that one of those two intervening months included the end of year holidays. When I’m doing long-term project scheduling, I generally write off 3 weeks out of December because of…

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So I’m preparing my slides for my Ignite Seattle talk tomorrow night (tonight? Tuesday night) and I go over to my friends’ place to practice with them and I am reminded that the format is not 15 slides for 20 seconds each but rather 20 slides for 15 seconds each! So now I’m trying to split each of my slides into four thirds and rejigger all the timings. Fun! I’d like to take a few moments out of my busy schedule to apologize in advance to anybody expecting a polished coherent lecture from me. I decided to take an extra…

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Next week I’ll be giving a talk at Ignite Seattle about Transhumanist Morality. It’s going to be a fun challenge to summarize my thoughts on the next thousand years of human history and how it forms a basis for a system of morality in 5 minutes or less! But I’m up for the challenge. The real question is if anybody else will get anything out of it. ;) The last Ignite Seattle event was tons of fun and highly educational. A really good crowd of people — a great way to meet like-minded geeks in town that you didn’t know…

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Last night I had a great time at a local O’Reilly event building a bridge out of popsicle sticks with a few good friends. The rules were pretty simple: you get 1,000 popsicle sticks and some hot glue guns to build a bridge that spans a 15″ gap in 30 minutes. Then we try to break them by standing on them. At first blush, very similar to a contest my junior high science teacher used to do, and that happen all over the place. But there are a number of subtleties in the execution of the competition that greatly effected…

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Yesterday I got all excited about a journal article indicating the possibility of faster-than-light communication through quantum entanglement. But I got excited before fully reading the article, and once I had I wrote a quick comment apologizing for the false alarm. It’s not a peer-reviewed article, and it’s not very scientific. I actually spent hours digging through their references trying to understand what they were saying, and wrote a longish post to a mailing list about it, so I figure I might as well share the analysis here. First, a minor quip from page 3 where they confuse atomic number…

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I spent Thanksgiving weekend on my Mom’s Ranchito in Southern California. (I’m not quite sure what else to call it — it’s not that big, but it’s got more dogs, cats, horses, chickens and turtles than you can shake a cactus branch at.) A few hours before getting on the plane, I was at a friend’s house and saw a 2×2x2 mini Rubik’s cube sitting on their living room table. Knowing all the residents of the house would be away, I asked if I could borrow the cube for the weekend. My bookshelf had run dry of easy-reading novels, so…

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Transhumanist Morality is the idea that we should consider the impact of our actions in the context of the millennium-scale history of humanity. Specifically, I think the only way we will avoid some kind of dystopian apocalyptic fate is by seeking salvation through technology. In this context, moral actions are those that increase the probability that as a species we achieve technological salvation before we blow ourselves up. I’d like to explore what this means in very practical terms by analyzing a number of jobs I’ve had and considered and seen my friends do over the years. SEO for e-Commerce…

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I’m currently traveling in mainland China. One of my primary reasons to be here is to practice my Mandarin. I lived in the town of Jinan for the better part of 2001, and by the end of my stay had a rough conversational grasp of the language. For cultural and geopolitical reasons I’d like to keep this skill. I’m also planning on going to China’s Global Debutante Ball in Beijing in 2008 and a little force-fed practice now can’t hurt. I think of myself as a dilettante polyglot – I have or have had a smattering of many languages –…

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