Simultaneously, technological advances have allowed advertising to progress along a different axis – to become more targeted.  Advertising used to only be broadcast widely through newspapers and television shows.  The best an advertiser could do to ensure their message reached the right kind of people was to select the aggregate demographics of everybody who read a particular magazine.  Now the internet allows ads to be targeted as precisely as you’d like.  Today, Google lets you get your message only in front of people who are about to buy a product like yours.  The ability to connect to people who have expressed an intention to “buy digital camera” is a literal gold-mine, making billionaires out of Larry, Sergey and Eric.  As effective as it is, targeted advertising won’t replace broadcast advertising, because there is still value in abstract brand-building.  Rather, the two will complement each other.

Enter Social Media

Social media has been all the buzz recently.  At its core it’s just a more convenient way for friends to communicate.  The “killer app” for computers has always been helping people communicate, and this is just another chapter in that book.  With this new communications medium comes a new opportunity for organizations to tell their stories.  In fact, I believe that social media will bring another tectonic shift in the entire marketing industry, possibly as important as search-based advertising.  As consumers have gotten more and more sophisticated at filtering out advertising from broadcast media, advertisers have gotten more and more desperate in their attempts to connect with people.  Social media marketing offers a new path – instead of hearing about products and services through ads, people can hear about products and services from their own friends.  Exactly how this will play out through Twitter/Facebook/Foursquare/whatever is not at all clear to me right now, but I fundamentally believe this change is coming, and it will take the entire marketing industry with it.  Klein and her fans are free to unplug from popular culture in order to avoid the onslaught of brand advertising, but they would be foolish to stop talking to their friends just because their friends are happy with things they’ve bought.

This vision is one of the main things that prompted me to jump off the comfy Google cruise liner and start paddling hard in Banyan Branch’s crowded dinghy.

Is marketing intrinsically evil?

I sometimes feel a need to justify this line of work to those who think that marketing is inherently dirty.  I admit that I’m more of a capitalist than many of my friends, but I certainly recognize that capitalism has its limits.  The vast majority of economic transactions are both consensual and mutually beneficial, and I will argue vigorously that there is nothing wrong with an economic system consisting of these transactions.  The biggest exception to this happens when transactions are not mutually beneficial because one party is not fully informed.  But what we’re doing is helping people share honest opinions and feedback about the things they buy and use.  By lubricating the flow of information between real people, I believe social media will reduce the effectiveness of deceptive marketing.  Moreover, it will help companies connect to their customers and hone their goods to people’s real concerns and desires.  It will help hold companies accountable for their mistakes, and enable companies to better make things that make people happy.

Additionally, I will point out that my employer represents no small amount of “pure good” for the world, including organizations such as The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Vittana, helping them tell their stories.

Taking a chance on a startup

Why did I choose this opportunity out of the sea of possibilities?  I evaluated the landscape as an investor would, since I am investing no small chunk of my life in this effort.  From my entrepreneurial training and experience, I know that smart investors care more about the people than the specific business plan.  The plan will almost certainly change, but the key management will not.  Having known one of the founders of Banyan quite well for a number of years, I am certain that many key elements for success are in place.  The corporate culture and governance will be solid.  I will be working in an environment where I am supported, and where I can learn and grow as a manager and a technologist.

Exactly what will I be doing or building?  I admit I’m not sure yet, but I have some very interesting ideas that I won’t be sharing here anytime soon.  I am sure that my work is very well positioned to be a part of a major shift in an entire industry — a rare opportunity.  Whether or not my work will play a key role in this shift is somewhat out of my hands — these things are always a roll of the dice.  But in another sense, it’s entirely within my control, and this is what I love about working in a small company.  There’s almost nothing but work between me and effective execution of our ideas.  Many people tend to exaggerate the importance of the idea itself, forgetting that it is incredibly important to execute well on whatever ideas you have.  I’ve heard people say that they had the idea for YouTube years before YouTube did.  How quickly we forget the dozens of other companies all working on the same problem in 2006, which almost all fell by the wayside because they didn’t execute as well as YouTube did.  Ideas matter for sure.  But hard work is critical.

If you’d like to jump on this raft and start paddling too, get in touch with me.  I need a few key rock-star developers who are’t scared of chaos and can think creatively about business problems.

The author of the book is Arthur Benjamin.  He gave a demonstration of his mad skillz at TED a while back, which I’m embedding here because it’s awesome.

Migrating this blog has been fun because it’s forced me to look over a lot of the old content I’ve written.  A couple years ago I found Benjamin’s Ted talk, which has inspired all this craziness.  I think it’s good to keep the brain fresh by taxing skills that one might not have used in a while.

December is often a time of reflection, with good reason.  It's a natural opportunity to consider how things are progressing on a longer time-scale than we often do.  For me, 2009 was a year of making long-term commitments.  I made two huge ones, and I'm extremely happy with both of them.  The process of making these commitments kept me quite busy for almost the entire year.

Most significantly, I married the most amazing woman I know.  Maegan Ashworth and I permanently committed ourselves to each other on September 19th.  Our promises to each other were conversational, humorous, long-winded, personal and deadly serious.  We made them in the most public way we could manage, and were still sad to miss the company of many important people in our lives.  I could fill a book with everything I love about Maegan, but that's even more self-indulgent than I'm willing to be right now.  Suffice to say I am confident this will turn out to be one of the most important positive changes in my life ever.

The real planning for our wedding was compressed into just a couple months because it was difficult to focus on the ceremony while the other major event of the year was uncertain.  But in July we moved into a new house, ending 8 months of ambiguity about where we'd call home.  The process started in November 2008 when we first became interested in the house.  (Just before Maegan and I left for our bicycle tour across Vietnam, where we got engaged.)  It took months to reach agreement with the sellers and then months more to finish the process.  

I went in with a group of friends to buy the house together.  For years we had dreamed of living together in something like an "urban kibbutz".  I've liked that phrase ever since I read it applied to Barack & Michelle's early domestic life.  But for a more complete description of our situation, see our co-habitation blog.  (currently unpublished.  sorry.)

Getting a mortgage was particularly complicated.  The global financial crisis obviously did not help, but our situation was especially difficult.  Living comfortably with lots of good friends requires a big house, which means an expensive house.  In real-estate, expensive is also referred to as "jumbo" meaning that it's too much for any kind of government guarantee.  So banks would either need to make a long-term commitment to us themselves (a so-called "portfolio loan") or re-sell the mortgage to another bank on the secondary market.  We learned that the secondary market was "frozen" to use the popular vernacular, probably at about the same time as one particular bank which had all but committed to giving us a loan.  Another complication was that we needed 3 unrelated applicants to demonstrate our collective ability to pay back the debt, which was unusual enough to make many mid-crisis banks feel extra skittish.  I spent a large part of 2009 working on different aspects of how to finance this house.

Happily the stars aligned one evening when I was walking over to the house of my then-future, now-current roommates.  It was quite common for me at the time to walk those several blocks to sign yet another thick stack of papers to give to some agent or broker or other helpful professional.  Along the way I noticed a four-leafed clover in the grass, and picked it up.  In grade school I spent a surprisingly large amount of my recesses scanning the lawn for these botanical mutants, and once had quite an eye for finding them.  So it wasn't an unusual or significant event for me, but it had been years since I'd found one.  We taped the clover onto the application-du-jour which was going to a small local bank, in an act that signified frustration, exhaustion and powerlessness more than hope.  This bank ended up financing our house.

So that took up most of my year.  Trying to buy a house for about the first half, with moving and settling.  Then a wedding followed by a fabulous honeymoon.

Most significantly is around intellectual property.  Google’s IP policy for its employees can be effectively summarized as "All your base are belong to us."  It’s a fairly standard employment agreement — anything I do or think of on Google’s time or using Google’s equipment belongs to Google.  The only exception is if I do something entirely on my own that is not related to Google’s current or reasonably foreseeable future business.  I’m not a lawyer, but California and Washington laws both read about the same.  The thing with Google is that essentially nothing in technology is outside of that scope.  Designing juggling balls or running shoes might be.  This was a concern for me in considering the position.  But in the end I couldn’t resist.

I suspect this means I won’t be able to post as much about what the industry needs to be doing.  On the flip-side, hopefully I’ll be in a position to be getting the industry to do these things.  People often ask me what I’ll be working on, and I always answer honestly that I don’t know.  As a Product Manager I’ll be working on products but not writing code — this is similar to a PM role in other companies, but there are very few at Google and their relationship is much more of a peer than in some companies.  As to products, I think everybody has to work on ads as a kind of penance.  But hopefully when I get my feet on the ground I’ll be working on all the things I’ve been posting about here.

Personally this means I’m going to be extremely busy for a while as I finish up a full quarter at school and start up a new job.  I’ll also be a cross-bridge commuter heading into Kirkland most days which I’m really unexcited about.  But the opportunity to work with lots of brilliant people and have a huge impact on the world makes up for it.  I’m pretty excited!

I’m talking about my good friend Barry’s new float tank.  It’s called the Lilypod for hopefully obvious reasons.  Setting this thing up and maintaining it is sure to be an adventure.  And adventures deserve blogs.  This one’s lives at http://thelilypod.blogspot.com/

I increasingly find myself facing a related problem: trying to allocate my finite time to seemingly unlimited desires to do stuff.  As I grow and learn there seems to be no limit to what I want to do.  Similarly, as I grow and learn and the world evolves around me, I seem to be genuinely able to accomplish more things in given amounts of time.  I think this feeds into my desires. 

How can I balance my time between all the professional goals, intellectual challenges, social activities, physical adventures, artistic pursuits, etc. that interest me?  The realization of this parallel between personal economics and classical economics gives me a hint that there are systems out there.  I’m going to think about market-based systems for allocating my time towards achieving my goals.  I wonder if I can do this without explicitly stating and prioritizing them.

Another tool that might be useful include meditation.  These unlimited desires often give me a short-attention span, maybe even A.D.D.  My good buddy Mez suggested some basic meditation as a way to help focus the brain.  I’ve been trying it for the last few days and I can already see some benefits.

It’s an interesting idea.  Six 28-hour days make up a week.  6 x 28 = 7 x 24 = 168 hours.  {math corrected} If you sleep 8 hours out of 28, then you’re getting 48 hours of sleep a week, which is equivalent to just under 7 hours of sleep a night on a regular schedule.  (6 hours 51 minutes).  Personally, I’m optimal at about 7 hours 25 minutes a night on a long-term basis, but I can go 6 hours a night for quite a while and stay upright.

To see what this might be like with my schedule, I put XKCD’s schedule into a public Google calendar.  It doesn’t fit with my school schedule next quarter, so I won’t be trying it.  But if you give it a try, let me know how it works.

Or here’s the ical version.

People come in my office and say "that’s a cool keyboard."  My response is generally something like "that’s what it takes."  I don’t use a $300 keyboard because it looks cool.  It’s more like a wheelchair.

I have repetitive strain injury.  It’s not carpal tunnel syndrome.  My wrists basically never bother me.  It’s more my pinkies, more the left than the right.  I can think of 3 causes.  In high-school I took a 3-day bike tour from San Diego to Santa Barbara wearing gloves that weren’t well padded.  For about a week afterwards I had no feeling in my left pinkie.  Then in 1996 a marathon perl coding session of several 100-hour weeks left my pinkies pretty sore because of all the mixed-case variables in our code. 

Also, I suspect cubital tunnel syndrome might have some part of it.  I’m not expert but my understanding is that it’s a result of spending too much time with bent elbows stretching some nerves causing problems with pinkies.  I understand the easiest thing to help is to sleep with straight arms.

The ironic thing is that with a good ergonomic keyboard I can write English text day
in and day out, but more than about 10-15 hours/week of coding and
things start to hurt.  Writing code on a laptop in bed, fun as it is, will get to me after about 10 minutes.  Code involves tons more time on the special keys
than English.  You don’t need a lot of
[]{}()<>*=+-~&^_!#@$%/|\ in e-mail or in specs.  And you don’t
need to bounce around the arrow keys for editing nearly so much
either.  The Kinesis advantage keyboard helps quite a lot, because it moves most of the keys that the pinkies do under the thumbs.  But it’s not quite enough for me, because the shift keys are still the responsibility of the pinkies.  I’ve tried using a foot-pedal for shift, but haven’t been able to
re-train myself.  And I’m not sure I really want to limit myself by
having a job I can only do in front of a super-tricked out
workstation.  Screwing up (gee it sure would be nice to get
something done on this here laptop) means having to use a microphone
and eat grams/day of ibuprofen for a few months which I’ve done and really really
sucks.

So physical disability has sent me down an interesting career path towards middle management.  I have tons of fun in this capacity, but sometimes I miss making things work with my own hands.

Also, if any of you have hints of repetitive strain injury, I strongly encourage you to shell out the cash for a good keyboard.  It’s way cheaper than the alternatives.

My girlfriend’s condition has gotten worse in recent months, to the point where immuno-suppresents seem reasonable.  But instead, she’s opted to do something much more difficult and follow the advice of a naturopath.  She’s agreed to eliminate basically all tasty foods from her diet for some unreasonably long period of time.  After weeks of eating nothing but rice and steamed vegetables (I’m exaggerating, but not much) she’ll slowly start adding foods in one at a time to see what might be causing an negative reaction.  It’s an elimination diet — a fairly common practice which is pretty easy to visualize but takes care and dedication to do properly.

Why suffer through this process instead of just taking some pills and getting better?  Because it promises
to understand and solve the cause of the problem, rather than just cover up the symptoms.  I admire her strength and wisdom in this choice.  Until then, we’ll be making lots of use of the veggie steamer.  (My veggie steamer actually looks a lot more like this one, but mine has the fabulous retro-luddite feature of a knob to set how long to cook for instead of digital controls.)

I was biking home from work, riding up Pinke on my normal commute route.  A bus was stopped in the right lane so I moved into the next lane to pass it.  As I did this, a white SUV (IIRC license plate 974-PPF) pulls up close behind me, revving its engine and honking repeatedly.  The driver yells out of the window "Get out of the road!"

My immediate reaction was what I always do in such circumstances which is to assert my position in the middle of the lane to ensure that the car doesn’t try to zoom by without leaving me enough room.  In the next block he found space to pass in the third lane, yelling obscenities on the way until a red light stops him.  I ride up next to him to have a chat.

At this point my blood pressure is quite high and I’ve pretty much lost control.  As I rode up I yelled "Do you have a problem sharing the road?"  His thoughtful response was "Get out of the !@#*& road.  I’m in a car."  Regrettably at this point I just laid into him for being lazy and contributing to global warming, to cheers from passing pedestrians.  The light changed and we went our own ways.

What makes me most sad about this interaction is that I didn’t make the time to understand what was going on in his head.  I would have enjoyed exploring the logic that accompanied "I’m in a car."  I might have learned something by listening a little better.

I’m also disappointed in myself for losing my calm.  His behavior was so patently absurd that I shouldn’t have any reason to get upset over it — it’s not like h was pointing out my personal failures or anything like that.  Arguably the implicit threat of physical violence on me justifies anger, and that the accompanying adrenaline actually helps me deal with the situation.  But the subsequent clouding of judgment really doesn’t help.  A fear reaction might have achieved the same benefits of adrenaline with a slightly more measured response.

Overall I wish I’d remained calm.  I’m hoping that by reflecting on the situation like this I might prepare myself to handle it better next time.

The biggest problem with an uncompiled language is that there’s no compiler to tell you when you’ve screwed something up.  The incredible power and flexibility you get from Ruby’s loose dynamic typing and mixin inheritance style means that the IDE and compiler really have no idea what’s valid when you type it.  Compare this to Eclipse for Java or Visual Studio for .net where once you type ‘objectname-dot’ there’s a list of valid methods you can call and what kinds of parameters they take.  If you get it wrong, there’s a red squiggly underline saying something is wrong before you’re on to the next line of code. 

Yesterday 3 reasonably good software engineers took a solid 3 hours to figure out that we were passing the wrong class of argument into a method.  The problem was exacerbated by the behind-the-scenes magic that Rails does to try to make your life easier.  We were passing a Tmail object into ActionMailer.receive, which might seem to make sense since the receive method that everybody who uses ActionMailer writes expects a Tmail object as an input.  But we had forgotten that you’re not supposed to call this method.  In fact ActionMailer makes it impossible to directly call the method we wrote.  Instead you’re forced to call the class method, which we had forgotten expects a string as input that it parses into a Tmail object for you.  And like usual, the error message is useless.  Bad error messages are the single biggest flaw with Ruby on Rails IMHO.  (Maybe just the easiest to fix compared to the other problems.)  This was particularly frustrating because we spent an entire day tracking down something that any strongly typed language would have caught instantly.

For a long time, I’ve argued that people should use the highest level programming language they can afford to.  A huge advantage of pointerless languages is that you can’t make pointer mistakes.  It’s simply not possible to write that kind of bug in the higher level language.  Coding therefore become faster and more reliable than in a lower-level language.  The only cost is run-time performance, and if you’re writing server code as most of us do these days, then scalability is generally not limited by performance.  I had assumed that this analogy would continue from managed-code languages up to the hottest new scripting language that seems like it’s flexibility might fulfill OO’s promise of code re-use.  Today I’ve changed my mind.  Ruby is not a higher level language than C# or Java. 

Conceivably, a really good IDE could make up for a lot of this.  But due to the run-time binding in Ruby it would never be perfect.  When selecting a development system, generally I think the language itself is really unimportant compared to the quality of the tools and libraries available.  OO languages are generally about the same.  But IDE’s matter so much.  And libraries determine how much you have to write yourself vs. using what others have done before you.

A friend asked me if I was writing this as a warning or a cry for help.  It’s both.  It’s a warning about the scalability limits of Ruby.  Many people intuitively suspect that Ruby on Rails won’t scale well, but they confuse the different types of scalability.  The most common complaint about Ruby is that its runtime performance is too slow to scale well.  As Cal Henderson’s wonderful book on website scalability points out, raw performance does not matter if you can add more servers, which you can with RoR.  But as I learned yesterday, Ruby on Rails does not scale well in terms of complexity.  A friend once aptly pointed out that 43 things was the largest site anybody had managed to build in RoR to date.  The current state of tools and libraries and aspects of the language itself make it extremely difficult to write and maintain large complex projects with many developers.

It’s also a cry for help, but not for our particular project.  You’ll see it soon enough.  It’s a request that if you’re working on Ruby or Rails, please invest in the tools and the robustness of the libraries.  The error messages in Rails are total crap, as I’ve mentioned a couple times before.  And the IDE’s really need to improve if the framework is going to see major use beyond hobbyists.

What is Dodgeball?

If your friends have discovered dodgeball, I’d guess you’re probably in one of three states:

• Infatuated with this neato service that broadcasts SMS text messages to your friends when you go out
• Wondering what your friends are always doing with their phones under the table and what the big deal is
• Sick of dodgeball spam to the point of being about to cancel it, or having already done so

For those of you lucky enough to have never experienced dodgeball, here’s how it works: every time you go to a bar or something like that, you send a text message to dodgeball telling it where you are.  Then dodgeball broadcasts that out to all your friends.  You can similarly send out non-location messages like "Anybody want to see a movie tonight?"  As a dodgeball user the result is that most evenings you get some (sometimes several dozen) text messages about what your friends are doing or thinking.  So many, in fact, that you will likely start to take the buzzing in your pocket less seriously than you used to.  At this point the service’s name and logo start to make some sense:

You see an innocent guy who’s just been hit in the back of the head with a ball.  Again.  It’s hurts.  It’s not much fun.  But at least he’s used to it.  And for some reason that he doesn’t really understand himself, he continues to put up with it.  Seek it out even.  The SMS noise on my phone now sounds like the "Bonk!" of a cherry ball striking the base of the skull.

Dodgeball Abuse

Knowing that your friends are hanging out at a bar is great.  That’s what it’s about.  These kinds of dodgeballs are intrinsic invitations to come hang out.  But if your friends are at all like mine, pretty soon you’ll start getting dodgeballs reporting that they are "on a small boat in the middle of lake serene" or "in a seaplane over Puget Sound."  These kinds of posts are much more bragging than invitations to join since clearly there’s no way to get where they are.  Private parties, distant airports and obscenely expensive restaurants are similar.  Also, sending messages like "my parents are driving me crazy" or "I’m stuck in traffic" really don’t add value for your friends.  Unless you’ve got a crush on the sender, they’re just whiny and annoying.

Several times in recent months, my social mailing lists have been filled with pleas for restraint in sending this kind of dodgeball, with only limited results.  Generally the consensus seems to be that you can always cancel the service if you don’t like it.  I find this somewhat disappointing because I think there is a good way to use the service. 

I consciously choose to put up with the perpetual annoyance for a couple of reasons.  Most importantly, the extra messages aren’t much of a burden for me — I’m not charged for them and my phone is "smart" enough to handle them.  There’s also some entertainment value in keeping in closer touch this way.  But most importantly it’s because about once a month I’m involved with a positive serendipitous social interaction from the service the way it was intended.  I’ll be walking down the street and my pocket buzzes and tells me that a friend I don’t see much is a block away, so I drop in and say hi, or vice versa.  That makes it worth while for me.

Managing Dodgeballs

A lot of these problems could be avoided by dodgeball adding a few more personalization features around delivery.  Right now you can completely block a user.  The so-called ex-girlfriend feature allows a user to appear to be your friend in the social network, but not exchange any messages with them.  This is a good way of dealing with friends who send lots of dodgeball spam.  Another mechanism that some of my friends have chosen is to have all dodgeballs delivered via email to a dedicated address.

But a better way for those of us with "smart" phones would be to segment which of our friends’ dodgeballs get delivered via SMS and which get delivered via e-mail.  Then certain A-list friends could actually send you text messages, and everybody else’s dodgeballs would get queued up in a place where you could see them, but wouldn’t get interrupted by them. 

Until the newly indocrinated googlers add this, I think there are some guidelines we can all follow to dodgeball responsibly.

Proper Dodgeball Etiquette

It’s become quickly obvious to my group of friends that the only obviously appropriate time to dodgeball is to report your location when others are welcome to join you.  (My friends have collectively chosen to ignore this guideline about as fast as they identified it, but that’s a different issue.)  Saying you’re at a bar or a concert, or even "in bed" are all totally valid dodgeballs, if used when others are welcome.  Sending messages like "drinks for happy hour?" or even "the sunset is absolutely gorgeous" are also completely socially responsible, IMHO.

The question of dodgeballing on a date has lingered as an interesting one.  Some of my friends like to dodgeball as a record of the places they’ve been.  But if you’re hanging out with just one person, do you really want company?  Rose, social genius that she is, figured out the right protocol for that one when she asked me "should we dodgeball?"  Recognizing that a dodgeball is an invitation for company, she asked me if I felt like inviting others to join us semi-serendipitously, or if I’d rather protect our hard-scheduled time as one-on-one. 

Really, asking first should be the standard protocol for dodgeballing.  When you’re with a large group of people at a bar, there might not be a point.  But if you’re over at a friend’s house for dinner or a movie, asking first is the responsible thing to do.  Otherwise whatstheirface might show up.  ;)

Now go forth and dodgeball responsibly.

My inappropriately named "smart phone" just needed to reboot (not at all uncommon) to get its clock reset.  But before too long I realized that not only was my smart phone was smart enough to move back its own clock, but that it also moved back every appointment in my calendar by an hour.  For many months I’ve been using this application as my primary scheduling calendar outside of work, so it’s full of stuff for months into the future.  I really didn’t want to update hundreds of calendar entries by hand (I’m a busy guy) so I broke down and called support.

First tier of VZW support says "that’s a feature of the phone." I called his bluff and he connected me to technical data support.  After hearing the issue, Tim from tech support laughed and apologizesdnicely for it.  After a bit of digging we found a knowledge base article describing this exact problem and the workaround steps.  Like Tim had suggested, plugging it into Outlook will fix all the calendar entries that were originally created in Outlook.  But ever since the Outlook sync application broke for the 17th time I’ve stopped trying to synchronize my calendars between my PC and my phone and have just been using the one that I always have with me.  So essentially all my calendar entries are phone-enterred, which turns out to be a mixed blessing.

Reading the KB article carefully it says in a roundabout way that for appointments enterred in the phone you have two choices: erase them and recreate them, or adjust them by hand.  I had to point this out to Tim whose casual reading of the KB article had convinced him that all our problems were solved.  When I said this was unacceptable, we finally got a hold of Carlos at Palm technical support, although it was amazingly difficult even with Tim driving.

Carlos had the creative suggestion of telling my phone it was in Mountain Time instead of Pacific.  Smart move for a smart phone because now all my calendar appointments actually had the correct time again!  Carlos was hoping this would satisfy me and I’d go away, but I realized that with the phone’s clock set ahead an hour I would still get all my reminders an hour ahead of when they should be.  After a bit more monkeying around like this he admited that my only option was to update them all by hand.  I thanked Carlos for being utterly unhelpful despite doing his best and drove off to school planning my revenge.

I don’t think I’ve yet warned both of you my dear readers, but if either of you are considering buying a high-end phone, stay as far away from the Treo 700w as possible.  Its problems are too numerous to list in this blog post, but I’ll write the first few that come to mind.  Like the CDMA stack crashing periodically so it stops receiving phone calls or text messages with no visual indication that anything is wrong.  Or the fact that the POP3 e-mail plugin is only about 10% reliable.  Or the moronic UI that happens if you accidentally hit the prominent side-of-phone volume buttons while pulling the phone out of your pocket to answer it, producing a dialog which covers up the name of the caller, and because the touch-screen is disabled in call-mode you can’t dismiss the dialog.  Or the fact that the camera can only take about 1 picture every 15 seconds because you almost always need to reboot the camera app between shots.  I could go on for pages.  It really is the worst phone I have ever heard of.  At least it’s bulky and expensive.  I periodically hear rumors about a class-action suit against Palm because of it.

All of this infuriates me with a rage I rarely feel in my oh-so-mature late-early-thirties.  I’m often tempted to smash the thing into the sidewalk but I know my insurance plan would just get me a brand-new but just-as-shitty replacement.  Why am I so upset?  Because I hate Steve and Bill?  I don’t think so — I know myself well enough to realize that I don’t get this way unless I’m hiding from something.  I think the true answer might lie in the fact that I was stupid enough to think buying this phone was a good idea.  I wanted to be cool and on the cutting edge and definitely should have known better than to trust an important part of my personal infrastructure to a v1.0 product. 

It’s tempting to spend a lot of energy bitching at VZW or Palm and try to get them to replace my phone with a 700p.  Or to spend a weekend with Ruby on Rails and build a "everything I hate about my Treo" support site.  Or maybe to organize that class action suit.  But few of these things actually add value to the world. What I’d really like is for Palm or MSFT to write a little application that fixes this problem for me.  Instead, I’ll probably spend a few humble hours this week while on the plane to China setting back every entry in my calendar.

First off, if you don’t have a fair amount of rock climbing
experience and mountaineering experience, or have a lot of experienced friends who are
willing to babysit you, go with a guide service.  This year I
went without a guide service and I’m really glad I did it.  But 3 of
the 4 of us had been up previously with RMI.  RMI used to be the only officially licensed guide service, but the NPS just opened up to allow two more: Alpine Ascents and International Mountain Guides.  How all this pans out remains to be seen.

Going with RMI had some fantastic benefits:

• Lighter pack
• Don’t need to carry safety gear b/c the guides carry that for you.  (lighter pack)
• Don’t need to carry a tent b/c RMI operates a building at Camp Muir.  (lighter pack)
• Don’t need to carry a stove or a rope or a bunch of other stuff.  (lighter pack)
• More likely to summit b/c you’re carrying a lighter pack
• Don’t need to learn crevasse rescue skills
• Really just need to haul your body up the hill without much thinking

As for training and preparation, I have some specific advice as well.  Get in shape.  It’s really physically draining.  Get in really good shape.  Stairmaster, bike, run, whatever.  The best thing you can do is to hike to Camp Muir a lot.  Camp Muir is the 10,000′ base camp for most people trying to summit Mt Rainier.  It’s a 5,000′ vertical ascent from Paradise, which makes it a really solid workout.  IMHO it’s also a fantastic way to spend a sunny Summer day.  Plus you get experience at moderate altitude.  If you do that a half dozen times in a summer with increasing weight each time, you’ll be in pretty good shape.  And you’ll get to know your gear pretty well, which is also super important.  I like to load my frame pack up with several gallons of water as ballast.  Get to the top, and make some friends by giving it away to the thirsty climbers, and save your knees the effort of hauling it down the hill.

Wear lots of sunscreen, especially on the bottom of your nose.  I recommend Aloe Gator 45 Gel, which has the physical consistency of crisco.  You might need steel wool to get it off, but it’s one of the only things that can really protect you from the super-bright glacier-reflected rays. 

Also, talk to your doctor about getting some diamox (acetazolamide).  It’s an altitude sickness drug which can both cure a case of AMS ("acute mountain sickness" — no, really, it’s a technical term) and will also help you acclimatize to the altitude faster so you’re less likely to have a problem in the first place.  It’s generally quite safe unless you have sulfa allergies.  The first time I went up, the stupid RMI guides advised one of my climbing partners not to take it (because drugs are bad and they’ve never needed it), and he didn’t summit because of AMS.  The worst thing about it is that it makes you pee more, and the benefits are marked.  Be sure to try drinking some coke when you’re on it.  It’s truly bizarre — no matter how fresh the bottle, it tastes flat and you can’t feel any bubbles on your tongue.  Diamox’s mechanism is to crank the CO₂ thermostat in your blood-stream to keep your blood’s pH neutral as you ascend, and a side effect is that carbonated beverages taste flat.  Go figure.

You’re gonna need a lot of gear.  Much of it can be rented.  I don’t really feel like going into it all here — maybe I’ll write more later if y’all want.

Be prepared for a really long hike.  We took 34 hours from car to car and of that 21 hours were spent hiking with a heavy pack on.  Our packs were about 55 pounds each getting up to base camp and probably 20 pounds up to the summit.  It took about 4 days before I didn’t feel constantly hungry and thirsty.  It’s intense.

And of course, like the lawyers say, use your head.  If you have to read this, go with a guide.  I’m really no expert, and people die up there.  But when you’re standing on top of the world at 14,411′ it all feels worth while.

Computers are getting faster and more powerful.  As they do so, they’re helping humans be smarter.  Maybe not invidual humans, as some studies have shown that things like e-mail and powerpoint can actually make people stupider for some definition.  I can see the truth in this by considering several very smart friends of mine who don’t actually remember their spouse’s cell phone numbers.  Because they don’t need to.  Their computer familiars remember these things for them — the external brain.  In combination we get smarter — the synergy of humans and computers or groups of humans connected through computers — whatever you want to call these aggregate life-forms, they are way better at solving difficult problems than any individual human was just 15 years ago, when there was little e-mail and no Google.  In just 15 years, we’ve seen massive improvements in our ability to solve problems!

Moreover, technological change is accelerating.  These changes aren’t going to stop until we have completely overcome biology.  Unless something horrible happens.  Which it could.  To be explicit, I see humanity facing two possible futures on the multi-century timescale:

• Enlightenment by transcending the limitations of biology through technology
• A dramatic, catastrophic, probably violent and painful return to a simpler way of life

Because of this, I feel a sense of transhumanist morality obliging me to dedicate my life’s work to striving for the first option: species-wide enlightenment through technology.

I plan on writing a lot more on this topic.  But I wanted to start by stating a thesis along with a few basic ideas.

Many years ago I remember a friend of mine saying she was investing in Starbucks because she saw it as an aggressively run company that sells an addictive product.  Wise choice she made.  I’ve also heard several amusing stories recently about how Starbucks got their venture capital.

At business school lectures I’ve had at least two VC’s tell me this exact story: Howard Shultz comes into their boardroom to pitch them on how he’s going to charge $5 for a commodity product that regularly sells for 25 cents.  The VCs listened politely to his presentation, waited for him to leave the room and then laughed their asses off.  This must have happened to him a lot, since I’ve heard about at least two incidents of it.  Barring hindsite, it was a reasonable reaction, IMO.  Now I hear my b-school friends trying to figure out how to charge $5 per brick for really high-end bricks.  There’s one key missing element to this plan: mortaring a row of really nice bricks on Tuesday doesn’t give you blinding headaches on Wednesday if you decide your wall is all done being built.

Interestingly, in order to actually secure funding, Shultz had to prove that urban coffee markets are/were really far from saturation.  To demonstrate the almost insatiable desire of modern yuppies to suck down sweet foamy caffeine drinks, he opened 2 Starbucks retail stores on the same block of downtown Chicago.  The fact that both stores quickly became profitable was proof enough to the investors that this business was going to go somewhere.

And here I am, freshly back on the wagon, having endured my blinding headaches, staring at these two tall tasty tins of temptation sitting on my desk…  rat bastards…

The communist party line in China is also very concerned with responsibilities, but in a somewhat different way.  When a Chinese person gets put in jail for speaking out against the government, Americans cry human rights abuses.  The Chinese might respond by saying that the stability of the government is more important for the entire population than the welfare of any individual.  The jailed person was not fulfilling their responsibility to the rest of the population.  A little twisted, a little tautological, but an interesting perspective nonetheless.

Individuals also vary along this same spectrum.  Some people are much more duty-driven than others.  I’m thinking of Frederick, the "slave of duty" in The Pirates of Penzance, probably because of the fabulous performance I just saw.  But I digress.  Other people have very little regard for how their actions affect others, and are consumed with themselves.

Over the decades, I have swung back and forth on this spectrum without realizing it.  Now that I understand what’s going on a bit more, I am consciously choosing to think about the world more in terms of responsibilities — my responsibilities to my friends, my family, my community and to the world at large.  I also have a responsibility to myself, but I try to consider it in balance with the other responsibilities I have.

This is not to say that I support human rights abuses in China.  But I do think that American collective psychology is fairly conceited, and greedy in a short-sited kind of way.    I should really gather all that paperwork together and turn in my application for an EU passport.  Not that I think I could ever really escape from my fabulous community here in Seattle, but it never hurts to have options.

You can also be pretty sure that surgery’s a good option in your future when you can dislocate your shoulder just by trying to wipe your own ass.  Yay for modern surgery!

It’s also a good thing I managed to get my arm back in its socket before we had to do all that.