To Abe, Bryce & Dave

I recently experienced a lot of encouragement and support from two wonderful friends of mine. It goes a long way to combat discouraging thoughts, procrastination and despair about ones situation in rough times. It can be a call to action that gets the wheels of the mind turning again and inspires you to get back on the horse. I’m not talking about generic “be all you can be” or “believe in yourself” comments, but the type of attention that only someone who knows you can give.

I’m addressing you guys specifically because I know you’re in the same boat as me. We are all trying to make it on our own right now: starting businesses, selling our talents and trying to carve out a place in the world for ourselves, on our own terms. This brings on a roller coaster of doubt, anxiety and excitement that makes it tough to stay on track.

I have known each of you for a long time. I have worked with all of you in one capacity or another - so I say this from experience. You each have something to offer the world and you’re on the right path. You can make it as an author, Abe. You can make it as an artist, Bryce. Your business will work, Dave (and so will your music). Keep going. We’re in this together.

If you aren’t one of the three people I’m addressing, you might be asking yourself why this is an open letter. I’m simply suggesting that you encourage a friend. Now!

The following conversation has been re-threaded to prevent seizures and consciousness disassociation. Also, reading the following will be more enjoyable if you first put on some 3D glasses.

Crispy Lettuce: Some of these dudes in Asimov’s piss me off. 3 degrees, have awesome jobs and write reems of scifi in their spare time. wtf
Cookie Monster: haha, yeah, some people I think are born to withstand distraction. can you imagine living in a time when geniuses were legends, like Da Vinci, Franklin, Tesla. fuck, Ben Franklin still intimidates me
Crispy Lettuce: Be nice if that came about again
Cookie Monster: the dude was a 1000 year champion of the universe
Crispy Lettuce: Instead of ashton getting the attn he does
Cookie Monster: like an age of legends
Crispy Lettuce: Mmmm
Crispy Lettuce: I need to go to space and mine things. Need scientists to get lots of money to make that possible. I can’t have a deflector shield without them
Cookie Monster: I want a space game to come out. something rad
Crispy Lettuce: Haha
Crispy Lettuce: No, CM, no. Stop glorifying game makers. We want real ships
Crispy Lettuce: No more sim space mining, no more sim space mining!
Crispy Lettuce chants
Cookie Monster: maybe my childrens children can do the mining
Cookie Monster: well, what are you doing about it? you should be a lobbyist and try and bring down the military spending and redirect it at intergalactic operations
Crispy Lettuce: yeah!
Crispy Lettuce: Uhhh being enthusiastic about the privatization of space?
Cookie Monster: get the fucking lead out
Cookie Monster: enthusiasm doesnt make spaceships. try and get in at an aerospace company
Crispy Lettuce: I have checked them all
Cookie Monster: your enthusiasm may be too low
Crispy Lettuce: They only want Space Avionic Commando Machinists LVL 3. I’m missing like 6 degrees in particle physics
Cookie Monster: dude, Ben Franklin would have 8
Crispy Lettuce: I know, I suck
Cookie Monster: you are not doing Ben justice
Crispy Lettuce:
Cookie Monster: epic life fail. I am ashamed to know you
Crispy Lettuce: I have failed u, Ben!
Cookie Monster: I will just get in my space game. you can go get more degrees
Crispy Lettuce: Nooooooo! But who will manage the mining drones?! I can’t do it all!
Cookie Monster: I dunno man, maybe some other dork, I will be on patrol around Ganymede. blasting space shit
Cookie Monster: into space shit
Crispy Lettuce: That’s it, no space for u
Crispy Lettuce: No u stay here and live in ur games
Cookie Monster: I have a space shit transmutifier
Crispy Lettuce: No Ganymede
Cookie Monster: F U, I go where I want
Cookie Monster scoots around Ganymede

Alright, so apparently hijacking Twitter trends isn’t a new idea. As I passed the link around to my previous post, I learned that this was already going on. However, I hadn’t seen an example of how its being done until today. The instances I have seen are just messages that contain all the keywords of the current trends in a single message. Unintelligible spam. Not sure why anyone would do that unless their account got compromised. Even though I wasn’t suggesting spam on that level, some people were reserved about helping me out because of this preexisting blight.

Another thing I learned was that URL compressing services flag your URL after awhile as being suspicious. I have no idea what the criteria is to warrant being flagged, but it happened to my links a couple times. They redirect you to their site and say the URL has been flagged for being shady and then let you click on through to the actual page. Maybe they scrape the Twitter timeline and look for their links? If a message containing one of their links is repeated past a certain threshold it gets flagged? I’m always thinking about the logic behind stuff like that. Usually the real answer is boring and unsophisticated, haha

I think this is a good example of why failure is important. I would have never learned these things unless I had tried out my idea. It was also really cool to see my friends jump in to action without any questions. I’m not calling you all sheep of course, but you were ready to help when I asked. Thanks peeps! *hugz*

While I haven’t heard anything from Twitter yet, I did get an interview for some contract work. That pretty much consumed my weekend - getting a portfolio together and all that. I’ve got a ton of resumes in the water and I’ve had a few bites here and there. Hopefully something will materialize in the next couple weeks.

On to the next adventure!

Like so many people around the country right now, I’m about to be unemployed. Knowing there is a lot of competition for every single job posting that goes up, I need an edge - and I’m hoping you will help me!

I’m a huge fan of Twitter and they currently have a job open that fits me like a glove (Product Manager). I’ve sent my app in but I want your help with improving my chances of getting an interview. My plan? Simple. Get as many people as I can to tweet @twitter a message about interviewing me! Who knows, with a little luck, maybe we can generate enough noise to get some attention.

I’m certainly not expecting anyone to recommend someone they know nothing about. To help that out a little I have posted a copy of the cover letter and resume that I submitted to Twitter.

Are you in? Simply tweet out this message and lets see what happens!

@twitter Please interview @crispylettuce for your Product Manager position. We love him like we love Harry Potter!

What’s with the line about Harry Potter? Well, I’m no Oprah. I don’t have millions of followers. I think the only way I can climb above the chatter is to hijack a trending topic. Hopefully this message will get mixed in to the Harry Potter feed and more people will pick it up. It certainly can’t hurt

Thanks in advance if you decided to participate! I will of course post updates as to what happens.

I’ve maintained a Dedicated Server with some friends for a few years now. First we were with 1&1. That turned out to be a disaster from the get go. Their support was unbelievably bad and we had all kinds of problems getting things setup. Our server eventually got turned in to a zombie spammer by some botnet. At that point we decided to move to Server Beach. The quality of their service and systems was much better. We stayed with them for the last two years and it was a solid two years. But once again, our server was recently zombified by a botnet. This time it was more our fault for neglecting server upgrades/patches for nearly a year.

Our focus previously was to have a server we could develop custom sites for through our company (Binary Moon Studios). Having a Dedicated Server allowed us to host our client’s sites and have a sandbox that we had a lot of control over. It worked out pretty well. As BMS is a freelancing outlet, the throughput of business varies widely based on what we are all up to with our regularly scheduled lives. We’ve all been pretty busy so we haven’t sought out new contracts or clients. These days we are mostly hosting personal sites and that has shifted our server needs.

This time we decided to get away from having a Dedicated Server and move to a managed/shared solution. I keep seeing tweets about people loving Media Temple. I checked them out and now we’re in the middle of migrating to them. The two big factors in choosing them was their virtualized “grid” structure and the fact that it was a managed account (we are no longer responsible for maintaining the server). Most hosts have you rent a physical box and you don’t have an easy way to upgrade it - upgrades usually mean migrating to another psychical box. With Media Temple we aren’t stuck with a piece of hardware that is aging and will eventually require us to migrate.

However, it doesn’t matter how well a hosting company is put together, migrating from one to another is always a painstaking process. Half of the reason for this post is to make sure my site is functioning properly now that it has been moved I have the tough part (database portion) figured out and now its just a matter of rinsing/repeating a few times and we’ll be back to normal. Back to command line land for me!

I think what I had in mind when I took up Mountain Biking was something closer to Hill Biking. I lived in Arizona for so damn long I forgot what traversing a real mountain feels like. If you don’t do it on a regular basis, it makes you feel like a worthless meatbag. Once you do it a few times and your body starts adjusting, it does end up being a lot of fun

Each weekend I try to go out at least once and find a new place to ride. I’ve been using a combination of online trail reviews and maps, plus a book I picked up. None of them work 100% of the time. I combine forces to insure I find something and don’t end up wasting my time.

In my experience, the various trail review sites are hit and miss. Most are user entry and instruct you to “keep going down Road X until you see a rock on the left. Pull off and park. Trail picks up right by the rock.”. Seriously. That’s shitty.

The book I am using is entitled Bay Area Biking and I find it a useful place to start looking for trails. The difficulty rating the author uses doesn’t really make any sense to me. Being a beginner, I’m looking for the easy stuff right now. More than once I’ve been duped by comforting pics of reasonably elevated terrain and the ever deceiving “low” difficulty rating of 2. Only to arrive at the location and wonder WTF IS A LEVEL 5 LIKE IF THIS IS A LEVEL 2?!! I HOPE A BEAR EATS ME, ANYTHING TO STOP THE PAIN!

Once you find the starting location, it’s usually in a park. The park will inevitably have a bunch of trails inside it. Another shortcoming of the book is that it doesn’t show you the suggested trail in context to the off-shoots and other trails. When an intersection appears it’s not always clear which path is the one you are trying to follow. Is it the big Fire Road that goes up the hill, a trail that cuts back…sort of in the direction you came from or that vaguely defined deer trail to the left that looks like it might lead you off a cliff? I can’t wait until I can just carry flexible, digital paper that lets me zoom in and out on maps when I’m in the middle of no where. Enhaaance!

On every outing, I have had my camera with me. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve kept any of the photos so far (that’s on par though). I did take a pic with my phone last weekend. I had just reached the end of one length of the trail. I decided to turn around and go back the way I had come. As soon as I turned around to get back on the trail I saw this sign. It’s a stereotypically bad camera phone shot, but it gets the point across, “The odds on this trail are stacked against you. Enjoy!”

While getting this shot off my phone, I realized it says “No Weapons” on the top right. Are you fucking kidding me?! If I find a sign at a trail head giving me instructions on how to duel a Mountain Lion, I’m changing out my backpack for a flame thrower.

If you’re like me, you expect everyone and everything you interact with to be as high tech as possible. There is a lot of technology out there and everyone should be using as much as they can. If you have that attitude, you’ve no doubt run in to people that think you’re crazy.

Why doesn’t the GPS in my car update itself from a satellite or open wi-fi signals I drive by? Why don’t you have texting enabled on your phone? Why can’t I just IM a sales rep from your website? Why the hell are you using MapQuest?! Why aren’t you blogging about your business? Why can’t I point my phone, like a Tricorder, at any product and get details about it?

And on and on. None of this is really impossible. It’s not like I’m demanding my own spaceship with an FTL drive. Granted, when it comes to the level of personal involvement in technology, each of us has to decide how wired we want to be. I’m just going to make a grumpy face at you when you tell me you aren’t connected for at least 18hrs a day.

Businesses, on the other hand, have no excuse. Well…they spew plenty of excuses. Too costly, too complicated, “we’re working on it”, etc. Businesses that haven’t figured out that technology, specifically the Interwebs, is key to their survival are quickly dying off. Many are lagging behind and don’t even seem to know what to do with all the options available to them. Take this tweet I saw from @AcmePhoto this morning –

“Marketing failure w/ company I love & trust. They did it wrong w/ email blast. From line “customer-service” subject line “Email blast” ;-(”

If a company can’t handle a technology that has been thoroughly explored, such as email, what are they going do when the Social Web eventually comes charging their way? All they will hear is “I’m the juggernaut, bitch!” and then the lights will go out.

I actually worked for a company that handled email campaigns for big brands like IBM, Polaroid and Sony. There was no sophistication with how these campaigns were prepared and processed. It was embarrassingly low tech and management wasn’t up for investing anything to make these efforts more accurate and profitable. Oh and guess what! They went under! Hahaha, that fact gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

If you have suggested that your company start blogging, that they setup a live video stream, that someone should man a Twitter account or expose their culture via photos on Flickr, thank you. You’re not alone and we all appreciate your efforts. If they looked at you like you’re crazy, it’s ok. Just envision them eventually being tossed in to the Bonfire of Ignorance with the rest of the technologically illiterate companies.

The reason I decided to write about this is that I keep finding organizations that have Twitter accounts and are using them effectively. They are actually interacting with their followers like a normal person instead of only spamming robotic updates (one of the rare situations where I’m not advocating robots :P). Quite a few high profile companies are tweeting. Technically. The number of companies that do it right are few and far between in my experience. If you use Twitter, you’ve experienced the bots that come through and add everyone and have nothing to say except prepared messages. Thanks for making more spam, asshats!

A couple of the good guys I’ve found recently are @goldengatepark (de facto park site) and @scifri (Science Friday on NPR). Now maybe a slick ad agency person convinced them to venture out in to the Twitterverse or maybe someone listened to a “crazy person”. Either way, someone did a good job

Alright, I keep telling everyone I’m gonna get back in to blogging. I really want to but I keep running out of hours in the day. I figure I’ll start small and maybe that will get things rolling again. Let’s do this Project Manager style.

1. I saw the trailer for the new Star Trek on the front of Bond this weekend. Maybe its the Trekkie inside me that can’t resist…but it looks like it might be awesome. We may have to ignore some stupid shit in the film, like another emotional train wreck for a Vulcan, but I’m willing to give it a chance. The shot of the enterprise being built planet-side was amazing.

2. Our new president is video blogging. That is fucking rad. It only took our government 8 years to join the 21st century. There might be hope after all. http://change.gov/newsroom/blog/

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Ryan

Ok, so it took me awhile to get around to posting about ETech again. I’m at the Phoenix Film Festival this weekend and a film Friday night prompted a major theme from ETech that I wanted to talk about: Activism.

ETech 08 was still very Web 2.0 centric. This time, instead of cheerleading for new companies joining the 2.0 bandwagon in an innovative way, it was about focusing 2.0 technologies on real subjects and impacting change. Sure we can share music listening habits, photos, create our own entertainment communities and generate maps with data that is uniquely meaningful to each visitor but can any of that same technology be used to tackle real issues?

The answer at ETech 08 was not only “yes” it was “check out what we have already done”. The two main areas where change was being demonstrated through Web 2.0 technologies were Governmental Reform and Global Warming.

Social Web methods are being employed to collect massive amounts of carbon emissions data in order to promote and gauge change. Screen scraping and API technologies are being leveraged to generate websites that are positively affecting Copyright Law. And now, a new political reform movement has been born by the author of the Creative Commons project.

What does that have to do with the film I mentioned? Well, it was all about activism.

The Orange Chronicles documented the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2004. Ukrainians saw a chance to overthrow leaders with heavy Russian influences and went for it. Fear tactics and numerous instances of voter fraud were perpetrated by the Russian backed candidate to “win” the majority vote. When the results were announced a revolution erupted in the capital and spread through the country.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians peacefully demonstrated for something like three months…in the heart of winter. Fucking crazy. People from both sides of the line filled the streets and through all of the frustration and passion there were no riots, looting, police brutality, etc. It was inspiring to see a nation’s people band together and force positive change.

I realized I had heard very little about this at the time. I remember the Dioxin assassination attempt on the Ukrainian favored candidate, but that’s about it. Nothing about the scale of this movement. At one point there were millions of demonstrators in the capital city. It didn’t surprise me though, our country had endured a flaky election just a few years before and the same genius was up for reelection. Unicorn forbid the US population sees that a successful, peaceful revolution is still possible in today’s riot shield and rubber bullet world.

It got me wondering if all of this technological activism that was displayed at ETech 08 will lead to a revolution in its own right. It’s kinda awesome to think about. Geeks leading the way

This is day two of the O’rielly Emerging Technology Conference. Maybe I’ll spew my general thoughts about the conference at some point but right now I want to mention a couple nifty things I have seen so far.

I was just down in the exhibition hall talking to some guys at the Sun booth. I’ve always thought Sun was going to disappear into the ether. I know what they did in the past but not now and they’ve never really had a foothold in any particular area. I still don’t think they do but at least they have a couple of interesting things going on. I’ll gab about one of them -

Project Blackbox
This is easily the most interesting Sun project I’ve seen. It’s basically a portable server room that lives inside a freight container. Now that I’ve said that, I’m sure your mind is spiraling with all kinds ways to utilize that. If you want details and installation examples, check out the site (I’m not going to repeat their info).

The guy at the booth was the dude that designed the cooling system for the containers. He was pretty fun to chat with, not being a salesman and all. Fucking salesmen. The one use that I thought was interesting (that I will repeat) was an implementation involving data transfer. Apparently, it’s faster to load up the servers in a container with 3 Petrabytes of data and ship it across the ocean than it is to transfer that amount over the wire.

Stamen and visualizations
This company has presented a couple times this week. They are here showing off their fancy data visualizations and they are pretty fuckin’ neat. Their work is plainly listed on the home page of their site so go check them out. My two favorites are both from Digg Labs. I like seeing how things are connected, so I find Arc and Swarm the most compelling.

Food Hacking
This was pretty out of character for ETech but it was definitely entertaining. Almost like watching street performers. It was an excellent reprieve for my brain which was already overloaded by noon on the first day

These guys simply want to understand the science of food, taste, etc and then manipulate it for fun. Making something eatable is sort of a secondary concern. “Avocado oil? Well let’s turn that into powder because we know how.” It didn’t taste very good. “Nitro glycerin? I know, let’s spoon crème in to it and then put it in our mouths! Because we can! Neeeaaaatooooo!”

Being programmers as well, they have spread their passion to the interwebz. I got an excellent shot of this while they were demoing the site.

There you go. That’s a little taste of ETech 2008. More to come