What To Fix

Too Many Manifestos

2012-02-01T18:49:25Z

I spent several hours this morning scouring the internet for manifestos.

Why I did this, I do not know. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

As a result, I have a new blog entry up on my Tiny Giant Books site entitled "After the Agile Manifesto, Stop Writing Any More. Please."

Didn't get a lot of traction for the article on the aggregate sites I submitted it to.

I find that many times when I find a small detail and chase it down, nobody is really interested. But if I get really emotional about a big, broad topic, articles become much more popular.

I'm not sure if that's a quality of my writing -- perhaps I suck at being interesting about narrow subjects -- or the "market" for blog readers. Need to think about this some more.

Programming is the new High School Diploma

2012-01-30T12:00:20Z

It used to be there were four tiers of work in the United States. The first tier was for the truly uneducated: the illiterate. The second tier was for people who could be counted on to read and write and perform basic math: the high school graduates. Then there were folks who could be counted on to learn a lot more and take up positions of greater complexity: the college graduates. Finally there was a spot in the job market every so often for an expert.

Newsflash: the second and third tier are going away. In it's place is a single tier: people who are literate and are able to control computers. And we're nowhere near ready for the changes coming.

Programming is the new High School Diploma.

Sure, it might be another decade or so until the rest of the world catches on, but we programmers, especially those of us over 40, already see it today. Forty years ago computers were specialty devices found only in the most obscure places, now they are everywhere. Until strong AI is discovered, we know there are severe limitations of canned programming. When I was a kid, nobody had computers. Now my dentist's office has at least a dozen. Hell the dentist himself has 3 or 4 he walks around with.

As as consumer of pop-media, there might be an app for everything, but the way an economy works is people putting together disparate things into something new. There's never going to be an app for your job. Because if there was an app for your job, your job would be on your way to being replaced by robots or outsourced.

The new "middle tier" of the workforce looks something like this: literate, able to use math and write well, able to read a manual and instruct computers to take various actions depending on various conditions. Note that I'm talking about entry-level work. This job segment will take over "old" jobs from both the illiterate sector, and the college-educated sector. Eventually, as robotics comes to fruition, it will consume every job niche but the true experts.

I think a fair criticism of this essay is "there's nothing new here," and in a general sense, that's true. After all, we all saw this coming. As technologists, the more technology we deploy, the less mundane jobs there are in the world. That's a given. But the flip side of that -- the more advanced jobs there are -- hasn't really sank in for most of us. After all, we're already programmers. In a way, as programmers we're stove-piped; we see just the system that we're writing and (hopefully) the repercussions of that. We don't sit on the other end of the table and see a dozen jobs working a dozen manual processes replaced by three jobs working two dozen computer programs. While we see the good that we do for one task, we have absolutely no insight into all those thousands of new multiple-application jobs (and the real-world implications for people) scattered all over the economy.

This really sank in for me when I read that although the United States leads the world in manufacturing, it does so with an ever-decreasing number of jobs. Nobody wants people to stand on an assembly line; they want people to tell the robots what to do. The robots work on the assembly line. When I thought of robots, for some reason I just thought about manufacturing cars, but that change happened in like, 1990. What has happened with computers in my lifetime is now happening with robots. In the next couple of decades, just like the last, seeing robots will go from a rare curiosity to an everyday occurrence. The only jobs left will be those that deal with computers. Dealing with computers; programming, scripting, reading manuals, and connecting interfaces and data; it's the new reading and writing.

Progress is good, and I can't wait until we get a world where the truly dehumanizing jobs are all gone, but while these jobs are coming online now, the education system is nowhere near understanding this new reality.

The political implications of this for older industrialized societies are vast. If there ever was a "red alert" we could put on a problem, this should be it, for what is about to happen is truly going to be unprecedented. We are going to end up with societies that have developed complex automated support and production systems that they themselves cannot manage. There's simply too much work and too little competence. Instead, outsourced programmers will be used to supervise and control much of this modernization over the net.

This will bring on even more commoditization of business practices than we already have. While your dentist could use a nurse who is able to do data mining and various programming tasks to help him optimize his business practices (and gain an edge on his competition), he won't be able to find one. Instead, he'll pitch in with dozens of other dentists to buy a pre-canned support system overseas, with real, live, English-speaking operators. They'll be able to do the same tasks, sure, but they won't be part of his team, programming and working the business problem intimately in an effort to innovate. Instead they'll just be a fancy vending machine. As services stratify, the opportunity to take many different technologies and merge them together, inherent in programming, will be lost to hundreds of thousands of businesses of all kinds.

The critical question that needs answering right now is: how do we make people of all education and age levels into somewhat competent programmers?

ADD: I hope I've described "programming" broadly enough for you to get the gist. I have a strong feeling we all could end up in a deep and long discussion about just what I mean by "programmer" That's probably a post for another day. LISP experience not required. The key here is learning and using all sorts of already programmed systems in scripted ways that are all edge cases. Also, as much as I love computers, this is also not an advocacy essay. I am not advocating one thing or another nor asking for your approval. Things are changing. We must adapt.

Agile Backlogs

2012-01-26T01:54:20Z

For the microsite.

Yes, I know the video sucks. One day I will have a budget for the hottest Hollywood star, and the background will be from Industrial Light and Magic. But guess what? When that day comes -- I'll be at the beach!

Agile Backlogs Redux

2012-01-25T23:23:00Z

Spent some time today gathering together the many ways Agile Backlogs are wrong.

It was a painful journey -- very sad to remember the different, many ways we screw up doing backlogs. But it was for a worthy cause: I have a new microsite positioned around Agile. Part of the site is a bunch of landing pages, part is a blog.

I've never blogged tightly around one subject before -- quite frankly, the concept drives me nuts. But I'm wiling to give it a go. I have a lot of experience with Agile teams. Perhaps I can take some of my SEO/Microsite experience, some of my Agile experience, some of my e-book experience, and make something useful out of it. Who knows? Never know unless you try.

Sucky Things You'd Rather Not Think About

2012-01-24T12:26:49Z

Steve Martin used to say "I learned enough philosophy in college to mess me up for the rest of my life."

There's a bit of truth to that. Philosophy -- the real stuff, not the stuff you learn mostly in college today -- makes you deal with a lot of things you'd rather not.

Your death is imminent. No way around that. In the big scheme of things, you're not even an ant. In fact, you exist for such a vanishingly-small amount of time and have such a tiny impact on anything that for all intents and purposes you don't exist at all. The question shouldn't be "How can I really know the rest of the universe exists?" The real question is more like "How does the universe really know I exist?"

Science is just a bunch of guesses. Yes, we've gotten really good at guessing, but for all we know we're just getting better at describing the workings of the computer simulation we all live inside of. We can do amazing things by empirically observing things, noting patterns, creating possible rules, and testing those rules. Science rocks. But there's always the chance we didn't observe enough, that our model is lacking fidelity and we just don't know. There were no black swans -- until somebody saw a black swan. Newton's laws worked awesomely well -- until they stopped working. Induction, the idea that if we see something over and over again we can infer a general pattern, works until it does not work. The turkey thinks the farmer is a friend and always brings food -- until the day he shows up with a hatchet. Mars had canals, hell they were empirically observed by multiple scientists, until we realized we were just looking at the backs of our own eyeballs.

Everything really cool is always going to be 20 years away -- right up until the day you die. Twenty years is about the size of something that looks possible, yet has so many problems we're not really sure how long it will take. So when people ask experts how long it's going to be until some super-cool new thing comes out, the answer more than likely will be "20 years." One day you'll be dying of disease X and read that a cure for disease X is only 20 years off. That's probably going to suck a lot.

Trans-humanism is going to take a lot longer than people think. On one hand, we're already at the singularity: people are integrated with machines to a point right now where only twenty years ago it would have been a miracle. The folks from twenty years ago could not have predicted how all the technology is starting to interact with each other. On the other hand we can get carried away with this very easily. To take the idea of a singularity to it's most extreme level, to say that some mystical far-out world will come into existence where literally everything will be possible? Not so much. Even if the technology races ahead, we are in for a long struggle as the human side of the changing world adapts. Don't expect this to happen overnight. Odds are we end up with a machine in a few decades that has the horsepower of a human mind; and then we abuse it or fight over it for years afterwards. We have no history of welcoming new intelligent species with open arms. Don't expect that to change.

Science will never be able to transfer your mind into a machine. Yes, maybe one day in the distant future some miracle will happen where all of your mind can be analyzed and copied, but that will only be a copy. The "real" you will die. There will just be a twin that's born with everything about you. You won't magically pop over from one head to the other. Yes, "you" might continue, but only in the sense that a new person begins that's just like you -- a super twin -- while you die. Not a pleasant thing to look forward to. However the future works out, the wetware that exists inside your skull is subject to the limitations of being a biological device. Not going to change. Ever.

The religious people were right all along. Given all this uncertainty and almost pointless nature of existence, the only rational course of action is to creatively speculate on what values you want for your life and why. Then make decisions every day based on that creative speculation. Remember that the driver of all religions is each individual having to make value decisions based on incomplete information. This is a good thing and, in fact, the only thing you really have. Don't confuse that with religion in the sense of an organized social structure. I'm not saying join a church, or start believing in a deity (although many religions have rather vague deities which sound a lot more like "the universe" or "nature" than anything else.) The existentialists argue that any formal, self-consistent religious structure is necessarily broken -- God is dead -- not that the essence of religion, finding meaning by artistically living an authentic life, doesn't work. Living life is an art, based in your own creative speculative imaginings of what the universe expects of you. You can start with somebody else's imagination of how it all fits together, but at the end of the day it's up to you to take ownership of this -- complete with all of the doubts that you might have made the wrong choice.

While these things are indeed sucky, they are also reality, which means we might as well get used to them. After all, there are some pretty good things too. You live at the pinnacle of modern thought. Billions of years of evolution has happened to put you exactly where you are today. Nobody else has lived in a time where lifespan is so extended, living is so easy, and people from all over the world are so connected. The poorest person in the United States has things that Louis XIV could have never imagined.

But you can't experience the total awesomeness of life unless you own the bad parts too. It's been my experience that you have to absorb these sucky things -- take them in and let them wash over you -- in order to truly move past them and enjoy life. Otherwise they always seem to be nagging at your heels. You can live in total denial of reality, or you can push through these sucky things to the other side. Being in the middle is unpleasant. Yeah, college can screw you up for the rest of your life. You can end up thinking nothing is true and everything is pointless. But that should only be a pit-stop on the way to the "dancing above the void" that marks a truly meaningful and enjoyed life.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

2012-01-18T15:03:54Z

New review up on hn-books!

Refactoring the United States

2012-01-14T12:50:49Z

As a libertarian, I do a lot of whining and complaining. Seems like the government is always taking up for special interests and consuming more and more of my freedom in the process. No matter which party is in power, I can count on having less freedom by the time they're through with me. Sometimes each party wants to screw me over different ways, but many times both parties are paid off by corporations and such and the only difference is what kind of political bullshit I have to listen to while my freedoms are being restricted.

Every week, it seems like it just gets worse and worse. SOPA/PIPA, NDAA, and so on. We keep getting laws passed with names like "The Protection of Bunnies and Children Act" which end up letting government do all sorts of nasty things that nobody who has really thought things through would agree with.

I'm getting tired of complaining. Today I thought I'd put some possible solutions out there. Suggest some ways to refactor the government:

Constitutional Amendment: The government shall not abridge the digital communication of data between people.

Constitutional Amendment: digital data collected by a person as part of a wearable or embeddable computational device shall be considered an integral and internal part of that person.

Constitutional Amendment: For any year that the Federal Government increases operating expenses more than 3%, or that the total federal tax burden is more than 20% of GDP, currently elected officials will not be eligible for re-election. (Also known as the "Warren Buffett" rule)

Constitutional Amendment: No federal law shall be valid for more than 40 years or less than 1 year.

Constitutional Amendment: The only form of tax collection authorized to the Federal Government is a flat tax on consumption, with blanket exemptions for certain types of consumption created and managed by law.

Constitutional Amendment: Each Congressional Representative shall represent no more than 100,000 people. (This would increase the size of the House to around 3,000 members, easily manageable by technology yet much more difficult for a 2-party system to control)

Constitutional Amendment: Senators shall be appointed by the legislatures in each state (This takes the Senate back to being an aristocracy, which was the intention of the body, and not just another place for populist grandstanding)

Admittedly there are probably a lot of problems with my suggestions. I would point out, however, that amendments are supposed to be simple and broad. They are later "colored" by court action. So although we have freedom of speech, we can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater. Likewise, although we might have freedom of digital data transfer, this probably wouldn't be construed to allow incarcerated drug lords to control their crime empires from prison. There will be many reasonable limitations to these amendments which will come out like always, through judicial interpretation.

I'd also caution against taking facile pot-shots at some of these ideas. It's easy to sound like you're making a valid criticism when in reality that's not the case. For instance, one of the reasons we have a popularly-elected Senate is because the states did such a bad job of it. At one point a businessman in Illinois basically paid-off every legislator so he could be a senator. This makes for a wonderfully dramatic rhetorical point, but looking back I think it was a major overreaction to change the entire system simply because of local abuses. The way it was supposed to work was that the House was filled with people who lived next door. The Senate was filled with rich banker and lawyer types. That's because the system is set up to be a balance between aristocracy and representative democracy. (Most graduates of High School civics classes are probably unaware of this fact.) What we've ended up with is both houses being full of banker and lawyer types -- the reason is that the House is too small, limiting the number of seats available, and the Senate is too dependent on national political parties for their election. Let's have some Senators chosen by states with 50/50 Democrats and Republicans. We know from past experience that we end up with a Senate that's much less partisan and full of more calm, thoughtful, diplomatic members.

I could go on, but the point isn't to defend each item. It would make for too long of a blog post. I just wanted to point out that I've heard many of the objections to these ideas. This wasn't something I saw on TV somewhere or read about in the back of a libertarian comic book.

The important thing is putting something on the table. Complaining is easy. Suggesting fixes is not. The only way we can improve is to discuss our problems enough so that we can then begin outlining ways we might fix them. Democracies work on conversations. Whining and complaining is a good way to begin a conversation, but at some point you have to move on to the next step.

ScrumMaster

2012-01-12T15:38:43Z

Shot a video for my ScumMaster book last night.

I think that's mostly it for the landing pages -- at least the big parts. I have a few more reviews coming in and I need to run some standard checks on the pages. Then, of course, the rewrite.

Somebody told me the video wasn't that good -- my head is down in the bottom of the frame and it runs on too long. Meh. I spent three hours shooting it. What do you think? Should I re-do it? Or is it good enough for now?

Drive-by Tweeting

2012-01-11T17:33:40Z

The other day when I posted my article about startups being like ice cream factories, a famous person from the startup community sent me a tweet. Something like "Great article! Keep it up!"

This was awesome! As a rule, I'm very stingy about who I follow. It's not that I don't like folks, I just like using Twitter as a conversation tool and not an endless stream. But here was famous person X telling me how awesome I am! I went immediately over to Twitter and started to click the "follow" button.

But then I caught myself.

You see, this was not the first time I've had a famous person pop over with a compliment. I really like this -- hey I can use the encouragement! -- but Joe Sixpack tweeting me with an "Awesome, man!" and famous person X doing the same thing are different things entirely.

Why? Take a look at what happens next. I click "like" or "follow" and become part of 27,421 other people following famous person X. Personal conversation with that person then ends.

I have nothing against the person who tweeted, and like I said, I'm immensely thankful. The guy that tweeted to me is a truly nice person whose work I admire. But there's a bit of game theory going on in social media. Eyeballs have value. If you are not careful, your stream becomes polluted with all sorts of people who just randomly said something nice to you one day.

It works pretty nice from the other end. If you're famous person X and building a mailing list! Hell, I might even try it myself someday. Take an hour each day and tweet, IM, or email authors of articles I see on HN and tell them how awesome they are. I bet you could pick up between 20 and 30 new followers a day. Do this for a month or two and soon the network effect would start to take hold.

But if you're not into noisy streams, as a recipient you have to resist the urge to follow when approached like this, especially from people with huge followings. (Or who are building huge followings.)

Yes, it's a good thing, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. You've probably just been a victim of a drive-by-tweet. :)

Welcome to the Ice Cream Factory

2012-01-09T12:41:45Z

When I worked for Pitney Bowes in Connecticut, one weekend the family took a trip to nearby Vermont. No trip to Vermont is complete without visiting Ben and Jerry's -- the world-famous place where they make all the yummy ice-cream.

We saw the strangest thing.

You could walk right in on the workers. I kind of expected an overview of the way ice-cream was made, perhaps a free cone (which, in all honesty, was one of the big reasons we visited), but a big part of the plant had glass walls. We could walk right up and watch everything they were doing in there. There were no secrets at all!

I didn't understand how they could do this. Didn't they have trade secrets? Things they had learned over the years to make their ice cream the best? If people could just walk around and watch everything they did, how could they run a business? Hell, how could they concentrate enough to run a business? Having all these clowns hanging around everyday would drive me bonkers.

A couple of years later I was working for the Federal Reserve. Great gig in downtown Washington, D.C. Right on the national mall. We could sit in the lunch room and watch buses pull up and thousands of tourists get off and start taking pictures. I would be checking in at my hotel and suddenly 300 Koreans would walk in the door -- all with that "Wow! Take a look at that!" look on their faces. Whatever I was doing, wherever I was, there would be tourists.

At work the tours weren't too bad -- after all, it was only every now and then, and it wasn't as bad as the Ben and Jerry's deal. It was actually kind of flattering. But still, I didn't see how anybody could run a business with tourists underfoot all of the time. I could deal with seeing these folks from time-to-time, but hell if I could put up with them in my office where I was programming.

Many years later in the startup world, I look around and it's not unusual for people to share everything they are doing. Popular blogs show how ideas were found, markets discovered. There are even lots of guys who publish weekly sales and profit numbers. Ideas are cheap, they say, information has to be free! The more eyeballs the better.

I'm still struggling with this -- something about this seems a bit too facile -- but I'm getting better. One of the things I've learned is nobody much cares about anything you are doing anyway. No matter how level-headed you are, you always consistently overestimate the degree to which anybody actually gives a hoot about your startup idea.

In a world of apathy, the best you can hope for is to write an interesting blog article. Then, if you're lucky, some smart people may drop by and offer you some advice that you really need. This is a key element of the startup experience -- serendipity. It can't be planned and it can't be forced. It's what makes a Silicon Valley work -- lots of politely-interested strangers providing bits of advice and informally seeing what combinations they can make to the community in general. Because people don't care personally about what you are doing, but they do feel part of a larger community that likes to help folks. This is the thing that is so hard to replicate about SV. You can dump a ton of money and build a hundred incubators, but you're nowhere near having an environment where you can walk a block to Starbucks, ask the first ten people in line what they think of your app, and end up with half-a-dozen great pieces of advice. The culture just isn't there. It has to grow.

And sorry, I still don't think people share as much as they make out to be sharing, at least publicly. Yes, every day I will see dozens of articles titled something like "How I got 100 thousand subscribers in one week!" These articles will tell me all sorts of generalities about getting celebrity endorsements and such. But most of the time I leave the blog just as ignorant as when I arrived. The critical details are always missing. Big ideas are always worthless, but a very small number of tiny ideas are priceless -- and perishable. You'll very rarely ever see these tiny ideas being published. If so, it's always a mistake.

For instance, if you knew that famous reporter X was a big photography fan and loved to chat and write about pictures, and then you pitched a story about your business which had a photography angle, would you be blabbing about it on your blog? Or would you file that piece of information away until the next time you needed a story? The reason why we keep reading all of these overnight success stories without actually learning anything is that the authors skate over the tiny details that make the entire thing work. Most of the time the readers don't know enough to realize what the authors are doing to them -- painting some broad attractive picture of amazing fame and fortune while ignoring the key tiny little tidbits that went into making it happen. So you get the general feeling that you're seeing something, but there's nothing really there. In a lot of ways it's like a magic trick: look over here while I do something over there. Interestingly, these tiny tidbits are exactly the kind of thing that you might share with somebody over coffee -- but you'd be an idiot to publish them.

Even Ben and Jerry's probably was this way, I was just too ignorant at the time to notice. After all, making ice cream isn't much of a secret -- no more than "How to speed up your website" or "Unknown magic of C#" -- all that stuff, while appearing to be important is just mundane technical details. The real secret is business relationships, marketing plans, how to approach new distributors, strategic plans, all the little detail work that goes into making and popularizing a company logo such as the one shown above. This is the good stuff, and no matter how intently you stare at them making ice cream, you're not going to see it.

So lately when I'm doing something like setting up a landing page for my new e-book on being a ScrumMaster, I go ahead and blab about it even though -- gasp! -- i'm actually still working on the page. Here I am making the ice cream. Here you are staring through the glass. Who knows? Maybe somebody will take a look and offhandedly suggest a great improvement to what I'm doing. Maybe you'll see something that will help you dramatically improve what you're doing. We'll never know unless we try.

So welcome to the ice cream factory! Just don't peak under the office door over there.

Playing Around with BoxShot 3D

2012-01-06T19:29:39Z

Been having fun with the little ray-tracer app I bought to make an image of my e-books. Like all things nerdy, it has a lot of little options, but it's surprisingly easy to use, too.

What I've been reading is that people are much more likely to buy an ebook if it looks like it might be a real book. Kind of weird, but people are like that.

Here's a shot I finished yesterday morning. I think it looks pretty close to being real!

It was really cool because it would do the alpha masking so I could output a transparent png file, shown. Bonus points if you can read any of the text on the back of the book (which was never intended!) I had to make it look real, yet on a tight budget and zero time, so I just faked it all. I felt somewhat like a counterfeiter or forger -- how close to real could I make it look?

But like all of these things, if I'm not careful I could spend a lot more time in a quest for perfection, and with a startup spending that kind of time on one thing is never advisable.

Still, cool.

E-books Are Not That Easy

2012-01-04T23:49:29Z

Seems like all I ever read about making an ebook is how easy it is.

Either that or a story about how somebody has created the perfect online app to let you self-publish.

I've just self-published my first "real" e-book. It's a step-by-step guide on how to set up an Agile team. The title is ScrumMaster. Here it is:

I found there were all kinds of details to keep track of -- whether or not you use a magic application or not. Here's a brain dump of just some of the things in no particular order.

Market research: initial. Determine the size of the potential market, what the buying indicators are, and where the competition is.
Landing page for your book (that you own). That's domain registration, formatting, JavaScript, email hookups -- the whole shebang.
Actually writing the book.
Converting the book into EPUB or another format. Bonus points if you write the book in a text editor and make your own BASH script to pack it all up.
Finding reviewers.
Creating a cover image.
Creating a 3-D image of your book as if it were a real book.
Creating a marketing plan.
Locating a distributor. Amazon pays me 17 bucks for a 50-dollar book. Can you say "assholes?" LuLu pays me 43 bucks, but only if you buy on their site. Do the math. Platform vendors own authors and small publishers.
Setting up an "I'm interested" email list in MailChimp. Integrating that list with your site.
Locating or creating any relevant artwork that you want inside the book.
Testing the book on various reader formats. Yep, it's back to the bad old days of browser compatibility. Looks great on my DX. Sucks on my Nook.
Validating your book. Just like HTML validation, it's not strictly necessary, but if your book validates at least it makes you feel better.
Dealing with special tags. Kindle has a page-break tag. Should you use it? I didn't. I'm not sure what the correct answer is.
Worrying about copyright issues. Remember that picture you took of the Sprint close with 15 guys all working at the story board? Got model releases from those guys? I didn't think so.
Market research: execution. If you finally get a book completed, then the real work begins: marketing campaigns. From your initial research you know there is a market, now how to you reach them? Who are the thought leaders? Where do the people hang out? What are their selling points? Some of this you'll only find through execution, but after you qualify the market though initial research, you had better be continuing the research as you put together the e-book.
Getting reviews. It's a social world, and people buy based on social signals. Can you provide enough social signals to a potential reader to allow them to make the purchase? That means a lot of people explaining your book's benefits to strangers. Where are you going to place those reviews, anyway?
Beta test. Yes, books, like computer programs, have beta tests. Who's in your beta program? How are you going to manage it?
Buy an ISBN. Have you seen the price on ISBNs? Try over a hundred bucks for just one number. Then you need a new number for every format your book is published in.

I'll be upgrading my book to version 2.0 over the next week or so. This is just "first publish," which I imagine to be something like the first time your program starts working -- pretty neat, but a long way from anything solid. The world is full of computer programs that solve all sorts of problems that nobody wants. I'm sure it's also full of e-books that nobody wants. I still need to check how the book appears on LuLu and Amazon, tweak the sales copy, and receive and process about an half-dozen technical reviews. The content is the least of it -- as a domain expert I imagine my content is 90% on-target. It's all the other stuff. If my marketing and sales pipeline don't work? Hang it up. It was a waste of time.

E-book publishing is not as easy as writing a MS Word document and pushing a button, no matter what the bloggers say. Even if you spend a couple of thousand dollars (I know somebody, not me, who spent over $4K on his e-book) it doesn't guarantee much of anything.

E-book publishing looks very much like writing your own app. Yes, you shouldn't spend all your time in the weeds, but just like any startup activity, the technical details of doing it and the actual business details of making it all work are two completely different things. The trick is making both the technical work and the business work mesh into one product. All this work I've done? I'm just barely getting started. Now the real work begins. Don't believe what they tell you. E-books are not that easy. Not at all.

Hacker's Guide to Mostly Free Great American Literature E-Books

2012-01-04T12:50:13Z

As a computer guy and hacker, I spend a lot of time reading technical articles. When I'm not doing that, I'm reading about startups.

It occurred to me that if I wasn't careful, my life would pass me by and I would have never spent any time with the great classics. Not knowing where to start, I went to my favorite source for all things academic, the Teaching Company. I just finished a terrific course called Classics of American literature from the Teaching Company. The professor, Arnold Weinstein, took us on a nice tour of American literature from the Revolution up until about 1950 or so. I enjoyed his explanation of subtext, his dramatic reading, and understanding the context and impact of many books I had heard about but never really took time to investigate.

It was a great romp, and I picked up a nice short list of works I want to read as soon as I get a chance. I thought I'd post it here. That way I can remember it. If you're of a technical mind like I am, you might like these too. I'll try to explain what as a hacker attracted me to each work.

The Red Badge of Courage. Just finished this last week. I should have read it in high school, but somehow missed out. Crane talks about the balance between a logical mind and young spirit and the chaos and inhumanity of war. The way the main character tests himself and his reactions, the way he observes the things around him, it all made for an excellent book. (By the way, these are affiliate links, but many of them, like this one, point to free e-books from Amazon. I will specifically call out the free ones.)

Moby Dick, or the White Whale. (free). The classic from Melville. I started in on this last week as well. This is a deeply philosophical work, with Melville talking about "the whiteness of the whale" and man's struggle against the universe. I also want to pick up Benito Cereno, which asks the question "If a person is totally innocent, are they able to see evil in the world?"

I've already read quite a bit of Poe, and enjoyed it. I didn't know how much "professional" writers of the time didn't like Poe -- they thought he was a hack. Part of the reason might be that after he wrote one of his famous poems, he then wrote a newspaper article giving precise how-to instructions for writing a famous poem! As you might imagine, it was a stinging accusation at poetry that it was so formulaic that you could teach it by the numbers. I guess that didn't make him very many friends.

Emily Dickinson was a nice find. I had heard of her, of course, but I liked what I heard from Weinstein. It sounded very direct, insightful, simple, yet subtly complex. She was a recluse, and one of her visitors famously described her as peering right through him as he spoke to her, as if she could see and understand everything about him. Yet her work reads almost child-like. Geesh, I might actually consider picking up poetry book! Please don't tell the other nerds.

The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. (free). Described as one of the best ghost stories ever and a discussion of what reality and perspective mean, it sounds fascinating. I'm keeping this in my stack for taking to the beach. I don't want to give away too much of the story. Hopefully I will have forgotten it by the time I come back to this list.

The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (free) I finished this two weeks ago. It's very short -- took about an hour -- and it's a must-read. Used now as a feminist resource, it's a great study about the descent into madness.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Made into a motion picture appearing soon, this sounds like a wonderful novel about the American Dream, getting rich, lost love, society, and the compromises we make and things we give up as life continues on. It sounds very sad, but also powerful. Powerful novels are always worthwhile experiences.

Ernest Hemingway. I've linked to the Amazon search page because I can't yet decide which of his works to read. "The Sun Also Rises" sounds really good, as does his more recently published "The Garden of Eden," which was pulled from his manuscripts and put together in publishable form in the 1980s and has a good reputation. His style is masterful, and he's a legend. Definitely want to check out some Hemingway.

The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. As I understand it, Faulkner tells the same story through multiple viewpoints simultaneously, never explaining what is going on. The reader eventually picks up the thread and starts putting together the story, but Faulkner makes them work for it. By the time the story is finished, all that extra effort on the reader's part leads to another emotionally-powerful piece. While I dread having to "work" so much, the professor definitely sold me on it.

Also from Faulkner is "Absalom Absalom," a story of friendship and the American Civil War. I've always had a fascination with the Civil War and look forward to reading this novel because of it.

There are not a lot of plays mentioned, but Eugene O'Neil feature prominently. I'm looking forward to tracking down a community theater version of "Death of a Salesman" and perhaps "A Streetcar Named Desire". From the descriptions, I've already seen these plots rehashed in other movies. It'd be good to see them done in the original form by the masters.

Finally, I wussed out and ordered the BluRay version of Toni Morrison's "Beloved" It sounded really good, and I should have ordered the book, but the movie looked like a keeper and my book list is already out of control!

Many of these works, because they are classics, can be gotten either free or picked up for pennies. So if you're on a budget, poke around a bit before you buy anything.

I really enjoyed Weinstein as a professor. I did some googling on him and found out he passed away just a few years ago. That's a shame. I was looking forward to writing him an email and thanking him for such a great course. If, like me, you don't have time to read all of this but would like the tour, pick up the CDs and listen to the lectures. I think you'll like them!

When I Grew up I Ended up Being a Writer

2012-01-02T13:35:56Z

I hated English class in school. The diagramming sentences. The reading stuff by guys who couldn't write a grocery list without using a thousand words. The political and personal interpretations by the teachers. The endless lists of words to learn. I had a lot of dreams as a kid, and none of them involved writing. Blech!

I hated creative writing. I was in a special creative writing group just for gifted children. The other kids -- mostly girls -- would write about their feelings in such a mushy and saccharine manner that it made me want to barf. Lame poetry. giving each other fake praise. It was all just too much. When I had a chance to critique these girls my analysis was carelessly acerbic. There is no theme here. Your meter is off. What is the point of this sentence? This adjective doesn't work here. You've wasted my time. You suck. Go away. Learn to sew and have kids -- there's no writing in your future.

I was kind of a class clown. What can I say? Tact was never my strong suit. Engineering and math seemed a lot more practical to me than fluffy prose.

My own writing for the group -- I had to write as well -- consisted of whatever I thought would mess with the other kid's heads the most. I remember one short story I wrote about a moose, from the moose's point of view, that told the story of his quest to find water, instead falling into a temporal rift that transported him back in time to where he was eventually eaten by dinosaurs. I'll never forget the look on the other kids' faces as they read my story. They had absolutely no idea of what to do with it.

I liked taking pictures, though, and ended up being a photographer for the school newspaper. That was a lot of fun! And from that job I was approached by the editor of the local weekly newspaper after I graduated and asked to do some lightweight photojournalism. Then, after the Marines, college, and BigCorp, I ended up writing for the local daily newspaper as a stringer and doing some national magazine work on the side.

There was a time in my early 20s that I seriously wanted to be a writer, but it never worked out. Computers and technology always called me back. The money was simply too good.

Twenty years later I get up today, update my funny picture collection, post to my blog, and then start working on my new short e-book. On my larger stack is another couple of blog posts I want to do for some other folks, another two short e-books, about a dozen websites that are in various stages of completion, and a larger e-book which I've been working on for a year.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to be a secret agent. I wanted to be a entrepreneur. Once those childhood dreams evaporated, I wanted to work with something substantial. Something with a deep set of logically-consistent rules. I look around at my friends in the tech community and I see a lot of me when I was a kid: easy criticism of other people's creative work, disdain of the "soft" sciences, and a desire just to focus on technical things. Like me, they find comfort in the certainty of hard science.

What I found was that no matter what you do in life, written communication is a critical part of your job. In fact, the more important you are in your field, the more important it is for you to be able to communicate. And I'm not talking about simply relating facts, either. The best part of writing is letting somebody else inside the way you think. That's the real value, whether you're writing fiction or fantasy. Writing, like managing and like manipulating technology, is a fundamental skill that must be mastered no matter what else you do. It's not optional. I wanted to do a lot of things. I did those. What I ended up being was a writer.

I miss that moose.

Under-reported Stories of 2011

2012-01-02T00:07:48Z

United States turns the corner on petroleum independence.

exporter

The myriad complexities of government in the states leave dozens of important issues hanging and un-attended for next year. The press continues to look at one issue at a time, say the Bush Tax Cuts, without looking at the larger context. There are dozens of things like the Bush Tax Cuts that are all coming "due" at the same time and nobody has any idea at all how to deal with them. The regulatory system is like a giant snowball rolling down a hill, each day getting bigger and bigger. There have been so many one-time, temporary, and complicated tax/policies made that businesses literally have no idea how much it costs to hire an employee -- or how much it might cost in five years. No wonder unemployment is a problem. It remains to be seen whether or not they can put enough bubble-gum and bailing wire on this mess to kick the can down the road for another year or so or not.

Congressmen and their staffs have been making a killing buying and selling stock with insider information and there's nothing we can do about it. I still can't believe that nobody is completely outraged at this story. Congressmen have hearings affecting the markets -- then they and their staffs make trades to capitalize off the legislative changes they are making. It's a scandal and an outrage, yet nobody seems to care that much. Go figure. Whatever the press coverage in 2011, this story is not going away.

Higgs-Boson found. Yes, the official word isn't in yet, but they've basically found it. Look for the "what's next" stories to start popping up around mid-year.

Mars has water. Lots of it. This year has noted a change between "we're not sure if Mars has water or not, but it might have a billion years ago" to "Mars has lots of water underground right now and we're going to find it." I'm not sure where that story goes. Perhaps Elon Musk will start picking landing sites? It'll be interesting if the "Mars might have had bacterial life a billion years ago" follows the same trajectory, especially with the new Curiosity rover arriving in August.

Europe is going to self-destruct and take the rest of the world into another recession. Europe is in a bad place, and nobody knows how much more papering over the problem they can get away with. Will the ECB dump a ton of Euros on the market buying up some of the debt? Will anybody figure out an orderly default for Greece? How can they have the controls they need and still have individual countries? I don't have the answers, but it's all coming to a head sooner rather than later. This is the big storm cloud on the horizon, and although it's gotten some attention, it's been nowhere near adequate for the size of the problem.

Posse Commitatus lifted for the U.S. Ever since the United States Civil War, the American people have purposely decided not to allow the military to have police duties. Armed soldiers should not be imposing law and order on the population. Now the War on Terror has caused a change to this stance, allowing the military to interdict and indefinitely detain possible "terrorists" found on U.S. soil. What with the troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, if that's not a perfect example of the "standing army" that the founders feared, I don't know what is.

Lots more, but these are the ones that come to mind. One wild card is the Kepler mission. You could argue it didn't get the attention it deserved in 2011 but so far many of the results are so preliminary. Will there be some big breakthroughs -- perhaps lots of earth-like planets -- in 2012? I hope so!

In fact, here's hoping most of these stories take a turn for the positive in the new year.