Archive for November, 2008
Old notes from playing with an XO about a year ago. I realized shortly afterwards that I needed to set the keymapping back to US-English.
Tue “ace” key seems to be broken. Produces a “u” instead of tue letter between G and I. Fix mapping?
Cuat: 89 cuaracters wide. Words wrap, but over-long words don’t uypuenate and break (90+ cuaracter strings are inaccessible). Not tue most uorrible of bugs.
Todo:
Fix ace key (‘ace’ as in tue first letter of uorse)
boot between stable and joyride
Play flasu movie
Play quicktime movie
Play suockwave games
Friday, November 28th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I will be in LA with Nikki for a week and consequently probably very slow to respond to email, and otherwise not-really-on-the-interwebs-that-much. (Prediction: withdrawal symptoms will be severe.)
In the meantime, food for thought.
Anyone that works on a team with absolutely brilliant people needs to read about apollo syndrome. I need to find a better resource on it. Basically, I’ve found that throwing a lot of smart people at a problem does not magically guarantee that problem will be solved; you’ve still got to figure out – as a group – how you are going to work together.
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tonight I was supposed to run a 2-hour brainstorm on recruiting new contributors for Sugar. We weren’t ready for it when the time came; we were all just dropping in our chairs, cranky, tired, impatient, distracted. Also something like an hour behind schedule. How can we ask more people to work with us before we learn how to work with each other?
Ah, sod it. Everybody take a 15 minute break; go get some water, check email, whatever. Come back. Close laptops. Get some dead trees and a pen. Come scoot around the whiteboard. We’re going to debrief on how the week went, because I’m not letting us end on an “I’m tired and frustrated” note. (And hey, I can always bring up the “we want newbies!” thing later – I’m sure I will; I want to be one of them, so I’d better.)
And we went down and across the whiteboard, and at the end, no big surprise, we had a list of things that bugged us and that we need to fix for the next Sugarcamp when we all get together again. But it was a wonderful surprise to see the list of things we thought were awesome scroll down, past the list of frustrations, down to hit the bottom of the board, up to the top, around, down another column… our list of happy things far outpaced the list of things we’ve got to fix.
And we were focused and productive, and I think we walked out of the Media Lab a little happier, a little bit more energetic, less drained, less frustrated, with a little more capacity together as a team. It felt great. I think it was the right thing to do.
Now I am completely. Stuffed. With fried cod and other quite excellent Portuguese food. It’s wonderful to be content, glass of red wine in your hand, listening to Walter recommending exhibits at the MFA to David (who leaves early on Monday; Greg is already gone). I miss people already. I learned a lot this week.
Mostly from watching people. They’re very different, and we need them all. Around the table late this afternoon, as an example: in the space of a 5-minute convo, you could see Scott’s lightning cleverness, Marco’s eagerness, David’s calm knack for restoring order; Ben’s eloquence, Walter’s grand vision, Tomeu’s insightful conciseness. Bernie’s way of flitting in between a million things to make them simultaneously work out, Greg’s “everyone together now!” rallying fire, Chris and his miraculous ability to defuse any argument and make anyone feel welcome…
Yes, 5 minutes, I swear. We talk fast. There are more people than the ones I just named, and much more to the ones I did describe, but whatever; I’m trying to grab a sample slice. It’s a community, a real one. We know each other, and we need each other, and we know it.
These are some things I love about my colleagues: they are a hell of a lot smarter than they usually show. They’re people. They’re not perfect and they know it and they’re open to whatever’s going to make them better. They don’t need to flaunt accomplishments or titles, prove themselves to anyone; they work hard and they have fun at the same time, and they teach me how. They build magical things spontaneously, and they surprise me and they make me smile. They challenge me to keep up with them, but in a certain way – I want to do things better for them, not because they ask or they expect it, but because I also want to surprise them, make them smile.
Right now there are three ways I do this: contagious enthusiasm, the fact that I like everybody, and my lack of shame (okay, the growing ability to hide my shyness) at asking stupid questions. As time goes on, I get less useless. (This is easy when you have good teachers.)
I swear again for the ten-thousandth time that I will try to be to people what these folks are being to me now; I can’t possibly pay them back, but I can pay it forward.
Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 | sugar, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Somewhat incoherent today; brain swarming. I think it will resolve and crystallize sometime over the next week; I can feel myself coming off the tail end of chaos, and it feels good. Great. Fan-freakin’-tastic.
Pika food!
I liked this quote, though it has seemingly no relevance whatsoever to my life at this moment. Aristotle’s wrong about one thing, though; being angry isn’t easy. It’s hard. Or maybe I’ve developed my reflex so strongly that to overcome it and to let myself be angry is difficult.
“Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way – this is not easy.” –Aristotle
I should at some point learn more about the pedagogical research around Moodle and how it’s been integrated into the technology design, and vice versa. Papers like “Moodle: Using Learning Communities to Create an Open Source Course Management System” make me super-excited. I should also at some point pull a Martin Dougiamas and document a reading sprint on Constructivism (and other learning philosophies, for that matter). I should pull more deliberately documented reading sprints.
Last night, the night before: Chinese food, beer, a giant plate of nachos, and the kinds of conversations that make the world around you swarm, just shine with possibilities. It’s great, this stuff-is-going-to-happen richness hanging in the air. I breathe it in ’till I’m exhausted, pass out on the couch, read Snow Crash. Hiro Protagonist. And swords.
This morning: Got a triple stack of new notebooks, pocket-sized ones this time. I’m out of paper, nearly out of pens. Shuffled down the brick divider that splits Main St. into two opposing lanes, past spray-painted arrows on the ground and into the Media Lab; Mitchell dropped a card down from the balcony so I could flash the reader in the up elevator, and here I am. Jackets and luggage line the perimeter; lousy jazz muzak pours out of the speakerphone in the center of the table. Friends around me. We’re working on what feels right now like a huge mass of half-corralled potential, and if we find a way to let people just tap it right…
I think that this is where history happens. Not on television screens or press releases; those come afterwards, sometimes, but ceremony only recognizes it after the fact, doesn’t create it. Actual changes come in accidentally coordinated spasms; messy conversations, half-incoherent arguments, whiteboard mockups done by a handful of exhausted hackers munching on Tootsie-Roll Pops and improvising things into the world.
Not sure quite how I got here; grateful that I am. And god, but do I have a lot to learn.
Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I wasn’t very good at being present earlier today. I realized this, and then I fixed it. This makes me happy.
Some good things happened tonight because of things that, earlier, were not so good. I have been told that I’m “depressingly optimistic” in the past. It seems to make me happy,though. Seems, for that matter, to make other people happy sometimes too. I think I’ll stick around this way.
I am thankful for the privilege of having friends who make me think and laugh, often at the same time. (Links in no particular order.)
Ideas. They’re so damn fragile. The world is terrifyingly malleable, and I love it. The way I live my life is built on thousands of fragile assumptions and habits I’ve stacked together because I had to fit into a sort-of-ordered world, and I could take it all apart so easily, for the right reason. I don’t know how to tell what the right reason is. I’m pretty sure that is an indication that I haven’t had one yet.
I need to not burn out. I’m going to bed. I’m learning how to rest.
Friday, November 21st, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I was reading Lessons Learned in Software Testing (by Kaner, Bach, and Pettichord) during a break today, and came across this snip about how testers are executives.
In one of his [Peter Drucker's] excellent books, The Effective Executive, he teaches that an executive is anyone who manages the value of her own time and affects the ability of the organization to perform. Most knowledge workers are executives. Drucker points out that executives are always given more to do than they can possibly achieve. Effective ones pick a subset of tasks that they will do well and skip many other tasks entirely… Give two executives identical jobs (not tasks, but ongoing jobs), and they’ll give very different performances.
A blinding light came on.
I’m going to try to explain why this was so surprising to me, which requires a bit of backstory.
I know I can’t do everything I could do. This was not always the case, and internalizing the truth of that statement is a painful learning process I’m still going through (but it is known, and it is getting there). It’s painful because, not long ago, my capacity to do things still outstripped the list of all the things I could potentially do. (In other words, if I had $20, the total contents of the stores I was allowed to shop at was $15 – so if I didn’t buy everything, I was really slacking off.)
At some point – midway through college – this changed. To run with the analogy, I was allowed into more stores, and came to have potential access to, say, $200 worth of stuff in stock – but I still had only $20 to spend. However, if your metric for “are you a slacker?” is “did you buy everything?” you’re going to be one unhappy teenager with mountains of the overwork equivalent of credit card debt. Worse yet, you’ll still be trying to buy everything, and thinking that your inability to do so is somehow a failure on your part. “I should be able to get it all for under budget; this always worked before. Why am I so inadequate?”
That’s how I spent most of my last 1.5 years in college, overworking myself into a wreck (friends, family, and professors cushioned my skids against turning into spectacular conflagrations of fireballs). I was happy, but I thought I sucked at everything.
Sometime around April 2007, the situation dawned on me. (It had done so in smaller ways beforehand, but at much more of an intellectual level only.) It was impossible for me to allocate Mel-resources in such a way that everything that could potentially get done would happen. I could buy $20 worth of stuff, maybe find ways to inch my pocketbook to $22, to $30… but ultimately, in terms of trying to buy the whole dang store of possibility, I would fail.
This was fantastically liberating. Things were broken – I was broken – but in a way I couldn’t fix! Instead of freaking out over not being able to fix something irreparably broken, I could (remember, I’m an engineer) …accept it. Work around it. Move on. I was not cut out to make huge changes in the world – I didn’t have the capacity. I could still try – and I still planned to, and I did – but I could be okay with failing now. It was expected, actually inevitable.
So I spent my gap year as a very happy failure. I slept, I rediscovered food, the daystar, and the pleasure of simply spending time with people.
And now I have another way of thinking. The difference that the passage made to me was that it kicked me into realizing this:
You think you’ve started losing the game, but you’ve actually just started to play the right one. (Don’t worry, you’re not late or starting out behind; you had to go through that to get to here.) This is the game successful people play. The real fun begins when it is impossible to take all the opportunities you’re given – your job now is to make the game itself. You’re not broken, and you’re not a failure; you just haven’t rewritten the rules to make it otherwise… yet.
In other words, kid: winners play Calvinball.
Welcome to the game.
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Food for thought, courtesy of my brother.
Last night I flopped down and almost immediately had vivid, color-saturated dreams involving longboards with laminated wood decks and a Parallax Hydra 32360 (yes, that exact board; I have no idea why), woke up feeling absolutely terrible, rested a little more and then went in to work.
A conversation with David last night, towards the tail end of the hackathon, is burnt into my brain. I don’t know what it means yet.
“It’s human nature. Most people want power.”
“I don’t want it. I’m trying to avoid it.”
“We’ve noticed.”
“That I run the hell away from power?”
“That you give it to others.”
Went on a manic rush yesterday to hand off as many responsibilities as I could muster. I am not bringing my computer to LA, nor am I bringing a book. Blank notebook, pens. Clothing and toiletries, wallet, cell phone and camera + chargers, backpack. That’s all. Maybe not even the camera.
Today: Blazing through repairs during a workshop, reflashing 50 XOs for a testbed; physical work feels good, and gives my overtaxed brain something to cling to, focus on.
I have no patience for meetings that don’t fully engage all of their participants at any given time. Presentations, too. That’s probably why I run hackathons and brainstorm sessions and open spaces and avoid talking at people when I can. Given this, I would love the challenge of teaching a class or workshop or giving a speech to a crowd of over 300 people. How to do?
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
I do this sometimes.
The news is a funny thing (scroll to the bottom of that last link).
Also, I want to learn a language the way Nagle learned German. Mandarin, Japanese, Tagalog, ASL, Fookien (which I know varying amounts of) – and then Spanish, French, Italian, and German (which I do not know at all). Korean, Russian, and Portuguese I wouldn’t mind, but have no reason to learn right now. It strikes me that this might be good to do in conjunction with an extended sailing, hiking, biking, or backpacking trip involving a different continent.
It doesn’t seem all that unreachable, really. I know people who’ve done this… not all those languages, but some; not all those modes of travel, but at least one. I can do some of them as well. Standing on the bow of a ship with dolphins leaping beside you – this is something I could also see.
Not that my current life isn’t exciting.
Tonight post-hackathon I found myself running after Ryan and Tomeu as they pulled 50 laptops in flimsy cardboard boxes on a rattling cart across cobblestoned Cambridge streets (after Michael and Mitchell had persuaded the attendant to let us out of the garage a good half-hour after it’d closed). A few yards from the door of OLPC’s office building, the box ripped and sent XOs spilling onto the street; Mitchell and Greg and I rushed forward and ran alongside the cart, grabbing the cardboard sheets together so that they stayed a box, 6 hackers glommed around a moving cart like some sort of crazy dragon dance. By the time we got the laptops back into the office, we were all laughing and out of breath.
“I kinda wish I had a picture of that,” I said in the elevator on the way down.
“Actually,” said Ryan, “I took a video.”
Monday, November 17th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Christoph, Wayan, Greg, Nikki, Andrea, and the Chrisses have just made me very, very happy. It is the tiny things that make my day: see article and 4th comment.
Today I am taking the unusual (for me) step of planning and prioritizing my week instead of launching in and improvising through it. (Rather, I’m trying to plan just enough so that I can improvise through it in my usual devil-may-care manner – I usually can improvise with no planning, but this week… is different, and I am struggling to learn this new habit, and fast.)
I’ve got ’till 3:30pm to plan my week. GO GO GO ADRENALINE RUSH GO!
Monday, November 17th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
I’ve never understood the prevalence of “it’s going to be all right” as a comforting phrase. Ok, things suck now, it says. But someday they won’t. (Well, how do you know that? Also, that doesn’t fix the current suck.)
Better (for me, at least) to see it as good now. One of the reasons that it could be good now is that a probable or possible future is going to be better. Maybe some things are suck. But it’s never the case that everything is awful. Even on the worst days, physics works. The sun continues to provide our planet with photons. Oxygen is present in the air in quantities sufficient for survival. If these things are not in a good state – the last one, anyway – you won’t be around much longer to complain, so why spend your last minutes cursing at something that doesn’t matter? Maybe some things are suck, but you’re dealing with them, and isn’t it good that you have that capacity?
I’ve been asked many times how I stay so damn optimistic and happy about the world. My quirky variant of naivety is Teflon-like in its resistance to bitter and jadedness despite any of the vast amounts of knowledge I have encountered or acquired through the years. How am I happy? I don’t know. How could I not be? The world is crap sometimes, but life is good.
Note: happiness does not imply complacency, and life being good does not remove the possibility that it could be better yet. Be happy, and get off your duff.
Sunday, November 16th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
