What I taught myself after work today
Next step: world domination. (Actually, next step: 2 pins.) Thank you, Uncle Don!
Posts that are Uncategorized-ish
Sword over my head
I literally have a sword (fine, a practice sword) hanging over my head at work. It’s awesome.
If I had a million dollars
If I had a million dollars
I’d build a tree fort in our yard
If I had a million dollars
You could help, it wouldn’t be that hard
If I had a million dollars
Maybe we could put like a little tiny fridge in there somewhere
If anyone has ever had any doubts about what I would do if I (by some weird, bizarre chance) became ridiculously wealthy, this is part of it.
And this kind of thing would likely be the other part.
Myself, I’d want a giant, sun-washed kitchen with a garbage disposal, a dishwasher, and a mini blowtorch hanging on the wall (you know… in case.) My own bedroom, because I need to not-sleep sometimes. A bike, a skateboard, rollerblades, and means of maintaining them; a wok and bamboo spatula, a blender, a rice cooker with steamer, a cutting board and a sharp santoku knife.
Bookshelves. And ready access to a maker space that’s full of people using awesome tools (laser cutter in the garage, a welding shed, etc.) to Make Things to Solve Problems, with mess rooms for painting and the like, a music room, an open room with mats and mirrors for dancing and wrestling and learning how to do backflips, an organic garden in the back for Produce of Awesome for my kitchen, and whiteboard walls.
And then enough to feed me, let me fly (coach - though I would like to, just once, fly across an ocean first class) to visit people occasionally, and study… anything I want. Tuition money, basically.
Aside from the kitchen - and that’s why I visit and cook at other people’s houses - I almost have all of this, actually. Not so much “ready access” to these spaces (note to self: move to Cambridge, not East Boston), but I can do these things if I want to - I have friends who’ll teach me things while I’m saving for grad school tuition, I have…
And I can reach beyond myself and do things with my time and with myself instead of with the money I don’t have - maybe will never have. Having money would sure be nice. It makes a lot of things much easier. It helps. It helps you not worry as much. (Sometimes I worry.)
I’m not rich. But my life is.
This is what counts, right?
Re: Fedora gots mad skeelz, yo
Gregdek is my hero.
POINT #1: ALL THE ENTHUSIASM IN THE WORLD FAILS IF IT CAN NOT BE HARNESSED.
POINT #2: WE STILL DO NOT HAVE A COMPREHENSIVE SET OF FEDORA WORK ITEMS SUITABLE FOR NEWBIES — BUT WE WILL FIX THAT.
This is an absolutely key problem to solve. The following scenario is one that we must avoid at all costs:
Newbie: I just found out that I can help this cool project called Fedora! I’m going to go to the Fedora site to learn more!
(An hour of searching an inherently confusing wiki follows.)
Newbie: This is really hard. I think I’ll go play Freeciv instead!
Note: MORE WIKI PAGES DO NOT SOLVE THIS PROBLEM.
Skills management. It is a problem. We are all learning how to solve it. This is a tough question, because conventional management training (I may be speaking wrongly, as I have little formal business training and have not read every book on the subject - but I’ve read a lot and asked around a lot) seems to focus on how to run things when you do have a chain of hired command.
When you can’t order people to do things, you have to use other ways of getting things beyond your individual capacity to happen. How do you do that? I’m looking at fundraising, nonprofit volunteer recruitment… these are all full-time jobs. What if you have a full-time job? What if you can’t take that much time? What do you do?
Why startup founders don’t sleep
Current song stuck in my head:
But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do
Once you find them
– Time in a Bottle
I’ve heard that the smartest people are the ones who can simultaneously hold the most (in number and in extremity of contrast) contradictory truths in their head at once. I hope this is true. Right now I’m in the “extraordinarily confused” stage and continuing to stumble forward until the dawn breaks once more (it’s happened before, and I expect the cycle to repeat many times over). Disequilibrium is a wonderful plateau to be on, and comforting in a weird way when you know it’s going to pass someday.
Also: perhaps the reason why startup founders put in such long hours is that they have to keep their company real by sheer force of constant belief - for instance, if I went to sleep tonight, thousands of people would still continue to act as if, say, IBM and General Motors and the like were real. So they are real, because they’re real to us.
But if I had an idea and started it and then I went to bed, then nobody would know, and that vision would wink out of being while I slept. Maybe it wouldn’t wake up again. You don’t know. If you want that vision to stay alive and to persist in the beliefs and actions of others, you have to stay up, you have to believe in it yourself, and act accordingly - act like it’s a fact that will (of course!) be staying.
Turning “real to me” into “real to us” into “of course it’s real!” is - well, that’s the trick, isn’t it?
A photo series I would like to see
Geeks crashing after hackathons.
The ways in which people crash when they’re utterly exhausted after a long work sprint are:
- Inventive - where do they sleep? what do they sleep on? how do they block out light and sound? what do they use for blankets?
- Informative - you learn a lot about someone by seeing what drives them to stay up past their bedtime
- Touching - this most of all. Sleeping hackers remind me a little bit of sleeping children. They fall asleep so full of dreams.
Status update
- Eyes: burning. (Reason: chopped a lot of onions for vegan Filipino food today, yay for Not!)
- Legs: tired. (Reason: learned to breakdance, yay for Woon!)
- Brain: on information overload (Reason: spent way too much time trying to roam through tangled documentation and wiki pages for OLPC today.)
At the risk of reinventing the wheel, I’m going to sleep on the question of “if we had a blank slate, what type of information-finding architecture would I want for support and QA?” and then wake up and write it down, and then see what bits of it have already been implemented.
I’m fairly certain that my obsession with clear, clean infrastructure comes from my high distractability quotient. If my environment prevents me from setting up a good work system, I flounder. Therefore, I need to refocus on modifying the environment first. Occasionally this ends up helping other people, which is nice. It does mean that it sometimes takes me longer to get around to what I am “supposed” to do.
Speaking of environment, it’s time for a 5min whirlwind room-cleaning, then for sleep.
How do you toot your own horn silently?
The catch with enabling is that the more effective it is, the more invisible it is. Enabling is about empowering other people to do what they do best, so the better you do your job, the less other people know you helped.
When the best have accomplished their task, and their work is done,
The people all say “We have done it ourselves.”
–Tao Te Ching, chapter 17
How do you measure helpingness? This is both for yourself (to see how you can do it more effectively) and to show others so you can get opportunities to help more people later. How do you show what you’ve done without pasting your name over something you’ve worked so hard to give somebody else ownership of and visibility by?
If you give a Mel a stove…
Garlicky collard greens and fried eggs
Open box of vegetables; find Gigantic Green Leaves, and go “what are these things?” Read tag on bottom that says “collard greens.” Go “What are those things?” Decide to exercise your primary cooking principles of Everything Tastes Good When You Put It In A Wok.
So. Cover the bottom of a wok with olive oil (maybe 1/4 cup) and put it on medium high with a good amount of minced garlic (half a head) and some sea salt. Wash and roughly chop a bunch of collard greens, then toss them in the wok with the tender garlic and ridiculously-fragrant-by-now spices; stir everything around ’till the greens are coated, then cover and let it steam up for 5 minutes or so. Uncover, mix everything up again, and let the liquid evaporate.
Dump the collard greens out of the wok onto a plate and quickly fry an egg or two in the wok, then deposit eggs atop the collard greens. Eat. This serves two (one Mel, one Ian Daniher). Cooking the greens this way brings out the citrus notes in the collard greens somehow, even if there’s no citrus, so I think sprinkling lemon or lime juice over would make it even better.
Milkless But Definitely Not Vegan Cream Of Broccoli Soup
Another morning, another kitchen episode. Think: “Man, I want soup. I have broccoli. I like broccoli and cheese soup. However, we have no dairy products other than part of a can of pre-shaved parmesan.” Shrug and decide to try it anyway.
Saute a clove or two of chopped garlic and olive oil in a wok while you chop a head of broccoli into stir-fry-size pieces. Dump broccoli into wok and continue to saute on medium-high heat for 2-3 minutes until the vegetables are heated through. Pour a cup of white wine into the wok, let it start to bubble, then turn the heat to high, cover the wok, and go off and make yourself a peach smoothie, washing out the blender afterwards (about 5 minutes).
Uncover the wok, stir things around a little, and let the wine evaporate (turn the heat to medium if you’re getting panicky about the time) while you peel a small onion and chuck it, raw, into the blender - it’ll give the soup some kick without the trouble of having to find a nice spice blend to go with it. Going further along the “don’t bother with a spice mix” decision, toss a bouillon cube in (honestly, after tasting the soup, I’d say the last bit was optional and salt and pepper would have been just fine.) Note that I have an uberblender. If you do not have an uberblender, you may want to chop the onion and saute it a little in olive oil first. In fact, I probably should have; the resulting soup was just a little too sharp.
Dump the wine-steamed broccoli and garlic into the blender atop the onion. Empty whatever shaved parmesan you have in your fridge (maybe 1/2 cup for me) into the blender. Pour a glass of water over all of it and blend for a couple minutes while you clean up everything else and eat some applesauce and/or drink your peach smoothie. The soup will be green, creamy, cheesy, and a little spicy due to the raw onion.
As a side benefit, you have consumed your Vegetable Quota for the day and can now go off and eat half a leftover chocolate cake without too much guilt. (Not that I, er, did this. There wasn’t half a cake left. I mean, woo nutrition!)
Peach smoothie
Look in the fridge. Realize that you have an incredibly overripe peach. Say “Oh man, peach smoothie!” Cut out the parts that are a little too ripe. Put it in a blender with soy milk, blend, and drink.
Cleanup for the latter two recipes
Wash a wok and a blender. (What? Look, I eat out of plates and bowls and things when I’m not the only one in the house, okay? I’m saving water here.)
Day of Awesome
Blues scale. 12-bar blues progression. Walking bass lines and augmented chords with sharp fifths and learning the proper names of note combos I’d made up my own terms for years ago but never thought to say out loud to other people (who would I say them to?) Music! Why didn’t I study this before? I need to make up for so many years of lost time. Glory!
Mako’s Free Software reading group at the Media Lab: ROCK. Cjb and I ran from 1cc to join in. I spent something like 5 minutes skimming all the first-session readings because that’s about how much advance notice I had about it (thanks for letting a last-minute auditer in, guys) and now I have to go back and read those several hundred pages a little more slowly; even I can’t read coherently that fast. It took a while for me to get used to the rapid back and forth conversation and frequent interruptions of the group, but I think I’ve mostly got the discussion style down now, and the sheer firehose magnitude of the bandwidth is fantastic.
Also, Berkman? BRAIN EXPLODES WITH AWESOME. I LOVE EVERYTHING. So very, very happy right now.
And tired. Very tired. I think. That I should go to bed.