Apr 27

Prediction for 37signals’ next move

Ponderings 4 Comments »

A public prediction for the next move by the five-person company that is taking the development world by storm: you will see 37signals launch a guild/certification within the next few months whereby developers pay $x to get "37sigified" and receive a plaque and a snippet of javascript that let’s them display a badge on their blog substantiating that they know how to "Get Real." This is the move that makes the most strategic sense. This post on O’Reilly Radar says it best:

37signals is taking “vertical integration” to new heights — now they not only make the software everyone is using, write the books everyone is reading to know how to use the software, sell the PDFs everyone is reading to know how to sell the software they’re writing, and design the interfaces everyone is copying, they’re also putting the butts of the developers they’ve trained into seats at the startups they’ve inspired with their new job network

The next logical play for them will be to capitalize on all the street cred and developer loyalty they have amassed thus far, or at least that should be their next play. Kimbro says, "those guys are just printing money" and that is the true mark of an important company when they can manifest dollars at will from the value they represent. The developer certification program would not only allow them to print another batch of dinero for cashflow but the nature of the program would also extend their reach and blow up their already disgustingly good Pagerank and visibility by having developers display a small 37s logo on their blogs and link back to them. Those guys are positioned for world domination in 2007 and they have to know it.

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Apr 01

Is hyper-connectedness making us ADD? Make your depth 2000ft

Ponderings, Productivity 9 Comments »

I used to have this picture hanging on the wall in my old office and one day I took it down because I realized why it resonated with me so much and why it needed to go. The hot topic now seems to be about how the daily barage of communications we receive is making us all A.D.D. and unable to concentrate intensely on one task – in order to be effective people have to force themselves into seclusion to get stuff done. Just the other day I was on the phone as messages were piling into my inbox, two IM windows popped up and my treo started vibrating as a text message came in. The person on the other line said "what the hell was that?" and I had to say "oh, don’t mind me I’m just weathering a tsunami of communications right now." No joke, I got a skype call about 5 minutes after I hung up and our fax machine ran out of paper later on that day and started beeping at my partner and I. Into this volley of exchanges mix in the constant temptation to tune into Bloglines to read the latest RSS goodness, or technorati alerts or to check up on the latest stats for your site are you can see that we’re dealing with a blizzard of distractions each day. So here is my advice for what to do:

Unplug. Literally remove your ethernet cable and disable the your wireless interface on your computer.Never in mankind’s history has an individual had so much access to knowledge and yet the stream of information has become a flailing fire hose out of control and the only way to to manage it is to occasionally "kink the hose." I know it sounds harsh and people say "how do I connect to the _fill_in_the_blank_service on the network i need to do my job?" If you rely upon remote resources during development then you’re pretty much screwed and you need to stay wired and handle each comm application individually by disabling them one at a time (IM, email, skype, IRC, gtalk) and then remove whatever shortcut you have on your desktop to your web browser and make it just inconvenient enough to browse so you resist the temptation to do anything but focus on what needs to be done. If you’re running VMware or VPC though, like I do, then you are already fully self-contained and it’s literally as simple as pulling the plug and doing your work. For those that rely upon things like livedocs and other hosted documentation, there are generally offline versions of this documentation you can get. For those that rely heavily on asking other people on lists how to do things, well maybe this is a well-deserved wakeup call for a little "RTFM" for you…

There are people like this and this that somehow thrive in this hyper-connected world and stay productive. Sean Corfield is, by today’s standards, a modern-day superman – he is seemingly omniscient and omnipresent, five places at once solving technology problems around the world and holding a steady full-time position for Adobe. How a human can be this multi-threaded is beyond me (Corfield you rock). This is the exception however and not the rule – the rest of us mere mortals are sadly only capable of devoting full attention to one task at a time and therefore need to make a conscious effort single-thread our work routine.

It may be a stupid analogy but the way I like to think of myself when I’m on critical path is as a submarine that comes to the surface occasionally to conduct communications and then submerges and goes silent. Depending on what projects, deadlines, etc you’re facing you can be more or less flexible at the depth you set. Right now, it’s crunch time for me on my ABC project so I’m only coming up to periscope depth about 3x per day at this point. When deadlines are loose you can cruise on the surface and run with fully-open communications. If you have a family that depends on you or are awaiting time-sensitive information and you need to make yourself accessible to certain people in real-time (ie. turning off your phone is not an option), there are ways to selectively let certain people through. There is Call Filter for the treo (an app actually written by a guy we know) that does for your phone what rules in Outlook do for your email. It lets you specify conditions based on contact categories, contacts, and time of day so that only certain people can call you during specified times. Very slick.

The other thing I recommend is going back to good ole audio CD’s for music listening during crunch time. Generally during an average day I have winamp tuned to some ambient channel on shoutcast streaming non-obtrusive chill background music without lyrics. But radio of any kind is by nature fragmented. There is something to be said for the musical contiguity of listening to a CD start to finish – one artist, one album, continuous musical theme throughout. Things like satellite radio, internet radio or (heaven forbid) traditional airwave corporate radio in my opinion seem to contribute to the scatter-brainedness one faces each day. You consciously or unconsciously absorb these 3min ala carte snippets from a bunch of different artists interspersed with commentary from various radio personalities (major oxymoron btw) and commercials. I have a rack of CD’s left over from college sitting in my office that I still have yet to transfer to my iPod and I find that popping in a CD while I’m submerged helps focus.

My friend Dave just launched his blog and is taking it further with an experiment that will potentially allow him to ditch his cellphone altogether. I’m not quite there yet – I still find the cellphone too convenient to toss – but I agree with the premise that we need to exercise periodic isolation in order to achieve our best productivity. If this whole thought of "yourself as a submarine" feels ridiculous, ask yourself what’s more ridiculous in a crunch deadline…

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Mar 03

Opensource Goals Meme: a social experiment in becoming “write brained”

Ponderings, Productivity, Psychology 8 Comments »

Most self-improvement programs suggest that the first steps are to:

  1. write down a list of your short-term and long-term goals
  2. post them in a conspicuous place

Doing this puts several things to work for you: First, when you write something down, the act of writing itself causes your brain to use different neural pathways. Odds are you could care less about which neurons you use to get something done, but you’d probably be interested to know the effects that research has shown writing to have on memory, cognition and creativity. Additionally, when you write your goals down you are forced to quantify and qualify them in ways that do not occur when you simply think to yourself “it’d be nice if i could do xyz someday…” Writing out the goals generally requires that you to think through the path towards achieving them as well. It gets you 100% clear on your intent (the “why”) and that is the strongest motivator you can possibly bring to bear. Anything you want to improve, you must first be able to track- this exercise clarifies exactly what you’re tracking from now on. The last thing you enact by exposing your goals publicly is peer pressure- when you post them on your bathroom mirror or on your bedroom wall or even in your cube, you tap into the same advantages that come with having a workout partner at the gym (ie. thinking to yourself, “i can’t skip today because i’ll be letting so-and-so down”). Peer pressure is typically conceived as a _bad_ thing but in this context I would argue that having other people aware of your goals will compel you to take steps necessary to meet them that you otherwise would not have. Posting goals in your workplace is a start but there’s a better, more conspicuous place to post them…

So in a bit of a social experiment, I’m proposing a meme centered around exposing your goals publicly for the next year and beyond. At the very worst – it’s comedy, you miss the mark on everything and nobody remembers the post a year from now. At the very best – it’s a living post that changes as you attain goals, an exercise that is the catalyst for some greater focus, and a neat way to peer over the fence and see what is important to other people (and prod them towards reaching their own goals). If you choose to participate, this is what you need to do:

  1. post a list of your short-term and long-term goals on your blog and mention who tapped you for the experiment. The goals you list don’t have to be technology-specific or anything-specific really- just stuff you want to want to eventually achieve. Aim high here, really ponder what you want to achieve someday, what you want your life’s work to be, and then write it down. Try to make the list as close to the chronology as you see it playing out- make it so it starts with the most short-term/atomic/realistic goals and let it wander to the most ambitious / wacky / long-term dreams
  2. use the title “opensource goals meme” so that other people can do a search and find the other participants. copy these instructions somewhere in the post or refer them here
  3. tap 5 friends to do this exercise after you are finished and actually READ what they write and REFLECT how their priorities are similar and different from your own
  4. maintain this list as you go crossing off things as you achieve them and adding new ones as they develop

So my list is perhaps a bit on the exhaustive/ambitious side but it’s been building in my Treo over the past year:

learn decision tree analysis
get accepted to the 9rules network
learn how to kite surf
learn to paraglide
learn morse code
reconnect w/ old friends on working US roadtrip
down-size, consolidate and turn house and convert to performing asset
get back to single-digit bodyfat
organize barcamp phoenix
regain flexibility
work for myself
cook 90% of all meals- less eating out
grid7 retreat w/ core intellectuals @ tonto natural bridge
achieve 1000 WPM reading speed
write for a reputable publication
learn yoga
become an employer
learn krav maga
buy a beachfront condo somewhere tropical
play “Panama” live on stage w/ Van Halen
take the bob baunderant school of racing
hold summer “cabin codefest”
produce coldturkey’s next album
get scuba certified
build a home recording studio
create a revolutionary billion dollar company
make the homepage of slashdot
drive from alaska to chile (fireandicetour)
learn to surf
make the “backs of giants” mural
learn accounting principles & tax law
learn tai chi
publish a kid’s book
learn to fly a helicopter
liberate 100 people from shitty jobs they hate
take down a major bully
develop a highschool curriculum
learn handwriting analysis
do a wilderness survival school and survive 1 wk in wild
start a VC firm
study all the major world religions
read all the Great Books
travel to all 7 continents
launch VELA project in phoenix
serve abroad in the peace corps
learn feng shui fundamentals
summit large mountain
speak at a major conference
complete the chronos custom nutrition program
complete a marathon
earn para3 rating and fly torrey pines
make the cover of WIRED
earn a PhD in biomimicry
beat the champion level of scrabble
meet the Dhali Lama in person
raise a child
x-country paragliding trip in either chile or australia
win pulitzer
redistribute the wealth based on merit
visit outer space
find cure for a major mental illness like depression
earn nobel prize

Ok, so granted they get wildly ambitious towards the end ;-) but my friend Don always said “goals are dreams with a deadline.” Never stop dreaming big, right?
Kimbro Staken, Steven Harvill, Rob Brooks-Bilson and Chris Tingom – you’ve been “tapped” ;-)

UPDATE: a few more people I’m tapping on this meme- John Blayter, John Bland, Max Porges, Noah Kagan, Francine Hardaway, John Murch

UPDATE: 6/16/06 – Held Cabin Codefest in Munds Park.

UPDATE: 8/1/06 – Became an employer (hired Ben as our first full-time employee)

UPDATE: 10/15/06 – completed the PADI scuba class

UPDATE: 12/15/06 – Got accepted to 9rules and organized the 1st Barcamp Phoenix

UPDATE: 1/5/07 – Had my first kite surfing course – woohoo!

UPDATE: 3/9/07 – Published my first book

Jan 17

The future President is on MySpace

Ponderings 4 Comments »

a trippy thought, huh? In all likeliehood there’s a fifteen-yr-old kid somewhere right now with a MySpace account who is building out his/her friend network and talking online about stuff fifteen-yr-old kids talk about. What’s interesting is that with the plummeting cost of disk storage and the Wayback Machine’s and Google Cache’s of the world, this kid’s MySpace page will probably be preserved in some publicly-accessible archive somewhere until the day he/she becomes President (at which point the data will be accidentally lost in a freak harddrive crash or better yet, mistakenly highlighted with a sharpie)..

This has interesting implications as the voters will be able to read firsthand what this kid was doing from a very early age. It’s cool in the sense that it would be great to have seen what Lincoln and Kennedy’s Myspace pages would have looked like but it has pretty huge implications in terms of the transparency of this person’s life and the psychological profiling that can be done by opponents. Makes me think of something I recently read to the effect of "recognize that what you write now on your blog will be someday read by a future employer or potentially a future mate." Pretty weird…

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Jan 07

Playa del Carmen

Ponderings, Travels 6 Comments »

is an amazing place. My friend Benny and I just got back from a 2wk trip there and took a bunch of good pictures. It was our first time and both of us are now looking into buying property there. Having been to quite a few places in MX (Mazatlan, Guadalajara, Puerto Penasco, Cabo San Lucas, Loretto, Rosarito, Ensenada, Tijuana, Nogales, Laredo) I can say that of every spot I’ve been so far Playa is definitely my favorite. It has a high concentration of European tourists and is also apparently a popular tourist spot for Mexicans so you end up with this melting pot effect of non-local Mexicans, Italians, Dutch, Spanish, Kiwis and Norweigans mixed in with a handful of Americans. With the recent devastation of neighboring Cancun and Cozumel from hurricane Wilma, I really think it’s poised to explode in value. It reminds me a lot of how Puerto Vallarta used to be ten years ago when it was still an undiscovered gem . I’m glad the closest major airport is an hour away because it should help keep it “inconvenient enough” to deter the typical gringos and attract only the more mellow travelers.

Observations and Reflections

Mexico trips are always these rejuvenating experiences and before the excitement of the trip wears off and and the daily grind resumes, I want to write about the random things we observed and experienced. It’s surprising how after only 2wks of not driving an automobile, it feels completely foreign. Other stuff that seems strange right now:

  • throwing your toilet paper IN the toilet. Seriously. They are all on septic down there so you have to put it in the waste basket (which sounds gross but it’s just the way it’s done). Try doing that for 2wks and I promise you that you will have to make a conscious effort to actually drop it in the bowl when you come back.
  • drinking fountaiins: we take them for granted. All of Mexico’s water system is non-potable and used only for washing purposes. It’s odd to come back and be able to drink from the tap or a public drinking fountain.
  • the air and food are not as fresh here which is so funny because the stereotypical image of Mexico tends to be a dirty town like Tijuana and that’s just not representative of the rest of the country. Phoenix in the winter has a bad pollution problem with the inversion layer that traps our smog close to the ground. Both Benny and I noticed we felt significantly healthier day to day down there and that the air in Phx actually has a bad taste that is only noticeable when you come back to it. Same goes with produce and poultry, in Playa it’s all grown right there so it’s tough to beat the freshness.

PDC is not perfect- it’s definitely humid and supposedly their summers are unbearably hot with 100deg temperatures and 100% humidity. There’s a very real possibility though that you could set up a small office there for six months out of the year. Their internet connectivity was actually very good. I ran a traceroute from an internet cafe and there were surprisingly few hops to my server.


Actually I wasn’t intending to check email at all but we came back to the hotel one morning to find an note the hotel staff had posted on our door relayed from an ex-FBI detective who was working with my father on a big case in Florida. He needed server logs to confirm a hypothesis and I was able to assist his investigation remotely by providing by using RDP to get in and give him what he needed. Remote access is great.

I read two Paulo Coelho books down there (Eleven Minutes and The Zahir). Coelho books are ideal vacation reading material and while neither one was as good as my favorite Coelho book of all time, The Alchemist, they were both good. The Zahir hit very close to home and made me realize I have a zahir of my own right now, a face indellibly etched in my thoughts that refuses to leave. Coelho is the latest addition to the smart people list- he writes with a simplicity and honesty that nobody else does. Probably the greatest testament to his skill as a writer is that his books have been translated into every known language. If you’ve never read the Alchemist, you owe it to yourself to check out that book.

What worked well

  • Before we left, Benny and I hit up Walgreens and stocked up on a box of these $2 laser pens. It sounds funny but cheap electronic gadgetry is worth its weight in gold down in mexico and each night we went out we would bring a “super pluma” with us and invariably find a way to trade it for something worth more to us. They were practical in that you could point out stuff half a mile away or grab each other’s attention across the crowd. We both agreed it would be valuable to learn morse code as a means of communication. There were also countless other stupid uses for these pens.
  • Fortunately neither one of us lost any crucial travel documents and therefore didn’t have to rely on our remote backup plan but it was nice to know that we had it if we needed it.
  • The restaurants all hung these ziplock water bags above their outside tables. We asked why they were there and our waiter jokingly told us that it was in case we didn’t leave a good tip, they could shoot them and drench the gringos. It turns out they actually repel flies. I have no idea HOW it works but we did notice that the restaurants without them had significantly more flies. I would love to hear the explanation of why this trick works if anyone knows.
  • The iTrip came through big again and I used it to record an interview with the owner of one of the smaller hotels down there. We realized that there are a large number of hotels down there that don’t currently do online reservations. After talking with the owner of a small one we think there’s opportunity to mimic their current homegrown Foxpro booking systems that everyone seems to use and turn it into a local app that broadcasts availability to a central server. Their hangup on accepting creditcards is that it’s very difficult to get a merchant account in Mexico and their discount rate is like 6-7% (3x that of the US). We were thinking of ways to solve the online res problem in the face of these higher transaction fees. We came up with the idea of creating a type of escrow service based in the US that would allow people to book their res online by authing their card. The guest could then pay cash for their room and the hotel owner would still achieve full price without having to jack rates to cover merchant commission fees and at least the small hotels could capture the res online. . We thought setting up this service on a mac mini and selling it as a cheap appliance and taking a comission on the transactions we generate would be ideal. This could make an excellent Grid7 project. My friend John Blayter pointed me to this existing product which sounds to have a similar goal but appears to be a traditional reservation system and not the same escrow concept. Anyways, it’s an interesting idea. Here’s the interview for anyone interested.

Lessons learned for next time

  • Don’t change a light bulb while standing in the shower. This is obvious in hindsight but Benny nearly electrocuted himself in our cabana at La Ruina. He was knocked ten feet onto the bed and, fortunately so, because it broke the circuit and he escaped with just a shock.
  • Zip ties and carribeaners would have come in handy on a couple occasions for fastening stuff. We rolled with hiker packs and the trip would have been impossible with regular baggage. The mobility afforded by having a pack proved to be key when (due to a booking oversight on our part) we got kicked out of our hotel and had to find a new one at the apex of their tourist season on New Year’s eve.
  • _Never_ use a flimsy plastic bag as a carry-on with a bunch of stuff in it, it will turn your fingers into sausage links and you will arrive at your destination with zero perfusion and have pins & needles the rest of the night (notice the hand turning purple – not cool).

Here’s some cool videos :

Looking forward

My New Year’s resolution this year is to eliminate daily distractions and have laser focus on the things that matter. I’m actually resolving to read _fewer_ blogs (which is probably hypocritical because here I am writing my own huge post). I came back to 227 emails and 454 unread blog posts which really puts into perspective how much distraction I willfully subjecting myself to each day. Even with David Allen’s GTD method, it’s just a deluge of info that leaves your head spinning at the end of the day. As far as what’s going on for me now, I start classes at this entrepreneurial workshop called FastTrac on Tuesday with the goal of sponging off other entrepreneurs and ironing out the kinks in the Grid7 model. My office partner Kimbro is now my business partner and over the break he hashed out the skeleton of an immense side project he and I will be undertaking together that dovetails perfectly with Grid7. I know I’ve been talking it up for a few months now but February is the month this stuff all launches and we both have huge faith in this endeavor.

Other than that, I’m moving out of my house right now and converting it into a performing asset as a rental. It should cover itself plus my apartment rent which will nice. This is all part of a massive downsizing effort for me to sell off all my stuff, simplify, consolidate and become mobile for a big US working roadtrip I plan to take in August. This is a neat time of year because everyone has these bright hopes for the coming year. I share the same optimism but I’m always reminded of that lyric from the U2 song “nothing changes on New Year’s day.” It does and it doesn’t. It’s an arbitrary line in the sand but it helps us frame things and establish goals which is always a good thing.

I wanna end this post by paraphrasing this cool passage from The Zahir book. “Two firemen go into the woods to fight a forest fire. They both return only one’s face is covered in soot while the other’s is perfectly clean. Which do you think washes his face?” It’s like that cardgame “booger on the head” also called “indian poker” – you can see everyone else’s cards but your own. The fireman with the clean face will see his partner and assume he’s covered in soot and conversely the guy who really needs the bath will look at his partner and assume he’s clean as well. This was such a simple yet mind-blowing way to look at why some relationships fail unexpectedly.

Anyways, 2006- bring it. This image captures the essence of what I’m in for this year:

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Dec 18

Violent video games and aggressive behavior

Ponderings, Psychology No Comments »

This debate has been occurring for awhile now fueled by psychology research that seemingly supports the idea that games cause aggressive behavior in those who play them. Although I have zero allegiance to any companies producing violent games, I do feel compelled to chime in and point out a few thinigs in their defense. This whole scenario feels like a modern day rehashing of the same arguments surrounding music censorship put forth by the PMRC over a decade ago.

While there have been compelling studies conducted that show playing violent video games has a positive correlation with aggressive behavior, we all need to remember that causation cannot be assumed from correlation. Kids with violent personalities may just gravitate to the violent games. Just like the faulty conclusions drawn by Tipper Gore, et al in the PMRC days that listening to Judas Priest and Iron Maiden "rotted the brains" of the youngsters and drove them to commiting violent acts like killing their parents- this same leap of causality with games cannot be made upon corrleational studies alone.

I find it hugely ironic that for all the flak that game makers like Rockstar Games are now receiving for selling games like GTA:San Andreas that supposedly instill violent behavior in young people, the US Army is somehow exempt from the same criticism. They are arguably the single biggest contributor to this effect giving away the free first person shooter game America’s Army but I guess it’s okay as long as the violence they encourage is directed to our enemies and not manifested within our own country (?!?). From a pure business perspective, releasing this game for free is an ingenious move on their part- "get ’em while they’re young." It’s essentially the best possible recruitment and training tool they could hope for if the goal is to raise the next generation of soldiers, get them excited about the Army and have a comprehensive training course early on to teach genuine military tactics. It seems ironic though that police are now making a fuss saying that these games are producing more criminal activity. If it can be shown to have any significant effect at all (which it has not), isn’t this what the Army intended? If you stir up a hornet’s nest and get the reaction you sought (only in the wrong place), can you really be mad for getting stung?

I have to say I don’t play violent games. I played Myst and Riven awhile back and I had an Xbox a few years ago that was later stolen – the only game I ever played on it was Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Having now read the actual study that is the centerpiece of the argument against violent games and from a methodology standpoint it seems flawed. Polling 227 college students for aggressive behaviors and showing that their frequency of violent video game play correlates positively with irritability and retaliatory tendencies… okay, so what? It’s expected that you would find a positive correlation in this scenario, in the same way you’d probably discover a positive correlation with personality characteristics like introversion and creativity. For anyone not familiar with this flaw in correlational studies, the classic example in Psychology textbooks is that of a study conducted that found a positive correlation between crime and number of churches in a city. The researcher presents incontrovertible evidence to show that the more churches in a town, the more crime that exists. Obviously, making the causal leap that somehow the crime can be attributed to the churches is absurd. It’s not until we learn the critical driving factor is simply "city size" that we see how ridiculous the prior inference is. The non-correlational studies conducted in the lab setting have their own flaws (drawing the conclusions they did from studies measuring participants’ horn-blasting behavior after violent games seems like a leap in itself- it may have relevance for roadrage scenarios but extrapolating conclusions about general domestic violence and crime seems like an impossible stretch to me).

Having said all this – I can say that I remember in playing Tony Hawk for an extended period one day, and remember walking around outside afterwards and looking at every ledge or bench on the street thinking "I could grind that…" Games are more and more realistic now and their interactive, fast-paced nature definitely elicits stronger physiological responses than just passively watching a violent movie. More research needs to be conducted in this arena, but to claim that "violent games are the root of society’s aggression problems" is just silly. Kids with violent tendencies are undoubtedly drawn to violent games. And articles like this one that try to pin tragedies like Columbine on the Doom video game are just sensasionalistic crap.

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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