SteveC

Dispelling the Windows myths

I’ve been using windows 7 for about 6 months now. I have to tell you it’s not bad. In fact, it’s pretty good.

Yes, I’ve completely sold out and so on working at Microsoft. But it’s also true.

On a mac if you want to run a new program you go to the top-right and hit the search icon. Then you type the name and hit enter. On windows…. You do the same but it’s the bottom-left. Completely different, right?

I’ve rebooted my windows machine the same number of times I have my mac and my linux machine. For the same reasons: software updates. My windows machine has never crashed. OpenOffice is just as big and featured as Office. But Office actually works and stuff. Powerpoint works.

I’m not sure what else to say. But this idea that nothing works, it’s all complicated and crashes all the time just isn’t the case. Sorry.

It reminds me of NeXT becoming MacOS. NeXT used to have this really odd UI where menus were on the left and the program icons were on the right. Macs now have the menu at the top and the icons at the bottom. So they rotated the UI by 90 degrees clockwise and that was about it to get MacOS’s UI.

Looking back, it’s kind of odd that iOS and Android have icons and Windows Phone 7 have these tiles. It reminds me of people trying to sketch the iPhone before it came out. They sort of plastered the scroll wheel from the old iPod on to a phone. Incredibly short-sighted I used to think, it would have to be revolutionary to work and it was. The tiles make much better sense at using the surface area of a display than little icons in a touch environment. I think MS is ahead of the field here.

My Windows Phone 7 device is a pleasure to use, but I’ll save that for another post.

It pays to blog

A couple of weeks ago I wondered what would happen if I blogged every weekday. The results are in:

Those hits come from Hacker News in response to this post about rails rate of change. It spawned many follow up posts from members of the community, some core team members and a lot of comments here, on HN and elsewhere. I got 30-40,000 hits or so for that.

It’s not quite what I was expecting.

When it dawned on me the traffic that had hit, what I was expecting was a lot of trolling. And, yes, the usual ad hominem bullcrap was there but actually I was kind of surprised at the civility of the points.

When you get down to it the rate of change in a project is really the choice of the people building it and if you don’t like it you’re free to go build your own project or leave. Or something. What I hadn’t quite realized is that there are a lot of other people quietly worried about the pace. Especially the difficulty of upgrading projects from rails 2 to rails 3 which I hadn’t really considered. I was more interested in the pure barrier to entry new users are facing.

So, my week of blogging every day definitely had an impact for that post. But the driveby traffic is kind of uninteresting as it drops off as soon as you drop off the front page of HN.

I also blogged a bit about kayaking and flying. That too paid off. Some friends old and new introduced me to others who could help me with flying or great kayaking spots. That was and is much appreciated.

It pays to be prepared for luck. I got a bunch of lucky responses to my blog posts which will help me do more. I wasn’t as aware as I now am about the size of my audience and the ability they have to fairly simply make my life more fun. And hopefully me in return.

Flying: hour 2

Your Cessna is running low on gas. What do you do? Well, obviously, you drive it to your nearest gas station and fill up:

Filling up a plane is pretty similar to filling up your car. Same logo on the side of the gas station. Swipe your card to pay. You have to ground your plane in case it explodes (I wonder how we get around that with cars?). The hose is a bit longer and you have two gas caps though, one on each wing.

The fuel is leaded too, so breathing it in isn’t exactly fun. And you have to as it’s right next to your face. You watch the fuel fill up inside the wing as you pump it.

It reminds me of the differences between filling up your car in the US and the UK. In the UK there are all these bizarre rules as socialist countries are wont, like you can’t use a cell phone while filling up. The planet might explode or something. Amazingly it’s fine in the US and the world doesn’t blow up every single day. On the other hand it’s custom in the UK to fill up and then go inside and pay. In the US only criminals would attempt that – money first, gas second, thanks!

I did a lot of taxiing myself weaving around the line I was supposed to be on. I did some of the radio work, position reporting and stating intentions. I took off (mostly) myself which is the simple version of landing, which I won’t be able to do for awhile. I glided on engine idle and did a bunch of turns keeping the nose on the horizon.

The map work was fun. I can find myself on a map (who knew?) and point out things but I’m still having trouble correlating an angle on a map with an angle out in the real world. It takes a while to turn the plane and it feels like small angles on the map are much bigger on the ground in part because of the time it takes.

In high-wing aircraft you have to turn left before you turn right so you can raise your wing and see if anyone is in the way. There was a fair amount of air traffic and keeping an eye on them all was a little taxing. I’m still getting used to how bumpy things are too.

Getting fingerprinted

If you want to learn to fly and you’re not a US citizen then you’re obliged to go and get fingerprinted. And photographed. Again.

I used the TSA website to enter my details and pay ($130 from memory). It was a bit like using Netscape 4. Then you get a list of places to go get fingerprinted. Boeing in Seattle is basically the only place in the state you can go. So I set up my appointment after a bit of fiddling around as they’re not used to it.

Boeing is one of the other world-dominating companies from Seattle and is made of gigantic anonymous buildings with various technical measures stopping you from using the doors. They try their hardest to make finding the front door particularly difficult too but eventually I found their flight training building.

I went in and tried to go to the gift shop while waiting but that was of course a security violation. Instead I sat around and then was taken upstairs to be fingerprinted using actual ink. Actual ink! Red ink! Then demonstrating the technical prowess only federal government and the aeronautical industry are capable of my fingerprints were scanned using a flatbed scanner and posted electronically to the TSA.

That’s super interesting because the TSA fingerprint and photo me every single time I go through the border so you’d think they have  a bunch of copies. But these prints are wider to be fair. They try and get a wraparound view if every finger rather than just pushing one surface on a plate of glass.

Everyone was very friendly and as efficient as you can expect and it was over in about half an hour. Afterwards they were kind enough to drop me off at the gift shop too. From there it was a couple of days to confirm I could start flying and the whole TSA process took about two weeks.

My god, Woodstock is beautiful

I spent a chunk of the weekend in Woodstock, VT. It’s sort-of an English market town transplanted to the US:

Just look at that. Are we in the North Eastern teeny-states of the US or Hartley Wintney? They have houses made of bricks. For those unfamiliar with the US, most houses are made out of something that will decay by the time you do. That means that there is a housing industry for rebuilding every 30 years or so. The rolling hills and blue sky are just for fun.

Next let’s look at a typical pub:

Tell me that’s not British? You have bricks, wooden windows, wavy sign and everything.

Anyway.

I was there to speak at the Woodstock Digital Media Festival. It was a lot of fun and you should go next year. Hurricane ran a mapping party on behalf of MapQuest that went super well. I tried running my presentation off of my iPad 1 which was a bit of a mistake. It’s just too slow to switch slides with big images on them in under a second. Maybe an iPad 2 will help. You need that if you have a fast-paced and visual presentation style.

The after-party was great. There was a guy playing music using actual Gameboys, though I don’t remember the red backlights:

You can find videos on youtube:

Box bridges pepper the place. Or covered bridges as I think they’re more widely known:

Lastly I’ll tell you about Photosynth. There’s an awesome app from Bing which makes panoramas magically and then lets you upload them to the interwebs. Here’s one I made near a waterfall outside of Woodstock:

The bitcoin rollercoaster

I’m having a lot of fun investing in bitcoins. With thanks to Wikipedia:

This guy has put all of his savings in to bitcoins. That doesn’t seem very intelligent even if you have a very small amount of savings. I read a book a while ago advocating for a certain proportion of investment spread. Something like 10% risky, 70% stock market and 20% in something incredibly boring like T-bills. Maybe I should read it again.

So I’ve put $1000 in bitcoin and fully expect it to be stolen or lost. Or thrown down the bottom of a well and burnt.

I’m using an exchange called mtgox. It’s extremely early software written by monkeys as far as I can tell. My account data has already been compromised and I’ve only been a member for a week. What will happen in week two!? To fund your account you have to use a firm called dwolla with whom you have to give your bank information. Who the hell are those guys? So from your bank money gets sent to dwolla and then onwards to some guys personal email at mtgox. Those guys are trying semi-efficiently to hide who they are too, which hopefully is setting off alarm bells for you.

I hope that at least one of the reasons I have a horrible interest rate with my bank is that they employ thousands of people to phone me up when my card is used illicitly or I try to log in too many times with a broken password. Not so with mtgox. But if they are to survive then they have to start. And maybe have people do penetration testing and stuff.

Another lunatic has had half a million stolen from bitcoin. Yes million. Really. He thought he was being really clever hosting his bitcoin account inside a linux VM. The hacker was apparently cleverer.

Isn’t this exciting? This is why I’m investing in bitcoin. There is nowhere else on earth I can pay $1000 for this kind of entertainment and also get a front row education in economics and the digital economy. It’s a Stephenson-esque wet dream.

I read somewhere that the wild west of banking with its multiple currencies and frequent crashes was mostly a myth. In fact things were pretty stable and crashes only affected those stupid enough to pool their assets in one currency. Duh.

$1000 won’t even buy me a return flight to the UK in the next 6 months. I can buy a shitty car or some high class hookers. Bitcoin and mtgox are just off the charts more fun (I imagine). The high lasts more than a hangliding flight, I can tell you. Oh and also the federal government is starting to huff and puff about the whole thing. So some time in 2016 we should see some action. Until then, that’s another red rag to the bulls looking at the currency.

With a child on the way I will have to settle down soon too. So here’s to the rollercoaster.

PS the technical implementation of the shared transaction log is kind of interesting, go look.

Dear Posterous

Are you dead?

You have this awesome feature that lets me post in the future. Why if I send you something for the future and I miss one character, do you fuck it all up and post it immediately? You have this magical format on the subject line. If I add ((post: June 1, 2011)) then you will post on June 1. If I miss the colon, you post it immediately. Are you completely retarded? You should mail me back that something went wrong.

Are you alive?

Your themes haven’t changed since the Cambrian Explosion. Why? I want nicer themes. I want themes where I can put javascript in. I want a theme editor that isn’t a complete piece of shit.

Are you reading?

You stopped updating a while ago. Youtube now have youtu.be links. You fail on them. And many others.

Is it time to move to tumblr?

Google trends thinks so. I’m sad.

Stopping reading Reddit and HN

I give up.

I had been addicted to reading Reddit about once a day but I can’t do it anymore. It took me the characteristic too long time to figure out that it’s mostly 14-18 year olds posting shallow comments about things they don’t understand.

I want to write a letter to my younger self that would love you more, reddit. I’m sorry that rich people don’t want to give you all their money. I’m sorry that relationships are difficult. I’m sorry that finding the right girl is this horrific process.

But it gets better, I promise.

Please go read some books. Reading biographies is a great way to compress the life lessons from lots of people down in to the time where you can implement them. Typically people live one life. If you read lots of books you can speed that up and learn from as many as you like. You’ll find they’re very similar. They were angry that the world wasn’t perfect too. Then they got older and didn’t have time to fix it, or messed it up a bit enroute to their dreams. They even spent time screwing it up on purpose, just for you.

The bleating about healthcare and the rich and the jokes… Lets talk about the jokes. Reddit jokes are like light beer. You know you should like it. It tastes kind of like beer. It even has some alcohol in it. But it’s not going to make you drunk and it has kind of a crappy aftertaste. That’s reddit’s joke posts. You can drink another but you’re no closer to joy, so you might as well stop.

Hacker News is Reddit for the 18-24 year old entrepreneur wannabe or systematically thinking hacker with too much time. I’m sorry you have that idea that you’re never going to work on. Yes, you should fail fast or not. Yes, you should hire slow or fast. Yes, VC is important or not.

Having been through it, I can tell you it’s basically all bullcrap and you should just go out and start something. Be aware that everyone fits in to a few buckets – lying to you, useless, would love to help but can’t or a shark. Extremely few are in the golden bucket – helpful. You have to figure out on your own which is which. Never, ever, give up control. Have fun.

But don’t read HN.

Why I'm selling Fake Mayor

I had a lot of fun creating Fake Mayor. It’s a trivial iPhone app which lets you pretend to be mayor of some place. Like, you know, on foursquare. Now it’s for sale on flippa.com.

I used some help from oDesk to get it done. I’m not that good at design! It had a few hundred downloads which basically paid for itself. It was mentioned in a bunch of talks at Where 2.0 in 2010. I think one quote was “a dick thing to do” which pleased me greatly.

It’s both a piece of fun plus exposing some interesting flaws in business models reliant on showing someone your phone. That’s because you can get a free beer and other perks at many places if you’re the mayor of said place. So why not just fake it ‘till you make it? I don’t really have time to take it to its potential. If the app were made free I suspect there would be many, many more people using it. Then you could add some advertising or do something else innovative with it. The twitter handle plus website go along with the app of course. It’s served its purpose for me.

Flippa is quite a nice site to sell websites on. Very easy apart from having to confirm your phone number. There are a lot of crappy sites listed though. So if you know of anyone who wants to own a iPhone app with some fun potential with the twitter and website to back it, let ‘em know.

Why you should Kayak

I found an old plastic still-water kayak on craigslist for a couple of hundred dollars. Paddle included. Went to REI and bought a PFD (that’s American for life vest).

Still water kayaks are about as stable as your average north-african government. They’re flat-bottomed and tend to tip over. Hence they’re for still water. The weather has even been good enough to go outside recently in Redmond and luckily I live near a decent lake to paddle about in. I should mention that living near a lake in Redmond is about as likely as living near a pub in England.

It’s incredibly calming and fun to wander about (so long as you avoid the tipping over thing). It’s cheap. You’re not burning a few billion years of compressed energy and polluting. And it’s even free. How could you not find that fun?

The major problem is really only transporting your kayak. Here’s how I carry mine:

I just drive around with it hanging out the back and hold on to one of the handles at the front. I have a roof mounting kit but for the distances I go it’s not worth it. The next step is to buy a sea kayak so I can go on things like the sea. Like rivers and lakes with other people on them causing waves. They’re 4 times as expensive though and look like this:

The front and back have hatches (sometimes waterproof) for taking camping equipment, food and all that along with you. They’re a ton more stable and I highly recommend a short trip in one. I went around San Francisco in the bay in one on a guided tour.

The kicker here is that there are a ton of places to explore in Washington if you have a kayak. You can start basically in downtown Redmond and work down the Sammamish River to Lake Washington and the Pacific if you want to. I haven’t a clue how once I’m in the water and on my way I will get back with a kayak to my car but that’s another issue. I bought a couple of kayaking the Pacific Northwest (which I think means Washington, from hints) for 50 cents each at a garage sale. So, time to look on craigslist for an old sea kayak.

I just need to learn how to roll: