“personal”
97 posts under this tag.
Education doesn’t make you happy, and nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free—if we are; or because we’ve been educated—if we have; but because education may be the means by which we realise we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears… tells us where delights are lurking…
Iris Murdoch character in Richard Eyre’s IrisIMDB script
I can’t believe how silly happy I am some days. And then when I remember the world, and its great treasons, and the billions of un-happy, in-war, un-healthy, un-eating, un-knowing (of so much beauty!), still-mortal people in the world I can’t stall work any longer—but, you know, despite and impudently in front of it all, it just makes me happy to be so happy.
I just found an essay titled “Ambient Findability” by Peter Norville that seems almost like an outline of what would one year later become his terrific same-titled bookAM. The ideas are pretty rough and unpolished in the essay (or perhaps it’s only that I saw them first full-formed) but here are three highlights:
Google is undoubtedly having an impact on the evolution of the English language. I’d be surprised if the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary don’t have a secret threshold number of hits needed for new words to become official. “Blog” was recently added (3.7 million Google hits). I’m sure “Findability” is next (3,690 Google hits). Google is changing authority in ways we don’t fully understand.
As information becomes increasingly disembodied and pervasive, we run the risk of losing our sense of wonder at the richness of human communication.
And in the context of e-commerce, I’m fascinated and encouraged by the ability of customer reviews on sites like Amazon and Epinions to empower and inform consumers, increasing pressure on companies to build better products.
Interestingly, these reviews are driven by participation economies that reward the Top ReviewersAM with attention and trust. Note that the #1 Top Reviewer at Amazon (4550 book reviews) is Harriet KlausnerAM, formerly an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania. This just goes to show that librarians were destined to rule the Web.
I will one day build a Fortune Global 500WP company made out of less people than my then age. The headcount limit should keep it interesting.
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by…
— Douglas Adams WP
Oh boy, can you hear the whoosh yet again? For the first deadline (August 5) my excuse was mostly several huge, polished posts (1, 2, 3) that I just started pouring out possessedly one afternoon after another. For the second deadline (August 12—yesterday!), well, no excuse other than that I’m in thrall with Domburi, and despite sleepless nights (day? night? they’ve lost all meaning to me), I’m happily obsessing with details and trying all sorts of innovative things. I’ve reached a strange state of scripting satori: I’m writing HTML through Javascript like no one has before. I swear it’s so weird and powerful that in a way it’s funny. It’s big stuff.
So yes, it’s better to think of my previous Road Map as broad guidelines for what’s to come. Just trust me, when Domburi’s finally out (August 31), it’ll be heart-breakingly beautiful. Till then and thanks for keeping in touch.
Man! What withA all the delightfully absorbing work I’ve set myself to, I’m tremendously unexercised these days. Tonight I washed my teeth and it occurred to me half-jokingly that that was about all the exercise I was going to get for the day. It’s true.
Take the day off, my sister’s back from California!
I’ll be the first to admit I’m lousy keeping my public commitments. The thing is, they really help me clear my head and get some focus, and most of the time, even if I don’t finish on schedule, public shame makes me finish all I originally intended eventually (though usually pretty late). So I’m still a big fan of public commitments but this time I’ll add a novel feature to my schedule: incentives for me to finish on time.
Some background is in order: As I was saying yesterday, there is a big project (the biggest yet!) on the horizon, but before I can tackle it I need to give Imagery the much-promised revamping I’ve been talking about for 49 days now (!). I’ve several things to blame, of course, but by and large it’s the same lack as always: focus.
Anyway, many ideas have come to me in the meanwhile. To begin with, I definitely want Imagery to have a memorable, easy-to-pronounce dotcom name and after much brain-racking my creative-assistant-cum-sis, Chef, came up with domburi.comWHOIS, which I loved and was surprisingly available. DomburiWP (usually spelled donburi) is an extremely popular, delicious, and simple japanese dish that has been my top food for three weeks now (when it toppled Pad ThaiWP). The name’s short, memorable, easy to pronounce, and cool. It’ll be Imagery’s new identity. The next step now is to clone Imagery to Domburi and experiment there so that I don’t disturb Imagery searchers (how oh-so-cool to have a user base!). Imagery was always meant as an alpha application and has far outstretched itself already. A major polish is in order (not a rewrite from scratch, mind you!) and you’ll be able to track it from domburi.com (though the page will of course be unstable).
The other important idea was to create something of a brand house for Imagery Domburi and all the related interface projects that are to come. My first candidate for a name was the Interface Institute, which was dotcom available and seemed like fun (considering it’s a one-man enterprise), but I wanted something more risky, more challenging, and that’s how I ended up with  .net—after, of course, that famous quote from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire,
I don’t want reality, I want magic.
seen under the light of this other quote—that might as well be the new company’s mission statement—from Steven Johnson’s indispensable Interface Culture,
The real magic of graphic computers derives from the fact that they’re not tied to the old, analog world of objects. They can mimic much of that world of course, but they’re also capable of adopting new identities and performing new tasks that have no real-world equivalent whatsoever. People who get hooked on computers get hooked for this reason. They don’t become high-tech junkies because their machines remind them of their Rolodexes; they’re junkies because their machines do things they never thought possible. Interface design should reflect this newness, this range of possibility.
I’m tremendously excited about . Once, not long ago, I somewhat secretly decided that I’d someday work at virtual reality, the possibilities of which seem truly mind-boggling (some of you might remember my incoherent ramblings on the subject). To my mind, this seems like a weird early step in that direction—in virtual reality, everything is interface.
But that’s enough intro, here, finally, is my road map:
Start of Project Domburi!—29 July (Chef’s bday!)
Main Goal: Make Domburi IE and Opera compatible.
Punctuality Premium: If I do finish with the above task, I get to buy Getting Real, the book.
End of 1st Week—5 August
Main Goal: Add Yahoo! & Flickr to the list of Domburi engines and do interesting things like split screens and such with them.
End of 2nd Week—12 August
Main Goal: Implement Bento & Disjoint (Cool Domburi surprise features—you’ll see!). Begin writing copy (presentation, FAQ, help, requirements).
End of 3rd Week—19 August
Main Goal: Polishing, beta-testing, polishing. Rinse and repeat. Special attention to things like responsiveness, interaction, smoothness, design, performance, stability. Finish writing copy.
End of 4th Week—23 August
Main Goal: Publicity, more polishing, and more publicity. The hope here is a mention from
TechCrunch.
Tentative Finish—29 August
Project Domburi would be successfully finished now if the website had attained 10 thousand visitors per day, for more than 3 days (not necessarily in a row). If the challenge’s met I earn the Punctuality Premium, if not, I keep promoting and polishing the website fulltime.
Punctuality Premium: Read Replay, Machinery of Freedom, Artful Sentences and the week’s Economist—all told, my idea of nirvana.
End of 1st Cushion Week—2 September
The same review of the previous week: Domburi should have had 3 days with a 10-thousand-visitors-traffic by now. If it does, I earn a (big) Punctuality Premium, if not, I keep at it.
Punctuality Premium: Read Peter Watson’s massive Ideas: a history of thought and invention—with 750 pages (and big sheets at that, with the smallest of margins) it promises to be even more absorbing and challenging (and fun!) than The Modern Mind. Implement quick versions of 3 simple projects: a textviewer, a timetool, and an interface to RAE.
End of 2nd Cushion Week and Definitive Finish of Project Domburi—9 September
Domburi really should have had at least five 10,000-visitors days by now, but if it doesn’t I’ll move (shamefully) to the next project…
Start of Project Maki!—10 September
As always, any help keeping me on track (a simple message or comment or email) would be very very very appreciated. Being a human-timer is easy and fast, and yet rewards with lavish praise. ;)
This is one of the many things I ended up pasting on my wall last week. Since it’s something of an important breakthrough for me, let me try to explain what I mean with it.
I have always marveled at rich people, particularly at how one could get rich, and it always seemed impossible to the verge of immoral how a single person could earn on the order of tens of thousands of dollars per month. There were very few things I could think of for me to do in an hour that would be worth the hundreds of dollars I would need.
That is completely the wrong way to go about it. There really are few such one-hour isolated things that will get you a couple hundred dollars and most of them involve decades of poorly paid specialization. There is a better, more productive way to think of the problem, and that’s what the equation above serves as a reminder of: If you get one thousand people to give you fifty dollars per month, you’ll make fifty thousand dollars per month.
Yes, I know it’s mind-numbingly stupid, but it’s true. And fifty dollars aren’t really that much money, and a month is quite a big chunk of time, and a thousand people doesn’t seem as much to me now as it used to—that’s about the daily traffic of Imagery a couple of weeks ago (and yes, I know the comparison is worth squat, but it still was a landmark in my life to realize how easily I could interest and benefit and touch thousands of people).
Of course that getting-people-to-give-you-money part is not at all about mind-washing or extortion, it’s about creating more than fifty dollars of wealth in a month for over a thousand people. And doesn’t it seem exciting and achievable put this way? At any rate, it has my mind reeling, because a couple of days ago I finally crystallized an idea of a website that could do just that and much more (codename: maki). And it promises to be a lot of work, and to be the greatest challenge I’ve yet undertaken, and it will take me out to the real world every day, and I’d meet thousands of people, and it’d get me walking, and… well, time’ll tell, won’t it?
Inspired in part by Schockwave Rider’sWP Kate, I just redid my wall to mark a new stage in my life. Here’s the result (click on it to see notes on each picture). I will explain some of them in more depth next week, for now, I’m quite proud with how it went out, I like it.
On a sidenote, here’s an iibb: Flickr’s on-picture notes were, and still are, a stroke of genius, but by now one should be able to embed a picture together with its notes into another page, akin to how one embeds YouTube videos.
It’s early morning and it rains droplets and brisk light outside—I’m happy.
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