“promises”

I will one day build a Fortune Global 500^WP company made out of less people than my then age. The headcount limit should keep it interesting.

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.

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.com^WHOIS, which I loved and was surprisingly available. Domburi^WP (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 Thai^WP). 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,

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,

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!)

End of 1st Week—5 August

End of 2nd Week—12 August

End of 3rd Week—19 August

End of 4th Week—23 August

Tentative Finish—29 August

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

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. ;)

And this is it. Screw Chinese, screw German or French (both of which I already studied for a year), I’m off to learn Japanese.

Oh! I want to go to the Stanford Singularity Summit this May 13! I mean, Ray Kurzweil, Douglas Hofstadter, Cory Doctorow, Eric Drexler, Max More, and Eliezer Yudkowsky will be speaking! (Just imagine all the freaks¹ that’ll be there…) It’s free for the public and I already RSVP-ed. Let’s see, if I stay in California with some friends, if I fly cheap, if I eat nothing but air, if…

¹ Remember Tom Peters’s advise: Find a Fellow Freak Faraway.

I’m sick (and oh-so-very-tired) of this clueless, absent-minded, bumbling persona of mine. I’m sick of knowing nothing about the rw (that’s the real word), of always getting lost, of always forgetting stuff, of never having my cell phone around, of people patronizing me, of stupid little mistakes like today’s. It’s time to start paying attention, to notice my surroundings, to stop forgetting in the shower whether I already shampooed my head or not. I’m becoming (to some degree at least) a worldly person as of this moment. This is my official skin shed of the silly-clumsy-absent-minded-professor-persona. So long.

I have got to read Nietzsche one of these days.

To publish before the heat death of the universe:

1. I Fell In Love With Yoga
2. Me, Myself, and Exercise
3. Why Reading Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies Got Me Out of a Math Degree (And How Paul Graham Held My Hand Later On)
4. How to Use Firefox as a Text-Reader.
5. How I Finally Got Criticism with Interface Culture & Understanding Comics
6. In Defense of Prejudices
7. Paean to Contraceptives
8. On Premarital Sex
9. How to Use Winamp with Flair
10. Prefiero Lo Fresa
11. The Perry Bible Fellowship: The weirdest comics you’ll ever, ever read
12. No amamos a nuestros amantes por su belleza
13. Secrets of Language Learning
14. A List of Fruits
15. A Wikipedia Feature Proposal
16. Analogies
17. Music Search and the Future of Google
18. How to Learn Esperanto
19. Azureus’ 3d View: a Beautiful, Dense, Self-Explanatory Example of Information Design
20. On Youth (and Foolish Ambition)
21. A Personal Theory of Love
22. Urban Sensibility. Media Enjoyment.
23. I Used to Fly
24. The Synaptic Mesh That Is My Mind Seems To Have Reached a Link Tipping Point. The Same Goes For The Web.
25. Reasons to Love Web Design
26. Mejor, la Verdad
27. Una Introduccion a Fernando Delgadillo
28. Como Todas las Mañanas
29. Sobre el Peje y Cosas Peores
30. Memetic Alert!
31. Those Pfizer Ads Are Pure eemadges!
32. I Want To Be Selfish
33. City Driving
34. Art Definition
35. Una Introduccion a Akwid
36. Doug Engelbart’s Stages of Mankind
37. Borges, The Information Fetishist
38. Ghosts, A Novel
39. A Summary of Summaries
40. Conceptual Blending
41. A Dictionary of Language Extensions
42. 18 Pages of True Math (Or Why Minus Times Minus Yields Positive)
43. Discographies and Sturgeon’s Law
44. Internet & Electricity
45. Ten Reasons to Drop Out
46. Systems (My Kind)

Things have been slow lately and, as is my nature, I’ve crafted a small weird plan to get things moving once again. This week I’ll…

• publish Erasmo’s novel on Wednesday;
• take Hatha Yoga classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday;
• get myself a medical certificate saying I can swim and enroll at Acalli;
• swim on Thursday;
• go every morning, 7AM to 1PM, 8AM to 2PM, to Starbucks Mariano Otero Providencia Minerva to read and write;
• read Andrew Hunt and David Thomas’s The Pragmatic Programmer, Erich Fromm’s El Arte de Amar and O. C. Ferrell, Geoffrey A. Hirt, and Linda Ferrell’s Business: (a fascinating textbook from my sister Paulina);
• reread Strunk and White’s Elements of Style;
• finally finish my Notes On WikiCriticism, the exploratory essay I’ve been painting for too long already.

There’s sadly too little programming in here, but I need to find out how good the WikiCriticism idea really is before I can start to move on. Wish me luck!