# (8) 03 Feb 2009, 02:23AM: The Blog Host Market: I'm thinking of starting another blog for a little writing project of mine. I'd rather it have a more professional look-n-feel than the NewsBruiser blogs' built-in templates allow, and possibly an automatic audience if I can manage it easily.

So I thought about using Open Salon, which would be free and associated with an institution I'm nostalgically fond of. But every Open Salon blogger gets the same page template, including ads, and I wouldn't control my domain name, and the Terms of Service has some clauses I don't like:

By submitting or posting User Content using the Service or the Site, you grant to Salon an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to: (1) use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute the User Content in or through any medium now known or hereafter invented, for any purpose; (2) to prepare derivative works using the User Content, or to incorporate it into other works, for any purpose; and (3) to grant and authorize sublicenses of any or all of the foregoing rights.

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the User Content will no longer appear on the Site. However, you acknowledge that Salon may retain archived copies of your User Content, and that Salon will retain the rights to the content granted by these TOS.

So, I'm not technically giving up my rights to my words, but they get to use them as grist for any mill they ever conceive of. And I'm not sure how I'd export my work to back it up and have a local archive.

I also considered Six Apart's TypePad, which has a much more flexible template system. I'd be able to use a custom domain name. The price (about $10/month for what I want) seems reasonable. And the license (Section 10) for them to use my work is not perpetual, yay. But it's a paid service with no warranty, which raises my eyebrows. And I've seen complaints about the completeness of TypePad export.

WordPress.com has fantastic export, of course, and amazing customizability, and some built-in audience, and for a small price I could use a custom domain name. Let's check the ToS... Oh goody, mandatory arbitration in the case of a conflict (instead of getting a fair hearing in a court of law). And nothing in this contract, as far as I can tell, specifies that my words belong to me, although IP folks can tell me what assumption I should make.

At this point I'm thinking I should just coerce a web designer into making a nice NewsBruiser template for me and use a Crummy.com blog, because I know I can nag the sysadmin of that particular virtual box at will. Thoughts?

---

# 03 Feb 2009, 02:52AM: That's Webtertainment: I'm in Boston this week, probably till Sunday the 8th or so.

When I couchsurf, I want to entertain my hosts. Evidently I do this by foisting fun web videos that haven't really made the rounds, like Target Women, Drunk History, ROTOTRON CORNBOBBER, and the "Wishmaster" mondegreens.

Ever since Leonard built the PVR at our place, it's easier to make our guests watch these little show-and-tell bits. It's also way easier to play music (once I configured some stuff), and to watch TV en masse with automatic closed-caption activation and the skip-this-entire-commercial-break button (again, do some digging).

TiVo cost about $10/month; with MythTV, once you build the box, the channel listing service costs like $20 a year and that's it. And it's also a Linux box suitable for Songbird/Banshee, Hulu and Miro use, which is awesome. However, it breaks and doesn't record scheduled programs about once a month these days, in that frustrating open-sourcey-desktop-appy way. TiVo perhaps had this problem twice in several years of faithful service. So perhaps I should think of TV I like as a "river of entertainment," similar to the "river of news" model that info-use self-help types suggest RSS users adopt: you dip into it whenever you want, but don't get neurotic and completist.

However, Hulu makes it very easy to be a completist about most of my favorite shows. If MythTV falls down on the job, I can just alt-tab to Firefox and watch Colbert, Stewart, and Battlestar via Hulu. Unskippable commercials, worse UI, no closed captions most of the time, but there instead of not.

An exception: Leverage on TNT, which is not yet on Hulu. I want to view Leverage mainly so that I can read John Rogers's posts about it when they show up in my RSS reader. Because I am a completist.

---

# 03 Feb 2009, 02:59AM: Metonymy, New York: When I was in high school, I overheard a couple of English teachers mentioning how they always confuse metonymy and synecdoche and laughing their heads off. Now Leonard is ahead of the game.

---

# (2) 10 Feb 2009, 10:52AM: The Next Pursuit: I'm back in New York City, nursing a scratchy throat and catching up on Thoughtcrime Experiments submissions to keep my average response time down. The long-dormant Vista machine that PCF lent me is installing update 15 of 26; after I met up with Will Kahn-Greene in Somerville, I'm reassured that my testing can once more do Miro good. Leonard's oatmeal: supremely tasty.

---

# (1) 13 Feb 2009, 03:18PM: Friday Entertainments: Evidently tonight I could see the Nerdcore Rising documentary on the big screen and see whether Adi, John, Adam and I made it into the final cut. But instead I may go celebrate Unix time 1234567890. Leonard suggested that, as with the one billion second anniversary, we should try to meet up with Seth, fail, ride in a bus driven by a madman, and browse in a bookstore.

Plus, tonight people gather around our tube to watch Battlestar Galactica. You know, I'm beginning to think that all will not be revealed.

Thirteen submissions currently unread for Thoughtcrime Experiments; let's see if I can get all of them today.

---

# 17 Feb 2009, 10:01AM: Distractions: Tonight I see a staged reading at Woolly Mammoth costarring a friend of mine. I wonder what "Pay What You Can" brings in these days.

My life is better in some ways when I visit my sister. I exercise more, and she makes me laugh, and I meet her neat friends. But then yesterday, we spent twenty minutes coming up with "25 fake things about me" instead of writing An Important Government Paper or reading Thoughtcrime Experiment submissions. My favorite: "My relationship with onions is a pure and uncomplicated love." Her favorite: "I believe Reagan ended the Cold War."

---

# (1) 18 Feb 2009, 01:47AM: Half-Truths: Tonight I heard from DC-area sysadmin types that the area has plentiful IT jobs (which I'm willing to believe) and that Python and Ruby are fads on their way out (uh, no). Also I learned some wonderfully terrible jokes re: racism, anti-Semitism, and terrorism, of the sort I will only tell in person to thick-skinned friends.

---

# 18 Feb 2009, 06:05PM: Premise Quest: You know how when you play a lot of Tetris, brick walls look like problems to solve? And DDR makes techno songs sound like a cue to box step? Enter scifi obsession.

The quest for warm hands in a cold demanding environment is a long and frustrating one.

Corporal Duffy cursed Spacegov for banning weavlar mitts during duty shifts. The few seconds required to rip them off were an unacceptable risk, desk jockeys declared. She squeezed and released her neoneoprene-covered fists over and over...

---

# (5) 19 Feb 2009, 09:51AM: Skills And Lenses: A few models I've happened upon recently:

• No Big Deal: I visited Nandini. Her friend, a landscape architect, is helping her do up her apartment. We talked over breakfast. Susan's dad has always been a DIY type; his attitude is, why not try and do it himself? When she was a kid, her dad built a deck and she was his gofer. She'd take the leftover wood scraps and make doll furniture. To this day they enjoy working together and making stuff with their hands.

  My parents have written and edited stuff for fun for decades. When I was a kid, Nandini and I helped them mail out their zine. Dad performed pujas and wanted participants to know what the rituals and Sanskrit mantras meant, so he'd write up articles in Hindi, Kannada, and English, typeset them in MS Word on the 486 running Windows 3.1 or 95, run off 200 copies at Office Depot, and have me staple the brochures together. Eventually he started asking me to edit them ("Dad, no one knows what 'clarion' means, you should use a different word").

  They're always giving speeches, at parties, at Indian-American banquets/variety shows (invariably called "functions"), at schools, at an interfaith municipal Thanksgiving. And they'd push Nandini and me in front of the mike -- "Recite that poem you wrote! Sing that Weird Al song!" Once Nandini and I wrote, cast, and acted in a little four-act play called "Lost in Translation" at one of those Indian-American functions. I think we were teens.

  So after breakfast, Susan was singlehandedly putting up shelves in the guest room -- studfinding, putting up rails, cutting planks to size with a saw, and placing the brackets. Meanwhile, in the living room, Nandini was writing a big report on transit infrastructure in Thailand and India. She'll be doing a presentation on it, too. And I was working on a fiction anthology I'm editing. But we took a break to cowrite a silly monologue.

  One of the greatest gifts you can give your children, your employees, the people to whom you are a role model, is the knowledge that some field of endeavor is in a sense No Big Deal. Knowledge -- belief backed up by experience -- that they can do interesting and rewarding projects in it without fear of public embarrassment.

  I grew up thinking that writing, editing, publishing, public speaking, community leadership, hobbyist programming, and using the Net were No Big Deal. To this day, though, I'm leery of trying home improvement, car repair, sports, camping, and childcare. I don't have a baseline, I don't know where to start, I don't know how to know if I'm doing okay, I've never played around in a context where results don't matter, so I have that vague fear. Nandini got cooking from my mom; I didn't. I lost my fearlessness about hobbyist coding and am trying to get it back. I've gained some fearlessness about travel and capitalism.

  Leonard suggested a conclusion: you should treat everything like it's No Big Deal. Danger: you turn into one of those jerks who scorn strangers' struggles. (Yes, I'm thinking of those MIT jerks I met at that entrepreneurship meeting.) Self-efficacy demands that I treat my own attempts like No Big Deal; compassion demands that I recognize my privilege and help others build their skills and confidence.

• Hospitality + Integrity: How can I enter a party or meetup and start a good conversation with someone I've never met? I take the initiative to introduce myself to random people. I have a few starter and restarter questions at the ready -- what cool things are you up to? what's exciting you these days? how do you know the host? do you live around here? what are you reading? -- avoiding the boring status-laden questions like "What do you do?" and "Where did you go to school?" I enthusiastically listen and ask follow-up questions and bring up related topics and trivia.

  Some people respond in kind and get the momentum of the conversation going, start new threads and return to old ones. Some don't. If after five minutes of that treatment the person isn't saying anything particularly interesting, I say, "will you excuse me" and say something about food or drink or something, go away, and find some other person to talk to. I almost always find someone who can do twenty interesting minutes with me. And now I've made a new acquaintance, probably a friend. If I now need to mingle more to get good ROI out of the event, I frankly say, "I need to go mingle and meet more people," take her card or give him mine, and move on.

  In a sense I think of my conversation-starting as merely hospitable. I try to make people feel cared-about and give them a platform to show off their coolness. But I couldn't just do that insincerely; that's cynical and such a drain. I honestly believe most people have something interesting to show me, and that some just need a little help opening up. So I don't hide my opinions (open platforms win in the long run, the GOP is irresponsible, venture capital is uninteresting, Harry Potter Book 4 was great). But compassion demands that I avoid giving needless offense, and integrity demands that I back up my arguments and admit when I'm wrong, and hospitality demands that I never let myself become a boor or a bore.

  As I grow older, I find my deepest friends have integrity, a work ethic, some project that they're passionate about, and this seemingly innate dedication to conversational generosity. Attention, empathy, turn-taking, nitpicking only in the service of substantive truth, following the truth and the argument wherever it leads. And that's what I look for in new friends, and I keep finding it.

• Jokes, Games, and Stories as Syllogisms: A common way to describe speculative fiction (otherwise known as "science fiction and fantasy" is to call them "what-if stories." There's some counterfactual premise. My favorite stories are the ones where the interactions of the characters and the counterfactual premise(s) elegantly and inevitably lead to some satisfying resolution. The author reveals the emergent properties of a system.

  It turns out that this is also something I like in jokes. We see the rules of the world at the start, and then we see how they work themselves into something entertaining. My directions for creating observational humor aren't going to give you Dane-Cooky "that's so stupid! Blaaaaaah!" They're going to give you a Seinfeldesque analysis of the absurdity. Where did the incongruity come from, and what trend does it reveal?

  I'll leave it to the Adam Parrish/Zack Weinberg/Leonard Richardson/Brendan Adkins/Holly Gramazio/Kevan Davis/Alexei Othenin-Girard types to let me know whether I'm grounded in suspecting that this is some of the joy they find in designing games.

I started thinking about these models while chatting with friends and acquaintances near and far. Man, sociability is awesome.

---

# (6) 22 Feb 2009, 10:04AM: Open Question: What should go into Eggs Tesla?

---

# (3) 24 Feb 2009, 12:39PM: Two 101-Word Stories Inspired By Fred von Lohmann's Talk Last Night:

O'Porter

Most clients sounded more stressed and less grammatical than this guy. "Why did YouTube take down a video without soundtrack music? I didn't break any copyrights, did I?"

"You came to the right effing lawyer," O'Porter smirked, though technically EFF had fired him when he kept calling Seth a "Latin hunk." "Let's see it."

The stranger clicked Play and swiveled his laptop. O'Porter watched hamsters and tried to hear the words under the strange hiss --

Seth David Schoen closed the lid, peeled off his mask, and walked away from O'Porter's body. Really, breaking the Content-ID tool was just a bonus.

Venky

"I'm saying, 'Leibnitzian Python wonder-language that contains no ambiguity' was a JOKE, not a spec."

"So he was a jester-philosopher, the Birbal of his day."

"I think Colbert, Haskins or Stewart --"

"If code is law, shouldn't law be code? And who'll port it but us?"

"But it's the Cyc problem. We write legislation using subjective moral distinctions that change over time. Barring Seldon-level sociological prediction, your version 1 architecture is going to include something as abhorrent to future Americans as slavery is to us. Worst. Legacy. Code. Ever."

"Not if CSAIL works with us," said the dean of MIT Law.

Also inspired of course by Leonard and by Brendan. Very much not inspired by anything Seth or anyone at the Electronic Frontier Foundation has ever done.

---

# 25 Feb 2009, 09:20PM: Atlas Danced: Highlights of my recent round trip between NYC and Washington, D.C.:

• Sitting next to a fresh-from-college geekish Indian-American woman, chatting pleasantly for hours, reassuring her that she isn't alone in finding most Indian-American males unattractive, and finding and returning to her the well-loved copy of Atlas Shrugged she nearly left on the bus.
• Seeing the J. Fenimore Cooper Service Area. Great name.
• Driving past the Vigilant Hotel on 8th Ave. at 28th St. Even better name.
• Listening to 24 Hours at the Golden Apple, a This American Life episode that feels like a Unitarian Universalist Sunday service in the best possible way, and Big Wide World, a personal and uncomfortably historical TAL. What's the standard public radio listener lifecycle, and do I fit it? When I was a teen I'd listen to Morning Edition, Prairie Home Companion, Weekend Edition, Fresh Air, Says You!, and whatever Celtic, jazz, opera, folk, bluegrass, electronic, and et cetera music KUOP played before they switched to all-talk the moment I went off to college. Now I hear ten seconds of ME/WE or Marketplace when my alarm goes off, plus a TAL or two when I travel. Shouldn't I be increasing my public radio listenership as I become an old fogey?

---

# 26 Feb 2009, 01:05AM: Can I Be The Gardener From "Being There"?: Creating custom software, and perhaps client services in general, are more like agriculture than manufacturing. We aren't stamping out identical units and trying to increase "efficiency" by speeding up the process; we can't, because we can't negotiate away the time it takes to grow. Debugging, or copyediting, is like weeding. Creators and managers aren't forcing a thing to happen; we're guiding the creative spirit, feeding it, and guarding the fruit from harm.

Brooks's Law, pointing out that adding more staffers to a late software project makes it later, has something in common with "Nine women can't have a baby in a month." Add that to No Silver Bullet and you see that the irreducible bottleneck is the complicated thought it takes to make a complicated thing, an artifact of (arguably) the summit of human civilization. Not to sound like Louis CK.

---