Apr 2002, 63 entries

K’s brother is in the the intensive care unit in West Virginia. We’re flying out tonight to be there with him. Please pray for him. God’ll know who you’re talking about and what can be done. Thanks.

Review Mockerybird using Alexa’s new web search. They use Google search results but also have screenshots for some of the results. Some Alexa people came in to work the other day and explained how they did this, and I was quite impressed. I would tell you about it, but I’m not sure if it’s top secret or not.

Is that too much to ask of my muse?

I want to be done with the book (the first draft at least) by the New Years Day Parade of the year of our Lord 2004. Yes, that is not an ambitious goal, it’s pretty lame in fact. But it’s all I can do. My precious baby steps.

And yet… I’m already falling behind schedule. In order to finish my predetermined number of pages, I’ll need to write about 10 pages a month.

So I set up this accountability program, in order to ensure that I make the first step of my remaining 19 steps without falling on my face.

I’ve set a goal for myself of 10 pages a month, according to my word processor, which processes words at a steady 18 words per line, 39 lines per page, in a 10 point Georgia font. I’ll be keeping myself accountable on the Novel Accountability Program.

Currently, I belong to the camp of people who believe that Web Services will be the next big thing. In essence, websites that make their information and engines available to other websites, allowing for the infinite propogation of new conglomerate applications which speak to each other and tell jokes (that’s the next NEXT big thing) will produce a very noticeable shift in the way we live. It’s already happening.

My father once made the prediction to my mom, in the 70’s I think, that in 10 years the personal computer would be in almost everyone’s home. She thought he was crazy. By the time I gained the mental processes required to understand human communication (yeah, it took me about 10 years), his prediction was right. Web Services will be to 2012 what PCs were to 1982. Ya with me?

Testing a new kind of link: Amazon is Humming. Although I never visit Slashdot, last week I did, and really liked how, next to each link, the root domain was presented in brackets next to it, so you knew where you would go. In this world, you can make links like this using this syntax: [l|http://mockerybird.com/index.cgi?node=markup|markup in Salieri], and it will make markup in Salieri.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of having a splitting migraine and trying to debug an overloaded server remotely (via the help of a friend) at the same time. Luckily, Stephen came to the rescue.

The strange thing about coming out of a physically painful experience is that you again appreciate the pleasurable. After a migraine, I delight in the ability to think again. What do you think will be the Next Big Thing?

I haven’t been as impressed with the first listen of a CD as I am with Sophtware Slump in a long time.

I wired up the Google API to Salieri, meaning that I can now add in-line google search results, like this: The Most Beautiful One. Like the links to Amazon, the results are cached in XML and only updated once a day.

afterDinner, a new site for writers and readers, is like a manifestation of a dream. At one point, about a year ago, I developed a writing tool that was very similar to this site (many of the features were actually identical, like paragraph-by-paragraph commenting, and a versioning system), but I abandoned it because I didn’t think it would actually do what I wanted it to do (which was to become the actual tool with which I wrote, instead of a place to showcase somewhat polished writing. It was intended to replace my papier database and word processor).

I’m really glad to see that Alex has made this site. I have a story in a workshop there now (it’s anonymous, so I won’t link to it). I hope it (the site, not necessarily the story) succeeds.

Often imagined to be the smallest unit of the human mind, I think that the individual can actually by dissected into further independent components.

The private mind and the public mind are two of these components I’ve begun to think about so far. There is also the part of the mind that makes choices, I guess conventionally known as the will.

At least in my own experience I’ve found that I’ve stopped making choices so much as collecting experiences and memories and intuitions that, collectively, weigh more on one side of a decision than the other. I find it very difficult to “choose” to do something that I can not back up with some subtle sense of it being “better”. For example, I cannot force myself to eat healthier until I can almost tangibly feel that the healthier food will make a discernable impact on my future.

Clearly, this is not a well-formed thought just yet. I’ll explore it more in the will node in the near future.

The concept of community has been haunting my thoughts lately. That fuzzy distinction between the individual, and the effects of the group upon the individual.

Offline, I’m thinking about planned communities. The concept of the online community is no new thing either, and lately there have been several interesting new online communities. Within the book, I’m entering a stage in the development where the community of the city, the house, and the private conversation are coming together.

If anyone has any leads on material that might help satisfy my interest in this area, please let me know.

Much like a character in a novel, but instead of existing on the pages of a book, a bot exists on an instant messaging client on some server. Usually, it responds to very simple commands and sends you back some kind of information. There’s much potential for creativity here, I think.

I’m reading Dynamics of Software Development, at the request of my soon-to-be new boss, and I just came across one strikingly amusing paragraph that tries to explain the delicate balance of freedom and restriction that is ideal for bringing out ideas from your developers:

“Eventually (if you do what the author recommended earlier), it will begin to dawn on some of the team members that they are in fact in power. No one is holding them back. Resources are available. Creativity is welcome.

This creates another set of problems, of course. Many creative and brilliant people unconsciously insist that something hold them back, that some negative force prevents their gifts from emerging. They carry around within them a “governor” function that blocks the ultimate release of their full creative energy. This self-inhibiting stems no dount from some early parental rejection of the child’s beauty, passed blindly from parent to child, some introjected fearfulness of being: if I truly reveal my uniqueness, the child senses, you (the parent) will abandon me. Since few parents ever explicitly demand that their child limit his or her growth, we all tend to develop extremely subtle sensitivities that enable us to detect these negative parental demands. There probably is some healthy, gene-protecting impulse behind this urge to be “normal,” to be the same as everybody else, to gain broad acceptance in the mediocre, average community, to conform to some homogenized value system; but this impulse is the antithesis of what is required for intellectual leadership and for the creation of great software.”page 44 of Dynamics of Software Development

Wow. I almost gasped when I read that “this self-inhibiting stems no doubt from some early parental rejection of the child’s beauty”. It’s extremely presumptuous to start, and his matter-of-fact tone makes me want to severely disagree with him. Other than that (and his somewhat awkward writing style), I think the general point he is trying to make, may in some ways imply to me (as brilliant and creative as I tell myself that I am).

I am constantly on the lookout for an adversary, for restrictions which I can resist. At work, I work best when I have more to do than I am able, when I can blame my workaholic tendencies on an outside factor, something that someone else is doing to try to take advantage of me, but which I will turn around and excel at.

He goes on to say:

“Our self-limiting sensitivities—our compulsive search for negation—although healthy in a pathological environment become pathological in a healthy environment.”

I think this is where the money is. And this is where it is going to apply to the book. Basically, he’s saying that the skills that are necessary to survive in a world that is largely unfair and agressive are counter-productive in an environment where everyone is given power, and room to express their creativity and intellegence. This is the shift that the Remington House characters are experiencing. What do you do, and how do you adapt, when you are given the resources to do whatever you want? What to do with infinite potential?

The love story between two people who, for one reason or another, the universe does not want together.

Is there a better story to tell than Romeo and Juliet? I gravitate towards this story just because resonance is created between the two households, and the fact that it’s a pair being pushed together and pulled apart allows for all kinds of comparison and contradiction to occur between them.

I spent some time thinking about other star-crossed lovers, both fictional and non-fictional: Sid and Nancy, like Kurt and Courtney, Antony and Cleopatra, Bonnie and Clyde, Sonny and Cher. I know there are more, so if you can think of them, let me know.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what the most popular items from wishlists that people who write weblogs are? Well, that’s exactly what this is: Daypop Wishlists scrapes weblogs.com for recently updated weblogs, then checks those for amazon wishlist links, then checks amazon for the items on those wishlists.

The latest API that lives on top of other APIs: Book Watch is a site that scrapes the recently updated weblogs from weblogs.com, then scrapes the sites it’s pointing to for links to Amazon items, then counts them to see which are the most popular.

The result: a list of the most commonly linked-to books, based on the latest information posted on the internet. Beautiful! He even has an RSS feed so that someone like Moi? could harvest his harvested information for even more evil purposes! (coming soon)

Alex, one of my co-workers, has set up a site to check our local radio station (KEXP) for their real-time playlists, and then scrape Amazon for album information. The result is this fantastic radio of the future: delicious.org.

Inspired by him, I set up my own imitation, adding a few extra things like similarity and listmania information, upped the page refresh rate to a minute, and placed it in a sidebar: The KEXP Sidebar.

Service Me, Web The number of web services that are popping up around the Google API and the Amazon Associates API is really exciting. Only good things can come from this. I could hardly sleep last night trying to think of all the different combinations of APIs that I could create to offer even more extravagant and useful APIs (Delicious, Book Watch, and DayPop Wishlists are three great examples of some of the new potential), or maybe it was the mexican coffee I had at 10:30 that was keeping me awake.

However, this morning, I’m thinking more that I’m going to be using the web services for my own purposes rather than turning them around into new web services. At least for now. I think the biggest and best possibilities will be coming in a year or so, and better to get my feet locked in their starting blocks until then.

Everyone who’s doing great things though, rest assured that I’m jealous.