Rachel and I have been in New York since Wednesday. I went to participate in the Gel conference and it's been a fantastic experience. I'll be writing up a synopsis of the experience along with pictures some time in the next week.

Seeing such amazing speakers is always so inspirational and more than anything I want to transform this weblog into a better experience. As for work, after talking to a lot of very excited people about their Gmail experience has reminded me that my job isn't to make deliverables to make my coworkers happy. It's to create better experiences to make the users out there have better experiences. There are so many people out there who don't even know what they're missing, and if I'm going to make sure they get it, I need to be working for them. Okay. Back to it, then. Just know that even when I'm nto blogging, I'm workin' for ya.

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Every now and then I get a new mac and I have to load it up with a standard repertoire of software before I can use it the same way as I use my other computers.

Usually I add the pieces here and there over several weeks, but I'm trying to standardize it now, possibly burning all the software onto a single DVD for easy installing. Here are my absolutely essential isn't-my-mac-without-it list of programs:

• Standard 10.most-recent suite of OS X apps
• Stuff on the OS X Dev Tools DVD
• Photoshop (used to be 7, now CS, soon to be CS2)
• BBEdit 8
• Transmit 3 (ftp)
• Firefox
• mySQL (php is already in the OS X installation)
• CocoaMySQL (I wish they'd update it, but it's free!)
• Omnigraffle Pro (diagramming and flowcharting)
• Either Microsoft Office or iWork
• Snapz Pro (Screenshot-taker)
• Quicksilver (quick-access launcher)
• Subversion (version control software)

That's it. That's literally all I need to get along swimmingly on any mac and do all the things I want to do. There's nothing else anyone would need in order to create world-class web applications, or if there is I haven't found it. If I were locked in a room for a year with a machine loaded thusly and access to ports 22 (ssh) and 80 (web), I'd be wildly productive. Okay, maybe more productive without port 80 (damn you port 80...)

What's your essentials list? (Okay, okay. Windows folks too...)

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To anyone who thought AOLiza was an evil way of messing with people who randomly IM you, it's nothing compared to what's going to happen to Laura Pahl.

Update: Turns out the thing was a hoax, an April Fools joke they say, though I say no, since it's not yet April first. Ah well. Caught me!

Update to the update: Okay, purportedly not a hoax after all, but a story with some form of a conclusion now. Witness the drama, and the value of having a nice mom.

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I wrote two blog posts about Yahoo today, but decided not to post either of them because neither one ended up saying what I set out to say, and both sounded strangely bitter.

I have to say, I admire Zawodny and Scoble because while I often disagree with their views, they're very true to their own feelings, even when they may favor 'the competition' or be critical of their employer.

I think the biggest difference here is that I feel closer to the general population at Google than I ever did at Yahoo. I feel completely free to go to anyone's office and talk to them about what I like or don't like about their product, so I'm less likely to go to my blog and spout off when I could just as easily go straight to the people that made the thing, and know my words will have a real impact on the product. I never felt that at Yahoo, where business units were feifdoms and the competition was all too often the people on the other side of your floor.

Damnit. I did it again.

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You know you're doing some serious web surfing when you stumble across predictions of the social implications of a 'world net' written by researchers in 1983.

Scroll down to the highlighted 'Fear and Loathing' message in the digest. While I believe most of their concerns proved unfounded, it's great to think that the concerns we have about the net and the world today might be similarly sidestepped to introduce new concerns (like net addiction and cyberstalking) that we hadn't considered before.

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This comic brings to mind the immortal words of Homer Jay Simpson who said, "To alcohol the Internet: The cause of -- and solution to -- all of life's problems!"

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Positive reenforcement has been proved successful time and time again. Expressing joy at another person's kindness, gratitude at their thoughtfulness, or mirth at their jests, it all feeds back into the mix to produce more of the same. Somewhere along the way, quite non-deliberately, I took this principle and internalized it, and now I wonder if I'm alone.

I love to create. I like to make beautiful things, useful things, things that other people enjoy. It's probably a good thing that I'm an interaction designer, because when I put something out there I get far more satisfaction from seeing the impact it has on others than I feel from the simple creation of the work. On the basic level, public reaction is the loopback in my positive reenforcement feedback loop. I make good things, and people like them, making me want to make more good things. But the desire to make good things isn't enough.

Some time long ago, possibly in high school, maybe a lot earlier, I got in the habit of giving my subconscious positive reenforcement. In grade school I was always a procrastinator (who am I kidding? I'm at work at 10pm writing a post when I should be finishing the presentation I'm staying late to finish) and when it came to writing papers, I'd often spend the first 13 days of a two week assignment with the subject in the back of my head, taking up spare cycles in the shower or on the bus. Come 10pm the day before the paper's due I'd crack open the word processor (or piece of paper) and empty the tank that had slowly been filling in my head.

Thanks to spellcheckers, I often didn't even have to read my paper before turning it in the next morning.

It usually worked out okay. Somehow while distilling in my think-tank the thoughts polymerized into strands that came out well without doubling back or making logical knots. Sometimes it was disastrous. By the time I was a senior in high school I'd determined that anything I write had a 2/3rds chance of being terrific and a 1/3rd chance of being absolutely awful.

I used to brag that I never knew which it would be until it came back with a grade. In truth that probably has more to do with my frequent skipping of the proofreading process than any auto-aphasia relating to my own writing. I'd never add that part though. I preferred the mystery.

But I digress.

Inevitably, the paper would come back with a grade on it. As Miss Griffith walked around the classroom, handing back papers, I honestly had no idea what I'd find on mine; the subjectivity of grading prose multiplied by my own inability to judge my own work. The uncertainty always came to a sudden clarity when the paper made its way to my desk. (Ever notice how some teachers place the paper face down on your desk, forcing you to execute the revelatory act yourself, like pulling off a band-aid, or possibly a scab?) Either way, seconds later I would know whether I'd written something good or bad. The marks of red completed the greater, outer feedback loop.

This moment is when my own inner feedback loop begins. If I got a bad grade, I'd file the paper away in my backpack, never to be read again. If I got an A I'd re(?)read the paper carefully from beginning to end. I'd read it with pride, and that warmth would drift down to my subconscious, telling it that this is what good writing looks like.

The funny part is that I didn't have the intention of making my own writing better, only to read what I sound like when I'm doing it right.

Nowadays, now that I realize the net benefit, I do it more than ever. When someone gives a particularly laudatory comment on this site, I'll frequently re-read what I wrote, often re-reading the same piece several times. It's like watching a well-worn videotape, looking for clues you missed the first five times. Sometimes I find alliterations and nuggents of metaphor that were so buried in the stream of prose that I don't even know they were there until the fifth time I panned for the gold within.

It's not just papers anymore. I'll relive conversations, re-examine designs, sites, even code. I try to view each with the fresh eyes of he who provided the praise. I wipe my own mental slate clean and pour the sand down slowly and metered to experience not only the resulting work, but the formative process of taking the work in.

I don't know what my bad writing looks like, but as time goes on I seem to have less and less of it, because I understand much better where I find my successes. This might be true in the broader context of life as well. I don't dwell in the past, and when I do, I find it filled with nostalgia, and only very rarely pain.

It may be that I'm doomed to repeat past mistakes, but I don't think so. Tromping through the forest of life we all build trails, and if we backtrack to relive the more enjoyable ones, we can set forth in the future using these well-trod paths as guides, without the need to set warning markers on the rough paths traversed but once, all illusory allusions to Robert Frost aside.

Perhaps it's a form of egotism, or maybe selective memory, but I like to think of it as taking good care in raising my own homunculus.

As a parting thought, I wonder now how far this rabbit hole goes. Does my inner creative self encompass a homunculus of its own? The spark of creativity? Is it a tiny flame that is constantly fed, or one like I, who feeds on his own successes and starves on his failures? Food for thought, as it were.

I wonder if I'll ever read this.

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Updating last week's post where I wondered what would happen if traffic rules were relaxed in the US as they are in China, here's a counterpoint example in the form of a video of looser traffic regs in Bangkok (wmv file).

If this doesn't promote alternative transportation, I don't know what would.

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What if traffic lights disappeared? What if bikes, pedestrians and cars had equal rights on the road? It turns out, at least in one case study in China, that there are less accidents[*].

What's the catch? The drivers have to think. Oh well.

* Sorry for the Salon Magazine link. They'll want you to watch an ad for a day of 'premium access' to read the article. Actually, I went ahead and bought the 1 year subscription last month and I really enjoy it. I can't think of another news site I pay to access, aside from the occasional Slashdot donation.

That said, it would be pretty revolutionary if I could, as part of my subscription, link to an article and get a quota of registration-free clickthroughs, so the first 500 people could read the article via my special URL without having to watch an ad.

Hmmm... I'll have to think about that one some more...

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Doing some research on our new toy, I came across a teriffic article on Sports Illustrated's digital photo workflow.

Minutes after eight photographers stationed at this year's Superbowl took over 15,000 pictures in under 6 hours, it falls to two guys huddled around a monitor, giving the thumps-up or -down to two pictures a second, paring the shots down to a reasonable set, and that's just the beginning.

Just 18 months ago S.I. relied on film, two portable developers in a trailer, and a staff of negative-cutters and mounters to do the same job half as well. All-told, it's an interesting look at the melding of humans and computers in the workflow of managing 42 gigabytes of photos in under a day.

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No, it wasn't a sponsored event or anything, but the weather's beautiful, Rachel was an angel a few weeks ago and got my bike tuned up, and I was craving some exercise, so I took my bicycle to work today.

It's only 3 miles to work, and is mostly a straight-shot up Shoreline. In a testament to alternative transportation, Mountain View has plenty of bicycle lanes [1.9mb PDF], including lanes on every street on my shortest route.

Rachel saw me off, and less than 20 minutes later I was at work, feeling totally energized. Woo-hoo! This is definitely going to become a regular thing.

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Saturday was the Firefly Farewell party. A little over a year after Fox cancelled the show, twelve of us got together and watched the three unaired episodes that were released with the DVD box-set of the first (and only) season.

Leave it to Fox to cancel a show that's popular enough to justify a DVD release, and to do it when there are still completed episodes in the can.

At any rate, the party was great. The episodes were teriffic. We're all hoping the rumors that Joss is writing a movie script for Firefly are true.

Before the party a handfull of us had a TiVo Upgrade Party, replete with a trip to Fry's and subsequent sortie to Radio Shack. Paul and Karen now have 139-hour TiVos where before they had only 14 hours. Quite a difference I imagine.

Me, I was planning on upping my 80-hour to 200 hours, but talking with Ammy and Rachel the night before, I realized that about 80% of the space on my current TiVo is being used to hold shows I want to save, some of them over a year old. If I upgraded to 200 hours, eventually I'd be in the same position, effectively having a 15-hour TiVo with an additional 185 hours of online saved content.

Rather than spend money to upgrade the TiVo as a stopgap, I decided to give a DVD-Recorder a try. With the ability to offload my shows to DVD, I could again have a true 80-hour TiVo, as well as a way to offload and distribute shows to those who missed them, like when the cast of The Simpsons was on Inside the Actor's Studio.

Much of yesterday was spent rewiring all the AV equipment in the living room (Cable box, TV, TiVo, DVD-R, VCR (Don't ask the obvious question, please. I'm a geek. That's why.), Stereo Receiver and 5.1 decoder, Playstation 2, Gamecube), and going to dinner with Rachel.

Rachel and I celebrated our 1-year anniversary yesterday. One year ago we met for the first time when she picked me up at the Pittsburgh airport, coming home from winter break. A year later and we're going stronger than ever, and celebrated this by having wonderful French cuisine at Cafe Brioche, capped by an absolutely amazing chocolate souffle and blackberry cobbler a la mode.

This week is going to be all about rearranging furniture upstairs and redefining mental spaces. In medieval europe it was customary for neighbors to periodically walk their borders together, to establish in their head exactly where they agreed one property ended and the other began. Forget about GPS; back then not even good fences made good neighbors, because fencing off a 500-acre plot was an unheard-of amount of labor just to define a boundary, hence the walking of the lines.

Every once in a while it's good to walk the lines in several areas of life. It's annual review time at work, a walking of the lines, a defining of workplace scopes and boundaries. 1099s and W-4s are flying through the mail, to help us walk the lines with our government. I want to make a point of spending more 1-on-1 time with my close friends, walking those lines, touring their properties to see how their mental estates have flourished since the last time.

But right now it's work time, and I've got to get to it.

Happy Monday!

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I love my workplace. It's so... intimate.

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I find that I do so much more stuff when I'm doing it at the expense of something else.

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(From the category of 'turning stuff into other stuff')

Unpacking, I've come across a lot of stuff of questionable necessity. I like having business cards from my jobs at Dantz, USWeb/CKS, Yahoo, and my personal businesses, but how many do I really need? On one hand, a business card from a failed dotcom might be the best evidence of actual employment and job title, so I want to keep a handful, but do I really need 500?

Still, throwing them out seems wrong too...

Then the CardCube page comes across my desk. Following the instructions might not help me get rid of my cards, but at least I can have some fun with them. :-)

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About 90% of my web reading nowadays spawns from the 45 RSS feeds that I follow, the articles they point to, and the sites linked from within those articles. Now when I finish reading them, I'm almost at a loss as to where to surf next.

I've forgotten how to surf. I remember when it wasn't about finding a particular piece of information, but just about seeing what's out there. So much of how I surf finds me the latest memes, what everyone else is talking about, that I've lost most of my ability to just go out and hunt for interesting things... How do you surf? Why? What are your daily habits?

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Though nobody's brought it up, I can see how someone would look at this process and say "Yeah, I suppose it could be called participatory design, but isn't this design by committee?" My answer to that would be yes and no. What's happening with the user base ("yinz") is more like screening. I get feedback, and redesign, using my discretion on which things are perceived as rough, which are difficult to understand, overly obvious, and aesthetically pleasing or not.

Nearly all the stuff we've been doing here is visual design. At the same time, talking about the visual design, which is more justifiable to do in a participatory process, I'm getting a better idea of your individual workflows. How do you use Fury? How might the interactive design suit that better? These are questions I'm learning about while we dicker over highlight colors.

The actual interaction flows are being worked on in a more structured process. They'll also have their time to be put forward, but in a front-end user-experience form, not the back-end flows and such. This sort of thing is better done in ones and twos, so I need to find and test some local fury readers. Hey, any HCII brethren care to submit to a low-fi test or two?

Anyhow, just trying to say that giving you links and talking about impressions isn't my whole HCI process, but when dealing with expert users of the intended system, as you all are, interviews like these, even en masse in comments, have their place. you can already see the difference when you go back and look at the first mocks to now.

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Do you ever click the 'get mail' button a couple times, just to make sure you got all the email, and there's not another, overlooked letter, maybe sitting in the bottom of the virtual mailbag?

In user testing, time and time again reserchers will see a user try to do something with a new interface, and if the system doesn't react, they'll click again, and click harder again until they can't click any harder. Then they give up and try another tactic.

I wonder how interfaces could be designed to use these behaviors. First, we'd need a pressure-sensitive mouse button, then we'd need to reinvent interactive metaphors to better map to the way we work as people.

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Trust the government to spearhead waterfall design at the expense of usability. They're trying to make governmental data easier for ordinary citizens to find, but their 'three clicks or less' mantra leaves a lot to be desired.

"Three clicks or less" sounds great in meetings and when pitching to corporate schmoes, but it has absolutely nothing to do with usability, beyond ensuring that the final product will have been crippled by a false constraint at the outset.

The joining of several databases into a few unified search databases is laudable, but search has so much to do with how search requests are understood by the system, how different results are given levels of significance, and how those levels are indicated to the user, that the most unified search engine can end up being the worst, unless these factorsare taken into account.

Case in point: Go to 4 out of 5 consumer electroncs sites and search for a product name or part number and you'll receive 23 press releases that mention the product name, and you have to drag through two or three pages of search results before actually getting to the product page. This is a particularly lamentable example because it's clear that users desire product pages over press releases, and they could easily be grouped first, or the result set could even be gathered into piles from different categories so the user can say 'ooh, press releases!' and dive into that subset of the results.

Hopefully, government info is just as structured and easily clustered. They also have the benefit of being able to enforce metadata inclusion, to allow better sorting and grouping of result sets based on meta tags.

Of course, my grousing is based on the PR-speak coming from the project, and I'm assuming that the design will follow the propaganda they're spouting to the press. I just hope the actual designers don't accept the 'three click' mandate as the backbone of design, because just because you can get anywhere in three clicks, if each of those clicks are from a palette of a hundred or a thousand, then usability was gone before click one.

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(with apologies to Neil Gaiman)

When Sports Writers Snap. (Guardian UK)

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Following up on our discussion of John Brady Kiesling and John H. Brown's resignations from the diplomatic corps, I've received a copy of John Brown's resignation letter. While not as eloquently written as Mr. Kiesling's (which may be why the full copy didn't appear in the news outlets) it's still an interesting read.

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Wow. CNN PDF'ed and published a packet of the emails (2.2meg PDF) that went around NASA in the days days before the Columbia disaster. Reading the exchanges is truly fascinating. I'm only on page 9 of 27 now, but it's really clear that a lot of relevant people were aware of the risks, and did what they could to work out disaster scenarios if the wheel well was breeched.

The undercurrent to most of the correspondence was that if it was a problem it could easily become a catastrophic problem, but if the Shuttle made it through the early stages of re-entry, they needed to have decisions regarding bailout or landings sans-gear already decided.

It's horrible that this happened, and worse that more data wasn't available, especially now that detailed investigation found what was probably several tiles in orbit near the orbiter after an orbiter translation (not sure if it was an OMS burn or just an RCS adjustment).

Anyhow, if you're curious, or just morbid, it makes for very interesting reading, both from a historical and an organizational perspective. All in all, I feel this is a different NASA than the one that decided to launch Challenger, but accidents can still happen.

If you decide not to read it, don't worry, I'm sure the movie-of-the-week special will probably be out by September.

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Ahh, the inside jokes of working at Yahoo...

Before messenger clients go out to the masses in beta testing, we usually run alpha testing in-house. We post it inside the firewall for all the yahoos to download and use (and believe me, the average yahoo types far more words in instant messaging than says out loud on a given day) and see if any problems come up.

One day a server bug struck several dozen people using alpha copies. No matter what they typed into the composition window, all the other person would see is '3'.

Friend: Wanna grab some lunch?
Me: 3
Friend: isnt that a little late?
Me: 3

the problem was fixed by the end of the day, but for months amongst a small group of yahoos, the bug 'lingered on', always at the most opportune moments.

Manager: how're the mocks coming?
Me: 3
Manager: Quit it.
Me: 3

I miss the 'hoo.

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For the interested, I updated my resume design last semester, and finalized the design and content in a hurried session in Berkeley's Crépe de Vine last Thursday morning with Ali, before running down to my TiVo and eBay interviews in the afternoon.

I think it's pretty.

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Not just my TiVo, but the company.

I'm interviewing right now, between my first and second, just chillin' and bloggin'...

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I think I used to work for these guys...

(note to previous employers reading this blog: I don't mean you. I mean that company two jobs before I worked for you. You know, the one that, while it didn't get me the job with you, increased my résume-cred enough to warrant that phone screen interview...)

(note to everyone else: I can't believe a pap post like this is Fury's grand 1500th post. Ah well, happy cognitive reference point to me!)

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Completely unrelated topics, but they're quickies:

Yesterday was cold (and I'm sure my definition of that term will slide steadily down the mercury pole as the months roll on, but after 6 weeks in the 80s, it's cold). I figured it was mid-forties since, as a California wuss, that's what I would call cold. I only knew that my tech-jacket wasn't doing a good enough job in concert with my t-shirt at keeping the chill out, and an added sweatshirt only made things okay.

I didn't realize how cold it was until I went to my car after I was done with classes to find that the beaded droplets of rain on the hood, roof, trunk, windows, and windshield weren't the happy, liquid water they appeared to be, but were now a million tiny igloo squatters.

Catching me by surprise, it also caught me without my ice scraper which was (intelligently enough (as in, not at all)) back in my apartment, where it's nice and warm.

Okay, so it's getting colder around these parts, when cars freeze during an October afternoon.

Now, on to sleep. I'm tempted to say I haven't been getting enough of it, only I sort of have been, measured in aggregate.

Deposits into the sleep bank this week:

• Sunday: 3 hours
• Monday: 4 hours
• Tuesday: 10 hours
• Wednedday: 2 hours
• Thursday: 10 hours
• Average: 5.8 hours

Okay, so just under 6 hours probably doesn't sound like 'enough sleep' but it's what I lived on all last year at Yahoo... Still, I'm pretty sure the bank charges a commission whenever I don't pay the minimum daily balance, and their overdraft fines are pretty steep.

I was talking to Andrew last night about some projects I want to do, and he asked me where I'd find the time. I've rediscovered, as I discivered while doing the Trainblog last year, that the best way in the world not to procrastinate, or to make time for things you otherwise wouldn't do, is to make a regular schedule, and incorporate that thing into that schedule. It was easy to write 600 words a day when I was at Yahoo because writing was just the thing that I did when I was on the train, part of my daily process.

So basically I have to create a new daily process. So many of the things I do on a daily or weekly basis here are on my own, with no formal time or people dependencies, which means they don't get done until there is a time dependency or person dependency. This isn't good because it leaves me feeling like I have nothing to do until I suddenly have everything to do. Heck, even sleep has regulalry been postponed until 2 or 3am, simply because I have nothing, in my head or out of it, tha tells me that I should be going to sleep before midnight (well, there's common sense, but that's just a passenger in the backseat. Sadly, it may be the same passenger who's penning this very post, so we'll just have to hope that it can nudge instinct in the shoulder and tell her that it's my turn to drive.) Of course, I have to wake up at 7 to make it to class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so there's a dependency that results in the short night. On the other hand, if I had a dependency to go to sleep by a certain time, but didn't have one to wake up, I'd be grand.

This weekend's a good test. I have three days with virtually no time-anchored events, but a lot of things that need to be done. I think one of the first things is to map out what a Kevin day should look like, with slots for all the things I deem important, and try living on a schedule.

I don't see how it couldn't be worth it, considering that even breaking out of my planned schedule would feel like a guilty pleasure, while regular procrastination, because there's just too much to do to know where to start, is onthe empty side.

It's all a matter of intention.

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Well, not so dramatic, but I did have the opportunity to give a talk for my fellow HCI and Interaction Design classmates today (thanks for the forum, Micah and Neema!). I think it went pretty well, considering that I'm running on four hours sleep (hate the GOMS.. Really really hate the GOMS. Homeworks that can be described on half a page that take 12 hours and 38 pages of excel spreadsheets with careful measurements are so not not not fun...).

Anyhow, the talk went well, and I enjoyed sharing. Now I have to work into the wee hours on a project for Interactive Programming, not to mention the sequence models I need to have done in 34 minutes for my lab group meeting.

Ahh well, the forecast is that things should ease up around Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. Also, the nights have been getting downright chilly (around 38 degrees!) and the days are as amazingly bright as they are crisp. My family regularly spends Christmas week in Carmel each year, and this is the kind of weather we usually get, so naturally it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas around here, though probably just to me.

On another note, I see a few people are already using the Fury RSS feed, and one's even complained that I built it, and now haven't even posted in two days! Well at least this post might appease you.

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SFGate ran a nice article this morning on the maturation of Instant Messaging into corporate America. I just wish they'd mentioned Yahoo before the final set of links after the article.

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I've been wrestling with a moral dilemma for the last several days, tying me up in little knots, getting to the core of who I am both personally and professionally.

At last week's Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announce the .mac ('dot-mac') initiative, essentially taking the functionality of iTools, adding a few other features, and packaging it as a $100/yr subscription package.

There's some nice functionality in it, but at the same time they're also discontinuing iTools itself. Hundreds of thousands of Apple users who have been using the service, and using their mac.com email addresses will now lose those addresses unless they agree to pay $100 a year. There is no free version, and there is no announced forwarding policy.

As a user experience designer, this irritates me to no end. An Apple executive has been quoted in a News.com article as saying they anticipate that only 10% of the users will actually migrate to the paid service, meaning that 90% will lose their email addresses. Permanently.

Having worked at Yahoo for the last year, I'm no stranger to the push for subscription-based premium services, but Yahoo and most companies that are still in business have done it right: Charge for enhanced services and new services. when you can't do that, charge for those services which were free but are still ancillary, like POP mail access, but don't take a free service and tell your users 'tough. Fish or cut bait.'

So what did I do? I made a commercial. In the 'switch' style, but using no Apple logos or implied consent, I voiced my own opinion on Apple's new policy, and frankly I'm pretty proud of the result.

And herein lies the problem: Once I finish my HCI masters at Carnegie Mellon next year, Apple is very high on the list of companies where I would like to work. Knowing that a video/protest like this could come back to haunt me, I decided to make a pixelated version, hoping to obscure my identity. Still, I couldn't post it here, as people who know me personally would still recognize me and the cat would be out of the bag.

I showed the video to a lot of friends, and received positive feedback, but still I was torn:

When user experience design is my vocation, not just my job, what do I do when doing the right thing from a user experience perspective (on behalf of Mac users everywhere, my constituency in this case) can endanger my chances of getting a job as an experience and interface designer at the very company whose policies I'm calling into question?

Very frustrating indeed, but after a few days I have finally decided that if Apple wouldn't hire me because I stood up for the users in opposition to an Apple policy while I wasn't in their employ, then it's not a place I would want to work in the first place. As I mentioned to one of my former Yahoo coworkers: Yahoo would have hired me even if I was a vocal opponent of a Yahoo business practice before starting there, and I wouldn't want to work someplace less cool than yahoo. Let's hope that the people within Apple are more circumspect than Apple-the-company's recent business decisions.

So, without further ado, I give you:

Bait and Switch

I'm the first person in my group in to work today.

No jury duty this morning, but I have to call in again between 11 and 12 to find out if I need to come in for the 2pm juror call. Of course, the 2pm jurors aren't likely to hear cases today, but they might be assigned to cases starting tomorrow (my 'last day' at Yahoo), so if I *do* get called in, it will be pointless anyhow, since I can't sit on a multi-day jury. Argh.

Anyhow, hellishly busy wrapping things up, and I've pushed my last day from Thursday to Friday because somehow I have to find time to actually pack up my cube. Sorry if posts are a bit sporadic for the next couple days. :-D

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Busy busy busy... I actually got to sleep before midnight for the first time that I can remember, and I was startled that I woke up before my alarm clock went off this morning. That used to happen every day, but not since I started this 4-5 hours of sleep a night regimen.

I may (or may not) have jury duty tomorrow. If you're super-curious, call (510) 268-7626 after 5pm today. My group # is "L-3001".

Because of the aforementioned jury duty, I pushed my last day to Friday instead of Thursday.

Oh yeah, and I have my last two Spanish classes tonight and Thursday. I haven't even touched the textbook, but it'll all be okay...

I've been having a lot of 'Job as Relationship'-driven anxiety the past couple days, but realizing it for what it is has helped a lot.

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Here's an exercise: Take up painting. Get good at it. then start working on a huge canvas, planning, painting, for months. Now, you're 80% done and you have to paint the last 20% in 5% of the time.

To go fast is to create an inconsistant work, since the speed will show. To proceed at the same pace will leave part of your masterwork unfinished.

Letting go is harder for me to do than to do a sloppy job, even if nobody knows but me.

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So, true to the customs of HR departments all over the world, and as I anticipated, my manager wrote to me on Friday, asking for an official letter of resignation.

After a moment's contemplation and composition, I am at peace with my reply.

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"Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" said Thomas Edison. Then again, Edison created a lab in Menlo Park that employed hundreds of scientists to flesh out his ideas.

So perhaps Edison's famous quote wasn't so much a statement that genius isn't a shortcut past hard work, but rather that the true genius busies himself with the inspiration, and gets others to do the perspiration for him.

Hmmm....

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Riding the train. I overslept this morning, for the first time I can remember. Oh, sure, I'm a snooze-slut, resetting the alarm to give myself another 5 to 20 minutes for good behavior, but this morning I turned off the alarm, and closed my eyes for those last five minutes to sweep up my subconscious after the revelries of yesternight's dreams.

But the dreams weren't done with me, and I had two more before I woke up 30 minutes after the train left. Still, if I rushed I could still catch the late train, so rush I did. Even so I missed the train (or I presume that I did) in Jack London Square, instead rushing on to Hayward where I'd have a better shot.

So now I'm on the train, starting over an hour late at what already promised to be a hellishly busy day. Still, I get both of the big plusses of riding the train to work (surprisingly, 'saved time' isn't usually one of them): A little time to write (and I can hear some of you calling out right now, asking why I'm spending that time writing about this morning when I could be writing a dotcom story...), and a 'hard-out' at 5:30.

What else is in the news? Today is my one year anniversary at Yahoo!, three of my closest friends are out of town, Spanish class was cancelled yesterday, I got new contact lenses (I just put them in for the first time, and had to switch because I got left and right messed up), I got a funky new pair of headphones that stick all the way inside the ear canal. They have a dynamic range from 6Hz to 24Khz. That's some pumping bass.

I've got tons on my mind in every direction. I'm going apartment-hunting in Pittsburgh the week after leaving Yahoo!, and going to Brown Island with family the week after that. I've just found out that Richard Powers is teaching a Waltz Week in the last week of July, and I'd love to go, which suddenly means my huge downtime is reduced to just three weeks idle. Time flies, flies away. and now I'm at Santa Clara, and have to pack up my things here too. Bye!

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Well, the press release is posted, and the cat is out of Schrödinger's box.

That's what all the fretting has been about, leaving a job I love in favor of an opportunity I can't refuse.

So excited! Now, must go to work. I'm not gonna be a lame-duck slacker.

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Written Tuesday evening. Didn't get to finding the links and posting until Thursday morning. Read the article. You'll understand...

I store up ambition for the weekend, just in time to be tackled by my ambivilance. I'd have a list of things to accoomplish in the coming fin de semana, but the lethargy of choice usually meant I'd stay home, getting ready to do things, and spending so much time making everything optimal to work (or getting stuck in front of the TV) that soon the clock ticked around the the fateful five o'clock, that time by which if I wasn't underway, I'd already feel defeated because 5 is close to 6 and coming up on 7, the time when things start getting dark, and the time when I'd get home on a workday, so if I didn't feel like making something of the evening after a day at work, how could I bring myself to do it now?

This clearly had to stop.

A lot of intropsection revealed the following interesting insights:

• I'm afraid of success. As long as I'm not giving my 100%, then I can't fail inside, because I could attribute the failure to my not giving my all. But, if I do give my all, and it turns out to not be enough, then it's not that I failed, but that I'm incapable of success.
• I likw creating things, and often feel a sense of loss, of time wasted, when I do things that don't have permenent, tangible end products. I used to be an avid gamer, but nowadays I think about the prospect of sitting home alone for a weekend and churning my way through Half-Life II or Diablo II, networked or otherwise, and think about how it's just another drug, wasting valuable time for little more than an increased ability to play that game. (Irony so thick you can lap it up.)
• I don't have a spontaneous social life. Nearly all my friends live between 8 and 70 miles away, and those who are closer are those with their own social circles and a dearth of free spontaneous time. If I want to see a movie, I plan it between four and twenty days in advance.
• How the above factors combine when it comes to meeting new people is an exercise left to the reader.

Clearly, a change was called for.

It wasn't always like this...

A good part of the problem was accursed Berkeley. Having a car in Berkeley means walking a lot, or working your travels around the ebb and flow of cars, Bereley's tidal urban detrius.

On weekdays, the meters start filling up around 9am, and by 10 spaces are scarce, with those vacated by residents going to work quickly filled by commuting students. Around 3pm the student exodus exceeds the inflow, and spaces start to appear until the wave inverts around 5:30 and residents start coming home. By 7pm spaces are scarce again, and won't free up until 10pm, when those visitng friends, drinking, or studying late start heading home, and the influx is low.

On weekends it's almost reversed. The spaces are empty until nearly 1pm, then they quickly fill, to stay packed until nearly midnight.

All this leads to windows: It's hard to do something during the day if you know you'll have to walk a half-mile home from the closest parking space (which you only know is the closest because you followed your regular parking circuit twice to find the 'edge' where spaces go from nil to plentiful). Instead, you plan activities not around the traffic that moves, but that that is supposed to stand still.

Time for a change...

So as I've mentioned before, the commute is a beast, a killer of time, a murderer of sleep, and while it gives me in tome to write introspective soliloquies like this one, those six hours a week are bought at the expense of a great many more.

The solution isn't a simple change. A paradigm shift would be abandoned nearly as abruptly as it starts. A lifestyle is a heavy boat, and trying to turn it 90 degrees in an instant would only succeed in tipping it over by the might of the momentum it carries.

There are the small things: Do laundry when you only have a load or two, not when you no longer have anything to wear.

Ditto for dishes.

Next comes weekends: Make plans. Give themes to weekends. Get excited. Home is the place you get to escape from on a weekend, not cocoon yourself inside while waitng for yourself to do the things you know you won't.

In the words of Gary Graves, a drama teacher of mine who, in spite of some questionable productions, was one of my better mentors, "make the bold choice." (Alternatively, you can take the words of Dark Angel's 'Original Cindy' when she admits, 'it's a large life.')

Skydiving is a good example. I didn't go out to Byron ten days ago out of defiance against a life half-lived, but as an opportunity to experience something new (the latter being a natural positive, the former merely a double-negative).

And the fun doesn't stop there. This last weekend's original plan was to take a kitesurfing lesson with my father. Though they were booked (and I'm going on my own this coming weekend), and our alternate foray into flying model planes had disasterous results, it was still a thing to do. Any weekend that I don't have to complain about the jesus freaks because I wasn't home for them to torment is a good weekend. The more I do this, the more it sinks in.

Well, I'm starting to approach Jack London Square, without even getting to the heart of what is likely the most rambling post I've written in months.

Tonight and tomorrow morning is Beltane (okay, so finishing and editing took a while. Today's Beltane). Celebrated as a pagan holiday representing the renewing of the annual cycle, it's the closest thing to a spiritual new year. Medieval (and earlier) druidic cultures witnessed Beltane as nature's fertility rite. It was the time when the god and goddess came together to start the seed of a new goddess. In proper imitative ritual, it's the time when young couples would by and by leave the celebration to wander into the woods and fields and make merry, either for their own fertility, or in the fields, to ensure the fertility of the coming crops.

This month I'm seeding my metaphoric fields, planting for the longer view. I'm changing the way I work, the way I play, and to some degree the way I think.

As always, I'll keep you posted over the next few weeks on the more tangible changes.

Have a great Beltane everyone!

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My odd point at work today is when I was discussing an interaction flow with a coworker, and I said to her in all seriousness, "Well, this is how a porn site would do it..."

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I think I wrote about it before, but a cursory google search didn't turn anything up, and now there's another article...

I'm talking about Provigil, the FDA-approved pill that lets people stay awake for 40 hours straight, with no side effects (except mild nausea in a small percentage). As the LA Times reports, Provigil has been tested on swing-shift workers, military helecoptor pilots, and others extensively and is extraordinarily effective at obviating the need for sleep.

It's not a stimulant, it doesn't give you a rush, or make you hyper, or have a corresponding 'low'. It just maintains a normal wakeful state without lethargy or decrease in attention span.

There are days when I'm feeling creative, getting into the creative swing at 2am, and wow I wish I could just take one of these and be fine all night and the next day at work. Not every day, not every week, but once in a while it can make all the difference when time seems in such short supply.

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It's been a while since I've been on the train. Y'see, I started a Spanish class at De Anza College last week, and the class keeps me and my car in the South Bay two evenings a week.

I take the train on Mondays, but Tuesdays I drive down so I'll have my car to take me to class after work, then I crash at Rick and Ammy's place in the South Bay, and it's a blessedly short commute to the 'Hoo Wednesday morning. Wednesday evening the lure of my own bed drives me home, then it's back in the car to drive back down Thursday morning, class Thursday night, and back home. On the weeks when I can't telecommute Friday I'll probably take advantage of Ammy and Rick's hospitality again Thursday night. All in all it means only one day on Amtrak a week, and I can tell you that I miss the time cut off from the net.

In Douglas Coupland's book, Microserfs, the tiny group of hardcore programmers on a deadline would frequently code in their garage for 16 hours straight. They would refer to a stint like that 'flying to Australia' because that's roughly how long you'd have to sit on a plane to make the journey. "What'd you do this weekend?" "I flew to Australia twice. I could really use some downtime... and a couple Redbulls if ya got em."

Sitting on the train, getting into the writing groove that's enabled me to start telling so many of the stories in me, quite often I'm on the train, approaching my stop, and wishing I could just stay on the train, venturing on to Davis, Sacramento, Truckee, wherever. So long as I could sit in this seat where the words flow freer than behind any desk, watching the world go by outside when I should need a few moments of inspiration.

Listening to whatever comes up on the iPod's random shuffle and superimposing it over whatever is speeding past the window provides a wellspring of ideas. Unfocusing slightly and looking at the road paralleling the tracks while listening to REM's "Star Me Kitten" I can dip easily into childhood nostalgia to a depth impossible when surrounded by all the things that represent the now, be it a home, office, or car.

Time exerts itself less heavily around train tracks; consequently there exists the constant allure of starting out the window into anywhen.

Right now I'm about 10 minutes from my stop in Oakland, but I wish I could write all night. I've tried coding on the train, I've tried reading, and I've taken (this morning as a rare example) the occasional train nap. I never feel so at home as when I simply write, and there's no place else where writing feels so free.

I know precisely why this is, but that's a story for another telling. The point is that, for the next couple months, there will be a little less storytelling, parabalizing, and ranting. The class ends in June and time will flow like the sands after that. In the meantime, expect daily updates, but perhaps of the shorter variety, save for monday spews like this one.

Expect also an upswing in the work tempo of the pantheon of unfinished projects*. Underblog, Metacookie, Qwer and Randompixel will all get their turn as debutante before the Summer is out, not to mention Fury 4.0, which is already well underway...

Well, this is my stop! I'd love to write more but (now) you know how it is...

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When you're replying to an email, and your email client handily underlines the misspelled words, and you notice misspellings in the message you're replying to, do you correct them?

Is it better to pretend you didn't see them, or just not care, or is it better to fix them, to save the person the embarassment of reading over their own quoted words and seeing their mistakes?

Is there a difference between personal notes and professional correspondence? Does it matter whether it was that the writer didn't know the right spelling, or just totally messed it up via typo?

(I'm not spellchecking this post, just to help the conversation along, btw)

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When I was working at Ikonic Interactive, err... (let's see: Yahoo, UCB, Eleven, CKS) five jobs ago, One of our interaction designers was a woman named Susanne Goldstein who, among other things, had been an associate producer on the movie Captain Ron, but that's neither here nor there. More to the point, Susanne had a philosophy so profound that my coworker Evan and I coined it "The Goldstein Principle"

The principle worked like this: Susanne was a contractor and figured that she could accumulate as many billable hours as she had available time. Based on the assumption that she enjoyed her work more than she liked most more mundane tasks, she would try to find people that she could pay to do things for her that she would otherwise have to do herself. Housekeeping? Done. Laundry? Outsourced. As long as she was paying less for the service than she would get (after taxes, naturally) at her own hourly rate, and she actually used the free time to work more, she was actually making money by paying others to do these things for you. (It's a good thing she wasn't married. I don't really want to know exactly how far she'd push the principle.)

Anyhow, I've ues the Goldstein Principle several times since then to rationalize paying for professional services (Webvan, Cook Express, laundry services, etc.). Even when I haven't been working for an hourly wage, I've tried to figure out how much my time is worth to me, and how I can make more of it.

Unlike Susanne, I don't use the principle to justify doing some work instead of other work, for net profit. I use it to justify spending money in exchange for unfettered time. The saying goes that time equals money, but for most, this is usually a one-way function. Short of giving up our jobs, there's sparce opportunity to exchange a little money for more time. Sure, laundry, cleaning, shopping, but it doesn't add up to enough time to allow a real lifestyle change.

So, like I mentioned a few days ago, I've decided that if I stay on the Bay Area side of the middle, and continue at Yahoo! for the foreseeable future, I've decided to move. The reasoning for this is my largest application of the Goldstein Principle yet.

Posit:

• I currently leave home at 6:45 am to get to work by 8:45. I leave work at 5:30 to get home by 7:30. Going by car is roughly the same, since on car days I just tend to stay at work around 12 hours instead of 9, and it's still between one and two hours each way to drive. Average commuting time per day: 4 hours. Average commuting time per month (16 days/mo, after telecommuting, vacation, etc.): 64 hours.
• My commuting costs right now are $100/mo for Amtrak (after commuter check discount), and another $150 for the six roundtrips by car (90 mi/day, $0.28/mile 6 days a month). Total commuting costs: $250/month.
• A hypothetical new place would be less than 8 miles from work, and cost $500 more a month than where I live now (giving up rent control is so hard to do...). Commuting costs would be 18 roundtrips, hence 288 monthly miles, hence $80/mo.
• Commuting 8 miles to work would take roughly 15 minutes each way. 30 minutes a day. 16 days/mo at 30 min/day is 8 hours.
• Total time saved per month: 48 hours.
• Total cost change: $500 more in rent, $250-$80=$170 less in transportation. Net cost: $330/mo.
• Result: I can buy 48 hours every month for: $6.87/hr.

Of course it's more complicated than that, but more than three extra hours every workday is a powerful incentive, representing a 75% increase over the 4 hours a workday (7:30pm-11:30pm) I get now, and minimum wage isn't a very high price to pay for it. On the other hand of complexity, I really like my current apartment. I love the light, views on three sides, pizza 'till 2am, and the space that, while currently cluttered, I've spent the last six years slowly shaping into a home instead of a college student's crash space. In a sense, my apartment has been my own chrysalis. I went into it a juvenile with a futon-and-milkcrate mentality, and emerged having graduated to an Ikea mesa. It's like watching Fight Club in reverse.

I also have to think about my friends, and how while those who lived in Berkeley are all gone now (with rare exception), spread all over the bay: Alameda, Hayward, Santa Clara, Mountain View, San Francisco. Maybe something closer to the middle (ugh. ;-) ) like Union City would make more sense.

Anyhow, thanks for listening. It's good to get these thoughts down on paper (err, it feels good to get them down on microscopic ferromagnetic spots on the platter of a hard disk in a computer who knows where. Pasadena, I think).

Meanwhile, I wonder what Susanne's up to. I wonder if she's making enough an hour now to let her justify paying someone else to live her life for her?

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So two of my friends lost their jobs in the last week. One was laid off two days before the company laid off everyone else and closed its doors, making severance that much harder to get ("HR department? They went home for the day. Err, I mean forever. Try back later?"). The other, after pulling so many 12 hour days to support thousands of users, picking up the slack of her coworkers, closing trouble tickets at twice the rate of her three coworkers combined, was informed that she wouldn't be getting one of the spots available once the current project finished. Reason? Not a team player. Makes me sick...

Anyhow, today another friend of mine is interviewing for a spot in my department at Yahoo!. I really hope he gets it (and not (just) for the referral bonus). Ernie's been doing this kind of work for so long, and has such a passion for it, that if anyone has the spirit to bring more to the job than is just required, it's Ernie. After whoring himself out to one flailing dotcom after another, he deserves it. Heh; he also feels guilty for interviewing at the 'hoo 12 days after starting a contracting position at the largest US office building after the Pentagon. Well, we'll wait and see.

Like one of you said after my 'middle' post a couple days ago, there's good-good decisions, good-bad, and bad-bad decisions. Sometimes the thing to be most thankful is that you have a choice in the first place. I shouldn't take it for granted that two choices is infinitely better than no choices.

I may be in the middle, but only for as long as I choose to be. I wonder if it's the security blanket of alternatives that's so hard to cast aside and make a choice.

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Next time you're interviewing someone for a web development position and you wonder if they're overselling themselves, pick a random letter of the alphabet, and prepend it to 'html.' Ask the candidate how familiar they are with (for example) 'rhtml' and, if they claim any skill, ask them for an on-the-spot code example.

Of course this could backfire, if they actually do know it, and you didn't think it existed.

For you employers out there, here's a little cheat sheet. Let me know if I missed any:

• dhtml
• jhtml
• phtml
• shtml
• vhtml
• xhtml

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Just in case anyone (the curious reader, the occasional Yahoo! manager, etc...) should wonder how much time I spend posting at work, I'll let you in on a secret:

One of the features I put into Fury 3.2 is 'post embargoing' which lets me write a post, then specify how many seconds, minutes, hours, or days after submitting that the post should appear.

Why do I do this? Because a lot of the time I'll sit down and write, and I'll make like five substantial posts in an hour or two, and other times I'll go a day or two without posting. This way, if I'm going to be away or super-busy for a day or two, I can write up a several things on my mind and 'postpone' (pun not intended) publication of a post or two, so the posts flow freely and regular while I'm in silent-running, instead of in fits and starts.

I only bring it up so that people don't get the mistaken idea that I'm slacking and posting, when I'm actually at a doctors appointment (like this morning), or that I'm writing a huge story when I have a similarly huge deadline looming...

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Here it is, 11:30, and I've only just realized that I'm the only person in my row of ten that's at work today. I wonder how many on my floor are here? Now I won't feel gulty about taking a long lunch. :-)

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To quote Jerry Yang, "Limbo sucks."

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So as I mentioned yesterday, 75% of the layoffs are coming in Broadcast, international operations, and middle management.

It turns out that my group might not be so immune from the remaining 25%. the worst part is we don't have any answers yet, and we don't know when we'll know.

Like I said, I've never been around during a layoff before, and I'm quickly finding out that I don't really want to be around for one again (duh).

No news is no news, and I'll write more when I learn more.

Have a good weekend everyone!

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So presumably you read about yesterday's bowling trip. Much fun was had by all. While the trip itself was planned several weeks ago, I couldn't help but think that it has a bit of a "St. Crispens' Day Speech" feel to it, you know, 'tonight we party for tomorrow night we may all be dead"?

You see, today was Analyst Day, which is basically the corporate equivalent of parent-teacher conference day, where the executives are the teachers, industry analysts are the parents, and Yahoo! is the student.

During the quarterly report last month, Yahoo! announced that there would be layoffs, and a one-by-one analysis of each of Yahoo!'s 44 properties (mail, messenger, classifieds, geocities, etc.) to determine its future in Yahoo!'s new direction. The details of these assessments and determinations would be announced on Analyst Day, November 15th.

I shouldn't be so melodramatic. The Gooey group (Gooey = GUI = ... Oh yeah, I did that already) is centralized, so even if properties were shut down or folded into other properties, we would (hopefully) remain relatively untouched. Still, any time the family is trimmed, it's hardly a time for mirth.

Thinking about it today, I realized that I've worked for seven computer-related companies, four of which have dot-bombed (BMUG, MacWEEK, Dantz, Casady & Greene, Ikonic, CKS (aka USWeb/CKS, reinvent, marchFIRST), and Eleven), all with massive layoffs before the end, and yet I've never worked anyplace at the time they were laying off people, so this is all new to me. Also interesting is that every public company I've worked for (with the exception of the University of California) has gone under, and every privately-owned company is still around. Interesting.

Anyhow, the stock price has been going up steadily all week, apparently because strategic layoffs of between 5 and 15% of a company's workforce is seen as a healthy thing. I feel bad for feeling good about the stock. So the news was official today: 400 people (13%) will be laid off in the next few weeks, with 75% of the cuts coming from Yahoo! Broadcast, based in Dallas, and International divisions. Also, Yahoo! will be hiring another 100 people in their core growth areas. Presumably these new 100 will have specific skills or geographic locations or flexibility that the departing 400 don't.

So it looks like Gooey is pretty safe, though I can't sat the same for fellow weblogger Jason Silverstein, whose office (the aforementioned Yahoo! Broadcast) is facing workforce cuts of 45%. The worst part is that Broadcast was bought by Yahoo! less than a year ago, and now they're letting half the people go. Ai-yai-yai.

So tomorrow is the all-hands meeting, where senior management talks to all the employees, but I won't be there, as I'm going to Tahoe for a family reunion. I'll be sure to watch the archived webcast when I get back though.

The good news is that it looks like analysts viewed the all-day presentations well, and that Yahoo! does have a good plan for growth over the next four years. If Yahoo were to bomb, I'd lose faith in the net, because we do things right, have good karma (x-10 notwithstanding), and provide core, established services people need and use every day, and we don't charge for all the basic stuff. Call me tunnel-visioned or biased, but I don't think there's anyplace else out there that you can go to for 90% of the things you use the web for, at least I can't think of one.

So that's pretty much it for today. Just a from-the-trenches look at what's going on. The ship sails on, cool things are always on the way, and maybe most of them will still get to see the light of day.

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Emergency Exit is incredible. The site is a travelogue-meets-survival-guide, written by Dotcom expatriates travelling the world (primarily Southern Asia) with their severance packages.

Touring through the site almost makes me wistful for the thought of being paid to leave my job. I love my job; I just need a brain-break from the brain-bake.

'Till then, this site is a wonderful window into not only what you can experience travelling the world, but some powerful ways to share that experience with others.

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I'm sitting here on a Saturday afternoon, thinking I should do something with my blog. I've realized that the frequent exercise of writing on the train has resulted in the habit of spinning what I intend to be a one or two paragraph post into the huge yarns or rants.

Part of me thinks this is for the best, as it's a sort of storytelling skill, but another part inhibits me from writing short posts, since I think that if I just sit down to shoot off a quick 'what's on Kevin's mind?' entry, it'll just snowball into something big.

This post is a good example. This is already about as long as I intended it to be, and I'm still going.

I'll try to restrain myself.

I'm feeling burnt out on the web.

No, Internet, it's not you. It's me.

Okay, it's both of us. I know you think you can change, but you can't, and neither can I. Most of the time you're filled with the same crap worded different ways and with different graphic treatments. Whether you're wearing your c|net mask, or CNN, or ABCNews, or wing-nut news links off of MeFi, it all starts sounding the same. There's nothing new. It was fun for a while, and then I grew dependent, spending more and more time with you, hoping that if we got closer, I'd understand the subtleties, but instead I've just been pounded over the head by your pervasive generalities.

Okay, I guess that's true. If I wasn't so co-dependent I could take a few steps back, resist pumping CNN looking for the latest, or at least a distraction.

I know I have a lot to give, a lot that I haven't been, both at home and at work. I'm frustrated by the great ideas that share cycle-time in my head, but don't make it unto the world because my interface has become so one way, with data flowing in in such a torrent that almost nothing ever gets out.

This is probably why my posts have gone down 60% in the last few weeks, while the average length has gone up fivefold: With all the data-pressure flowing in to my head/brain/soul/reservoir, it's rarer that I can dam up the flow for a bit, and when I do, I can reverse the flow, a huge outpouring of content, a torrent of words, ideas, feelings. A desperate attempt to relieve the pressure, the imbalance between data-in and data-out.

It's no wonder that my posts are mostly written on the train nowadays: It's the only time I have access to a computer without having access to the net. It's the only time that the noise stops and I can concentrate.

This has got to stop.

I'm cutting myself off. For every good thing there is that point when it polarizes into something just as bad. For some substances, this happens quickly. I learned this the time nothing sounded so good as cheddar cheese, so I cubed up half a block into a cup. One piece, two pieces, five pieces, and I was looking at the remaining 15, not with disgust, but with utter lack of interest.

Other things take more. There are things you absolutely adore and can't imagine feeling otherwise, but that tipping point is out there, whether you ever reach it or not.

I hit that point right now.

Today I reverse the flow.

Starting now, I'm releasing the pressure.

This isn't a manifesto on how I'm going to finish all the personal projects on my plate in short order. This isn't a promise to kick out the purity survey, randompixel, underblog, metacookie, more aoliza, and all the rest in one week. This is a reclamation of my life. This is good.

So what? This isn't a plan, it's just an action. I'm not going to wait up 'till midnight on Tuesday to read The Onion. I'm n