Subject: Re: Question

Body:

| In a nutshell, I would like to create something – like [XXX] – that is geared more towards the [XXX] community.

| Is that enough information?

Obviously not.

| I don’t want to go to in depth because it may be a “very” good idea and I would like to know I could trust the person – hearing the whole presentation – to not disqualify it to me and then go on to develop it for their own personal gain.

That is in almost all cases a very flawed path to follow. Ideas aren’t worth much of anything, I assure you somebody else has had your idea and most likely many other people, the fewer people you tell your idea to the more likely it is that you will build yourself into a hole without input, fail to see things from other perspectives, fail to find out that your idea has already been done before you waste the time trying to build it, and in almost all cases simply fail. “Stealth Mode” is a worn out and useless concept perpetuated by people who expect to get something for nothing, what makes things happen is (1) actually fleshing out the idea through constant interaction with other people more knowledgeable than yourself, giving you additional reasons and urgency to actually build it, and (2) actually building it. The difference between the successful and the unsuccessful entrepreneur often has much more to do with how well that person can actually organize the people around her into making their dreams a reality than about an idea.

Good luck.

–andy

I decided to continue my pain and suffering and place an order online with Safeway for some household essentials because they can deliver 7pm-9pm. Seemed to go pretty well except today at 1:59pm I receive a call from Safeway, “your card was declined we need another one,” I say it’s probably my bank blocking things for the 10th time in the last 2 weeks and that I’ll sort it out with them and then they can re-run the card. He says, sure here’s the number to call me on when you have that sorted out.

So I call up Citibank, go through the same set of hoops answering the questions before they even ask them because I’ve done this so many times now. They rattle off another set of “unusual activity” charges and ask me to confirm them, I do.

Time to call back Safeway. First girl who answers has no idea what I am talking about and promptly hands me to a manager, manager transfers me to whatever department I am supposed to be talking to, rings for a while finally somebody else answers and asks what I am calling about, transfers me to the same department, rings for a while, he answers again, oh I guess nobody is there, but they just called me, well they leave at 2pm you should try the 800 number.

I try the 800 number, get transferred two more times. My order is cancelled, what I should do is go make another order. Yeah fucking right.

Btw, my IKEA sofas, one of which I don’t have screws for, the other has the wrong frame, just doesn’t fit, it’s for a different sofa.

update Guy at Safeway was outside, called me back, re-running the order. I guess that at least is something.

Seems like few things make one as hungry as that state of pseudo panig that goes with scheduled downtime and feature releases, something about remembering all the things you forgot at the last minute, about having a plan that would have worked if you weren’t going to get so many views in hte first seconds of uptime that the site stops responding.

But it’s done now, this week’s mini crisis, and we got some cool stuff out of it, our Jabber bot has now been scaled out of private beta and our search is now quite a bit more universal. Plenty of other small things and more stuff sitting in the oven.

…

Seeing as how I didn’t get a chance to type this in until what, 8 hours after lunch, it’s worth noting that it apparently wasn’t “done.” Now to survive through the US hours.

I’m fluent in spanish. Well, arguably nowadays as it is so infrequent that I use it, but I went to an immersion school (means they only spoke spanish to me) for the first 6 grades, and than into a pretty high level spanish program for 7 and 8, making english my second language according to the school system.

I was a philosophy major, for the little bit that I went to college (I finished high school at a JC and put in a year and half afterwards). Technically I was doing a bunch of stuff for the CS major too since I wanted to go to MIT, but I ended up dropping out and moving to Canada before finishing the classes I needed. If/when I go back to school, I’ll probably start off with math and take philosophy classes on the side.

I’ve worked a lot of different jobs, all of these have at some point been my source of income: translating documents to spanish; babysitting a little girl; weeding; data entry, reception and graphic design at an insurance company; cashier and customer service at a computer store; host, server and trainer at a restaurant; gambling; barista at a cafe; sales and stock at a clothing store; general grunt and server for a catering company; parking at a music venue; painting houses; writing php, sql and sysadmining at a hosting company; writing perl and ant at an identity company; writing javascript and xul at a browser company; writing python for the department of defense; writing php, python, sql and sysadmining at a web service. Some other things I did that I volunteered / never got paid for were: writing lpc for a MUD at a university, trying to start up a game development company, interviewing people who just got out of jail for drug abuse and and writing some software for rfid tables and kiosks for a company in Amsterdam.

I was a theatre person in high school, even snagged some lead roles. My high school had a big drama program that brought in more money than football, so being a lead in the plays had many parallels to being the star quarterback that is so often portrayed in movies and I pretty much had run of the school during my junior year.

I got into “learning” because of a crush in kindergarten, her name was Jennifer and she had a big crush on me but I was still in the girls have cooties phase and one day during nap time she had been taken to the back of the room to take some tests with these college people so I snuck back to listen to what they were talking about and overheard them say that she read and wrote at a high school graduate level and I instantly developed a huge crush on her (but had already scared her off with my anti-girl actions) and I thought the only way I was ever going to impress her was to be rily smart ‘n shit, so by 1st grade I also read and wrote at a high school graduate level when I took my tests, but alas I was at a different school by then.

Next up: Michell, Jeff, Marco, Andy and Dries

January: On the 11th, I arrive in Amsterdam and move a suitcase of stuff into Nadya’s soon to be demolished apartment out on the Marcusstraat. Things are topsy-turvy.

February: Hmm, we’re going to have to move out of that apartment soon, Nadya is moving in with her friend who had grown to hate me (at the time) and so I can’t follow her, guess I better find my own place. There’s a Berlin trip in here that helped vaguely lead to the hating of me, and a Brussels trip for FOSDEM.

March: Found a place, but it is not available until April, but my great-grandmother finally gave us the heave-ho so I fly back to San Jose / San Francisco for a couple weeks, when I return my suitcase of stuff moves to Nadya’s father’s house.

April: I move in to my apartment on Prins Hendrikkade, two weeks later the old tenants move out and I decide to take over the whole place instead of having a roommate. Nadya hurts her foot and stays with me for a bit. CocoaDevHouse happens. Steph and Tyrell come visit for Queen’s Day, debauchery ensues.

May: Nadya and her roommate have decided to call it quits in a rather tumultuous way, Nadya moves in with me. It’s spring time, and tulips are everywhere. Xtech happens, as does BarCampAmsterdamII. I also go to Prague with Zbigniew, and participate in a hitchhiking competition to Berlin where I go to ph-neutral.

June: Remembering a year worth of stuff is harder than I thought. World Cup madness/fun, it seems like there were a lot of parties this month. Oh, and I bike to Edam with Michell and Carla.

July: July was the month that travel started. I go to Lausanne, Geneva and CERN for EuroPython, then to Austria to hike in the alps, swing by Munich on the way back, eat an english breakfast prepared by Matt Biddulph, head to Stuttgart for a week to visit the Bryght guys, meet Ben Cerveny and go to Budapest for my birthday.

August: To California for nearly the whole month, Nadya and I rent out apartment out for the month. In California we go to Yosemite and chill with Nadya’s brother, Kurt.

September: When we return from California we head to Linz for Ars Electronica on bus, then we go to EuroOSCON/DrupalCon/BarCamp in Brussels, Neil and Zack stay at our apartment for a few days beforehand. The PICNIC conference happens in Amsterdam bringing with it many sleepless nights. Just before this, I leave Flock and become a free agent.

October: Friedrich and Hannah visit for a few days, causing us to generate a Risk game board on our coffee table, and I fly over to Helsinki where Jaiku convinces me to work for them. I discover many excitingly long finnish words during two weeks of near continuous work. Halloween rolls around and with it Nadya’s birthday, we have a party at our apartment. Mediamatic organizes a concert by a punk band where the sound is broadcast over FM so that cars nearby provide the amplification.

November: The micro-green restaurant and the Night Garden exhibit it is part of open up at Mediamatic bringing with it many tasty sprouts for my mouth to appreciate. I meet some italian guys, eat some pickles in Helsinki, attend a cooking class taught by a michelin star chef, I think museumnacht is in here somewhere. Nadya bakes a pumpkin pie, I discover I am allergic to something in pumpkin pie.

December: Much eating of sprouts, Sinter Klaas comes to town, we set up a Christmas tree, my father visits for a few days and we make an epic journey to the Harley World. Mediamatic launches a big screen in the middle of town that I am standing in front of in many of the local newspapers. I fly out to California on Christmas day and arrive at my grandmother’s house 24 hours after I leave my house in Amsterdam.

1. Really, please, start your conversation with a link and a small explanation if the url does not do the trick. This is IM, I do not want to say “hi,” I do not want to have a little chat so that you can act like there was a reason for messaging me other than that you wanted to show this link to people. Just give it to me, right away, and I’ll click on it when I get around to it.

2. The only people allowed to use the o_O, x_x, -.- (and so forth) smileys are those with an excessively flare for cuteness which pretty much limits it to cute-but-shy girls, David Weekly and Jeff’s dog.

3. You do not have to feel bad about wasting my time, when I am busy I will either ignore you or write “busy” very quickly. Again, this is IM, the whole point of it to me is that I can defer conversations until I get a chance to respond. I usually leave all the windows open in Adium until I get a chance to respond, so even if you leave and come back I will probably eventually get back to you.

4. I do not use “LOL,” sorry, just can’t do it anymore. I will say “omgkthxbai” from time to time though. Your status in my mental acceptability for chat list will quickly decrease with excessive use of “lol.” And spell properly, please.

5. I generally try to make friends in person and via blogs or email mostly because I can do it on my time, so while I am happy to have pleasant conversation with you it is pretty uncommon for me to have a chance to do so. Note that existing friends require much less context and are therefore much easier to chat with online. Asking questions is fine, but I get tired of answering them if you don’t seem gracious.

6. If you start chatting with me and I do not know or remember who you are, I will say, “who am I speaking with?” at which point you should respond with your name or where I know you from, if you begin to play a game like “guess who I am” I will countdown from 3 and block you once I get to 0.

7. I guess that last one was like Bryan’s 7th. As far as not scaring me though, I’m not going to be afraid, but I will become thoroughly unfriendly towards you if you message me out of the blue and begin speaking very explicitly about having sex with me.

8. I always have an away message, usually in the morning I’ve forgotten what it was so I’ll look like I am “sleepzzzz” all day or something like that. I do try to set clever away messages somehow related to what I am doing, I think of them as a status message for the most part, but don’t trust them, I may well be there. I think my idle status is public on most things so you can judge my presence by that.

9. Let me reiterate that first one: get to the point. It doesn’t have to be any sort of important point, it could very well be “how many chips do you think are in a bag of Doritos” if that is really a question you have. Making small talk and asking how work is going is pretty likely to annoy me.

So many people that I meet have that way of looking at me after I voice an opinion about something that says, “you poor, defenseless creature, yes, I will pretend to understand what you are saying for your sake even though I know what you are ignorant.”

By far the most impressive presentation I saw was by Toshio Iwai (non-arty folks, see wikipedia to catch up on the background). It lasted over two hours and I had to sit on the floor of the massively overcrowded room but it was worth it in every way. The presentation covered sections of his life with an emphasis on his childhood and on making toys with his daughter.

Other fun things were in the Ars Electronica Center where, again, the emphasis was on children and giving them something to interact with. A virtual world where a model sculpted in play-doh could be scanned into a 3D model to be interacted with, shadow puppetry that formed animated shapes, a harness one could be strapped in to to simulate flying or swimming through a version of Linz. They also had copies of Toshio Iwai’s Electroplankton there to play with.

I guess what I am trying to say is, the truly impressive and often times revolutionary concepts are inspired by a child’s unimpaired version of fun.

This has been one of Andy’s thoughtful moments

Ars Electronica is the biggest something something arty-electonicky festoconferoexhibition in some reasonably large area (possibly the planet?), so presumably it is the top of the

Sorry, some lounge rendition of Spanish Flea started playing on SomaFM and I got distracted.

It’s full of all kinds of neat things, some pretty, some arty, some electronicky. Many of the student pieces (and they had a bunch of students from Helsinki this year as guests) were very nice concepts that gave me hope for the future of all this stuff, but so many of the highly prized pieces have to be of the pets.com variety.

“The Messenger” was a… room. Your immediate reaction upon entering would probably be one of excitement, here are all these things line up, some fancy glowing jars (pretty) and some ceramic bowls. Oh, what’s that in the corner? Skeletons on hooks? The point is, the piece was obviously sold as a “communication device between the internet and the real world,” and a crappy one at that. I can’t imagine anybody who could sit through a single word being “communicated” before becoming utterly bored by the novelty of this project built entirely upon the fact that people like green glowing jars. I bet it can’t handle unicode, either.

“drawn” (note the artistic use of lowercase there?)

Sorry, went to grab another beer. Belgians sure make great beer.

Drawn would be cool if it didn’t amount to stupid noises being played while you wave your hand over a screen wishing that it would do anything but what it was doing.

“Hello, World!” was cool in every way, although I admit to being a sucker for anything that displays text with a bunch of noise. And I also liked “yokomono” even if everybody else thought it was pretty stupid. I liked a bunch of other stuff, too.

The Girl From Ipanema is now drawing me away. Take me, Richard Hayman, take me into your deceitful lair of whistling synths.

Sitting here by myself, after a rather extreme storm that I decided to bike through, soaking myself, — aside, I wanted to put two commas there because I was ending two subclauses at once but unfortunately english doesn’t support a properly unambiguous approach to that… I guess indentation wouldn’t work, too bad (I need another subclause here, because I want to say, actually I guess it doesn’t really support putting an em-dash directly after a comma either, but I am getting a bit ridiculous in my levels of nested subclausal) — I was reading my email and feeds and they were teaming up to make me feel a bit anti-authoritarian. Not that I don’t feel that way usually, but my usual ethical restraint about doing many things seemed to momentarily disappear and it was a strange introspective moment while I considered the implications.