We’ve been TV-free for almost four years now

So ever since we moved back to our house after the rebuild in June 2004, we’ve gone without broadcast or cable TV. Prior to it we were constantly living in front of a TV, watching, dining, sleeping, etc. There were hardly any moments when the TV wasn’t on. Where the TV was, that’s where we really lived. All the other parts of the house were essentially unused. We were that pathetic, and I imagine, not far from the American norm.

So when we had a chance to start fresh, we wanted to just make a break for it. We had originally designed so that there would be no TV in the main living level, and only have TV downstairs. But with all the moving in and settling down, we never got around to calling in the cable guy, or setup the satellite. The Tivo sat in the box with taped shows from 2004. Our big Sony CRT tv sits in a neglected corner hooked up only to the DVD Player and VHS.

The kids (mostly Isabelle, since Camille was only a few months old at the time) watched videos on the computer upstairs, either on a DVD or ripped/downloaded video files. My wife and I just stopped wasting time on Food network (whose shows were getting boring anyway) and any Must See TV. Yes, it was weird for a while, but eventually the cold turkey became the norm and we haven’t looked back (much) since.

I found much more time reading web stuff, blogs, etc. I started reading more books, spending more time playing games with the kids. I’ve stopped wasting time on shows that I don’t really like, but were watching simply because it was on. I think I’ve gained back at least 3-4 hours of productivity time back.

Today, we watch movies on DVD or streamed onto our Apple TV on a projector, a much more intentional event than just the background TV viewing habits of old. We are focused when we are watching something, and not let TV be the condiment to real lives. We do spend an amazing amount of time on the web, and increasingly watch streamed stuff via youtube, hulu, or bit torrent stuff. But all-in-all, it encouraged more play or reading times for the kids and adults alike, and I’m glad we left it all behind.

My new project

I’ve been very busy getting a new project off the ground. It’s AllYourPals.com, and while we have nothing to show for the moment, I’ve been working busily in the back to get our business plan together, meeting with advisors and investors alike, and just getting alot of very valuable feedback from friends. We have also started a blog for it, and you may find more post activities over there for the time being.

This is my second attempt at a startup since leaving the Big Software Company in Redmond, and the learning is starting to show, I’m glad to say.

riaa/mpaa should go talk to monsanto

reading michael polan’s excellent “omnivore’s dillemma” and found this quote fascinating:

“it’s difficult to control the means of production when the product you’re selling can reproduce itself endlessly.”

what he’s talking about is that when two varieties of a crop are crossed to produce an improved hybrid, it’s hard to profit from the hybrid “discovery”, as once you sell a few of these improved hybrid plants, the buyer can collect the seeds by these plants themselves to start next year’s crop. there’s no easy way to monopoly or control over the hybrid design. except, it seems, for one species in the common food corp. for this particular species, the offsprings of two of the hybrid plants produces seeds that are nothing like its parents, making the offspring useless to the farmer. so every year the farmer is forced to go back and buy more seeds. that’s how monsanto makes millions by selling its special hybrid variety seed, which grows into plants that can withstand the weed killer roundup.

it seems that nature is much better at developing rights management than anything that microsoft, apple, real networks, riaa, and mpaa can together conjured up. maybe they should pay a visit to monstanto, or better yet, go directly to the species known as “zea mays”, or what is commonly called corn. for it holds nature’s answer to copy protection.

Sun buys the M in LAMP

Sun Microsystem just bought MySQL AB, the company that services MySQL. Reading it this morning sent chills down my spine: is this the end of MySQL?

Though two positive thoughts help settle me down: 1. MySQL is under GPL license, which means that if Sun does anything too funny, the open source devs will fork it and Sun is left without the support of the community, probably devalues the whole thing. 2. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, seems to get it as he was quoted as saying:

CTO’s at startups and web companies disallow the usage of products that aren’t free and open source. They need and want access to source code to enable optimization and rapid problem resolution (although they’re happy to pay for support if they see value). Alternatively, more traditional CIO’s disallow the usage of products that aren’t backed by commercial support relationships – they’re more comfortable relying on vendors like Sun to manage global, mission critical infrastructure.

So maybe this isn’t so bad afterall.

When others can say it much better than I can

A long time Apple employee leaves and talks about why. This ex-Microsoftie felt very similar sentiments when I made the big jump last year, even though the two companies in many ways couldn’t be more different.

Wow, talk about handy work

Before there was the transistor, vacuum tubes were the high technology of electronics. I’ve never played with one myself, but one of these days may try to build something simple with it. Their warm glow like an incandescent bulb is very appealing in a nostalgic way.

While tubes and transistors are very different beasts in electronic circuits, you can think of their served function as roughly equivalent in scale, i.e. you’ll need one transistor to do the job of one vacuum tube.   Now with a Core 2 Duo CPU of today, you are getting about 300 Million transistors. So to do the same thing in tubes, you’ll need 300 million vacuum tubes. With a tube is about the size of a swollen thumb, and you can imagine the size of the beast that will take to perform what Intel put into the space of a 140mm x 140mm. Now to mention the amount of wiring needed, electricity used, light and heat generated and the infrastructure it would have taken to support such a montrosity.

Now go one step further, and see the video below on the steps needed to make ONE vacuum tube, and multiple it 300M times, and you may just blow your mind:

via hackaday

Interesting thoughts from Edsger Dijkstra (Turing Award Winner)

He’s about as far from the School of Hacks as you can possibly find in the field of Computer Science. While I am not sure I subscribe to his philosophy, his philosophy as documented on this video series “Discipline in Thoughts” is very interesting in our age. In particular, his disdain for the tech industries’ propensity to ship Beta or v1 craps and then rev it. It’s worth thinking about:

“You just cobble something together to sell. It need not be any good. As long as you can fool people into buying it, you can always try to make better versions later. So then you get these version numbers, even with decimals, version 2.6 or 2.7. That nonsense. While version 1 should have been the finished product.”

what to do when a partnership doesn’t work out?

Amongst my various projects on the burner, I’ve been working with two friends of mine, who are both full timers, on creating a new startup. We haven’t capitalize on our partnership, which we envision to be roughly equal partners, but we’ve pitched in time and thoughts. Due to my transition to full time entrepreneur in September, I’ve been hoping that we can really turn the ideas we have into reality quickly. However, with their busy lives and existing commitments my partners haven’t been able to commit as much energy to the project. Meanwhile, I found myself wanting to run faster but feel held back because of our speed differential. Decisions are not made quickly. Communications are often delay and virtually non-existent. The situation has been troubling me for months. On one hand, I really think highly of my partners and friends. On the other, I am losing valuable time and energy.

So after many months of frustration on my part, and after dwelling on how to resolve it, I decided that it’s time to cut my losses here and move on. Below is the email I sent to my friends and partners. I haven’t heard back from them yet.

Have you experienced any similar situation before? What have you done to unwind the failed partnership and still maintain friends?

p.s. Their names are changed to protect their privacy and identity.

Guys, this is really not working for me. I think we need to make somechanges about the partnership situation, or maybe I just need to get out of this arrangement.

Since we are partners, and it’s important to be open and honest between us, I’m going to go ahead and come out with my observations and feelings on our
partnership for the last few months:

John:
I wanted to work with you from the beginning because of your skills and experience. That sense is even stronger for me today than when we started more than six months ago.

However, I do suspect that your career is going pretty good right now, which I totally respect and envy. I totally understand why you need to spend time and priority on advancing your career. Between that and your family, I suspect you have your hands very full. To be honest, I’ve wondered if this is a moment in time when you have the time and energy to start a business as a full-on founder. Maybe the timing was good six months ago, but things have changed (for the better!)

Paul:
I admire your work and your energy, and more importantly, you as a person; I hope you’ve worked with me long enough to know that. At this very early juncture of a startup, however, I wonder if between us there aren “too many PMs, not enough devs”. I suspect the thought might have crossed your mind
as well, but may be you were too polite to say it. There are also philosophical distance between us: preference of open source/LAMP technologies on my part vs. Microsoft technologies; your careful considered style vs. my riskier, damn-the-torpedos approach. While we have compromised on this before, e.g. Rails vs. ASP.net, I suspect that it’ll continue to be an issue. And I think you too are having a hard time finding consistent free time to work on the project because of your job, your wife, etc.

As for me, I know damn well how difficult it is to work full time and try to start a parallel side gig. I’ve been there, and it was darn tough. Many friends have tried this and eventually abandoned the projects. Between family and work, there’s just not much time and energy left over for “escape velocity” of a new startup. I have been stuck at that same stage, and finally had to commit myself to lose a year of salary to give it an honest attempt. It’s a substantial sacrifice to my financial bottom line, as you can imagine. And I want to make the most out of this time, as I doubt I’ll be afforded another such an opportunity again. The progress in the last 5-6 months has been too slow, for me.

I don’t really know what to do here, but have struggled with it enough in my head that these ideas floated up:

* Given that we haven’t capitalized, we can just split the partnership. I think we can talk about about time/ideas that’s been committed to the joint partnership and how to dispose of them. I’d just like to be able to explore the idea of XXXXXXXXX on my own, which I proposed to the group in Overlake Red Robin back in June or so.

* I’ll forge ahead with the project on my own, and to compensate for your contribution thus far we’ll agree on a share percentage of the company. If I make the project a success, which I fully intend to, you guys will participate on the upside. Obviously I’d love that I can tap you guys as advisors on the board as well.

That’s all I can think of so far, and it’s completely from my point of view. I’d love to hear your reactions and feedback. Let’s talk?

facebook’s social ads beacon just used me

Update: see the response by kongregate co-founder emily greer in the comments…

like everyone else, i read facebook’s announcement yesterday with interest, but hesitation. techcrunch is already documenting the backlash, but i have one anecdote to add about the Beacon, hmmm, feature. i thought that Beacon is the api where brands can push news feeds to you if you are a fan of the brand. well, my first hand initial experience with Beacon completely spooked me as a user, and has me wondering if king zuckerberg has any clothes.

the web is built around your email as your user id. i, like most users, have an email address that i used to signs up to various sites. i do it with web2 sites that i’m checking out, i do it with sites that i use on a regular basis, i do it with sites that i have passing interests. in this case, signed up to kongregate.com, where i waste many hours playing casual games, and of course the same email is on my facbeook profile. but when i signed up on either of these sites, i never expected that those two islands are going to gang up on me and use me as an unwitting endorser of kongregate’s products. and yet that’s exactly what just happened.

i was playing games on kongregate, and in the middle of a game something pop’ed up telling me that kongregate just added a note to my facebook news feeds. i did a double take; did i just see that correctly? how did kongregate know about my facebook without me doing anything? kongregate didn’t ask me for a facebook id, or whether it’s okay to send something to facebook; it just fired it off. now most sites will send the occassional email “news”, but at least they usually have a checkbox for you to opt out of them at signup. in this case, i had no expectation that this was a possibility, and no opton to turn it off. i dig thru all the kongregate settings and couldn’t find any facebook opt-out checkbox.

not being able to stop the spam at the source, i logged on to facebook. it notified me that with this little box on top of my facebook home page:

at first sight, i had no idea whether that notice was about. was it the equivalent of “is this spam and should i proceed?” or was it “the spam already went through, but we thought you should at least know about it.” given the ambiguity, i decided to go check out my profile and read my own mini feed. guess what, it was the latter! it already spammed all my friends without my permission! awesome, way to treat your users!

i went back to my facebook home page, and now even that notice is gone. it didn’t even obey its own “don’t show me this again” checkbox, which i never checked. now i don’t know where to block kongregate from doing this again. it sure isn’t under facebook’s “privacy” page.

so in summary:

- this is worse than spam, part 1: facebook and in this case kongregate spammed me without asking, and since it’s the wild west, there’s no law requiring them to label things as spam, or the mandatory “unsubscribe” button

- this is worse than spam, part 2: not only do they spam you, the user, they spam you and all your friends on facebook.

- this is worse than anything on the web today: google at least keep it to themselves what they know about you. facebook and their advertisers, in this case, exposes what they know about you to all your friends. if you are a closet gamer (or “worse”), and don’t want all your co-workers or friends to know a particular aspect of your life, too bad.

how on earth does facebook overlook all these privacy issues? was it because of the dollar sign? was kongregate just a renegade and just didn’t obey the rules? but even then, how can facebook betray the trust of its own users and let the “news” be published to all his friends without first obtaining consent (opt-in), or at minimum a notice (opt-out)?

turning facebook users into unwitting endorsers of brands? is zuckerberg on drugs?

getting things done, round 5

years ago i read getting things done by david allen (gtd), and found it incredibly simple and sensible. since then i’ve tried many tools to maintain my gtd habit.

i’ve tried:
1. microsoft one note. pro: freeform editing allows quick access. con: only accessible from one pc, inaccessible from smartphone.
2. tiddlywiki and its variants. pro: supports the gtd syste. con: again, local pc only, and slow once it gets big.
3. tiddlywiki + foldershare: same as above but solves the roaming problem from other pc’s. still no phone access though.
4. vitalist or other online todo lists. pro: great for tracking, accessible from phones and pc’s alike. con: slower, too structured.

(see bottom of post if you want to know the details of each system that I’ve tried)

recently though, i found something i really like. it’s called taskpaper, by hog bay software. (sorry, mac only.) i’ve used their earlier product before, a word processor called writeroom, which is so retro-simple that there’s no toolbars, no menus, and have the look of a text only terminal back in 1980’s, with green text on black background. writeroom’s m.o. is to strip away everything that isn’t necessary for focused writing. and so instead of worrying about all the gadgets, formatting, etc, you just focus on the text you are writing. it worked like a charm for me, and i adored the minimalist philosophy.

well taskpaper takes that philosophy and applied it to gtd. it’s a stripped down editor, with only two features distinguishing it as a gtd enabler: it allows a simple “:” or “-” character to designate a line as either a project or a task, respectively, and format the item as such. now you can quickly glance and know which line is a project grouping, and which is a task under that project, something that’s not so easy in notepad or textedit. the second feature, which is equally if not more genius, is the simple automation of tags. if you type “@text”, then the word “text” automatically becomes a tag. you can use it to group tasks together, as in the gtd system of contexts, such as @call, @computer, @errand. but you can also create your own system by just naming tags the way you see fit. once tags are created, you can quickly filter down the document to show only those of a particular tag. and so you can quickly bring up all the items that are “@call” and make your phone calls.

oh, and for tasks, they give you a checkbox for each task so that you can tick things off as completed, in which case you get a satisfying strike out effect for that task. mission accomplished.

and that’s pretty much it. that’s the entire feature set. add one more thing and it’ll probably start to feel rigid or bloated. remove one feature and you may as well be using an editor. and yet, everything is easily accessible via a single key, be it “:” “-” or “@”, making things super quick and lightweight.

i really like it after a week of daily usage. right now i’m using it as a scratchpad for brainstorming, and still uses vitalist for tracking given its reminder functionality. but it’s already allowed me to think through a project’s many steps and capture it quickly, which means i’ll be more prepared to make progress on all these projects.

if the developer jesse grosjean is reading this, i do have two requests:
- autosave the taskpaper without making me hit ctrl-s. that’s one of the best innovation of one note.
- i’d like to see a “back” button in addition to the “home” button. Sometimes I click on a tag filter and wants to undo it, but hitting home doesn’t quite feel right.

——————————————————————-
various systems that i’ve tried:

first, i tried simply using microsoft one note, and while it’s incredibly flexible, it completely lacks any structure and is a pain to keep track of everything manually. plus the fact that it doesn’t roam beyond my laptop, which is a major inconvenience. i tried supplementing it with paper+pencil, but never having one place where every action is collected is a major drawback. eventually i stopped doing it altogether.

then i tried tiddlywiki (and its many variations, some dedicated to gtd), which is a single page wiki that’s entirely implemented using javascript. it allows some automation with tags and project names, which solved the manual organization problem of using essentially a text editor in one note. but, the one page local .html file that is the tiddlywiki doesn’t roam between work and home.

and so i supplemented it with foldershare, which was a microsoft acquisition that synchronize folders across machines, mac or pc. tiddlywiki + foldershare turns out to be a pretty good tandem: i’ll add an action to tiddlywiki at home, which creates a new version of the html file. foldershare then dutifully copies that html file to my other machines, and so i can go into work and still have my latest gtd list.

this combo lasted me about 1-2 years, until i tried some of the tiddlywiki variants because of the allure of even fancier automation around @contexts, dashboard views, etc., and found that to get the automation I seek, the javascript for the automation has become incredibly slow. for stuff that is supposed to help me be more productive, it’s ridiculous to expect people wait for the tool to do its work. after a round of trying 3-4 variants of tiddlywiki, i gave up gtd again. which means my productivity went to pieces.

when i found that i really needed to get organized again, i had upgraded to a smartphone , and now have the capability to be online pretty much constantly. i thought it’s time to try some web to-do list solutions and get rid of foldershare as a crutch of synchronization. at first i tried remember the milk, which was kinda clunky. lifehacker pointed me to vitalist, which adopted the gtd system and have many support for it. it turns out to be a good choice because its ui is pretty sweet, reliable, and they do a good job supporting mobile web browser. i paid up and became a subscriber, and have been using it for last 3 months to good effect.

but one thing i didn’t like about vitalist, or for that matter any hardwired gtd system, is the ability to quickly create a list in a free-form way. when i was using one note, i could create a task as easily as typing in some text in a bulleted list. the ease with which I can add, delete, edit, and cut-n-paste the lists was great, and really facilitated me in flushing out a list. with vitalist, however, it’s a few ajax moves to create a new item, and it just isn’t as speedy as typing. as a result, i have every immediate action tracked in vitalist, but often beyond a week out i’d have no idea what i need to do next to complete any given project.

so, again, i’m finding myself needing to supplement my gtd system under vitalist. i need a scratchpad of sorts that’s simple, quick, and lightweight, to brainstorm the steps of a project so that i can lay out the steps in one spot. sure, i can use a text editor, but i have to format things myself, which i hate. and there’s no tagging of items, no relationship between items. it’s just too raw.