stevengharms

I woke up this morning after having spent the weekend down in LA and Orange County with the desire to say something: something longer than a tweet, something shorter than an essay.

It was something about technology, or people, or power, or art. And then I realized: I wanted to blog again.

And then I realized something important. Writing isn’t something you do when you have copious free time, it’s something you do when you don’t. It’s something you do when your spirits are in the right place, when inspiration is around you and through you (which usually has the consequence of you having no copious free time).

The job change I am to undertake within the next week is making me want to do the things that I lost interest in. I want to rework the site, I want to stop digitally sharecropping my content to Facebook and Twitter. I want to integrate this interface and make it the default and have Google+, Facebook, and Twitter be my syndication services.

I’m so glad that a part of the best part of me is coming back.

Probably the most significant constant in the entire history of this blog has been where I have spent several hours of my day each work-day. For a great many years, I have been an employee of Cisco Inc. As of the 19^th of this month, that will end.

I will commence employment at Carbon Five, a consulting and application development firm in San Francisco, on the 24th of this month. I am elated about joining Carbon Five’s team of energetic and innnovative developers. I will be doing Ruby and Rails development and I hope to learn more about mobile development, async server technologies, and sexy Javascript front-ends.

Since last Winter Carbon Five has hosted a fortnightly “hack night.” Through the winter and spring they saw me struggle and batter my way through the rewrite of my LatinVerb library and my metaprogramming presentation. Ultimately this co-working session facilitated a relationship which is about to turn into a working relationship. Here are the things I like about them:

1. Team
   1. Management: Friendly but clearly with a sense of standards and high expectations but with great trust in the developers to do what’s right, well
   2. Staff: Excited, energetic, motivated, funny on Twitter
   3. Size: Forty-ish or souls with whom I can have actual relationships
2. Culture
   1. Standardized hours (exceptions allowed)
   2. Fancy coffee machine that scares me
   3. Developer-sensitive culture: don’t burn out, do good work on good equipment in a nice place
3. Agile Methodologies: Paired programming (flexibly), User Stories
4. Client Engatement: I’ve never worked whith a money-paying customer, I think that’s an experience to have!
5. Technology: The team there is trying out new ideas and tools all the time.
6. Proximity: They’re a 3 block walk from my home. Granted, two of those are SoMa wide north-east/south-west blocks, but it beats the heck out of driving or taking the train anywhere. They’re also surrounded by several gyms so I can get some fitness work in.
7. Type of Work
   1. Application development (including “heavy lifting” of the back end)
   2. Startup / Idea bootstrapping
   3. Design

When the door opened, I felt that the time was right for me to make a change.

I will miss my friends and contacts from Cisco terribly. The people at Cisco and my experiences there defined many of my friends and many years of great memories. Nevertheless I am so excited about my future with Carbon Five. I find so much peace in Ovid these days that I’ll repeat the quote I gave in my “sign off” email:

“As pliable wax, stamped with new designs, it is no longer what it was; does not keep the same form; but is still one and the same;”

Quoque mutabo

I was particularly interested in one of the last pictures I saw from Engaget’s liveblog of the Apple iPad2 announcement. It was a picture of two crossed street signs (black letters on white field, just like the city of San Francisco) between “Liberal Arts” and “Technology.” Topolsky blogged the following, quoting or paraphrasing Steve:

“It’s tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it’s the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are pos[sic]-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive.” — Steve Jobs

I’ve always agreed with this sentiment. Technology without humanity is how you get liquid metal, time-traveling assassins in service to SkyNet and humanity without technology is how you get over-introspective, emotivist populations rife for manipulation. Interestingly this philosophical quip from St. Steven of Cupertino also has a stunning rhetorical payload:

1. Defines now as the post-PC era: There was a PC era, we lost to WinTel in the 80’s and 90’s, but the 21^st century’s opening decades are plainly ours.
2. Note the players in the post-PC era: Samsung, Google…no Microsoft, no Nokia. The message is clear, “Those guys in Redmond? They’re just not relevant anymore.”
3. In Apple’s DNA: I think this is a particularly important telegraph. Jobs seems to be saying: “This competitive advantage is not in corpore of Jobs, it is within the institution. Wall Street, stop hedging your stock positions on my health.” Although I wish Mr. Jobs the best in facing his health battles

Valentine’s day inconveniently falls on a Monday this year, on an evening that Lauren has night class obligations, so we’re celebrating Valentine’s day a day early. The plan:

3:15: Depart home
4:00: Chopin’s Birthday recital of Chopin
5:15-5:30 Head to Rye for pre-dinner drinks
6:30: Dinner at Grand Café
After: ???

Last Valentine’s day I was recovering from a bout of flu. This year it’s Lauren’s turn, but I think that no matter our state of wellness, we are always mindful of how great a life it is to lead which is full of love every single day.

Last night we attended a birthday party / art showing in Sonoma. The guest of honor was Lauren’s uncle, an artist in the oil medium and resident of the area, James Pickel. The grounds were the beautiful home of his friends who covered the beautifully painted and color-washed walls of this retreat with his art. Hidden away up a rambling road into the vibrating, verdant hills of Sonoma county, the afternoon sun draped everything clearly and brightly until the tinge of twilight set to turning the sky’s blue to orange.

The neighboring bleating sheep ushered the twilight as we uncorked the bottles.

Young children of the peaceful people of Northern California ran about, taking turns from the occasional stab at photography, to running, to taking sandwich orders that they sweetly prepared and served with a smile.

The work was rich and heavy with pastoral references: bees and flowers, blossoms, fruit. The hanging canvases, old friends, impressions of life and time in oil, never done, bore silent witness to the evening.

We ate, the fog rose, and conversational partners turned and danced as the night’s chill pushed us inward from the patios. As children turned bleary-eyed, discussion of Indian ragas turned to their production by the able hands and fingers. On the tip of that tilt from soiree to nuit, we politely crept away, redire ex rure ad urbem, the silver German automotive growl prowling down to the Redwood highway.

Back in the City this morning I could think only of Horace:

o rus, quando ego te aspiciam! quandoque licebit nunc veterum libris, nunc somno et inertibus horis, ducere sollicitae iucunda oblivia vitae!

O countryside, when shall I see you! And when will it be granted [that] now by aged books, now by sleep and idle hours to pursue happy forgetfulness of a life of obligation!

The Epicurean ideal in Rome was to have your villa in the city and your retreat amongst nature where you could re-align yourself. It was just so for us.

That day in third grade, on a winter day with its curious, early darkness that seems anomalous to life in the South, the record labored slowly and desultorialy at its task. She played the record that left a furious kiss on my heart amidst scratching fiddles and the conspiratorial flatness of banjos.

A thousand devils’ dulcimer hammers pounded the burning vengeful amalgam of those words, fury, fire and the tribulation meet to us by a jealous God into scalding, thin sheets and wrapped them around my child’s heart. I was baptized to the full, fatal fury of my birthright as a son from the Southwestern states. It was the Appalachian folk music that changed me that day.

The young aren’t supposed to know such things, much less suburban, affluent kids, but they know them sooner than their parents would wish. Carefree and incautious they find those words: “kill,” “die,” and “death” as unaware as when God came across Cain in his soggy field.

And (we) adults come upon them and their new vocabularies in the same way, the table now turned, we play the naïf: “Where is your brother Abel? Whither is that innocence you had just yesterday?”

(more…)

It’s been a number of months since I have posted or have even felt like posting, to tell the truth. The good news is that Lauren and I took a much-needed and well-deserved vacation on the island of Oahu.

We had a wonderful visit and I will post some pictures soon. For the moment know that I will be returning to the Internet and Ruby work space with a vengeance. Some of my zeal is slightly tempered by the fact that I decided to revert back to the “standard” keyboard layout after 10 years of Dvorak use and the tranlition is still very much underway. With any luck this will make me much pithter until such time as I am re-acclimated.

Mike Maples’ recent discussion on startups was my morning listening as I churned through weekend email stack and I came away with the following notes.

• Maples chases Thunder Lizards
  • Godzillas
  • They start from atomic eggs
  • Disrupt their ecosystem (fishing boat)
    • Disrupt the embeddeds (storm into Tokyo)
    • Devour the embeddeds (eat the power lines and the trains)
    • Rare: Cisco, Intel
    • They take all the Oxygen out of the room, high tech has little room for also-rans
    • #1 takes the glory
    • #2 takes some pittance # #3 == who?
• The business of a startup is to validate ab usiness model
  • It must present how their business creates, stores, and delivers value
  • You should do something like the above that brings in money more than you spend it
  • Upon finding a successful one of these, maximize the delta (duh)
• Pivoting
  • You must be able to throw away a really good business model
    • iPhone games
      • Charge $10.00! - making money!
      • Market pushes price to $2.00 - making very little money
      • Entrenched players, low barrier to entry
      • BAIL BAIL BAIL BAIL! You should BAIL
        • You’re spending time trying to make $2.00 grow, not finding that great $10/unit model!
        • This is hard cf. Cortez and his ships
    • Odeo
      • People will want to do audio blogs, podcasts
      • Great!
      • AAPL enters. Crap.
      • Hey I added this twttr feature ← that was a winner
• Great startups CAN and DO pivot and this is their edge against a Thunder Lizard. By maximizing on a great pivot they can become a Thunder Lizard!

This thing really inspired me. You see, I had an idea after Silicon Valley Code Camp I thought I would create a tool that allows one to write Markdown style text as an internal Ruby DSL but that would add the ability to add Semantic payload to the text easily.

It started off on a bad foot, a footing that should have scared me off. The way one formats a heading in Markdown is by using the ‘#’ character. One ‘#’ means an ‘h1’ heading, ‘##’ means 2, etc. But ‘#’ in Ruby means a comment.

So as an internal DSL I was going to have to tell Ruby to ignore its nature that ‘#’ doesn’t mean what it thinks it means and that etc.

This is madness.

I looked back at the Markdown documentation and found an exculpatory clause in Markdown’s documentation:

While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

Wait a second, if you’re writing a plain text email, you want to set things off visually. You want the plain text to try to imitate the power of newsprint or a memo.

# THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD #


## Volume 1:  The Greeks ##
1.  They invented philosophy
   1. Thales
   1. Anaximander
   1. Anaximenes
1.  The Sophists

* Greek Cuisine
  * Olive oil
  * Feta
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

## Volume 2:  The Romans ##

* amare
* dicere
  * irregular imperative:  dic
  * dicite

This is not a format for which adding rich metadata is ideal, it’s a format which looks great in plain text OR which can be converted to more rich HTML. Only a fool would try to coerce those non-fitting bits together.

This guy.

Looking at the other markup language Textile, it’s obvious that it’s a language meant for structure. How do you make an <h1> in Textile? You type h1. This is obviously a language for people who are thinking about HTML as the goal and are using a simplified markup language for producing that output.

Unsurprisingly, this works much better. This was just a sketch a typed up between San Francisco and Palo Alto on the train:

    def html(&b)
      puts "No usable input" if b.nil?
      puts "<html>"
      yield
      puts "</html>"
    end

    def h1(t)
      puts "<h1>#{t}</h1>"
    end

    def h2(t)
      puts "<h1>#{t}</h1>"
    end

    def p(*args,&b)
      print "<p>"
      if args[0].nil?
        puts _reformatter(yield)
      else
        args[0]
      end
      puts "</p>"
    end

    def _reformatter(t)
      t.gsub! "\n", ' '
      t.gsub! '  ', "\n"
      # More reformatting goes here...
      t
    end

    html do 
      h1 "This is an HTML document"
      h2 "This is a topic"
       p do
          "There is no argument here.
          I encourage all of you to be *bold*
          and _emphatic_ and to accept your
          -errors- as mere +moments+ leading to
          the full culmination of self."
         end
    end

Running this nets:

    <html>
    <h1>This is an HTML document</h1>
    <h1>This is a topic</h1>
    <p>There is no argument here.


     I encourage all of you to be *bold*


     and _emphatic_ and to accept your


     -errors- as mere +moments+ leading to


     the full culmination of self.
    </p>
    </html>

So, Mr. Maples, you convinced me, sometimes you have to ditch that loser idea, drop that pair of pocket queens and pivot.

I don’t recommend buying warranties on many consumer electronics, but I really must emphasize how lucky I was to have it on my MacBook Pro (purchased June 2008).

In November 2008 on Election Day my battery failed to hold its charge a reasonable amount of time. Trip to Genius bar in Valley Fair + AppleCare → Free replacement. That’s a savings of ~ $100. Yes we can, indeed.

Time passed, in the words of Sid Meier’s Civilzation (tm), and my Employer gave me a MacBook Pro. I handed my old one down to my girlfriend who has used it with great dedication since. On June 20th she IM’d me and said that the video seemed to have gone wonky, scanlines showing up, machine needed to shut down.

We took it to the genius bar on Stockton the 20th of June, Applecare expired on the 21st.

I could feel the air of a displaced bullet swishing past.

They replaced the battery (it had recently moved to holding charge for ~5 minutes), logic board, as well as the video unit. Cost? $0.00. That’s savings of ~$300.00.

So, for the outlay of another hundred, I saved myself at least $400 in repair, PLUS I got 90 days extra coverage for work done (even now that it’s past the AppleCare horizon). I told her to start saving for that new MBP, but she can still type this one into the ground, thanks to the AppleCare investment.

Then, Sunday night I went to do another Goodwill run and as I drove out of the garage I heard something that wasn’t right. I stopped the car and looked out, my tire was barely full. I limped to the Shell across the street and filled it back up. A quick test showed I was losing about 10 Psi per evening. I filled it up and headed down to the Discount Tire in Redwood City. Thanks to my warranty a brand new replacement Michelin was $0.00. This is much less than the cost of one tire. $25 bucks to renew the certification and labor had me back on the road, safe and sure 40 minutes later.

Oh yes, and I noticed some scratches in my hardwood floor the other day that appear to be where some equipment with pointy ends had rested during the upgrade installation of my place. Warranty! Wha-bam. A very expensive contractor who specializes in slat color matching is coming next Thursday.

I know most of the time paying for warranties is a tool whereby to exploit the rubes, but lately, this rube has struck back. A win for one of us is a win for all. Bask with me, won’t you?

Yes, yes, yes friends. According to my awesome realtor, Vanessa Gamp, we are aiming to close on the condo on the 21^st. I recorded some footage of us doing the walkthru with the builder with my awesome new Flip UltraHD!

Now this is normally where I put something really cool of the house that I took with the Flip in the blog post.

But honestly, my filming skill was so crappy and jerky i gave myself a seizure halfway through. So, here’s a snippet of Lauren and I getting an early dinner after doing the walkthru.

Here’s a still that Lauren took