The ad runs for 1 minute and 30 seconds, the first minute of which is devoted to Jerry helping Bill shop for discount shoes. Microsoft or what they promise for the future isn’t mentioned until the 1:02 mark, and the big revelation is that they’re going to make computers moist and chewy like cake. The commercial ends with Bill shaking the junk in his trunk, followed by three cards: “The Future”, “Delicious”, and finally the Windows logo.
My guess is that the purpose of this commercial is to set the tone and flavor of the Gates/Seinfeld relationship for the ones to follow, which presumably will have a little more substance.
when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.
Very true, especially since there are whole industries and professions that specialize in manipulating your tastes in order to get you to line other people’s pockets. Well put, why!
Scenes from the Valley’s El Camino Real (left) and Seattle’s Pioneer Square (right).
Here’s some food for thought. Ahmed Hassan very recently wrote a comment in response to an article of mine, Ideas to Steal from Silicon Valley and Seattle, and it’s worth promoting to its own article, so here it is.
Being from Toronto and having worked in both Toronto, Ottawa, and the US, I think Toronto has severe challenges.
1. We build workers…not leaders.
We have loads of talent…but all we create is good worker bees.
2. Yes, lack of big companies is a big deal.
There are some ‘entrepreneurs’ who will just go at it on their own. yet, the vast majority of people like a decent job. So they meet up at large companies…work for a while…then maybe decide to start their own thing. All we have in Toronto proper is IBM and AMD. Anyone care to explain how RIM was founded in Waterloo. I ask that as a serious question. How does a small town create the only great Canadian tech company in operation right now? Why was it not founded in Toronto? Ask that question a few times…over and over.
3. Politicians do not understand business.
When you have someone like Miller who says he doesn’t care about companies who move to Mississauga for lower tax rates as he only wants companies who are willing to pay more to take advantage of Toronto’s urban character… you know something is wrong. They will try to push venture capital and ‘incubators…’.
As I say…mentality before process.
4. Sometimes you run out of talent.
How many high tech centers do we need? Everywhere you go, there is a lack of talent. If Toronto tech can just pickup and move to Seattle, Silicon valley, New york, boston, dallas, austin… in an already established tech base, why would they bother doing it here? Better weather, lower taxes, more like-minded entrepreneurs.
It’s not impossible. But Toronto has its work cut out for it. The biggest threat to Toronto…is actually Waterloo. Very close to Toronto and with a large tech base. It’s largely a mentality gap. Toronto embraces bureaucracy and structure. Startups are about freedom and independence. If you will…that’s why RIM was founded in Waterloo as opposed to Toronto. No Toronto bureaucracy would have ever approved of RIM. I mean they would be competing against Motorola, Nokia, MS… impossible…that’s a bad investment.
If you’re a reader of the usual sites with links that nerds like, you’ve probably seen the video or read the writeup of Clay Shirky’s presentation at Web 2.0 on “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”.
In his presentation, he describes a conversation with a TV producer, in which he talked about the effort that people put into the “Pluto” entry in Wikipedia. The producer, hearing this story, rolled her eyes and asked “Where do they find the time?”
Clay suggests that the producer believed that “free time”, which he refers to as “cognitive surplus” or “social surplus”, was TV’s by divine right. He posits that the mental energy once devoted to television watching and other equally passive ways of filling one’s spare time is being better spent — on the internet.
(I’ve always found that saying someone has “too much time on their hands” is an intellectually dishonest way of dismissing someone: see my entry Too Much Spare Time? and Cory Doctorow’s essay, Too Much Time on His Hands.)
If you haven’t seen the video of Clay’s presentation, here it is — it’s 16 minutes of your free time well spent:
The TV producer reminded me of a record executive whom I encountered at my first job out of school. It’s an interesting story about programming work and technology in the mid-90′s, the music industry and how predictions about technology can be way, way off.
My First Job Out of School
A screenshot from the 1991 version of the Mackerel Stack, a HyperCard stack the promoted Mackerel’s design work.
My first job fresh from getting my computer science degree at Crazy Go Nuts University was developing multimedia applications in Director at a little company called Mackerel Interactive Multimedia.
The year was 1995, when Myst still defined the cutting edge of multimedia, CD-ROMs and sound cards were still fairly novel peripherals and the only other opportunities for a wet-behind-the ears developer seemed to be at a bank or insurance company, neither of which seemed to be appealing. While the pay wasn’t great — I used to call us the “hos of technology” and did a Full Metal Jacket-esque routine that ended with me shouting “Me so geeky! Clicky-clicky! Me hack for long time!” — the place wasn’t soul-killing like a bank or insurance company might have been. I could wear whatever I wanted, I could dress up my office space however I pleased, the hours were flexible and the co-workers were great: a hip and cool set of young people, with a near 50:50 gender balance. It seemed like Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, which had just been published at that time, right down to the ill-advised office romances (one of which was mine).
While the dream at the company was to write the next Myst, we paid the bills by writing multimedia apps for clients — typically interactive advertising or educational pieces that would eventually be distributed on CDs or even multiple floppies.
The company went under after a disastrous merger in 1997. Its story was covered by Cory Doctorow wrote an article for Wired about the Mackerel’s demise; unfortunately, it never got published in the magazine. The Mackerel story is told from a different angle by co-founders Dave Groff and Kevin Steele at the Smackerel site, which is subtitled A Biased History of Interactive Media.
Enter the Record Exec
One of the bands represented by the record exec’s company. You can try to guess who they are, and you should be able to figure out the record company as well.
One day during the summer of 1996, one of the founders came into the area where the developers hung out and told us that we’d landed a contract with an independent record label belonging to a major record company.
“Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” I asked.
Apparently it wasn’t. The indy label turned out to be merely a new branch of the major record company. It would sign up-and-coming underground and alternative acts and use the major label for distribution. If the major label was pin-striped and buttoned-down, the indy label was its edgier nephew, clad in faux Hot Topic-esque cred. In spite of their trying-too-hard-to-be-cool aspects, we thought they’d make an interesting client.
The record company exec was a woman who was about five years past their twenty-something demographic. She gave off more of a business school vibe than a rock vibe. She peppered her speech with business-school-isms like “target audience” and “units sold”. She used the word “product” several times and didn’t use the word “music” or even “album” once. Everything she knew about music didn’t come from being a fan; it came from what she’d read in her market research reports.
“That’s why they don’t call it show art,” one of us quipped.
The Brainstorming Session
The CD player application from System 7, the version of Mac OS from 1996.
One of the goals of this initial meeting was to brainstorm some ideas for interactive apps that we could build for them. I had been working on an idea that I was rather proud of: CD player apps customized for specific albums. For any CD other than the one for which it was customized, it would show a mostly plain interface, plus some promos for the album. However, if you used the player to play the album for which it was customized, it would “come alive” with lyrics, liner notes, album art and so on. It was an attempt to bring back what was lost in the move from LPs to CDs.
“Nice try, kid,” said the exec with great disdain. “We did some market research and we’ve determined that no one will ever listen to music on their computer. People see them as machines for getting work done. We’re aiming for the rec room, the den, the living room and the bedroom, not the home office. You computer guys are aiming for home office.”
“You sure about that?” our production manager asked. “We all use the CD players on our machines. For some of us, our computers are in our bedrooms and living rooms, and they’re also our primary stereos now.”
“That may be true for you,” she replied, “but you guys are the exception. Computers are great, but they’re office equipment. You don’t keep a typewriter or photocopier in your living room, so why would you have a computer there? And that’s where people listen to their music. Office equipment and entertainment: apples and oranges. Trust me – I’ve been in the music industry for a while – no one’s going to listen to music on their computer.”
I listened as a few other people had their ideas shot down in similar fashion. It was a matter of her knowing the music industry better than we did.
The Hail Mary MP3 Play
At some point during the increasingly futile brainstorming session, I remembered something that I’d brought back from the Macromedia User Conference. I reached into my laptop bag and fished out a floppy disc.
“Here, check this out,” I said, slotting the diskette into my laptop. “It’s something called Shockwave, which lets you embed multimedia applications inside web pages.”
“We don’t think there will be much interest in the world wide web outside of technical people. The pictures are tiny, you’re stuck with default fonts, and your customers have to go buy a modem. Too much tech hassle, too little payoff.”
“You should give this a look,” I insisted. “The company that makes the tool we use to write multimedia software is using MPEG layer 3 [the term "MP3" hadn't made common parlance yet] compression to squeeze music files into less space. There’s a small multimedia program on this floppy, and a whole three-minute song. It would normally take about 8 floppies to hold this song.”
I put the disk in my laptop and launched the Shockwave application, which started a tune playing.
“Sounds like crap,” she said. “And who’s the band? The Spin Doctors? They’re so over.”
“Ignore the band,” I said, trying to remain patient. “Just think of the possibilities. This three-minute single is only a megabyte in size. It fits on a floppy, which you can hand out, or you’d be able to download it in a reasonable amount of time. The download will be even faster on the new 56K modems.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” she said, making that opening-and-closing hand gesture signifying pointless chatter. “It only means something to you because you’re a techie. I’ve seen the market research, and I will tell you now: people are not going to be getting their entertainment from computers or the internet. It’s going to come from set-top boxes and MiniDisc recharging stations at their record stores.”
At this point, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour. “Well, you seem to have all the market research, so maybe the best thing would be for you to come up with ideas for an interactive application, and then we can hammer out the details with you in a later meeting.”
“I think that would be a good idea,” she said. She rose from her seat to leave the room, shaking her head.
“I don’t know about you,” I said to the others after confirming that she was out of earshot, “but I think the music industry needs to be destroyed.”
What They Don’t Tell You About Starting a Startup: “Most of the times when we discuss startups, we only discuss success stories. We just see the end result of entrepreneurs making multi-million dollars. We talk about what a great life that entrepreneur must be living now. We always neglect the other side of entrepreneurs’ life. The painful life.”
If your idea for a web business is more along the lines of the mundane “product * price = profit” (3P) variety, I think the culture of San Francisco and that famous 20-mile radius around Stanford is anything but helpful. I might even go as far as say it’s downright harmful.
The flush availability of other people’s money is simply too tempting. When you’re not spending your own money, it’s easy to splash on a big open office on day one, a staff of 10+ in no time, and have few worries about paying the bills on the 1st of the month. It takes away much of the urgency to make money that I think is critical to build sustainable businesses. It gives you too many resources to be satisfied building simple tools for niche markets. Everything becomes about catching that huge wave.
I can vouch from personal experience that the line about what happens when you’re not spending your own money is so true. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you about it.
Naturally, the question comes up: “If San Francisco, the Bay area, and Sillicon Valley aren’t good places to start a web business of the 3P variety, where is?”
David provides a quick list of cities where some interesting applications are being developed, which includes:
Chicago (and originally, Copenhagen), home of BaseCamp
I’m highlighting Toronto not only because it’s the city I call home, but also because there’s a strong small development shop community that’s been building up here over the past few years: we hosted one of the first BarCamps to follow the original, and created DemoCamp, CaseCamp and TransitCamp as well as the upcoming RubyFringe conference, which promises to be quite unlike any other developer conference out there. Toronto also offers some serious quality-of-life bonuses to techies, a very livable city with lots to do at night, Asian food aplenty (including three or four Chinatowns, depending on how you count ‘em), a smart workforce and proximity to major cities in the United States (we’re about an hour away by plane from New York, Boston and Chicago).
When I moved to my current position as Nerd Wrangler at b5media, I arrived to discover that the computer waiting for me was a Toshiba P200, a 17″ beast of a laptop that I’ve named “The Coffee Table”. This is the first time in about 5 years that I’ve worked with Windows as my primary operating system, and after a month in Vista, my feelings about operating systems are pretty much summarized by the picture below:
The Audigy series of Creative Labs’ Sound Blasters lost some functionality with the release of Windows Vista:
EAX: “Environmental Audio Extensions”, a set of digital signal processing presets that are meant to make sound in games seem more realistic.
3D Audio
Sampling rate conversion
Audio mixing
Creative’s story is that Microsoft removed “the ‘Vendor Extension mechanism from Vista’s DirectSound implementation,’ which is what Sound Blaster Audigy relied on to generate EAX effects and other audio processing.” Without this bit of code, Sound Blaster Audigy cards produce regular 2-channel stereo sound and not the supposedly more realistic-sounding, spatially-localized sounds for which people bought Audigy cards in the first place.
If this development wasn’t enough to upset Audigy owners, Creative stirred the pot last July by charging $10 for software called Creative ALchemy (that’s not a typo — the first two letters in “ALchemy”, when referring to the software, are supposed to be capitalized). Here’s the description from its page on Creative’s site:
Creative ALchemy (Audigy Edition) restores your Sound Blaster Audigy’s ability to process EAX effects, 3D audio, sampling rate conversion and audio mixing for certain DirectSound3D games in Windows Vista.
Quite predictably, some users were quite annoyed at being asked to pay for this software. In the words of this Gizmodo article, Creative was effectively “charging 10 bucks to fix something that should work in the first place.” A commenter in this CrunchGear article on the issue made a point that the charge could reflect the extra development effort required in making Audigy cards work under Vista, but also suggested that Creative could’ve eaten that cost “for PR purposes”.
For more commentary on Creative Labs’ charging $10 for what some saw as functionality that they had already paid for, see this ZDNet article titled Creative charging $9.99 for Vista EAX update?.
It’s quite likely that the workaround in question was a solution posted by one “Daniel_K”. Here’s what a Gizmodo article posted yesterday has to say about it:
Developer, good-guy and all around hero, Daniel_K stepped up to the challenge, putting together his own drivers and asking for non-obligatory donations in recognition of his effort. Daniel_K’s drivers restored functionality, and added some extra features to boot.
You might think that Creative would be pleased: here’s a user with the will and the skill to develop a software fix that restores functionality to their hardware under Vista — essentially crowdsourcing at its best.
However, they were not pleased. Here’s a message posted to their forums by Creative’s VP Corporate Communication, Phil O’Shaughnessy. I’ve emphasized the part of the message that really grind my gears:
Daniel_K:
We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don’t have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.
Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.
Phil O’Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.
Simply put, Creative is saying that by fixing stuff that they’ve broken on purpose in order to gouge more money out of their customers, you’re stealing from them. It’s just another case of a vendor seeing its customers as “batteries for their Matrix”, or a Jay Michalski puts it, gullets that live under the end of the distribution system’s conveyor belt, where they gulp down products and crap out cash.
The quick version of the Zero Punctuation review of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune: Some very nice visuals, nothing new either gameplay- or plot-wise, and if you’re a white supremacist, you’ll love this game. Watch the full review!
Where is our “Fairchild” that creates our own “Fairchildren”? “Can you name big successful software companies that have started in Toronto? More importantly, can you name successful companies that have started because the founders were members of another “parent” company? Why has RIM or Nortel not created a strong spinoff culture?”
One possible source of “Fairchildren” might be people who’ve spent time in Silicon Valley and other hubs, who’ve either returned or migrated to Toronto to start companies here. They bring with them experience and connections and “might be a better hope for new wealth creation in Toronto in the high-tech sector.”
ICT Toronto is a joke. David’s feeling about City Hall’s attempt to bolster Toronto’s standing as a high-tech hub is similar to mine: “We have a fascination with self-congratulatory bullshit efforts!” Last year’s TechWeek was a non-event that registered on almost nobody’s radar, and I have my doubts about this year’s. Their goals are misguided, and they have no idea of what it means to be local technology company. They seem to be focused on on turning Toronto into a place to do “nearsourcing”, in which case they might as well come up with a marketing campaign like “Toronto: The Bangalore Next Door” and resign us to the fate of being a call center hub.
I fell in love with Montreal in my late teens. It’s quite unlike most cities in North America — you can practically feel the place’s history, and everything from its architecture to the “feel” of its streets just seems different. It’s like having a little bit of Europe, but closer by and cheaper to get to. If you’re from North America and looking for a different vacation destination and on a budget, I recommend Montreal.
Today’s Montreal Gazette features an article titled Silicon Island?, which takes a look at their high-tech community’s grassroots movement:
Inspired by the collaborative nature of the Internet, local geeks with bright ideas started meeting at informal, community-organized events called BarCamps. The global movement that began in the Silicon Valley was the grassroots retort to stuffy, invitation-only tech conferences. In a BarCamp, computer whizzes show the first drafts of their garage projects to anyone who will listen.
This type of networking results in lasting connections that can pay off. Now when [George Favvas of Montreal-based SmartHippo.com] needs someone with a particular skill, he puts the word out on his blog, his Facebook profile or on his LinkedIn page, a social network for business contacts. Other bloggers write about it. Someone who knows just the guy gets wind of it, and Favvas has a candidate in a few hours.
This way of doing things has been so fruitful that it’s being seen as a model for other sectors of the technology industry, like telecommunications and life sciences.
“The young entrepreneurs today are different from the IT entrepreneurs of the ’80s and ’90s,” said René Barsalo, the director of strategy and liaison for the Society for Arts and Technology, which has become the preferred venue for local tech gatherings.
“They are very good at organizing themselves. … It’s sad to see more established companies not seeing this as a core of business,” he said.
There’s also a gathering called YULbiz, a monthly get-together for local business bloggers (YUL is the airport code for Montreal’s Pierre Trudeau airport). Montreal StartUp encourages successful entrepreneurs to become angel investors. Guy Kawasaki’s Garage Technology Ventures has a branch office in Montreal.
Map of Montreal’s subway.
As with Toronto, the chicken-and-egg problem also plagued Montreal. As the article puts it: “Do risk-takers attract smart money, or does the availability of money encourage risk-takers? Ideally, both factors are at work, in a mutually reaffirming symbiosis.” The seed money is now coming in, and things are looking up:
With its pool of tech talent, the emergence of seed money, and a budding network of mentors, “Montreal has the right mix of elements and we’ll see it really flourish next year,” [Austin Hill] said.
The next step is to get people from different tech and business sectors talking to each other. René Barsalo, the director of strategy and liaison for the Society for Arts and Technology (“the preferred venue for local tech gatherings”) says that in his ideal world, a presentation by a 3D animator would have engineers, musicians, medical technicians and furniture designers in the audience.
The article closes with a line that people in the Toronto tech community will find familiar: “The grassroots is moving up quite nicely, but a top-down movement isn’t happening at all.”
Zed Shaw’s title for his writeup of the CUSEC 2008 conference sums up his opinions: CUSEC 2008 Rocked Hard!. It’s a telling sign when the master of over-the-top condemnation has nothing but praise for your endeavour.
Here’s a quick summary of his points:
“The first thing I’d say about this conference, and many of the other small regional conferences is just how well organized they are compared to the professional and larger conferences. The CUSEC organizers are all volunteers from universities, yet they were better planned, had their act together, and really knew how to put on a show.”
Montreal however reminded me of what Canada is supposed to be: friendly, cool, relaxed, and open. The sexy French accents helped push this perception, but also the food, the fact that strip clubs were everywhere, the streets were clean, people smiled at me (nobody in Vancouver smiled) and everyone seemed to be having a good time.
Tim Bray’s presentation: “It was a decent talk, and I think the audience got some valuable information out of it…I liked Tim’s talk since it was perfect for students starting out, and it dovetailed well with a talk by Dr. Peter Grogono on the same subject.”
Kate Hollenbach’s presentation: “What she demonstrated is a way to do simple visualizations using a Python simplification wrapper to most OpenGL primitives. What impressed me the most is she did live demos of large scale 3D visualizations based on information from internet services like Facebook. She did this live right off the internet and it didn’t tank on her. If the project already can survive the demo effect then it’s doing pretty damn good.”
Zed’s keynote: “I did my keynote in Factor using a neat presentation DSL that Slava wrote up for another presentation he did. You can grab the source to it here. Then go grab the 0.91 release, put the file in extra/cusec2008/ in the Factor directory, and then just start factor and type: “cusec2008” run to start it. Yes, I make it hard to read through on purpose you bastards. Learn something for a change.” (That crazy Zed, always working that “Magnificent Bastard” persona…)
The points from Zed’s keynote:
I work at a stupid bank on a cool project.
They’re bureaucracy almost crushed the project.
They tried to push through a product we couldn’t use due to a major theoretical limitation in how ACLs work: they aren’t turing complete.
Steak And Strippers! The sales guy’s dirty bomb.
After months of wasted effort on the project and fighting stupid politics we finally implemented something better.
This kind of thing makes being a corporate programmer suck, suck, suck!
Don’t be a corporate programmer. They demand all of your creativity and trust none of your judgment.
But, you’ve gotta eat so if you do become one, here’s how you survive.
Then tons of advice on how to survive and be happy until the moron MBAs who know nothing of technology die off and are replaced with people who get it.
“Another thing that impressed the hell out of me about the audience is that many of them actually came up and told me they didn’t agree with all that I said. Other conferences I’ve been to people either don’t speak up when a speaker is being an asshat, or if you do challenge the speaker he gets all pissy.”
“What blew me away first off is that the audience asked actual fucking questions. I’ve been to so many conferences where half of the shit the audience spews out of their mouth hole after the talk isn’t a question. They state what they think, talk about their own work (which usually sucks), and just don’t ask a fucking question. The CUSEC attendees rocked because they got up, and not only asked great questions, but asked challenging ones that caught a few speakers off guard, myself included.”
“CUSEC was full of great independent thinkers and I hope they never lose that. Always question the people telling you how it should be and demand evidence. If some shit head Haskell moron tells you that software should be stateless, then ask him why there’s monads. If someone says that you should be doing more usability, then ask him why his website sucks shit.”
At CUSEC the corporate talks were actually useful and given by non-sales people. They did include pitches to hire folks, but not but based on how cool their product was and how interesting the work is. Additionally, I had managed to inoculate most of the students against stupid sales pitches so most of the people trying to recruit had to throw in, “We don’t suck like Zed says other corporations suck.” I was actually also proud since throughout the rest of the conference students would yell out “Steak and Strippers!” whenever it was funny.
Jeffrey Ullman’s keynote: “Pretty neat stuff, and since he’s basically the grandfather of google having been their thesis adviser, it was worth seeing.”
Idee’s as a start-up: “Then they mentioned that the two partners actually had 2.1 million of their own money for the “start-up”. That pretty much killed the talk for me. Technically it was excellent, but if you come to me and say you got your business off the ground by a heavy investment of 2.1 million bones then I don’t call you a start-up. A start-up is Woz and Steve Jobs making circuit boards in their garage on nothing. With that much money you’re just a business.”
On Slava Pestov’s no-show: “…he whimped out at the last minute and decided to defend his MSc. in Mathematics instead. Loser. No worries though, because I got Slava’s CUSEC speaker’s plaque and plan to take it on a disgusting traveling gnome style tour of NYC before mailing it to him.”
Jeremy Cooperstock’s presentation: “It was a kick ass talk about how the current internet can’t handle the required latency for musicians in different locations to perform together.”
On Jon Udell’s talk: “One thing I found annoying about Jon Udell’s talk is that, just like all the other RESTafarians, didn’t have a clue about HTTP. He mentioned that you could use ’;’ in a URL to give people hierarchy, but that’s just dead wrong. It’s the exact same problem that Rails ran into, since ’;’ is a path parameter and isn’t part of a file name at all. It’s right there in the HTTP spec that you can’t do it, and part of the grammar even, but REST people don’t have a clue. They think if they can put the char in a file on their modern file system then it can go in a URL. Not true at all since HTTP was built before most modern file systems…I later had the chance to sit next to Jon and chat with him. He’s a smart guy for sure and very nice. Just wish he wasn’t telling kids how to do REST.”
Jeff Atwood’s talk: “Finally I watched Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame talk about what a lot of other people have said and why you should blog. I completely agreed with everything Jeff said, except for a tiny bit of hypocrisy he didn’t fess up to until asked…Jeff is a great public speaker too. Even though I disagreed with a few of his points I really liked his talk and would see him speak again any time.”
Don’t just fucking blog, but write some software and give it away. While the average person can only read a human language, the people you really need to hit with your message as a programmer are other coders. I’d say that’s the best thing I’ve done for myself, not really the blogging.
I have a policy of not naming people on my blog since it’s normally a pretty fucked up place to get named. I’ll just keep it short however and say all of the organizers kicked major ass. They were all nice, awesome people that I’d hang out with any day. I’m glad they invited me to the conference and I’d come to the next one any time.
It’s a list on PickTheBrain.com that originally appeared in Investors Business Daily. This list is based on answers to questions they asked “industry leaders, investors and entrepreneurs to understand the traits they all had in common”.
Here’s a simplified version of the list — to see the whole thing, read the article:
How you think is everything. “Think Success, not Failure. Beware of a negative environment. This trait has to be one of the most important in the entire list. Your belief that you can accomplish your goals has to be unwavering.”
Decide upon your true dreams and goals. “Write down your specific goals and develop a plan to reach them…Goals are those concrete, measurable stepping stones of achievement that track your progress towards your dreams.”
Take action. “Goals are nothing without action.”
Never stop learning. “Becoming a life long learner would benefit us all and is something we should instill in our kids. It’s funny that once you’re out of school you realize how enjoyable learning can be.”
Be persistent and work hard. “Success is a marathon, not a sprint.”
Learn to analyze details. Get all the facts, all the input. Learn from your mistakes. I think you have to strike a balance between getting all the facts and making a decision with incomplete data – both are traits of successful people. Spend time gathering details, but don’t catch ‘analysis paralysis’.
Focus your time and money. “Don’t let other people or things distract you.”
![Why\'s photo-illustration of his book, \"why\'s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby\"](http://www.joeydevilla.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/whys_poignant_guide.jpg "Why\'s photo-illustration of his book, \\"why\'s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby\\"")
