Monthly Archive for February, 2010

Big Change in the Tech World, a new essay today by Dave Winer, is spot on.  (His site is down right now, but you can read the cached version here).  Talking about the funk the PC industry was in just a couple decades ago:

“Something wonderful happened when the Internet broke through a similar logjam in the early 90s. But that’s now a distant memory. A new generation has come of age. The students I work with at NYU were small children when the Web grew out of the ruins of the PC business. They don’t have any memory of what it was like before.”

Some people are too young to remember, or just weren’t into tech at the time, but the 90s were a relatively sad time in the tech world.  Big companies–predominantly Microsoft–had amassed huge amounts of power. Desktop computing had matured as a technology, and these big players were entrenched as gatekeepers in that space.  If you couldn’t build it with Microsoft’s tools, you couldn’t build it.  Many of the industry’s best and brightest stopped pushing boundaries, and we were stuck with the boring, conservative technological updates the big corporations fed to us.

I used to think the stuff Paul Thurrott writes about on WinSuperSite was the epitome of exciting up-and-coming tech.  That’s how bad it was.

Lucky for us the web came along, on the back of the Open Source movement, and changed all that.  It was a new platform where Microsoft didn’t hold the keys, where smart, enterprising folks could build truly revolutionary products without the blessing of the megacorps.  Because of this new opportunity, we have Google and Facebook and Twitter, and this bevy of crazy, new, disruptive technologies that allow totally new ways of using computers.

If we had left things to Microsoft, there is no way you would be carrying an unlimited information resource around in your pocket, connected to your friends and loved ones thousands of miles away, in constant coordination with your social network, passing news and photos and videos around like candy.  No chance.

This glorious, scrappy innovation continues today, within these companies and without.  But frightening new powers are amassing in the halls of Facebook and Google.

But the hearts of men are easily corrupted,
And the ring of power has a will of its own.
It betrayed Isildur to his death
And some things that should not have been forgotten,
were lost.

…

Rumor grew of a shadow in the East,
whispers of a nameless fear.
And the Ring of power perceived:
its time had now come.

The internet gave us developers and our users a great power: freedom from needing to write and run software for Microsoft’s platform.  But just as we gained this power, we gave one up.  We took the responsibility of running our own software and storing our own data and handed it over to companies like Google and Facebook.

I don’t get to decide which applications can run on my internet profile, Facebook does.  I don’t get to decide whether I upgrade my email application, Google does.  I don’t get to decide which applications can see the email addresses of my friends, Facebook does.  I don’t get to decide which applications get access to my news feed, Twitter does.  For now, these companies are generally pretty liberal with allowing us to push this data around.  But in the end, Facebook Giveth, and Facebook Can Taketh Away.  These are freedoms I had and have lost.

Are these few minor limitations the price that we have to pay for the incredible conveniences Google and Facebook have brought us, or are they harbingers of future freedoms these companies will continue to leech away from us?

Time will tell.

The one thing that gives me faith is that the internet has promises that have nothing to do with these companies.  The difficulty and cost associated with creating our own web services is plummeting.  In ten years, you will be able to create your own social network, totally independent of Facebook, in a weekend.  And you’ll be able to host it for you and your friends for pennies a day.

This is the fundamental empowering fact of information technology.  Large companies can control the landscape of today, but the landscape of tomorrow is always open season, and it is advancing like a freight train.  This is what keeps Steve Ballmer and Mark Zuckerberg awake at night.  If Facebook becomes tomorrow’s Microsoft, then we will just build tomorrow’s Facebook.  Like the tech giants of yore, they too can fade into obscurity.

I just hope that this time when we start seeing abuses, it will take only months to route around them.  Not years or decades like it took for us to maneuver around Microsoft.  I don’t want my little heart to have to handle the disappointment of seeing my field falling into another depression like that one.

One of the thorniest issues in my life these days is motivation.  Somewhat it’s because I work for myself and my work is largely unstructured (until I structure it).  But somewhat it’s just a facet of getting older.  I just watched The Hurt Locker last night (amazing film, btw!)  There was an incredible quote at the end: (WARNING: this is sort of a spoiler)

“As you get older… some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you’ll realize it’s just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And then you forget the few things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it’s only one or two things. With me, I think it’s one.”

Somewhat, I think that’s the motivation thing.  The older I get, the more I see through things, and the harder it is to convince myself that Yes, I Really Should Invest My Time In This.

I don’t feel like I have all the answers, or even very many of them.  But I thought I’d share a few of the things I’ve been telling myself lately to help keep myself motivated.  What are yours?

Seven Ways To Stay Motivated
by Erik Pukinskis

1) Wait until you care.  Sometimes when you feel like you have to do something, you are resistant to it.  Giving yourself permission to wait (or not do it all) can help you realize that you actually want to get moving.

2) Aim high.  Familiarize yourself with the big, crazy, hard tasks that mean a lot to you. These hard, long-range goals are a good motivating force if you can carve out a bite-sized goal to work on.

3) Aim low.  Big, crazy goals are something to aim for, not something to actually try to make happen.  If you short-term plan involves doing something extremely difficult or complicated, you’re probably trying to accomplish two goals at once.  Split them in two until you get something bite sized.

4) Pay attention to your emotions.  Are you feeling anxious?  Depressed?  Stop what you’re doing and try to figure out where it’s coming from.  Rogue emotions will cause you to do all kinds of crazy things to address them.  It’s faster just to get it out of the way.

5) Stop doing things and think about what your options are.  Think about where different courses of action could lead.  Evaluate plusses and minuses of different ways to invest your time.  The more time you spend thinking about the incentives, the more likely you are to want to move.

6) Make good choices.  Feeling like you’re toiling away at something useless is a surefire recipe for apathy.  If something isn’t working, stop doing it.  And start doing something you believe in.

7) Don’t obsess about perfection.  Planning is important, but iteration will often yield better results than obsessive planning.  And spending all of your time planning is an easy way to avoid actually doing something.  Once you have a plan that has a chance of working, and more planning isn’t fundamentally improving it, stop planning and start doing.

I’ve long been against whole wheat pizza crusts.  They always taste bland to me, or they’re tough, or crumbly, or dry.  But this week I made a crust I was really proud of, that had none of these issues, so I thought I’d share the recipe.

Relatively Quick Whole Wheat Pizza Crust
Makes two large pizzas.

3 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tbsp yeast
1 1/2 tbsp salt
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp garlic powder
2 tbsp olive oil
Water, as needed, about 1 1/2 cups

Process dry ingredients in your food processor for 30 seconds until mixed.  While the food processor is on, add the oil through the feed tube.  Slowly pour water in through the feed tube, watching very carefully.  As you add water the flour will start to come together into crumbles, and then it will seize up into a single mass.  Just as it is forming into a mass, add a final splash of water (about 1/4 cup, just estimate).

Continue to let the food processor knead the dough.  It should move around the food processor.  If it starts to pancake and gum up the blade, add more flour.  It should be roughly the softness of a marshmallow.  If it’s tough, add a little more water.  Let it knead for 5 minutes.  A long knead is important to develop the stretchiness the dough needs.

Pour a little olive oil in a bowl at least 3x the size of the dough and smoosh it around.  Add the dough.  Put your pizza stone in the oven and turn it on to 500 degrees for 2 minutes.  Turn off the oven, and set the dough in the oven, in the bowl, covered.  MAKE SURE THE OVEN IS OFF! Let it rise until it doubles in volume, 30-40 minutes.

Once the dough is out of the oven, put it back to 500 degrees to preheat. (Or hotter if you oven goes hotter!)

Divide the dough in half, and roll it out.  I recommend kneading each half a little, and then flattening it into a disc, using plenty of flour, and then alternating between rolling it out and stretching it by hand until it’s a large circle.  It takes a lot of finesse, so just practice.

Cover a large round pan or pizza peel with cornmeal and transfer the pizza “shell” onto it.  Add ingredients, being careful not to smoosh the dough down (that will make it stick).  Also be careful that all juices stay on the pie.  If they drip off the edge, that might make the pizza stick.

When the oven is preheated, jiggle the pizza pan gently to see if it’s sticking.  If it is, use a spatula to lift up around the edges, adding more cornmeal between the dough and the pan/peel.  Do another test jiggle.

When the pizza is free, open the oven and slide it gently and confidently onto the stone.  Basically, stick the pan in towards the back of the stone, and slide the back edge off onto the stone, then pull the pan out from under the pie.

Bake for 8 minutes (less if your oven goes above 500 degrees).  Put on a cooking rack when you remove it from the oven, and let cool for a few minutes.

Enjoy the crap out of that thing!