wanderingstan

After months of talk, I’m finally in Berlin and enjoying a  warm day sitting outside on a quite street.

I’ve been trying to ressurect my German of course. Though “resurrect” is surely too strong a word for something which was never quite alive in the first place!

Thankfully many of the words are coming back, but I’m also remembering some of the meta-experiences of being the foreigner. For example:

• Like a child again: Being a foreigner feels a lot like being a child. I’m filled with childlike wonder at seeing new ways of doing things. The horizontal centrifuge washing machine is so fascinating! The way you tell the waiter how much you’re paying, not how much you want back–so interesting! And also childlike in feelings of powerlessness. Not knowing how to properly take out the garbage. Not being able to participate in “grown up” conversations. Having to ask questions all the time.
• The choice to “Tune Out”: It is easy to “tune out” a foreign language. So I find it much easier here to get lost in my own thoughts. And as it’s more socially acceptable for me to not understand what’s going on in a conversation, I’ll often “tune out” for lengths of time to think deeper about something that someone has said and drift off into implications. I remember getting on the airplane to fly home after a year in Germany, and being truly annoyed with all the English jabber around me that I could not help but listen too–so distracting!
• Most Interested Listener Problem: Listening takes my full concentration. And with limited language capability, I rely heavily on the speaker’s body language and facial expressions to piece together what they are talking about. So when someone in a group is speaking, I give them my rapt attention, never taking my eyes away for fear of missing a clue. I then appear (and am) the most engaged listener. And yet I am understanding the least! But subconsciously, they start directing more and more of their talk to me, and direct follow-up questions to me (”So, has this happened to you too?”, “So you agree?”), and generally direct the conversation to me once they are done speaking. Ack! Then I am busted, outed, revealed! (Perhaps I didn’t manage to understand anything at all?) The trick then, is to listen as closely as possible all the while appearing to be one of the least interested listeners. Not so easy!
• Need For Creativity: When you’re only catching bits and pieces of a story, it demands extraordinary creativity to try and fill in the gaps. I find this to be a nice mental exercise. E.g. given “horse”, “field”, “yesterday”, “first time”, “jump”, “and then I laughed”. Was he riding the horse in a field, and jumped off? Or the horse jumped? Or maybe it was the first time riding in that particular field? Or maybe it was the horse that laughed? In any case, you have to keep all possible storylines currently in your head until you get enough (understood) context from later in the story to eliminate possibilities. If the needed context doesn’t come, then my stack overflows and it’s time to start over.
• Fake it till you Make it: When people figure out that you’re not understanding everything you say, they feel compelled to stop and explain (or to switch to English). But most of the time, all you need is for them to keep going and later context will fill in the gaps. (See above.) So I find myself relying heavily expressing the usual signs of interest and understanding (”I see.”, “Really?”, “And then?”, “Oh!”, ” No way!”) to keep them talking. A friend in Osnabrück once outed me on this, saying that I was one of the best foreigners at this “skill”!

When you’re learning a new sport, art, or any activity, you basically suck at it. That’s what it means to be a beginner. But if you keep at it, you will learn to get better.  It occurred to me recently, while I was sucking in a game of ultimate frisbee, that you are actually learning two things in parallel.

First, you are learning the needed skills: how to move, common tricks, techniques, etc…

But secondly, you are also learning to how to evaluate the execution of those skills.

This is all fine and good as you learn these two things in parallel. However, when you slack off for a long time, you lose your edge. I used to be quite a good ultimate player. As of last Saturday, I know that this is no longer the case. The problem is that while you have gotten rusty at the skill itself, you still fully remember how to evaluate. Thus, you can berate yourself for your poor execution.

And as you get older, you accumulate more activities that this can occur in. After all, you can’t be in top form in every activity all the time. Recently I’ve noticed it in myself for frisbee, mountain biking, calligraphy, and even coding.

The sad thing is that you’re probably doing pretty well–just not as well as when your evaluation criteria were being honed. Certainly better than a beginner. (and probably better than people who have been doing it a while.) That is, I actually was playing a pretty good frisbee game!

The trick of course, is to change your evaluation strategy: try to remember what it was like as a total beginner, be extra-cognizant of the things which you are doing right, and give yourself time to re-form the habits and muscle-memory that go into a skill. And if it’s something that you don’t need to be “the best at,” allow yourself simply enjoy the activity rather itself rather than always pushing for “better.”

Many moons ago, my Ben Casnocha challenged me to write about the books that have had the greatest affect on me. Maybe it wasn’t so much of a challenge as a prod to blog. One that took some time to work.

The Grand Inquisitor, by Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the first to spring to mind.  It isn’t a actually book, but rather a longish story that one character tells another in The Brother’s Karamazov, published in 1880. You can read the whole thing online in twenty minutes.

Why did it have such an impact me, reading it there in that messy dorm room at the start of my sophomore year?

The Grand Inquisitor is basically telling Jesus off. That’s pretty bold for a character written in the nineteenth century, in a story set in the sixteenth, in a book written by a Christian. He says that Jesus messed everything up, and now he and the Church have fixed it.

As if that audacity wasn’t enough, the the Inquisitor’s logic is surprising hard to argue with.

His beef is that Jesus promised to make people both free and happy, and that’s just impossible. Freedom is a burden, it makes them unhappy. People want to believe that they are free, but to actually to have as little freedom as possible. Jesus came and actually increased freedom, which only served to increase the world’s misery.

The “solution” that the Inquisitor and his church have come up with, is for a few people to take on the burden of freedom, thus sparing the rest. In a bizarre twist, the Inquisitor and others in the church are cast as the selfless caring saints precisely because they lie to the masses. The truth, and true freedom, are burden which they carry sacrificially so that others don’t have to. So that the masses can be happy.

“And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.”

This was a different angle than what I’d been hearing in Sunday school.

There is much more to say about the story itself. But the reason it has endured in my thinking is how often its themes show up in life.

Consider this scene from The Matrix, where the top request of the traitor is to re-enter the matrix, forget reality, not to remember, and to live a lie.

(I also think of the Grand Inquistor in more mundane matters. For example, interface design. User’s think that they want tons of features with freedom over every little aspect. But what actually makes them happy is an interface that hides most “freedoms”, leaving them the few choices that make the most sense.)

Given the choice between freedom and happiness, or the truth and happines, which would you choose? This drives to the recents trends in “happiness research.” The Inquistor’s agrument rests on the idea that happiness is the greater good. Is that so?

I’m working this weekend on a little project inspired by Fred Wilson’s Blog Scrobbler. The idea is to keep a published record of blog posts that you view.

Pretty simple. But it’s got me thinking about a much bigger idea, which is starting to come into focus.

You see, even a few years ago this weekend’s project would entail setting up a dedicated server to hold the data, creating a web interface to display it, managing a user login/registration system, creating an API for accessing it, and much more. That’s hard.

But I can do the project in a weekend because Twitter has done all the work for me: it will be the “data bucket”. I don’t have to set up any servers or write any user registration systems. I just have to collect my little bits of data and ship it off to twitter where it will be stored and published for others to consume.

There is something profound about this.

Already, twitter itself is primary a storage and distribution system, NOT a website. People interact with it via numerous clients and phones. The fact that there is a web interface to view and enter tweets is not the selling point.

I see the possibility for a service that provides huge, generic, user data storage. Users could use any applications they like for adding data (like I use tinytwitter on my blackberry) or for viewing data (like I use tweetdeck on my laptop). Except that “statuses” would be only one of many types of data that could be stored and published: photos, posts, friend lists, song scrobbles, blog scrobbles, current weight, morale, classified listings, emails, etc.

Your hard drive for the web.

There could then be an ecosystem of services like gnip that continuously crawl this data and republish it for consumption by other services. New breeds of services could emerge from mining this data, in the same way the Summize creating a new type of search application by mining twitter’s data.

More importantly, this would allow a user to keep their data (or at least the gold-standard version of their data) in one place. Presently, using any web service means that your data is stored only on *their* servers. This means that your data is spread across, e.g. gmail for email, twitter for tweets, flickr for photos, zoho for docs, etc.

A geeky way to look at it is to again consider the MVC (model, view, controller) paradigm: Twitter provides a model (storage) for tweets, a simple view (the web or incoming sms), and controllers (web form or outgoing-sms). But twitter allows you to use other views and controllers (e.g. tinytwitter or tweetdeck).

If we can separate the storage of our data from the viewing and editing of it, more cool projects like this weekend’s “Blog Scrobbler” –and whole new breeds of companies– would be possible.

At dinner the other night with New York entrepreneurs we realized that half of us came from technical backgrounds, and half not. One of the non-technical founders said something like, “I wish that I could get in there and help with the coding, but that’s one place where hard work isn’t enough. You really have to know how.”

My immediate response, echoed by the other technical founders, was “No, you don’t want to know how to code!” The problem is that if you know how, then you feel guilty for not doing it. In fact, the more competent you are, the easier it is to think that you can or should do it all. It’s the classic problem of founders not wanting to let go.

On the other hand, if you are a non-technical founder, you are forced from day one to rely on other people to build your product. You learn other skills like “how to assess someone’s competency” and “how to inspire others to work” and “how to lead.” These are skills that scale.

(In the parlance of The Black Swan, coding is in the same category of bakers, dentists, and prostitutes.)

Still, in the early stages of any company (and especially when there is no company, but just an idea) a non-technical founder can blow a lot of money paying other people to build prototypes that don’t work.

It broke my heart last year (in a purely business sense) when I talked to a business guy who had spent nearly $20,000 on outsourced programming to build something that really didn’t work.

In a perfect world, you need a founder of each type who trust each other, or a technical founder who knows when to let go.

When does one first get an identity online? Last Sunday I had brunch with my friend Fraser and we talked about how so many parents have blogs for their babies, sometimes written from the baby’s point of view. E.g. see Aren’s blog. I’ve also heard of people creating Facebook accounts for their toddlers. If I became a father, I’m sure I would do the same.

This raises an interesting decision: At what point do you hand over the password to your child? At what point can they be trusted to shape their online identity? Could this be the modern “coming of age” event, a sort of digital Bar Mitzvah?

Lately I and my family have been doing a lot of archiving. My Dad at last count had scanned 13,437 photos, letters, postcards, and mementos. Some of them go back to the 1890’s.

I need to write a full post about that project (and how there are no good tools for it, and my fears about Facebook and archiving…), but in the meantime here are some deliciously outrageous scans from two German 1973 mail-order catalogs. I found them years ago in the basement and have kept them as a little treasure to pull out when design/fashion-savvy guests are over.

The full set is viewable on Flickr.

All 49 scans available on Flickr…

The way we handle screens is all wrong.

Looking at all the “Black Friday” advertisements, I’m struck by how cheap bigscreen TV’s have become. Of course, this is a trend that has been going on for a long time. Just like Moore’s law predicts that computer speed will double every two years, I suspect there is a similar “law” at work for displays.

If the data were available, I would love to chart the dropping cost per pixel over the last 30 years. Bottom line: more and more of our visual world will be dynamically controlled.

At this point I usually go off thinking about laser retinal diplays, but we still have a few good years of playing with old-fashioned screens before then.

The problem right now is that we are unreasonably committed to the principle that one device has one screen, period.

- What happens when I’ve found a video on my phone that I want to show everyone on the bigscreen TV? (Answer: Try to find the same site and perform the same search on whatever computer is hooked up to the TV. Ugh.)

- What happens when I’m in a presentation and want to show everyone a chart that’s on my laptop? I’d like to quickly throw it up on the projector, but that entails unplugging cables and figuring out resolution/DVI/VGA issues. Not worth it for one image, so instead I hold the laptop above my head and hope everyone can see it. Lame.

- What happens when the person sitting next to me has a screenfull of information that I need a copy of? It’s ridiculously hard to get that information to move the 30 inches over to my machine. Email it? Send it via chat?

- What happens when I’m walking by one of those advertisement screens by NYC subways and I want more info about the product? Right now I have remember a web page and maybe look it up later. Why can’t I grab information right onto my phone?

What we *want* is to separate the concept of screens and devices. When sitting in your living room, there are several media sources (cable TV, game systems, phones, browsers, other applications) and there are several screens (on phones, on laptops, on TV’s, on refrigerators, etc). It should be a seamless gesture to move content from one display to another.

Talking with Ben Brightwell the other night, I realized that this is tantamount to a hardware implementation of the MVC paradigm. For you non-nerds, MVC stands for “model-view-controller”, and has come to be standard good practice for software. It means that you separate data (the model) from the display of that data (the view) from the manipulation of that data (the controller). If you build your software application this way, its no problem to have the same data showing up on (for example) a web page, an iphone app, a desktop application, or a refrigerator.

What we have now in hardware is similar to what used to happen in software: the model, view, and controller are all so tangled together that it is near impossible to change anything.

It’s not clear what the perfect solution will be. High speed wireless will help. Bluetooth will probably play a part. Maybe one day all screens will come with wireless connections and there will be smart protocol that lets them simply “announce” themselves to the rest of your network that they are available for display. There will need to be gestures standardized for moving windows (or whatever) from one screen to another.

I’m happy that the Oblong guys are re-thinking interfaces, including screens. It used to be one computer for one person, sitting in front of one little screen, dragging around one little mouse, running one little program. Those days are gone, and its time that the hardware caught up.

Most of the internet is about the now, and getting even now-er. Why wait for people to upload concert pictures the next day when they can send them straight from their phone to Facebook? This trend will certainly continue, but lately I’ve been thinking more about the flip side: the retrospective, the looking-back.

Most recently, Andrew Sullivan’s excellent article “Why I Blog“, (hat tip to Feld) hints at it when he says

On my blog, my readers and I experienced 9/11 together, in real time. I can look back and see not just how I responded to the event, but how I responded to it at 3:47 that afternoon. And at 9:46 that night.

I’ve noticed this with Twitter as well, where I can go back in time and see exactly what I was doing and feeling a year ago. I also encountered it when backing up old email archives from 10 years ago and finding powerful emails from friends mixed in amongst the business chatter.

What’s interesting is that this fine-grained retrospective power is a New Thing.

For the last 3 years my Dad has been scanning his old slides and photos. He has now done over 13,000 of them, including writing captions for most of them. (He’s blogging some of them at Vern’s Memories)

That’s pretty amazing, but it’s nothing compared to the abundance of data that my generation, and especially the younger “facebook generation” will have! The other night at dinner my friends and I were joking about how our decedents will be overwhelmed with minutia about our lives (e.g. Twittering “At dinner, talking with friends about decedents being overwhelmed with minutia. Pork rib was good.”)

The only point here, if there is a point, is that current web tools kinda suck at the retrospective. That’s to be expected, because retrospective is impossible at the beginning. But when today’s kids are 75 years old and looking back on their lives — and most of the traces of those lives resides in twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and whatever New Thing is around the corner — you can bet that there will be a need for some better retrospecting tools.

It’s been a while since I blogged. I miss the interaction, but also needed some time away to re-set.

Of course, I feel like I need something extra overly amazingly dramatic and insightful to kick off again. This approach is the writing equivalent of trying to win back the money you lost at the casino, placing ever more desperate bets for the big one that will put you back in the black. Never works.

Ben Casnocha asked in an email a few weeks ago about a name for this effect.

Is there a name for the effect that completing a task becomes harder as each day passes with it remaining un-done?

E.g. Most new bloggers stop blogging after a month. Each day that passes makes it harder and harder for them to pick up the habit again. Until ultimately they drop it altogether. Same with going to a gym.

I stopped blogging once before, back in 2005. And started up again around this time of year. Maybe the cooler weather inspires me to write more, after summer’s outdoor frolicking?

Jason Calacanis retired from blogging also, and I understand what he means by the pressure to be an A-list blogger. Not that I ever was one, but in the heady days of 2004-2007 there was a landrush exuberance–that you had to get in front and stay in front and never let your numbers drop.

I’m out of that race. But I miss the way that writing a post would focus my thoughts. It is always a transformative experience where I go in thinking I’m going to say one thing, and in the processes of putting thoughts it writing it all changes. That’s good.

And see? It’s happening already. I thought this would be a 2 line apology post, and you see how well that plan has turned out.