Unexpected Relocation: Moving To Atlanta

In Atlanta, GA, you can get a job where you give 18-year-old girls spankings for being too naked. I bet the job satisfaction there is off the charts.

Update: People from Atlanta keep telling me this happened in Alabama.

Advertizing Will Shrink And Grow Feathers

Is it such a bad thing that newspapers are dying? First, the world of newspapers could never have permitted the evolution of a market niche like John Gruber's or Nate Silver's; neither of these terrific, deeply specific journalists could have made a dime or seen a word in print in the pre-Internet era. Secondly, newspapers aren't really dying; this is the histrionic shriek of the privileged when forced to reckon with the requirements of a world that no longer spoils them. Did the dinosaurs ever really go extinct? Of course not. They shrank, they grew feathers, and they proliferated. Not only are the dinosaurs still alive, but many of them have learned to speak English.


via flickr

Newspapers are not dying. Newspapers are shrinking. They shrink because their form has not enough to do with their function; they derived their income from classified ads, and Craigslist destroyed their business. But Craigslist didn't destroy their business by being better at tying classified advertizing to journalism; Craigslist destroyed their business because there was no logical, necessary connection between classified ads and journalism in the first place. Classified ads went in the paper because everybody read the paper. Circumstances of social organization ("everybody reads the paper") created an artificial relationship, which was doomed to disintegrate.



Advertizing has the same problem.


from wondermark

In an alternate universe with no Internet, we still have Keyboard Cat. He just sells cereal for Kellogg. Irreverent, foolish, short-form video dominated American culture for decades before YouTube came along. Corporations subsidized it, due to circumstances of social organization ("everybody watches The Honeymooners") which no longer hold true. This shit will change.

If you want to know how, I'm doing some experiments, and you can get a rough, raw, comprehensive and honest overview of these experiments in my video Internet Marketing For Alpha Geeks.

Buy A Hippo Saying "Muppetfuckers"

I saw something on Twitter which surprised me, when I put my internet marketing video on sale: people who wanted to buy it to support the blog, but didn't want to spend that much. Despite all the talk on the internet about 1000 true fans, somehow this obvious possibility had never crossed my mind.

For those of you who want to show support for my blog, first of all, I want to give you my gratitude. Second, I want to sell you a hippo saying "muppetfuckers."

You can buy it on a coffee mug:



Or a clock:



Or a SIGG water bottle:



Or a t-shirt:



Or a dog:



(Dog sold separately.)

Or a tote bag:



Or a trucker hat:



Or a women's zip hoodie:



Or any of many, many other products. Some amount of the profit will go to various charitable organizations, art projects, and open source projects, as determined by my near-random whims. The rest will go to support my blogging habit and/or to redress my severe Lamborghini and helicopter deficiency.



Check out all the awesome and ridiculous products you can buy a picture of a hippo saying "muppetfuckers" on.

Web Replacing Older Media: Positive & Negative Effects

Neuroscience and fragmented attention on the Internet:

What kind of brain is the Web giving us? That question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise—and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.

Dan Pink and Clay Shirky:

Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.

Practice Video For Acting Class

Spoilers ahead...

All I'm actually doing in this video is using techniques from Stephen Book - a series of emotion arcs and a few emotion switches - but I was pretty happy with the effect. Emotion switches are self-explanatory; an emotion arc is a progression from a low-intensity version of an emotion to a high-intensity version. For instance, I did a happy arc in the rant about chaos, then switched to a low level of anger and ramped up an anger arc at the very end.

When I did the scene in class, it went well. One of the people watching told me I scared them. I liked that, because I'd set out to scare people. The switch from happy to angry, and just being happy about the ubiquity of chaos in the first place, makes it a threatening scene.

It kind of validates all that 37 Signals stuff about embracing constraints; I chose to arc happy during the rant on chaos not because of anything in the script, but because I had already decided to focus on emotion arcs, and happy was the only arc that was interesting and challenging from a technical point of view. It's easy to arc fear if you're discussing ever-present danger. There was some support for the happy arc in another technique from Stephen Book, a script analysis technique, but it was essentially all about the constraints I'd chosen and the technical challenge I found within those constraints.

How Programmers Approach Internet Marketing

from oglaf

Specific people inspired this post. You guys know who you are! I'm in there with you - I'm constantly writing blog posts to promote my acting career, writing blog posts to make myself a better programmer, and writing blog posts so I can get more exercise (I'm not even kidding). There are more immediate ways to accomplish every one of these goals.

I think the most thorough and permanent solution is to learn a foreign language. When you learn a foreign language, you also learn a foreign way of speaking - for instance, Japanese bakes its system of etiquette and status directly into the grammar and even the forms of words. That's weird for an American, but this is even weirder:

In many Japanese offices, you're required to scream "Good morning!" at the top of your lungs, clapping your hands to your thighs, as soon as you enter the office area every morning. Everyone in the office then shouts "Good morning!" back to you....

"Before we move onto the next item, does anyone have any questions?" I seriously and portentously asked a question, then, which I thought was hilarious: "If we're the first one in the office in the morning, do we still have to scream 'Good Morning' and clap our hands to the sides of our legs?" Her answer was immediate, and humorless: "Yes." "Well, I mean, there's no one else around to hear it, right?" "You still have to do it. It's the rule. Every employee must do this. That's why we call it 'protocol.'"...

When I first came to Japan, and learned that "irasshaimase" meant "come [into the store]!" I expressed a certain amount of confusion to the dude who was playing the part of my tour guide. We were in a Jeansmate — a Japanese jeans store that is inexplicably open twenty-four hours a day, even in towns where (as in ours) the only god damn supermarket closes at eight in the PM. I was looking at jeans, and an employee, standing nearby, was repeatedly yelling "Irrashaimase" at my roommate and I. "That's just how they do things." He must have yelled it maybe a hundred times. We were the only customers in the store. "Why is he telling us to come into the store if we're already in the store?" "Beats me, man," was my roommate's response.

If that's too much for you, resort to the old saying: "when in Rome, do as the Romans do."

A less dramatic example of different cultures communicating in different ways: I read somewhere that at Python conferences, there is no IRC channel. Having a laptop open and hacking during a presentation is considered rude and gets you shunned.

Internet marketing is a different way of thinking. If you learn it, you can make money with it. What you do with that money, and the time it frees up, is up to you. There's nothing to say that the king doesn't build labyrinths in his spare time. The labyrinth guy might only be in the throne room because the king just said to him, before the comic began, "dude, I'm going to build a labyrinth, it's going to be awesome, you can help, just hang out in the throne room for five minutes while I take care of some business first."

Assuming that you're a programmer who wants to do internet marketing, what you need to do is be your own inner king, and tell your inner labyrinth nut to hang out in the throne room of your mind for five minutes while you take care of some business first. If you can do that, you can avoid having some corporate and/or VC dillweed be your king. You're going to have a king either way. It's impossible to exist without a king. What you can do is choose between an external king or an internal king.

The Goat Testicle Millionaire

I haven't read this yet, but I'm posting about it right away, because a blog post title like that is a gift from the gods, and you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.





These two books delve into John Brinkley, who made $800MM selling goat testicles to Americans as a cure for impotence.

One day in the fall of 1917, a Kansas farmer named Bill Stittsworth, 46 years of age, showed up at the clinic that had recently been opened in the hamlet of Milford by a medical quack named John R. Brinkley. "His visit didn't seem like the Annunciation," Pope Brock writes in this hugely amusing if somewhat sobering book, "any more than he looked like the archangel Gabriel." Stittsworth reluctantly admitted that he was suffering the condition for which Viagra is now prescribed. As Brinkley tried to dream up a solution, the farmer looked wistfully out the window, "pondering the livestock," and said: "Too bad I don't have billy goat nuts."

Precisely what happened thereafter "is in dispute," but two nights later Stittsworth returned to the clinic, "climbed onto the operating table," and awaited Brinkley. "Masked, gowned, and rubber gloved, Brinkley entered with a small silver tray, carried in both hands, like the Host. On it were two goat testicles in a bed of cotton. He set the tray down, injected anesthetic," and Brinkley was on his way. Two weeks later Stittsworth "reappeared with a smile on his face." As he told other farmers about his good fortune, men -- and then women -- began to queue up for injections of billy goat magic, with the result that Brinkley soon "became a pioneer in gland transplants" at exactly the moment when America was ready for them.

No More Daily MP3s; Weekly Instead

I've been doing daily mp3s at @djgoatboy on Twitter for about a year and a half now. It's worked well, but I'm changing it up. I'm going to continue making music every day, but only upload it once a week. This will allow me to either post the best mp3 of the week, or post an mp3 I've been working on all week. The continuous effort factor stays the same, but the standard of quality rises.

More info in today's mp3

DrumChuk

DrumChuk is a customizable Ruby-based MIDI Drum Controller for the Wii Remote and Nunchuk.

Arc90 Readability For The iPad

It's easy (although convoluted) to install bookmarklets on an iPhone or an iPad; all you do is create a new bookmark, edit it, and then paste the JavaScript for the bookmarklet into the bookmark's URL field.

However, you need the source for the bookmarklet to do this in the first place; Arc90's Readability page doesn't give that source. I'm assuming that's an oversight. Here's the code:

javascript: (function () {
    readStyle = 'style-newspaper';
    readSize = 'size-medium';
    readMargin = 'margin-wide';
    _readability_script = document.createElement('SCRIPT');
    _readability_script.type = 'text/javascript';
    _readability_script.src = 'http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability.js?x=' + (Math.random());
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_script);
    _readability_css = document.createElement('LINK');
    _readability_css.rel = 'stylesheet';
    _readability_css.href = 'http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css';
    _readability_css.type = 'text/css';
    _readability_css.media = 'all';
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_css);
    _readability_print_css = document.createElement('LINK');
    _readability_print_css.rel = 'stylesheet';
    _readability_print_css.href = 'http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css';
    _readability_print_css.media = 'print';
    _readability_print_css.type = 'text/css';
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_print_css);
})();

Bookmark this page, name the bookmark "Readability", then edit the bookmark, and copy-paste this code into the URL field. Boom - it just works.

Drive, As Real-Time Comic

(via Eugenia Harris, via Kent Beck)

Python Time-Stretcher

The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. It has quite a magical effect.

Money for Nothing (permutated by the Swinger in Python) by TeeJay

Connected to what looks to be an amazing project called Echo Nest Remix:

The Echo Nest Remix API is the Internet Synthesizer that lets you make things with music and video.

We've done the following: rearranged the syllables of a vocal line, walkenized and cowbellized hundreds of thousands of songs in a week, mixed up the hits of a drum beat and synced it to another loop, beat matched two songs, split apart DJ mixes by their individual tracks, made new kinds of video mashups, corrected sloppy drumming, synced a video to a song, transitioned between two covers of the same song, made a cat play piano, put a donk on it.

We're making this available as an open source SDK for Python (other languages forthcoming!) that can be easily installed for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

According to this tutorial, Echo Nest Remix is like Ableton Live via REST:

Remix is a sophisticated tool to allow you to quickly, expressively, and intuitively chop up existing audio content and create new content based on the old. It allows you to reach inside the music, and let the music’s own musical qualities be your — or your computer’s — guide in finding something new in the old. By using Remix’s knowledge of a given song’s structure, you can render the familiar strange, or the strange slightly more familiar-sounding. You can create countless parameterized variations of a given song — or one of near-limitless length — that respect or desecrate the original, or land on any of countless steps in between.

Japanese Robot Butterfly

College Is Bullshit. I Am The Future.

Seth Godin wrote some interesting things about higher education, but his blog post starts out with a questionable assertion:

For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.

Wait, what? Never mind the idea that college basketball represents an increase in prestige from fucking Galileo. Leave that aside for now. What was that stuff about Galileo being offered a guest spot at Harvard? Galileo was hounded to the death by the Catholic Church for heresy. Why would he have not bailed for a deal like that?


Wow, this Inquisition is fun! I'm so glad I stayed in Italy.

Time to get my Google on.

I found this on snopes.com:

This is chronologically possible since Harvard College was founded in 1636 and Galileo died in 1642, but I'd say it's unlikely because:

a) Galileo spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest in Florence.

b) The early Harvard College's emphasis was on producing "literate [Protestant] ministers," so they probably had no interest in bringing someone like Galileo on board.

c) At its founding in 1636, Harvard College had "nine students with a single master," so they probably weren't looking to spend money on recruiting foreign professors from abroad.

...

Why would he even want to go there? 17th Century Boston was a backwater colony. It would be like Steven Hawking leaving Cambridge to accept a seat at a one-room schoolhouse on the African Savannah.

Looks like a professional writer with no qualms about plagiarism found it too, and put it in a newspaper article for the Guardian in the UK:

I was once told that when he was having a spot of bother with the church, Galileo received an offer from Harvard. Harvard was founded in 1636, Galileo died in 1642, so it is just barely possible. Still, it is rather like hearing that the University of Notre Dame came in for Adam and Eve when they were denied tenure in the Garden of Eden.

That's the most reputable source I've been able to find that says anything about it at all, so I'm going to guess Seth didn't use his bullshit detector on that one. But the argument with which he follows up on his unforunate introduction holds together much better:

Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is? While there are outliers (like St. Johns, Deep Springs or Full Sail) most schools aren't really outliers. They are mass marketers.

Side note: I went to St. John's for a year. Loved it. Godin continues:

Why do colleges send millions (!) of undifferentiated pieces of junk mail to high school students now? We will waive the admission fee! We have a one page application! Apply! This is some of the most amateur and bland direct mail I've ever seen. Why do it?

Biggest reason: So the schools can reject more applicants. The more applicants they reject, the higher they rank in US News and other rankings. And thus the rush to game the rankings continues, which is a sign that the marketers in question (the colleges) are getting desperate for more than their fair share...



Back before the digital revolution, access to information was an issue. The size of the library mattered. One reason to go to college was to get access. Today, that access is worth a lot less. The valuable things people take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people. The question I'd ask: is the money that mass-marketing colleges are spending on marketing themselves and scaling themselves well spent? Are they organizing for changing lives or for ranking high?

Godin's argument here holds solid as a rock. But the title of his blog post - The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer) - promises an apocalypse and delivers only a numbers racket. I would love to deliver the promised apocalypse, like a mid-May Santa Claus with a bag full of Mad Max for all the good boys and Tank Girls, but I'm going to stick to what I can prove.



Godin leaps from "I have discovered a numbers racket" to "this house of cards must fall" without any stated reason. I'm going to assume, for the sake of argument, that his reasons are a presumptive confidence in the triumph of goodness and light, and a faith that ugly stupidity always collapses because it's evil. I'm also going to assume, for the sake of argument, that a twelve-year-old could spot the hole in that theory.



I had to write a script recently for an acting class. I wrote it on my iPad and sent it to myself via e-mail so I could print it at Kinko's, but the Microsoft Windows machines at Kinko's couldn't even display the PDF properly. In order to print my script with the correct fonts, I had to experience the latest version of Word.

If you've not used this latest version, but you've used previous versions and you're confident Word could not have gotten worse, I'm going to have to shatter that confidence. You would be amazed. If Michael Richards, after the insane, racist rant that killed his post-Seinfeld standup career, had toured the entire planet in blackface instead of slinking off into obscurity, that would be kind of similar to the latest version of Microsoft Word. Back in the 90s, what I had thought was the worst software I'd ever see in my life was, for Microsoft, just the beginning, and nothing to regret or learn from, let alone atone for; only something to expand upon.

Progress is a myth, and the reality is monsters like Bill Gates, and the hideous code-beasts he's polluted our lives with. Evil does not always collapse under its own weight. Sometimes it just mints money like there's no tomorrow. Sometimes it lasts forever.

Here's something from a previous rant:

When the Roman Empire fell, its gigantic nervous system stayed intact and transformed into a religious organization. The aristocracy who controlled the Empire, and enjoyed a powerful transnational network for amassing and transferring wealth, dropped their military and their government but kept [their powerful transnational network for] amassing and transferring wealth. They got so good at rhetoric that they threw away their swords.

I'm not saying the Catholic Church is evil - but there's no doubt that between the pedophiles today, the Inquisition which destroyed Galileo, and guys like Il Papa Terrible, the Warrior Pope - I'm not making this up - the Catholic Church has certainly harbored evil from time to time throughout its long and varied history.


And if you can't tell this guy's a fucking vampire who's about to feast on human children, you'd never survive even the first fifteen minutes of a horror movie.

But that's not the point. The point is that the Catholic Church owns an unholy fuckton of real estate, and therefore represents the longest-lived real estate empire in human history. This real estate empire began as part of the Roman Empire, outlasted that empire's alleged death, and (in its headquarters) still speaks that allegedly dead empire's allegedly dead language. And although the Catholic Church has done great good in the world, building orphanages and schools, etc., it has also been a terrible instrument of evil. The myth of progress gives us no explanation for the near immortality of this real estate empire, and the idea that evil automatically collapses on itself the moment it's shown to be bad does not explain the Warrior Pope or the Pope we have today, who very long ago was a member of the Hitler Youth, and very recently exonerated a Holocaust denier.

And even if the idea that evil collapses in on itself did somehow account for the Catholic Church, it sure as hell can't explain Bill Gates. Logically, if evil collapses in on itself, then Redmond should have turned into a black hole decades ago.


Redmond, WA: Theory


Redmond, WA: Practice

The myth of progress deludes most programmers and tech marketers. Why do people say "Flash is dead" the minute they find out that some mobile devices don't support it? Why did people expect Linux to kill mainframes, when in fact it was Linux that revived the mainframe market? There's that idea that every new thing kills all the previous things. It's false. It's a myth.

It's even there in the title of my blog post: "College is bullshit. I am the future." What I meant to say, before I got off on this tangent, was that selling information products, like I do, is a better educational model than four-year colleges. But think about my phrasing - is future the opposite of bullshit? A better title, with no myth-of-progress taint, might have been "College Is Bullshit. There Is No Future." But it's not really that there is no future; it's just that there is no the future.

The myth of progress suckers would-be innovators into giving up. For instance, if you listen to this idiot from Forrester Research, Steve Jobs has not created a brilliant product; instead he has discovered the future. And in so doing, he has not created a new market, demonstrating that all you need to do to create a new market is build something so awesome everybody wants it; he has found the way, discovered the future, and in so doing rendered every other future that could have been "discovered" not only moot but also provably false.

It's thanks to idiots like this Forrester Research muppet that we are getting lifeless, soulless me-too products from companies like Google, which could be (and has in the past been) an engine of terrific innovation.

Rant over. Let's get back to Seth Godin and his criticism of conventional American universities. Godin identified some serious bullshit afoot; however, to be fair, serious bullshit in academia is nothing new. I once visited a friend at Yale; she showed me cargo cult architecture. Yale's architects set this extraordinary high water mark for insecurity by copying distinctive features of prestigious British universities like Cambridge and Oxford - including "features" like lead reinforcement of broken windows, applied to windows that were broken specifically in order to be "repaired" this way, and pedestals with no statues on them, because British universities had traditions of students stealing statues from pedestals as pranks. They also splashed their buildings' walls with acid in order to give them a false patina of age, in a move so dementedly retro it makes Ayn Rand's caricatures of history-worshipping architects in The Fountainhead look naturalistic.

Hah, did I say rant over? I have not yet even begun to rant. And by the way, speaking of Ayn Rand, yes, she was a lunatic on amphetamines, but that lady could rant. There's a fantastic but very obscure anime about her called Logical Demon Yenta High School. It's amazing. Giant oni invade a steampunk St. Petersburg; 16-yr-old Ayn Rand rants at them until their heads explode. You won't find it on Hulu, but believe me, it's something to watch. It's kind of like Last Exile with tentacles and lots of ranting. Plus some incomprehensible romantic subplots.



Anyway, so, when I was 19ish, I went on a road trip and discovered Yale's insane architecture. It was on this road trip, where I also visited a friend at Harvard - or actually, I suppose, several - that I began to suspect "serious bullshit afoot" was par for the course in academia. The numbers bear me out. Researchers in Australia found "that higher levels of educational attainment are associated with lower self-rated happiness or life satisfaction."

And here's a graph from Godin's post:



It shows college tuition increasing much, much faster than cost of living. It also shows medical costs for some insane reason, but skip that for now. Let me call your attention to what it doesn't show. What's missing from the graph: the rise in wages, over the years, to match the rise in tuition costs. And it's not just missing from the graph; it's missing from the world. Wages have declined or stagnated since the late 1970s.

Of course, the Internet will save us all, with free, high-quality online courses.

Also of course, the Hacker News community responds to the discovery of these free, high-quality online courses in moronic ways:

Free online accredited college/school is an idea up for grabs and needs to happen.

Let's skip the part where somebody sees an idea executed and claims that it needs to happen, as if it hasn't already just happened right in front of their eyes. We can even skip the part where you can already find loads of excellent video from existing accredited universities on iTunes for free. This response fails on much deeper levels than that. Building online schools with college credentials is exactly the same moronic bullshit the Yale architects engaged in when they built "broken" windows "repaired" with lead because the great, prestigious universities in England had broken windows repaired with lead. College credentials patch over a problem the same way that lead patched up windows in the Middle Ages in Europe (and as recently as 1931, at Yale). Accredited schools exist because many people don't want knowledge, they just want a credential. That's why the astronomic rise in college tuition accompanies no rise at all in the wages a degree can bring you.

Wages have not risen since the 1970s for workers with college degrees. Wages have diminished since the 70s for workers without college degrees. However, in that same period of time, CEO pay has gone from 40 times worker pay to 500 times worker pay. What's happening here is class distinctions growing tremendously, and in a society where class distinctions matter a great deal, the perceived value of a college degree skyrockets, even as the economic advantage that it used to give you deteriorates into nothing. In a society where social class and family background can profoundly distort economic achievement, a mark of prestige like a college degree goes way up in price, because without it, you're just a member of the working class. (Oh noez!) Colleges are selling liferafts on a sinking ship, and that gives them a license to print money.

I'm going to skip the myriad idiotic "solutions" to this problem, because this problem could not be simpler: if the only type of pay that's risen at all in the last forty years is CEO pay, then the only sane career choice is CEO.

That's assuming for the sake of argument that your career goals center around rising income. It's a huge assumption. It doesn't hold true in my case; I want to make movies, make music, write, draw, act, and code way more than I want to make money. But it still kinda holds true. The people who make money as musicians today tend to be CEOs, whether it's informal co-CEOs like Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn from Pomplamoose - who would never call themsleves CEOs, because of the term's horrifying cultural baggage, but have in fact pioneered a new business model - or gigantor musician/CEOs like Jay-Z and 50 Cent. Cartoonists support themselves as the CEOs of tiny online comics like Questionable Content, xkcd, and Drow Tales. Even for artists, taking on the CEO role makes good career sense.


Jay-Z meeting Bill Gates

Because of this, I'm doing monthly micro-business launches. In November I launched an uninteresting experimental project. In December I launched a career coaching service. In January I re-launched it. In February I think I forgot to launch anything. In March I launched a business selling videos. In April I launched another video, using a different launch tactic, and this past week (in May) I quietly launched a new video using another different launch tactic, as an experiment to compare launch tactics. My experiment in launching mini-businesses monthly resulted more in a series of products than a series of businesses, but it's a year-long experiment, and it's not over yet.

By the way, although these businesses exist primarily for experimental purposes, they are already paying my rent. I work for myself today. If you want to know more about that, you can buy an excellent video about it from me for $197.

Buy Now

The video's an hour and a half long and includes a two-hour bonus video where I follow up by answering questions posed by the first 50 purchasers of the product (who got it for half price - remember, kids, the early bird gets the worm). Note that some of my answers to the questions are offensive and/or obnoxious. The video is called Internet Marketing For Alpha Geeks and represents a very haphazard but awesome overview of my research and experiences so far.

Buy Now

Of course if you buy it and you're not thrilled to bits, you can request a refund.

Anyhoo, this brought me back to information products, which completes the circle, so let's spend a moment to observe how information products may replace accredited colleges and universities.

First, let's consider why you might want to replace accredited colleges and universities in the first place. Researchers found a negative effect on quality of life (see link above). Colleges and universities operate on a one-time training model, but training should be perpetual and continuous. And higher education fails at teaching technical topics, because technology moves too quickly for academia to keep pace. As the great Alan Kay once said,

"Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture."

"Pop culture" fits. Information products are not prestigious. When I began marketing information products, this one dude who hates me for some reason (I think he works for Microsoft) posted satirical "pictures of me" on Hacker News and Twitter:



If you're wondering why the fuck this guy thinks I'm the Riddler, well, so was I. But don't riddle me that, because you're not looking at the Riddler. You're looking at some hokey salesman for some hokey information product or products. His name is Matt Kelso or something like that.

The funny part: hokey is a good sign. It means my business is onto something. In 2008 I wrote a blog post called How To Dodge Corporate Monkeys, where I explained how both Google and Ruby on Rails - huge successes which started small - targeted low-hanging fruit with superior technology. The canonical example of information products online is an ebook about the care and feeding of parrots. It works because the niche is underserved, but at Internet scale, when you can reach every member of that niche worldwide, it's a lot of people. Using the Internet to sell an ebook like that, to an underserved niche that conventional publishers can't target effectively, is a textbook case of targeting low-hanging fruit with superior technology.

The next step, in many successful technology businesses, is to scale up. For example, another example in the Corporate Monkeys blog post is Propellerhead Reason, which has four times the installed user base of its fancier competitors Logic and Ableton Live, and probably an even stronger advantage over their competitor Pro Tools, which is only for serious, professional musicians. At the time I wrote that post, Reason restricted itself to virtual studio music-making - if you wanted to use real instruments, you had to go to the big boys. Virtual studios were the low-hanging fruit. Since then, Propellerhead released a product targeting higher-hanging fruit like recording audio (and, therefore, real instruments). They released it to a huge user base.

Information products may replace colleges and universities because they start down at the bottom, and therefore can build from there to the top. Already, ebooks have graduated from PDFs to complex web sites full of video, with numerous subscription options and add-on software. After you target low-hanging fruit with superior technology, you look for ways to get the fruit that's just a little higher up without losing your technological edge.

As John Gruber says, discussing Apple's history of doing exactly that:

It’s a slow and steady process of continuous iterative improvement—so slow, in fact, that the process is easy to overlook if you’re observing it in real time.

Paul Graham echoes that with a comment about toys:

Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.

We can all see the Internet changing the way people do business right before our eyes. Futurists and science fiction writers have been telling us this would happen. The question is how much it will change, and how fast. Is it difficult to believe that the entire way we share information and conduct business will change on every level? Everybody who does entrepreneurial work in some way expects that to happen; the VC culture, especially in places like Google, expects that change to come from the best universities in the world. Google gives massive hiring preference to grads from schools like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Yale (hopefully not including the school of architecture, although that would explain Buzz).

Many of my friends and classmates from high school went on to the best universities in the world. I visited them at these universities and I was not impressed. I went to a great high school, and I'm very grateful that I got to study Latin and Ancient Greek when I was 16, but not everything about that school was great. The other night, I did some reading on the history of Facebook, and I had a flashback to some of the unethical, corrupt, rich-kid bullshit I saw in my high school days.

Not infrequently, [Mark Zuckerberg] acted like he was captain of a pirate ship. Among the few possessions he had brought to Silicon Valley with him were his fencing paraphernalia, which he left lying in a pile. Often he'd grab his foil and start swinging it through the air. "Okay, we've got to talk about this," he would declare, one hand held behind his back, lunging forward with this foil. Often the sword would get uncomfortably close to people's faces. "I'm the personality type where that would get me sometimes," says co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. "It was a pretty small room." Later Moskovitz and the others banned fencing from the house.

...

The house at 819 La Jennifer Way, with a resident population of seven guys, felt like a dorm. Some people -- female and male -- stopped by for days and just hung around. Stanford University was only a mile away, so the housemates would announce parties using a Facebook feature that enabled them to target specific schools. They were mobbed by Stanford students and townies. Hanging out by the pool was a major activity, and broken glass would simply be swept into the water. One housemate strung a wire from the top of the chimney to a spot on a telephone pole beyond the pool. With a pulley, he turned it into a zip line, so partiers could ride down the wire and drop into the pool with a massive splash. (When the owners finally returned in the fall, they were shocked. In a later court case, the owners described the house as "in total disarray and very dirty.")

...

One of the crew's edgiest pranks in those days was a presentation made to the blue-chip venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital, known in the Valley for a certain humorlessness. Sequoia éminence grise and consummate power player Michael Moritz had been on Plaxo's board. Sean Parker, one of Zuckerberg's first Silicon Valley advisers, had been been fired from Plaxo by its board, and he saw Moritz as having contributed to his downfall. "There was no way we were ever going to take money from Sequoia, given what they'd done to me," says Parker. The firm wanted to invest in Facebook, so as a joke the boys offered to pitch the partners a Zuckerberg side project called Wirehog, a peer-to-peer file-sharing program.

Zuckerberg and another partner showed up deliberately late for an 8 a.m. meeting, in their pajamas. They didn't even make a pitch for Wirehog. Zuckerberg showed a PowerPoint presentation David Letterman-style: "The Top Ten Reasons You Should Not Invest in Wirehog." It started out almost seriously. "The number 10 reason not to invest in Wirehog: we have no revenue." Number 9: "We will probably get sued by the music industry." By the final few points it was unashamedly rude. Number 3: "We showed up at your office late in our pajamas." Number 2: "Because Sean Parker is involved." And the number one reason Sequoia should not invest in Wirehog: "We're only here because [a Sequoia partner] told us to come." The partners seemed to listen respectfully, recalls Zuckerberg, who says he now regrets the incident. "I assume we really offended them and now I feel really bad about that."

Facebook's final fling of sophomoric adventures came in late 2006, when the company was starting to get billion-dollar takeover offers from major corporations. For its holiday party that December, the entire company, now about 150 people, took buses to the Great America Theme Park in nearby Santa Clara. From the minute people got on the buses they started drinking. By the time they arrived at the park many were already drunk. Facebook's employees celebrated a successful year on the park's thrill rides that spun, dropped, twisted and inverted them. On the way home an employee threw up in an air vent of one of the buses. The company had to pay several thousand dollars to repair the damage.

The VC vision says these kids are the brightest hope the world has. They are our shining future. Do they really sound like the brightest people on the planet? A lot of who gets into Harvard comes down to whose parents have a lot of money. There's work to it, there's talent, but there's also a great big funnel that feeds spoiled rich kids from expensive school to expensive school.


This idiot graduated from Yale.

College marketing and Western traditions might tell us that this funnel will bring us the glorious high-tech future, but if you actually look at the history of successful technology projects, the overwhelming theme is targeting low-hanging fruit with superior technology. That's how a scrappy little mammal takes out a lumbering dinosaur.

Rule number one in information products: target a niche. Low-hanging fruit defines this entire industry, and the marketing and sales systems completely outstrip what I've seen as a programmer, in terms of sophistication and effectiveness. Information product marketers like me are already nabbing that low-hanging fruit and using superior technology to do it. It's way too early to say for sure, but from where I'm standing, I'd say the mammals are the ones publishing ebooks, and the dinosaurs are the ones who bring their European fencing swords with them when they move from Harvard University to Palo Alto. I did fencing at St. John's, and I loved it, but it's not exactly futuristic. I mean it could be, if there were lightsabers involved, but there aren't.

By the way, I wanted to thank my sponsor for sponsoring this blog post. My sponsor is a video called Internet Marketing For Alpha Geeks. You may remember it from above. It's awesome, and it's only $197.

Buy Now

I made it, and it paid me to write this. Thanks, Internet Marketing For Alpha Geeks!

Update: some caveats.

Vim in IRB on Vimcasts

The new Vimcasts features my vim in irb hack; not only that, it also clues me into an improved version created last year and the fact that Charles Nutter got it working in JRuby, after I had filed a ticket, seen the ticket marked unfixable, and given up completely! Very glad to see that.

New Age Advice From A Tea Party Republican

I don't know if Dan Kennedy is a true Tea Party Republican, but he's damn close. He praises Rush Limbaugh and calls Obama a socialist without a shred of irony. I think his politics are crazy, but I respect him as a businessman, a writer, and a marketer - and I got some advice from him that sounds more like something you'd see in The Secret.



The advice was in one of Kennedy's books. I can't remember which one, because I've read all of them, but if I have to guess, I'll say it's No BS Wealth Attraction For Entrepreneurs. I soon saw it repeated in a few other places, including Yanik Silver's blog. I have absolutely no proof that it works, it's like entrepreneur astrology, but so far, so good - the anecdotal evidence that it works came from millionaries and since putting this advice in action, I've gone from working for The Man to working from home in my pajamas, and many days not working at all.

Want the advice?

I'll give you a hint.


from penny arcade

The advice is to give stuff away. First, look around your home, find some clutter you don't need, and take it to Goodwill. I do this every week.

Second, open a separate checking account for charitable donations - anything, including political causes, art projects, open source experiments, traditional charities, and homeless people on the street begging for change. (Give one of these guys a $20 some time, or buy them a huge meal at Taco Bell or whatever. Nothing else you can buy for the same money will have the same effect on your day.)

Keep this separate checking account stocked with some small percentage of your income and give it away on a regular basis. Then get on with whatever else you're doing to make money. Give it some time; it works.

Quick Note: Community Sites & Advice

I've ranted in great length before about the disadvantages of crowdsourcing your bullshit filter; this is just a footnote to that. In this thread from Hacker News, a programmer asks for advice on how to pay the rent without writing code, so he doesn't have to write code for other people, only for his own projects. I've achieved exactly that, but leave that aside for now. Take a look at the answers.

They are, as always in sites that follow this terrible model, sorted by upvotes, which is to say, sorted by explicit voting to determine popularity. There is no filter on the voting which requires that a voter test the advice before voting for or against it. There is likewise no filter on the contributing which requires that a contributor base their advice on experience of any kind.

The community-upvoting model of news sites encourages groupthink, and the effect on advice is especially bad. If you're looking for an answer to an unconventional challenge, you want your responses sorted not by community popularity, but by likelihood of success and appropriateness to your situation.

Rails Tutorial: Terrifying Aquatic Beasts

Recently I blogged about an Animal Planet feature which dares to voice the burning question which keeps us all awake at night, namely, "who would win in a fight, a hippo or a shark?" You may already know my answer - the hippo - and Animal Planet reached the same conclusion. Now hippos and sharks appear in the pages of a Rails tutorial. Coincidence? I think not. (Mainly because the guy who wrote the tutorial told me it wasn't.)

Facebook: Danah Boyd Nails It

I'm not usually a fan, but this rant about Facebook is dead-on:

The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent.

By the way, in my acting classes, I meet tons of non-techies (duh), and many of them find Facebook's access to their data creepy or even terrifying.

Law Professors Up, VCs Down

My latest reason for staying off Twitter: demented conspiracy theories about the Diaspora guys being up to various tricks, being doomed to fail for unspecified reasons, and courting VCs on the sly. Meanwhile, in reality, they're spending their time talking to groups gathered by free software lawyer Eben Moglen.



Sometimes the best explanation is the one which makes the most sense.

Internet Marketing For Alpha Geeks: Re-Release, With Bonus Video

Update: this product is going off the market. Stay tuned for something bigger and badder!



I'm re-releasing my video Internet Marketing For Alpha Geeks. It costs $197; in addition to the original, hour-and-a-half long video, you also receive a two-hour bonus video. The bonus video includes a few minutes of recap, telling the story of marketing and selling Internet Marketing For Alpha Geeks itself, but I spend the majority of the two-hour video answering questions from the customers who bought during the first run.

Three and a half hours of how I do internet marketing and what I've learned about it so far.

Buy Now

By the way, if you don't like the video, I have a simple refund policy: No questions asked. Any reason works. I will literally give you a refund because you stubbed your toe or your cat farted. I do not care; if a customer asks for a refund, the customer gets the refund (with the caveat that it may not be instant, depending on my schedule). Your trust is worth way more to me than $197.

New Video Sneak Peek

Coming soon...

Venture Capital Obsolete: More Anecdotal Evidence

Diaspora, a Kickstarter-funded startup centered on purpose rather than profit - its purpose being to replace Facebook with a free, open, distributed, and open-source solution which does not threaten democracy or privacy - got more than double its required pledges of funding with more than 20 days to go before its funding drive ends.

Burn, Palo Alto, burn!



Please donate to the project; Facebook is evil and deserves to die. We can kill it, and dance around the fire as we burn its corpse.

New Videos Coming

Tomorrow I'm hoping to release two videos - one new, the other a re-release. The re-release is Internet Marketing For Alpha Geeks; the new video is about resumés and shows you to create a great one. It may also include a worksheet guiding you through the process.

I may only keep the videos on sale for a brief time period; it appears to boost sales. It also has another useful benefit: I may be able to use it, for example, in the case of the resumés video, to sell individual consulting and resumé re-writing services. Not the most fascinating work in the world, but I can do it, I can do it well, it's good karma, and it'll tell me how I can make the video better, should I choose to re-release it later on.

I also noticed something interesting when I released my last video, which was that some people wanted to buy it just because they were fans of my blog and wanted to support what I was doing. That's awesome! I decided to create something for that, which is almost ready, and which I hope to blog here soon.

Robot Gamelan Orchestra @ CalArts

The Karmetik Machine Orchestra:



Appearing next Thursday at the Disney Modular Theater in Valencia.

Videos: Internet Marketing Returns, Plus Maybe Something More

Internet Marketing For Alpha Geeks should go on sale again soon, possibly again for a limited time only - I haven't decided - and there may also be another new product soon. Also, I think I'm going to raise the price on my programming careers video, so if you want that, the smart move is to buy it now.

Linux Touchscreen Guitar

by Misa Digital

Job-Hopping

Paul Dix dignified some venture capital horseshit with a response; another response showed up on Hacker News(paper), and that response seemed to indicate the infamous muppetfucker Jason Calacanis had chimed in. I think of Calacanis as a canary in the coal mine of bullshit; if he enters a discussion, it's a bad sign. If a discussion mentions him, it's a bad sign. However, I'm going to get into this topic despite my misgivings.

The original source of VC BS in this instance, one Mark Suster, defined a job-hopper as somebody who's had "5 jobs of 2 years or less each." I've worked for more than 30 different companies, not counting my freelance production artist work in Chicago before I discovered programming. Suster reminds me of those crazy fundamentalist preachers in the desert -istan countries who call women sluts because they wear clothes that make their ankles visible. By his standards, I'm the Whore of Babylon.

Before I go into why I think Suster's argument is worthless, let me pause to give it some fair consideration. First of all, his argument is mostly a tautology: you shouldn't hire job-hoppers, because they might job-hop. It's hard to argue with a tautology.

It is soul-destroying to have to train “yet another head of QA.” It is bad on team morale when good people quit. The people who stay are often with you. But sometimes it weakens their own resolve. Especially when this job-hopper has them out for drinks to talk about his cool new gig where the grass is currently greener.

Obviously, the thing that makes it hard to argue with tautologies is that they're true. I've job-hopped like crazy, and let me tell you, if a job sucked, yes, I would quit. I once went through this ridiculous telephone interview for a job at a science lab in New Mexico. After 45 minutes of an absolutely grueling alpha geek beatdown, they asked me about my job-hopping. They asked me what was to stop me from going back to California. I told them nothing, and that I was headed to California next month to go camping; although I didn't actually say it, I think they could also tell that I wasn't that interested in the job, and that I had only stuck through the alpha geek beatdown because it was more interesting than watching TV. I didn't get the job.

This brings me to probably the only useful thing I can say about job-hopping: if you're job-hopping, you are over-qualified. One of the things that annoyed me about writing code for large corporations was the cliché of seeing a badly designed web site and hearing that it was "designed by a developer." It annoyed me because I'd worked in graphic design and never found it hard. So I'd be having people tell me, oooooh, you have to get it to the designer to get it done right, and I'd be all, whatever, I'll just hammer it out, the designer's way too busy and he went to lunch 10 minutes ago anyway. And I'd get these looks of shock and awe, like, ZOMG YOU CAN USE PHOTOSHOP?!?!1


yes, I can use Photoshop, but I prefer gouache

Sorry, tangent. Point is, a job-hopper is like Larry King. Larry King's about to have his 8th divorce. He has all these women asking him to marry them, he marries them, it doesn't work out, he moves on to the next one. I don't know Larry King and I wish him the best, but to me, it sure looks like every time he gets married, he's settling. If that wasn't the way it was, he would have fought to keep at least one of those marriages intact. And that's kinda what's going on if you're a job-hopper. It means the companies want you bad, but you could care less about the companies. I hate to side with the VCs here, but if they want you more than you want them, maybe it means you need to aim higher.

Of course I can't fully side with the VCs, and nobody who knows this blog would expect me to. Here's Paul Dix, attacking Suster's assertion that you can't trust a job-hopper, because with a job-hopper, "you're in it for yourself more than the company."

"You're in it for yourself more than the company"?! That's exactly what I expect of everyone I work with. They have families to feed, student loans to pay, rent to pay, and they have to be worried about whether their continued employment at the company will benefit their overall career. Everyone is in it for themselves. That's capitalism.

Somebody who calls himself Angry Asian made a similar response:

There is nothing wrong with putting your monetary future first. I find it very unsettling for people with millions in the bank to tell others not to go out and find the best deal.

What's going on here is a double standard combined with bad listening. To be fair to Suster, he never said it was a bad idea to be a job-hopper. He just said he wouldn't hire one. What he's saying is that you want to hire people who value loyalty to the company over their own practical interests.

For perspective, here's a passage on being loyal to companies, from How To Get Rich, by Felix Dennis, whose estimated net worth exceeds a billion dollars:

Team spirit is for losers, financially speaking. It's the glue that binds the losers together. It's the methodology employers use to shackle useful employees to their desks without having to pay them too much. While lives may depend on it in a few professions, like soldiering or firefighting, in commerce it acts as a subtle handicap and a brake to ambitious individuals. Which, in a way, is what it's designed to do.

Dennis goes on to praise an employee who bailed on him - Neil Tennant, who left a terrific job working for Dennis to start a pop group called The Pet Shop Boys, which made him a rich and famous international star.



I bring up the praise element because Dennis does not share Suster's attitude that you should hire people who place your interests ahead of theirs. He says so elsewhere in his book.

Outsiders are sometimes surprised at my reaction when people decide to leave one of my own companies and set up on their own. I always wish them well. Not only outwardly, but in my heart, too. Often I throw a party for them. Or write glowing testimonials. Once or twice I have even underwritten their office lease or introduced them to a banker of lawyer I trust.

Actually, I couldn't find it - sorry, but I don't have all day - but he says, in the vicinity of this passage, that the people who bail to start their own companies are the best employees and the ones you should look for.

This is why I think Suster's argument is worthless: the double standard he recommends using against your people is not one that Felix Dennis endorses. When two people disagree about business, and one of them is a millionaire, but the other is a billionaire, the mere millionaire should shut the fuck up and listen. I think there are a lot of other reasons to disregard Suster's opinion - it's unethical, it's slimy, it represents a terrible attitude towards other human beings, and Jason Calacanis agrees with it - but here he is, a venture capitalist, and the bootstrap billionaire doesn't even agree with him. There's no point attacking him on any other point, when he fails on his own ground.

Update:

Hacker News(paper) Was Essential This Morning

Often useless, today it was, for a brief shining moment, vital.

Excellent perspective on Facebook.

Making Millions With Open Source Hardware:



Donate To Gigantic Burning Man Fire-Spewing Collaborative Musical Instrument:



I donated $250. Donate here!

Also, if you're bored, here's a goth song about random objects in or near my home.

Free iPad Sleeve

I bought it for the little plastic stand, but now better stands are on the market, and the sleeve itself, I don't use. Simple black neoprene sleeve, continental US only (unless you want to Paypal me a few bucks for shipping). First come, first served, only one available, void where prohibited by law or hippo.

Update: taken!

RIP Lynn Redgrave

She was my distant, distant cousin. I admired her work and would have loved to have met her.

Apple Antitrust?

This could be excellent news. I've defended 3.3.1 in the past, but mainly because I think geeks talking about "voting with their wallets" is disgusting, outmoded Reagan-era bullshit. You vote with your vote.

Considering A San Francisco Visit

I might be up in the Bay Area mid-May-ish. I'm very much only ramen-profitable at the moment, so I'm in search of a sofa to crash on. (Actually, the same is true to a lesser extent for New York; if there's a sofa to crash on, I might be able to go to GoRuCo.) I'm allergic to cats. In San Francisco there's a very old-school DJ I want to hear. Need more info, just e-mail - I'm not using Twitter at the moment.

Update: got sofas in both places (thank you peeps!) but may not go. The conf I wanted to go to in New York, GoRuCo, is sold out; SF is more likely but I may not have time.

HIPPO VS. SHARK

Taking the postmodern evolution of niche entertainment to an extreme, somebody out there is making television just for me.