Clay Shirky’s essays are usually something that ends up in my inbox and I skip over, usually because they’re too long to rip through and move on to other things.

Today I tried to make good on my promise to myself to not put things off and read it right away. Dealing with it right away takes less time than passing it over all the time, but it makes it difficult to focus on the highest priority items.

(Regrettably I wasn’t able to follow through on my promise of actually finishing this and posting it, hence why it’s appearing more than a week after Clay’s essay.)

A number of points he made in his latest essay, “Situated Software” rang clear with me.

First, I wholeheartedly agree that when people build products for themselves or their friends, the result is often way better than a traditional reauirements-gathering, design and planning cycle. It’s like hyper-accelerated Extreme Programming. You are the beta users.

Sidenote: I worked with Clay a long time ago when his design firm worked on the never launches redesign of CRAYON. More on that in a future blog.

I’ve experienced this with some projects I’ve done at work.

The problem is that people who have this product instinct are rare. Steve Jobs is probably one well-known one. People who have good product instinct AND can actually create it are even harder to find. Hiring is hard enough. Where do you find those people?

While I may claim to know how to make a good tool for say, Geocaching, because I spend a lot of time doing it, ask me to design an accounting tool and I’ll probably get it all wrong.

There are some areas where I just don’t know if there are people that could wholly conceive and design it. The space shuttle is one that comes to mind, but I’m sure there are other examples on a smaller scale.

At work we fight this every time there’s a build or buy decision. Sure, we can write some software to do most of what we want, but might it be cheaper to use some thing already out there, free or not. But it might be more trouble than it’s worth and not meet our customized needs. Instead, the generalized nature of any repurposeable tool might make it obtuse, such as forcing you to wade through features you don’t use.

The ‘feature’ of small scale often enables something to succeed.

One last point I wanted to nod at was the coming of age of MySQL as the “apache of databases”. We use it at work. It’s certainly not perfect and some of the bugs are pretty bad, but the cost (free) has enabled us to build systems faster than before that anyone can understand. It has allowed relational databases to spread virually through a company that has been tradionally adverse to databases. This is even more suprising when many in the company including executives are refugees of Oracle.

I guess now I’ve have less excuses to put off reading Clay since he was so on target this time.

Here’s a first – I’m blogging from the beach. Point Reyes to be exact.

Anne’s been wanting to do a backpacking trip here for a long time, so she made reservations a few months ago.

On the way in, we realized that we had never actually gone backpacking with just the two of us. We’ve gone on many hikes and car camped of course. And we’ve gone backpacking together with friends before, but never just us. So I guess this is first though it seems like the bazillionth time.

The route we took in was the same that I took with a friend in 1995 when I was doing an internship in Mountain View. We went out to Arch Rock, then up the coast trail to Coast Camp where we are staying the night. Apparently we got a really good site. It’s at the very end so you don’t have anybody walking by and you can’t see into any of the other sites. Unfortunately that also means it’s a looong way to the bathroom.

On my last trip here we stayed at some roadside campsite nearby where this woman just feet away from us blabbered on all night and kept us awake.

There were only two geocaches on our 8-mile route in. I’m surprised there were even that many because this is a national park and the NPS has explicitly banned them. I guess they must have been placed before the ban. We’ll hit two more on our loop back tomorrow and maybe some more on our way home, but it seems unlikely that I’ll meet my goal of averaging 2 per day for this week since the two today were the only ones all week.

I have a new enemy in the plant kingdom: stinging nettles. This nasty little plant got me in a few places while searching for the first cache. It still stings a bit. Between them the poison oak, going anywhere off the paths is like walking through a minefield – except sometimes you don’t know you stepped on a mine until 48 hours later.

Once we unpacked we realized the first thing we forgot – a pot. I have a small one in my mess kit but it might make our dinner of couscous and green beans more challenging than planned.

It got quite chilly in the evening. It started to make sense why some people walking around here were dressed like Eskimos. This was when we found that we did not bring gloves. No problem, tomorrow’s socks work great as today’s mittens.

After dinner when it gets dark, we’ll head down to the beach to walk around and see if anyone was successful in setting up a fire in the sand. It should be cool out there. Stars are unlikely because it’s all fogged in which is typical for here.

Tomorrow we’re heading up the mountain to see how well our feet hold up on the second day. Thinking positively, we’ll have less water, propane and food to lug back.

Hopefully when I get home and do “the reveal” of my feet they’ll be free of toenail trauma from my boots and blister-free.

Yeah, that’ll be a first.

If you’re reading this and using a Mac with Safari as your browser, you’re obligated to install this.

Safari2Yahoo

Otherwise, you will make me sad. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

I had a very strange dream last night where Britney Spears was asking me about how she was doing on the Yahoo! Buzz Index. As typical in most dreams, I could not get to buzz.yahoo.com and the link from yahoo.com was removed. Very embarrassing. I did get a very cool GPS watch though. Not sure what I ate that caused these dreams.

Got the real Buzz Index mail today and I enjoyed this bit:

Top Condoleezza Mispellings: 1. Condoleeza, 2. Condaleeza, 3. Condolezza, 4. Condeleeza, 5. Condalisa, 6. Condelezza, 7. Condoleza, 8. Condelisa, 9. Condolisa, 10. Condalezza

The 120GB hard drive on my TiVo is full. Not that all of that is good stuff, but we’ve clearly been getting behind.

So last night we went to the oldest programs and saw that we haven’t watched “The Practice” in a couple months. We ended up watching 3 1-hour episodes back to back in 2 hours. Even better was that these were all part of a three part series. Not only were we able to skip the commercials, intro and credits, but also the “previously on The Practice” and “Next week on The Practice”. We spent neither time wondering how it was going to end next week nor trying to remember what happened last week.

I think that everyone expected that the show would jump the shark after half the cast left at the end of last season, but it’s still quite good. The writing is great and James Spader is awesome, so much so that you barely see the rest of the cast.

All hail TiVo!

See what happens when you try to cook fish sticks? You get shot.

After my previous bad fish stick experiences, I tried again last weekend. I burnt them to a crisp.

But wait! Last night I got some different fish sticks from costco (118 per bag!) and stuck them in the regular oven rather than the toaster and they came out ok! They were edible! So maybe you can cook fish sticks, but they will only work 1/4 of the time.

Well, if Jeremy can do it, so can I.

I’m hiring. That’s right, if you’re a nerdy type that doesn’t like to sleep and you’ve got mad programming or operations skillz, Yahoo! might be the right place to you.

Caveat: I’ll be your boss.
Mitigant: Reading my blog is encouraged but not required.

Software Engineer – Yahoo! News and Weather

Operations Engineer, Yahoo! News

I’m really getting tired of all these sites that insist on adding ‘ster’ to the end of their names. First there was Napster, then AIMster, then Feedster, and now Eurekster, a personalized search engine. I’m sure there are many more; those are just what I can think of off the top of my head.

Shawn Fanning at least had a reason for naming his app Napster – it was his nickname. Little did he know that he would invent a whole new suffix. If Yahoo was started today, would it be called Yahooster?

Someday all of these unoriginal names are going to look like all those tech companies ending in ‘tron’ do today – obsolete.

If you’re going to name your company, come up with a name that’s a little more original than taking a common word and slapping ‘ster’ at the end of it. That’s just lamester.

I finally got going with the MySQL server on the machine that hosts boulter.com.

One of the first things I did was import MT into the database, for two reasons: having all this stuff in db files is scary and mysql makes it a lot easiser to delete all the comment spam I’ve been getting lately. There’s gotta be a better way.

It would be great if MT had an approval process for comments, so I could just click to approve posts and the rest it would just ignore.

Maybe I should feel honored that spammers think my blog is popular enough to spam. 🙂

It arrived at my desk Friday, my 40GB iPod, disguised in a rather large box in which was a much smaller box with the actual shrinkwrapped box inside. Once all that was out of the way, I actually got to open the thing. The box has a sheath that comes off, then folds open with flaps on the inside. It’s a beatiful thing that belongs in a museum.

The hardest part was getting it to hooked upwith my Windows 2000 box at work.
Since I don’t have firewire or USB 2.0 on my work machine, I borrowed a USB adapter and plugged it in. Windows did its thing and identified it and installed some stuff, but it iTunes didn’t recognize it. Reboot. So I downloaded the latest version of the software from Apple and tried that. “You need Windows 2000 Service Pack 4.” Great. Download, install, wait, wait, find an opportunity to reboot as I headed into an interview with a candidate.

I then ran the iTunes updater software again and no go, so I uninstalled what windows had autoinstalled, and used the software to install it first. Finally it worked and it went about reformatting the drive on the iPod. I threw a few songs on there for fun even though I planned to just take my entire music collection at home and throw it on there that night. USB transfer was slow, but not as slow as I though it would be. Those flash-based players take forever to get songs on them. This one took about 10 seconds per song.

Once I got it working, I had some time to check it out. Some of my first impressions were:

– The dislay uses the Geneva font, the original Mac menu font. Interesting.
– The devices is smaller than I had imagined, but heavy for its size.
– The ear buds are supposed to be great, but I wasn’t very impressed with them. The sound didn’t seem all that rich and those in-ear types always end up hurting my ears after a few hours.
– The iPod is almost entirely a read-only device. You can put songs into ONE “On-The-Go” playlist, rate songs, and change settings, but that’s about it. It feels strange to have all my contacts and calendar on there but not being able to change any of them. Then again, my Treo serves that purpose just fine.
– The scroll wheel is very fast and makes it easy to rip through long lists of artists and songs.
– Going “forward” in the menus is intuitive enough – just hit the button in the middle of the scroll wheel. Going “back” is not. You have to hit the “MENU” button which is above and to the left. Why not just split the middle button in two and put arrows on them?
– Somehow I already had some scratches on the back. The shiny metal case picks up fingerprints and looks dirty really quickly. It sure looks cool when it’s clean though.
– You can’t view album covers from the MP3’s. They might not look great in grayscale, but Apple went to the trouble of making them really easy to add in iTunes, so why not put them on the iPod too? I’d love to browse music visually by album cover.
– The battery status is a little weird. I let it charge all night and when I pick it up in the morning it still displays the charge left from before I charged it. Then sometime later it figures it out and shows the full charge