A Tech Lover’s Luddian Emotions

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I have been conflicted for a long time with technology, and hype. Technology is wonderful in that it gives us productivity or efficiency, but what are do we trade for them? It isn’t always free, we still have to put in something, and maybe we don’t even see all the resources that are devoted to the process.

I have a tendency to feel Luddian about things, but it comes from knowledge not ignorance. Most things have merits, that, I can’t deny, but it also has somewhat hidden ramifications for it’s use. Cellphones. RSS. Search Engines. Social Networks. All have their positives, but simultaneously negatives.

We have reached a point of decentralization, so that we can do almost anything, anywhere; we’ve also managed to place a shackle upon ourselves, that is virtually always there, (or always virtually there.) We have created a world that we can’t walk away from, because it is so easy to connect and get drawn in. We can check the news, our portfolios, our relationships with family and friends, using the technology at our fingertips via text, photos, video, audio all on a device that can be kept in our pocket. At this point we have more knowledge that is more ubiquitous than at any other time, but with it we’ve become forgetful.

I’m stupid. I can’t give you a single friends phone number off the top of my head. My grammar and spelling is often atrocious, without spellcheck. I often have to check definitions because I only have half a clue of what a word might mean. I can find information, but it’s often not of the quality that is necessary, for what I want.

We gave up our freedom, of being unavailable for evenings, weekends, weeks, in order to always have access to the outside world, with cellphones. Then we gave up our freedom to not be bombarded by news, and information. How much of the news you see every day, has an immediate or profound effect on you? Noise is growing faster than the valuable pieces, and search is succumbing to it.

Last night, I spent 2 hours searching for an article I had read about the creation of Zork. Unfortunately, the article was mainly on the MDL language, with Zork  only as an example. Searching for it, Google gave me nothing but junk. Stumbleupon and Delicious  gave me nothing. I only lucked out in that I had shared the article with Friendfeed, and Friendfeed’s search was actually functional. It shouldn’t take that long to find what you’re looking for. That was 2 hours I could have spent actually doing something, by the end I was exhausted, and didn’t even really want to do what I had started the search for.

Everything comes with the sacrifice, but it seems that I’m having to sacrifice more and more to gather the value from all the systems that I use. I broke away from my cell phone last year, it was great for setting up the occasional meeting with friends, and in cases of emergency, but over all it was just a nuisance. I like to escape from constant distraction and information, because it’s what I deal with on a day to day basis. Somewhere I feel that we lost our way, but at the same time I’m damn amazed at what is possible now. I stand torn, in what I know, and my opinions on what I know.

This was written on January 21st, 2011.

The Thought Of Success Is Wonderful

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Humans are self and group inhibitors in general, primarily the former. We all have fears and worries, that force us into reactionary tactics for survival, but often times, the fears are fiction, induced by over-thinking, or someone promoting them. Reactions, aren’t precise and are rarely efficient, they are emotional decisions made in angst, we shouldn’t trust it in most cases. I think this is why so many people fail, they allow fears to get in their way.

A child’s innocence and sense of wonder make them marvelous. They truly believe anything is possible, they aren’t inhibited by their prior experience. The “empty” mind that is open to being filled, with new experiences, new ideas, but they often lack the experience and skills required to communicate  with the world. If children are able to fight the inhibitions that allows their wonder, can we try to promote it to as a way to encourage success?*

Adults have mostly forgotten how wonderful life is, and think it is beating them down. I can’t count how many people I know who think life is out to get them, because of their bad experiences, with prior failure or contempt at others success. Many suspend their wonder, in order to fight others ability to succeed, they feel that injustices were served to them, because a disease, their financial situation, employment possibilities, etc. I’m not saying any of that is necessarily wrong, but what is wrong, is complaining about what you can’t do, instead of  looking at what you can do, in an uninhibited manner.

Your dreams don’t have to die, because of something that has happened to you. e.g. Randy Pausch – Experience Zero G like an Astronaut. Randy Pausch author of, “The Last Lecture.” He realized early on that he couldn’t be an Astronaut, because he wore glasses, so he changed his goal. All Randy really wanted to experience was Zero G, so he set out in life with the goal of one day going on, “The Vomit Commit,” which is an aircraft used for simulating Zero G. He changed his goal, to fit what he could do, and I believe too many people give up, based on their general disadvantages, and never look at what they could do, regardless, to get close.**

Open your mind, your eyes, your heart, and fight for your dreams. Find someone to help, I know not everyone has someone to help, but it never hurts to ask. There are plenty of enablers out there, just show them that you’re passionate. If there is one thing I’ve seen lately is that there has been talk about how to get a mentor to assist you, in achieving your goals, and there has been one point in these articles that sticks out.

“I’m not going to  spend my time helping you, unless you prove that you’re willing to put the time in yourself, and show me what you’ve done. You have to show that you’re willing to go it alone, but would like help.”

So what are your dreams? Write down 5 things you’d like to do in the next 5 years, and/or 5 things you want to do before you die.

*= One of the things that occurs to me, about STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), is that they are very rigid in general, and our school system doesn’t try to break from the rigidity. What that rigidity does, is when a child doesn’t get something, he is penalized by bad grades, but this enforces fear and contempt, or it is overly repetitive and the child loses his sense of wonder. We should work on filling these areas with wonder and flexibility.

**= Actually, while skimming the book to find the story on this, I noticed this article is very reminiscent of the later chapters, on Dreaming Big.

I Can’t Say I Can’t, But I Could If…

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With the beginning of a new year, I plan on taking several realizations and things I discovered momentarily, last year, and try to make them permanent. The first is to stop saying, “I/it can’t…,” with the exception of when used in conjunction with, “… but I could if.” The second is, “third-person introspective.”

Some time in September or October, I had an epiphany of how harmful, “I can’t,” is; it allows for excuses to be provided so easily. It allows you to just shuck your responsibility, without fully thinking through the problem, or trying to find another way around the problem. My solution is to only allow myself to say the phrase, “I/It can’t X, but I/it could if x.” It is a simple method, that can be used recursively, to find the starting point, if you can’t do x, then substitute it for X and start again. Ultimately, I feel that it is a great way of breaking a problem down, and avoiding excuses.

Third-person introspective, now this idea is a little less approachable, but personally more fun. I allow myself to escape, and critique myself on all of the actions I make as though I had someone following me around, looking over my shoulder. I tried this for about a week, and while it’s odd at first, it has some pretty interesting results,  you self-inhibit as though you weren’t alone, even if you are. The one issue that I had with it is that you have to be able to maintain two-levels of consciousness simultaneously, which can be difficult, particularly when you’re tired. I assume once one becomes adjusted to it, the second consciousness could become controlled subconsciously.

I’m hoping that implementing both of these, along with my recent purging of  stuff that was weighing on my mind will help me be more active, and engaged in the now. I still have a couple more things to get out of there, but for the most part, I’ve put everything I want behind me, and I’m starting to truly move forward for the first time in two or three years. Hope your year is going to be as wonderful as mine.

Chronological Data’s Influence On Relevancy Analysis

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Last night , I read Content should be experienced by relevance and importance and interestingness, not chronologically,  after Louis Gray shared it on Friendfeed. This is my take on chronological and other relevancy metrics. While, I agree with Garry on the outcome; I don’t  want to shrug off chronology as lacking importance, is a great tool for weighting an objects relevance.

Chronological data is a very nice weight to have when you’re looking at the whole set of objects. Chronology isn’t as important for idea’s or thoughts, as it is for news, but when looking at the subset of most actual news, it is much better.  Cadmus succeeds because it focuses on a small chronological window, or at least it does in my case, showing me the most relevant items in the last 24 hours, as well as a focused source of input, Twitter. Twitter, and most social tools, have high-entropy in relevance over a sustained period, so that if you really want to provide relevant or important information, focusing on what has happened in the past 24 hours is a great idea. Unfortunately, the web isn’t just Twitter, Facebook, or other tools, there are thousands of blogs, and news sources that are also relevant.

I’m going to use the example of a feed reader, considering that’s where I was focused when looking at these things, and thus have more insight into the discussion at hand, in that area. Trying to determine relevance on items, particularly news, doesn’t work so well when you’re focusing on a set of items you’ haven’t read, over a period of weeks, months, years, or even a few days, and seeking relevance/importance. What you end up with is possibly having sets of news that is outdated, being more relevant than current news, or an item that doesn’t fit the users interests.

Some real quick techniques, to boost relevance involve chronological data, though it’s not as necessary in the later stages of relevancy, it plays a huge role in cutting the set down to size for analysis. Here are a few methods of using chronological data for quickly sculpting more relevant information.

  • Create a window, static or sliding, this helps capture and condense echo. (48-72 hours is good)
  • Over a period, larger than your initial window, you can remove stale items, by comparing condense sets, that are on the topics that are more current.

Chronology is an extremely quick and dirty tool, but it can help tremendously, in narrowing the items down quickly. So that the data that needs to be processed for each user is much smaller, however it is far from the be all end all of the process for determining relevant data. The list of other items for determining importance or relevancy:

  • An external source weighting similar to PageRank — allowing high-value content to be controlled by peers as well as sharing it’s clout. (Source-Data relationships)
  • A personalized weighting based on your relationships similar to EdgeRank — allowing your personal interactions to show trust and interest in items. (Human-Human relationships)
  • A personalized weighting, based on your habits, and usage of various items similar to APML — allowing your content usage to be analyzed and weighted. (Human-Data relationships)
  • An aggregate weighting of both Edgerank & APML, to determine, weighting of topics based on human relationships and habit comparison, an idea like GAP(ML) — allowing your common interests and friendship to expose a more complex set of relevant data. (Human-Data-Human relationships)
  • A set of common related data carriers, and user relationship with his sources, somewhere in between Edgerank and Pagerank — allowing quick analysis and overview of sources, to determine what is important currently, as well as what is important among the sites the user trusts. (Source-Source & Source-Human relationships)

Those are the main relationships, in my mind, though there are a few others, such as media relationships(text, audio, video) not all people prefer the same type of information format. Tools that the user is using, you may want to provide data to the user in a different manner depending on how and what they are using to observe the data, or where they observe the data. If the user is the key, then the relationships and objects around the user are most definitely the teeth, and you have to hit as many tumblers as you can, without getting stuck.

These are just the ones I’ve focused on, and I’m sure their are others just as value that I have skimmed over, but this should provide a good, base for starting out, and there are probably a million little tweaks and touches that I skipped.  To quote Garry, because he was right.

The field is still a bit wide open because few people have both the dataset to work and test on, AND the financial backing to see the project all the way through.

We will definitely push the boundaries over the next few years, and we’ll have a better order for our information, I have no doubt in this. However, I’m betting many individuals will still rely on the very simplicity that we rely today: Chronological ordering. And even if it isn’t shown that way on the surface, deep down, it will be at the very base of relevance. Some under-the-radar companies, in this area, are Bit.ly and BagtheWeb — bundles are an excellent source of the information required for relevancy*, Quora and Stack Overflow — Q&A is a huge resource for the personal interests, Cadmus, Hunch, and My6Sense — all have experience working with this, and I have no doubt all three will only get better.

*- I may be biased here, I’ve been working on and off with bundling, for close to 2 years, but ultimately got lost in perfecting how the data was stored.

Budgeting on Variable Income

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The three main things that need to be taken into account are:

  • Definite Expenses
  • Estimated Income
  • Savings required to cover deficiencies between Income & Expense

Defining Expenses

  • Write down all non-variable monthly expenses (e.g. Rent, Utilities, Insurance, etc.)
  • Estimate all recurring variable expenses for the month(e.g Food, Fuel, etc.)

Add these together and multiply them by 1.10 -1.20 to provide yourself with a buffer  in case of any upward fluctuations of variable expenditures. Excess at the month should be saved  or split between discretionary spending and savings, with only 10-20% going to discretionary, at most, the remaining 80-90% saved.

Estimating Income

  • Average your past 6-12 months of income. Avg. Inc. = (Total income/months)
  • If possible also average your highest and lowest monthly levels of income. H&L = ([Highest + Lowest]/2)
  • Average both of these numbers to come up with a good estimate of your monthly income. Est. Inc. = ([Avg. Inc. + H&L]/2)

* You can also add in quarterly averages, if you’ve seen a recent change in your income up or down, such as change in employment status.

Savings

Take 10-15% of your estimated income and try to save it, and any excess after your budgeted expense, for handling monthly deficiencies. You can use a portion of this as discretionary spending, or rainy day fund, to help maintain your personal happiness. Also, set a baseline for a buffer in your bank account, which you can check against, say $200 dollars, and you can raise this as you progress.

*You don’t have to place it in a savings account, the interest rates are horrible currently anyways, just so long as you try not to overuse these funds.

These techniques aren’t perfect, but they do provide a very good starting line for determining how much you can reasonably spend per month. I used these basic ideas as a set of tools, slightly modified for my personal usage, and managed to pay off $1800 in student loans and save ~$1200 on a variable income that ranged between $500-1400 over 13 months. My average monthly expenses were $400 and my average monthly income was $750. I also managed to maintain a fairly consistent spending, about $50 month, on entertainment.

Ordered Networking: 4munity/hIphS

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As I feel like it’s good to recognize your failures and look at what went wrong, here is the first of several posts on some of my failures. I’m posting these for two reasons, storing my failures and lessons, but also my ideas, however loosely bound they may be.

Date: December 2007 – September 15th, 2008

Core Ideas:

Limited number of relationships based on Dunbar’s Number(150); Segregation of various groups (e.g. Work, Family, etc.); Focus on forums for communication; Making an environment, extremely unfriendly to spammers.

From the notes:

Privatized Comments – Scalable conversations 1:1 – 1:100 conversation, allowance of publication by Owner [commenter]; Features: OpenID Profiles – Tweet Threads – Forums – API Integration – Collab Napkin Interface; Ordered Network – 150 Friends Max, (later laxed to 200) 149×150(22350) 2nd Order, 149x149x150(3.3million) 3rd Order;  Access: Friends – View Profile, comment, message; 2nd – View profile w/o comments, message; 3rd message; AJAX Threading – Personal Styles (Pre-Designed Offerings); Mobile entry coding: (P[post]/R[read]) GGTT [Group/ Thread Depth] For new thread posting location; AL Appends Last Message (within 15 minutes.)

Background:

I got really sick of Facebook, had already deleted 2 accounts, and barely using a 3rd, Myspace, and forums because of security and overall interaction present on those platforms. The information I saw was spammy or non-relavent to me. I was more interested in finding a way to maximize value of relationships, and communications.

It started off as just an interesting piece of forum software, and then evolved into using relationships to promote and control the relevance of the data, and collaboration. Unfortunately, I was utterly clueless about what I was doing, and went about using Java to build the interface, and text files for storing relationship data; I had no clue about true databases at this point. The whole database was a set of folders and text files, what could go wrong. Yep, not much else got done, except for a barely working version of the napkin, and it definetly wasn’t as functional as I would have liked.

Ultimately, I fell in love with Twitter, and decided to walk away from the project. Not before posting, a blog post detailing the basics fo the service, which I’ll post at the bottom. Overall, I was so disturbed I tossed most of the code out immediately, and have sense thrown most of the other pieces from here and there out as well, even the original logo, which I would have liked to added to this post.

Lessons:

Layout a solid plan, and pick your tools wisely.

Don’t try to do everything, too much, means it takes forever to get things done.

If you need help, ask for advice from people you trust.

If you lose interest before you’ve even completed the project stop throwing more time into it.

Sep 05, 2008

What is hIphS?

A lot of people that have found this place are probably wondering what is hIphs. So I’ll give you some back story on what it is and why it needs to be. hIphs is something that I am currently developing to remove the problems I have found with the Social networking area. It is here to confront spamming, promote relationships, and help people collaborate on projects. It is a support group, a conference for you team, it is a place to connect with your family, above all it is here for you to use. I see it as a social experiment at this stage as of some of the boundaries I have set to force all of the goals, layered networks, personal forums, and above all a 200 person limit for friends, family, and partners.

I feel that If you can force the limit constraint that it will promote relationships and (it has just begun to be implemented in lighter extent on digg and twitter) to reduce spam. I am also working on a napkin interface for collaborative work that would allow you to upload files to share during a conversation, along with and IM client and a whiteboard, all to open the web to truly interactive collaborative projects. It is also to my interest to at some point in the future to allow saving of this collaborative event and allow you to provide it to clients or share it in house. The one other aspect that I’m working on is to provide a threaded forum based twitter like threading that you only receive the threads of your friends and you can keep the thread going with someone who is mutually related to your friend, so long as your friend is the one who began the thread.

Why the name hIphs and why the odd capitalization?

This is actually one of the last names I came up with for the site as my favorites were already taken. The name is based on several levels: First, is the likeness of a closed social network to that of a bee hive, you and your friends are more productive when your dealing on a trust based system. Second, is what you get when you split the word apart “Hi Phs” which I came to symbolize as Hello Friends. Third, I feel that the site will be providing multiple ‘I’nternet ‘S’ervices in the future, thus, the emphasis on those to letters. That’s my description on what hIphS is and why I chose the names. Thank you for reading this if you somehow found it, at this

Letter to Myself: Discouragement And The “Sad” Art Of Never Finishing

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Dear James,

Over the past 4-5 years, you’ve worked on roughly that many major projects, but have never taken any further than a prototype. The various reasons, of which there are many, range from, lack of domain knowledge to similar, but very different products, but always because you choose to walk away in discouragement. Over the past 6 months or so, I’ve seen a variation of these items, and while they might not be verified successes, yet; they have seen plenty of success among the press, imagine what would have been thought years ago.This is my personal appeal to you to stop getting discouraged, because you need to finish the shit you start.

You may not feel like there is room for your ideas anymore, but if you never finish, you’ll never know the success, or gratification of just finishing the job. Here are a few tips of advice for you, to help keep you from getting discouraged.

First of market, is rarely the best. The goal is to be a close second, that uses the knowledge garnered from the prior groups successes and failures.

You’ll never be  as ignorant and stupid as you are today.

Don’t worry about getting everything perfect — I know how hard  this is for you — there is no need to get it perfect the first time right. Even if you want to believe, “a job isn’t worth doing if the job isn’t done right,” remember that you just need to get the initial job done, and then get it right; do it properly, but not perfectly.

Look back at all the failures, and make some changes, in how you do things, never be afraid to call yourself out, it’s as important as making sure others call you out.

Overall, I just want to repeat what someone once told me, “If I were your age, I wouldn’t take relationships too seriously, and I’d be looking for I what really want. You are at the age everyone would want to be at if they chose. Figure out the person you want to be with and the career you want to have now. Don’t wait, because within the next five years you can get whatever you want if you try.” ~ C. W. The fact is the matter, even if you never make it to where you wanted to go you’ll have experienced a life worth looking back on. Just fucking finish.

Yourself,

James Fuller

I plan on collecting and writing about my failed projects, over the next few weeks.