Houston... We have a problem

Every so often, I take a look at Google Maps to see whether they’ve finally put our house in the right spot. On the one hand, things are looking good. We’re only a quarter mile off now (as opposed to the 1.5 miles we’ve been off by until recently).

On the other hand, they’ve also added a bunch of landmarks to the map. Every single one of them is off by somewhere between a quarter mile and 25 miles. They even get the location of the famous Ahwahnee Dining Room wrong… by 17 miles. Though not on the image, they also put the Ahwahnee Hotel in the wrong place and show “National Park Services” in a spot that is, in reality, 15 miles from the nearest services (or buildings) of any kind, unless you count the roadside bathroom about half a mile from where they put marker. Keep in mind that this is a national park that got 3.9 million visitors last year, so screwing up the directions to basic services is not a minor problem.

Meanwhile, they succeed in successfully locating two well-known rock climbs, both of which likely have fewer than 100 visitors per year.

The only real bright side is that I can see is that they incorrectly label Carol’s house, so at least they’ve accidentally left her privacy intact.

I’m sure there are lots of reasons for this, but you can open the troubleshooting page by going to Settings -> Offline and scrolling down to the link for the Troubleshooting Page.

On my page, I noticed several errors for Failed to get blob down at the bottom of the page under “Recent Errors”.

A BLOB, of course, is a Binary Large Object. I realized at that point that I had unsynchronized messages with images attached (that is to say with BLOBs attached).

I tried moving these to Drafts, but that still didn’t work, so I copied and pasted the contents into a text editor for safe keeping, deleted the messages, cleared the browser cache, closed the browser, reopened, and reloaded GMail.

Success!

I’m sure there are a lot of other things that can cause this, but I didn’t find any good information on this on Google Groups or with a quick search, so hopefully this will help someone or at least give some directions to look in.

However, I think everyone should start an interview podcast. I’ve always loved listening to interviews on NPR (especially Fresh Air), but it always seemed like something that only a journalist with a radio show could do. Then I stumbled across Andrew Warner doing interviews over at Mixergy. Great interviews, in fact, with people like Derrick Sivers (founder of CD Baby), Tim Ferris (Four Hour Work Week), and some guy who got lost in the Amazon and had to dig deep to survive and get out. Great stuff and, with Andrew’s podcasting advice and encouragement, I decided to interview people I care about. He mostly interviews entrepeneurs. I interview skiers or, more precisely, people who make it their mission to help others ski better (instructors, coaches, trainers).

I’ve only done four interviews, but it’s been great: You learn stuff, you help people establish themselves as experts, the kind of people worth interviewing, you provide useful information or at least I hope so, and you make some fun connections or reconnections (it’s a good excuse to call up an old friend or someone you admire but otherwise would never call).

Those are the obvious benefits, but there are effects that I hadn’t expected. You start to hear how you speak. I do the interview, and then go back to edit. When I edit, I um learn, you know, the uh obvious — I and all my guests love filler words. But there’s more. I realize that I have a very non-linear way of speaking that takes away from my effectiveness as a speaker and makes me harder to follow. For example, I might say something like this: "When someone is doing deadlifts. Let’s say you have someone who wants to get strong for skiing and they’re looking for a good exercise and decide to try deadlifts…." And then of course, pepper it with ums and you knows.

So what? Lots of people speak that way, right? I feel like after only four interviews, it’s changing the way I speak very subtly. When you write anything of importance, you do a rough draft and at least one edit. The more you do that, the better your rough drafts become and the better your final drafts become. We don’t typically have any similar feedback loop for conversation. In fact, in my experience, we tend to avoid that feedback loop. I always hated listening to myself on recordings and I know many people feel the same way about themselves. And my friends, mercifully, do not critique my conversation. So again, there’s no feedback loop. Editing your interviews provides the feedback loop.

I’m not sure it will change the way I speak, but I think it will for two simple reasons. First, just knowing how I speak is huge. Second, when someone speaks directly, clearly and effectively, it takes a lot less work to edit. And since I prefer to avoid work, it’s an incentive to try to get better at my rough draft instead of trying to fix it in the editing stage. Of course you can’t always fix audio in the editing. And video? Forget it.

We’ll see where it ends, but if you are thinking there’s a topic you want to write about, consider doing interviews instead. So far, it’s been an interesting experiment for me and worth the time invested.

If you have an interview show, tell me about it in the comments or through the contact form and I’ll list you here with the anchor text of your choosing to give you a boost from the search engines.

Interview podcasts I listen to regularly include

• Mixergy — Andrew Warner interviews entrepeneurs and people of interest to entrepeneurs. Some great stuff.
• In the Trenches — Mike Robertson interviews top strength coaches. These are the top guys in the business, the ones that train elite athletes and the podcast is packed with good info, though also a fair bit of jargon. If you don’t know what RDLs are, it can be a bit hard to follow (RDL = Romanian Deadlift).

When I first heard about ChaCha I was amazed: I can text in a question and get an answer in two minutes. I was amazed because sometimes in the course of my research, I have questions that take days to answer or that I can’t answer at all. Imagine getting that down to two minutes. Then I thought maybe they don’t have God-like omniscience and maybe, just maybe, they aren’t set up to do archival research on sixteenth-century Geneva. Maybe you need to focus on simpler questions, more modern questions.

At Pubcon, someone mentioned that you can use the AdWords search preview tool if you want to see where you rank for a given search term without interference from personalized search (if logged into a Google account) or geo-targetting (always on based on your IP number which is sent to Google with every request). This cool tool also lets you see what search results (and ads) you would get in various geographical regions.

So I thought I would do a somewhat whimsical search and searched on bowling deaths. The choice isn’t arbitrary. I usually rank #1 for that search, but I was curious to find out whether that was true even if Google didn’t know who or where I was. And sure enough, there I was, still #1. But ChaCha came up as the number two result with a clear and succinct answer that looked suspiciously familiar. To the question "How many deaths are caused annually by bowling," the ChaCha expert answered

On average there are four bowling deaths due to bowling or bowling equipment each year. Natural deaths while bowling do not count.

Sure enough, the "source" cited was none other than my article. The problem is, my article is satire. The point of the article, to the extent that there was one, was to highlight the idiotic ways in which journalists use statistics, often failing to understand the importance of sample size, significance (as determined by chi-square and such) and so forth.

That article gets a lot of mentions in forums, almost always with a "heh heh" after it. ChaCha is unique in treating it as fact. So I guess that’s the downside of getting answers in two minutes. Maybe I just guessed right in my satirical article? Nah. ChaCha cites its sources, in this case, it’s my very own analysis death rates from bowling.

I wonder how many other examples one could find. Are you a ChaCha user? Have you gotten any tragically bad ChaCha answers? If so, add a comment and tell us about it. I sure hope you weren’t asking for directions!

I’ve already written about how I use Twitter and why I follow so few people. I’ve also thought about the possible ways to use Twitter. Greg’s situation got me thinking specifics of how to use Twitter as a writer. My books, being obscure scholarly tomes, I haven’t used Twitter to promote them, but I’ve been watching how people use Twitter and what works and what doesn’t and this is my best advice to Greg. If you have something to add, disagree with something, or think this is good advice and want to encourage Greg to follow this advice, please help Greg out by leaving a comment.

If you don’t need a pep talk about self-promotion, you can skip straight to the bit on how writers can use Twitter, but first I feel compelled to address something that might be the biggest obstacle for many writers…

Self-Promotion Makes You Feel Icky? Get Over It!

Best-selling author Tim Ferris gives a great interview on Mixergy.com that provides illuminating insight the new world of book publishing and promotion. Every author should listen to this. If you’re too much of an artiste to get out there and hawk your book, be prepared to see your book remaindered. Comfort with self-promotion is a major hurdle for many authors, especially those of us trained to life of scholarship and poverty. So before we even get into the specifics of Twitter, first ask yourself:

• Do you think your book is worthwhile and well-written?
• Do you think that there are people out there who would derive pleasure or useful information from your book?
• Do you think there’s something slimy about making it as easy as possible for people to learn about and purchase a useful and/or enjoyable book?
• You’re diligent enough to write a book, are you too lazy to do some work to spread the word about it?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, may you write the book of the century, so brilliant that word will spread all on its own with no help from you. Otherwise, may the Force be with you. I would say "no skin off my back," but if you have a book that I would enjoy reading, it is skin off my back. That’s the realization that changed my attitudes on the subject (though not always my practice). If you have something that could improve someone’s life, even "just" by being entertaining, and you do nothing to get the word out there, you are doing a disservice to all the people who could benefit and you are dishonoring your own labor.

That’s probably preaching to the choir. Most people probably agree with that already or need a lot more convincing than that. But in any case, ask yourself very honestly if self-promotion still makes you feel icky. I’ll be honest, it does me, but thinking about it like I just outlined, makes me a lot more comfortable with it.

Ideas on How to Use Twitter as an Author

Okay, so you’re convinced that you owe it to your soon-to-be adoring public to get the word out about your masterpiece. You’ll want to create a Facebook Fan Page. And you’ll want to build a presence and above all a following on Twitter.

Your goal is to connect with people who share your interests and might enjoy your book in order to create an audience who will be ready to buy when the book comes out. It’s not how many copies you sell in a year that affects your Amazon (or god willing NYT) ranking, it’s how many you’ve sold recently. So one of the keys is preparing the soil. You have all these people following you because you post on stuff they care about. They like you for it and they’re grateful, which is as it should be, because it takes actual effort on your part. Your book comes out. Your Twitter followers buy 500 copies. It’s not many, but it’s all in the same week. That makes you the #1 history book on Amazon and pushes you to the top to get noticed. Small numbers are big here.

• Remember: You’re reaching out to new people, not keeping up with your old surfing buddies. That has a big impact on what you’ll post and it’s good to be clear on your goals. I have two accounts. On my "just for friends" account, for the most part, if we’ve never had a face-to-face conversation, I’m not following you on that account and I’m posting stuff that only people who know me would find interesting (and often not even them). I’ve been playing with Twitter to help attract readers to one of my websites. For that, I tweet on personal topics, but not inside jokes for my friends, and I keep most of the posts on subjects in line with the website.
• Create a custom profile background. Your background should say something about who you are. Once you have a cover design, you need a photo of the book on your profile page.
• Link to your book’s website from your profile. You have at least a basic website for your book right? No? Why not? You can build a simple website in an hour.
• This is a marathon, not a sprint. You’re a writer, so you know all about persistence and marathons. If you have a year until your book goes to press, that’s great. You’ll need all of that because it’s important to start building that audience now.
• Content first, then networking. You can start following your real-world friends right away, but don’t follow people you don’t know until you have some posting history. I always look to see what sort of posts someone has before I follow back. If it’s just 2-3 vague posts, I don’t follow back.
• Write tweets on topics related to your book. When I say "related to your book" that doesn’t mean only self-absorbed posts about how the writing is going, but also just topically related. If you’re writing about pilots flying over the Himalaya in World War II, then you could have posts on WWII history, aviation, the Himalaya. Link to books or book reviews on something you’ve read lately that you liked. Share something cool you’ve found in your research. And yes, the occasional self-absorbed post about how the writing is going. Tweet enough about topics loosely related to your book that there is always one on your profile page.
• Don’t sell on Twitter. Your goal is to connect, have a presence and on rare occasions mention that you have a book for sale. Rare occasions. In other words, as often as you would want to get a sales pitch from every person in your stream, that’s how often they want a sales pitch from you. Save it for when you need.
• Sell on Twitter. Okay, sometimes you do need it. When your book comes out and you want to generate momentum to get higher listings in Amazon or, God willing, the New York Times. That’s when you call on the people who follow you and say, very simply, "If you’re thinking of buying my book eventually, it would be huge for me if you ordered it this week." That’s 101 characters, so there’s even enough left over for a link to where to buy it. Remember though, this it a rare event, calling in a favor from your followers in return for all the great links and thoughts you offer without asking anything in return.
• Regular updates are good, but more than a couple a day and people get tired of you. There are only two sorts of people who will put up with a regular output of 20 posts per day — people who are filtering and not actually reading you anyway, and people who are stalking you and you shouldn’t be giving them that much information. Everyone else is just getting annoyed and they will unfollow you. One marketer type I was reading said there is an optimum number of tweets per day, and that number is three. I think he meant it half tongue-in-cheek, but that correlates with my experience in terms of who I most like to follow. Also, it’s not about averages. The worst twitterers of all do no posts for a month, then do thirty in two days. Never forget that it takes only one click to unfollow you.
• No minute-by-minute updates. If coffee doesn’t play a big role in your book, nobody cares what kind of coffee you had this morning. I hate to break the bad news, but aside from your mother and a few friends, nobody cares about you. They will follow you because you have something interesting to say for them.
• Be personal, be real. The flip side of the last point is that you want to be a real person, the idea is to connect with people on a somewhat more personal level, so your Twitter stream needs some personal flavor, some updates that are not "on topic". It’s a balance, between letting people know who you are and burying them in an avalanche of personal detail. Write a fair number of posts that are specific to you (either personally or your book). If your best friend or spouse can’t guess from the content on the first page whose Twitter stream it is, you’re being way too vague and general.
• Follow the people who follow you if they don’t look like robots or spammers. If someone looks really off from my interests, I don’t follow, but generally you want to because this allows you to direct message each other which can really help get to know someone. If you’re writing non-fiction and still researching, you probably want to make it easy for people to communicate with you.
• Actively block spammers and robots. Some people disagree with this. What’s the harm in having someone you don’t like follow you and add to your follower count? The way I see it, when you follow someone, before they follow back, they’ll look at what you post, who’s following you and who you follow. You want that profile to look like "their people" (i.e. actual human beings who read books like yours). Put another way, think about how Google evaluates web pages. It’s who links to you and who you link to that helps them decide which "neighborhood" you’re in. I want my Twitter profile to show that I’m in a neighborhood of "our people". In the Twitter world, I live in a gated community. Spammer scumbags are turned away by security.
• Find people to follow with Twitter search. With some Twitter readers (Hoot Suite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc.), you can create a column for a search if you really want to follow your topic. Put in some words related to your book and find people to follow and connect with. If you follow someone, he or she will likely look at your profile. If they see a kindred spirit, they’ll follow you.
• If someone mentions you, they’ll do so with an "at reply" and you must acknowledge it. To fail to do so makes you look like a prima dona too busy to respond to the little people. If you are like Neil Gaiman with thousands of followers, all reasonable people will understand that you can’t respond to everyone (though Neil gets complaints from people who just don’t get it). For most of us, though, it is completely manageable in a few minutes per day. If you don’t have those few minutes, then just don’t be on Twitter. Simple as that. Of be on Twitter, but just for social reasons, not to spread the word about your book.

I know there are many things I’ve left out and maybe some things that you disagree with. If so, please leave a comment to make this post better for other writers!

In times of yore, like last month, having a long username was a liability for getting "retweeted" because your Twitter nickname counted toward the character count in the retweet (which sounds like something Elmer Fudd would say to the troops do if being overrun by superior forces: Retweet! Retweet!). Twitter has recently added new functionality that makes the length of the username irrelevant, but I’m somewhat sorry they did. I think that this is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.

Under the new system, if I retweet something, it appears to my followers as if they’re suddently following that person. In my profile picture appearing in their stream, but the person I retweeted appearing out of nowhere in their stream. This is in theory good for the the person who wrote the original post, but not necessarily.

• From the end reader perspective. I find this confusing. Suddenly people I don’t know are appearing in my stream. Maybe I’m just not used to it, but I don’t particularly like that. On the plus side, I have instant one-click access to the original author’s information.
• From the retweeter’s perspective. I lose my identity. I may want to share something, but I may want my followers to know that it’s from me. On the plus side, I don’t have to edit a post down to fit into the 140-char limit.
• From the original author’s perspective. You might think there’s no downside here. Suddenly, there you are with your picture and everything in the stream of everyone who follows your beloved retweeter. The downside here is that you’ve mostly lost the benefits of social proof and the value of a retweet as a personal recommendation.

The last point bears some further comment. Let’s say I’m an author hoping to reach potential readers of my forthcoming book via Twitter (see Twitter for writers). I’m now injected picture and all into the user’s stream, which has to be better, right?

The problem is that the challenge is not in being available to the largest number of people, but in actually finding a way to cut through the noise. I delete at least half of my non-spam emails unopened and read at best 20% of what appears in my Twitter stream. And I follow very few people. I think the numbers are worse with someone who follows 200 or 2000 people. I tend to skim for the people I really want to read. More and more, Twitter applications let me filter into user lists, topic lists, and all sorts of things. So though I will always read something if it has @simplytheresa’s smiling face, on most days, I skip most people in my stream unless I’m in a serious procrastination mode. And to be clear, I’m not skipping people I actively dislike, because obviously I’m not following those people. I’m skipping anyone that I don’t really really really want to read, some days anyone who isn’t my wife. In other words, when
I’m skimming, it’s a whitelist algorithm, not a blacklist. I’m looking for people I actively want to read. If I’m not looking for you, you don’t get read. So if you someone retweets you with the native Twitter function, that means you. I don’t know you and I won’t read you.

It’s not clear what’s going to happen with the native Twitter. Most people use some third-party application to tweet from and that functionality is not included in most of them yet, though I suspect it will be soon. And then the next question is whether or not it will be widely adopted. I suspect it will.

So that leads to the important question: how can you get people to retweet old-style? In short, there’s not much you can do to positively encourage it. The best you can do is remove obstacles. Above all, that means making sure that your message stands on it’s own and doesn’t need editing to be retweeted.

Again, consider an author who wants to get the word out about his book, in part using Twitter. So if you’re giving a book reading, for example, that you announce on Twitter, you want your fans to be able to pass that on to their friends, which they will usually do with a "retweet". The old and still standard format is to take your message and copy it into their message and add "RT @yourname[space]".

Thankfully for Robert Louis Stevenson, he wasn’t trying to sell books in the Twitter era. By the time he leaves enough space for retweeting, he’s used up 25 characters, 18% of his total allotement. So he can’t tweet this 140 character message

I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8:30pm @ Moe’s in Berkeley

Because it would become

RT @RobertLouisStevenson I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8

Homer, on the other hand, would have it made.

RT @Homer I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Iliad this month – Dec 12, 7pm @ Book Passages, Corte Madera; Dec 14, 8pm at Moe’s in Berkeley

If at all possible, Robert Louis Stevenson would have wanted to get on Twitter day one to reserve RLS or at least RLStevenson. Regardless of the name, when composing a tweet that he wants retweeted, RLS would want to know his retweetable character count. The easy way to do this is to simply compose the post as a retweet, and then lop of the RT @RobertLouisStevenson part. Beyond that, people will do what they do and it remains to be seen whether the new interface features will overcome established practice. As I say, I suspect they will, and you’ll just have to live with it.

What do you think of the new Twitter Retweet function? Add a comment with your thumbs up or thumbs down.

Fool’s Goal and the Value of Forests

Obviously, I’m not against long-term goal setting per se. As I mentioned, my weekly task list depends on having some longer term goals in order to decide what goes on the list. That said, if you set a long-term goal whose only value is in realizing the goal, it’s the wrong goal. As a historian, I’m in favor of long-term thinking. The problem is that when you chart a course into the future, you exclude the one-in-a-million probabilities, but over long enough spans of time, some of these come to pass, so there is too much uncertainty in long-term plans for them to have any degree of accountability.

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make them, but the value in long-term planning is usually in the unintended consequences that result from the fact that projecting far into the future allows us to understand more clearly what’s happening in the present. I strongly recommend the best book I know on long-term thinking, The Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand. Brand cites the example of the Swedish Navy who, in the eighteenth century, noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to find tall straight trees to make masts for ships. Since having fast, powerful ships was an essential strategic resource, the navy commissioned the royal forester to set aside areas to grow these trees. Two hundred years later, the forester notified the navy that their trees were ready. The trees no longer had any great strategic value, but they did have tremendous value as some of the last remaining old-growth forest in Sweden. The goal of securing an essential strategic resource had been rendered null by new technology, but long-term planning had enabled the navy to recognize the problem of the disappearing forests.

It’s the same with the majority of goals we set. If we decide to train for a marathon, it’s not really finishing the marathon that matters for most of us. Most of the benefit is in the training for it.

Having some long-term goals helps prioritize tasks, but I mostly focus on short-term tasks, for reasons I explain below. These, by the way can be anything, even something like “get to bed before 10pm five nights this week” or “go skiing”. They always include some fun things, usually including at least four exercise days. This article is one item on this week’s list and so was this morning’s run. The key is that they are things I not only want to do (write, run) or have to do (paint the house), but things I will do that week, not things I sort of vaguely might to do that week if I get to it.

Failing Has to Feel Like This

If I fail, I “fine” myself $250. If I finish it, I award myself $50. The 5:1 ratio there is not accidental. Humans tend to be more attuned to voiding pain than to seeking pleasure. Losing five weeks of reward for a single failure is really powerful. The reward money into a pot to spend on things I otherwise wouldn’t sping for. Wireless headphones for example, which I most definitely don’t need, but not pants. Having a defined list, a defined deadline and $300 riding on it helps stay on track. It’s been an interesting experiment (going on about three months now). Depending on how miserly you are, maybe $300 won’t do it for you. Maybe you need to make it $3000. One thing is certain: for the system to work, it needs to be an amount of money that will hurt. It helps to have it allocated toward something you really want, so you tell yourself you’ll get that iPod Touch once you’ve saved up. So if you go five weeks and you’re almost there, missing one goal that week sets your iPod purchase back six weeks! Then you have a dilemma — stay up until midnight writing that article or wait an extra six weeks to buy your bauble. It’s powerful.

So what have I noticed as a result of my experiment?

Short-term tasks allow for accountability.

It’s hard to be accountable on a daily or weekly basis for progress toward long-term goals. Something that will take a year to achieve or perhaps that I may never really achieve is just too abstract. That abstraction makes those type of goals very easy to avoid, shirk and procrastinate on. Because I choose actions I can control and that are achievable, I can hold myself accountable every week. Focusing on a weekly list of discreet tasks that I must finish has four consequences:

1. My weekly tasks are not all that ambitious. I set targets I can meet. This helps me be realistic and really prioritize.
2. My weekly tasks are things I can control. So I would never say “Talk to Bill about X.” I would say “Make at least three attempts to reach Bill to discuss X”.
3. I have more true free time because when my list is done for the week, I’m done and can pitter and putter guilt free.
4. I rack up victories, not defeats, successes, not failures.

The last of these may be the most important. At any given moment, I have 200 years worth of things I would like to do in theory, but the list grows faster than I can knock things off. Life is just too damn interesting! The downside of there being so many interesting things to do in life is that they pile up and that can lead to feeling that I just get further and further behind on those long-term goals and that’s depressing.

Small steps are easier to take than giant steps.

As a mountaineer I have never found summits very motivating. I need to focus on the experience and on very small, intermediate milestones if I’m to get anywhere. On a long, steep snow slope, I often play the 50-step game, that is telling myself I will take 50 steps before I rest. Then I play the ten breaths game, that is, I’ll only rest for ten breaths, then start plodding again. The summit is too abstract. I focus on the immediate task and the experience and find that much better at keeping me going.

I once read something in Hindu literature which, sadly, I can’t find again, that said roughly: “If we dare too much, we will be destroyed, but by advancing in small steps, the gods themselves can be defeated.”

Any process you don’t break down into manageable components becomes overwhelming. Breaking it down into small unintimidating chunks makes everything more pleasant and manageable. Having these very discreet and achievable lists is like that. It’s a lot less intimidating to get going on something I can finish this week.

It’s ultimately not the goal that matters

Mark Twight, one of America’s great alpinists, notes that it’s possible to “fail upwards”, that is climb yourself into a situation unintentionally where your only recourse is to continue up, possibly in bad style and often at increasing risk. He sees that as a failure because you reach the summit not because you choose to, but because you have to. Conversely, it’s also possible to have a great climb that ends in retreat, but retreat on your own terms, which can be a success (you have a great time, you learn a lot, you live). Ultimately, the value lies in the climb, not in the summit.

That might not make obvious sense to people who don’t climb. Maybe instead of a climb, your goal is to make ten million dollars. What if you “failed upwards”, that is made your ten million dollars with a successful business, but in doing so you compromised everything you believed in and destroyed your health from overwork? On the other hand, what if you retreated short of the summit, but built a business that changed the lives of your employees and customers for the better, was exciting and satisfying, but in the end, after 15 years, still didn’t turn a profit and closed it’s doors? In the latter case you failed to achieve your goal, but which was the failure and which was the success?

With these small, achievable steps, based on your long-term and short-term goals, it also keeps you focused on the journey, but a journey with the summit in view.

The Practical Part

Incidentally, I usually just create a table each week in a Google Doc, adding the new week at the top of the document, and put my task/goal in the left column and fill out the right column as I accomplish things. I track the money part in an Excel spreadsheet. I also keep my “anything goes” TODO list using the awesome TODO list from Abstract Spoon. It has pretty much everything I need, but I keep hundred or thousands of items in there, categorized by things like “reading lists”, “house”, “Ultraskier” and so on.

Your Turn

What do you do to get motivated when you feel frustrated? What do you do to keep cool when you feel overwhelmed? Do you have a good system? Tell me what it is in the comments or use the comment field to drop a link to it if you have an article about it somewhere.

Or, you had an idea for this brilliant new service and you would have run home and started coding, but first you need to learn seven new technologies and, well, there are dogs to feed and you still haven’t learned how to integrate Ruby on Rails with SMS messaging, so you’ve been working away for three years, hundreds of hours, but you haven’t launched anything, so you don’t actually have a clue whether or not anyone actually wants your service. Have you been wasting your time and how will you know?

The best way to find out, is to get a simple content site up and start collecting data to find out whether there’s any interest at all. Launch simple and then, depending on what rolls in for data, build it out. At least, you’ll have some content that can site on the web and age.

Still stuck? I just gave a talk at Pubcon on the simplest, fastest method to get something online, because something, is better than nothing.

The idea was to inspire people to simplify the process and make it as easy as possible to get started, get some content up and start collecting data to find out if anyone but you actually gives a damn about your genius idea before you spend thousands of hours and thousands of dollars thinking about it.

You can download the Powerpoint Deck here:
Super Rapid Website Developement

I hope you enjoy it – if you have any questions, drop me a line.

So I’ve been struggling lately trying to get things sorted out for doing remote video interviews. The person who inspired me, more than any, to start doing these interviews is Andrew Warner. Over at Mixergy.com, he does terrific interviews with people who are crafting lives of their own design, mostly entrepeneurs. If that sounds interesting, head over there and poke around. If it doesn’t sound interesting, start with the interviews of Derek Sivers, Premal Shah and Yossi Ginsburg. If you don’t find those interesting and inspiring, I don’t know what to say.

Anyway, Andrew not only has interesting guests, but he really has the interview thing down and so, struggling with my own efforts, I asked him if he would consent to a phone call to help me out. Despite being in between his honeymoon and his impending move to Argentina, he found time to talk to me and here are some tips he passed on.

• Suggest a time in your initial email. This seems so obvious, but I’ve been wasting a lot of time getting consent and then going round about scheduling and waiting for replies. This way they can either say yes, no or suggest another time and that shortcuts the whole process.
• Transcripts. Andrew has transcripts of his interviews on his site and I asked him how he produces them. He said he uses Mechanical Turk and offers people $2 per 5 minute segment they transcribe. He said he thinks a good summary would actually be as good or better than a transcipt. That was my gut feeling, which is good news for me. Having paid my bills for 20 years by putting words on a page, I find the prospect of writing a summary of an interview a lot less daunting than chopping it into segments and getting it transcribed. Anyway, I don’t feel like I’ve really digested a conversation until I retell to someone else or I write about it (thus the current summary).
• I’m interested in interviewing skiers, ski instructors, ski mountaineering guides and folks like that. Not surprisingly, they’re not as techy as the web entrepeneurs that Andrew interviews, but I was stuck on the idea of Skype-to-Skype interviews or phone-to-phone interviews. He suggested just doing the interview over the phone via Skype, have audio only. Another solution that seemed so simple and obvious once Andrew said it.
• For audio-only interviews, show a picture with a play button so it sort of looks like video and gives people something to look at. This was huge because I was tearing my hair out about the video aspect and I couldn’t figure out how to get my telephone to record. I hadn’t thought I could just call someone on their home telephone using Skype and just record it. And I get unlimited long distance for $3 per month!
• Get a decent microphone. Andrew has tried mics up to $500. He recommended the Blue Snowball USB Mic, which I found at Amazon for just $69 ($139 list). It came two days later and the difference is huge — almost all the hum, hiss, buzz and other distortion dropped away. This is a huge improvement. $69 well spent. [update: the Blue Snowball came and I've recorded two calls with it. It's everything Andrew promised. HUGE jump in sound quality]

• Get a backup. Another tip that’s so obvious when someone says it. I had been experimenting with Pamela for Skype, which lets you record audio and video calls, but was having trouble with it quitting [update: this was a known issue and is now fixed], so I was afraid to depend on it. Andrew runs his call recorder (I believe Ecamm Call Recorder, which is Mac only), plus he runs a screen capture program (Screenflow, again Mac Only), so he is actually recording twice and if the primary recorder fails, he is automatically doing a backup. As obvious as it is brilliant once you someone tells you. I haven’t settled on a screen capture program, but there are some good free ones for Windows:
  • NCH Software has a whole host of free tools (with upgrades to pro versions, but generally the free ones do what I need at this point). For screen capture, I’m using Debut Video Recorder. The also have good audio and video file format converters, audio editing software (similar to Audacity).
  • Camstudio is a Camtasia competitor. Camtasia is the category leader and costs several hundred dollars. Camstudio does everything I could want.
• Webcams have lower quality than a real video camera, but allow you to see yourself. This is a good tip. I never realized how much I move around, look around close my eyes when I’m thinking, uhhhh rub my nose and eyes and lick my lips. I am not a TV presence and definitely won’t be the next Gary Vaynerchuk (another reason for me to like audio, even though I have a voice for print).

Maybe to people smarter than me, all of this seems obvious, but this advice cut through so many podcasting obstacles for me. It’s absolutely huge. Thanks Andrew!

I just loved the service on keyword airlines!

Source: Skymall catalog on a recent Delta flight.

I’m sure this testimonial is 100% legitimate. I mean, your typical loving family peppers their speech with “keyword” when they can’t think of the exact word, right? And a company would never reuse a testimonial would they? Of course not!

I was really bored, so I picked up the in-flight gadget catalog and they had this ad for the coolest keyword ever! The family in the testimonial for the keyword made it sound so good, I just had to have one!

The Audience Problem

Like I say, not sure how much my thoughts are worth, since clearly they’re aiming at another audience. As in: I don’t do chat, IM, text messaging or any of that. I have long since trained my friends that I don’t often answer emails the same day I receive them (and long before I heard of Tim Ferris). The only immediate response thing I do is phone and skype and I only give my skype address out to family and a few friends and try to limit that. So it’s a bit hard for me to see how I would participate in Aardvark.

Conceptual level. The Big Idea level….

Here’s where they fail to make the sale to me and once they fail to make this sale, it’s an uphill battle for them to build trust through the rest of the process. The thing that is difficult for me to get around is that in my view there are personal and impersonal channels of communication.

• Personal: email, chat, skype, Facebook personal messaging, Twitter direct messagings. These are all messages from someone to me specifically and nobody else.
• Impersonal: Twitter posts, forums, Facebook wall, etc. These are messages that go from someone to the wide wide world. They’re not to me personally and uniquely.

I try to keep my personal channels free from impersonal messages. I have spamcatcher email addresses I use for things that blur the line, such as newsletters, mailing lists, signing up for accounts with BestBuy, Amazon and such. It strikes me that Aardvark is trying to use a personal channel (chat, email) to deliver an impersonal message. Yes, it is personalized — I only get messages that are supposed to be appropriate to me — but not personal, that is only to me. So that’s an adoption hurdle for me just as a concept.

The Registration Problem

They could overcome the personal/impersonal problem by using the registration process to allay fears and make the sale, but in my opinion, they do the opposite. Aardvark actually asks for quite a bit of information just to get started. I’m always skeptical of that and if I’m going to give away a lot of personal information about where I live and what I like, information that marketers will kill for (or worse yet, pay for). To give away all that information, it needs to meet one of two conditions, and preferably both:

• I need it. I may be a little uneasy about a site, but they have something that I absolutely need. I can’t do without it or I don’t want to do without it. They’re asking for personal details, but they’re offering something of great value.
• I trust them. There are a few sites that I trust implicitly with my information. I don’t give Amazon more than I have to, and they have only my spam catcher email address, but over the years they’ve built up great trust by not abusing my information. Often not-for-profits ask me to trust them because they have a great mission and are inherently good. Just like the government, if you catch my meaning. And if you don’t, that is to say that the government has been a poor steward of my privacy lately.

Typically, when I sign up for a new service that I don’t necessarily trust, I start by giving a spam catcher address and often a fake name (and almost always a fake birth date). If they want personally identifiable information,they need to build my trust either before, during or after the registration process.

I actually went all the way through the Aardvark registration process because I was asked by a friend to test it. I found it much too intrusive for a site that I had never heard of and knew little about. They have detailed information on how it works in theory, but nothing at all on what happens with my data, who can see it, and what control I would have over contact from people I know and don’t know.

An example

And then there are parts that I didn’t do anyway, even if invited by my friend…. Example: in general, I block all Facebook apps. I find all those snowballs fights, mafia, pirate stuff absurd and just a distraction to keeping in touch with family and friends. And I don’t collect Facebook friends. I try to keep it a personal channel as much as possible. If you we don’t have personal history together, you’re not on my Facebook list. When Aardvark offers to connect to Facebook, it’s still not clear to me exactly what’s going to happen, how it’s going to show up on Facebook, what my friends will see, and what exactly my benefit is. Ideally, exactly next to the Facebook connect button there should be a "what’s this?" or "how this works" link to a video that shows how it shows up in Facebook, what my friends will see, what benefits it offers and what hassles, if any, it imposes on my life. For me Facebook is a semi-personal channel and and I don’t want to annoy my friends and family that I keep in touch with via Facebook. Before I connect other data, I need to know that it won’t annoy my friends or affect my reputation.

A Broken Interface Erodes Trust

If I start setup, I can’t get to the welcome/home page any more or at least I couldn’t figure out how. It always brings me to the last spot I was in during setup like a pitbull that won’t let go. Clicking on the Aardvark at the top should always take me to the home page (a web interface standard that must not be broken), but it took me to the Facebook Connect page. So I’m not on Facebook (though I am) and it took me to the Add Categories page. But do I want to add categories? Again, are my categories and demographic info being shared with marketers? This type of behavior once again erodes trust. It makes the user feel trapped.

A recommendation

Think about every possible hesitation and catch me exactly at my hesitation point, like the suggestion to have an explanation about effects on privacy and such right next to the Facebook Connect button. I know of marketers who say they get much higher conversions when they have a popup link to their privacy policy right on the registration or order form, for example. That would help a lot.

Aardvark needs to think a bit more about the registration process if they want easy adoption beyond social networking true believers: what trust and social proof barriers might people perceive, figure out what the choke points are by keeping track of exactly where people abandon the process, figure out why, and take steps to fix it.

Online, trust is everything. In person, we have the idea that if something goes truly bad, we can go down to the business or local animal shelter or whatever and picket, protest, call the police, walk in with a lawyer. It doesn’t mean I trust those businesses. They often ask for a phone number at transaction time and I simply say no. But I do have the assurance that I can come down and find these people.

Trust is harder to build online and must be cultivated carefully and persistently at every possible occasion. There is no such thing as paying to much attention to building trust, and Aardvark needs to pay more attention.

Back in the 1980s, I hitchhiked thousands of miles to find work, go rock climbing and visit relatives. After working the fish processing plants in Alaska, dressed in worn military surplus clothing, toting a large backpack and sporting a beard, I was not optimally groomed for hitchhiking success. I spent over eight hours by the side of the road waiting for a ride on many occasions and got picked up by a variety of somewhat unstable characters, including a nice old grandfatherly man who at one point was waving a gun about complaining about all the Californians invading Oregon. I never had a really bad ride, though and was only conditionally threatened with death ("If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you"). That seemed fair (I wasn’t planning to fuck with him) and he turned out to be quite a nice guy for someone only six months out of prison.

Over time I figured out some rules for successful hitching that turn out to be some pretty good rules for life, though I think I might need to remind myself of the lesson a bit more forcefully.

1. The slowest, most dangerous way to hitchhike is to stand by the side of the road with your thumb out hoping someone takes pity on you and stops to help.
2. The fastest, safest, most effective way to hitchhike is to go to places where travellers are already stopped, and pitch your case.
3. Looking dangerous puts you in danger.

If it’s not obvious why this is so and how it applies elsewhere, let me just ask this:

• Is buying from your online store as difficult as stopping a speeding car on a road without an adequate pullout for a total stranger who looks dangerous?
• Did you get your last job by waiting around for someone to post a position that matched your qualifications?

Some Commentary for Slow Learners

Let me explain a little more about how this works. Rather than standing by the side of the road, find a place like a gas station right off the highway. Approach someone and say "Excuse me, sorry to bother you. I’m trying to get to SomeCity. I’d be happy to help with the gas [unless you're really, really broke] if you’d be willing to let me ride along."

• Take control of the decision. If you stand by the side of the road with your thumb out, you have turned over the choice of whom you’ll ride with to random psychopaths passing in cars. Don’t let the psychopaths decide. Ask for help, rather than waiting for someone to offer. Donate to a political campaign early, before the big money psychopaths have chosen someone who meets their needs. Aside from his first job out of college, my brother has convinced every company he’s worked for to create the position they hired him into. I pretty much liquated everything and took on debt because the most important thing to me was to become a historian. Within two years I was eeking out a living and getting paid to do exactly the sort of research I wanted, despite only taking one history course in college. Lately, though, I’m disappointed in myself. I feel like I’ve been doing too much standing by the side of the road and not enough going to parking lots. I signed up to give a talk way outside my field in November. We’ll see how that goes.
• Make it easy for people to help you. I see a lot of people hitching where traffic is moving fast, there’s no decent pullout and I don’t get a long look at them. If they’re already stopped, you’ve taken away one impediment to letting you onboard. How hard is it to keep my foot on the gas compared to stopping? How hard is it to go back to Google for another search instead of trying to navigate your impossible website?
• Make a connection.You might think, "They can’t know I’m not a psychopath just by one sentence at a gas station." That’s true, but they can sense normalcy, they can see you up close, they can tell you’re not stinking drunk. Or just plain stinking. That’s already a huge boost over someone that they’re trying to glimpse by the side of the road at 50mph. Your one sentence is a chance to show you’re polite and respectful ("Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you") and your chance to persuade ("I’d be happy to help with the gas" powerfully invokes the principle of reciprocity — you’ve offered to help, so they’ll want to help too). That may not be enough to overcome their resistance to letting a stranger in the car, but it’s a lot more persuasive than sticking your thumb out. This is universal. Nothing makes people feel as good as helping someone out. Studies have shown that over the long term, most people get a bigger boost in happiness by giving gifts than by receiving them. If you make a connection, people will want to help you, and that could mean giving you a ride or buying from your store. I just made an unplanned purchase for $78 in the store next to the ice cream shop, because the people in there connected to me.
• Dress for Success or Birds of a feather flock together. If you look grungy, dirty and dangerous, you’ll get picked up by people who see that as normal. Your goal is to appear normal to the people your prospective ride. That doesn’t mean you necessarily want to look like your clients. You want to look like someone they can trust in this situtation. People in suits and ties don’t want mechanics in suits and ties.

In physics, power is work per unit time. Knowledge increases efficiency, but it doesn’t do anything all by itself. If I have only knowledge, nothing great happens. But as I increase my knowledge, I add a little more length to the pry bar. If I have enough pertinent knowledge, I have a huge bar. Perhaps with that lever and enough effort and persistence and courage, I can move the world. But with just a big lever, nothing happens.

I’ve spent most of my life as a scholar, believing it was the lever that mattered. It took me until my 40s to figure out that lever is just one piece.

As we left, my mother gave me a lesson that has resulted in me getting my way more times than I can count in the intervening 36 years. She said "Most people naturally want to help you and the trick is to make that easy for them. You can always yell later, but you start with a yell, you can never take it back."

Sometimes, though, it’s just satisfying to yell, even when you know it’s not in anybody’s best interest. I did it yesterday for the first time in a very long time. I’m still trying to decide whether or not it felt good.

• 1. United States
  • 3. California
  • 4. Vermont
• 2. Canada
  • 5. Alberta

I want it so that if I tag something as California (term 3), it also gets tagged as United States (term 1). The Hierarchical Select module does this, and much more, but it has conflicts with other Drupal modules I want to use, so I just gave up on it.

Finally, I realized that I could simply turn it around and solve this on the data retrieval end, rather than the data storage end. In Drupal, if you enter a standard Drupal path like /taxonomy/term/1, that shows only nodes tagged as United States, but /taxonomy/term/1/all shows all nodes tagged United States and all nodes tagged with child terms.

I’m trying to build a drill-down directory of professional ski instructors (emphasis on trying — it’s still pretty rudimentary now and doesn’t yet have any instructors really). I realized that I could use the Advanced Taxonomy Blocks module to navigate for the drill down and was looking to create an add-on module or a patch for the module so that I could have it add the “all” to the end of the URL. Then I saw this in the settings:

All you have to do is add the /all to the end of the path. It’s built right in to the module settings (go to /admin/settings/taxonomyblocks and click Configure).

So much thanks to Aaron Hawkins, an awesome drupal developer, for this simple way around my problem.

So now I ask you, “What else should I look at besides the awesome look of KillerThemeCSS?” Here are some things I’ve already looked at. Please add to them or correct my foolishness if I’m just plain looking at something the wrong way.

These are in the order the popped into my head, not necessarily in order of importance (and to some extent the importance will be determined by the degree to which they fail any of these tests).

Content code near the top

Do I really have to look at the code? I hope not. I’m a little worried, because I don’t really know HTML but even so, when I opened it up with View Source, the source was 10 screenfuls long and the main headline for the page was on the ninth screen. Is that a problem?

(Okay, this is not as big a problem as it used to be because the search engines have gotten better at figuring out what’s unique and what’s just repeated “service” content like navigational links and disclaimers and such. Look at the source code for a Google results page and you’ll see they certainly aren’t worrying as much about clean code either. But it’s still better not to confuse Google too much).

Proper use of H1 and H2

So someone told me it’s good to put my page headline in an H1 tag. But when I was looking at the source in the last step, I couldn’t find one? Is that a problem?

(This is unbelievably common and this post was actually prompted because I just looked at a “premium” paid theme that had no h1 or h2 on the front page and no h1 on the content pages).

What’s “above the fold” mean?

I love that stunning header image. It’s crisp, it’s clean, it looks professional and really catches the eye. And it had better catch the eye, because for users who don’t have the mega big monitor that the designer has, that’s all they’ll see because it takes up most of the screen. Is that bad?

(I’m exaggerating a bit, but there seems to be an increasing vogue for themes with such big headers that there’s hardly any content at all above the fold, that is, hardly any meaningful content visible to a user on an average monitor without scrolling).

Color and Contrast

My new theme with grey type on a black background looks awesome dude. Cool. Suave. Perfect for my edgy new music site. Except that nobody on a Mac can read it because their different gamma settings make it more like black on black. Is that a problem? And I really love the emphatic RED TYPE in the green sidebar. Many of my visitors are red-green color blind, so the only way they can see it is by doing “select all”. Is that a problem? I tried this just for kicks. I took a screenshot and loaded it into Photoshop (or was it Irfanview?).
– Converted it to greyscale. I couldn’t read a thing, but nobody has a black and white monitor, so this isn’t a problem right?
– Then I played with the contrast, brightness and gamma (in “levels” on Photoshop; under “Enhance colors” in Irfanview). When I got the gamma up to 1.30 or down to .70 I couldn’t tell my form buttons from the background, but nobody’s monitor is that far different from mine is it?

Font size

I love that font they use and how efficient it is at really packing information onto the page, though it is a bit of a hassle trying to read and hold a magnifying glass at the same time. So I hit CTRL-+ on Firefox and… and… it doesn’t resize. That should be okay though, right because everyone has the same screen resolution as I do and my target audience is all under 40, so they all have good eyes. That’s a safe assumption, right?

All screens wide and small

Hey, it’s a fluid design. That’s awesome! I heard that was the best way to go. It uses all my screen real estate and looks great at 800px and at 1024px. It’s a little hard to read at 1200px because the lines are sort of long. But nobody really opens their browser full screen at 1200px do they? And all those visitors in my logs with 1680px widescreen monitor have their browsers open at a reasonable size, right? They won’t get headaches and lose their place because my lines are 250 characters long, will they? And I don’t worry about those iPhone users because I checked my logs and they only visit one page and leave anyway, so I don’t really need to be concerned with them do I?

(Fluid is okay, but it can’t just let the content area expand up to any line length until it becomes unreadable. It can allow longer line lengths in terms pixels when it has bigger text — so if you’re going for variable line lengths, better to use ems, not pixels. It can allow wider display by rearranging elements at certain break points and intelligently using the screen — that’s the more sophisticated and more rare Switchy McLayout approach.

But with the growing prevalence of widescreens, an infinitely expandable center content area at a small font size is not good. At the same time, the mobile market has increased a lot too [candid admission: and I ignore it completely]. More and more there’s no such thing as a standard screen size and a higher and higher percentage of viewers will have very large (1600px+ wide) or very small (400px or less wide) screens. At least try one of the extremes depending on what your target audience is likely to be. The truth is, I don’t build to be mobile-friendly, but I’m seeing that the time has come, perhaps past, when you can get away with this without taking a hit).

Do Javascript and Flash degrade gracefully?

So I love how this theme has AJAX this and that and sIFR headlines that looks so crisp since standard HTML+CSS doesn’t give you anti-aliased fonts. Awesome. But when I looked at it while running the Firefox NoScript plugin, which blocks Flash and Javascript, well, the headlines were completely messed up and the navigation didn’t work and I can’t make comments or anything. Do people really surf without Flash and Jacascript? Is this something I should worry about?

(You used to have to count on losing 10% of your audience if your site required Javascript. Now so many popular sites are enhanced by Javascript, that the numbers of those opting out are dropping some, but there will always be some security conscious visitors who will opt out. Best practice is to opt for a progressive enhancement model, where the site works without Javascript, but it adds a lot of useful features if available.).

Is there a separate CSS file or section of a file for MY styles?

The theme has a hodge-podge of CSS files and I can’t figure out where I need to go to change anything. Is that a problem?

(Maybe or maybe not, depending on your skill and your needs. Some themes are made to be customized and some are not. I like themes that by default include an extra CSS file. Yep, that’s one more file to download, but you might be able to get around that once you go live (Drupal allows you to combine all the files once the development phase is over and cache it as a single, albeit hugely bloated, CSS file) and modern browsers allow more concurrent connections so in the future you may be better off with more small files rather than one big one anyway, even without taking browser caching into account. Once you have it tweaked in your prototype, you can always put it into one small, light CSS file to bring bandwidth down.

The advantage of this system, is that you can make any changes you want to that last file, the one with just your CSS rules, and override the distribution files. Then if the developers find that the theme itself has cross-browser or even security problems, you can move up to the next version of the theme without losing your changes. Also, new versions of the CMS may require new versions of the theme and by compartmentalizing your changes, the upgrade process will be simpler. Even if you do combine files in the end, you’ll have that file with the core changes you made to get your original look, so you can fall back on that if you upgrade.)

Validation

I just ran my site through the W3C HTML validator and got 132 errors. Is that a problem?

(Maybe. It can be hard to find a CMS and theme that actually passes HTML and CSS validation. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one is that modules often generate code and there is generally not a system for a module to find out what the theme DOCTYPE is. So if the theme is XHTML and the module expects HTML and throws out an tag without closing it ( or ) then it won’t validate. Also, since it’s hard to force users to input valid HTML, most CMSes stipulate a transitional DOCTYPE, not strict. Finally, a single affiliate banner from Commission Junction can trigger tons of errors and that’s the fault of nobody but the affiliate network.

I won’t get into the strict/transitional, html/xhtml debate here, but it is reasonable to expect that a theme, running stripped down with only core modules/plugins and validated content, should conform to whatever DOCTYPE the theme author specifies. Ideally, it should validate to the strict version of that DOCTYPE under that situation, though I might want to actually run it as transitional because of the issues with user-generated content. That said, those who tell you validation matters for ranking in Google are blowing smoke. The vast majority of websites don’t validate and so Google does not take validation into account per se, but only secondary effects, like truly broken code that it can’t parse out in order to figure out what the point of your page is and where the links go. It has to be really broken for that.)

Whoa! My Head’s Spinning. Can’t I Hire Someone?

Okay, confession time. I was possessed by an evil demon who channeled through my fingers and I have pretty much no clue what half of that stuff I typed up there means. What I really need is for someone who can just make those changes for me if they’re necessary.

I think I’m only going to use themes designed by freelance designers who are actually out there for hire and looking for work, because as it turns out, most of the hobbyists who design themes are too damn busy with the rest of their lives to even answer my emails and wouldn’t consider working for hire because they care more about spending time with their kids than the $150 I’m willing to give them.

Looking forward to you advice. PS My boss needs our site up and running tomorrow.

Since this is a long review of my trials and travails with Live Mesh, let me give a little summary at the top for the impatient types and the pros and cons of Live Mesh.

Live Mesh pros

• Synchronization through your internet connection, so it does not depend on the reliability of your home network.
• Real-time synchronization that works in the background so you don’t have to remember to sync.
• Off-site storage (5GB) so you can actually sync while one computer is off.

Live Mesh negatives

• Data integrity and potential data loss. Live Mesh doesn’t use a transactional model, or anything close, and deletes data willy nilly while it sorts out your supposed conflicts (see the "Cardinal Sin" section at the end).
• Performance. Synchronization through an internet connection is very slow. It will take days to synchronize an amount of data that you will synch in minutes through the local connection.
• System performance. My system ground to a halt while Live Mesh ran, eventually getting to the point where it took over four minutes to launch Word. It normally takes under two seconds.
• System stability. After a couple of days, both computers running Mesh started to experience major issues. Application crashes, system instability and lockups, system crashes. These computers were formerly quite stable and restabilized as soon as I removed Live Mesh.
• Phantom conflicts. I created perfect mirrors in the file systems for the folders I was planning to synch. Same files, same timestamps. Mesh flagged almost every one of them as a conflict. I’m not sure how Mesh determines whether or not there’s a conflict, but there is a serious problem with the algorithm. The two other synch/compare tools I ran found no conflicts.

Bottom Line

A friend is running Live Mesh with great success so I know it can work for some people, but for me it was a disaster. I have previously depended on two excellent, stable and reliable tools, Allway Sync and Beyond Compare, and I’m back to using those and that’s what I still recommend. Live Mesh has, in my opinion, fundamental architecture flaws that simply can’t be solved by any number of bug fixes. I’d like to see a product like Live Mesh, but properly implemented.

My Live Mesh Saga in Detail

So, this long saga of my Live Mesh trial (in at least two sense of that word) may try the average reader. If you want the real meat of it, skip to the Cardinal Sin section at the end.

The Problem

The hard part is keeping the computers in synch. For normal daily syncs, I have been using Allway Sync, which is a great product. For more complicated syncs and anything involving synching a local machine with data on a server, I use Beyond Compare, which is a file/directory comparison tool, but has some great synchronization tools (I need to review these, because they’re worth knowing about). The Achilles heel of Allway Sync and Beyond Compare, and almost every similar tool, is that they depend on my local network. Unfortunately networking my Windows XP Home computer and my Vista Home Premium computer is an exercise in frustration, with the Vista computer unable to see the XP computer ever, and the XP computer losing the connection to the Vista computer frequently. Also, these syncs only happen when I remember to do them, rather than happening in the background. That means I don’t waste system resources on background processes, but I could get caught with my data down, so to speak.

Enter Live Mesh

In theory, Live Mesh would solve both of the problems. It does it’s synching through the regular internet connection and it synchs files whenever a file is created or modified. For the first 5GB of data, it also stores the data on your Live Mesh Desktop, which is on a remote Microsoft server. 5GB is kind of laughable by today’s standards (I commonly file a 4GB photo card on a weekend hike), but it’s more than zero. Then finally, Live Mesh includes a remote desktop tool that gives you access, upon approval, from one computer to the other, and unlike the solutions that run over the local network, it worked from the Vista machine to the XP machine as well as the other way. Sounds like a great solution. And it’s a Microsoft product. I know for many people that means run for the hills, but I figured if anyone should be able to get something to work stably with the two latest Miscrosoft operating systems, it should be Microsoft. Figure again.

Getting Started — Initial Quibbles

I found getting Live Mesh up and running rather unintitive. Before installing it, I had done an up to the minute sync and so I knew both file sets were identical. It took some playing around to figure out how to tell Mesh which folders to match with which folders. On two machines with identical file structures, that might not be a problem, but since XP has My This and My That (e.g. My Documents) and Vista has just This and That (e.g. Documents) the file paths do not line up. So what Mesh likes to do is create a new folder on the target machine desktop that correlates to the source folder on the machine you’re working on.

The trick is that when you add a folder to Mesh on one machine, tell it to synch with the other machine (or was it not synch?). Then go to the target machine, right click the light blue folder on the desktop and tell Mesh which local folder to match that to. If the folder is dark blue, it’s too late, you can’t change it and you have to delete the Mesh folders and start over again. And again. I repeated this several times before I got it right. If that sounds confusing and unnecessarily complex for what should obviously be the simplest use case and primary task for Mesh, you’re starting to get why this is not a positive review. Eventually, though, I got all that figured out after much trial and error and Mesh started its work.

And then I started looking for missing features I had come to expect from Allway Sync

• File masks — omit certain types of files from my synch because I don’t want to copy, for example, shortcuts from one machine to another because XP and Vista have different file paths. Live Mesh is all or nothing.
• Folder masks — omit some subfolders from synch. I keep my archived backups, for example, only on the desktop (and external hard drive). Again, Live Mesh is all or nothing.
• Force a synch — this isn’t part of the Mesh paradigm. It’s real-time synching. The thing is, 90% of the time when I use the laptop, I don’t have an internet connection. So when I’m getting ready to head up to the mountain house for a few days, I like to force a quick synch before I head out the door. In theory, Mesh is up to date at all times, but that’s only true if you have a connection between the machines at all times. That might be good for an office worker who is synching with colleagues or a file server, but it’s not my situation.

Signs of Trouble

Now, if these two machines are in synch, it takes Allway or Beyond Compare about 5 minutes to run the analysis and generate a report. Unless I’ve just uploaded 10GB of photos or unzipped some massive open source application with thousands of files, the actual synch takes a couple of minutes. Usually I allow ten minutes total, but half of that if I know they’re basically already mirroring each other.

So Mesh started working. I expected that the internet synch over 1.5Mbps DSL would be slower than over the local network, but I was completely unprepared for this. Even though the folders in question were identical, Mesh was working for days and there is no progress indicator, so I had no idea whatsoever whether or not I was even getting close. Granted, I was synching about 50GB of data, but every file was bit for bit identical with identical timestamps. How hard could this be?

Then It Gets Bad: Crashes, Slowdowns and Conflict Hell

Apparently, really hard. As Live Mesh ground away, my Vista computer became progressively slower and less stable. Applications crashed. Live Mesh crashed and had to be restarted several times. It got to the point where I couldn’t work. I counted four minutes and two seconds to launch Word. And it wasn’t Word’s fault. Every app started behaving like that. And Word started to get a little crazy and at one point I could not save documents. Even closing and reopening Word (four minutes remember), I could not save a document. Finally, I shut Mesh off temporarily and Word sprang back to life, launching in under two seconds, but I actually had to reboot to get file-saving abilities back. So I decided I could only let Mesh run while I wasn’t actually doing anything. Eventually, though, Mesh crashed and would not restart on the Vista machine.

Meanwhile, it was cranking along the laptop and I decided to let it run and see what woud happen. What happened is I started getting notifications that I was out of disk space and that computer was crashing too. Now, I only had 22GB of free space on that machine, but since I was not adding one single byte of data, I figured that would be okay. Not quite. In two days, Mesh had brought down two computers, both of which had run reliably for years.

So clearly, I had to get Mesh off my system and uninstall it. So I did. That was easy enough. Now I had to figure out how to get things back the way they were. The first thing I noticed is I had a Live Mesh folder on my desktop. I looked inside and it had a subfolder labelled “conflicts”. Hmm… that’s interesting. Why would there be any conflicts? I wonder what’s in there. Answer: thousands of files. A total of something like 18GB of zip-compressed data. Now, that’s enough for me to damn Live Mesh to the Seventh Circle of Software Hell. Why is it finding conflicts when the data is bit-for-bit identical, has the same hash, and has the same timestamp? I mean, for God’s sake, what other tests are there? What possible conflict is there?

Essentially, Live Mesh saw every single file it analyzed as a conflict, and that was what was filling up my disk — when it sees a conflict, it puts a zipped copy of the file in a Live Mesh folder to await resolution (or so I thought). So I deleted that folder to get the XP machine running again.

The Cardinal Sin: Not Respecting Data Integrity

Then I fired up Allway Sync to analyze the disks in case Mesh had changed any data. Oh, my naiveté! Thousands and thousands of deleted and new files. So then I fired up trusty Beyond Compare for a little more analysis. It turns out that every time Live Mesh had found a conflict it had deleted one copy and moved, not copied, that file to the Conflicts folder. In the meantime, it had created thousands of placeholder files with the name filename.ext.xlp.

I don’t think I lost any data, because Mesh keeps one copy and deletes the other, but I had to go through and delete thousands of *.xlp files and then essentially move 27GB of data (the uncompressed size of the 18GB of compressed conflicts) from the computer that still had a copy to the one that didn’t (not always the same).

So here’s the cardinal sin: any data synch like this should be as transactional as possible. In SQL, you can group operations into transactions, which means that a set of operations fails if any individual operation fails. Here’s an example. When you go to the ATM machine and ask for money, the transaction looks like this:

• Request money from account
• Debit account for amount
• Spit bills out the slot
• Roll up the transaction

If the machine fails to give you the bills, the transaction fails, the debit gets rolled back and you don’t have to prove you didn’t get your money. The financial system and any system that depends on having the data right depends on a transactional model.

The key principle is data integrity. You can get a lot wrong in an application, but you shouldn’t screw up the data integrity part. So in my opinion, the fatal and fundamental flaw of the Live Mesh architecture is that it does a poor job of maintaining data integrity. Now, data synch can’t be fully transactional, because if the connection dies, you can end up unable to roll the transaction back. But, the placeholder files that mark the fact that Mesh has flagged a conflict should be in the Live Mesh/conflicts folder and the original data should be left intact for as long as possible. In other words, it should identify the conflict, which presumably requires user intervention of some sort, and do nothing to the data until it has instructions from the user. The Desktop/Live Mesh/conflicts folder should hold the placeholders and leave the original files alone until the last possible moment. To go around deleting my data and creating placeholder files in my data folders merely to mark the existence of a conflict is borderlin criminal!

So for me, the broad outlines and concept for Live Mesh is interesting, but the implementation is so fundamentally flawed that I don’t think any amount of bug fixes could redeem it and convince me to use it and I can’t recommend it.

I was looking to buy a copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student Edition. I looked at my favorite places: Tiger Direct, Amazon, BestBuy and decided to have a look at EBay, though I’m always a little leery of EBay. It had what looked like a legitimate copy from a legitimate seller. It was a UK seller, with almost 500 sales and over a 98% positive rating. The description said the item was a retail copy, not OEM, which was important to me because the retail version can be legally installed on three machines, but the OEM version is only for one machine. Everything looked good, but I was still skeptical. Finally, one thing tipped the balance: it was guaranteed by Paypal Buyer Protection. I’m a fan of Paypal, so it seemed like a good bet.

A day later, I got notification that my software had shipped. The email was funny — several characters that wouldn’t render. Uh oh. So I clicked the tracking info and it was shipping from Shanghai! Okay, could be a drop shipper, but it wasn’t looking good. I logged into my EBay account and all trace of the purchase had been wiped clean. The seller account was gone. All information about my purchase was gone. Double uh oh.

So I call EBay. They can’t help because the seller has been kicked out and they won’t arbitrate at this point. They tell me I will have to wait until the item arrives and then take it up with Paypal if there’s a problem.

The item arrives and it’s a recordable DVD with a handwritten product code on it. I call Paypal and they will not cover it until I return it. I’m livid. This person is an obvious criminal without a let to stand on. If I had put it on my credit card, I would cancel my charge and end of story. With Paypal, not only do I need to return the item, I need to return it with tracking. As it turns out, the cheapest way of tracking the item will only track it out of the US, but not to the seller’s door. To do that, I would need to spend more than the cost of a the software at Amazon.

Alas, it’s a sunk costs question. No way to recoup my money. So I went back to Amazon and bought it there. Brand new, retail version, three licesnes that validated with Microsoft. Only about $5 more than the Chinese ripoff artist.

Lessons learned:

• Never buy software on EBay. There’s just no way to tell unless it’s a merchant you know.
• Avoid Paypal for online purchases and use a real credit card with reasonable dispute policies
• Scammers are making brands more powerful and making it hard for small merchants to make a living on the web.

It’s graduation season, but alas, once again, none of the fine high schools of America, or elsewhere, has asked me to bestow my great wisdom on their graduates. I’m not sure how such a thing could have happened yet again this year.

This season brings back the painful memory of the two valedictorian speeches at my high school graduation. One argued that life is like a mountain. We climb up and up, meeting new challenges, always rising higher. The other spoke about how life is like flying an airplane, we climb up and up, meeting new challenges, always rising higher. Those two speeches, and their strange resemblance to each other, pretty much encapsulate everything I hated about my high school years.

I’m not saying I’m a sage. I’m not saying anyone should follow my advice. Especially not with respect to money. But I think I can do better than "Life is an airplane." And just because I’m horrible at taking my own advice, does not make it bad advice.

So here’s what I would tell a crowd of restless high school students, veins coursing with hormones and minds and bodies, itching to get this over with and get on to the graduation party.

Welcome Graduates

Welcome,

Parents, grandparents, teachers and, above all, the Class of 2009 [pause for exuberant, self-congratulatory, cheers and applause].

I know some of you are asking how this dashing, exuberant youth before you could possibly have any wisdom to impart. To you, I say that I am here not for you, but for your grandchildren. They are the ones you have humiliated by forcing them to wear those silly hats and gowns and who, only seconds into what will, I’m sorry to say, be a long address, are already nudging their neighbor and saying "That old guy is boring."

Boring I may be and certainly no wiser than your grandparents and parents and teachers, but since you won’t listen to them, I have been recruited in a last ditch effort to repeat the same old saws you’ve heard many times these last 17 or so years. But don’t worry, this will all be over in less time than it takes to watch the Lords of the Rings movies. The director’s cut.

I have a few things I’d like to impart to you, the graduates of the Class of 2009 (pause for self-congratulatory cheers). Some are things I’ve learned through hard experience. Most of them are things I made up yesterday when they told me that they told me I had a full two hours this afternoon. In no particular order, here are eight things I wish I had known at your age, rather than waiting until yesterday to make them up.

1. Write Your Biography Now

You have a summer before you. Write your biography, but don’t stop at 17. Go to 70. It may seem early to write your biography, especially for the years you haven’t lived yet, but everyone is telling you who they think you should be. By everyone, I mean television ads, inane magazines at the supermarket, teachers and parents, friends and enemies. Take some time and sit down and write the biography you want to be able to write when you’re seventy. Record now the life you hope you will have lived. What will you have done? Who will you have been? Who will you have loved? Where will you have lived? Feel no need to stick to the boring details of your actual life. I certainly haven’t in my biography [originally, by the way, I had thought Raised By Turtles would be a place for people to exchange such biographies, and that's where it got its name ("I was raised by turtles"), but I never quite figured out how I would get people to do it].

This biography is not, in the end, a blueprint, a plan, a roadmap or a tick list. What it is, is a safe spot. It’s the place you can go to remember who you are and who you should be when your tin foil hat falls off and you get confused by those messages the government is beaming into your head.

2. There Is No Plan.

Why isn’t your biography a plan? Because there is no plan. There is value in planning for the long-term, which is fundamentally planning for uncertainty and varied outcomes. That’s different from thinking you can predict the future and make a step-by-step long-range planning. When you make a plan, you exclude the things that have a one in a thousand chance of happening. But played out over thousands of options, sometimes the one in a thousand chance will come to pass and your plan is out the window. If every five years since I was 15, I had predicted where I would be living and what sort of work I’d be doing, I would have have been wrong on one or both counts every single time. You’ve heard of Plan B? I think I’m on Plan BB now, having already gone through the whole alphabet once. Or twice.

That should be liberating. You don’t have to know now what you will become. You’ll work it out as you go mostly. One of the most dangerous myths foisted upon you is the idea that you should know today who you will be and what you will be doing (particularly what type of job) in twenty years. In addition to being dangerous, it’s ridiculous.

I’ll wager this: the adults that you really admire did not become what their sixteen year-old selves thought they would become (in my case, a medical doctor). My father was a university athletic director who had trained to be a math teacher, a fighter pilot and a health researcher, but never an athletic director. When I was 23 and anguished by the prospect of trying to plan my future, he said as only a father can "Remind me, how old are you now?" and then said "If someone had told me when I was 23 that I would end my career as an athletic director, I would have laughed. Just keep trying new things until you find something that excites you or you’re old enough to collect Social Security." That works for me.

Make plans. Have goals. But don’t be too upset when you have to scratch them and start over.

3. Life Takes Patience and Persistence.

I just made it sound like it’s no big deal to cast aside goals and plans, but it is. All I meant to say is that it was necessary, not that it was easy. Lou Reed says:

You’ve got to be very strong,
Because you start from zero
Over and over again.

Most great things are achieved not with brilliance, but with persistence and patience. That’s good news, because unlike genius and innate talent, those are things we learn, not things that we have to be born with. So they’re available to all of us.

Having patience does not mean sitting around waiting for something wonderful to happen miraculously, out of thin air. It means working the hard work and getting your hands dirty and sticking to it as the seed grows bit by bit until finally, something wonderful pokes through the soil. But when it doesn’t, when Plan A fails, you need persistence, because you start from zero, over and over again. The most powerful metaphor I’ve known in life is that of the phoenix, the bird that burns to ash and rises again stronger and renewed. It runs through my mind whenever I face hard times and setbacks. Sometimes in life, you need to burn like the phoenix before you can rise again and for that, you’ve got to be very strong.

4. Life gets easier.

Patience? Persistence? That makes life sound nasty, brutish and long. But in truth, for most people, life gets easier as you move from childhood to adulthood. That’s the secret that adults hate to tell kids. In fact, they constantly try to make you believe it’s the other way around.

In third grade they started telling me I wouldn’t be able to get away with that when I got to fourth grade, where we would get letter grades, the threat of which was supposed to shake me to my bones.Then they threatened me with the specter of not being able to get away with that in middle school, then high school, then college and then with the most ominous threat of all, the "real world". Nobody ever clearly defined what that was, but it was always something vaguely related to my laziness, incompetence, poor penmanship, inability to sit still in class or some other supposed deficit of mine that, in the end, never once hurt me in any way shape or form in the supposed real world.

That’s just me. I can’t guarantee that life will get easier for all of you, but the part they don’t tell you is that in general, the tools you have to work with and the freedom you have with which to use them will increase in much greater proportion than the tasks you’re given. So yes, you’ll be expected to do five times more and to do it five or fifty times as well, but by the time that expectation is placed on you, it will actually be easier than what you’re being asked to do now. If an adult in your life scoffs at this idea, ask if he or she wants to trade places. I guarantee none of them will. They’ll tell you "if only I could" but they are not being even remotely honest.

And adults in the audience, I have a request. I don’t know why so many of you have decided it’s your duty to fill the next generation with pessimism and foreboding for the future. Do me one favor: please, help them get started. Then get out of their way and let them create their future. They’re the ones that have to live there.

5. You Are More Free Than You Know.

It’s difficult for me to watch kids being told not to do things that their parents do. Really? That food is bad for them, but not for you? Me, I lead by example. The other day my wife and I were passing by the Lake Champlain Chocolates store in Waterbury, Vermont. Since they have the best chocolate ice cream in the universe, we decided to have chocolate ice cream for dinner. Being a grown up is great.

Sadly, most people don’t know how free they are. Much of what they see as natural and obligatory is just a set of circumstances handed to them because of where they live and who they know. When I was a few years older than you, I had the chance to meet Michel Foucault, one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century. He gave me something valuable that I keep with me at all times and which I bring out in times of need. Now I’m going to give it to you. What he gave me was an idea. He said "The purpose of my work is to show people how free they are." When you feel boxed in, you can pull that out too and remember how free you are.

It doesn’t mean you can be anything you want. Adults, please stop parotting that claptrap at young people. Some things are impossible or so difficult that only the foolhardy would even try. Some things require innate talents you don’t have. You can’t play pro basketball if you’re 5′2" and 120 pounds and you can’t be a pro jockey if you’re 6′10 and 280 pounds. Do not believe the snake oil salesmen who tell you that can do anything. You can’t. Being free doesn’t mean you’re God, Superman, Einstein or a shapeshifter.

But too many people see compulsion where they should be see choice. Consider two people:

• One says "I wish I could go skiing tomorrow, but my boss won’t let me".
• The other says "It would be fun to go skiing tomorrow, but I value my job more than a day of skiing."

One sees nefarious, external forces at work (the boss). The other sees a personal choice. One sees constraint. The other sees decision. We, as Americans in the 21st century, are unlikely to be sold into bondage. We lose our freedom in our minds. Never forget how free you are.

6. These Are Probably Not the Best Years of Your Life

Why do we tell people who are 17 to "enjoy it, these are the best years of your life"? That was actually the line they used to try to sell me a yearbook when I was your age. It seemed ridiculous to me then and now it makes me sad to think of the kids who believed it, who believed that at 17 years old their best years were behind them. Screw that. My grandmother told me her eighties were her best years, and not because the ones before that were especially bad. Her eighties were especially good. Let’s just stop and think about that for a second [pause].

If your high school years have been great, think how lucky you are. Even better years probably await and it’s way more fun to believe that anyway. If your high school years have been miserable, don’t despair just yet. Lots of happy, well-adjusted, successful adults with great friends and wonderful spouses and children were miserable in high school. How happy you are in high school is not a good predictor of how happy you’ll be as an adult.

If you have felt awkward, possibly miserable, these last years, don’t worry, you have a lot more company than you think. For the vast majority of you, better years are ahead. It’s dramatically easier as you get older to find a circle, a group, a tribe that you belong to. Just because you can’t be anything you want, doesn’t mean that the doors of possibility are not about to be thrown wide open.

7. Fear Is the Mind Killer

I stole that title from Frank Herbert’s Dune, a story about Paul Atreides, a boy who becomes a God. Your future is not nearly scary as his, but trying new things is a scary business. Remember this: the things that you fear the most will rarely if ever come to pass. Everyone repeat after me: "The things I fear the most, will rarely if ever come to pass." [repeat until crowd says it] You will worry and you will fret and you will at times be paralyzed with fear, and most of the time, nothing bad will ever happen. Remember that while you’re remembering how free you are.

8. Do What You Love, But The Money Probably Won’t Follow

I don’t know why adults insist on telling kids that if you do what you love, the money will follow. For the overwhelming majority of human beings on the planet, that is not true. In most times and places, the idea that the thing you love the most would also bring you enough money to live on wasn’t even reasonable. Most people will have to make a choice. If your passion is medecine, law or business, you might be able to have it all. Me, I loved history and I have been able to support myself as a historian in some form or another since 1989, though the first years were real lean. I’ve made a living, but it would be hard to say "the money followed". God forbid I should have loved to write poetry or spend my days fly fishing or playing basketball or writing a blog and hoped to make a living doing one of those. Perhaps for every 100,000 boys who love basketball, one makes a living at it as a pro. And let’s be clear here, you’re one of the 99,999. And that’s okay.

For the most part, if you are like 99% of humanity, your job simply will not be something you love. You can still do the things you love. You’ll spend less than half your waking life at work. So do what you love. But it need not be your job. Almost nobody can make a living writing poetry. But it doesn’t mean you can’t be plumber and a poet.

Last Words

I know I was supposed to tell you that life is wonderful, a world of possibility lies before you and you can do anything. I think my closing words were supposed to be "And now go out and change the world". That seems to be the standard script. Well, you can’t do anything, but it is true that the range of possibility stretches beyond your imagination and mine. You will change the world, but only a little bit. Still, try to change it just a little for the better if it’s all the same to you. And life is wonderful. But sometimes it’s hard too.

But I’m an optimist. I think a world in which you can both make a living and do what you love is a pretty good place, even if you can’t do both at the same time.

And now one last thing: take the rest of the afternoon off. Remember, life takes patience. Pace yourself.