Speed Hump Me?
...but no.
Every now and then, it actually strikes me as odd how my much life has become one defined primarily by multitudes of overlapping rectangles containing an nearly infinite but ephemeral stream of tiny meandering thoughts sent seemingly from a universe away by my little square friends often to no one in particular and apropos of nothing.
And then I get back work...
Just me, my furry office mate and my tiny little square friends. What an ultramodern, fantastical and lonely little world we've made for ourselves.
- Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be skeptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
- Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
- It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
- Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
- Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
- Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
- Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
- Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
- Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
- Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
From the end of this article, "Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom". Nassim Nicholas Taleb is one of my heros. I've only read Fooled By Randomness, the book before Black Swan, but the ideas have been resonating with me for years. Basically, embrace randomness, accept big failure, focus on how you do things not necessarily whether they have immediate results. Living with good intentions is really about the only thing we can really control.
I also love his new emphasis on social interaction as the only primary filter on the world's information. Go to lots of parties and listen. Dress well for your own execution.
I was gonna include some more excerpts but there are too many good ones. Just read the whole thing.
Speaking of slicing life, part of the reason the 8:36pm project excites me right now is because new tools are becoming available that make slicing life a whole lot easier than it used to be. Twitter makes it easy to create a quick sentence about what you're doing. But I've always been more interested in the photo aspect of the project, about taking the picture that captures the moment. 30 years from now, the pictures are going to tell a better story about the life I was living than a sentence will.
So, obviously, having a camera phone and a way to send it directly to Flickr is really useful for this purpose. My original inspiration, Jamie Livingston's Photo of the Day project from 1979-1997, were Polaroids. That's obviously a lot more work to have to carry a Poloroid camera with you every day, and then carry the photos, sort them, and save them.
The new iPhone also has the ability to detect your location, and attach this information to the photos that you take. And, theoretically, Flickr could take this information and put the photo on a map. Unfortunately, the current implementation doesn't seem to do this, and I hear that it's because the iPhone's email application strips the data of photos out before it sends them. Why?
In any case, this is where Air Me (iTunes link) comes in. They seem to be on the same wavelength as me in regards to finding a way to transport as much data about the slice of life a photo captures as possible. Already, their app will attach your geo-location to the photo, and tag it with the city, state, and country you're in. Also, magically, it will tag the photo with the current temperature (73 degrees) and weather description (Mostly Sunny) of that city. Pretty awesome.
Only problem, at the moment, they don't allow you to specify a title for the photo in question before it automatically uploads. When I emailed support, Phil Easter, their CTO, responded within 5 minutes saying that they'd have these things fixed within the week. Also, they are planning on adding more automatic tagging options as well.
Here's my wishlist of features to make this work even better with my project (and I acknowledge that they might not all be features that are in the best interest of their product, but I think most of them are):
- In addition to each kind of tag they automatically add to the photo, they should also add a corresponding machine tag, so that I can programatically extract the information from the photo as well. Basically, in addition to "Mostly Sunny" they should add "airme:weathername=Mostly Sunny". Flickr hides them, but gives access to them programatically so that it's easy to extract the data from the photo via their API.
- A headline and link to the top news article on CNN or NY Times? I was planning on doing this myself for each day, finding the top news items of the day to go with the photo, but if they did it then I wouldn't have to!
- Option to post the subject line of the photo to Twitter, along with a tinyurl link to the Flickr photo. I currently use Twittergram to do this, but they seem to be a little flaky with getting the Twitter posted with any expediency and consistency.
- Option to add the photo to a photo set of my choosing. I'm currently manually adding them to my 8:36pm photo set, and they currently have an option to automatically create a set for the photos. They would just have to let me select the set rather than have it default to a "Seattle" set automatically.
I could come up with more, but these are the ones that are most important and exciting to me.
I'm looking forward to their next few releases, and have high hopes for using the new features for this project.
I've been taking a picture of whatever I'm doing at 8:36pm every day now for almost 2 months now, and I'm still just as excited about it as ever. Actually, a few things that'll be happening soon with a new iPhone app called Air Me will take this project to the next level.
When I was taking a picture at 8:36pm last night while having a catch-up-with-everything dinner with Kindra, she asked how long I plan on doing this project. FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. Which is a pretty ambitious goal, considering that there are very few things we plan on doing for the rest of our lives, and most of them are pretty serious habits, like eating, drinking, sleeping. Things that aren't required for survival include brushing teeth, getting dressed, hygenic things. Getting married is a promise to do something every day for the rest of your life too, and therefore carries a huge weight of importance with it.
I love the 8:36pm project because it has constraints. It's one picture a day. It's at the same time every day. It's a slice of life that I don't have much editorial control over. Sure I could try to do something interesting at 8:36pm every day, but that's gonna require more energy than I have. It's the every day that I want to capture, anyway, the act of living rather than the act of projecting a cool or interesting life to the Internet. And it's interesting because when I tell people about this project the first response is also, "I could never do that because I'm never doing anything interesting at 8:36pm." Exactly. Or, maybe once in a while you are. But in any case, we of the Internet Age are so used to filtering our experiences and only expressing the highs and lows for the most part. Of course, even our highs and lows will bore most people, since we have such a high bar for being interested in anything, but I think it's interesting to go the other route. Capture the ordinary, the repetitive, the mundane, the fact that you eat the same thing every day or see the same people. Because there's something beautiful about not editorializing everything.
It's a relief of sorts to not worry about being interesting. Since the constraint is forced by a particular minute of the day, it's also not necessarily "your fault" for not being interesting. Instructions on how to play are here, if you feel like joining up.
One of the biggest differences I noticed between living in the U.S. and living abroad is the number of stupid laws made here and signs to inform you of all of them and those other things the control freaks want you to know.
Go to any park or into an underground MUNI station to see what I mean. No smoking, no pets, no offleash pets, no loitering, no camping, no panhandling, no vending, no solicitig, stay to the right, yield seats for handicapped and elderly, stay behind yellow line, no unauthorized personally, don't touch the third fucking rail.
O RLY?
Since returning from Europe -- where there are relatively few of these things -- I've been tormented by the condescension. But there was something else; some other reason it bothered me. Upon reading this (via ydnar), it hit me:
The Drachten Experiment
Think of Drachten, where they removed all of the traffic lights and stop signs, based on the work of the late Hans Monderman. "The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior," says Monderman. "The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles."
That's it. Making sure that Everything You Need to Know is written on the walls and signs around you creates an environment where an individual is essentially absolved of the full breadth of things that make us good neighbors and educated well-mannered citizens. When communities try to hold their people and way of life together with tactics akin to passive-aggressive sticky notes on the refrigerator, we all become lesser co-habitators.
I don't need a sign to tell me to give my seat on the bus to those who need it. I don't need a sign to tell me to pick up my dog's shit. I don't need a sign to tell me not to jump down onto the track of the BART train and touch the third-goddamned rail. These things should be completely and utterly obvious and ingrained in everyone. And if the failing of our society seems imminent without these prescriptions, then perhaps a few third rail surprises might actually help us all.
Had a fantastic weekend of sparkly birthdays, island bike rides, and general iPhone mania.
It's one year minus one day since Kellianne and I got engaged. But we didn't post about it publicly for another 2 months.
The bike ride through and around Bainbridge Island was amazing. It was a perfect day. I can still summon the smell of nature and plants and water and air, and remember the quiet quiet.
Everything always seems to be happening so fast that it's good to be able to appreciate a moment unconnected from all the rest every once in a while.
