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Context Free

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 22:38:24 +0000

The podcast I do with @kegz is out!

My podcast Debut as a Jazz Era Thug

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 18:40:10 +0000

I’ve a bit part in E’Ville the radio drama that is hosted as part of the Unreliable Narrators podcast. I get to play Jeff Doe a Jazz era thug. It’s a lot of fun and I appreciate the invitation to participate from Christopher Cornell and the rest of the gang at the Unreliable Narrators podcast. I show up in the beginning of episode 2.

Grappling the Deal

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 16:57:57 +0000

My crime fiction flash piece full of swearing and raunchiness is online!

Coming Soon: Grappling with the Deal

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 04:19:56 +0000

My piece “Grappling with the Deal” should be showing up in Shotgun Honey very soon.

The Iron

Fri, 09 Jan 2015 22:04:23 +0000

I tried something new. A new job that sounded risky but interesting and educational. It didn’t go well: I got laid off in just after a month. I’ve spent a couple months trying to find the right job.

Interviewing is horrible. Having been on both sides of the process, I know how arbitrary and silly it can be. You get asked questions that range from insightful to pointless and you jump through the hoops. And you get feedback that has the same range.

Old Bad Code

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 09:00:17 +0000

Photo Credit: Kalexanderson via Compfight cc

This summer I was lucky enough to get a chance to speak at a conference. I was giving a pretty hands on product oriented talk with live coding and the majority of the conference was pretty high level and abstract, but I like to think the folks that showed up learned exactly what my session advertised.

A little before my talk, I ran into someone I vaguely knew from an old job. I said “Hi” to him, excited that I actually ran into someone I knew. And it didn’t take him long to let me know that something I did eleven years ago was the worst thing he had ever seen. I was probably mentally incompetent. He looked down his nose at me, adjusted his fedora and walked away shaking his head.

Uber

Sun, 06 Jul 2014 10:34:33 +0000

Uber, Taxis and Protecting Workers

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about business models and transit. From Uber and Lyft to the world of bike sharing we discussed business models and their effects on labor, etc… I love talking to him. We’ve known each other since college and in many ways we have opposite world views. I tend to think about things in terms of organic bottom up systems. He’s a top down guy, and to–probably unfairly–characterize his views, let’s talk about taxi cabs.

In most Metropolitan areas in the United States, taxi cabs are regulated. In New York City, you must have a “Medallion” to act as a Taxi. To do business as a taxi you have to purchase access to the market from the government. [0] There are a limited number of Taxis allowed to have these medallions, so this form of government regulation creates an artificial limit on supply.

My friend seemed to believe that taxi medallions are a good form of regulation in the sense that they protected taxi drivers by restricting the supply of taxis. More Taxis would mean that each taxi driver would make less, so he saw this form of regulation as a social good since it was a way to ensure that that taxi drivers received a good wage. He saw Uber and Lyft as damaging this labor protecting mechanism as well as putting their own drivers in an unhealthy race toward the bottom in terms of their own wages.

To me, there are so many other competing factors that I find the argument fairly uncompelling.

Mockery of Equal Protection. You should know about Matt Taibbi

Tue, 22 Apr 2014 13:17:01 +0000

Matt Taibbi has been compared to Hunter Thompson the progenitor of GonzoJournalism. While there’s definitely some Gonzo in him, I think it’s more of a sign of the corporatism and crony politics of modern journalism that he’s described that way. Taibbi has opinions, but while most journalists I associate with the left, seem to apologize for or rationalize the actions of the current regime, Taibbi pulls no punches. It’s not about muck raking. It’s about injustice.

His new book The Divide follows two different kinds of crime. The actions of the wealthy and banks like HSBC and Goldman Sachs and the daily lives of the poor.

Kids These Days. You should know about Danah Boyd

Sat, 29 Mar 2014 08:49:27 +0000

Ok, she works for Microsoft. Don’t hold that against her. I don’t remember when I first encountered her, but it was probably in a mention from Cory Doctorow. Her blog with the excellent name of apophenia, is one I always check on. [0] Her thoughts on youth and media are not to be missed. She spans social media, teen behavior, LGBT issues and bullying. But that’s not why you should know who she is.

You should know who she is because, like Bruce Schneier does for security, Danah gets to the heart of the matter. She gets to the unintended consequences of policies, the unseen costs of short-hand thinking. She shows what is actually going on with teens, not what adults imagine or someone’s ideology dictates. While most media makes its money by appealing to the mental junk foods of fear (If it bleeds, it leads), gossip, and tribalism, people like Bruce and Danah cut through those narratives and deserve our attention and our dollars.

Two Girls Restore Their Friendship… and Avoid Zombies

Tue, 04 Mar 2014 09:30:36 +0000

Two girls try to restore their friendship… and try to escape a military dictatorship and spore infected rage zombies.

The Last of Us: Left Behind.

Before I get too far, I recieved disturbing news while working on this. A highschool friend has escaped a physically abusive relationship. People’s reaction on social media? Accusing her of being a crazy person. Sometimes it’s hard for people to see any problems with our culture’s relationship to gender and even mentioning the word misogyny puts you, for some, into the category of extremist jumping at imagined shadows. Perhaps a zombie video game will change minds.

Resilience, Recovery and Antifragility in Security

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 09:30:35 +0000

Resilience and Recovery are undervalued aspects of Security.

When it comes to security, popular culture and politicians focus too much on control. They should be focussing on resilience and recovery. Control strategies contribute to security theater. They give the impression that someone is in charge and that things are under control. When that is always a bit of a facade on reality. Our ability to recover is more important and effective, especially when it comes to extremely rare events. To take two kinds of failure of control, school shootings and terrorism. Fortunately, both are extremely rare.

Being able to respond quickly to school shootings appears to have reduced their impact. Control based strategies haven’t been successful in this regard. Limiting access to guns sounds good, but the proliferation of guns in the United States make it unlikely that a ban would be effective. There is a lot of emotional rhetoric around assault rifle bans, but the reality is that even those bans wouldn’t have covered the weapon used by Adam Lanza, a weapon acquired by his mother legally.

Three Fifteen

Thu, 30 Jan 2014 08:00:02 +0000

Three fifteen isn’t a magic number.

Wait, let me back up.

When I was younger, I really enjoyed weightlifting. I was reasonably good at it and it was a great way to get exercise, but after high school I could never get back into it. Oh I tried. I would spend hours in the gym performing the standard three sets of eight to twelve reps. And I would get nowhere. Months of going to the gym and no progress. Every couple years I would try this. Same routine and the same results.

But, everyone has heard the quote:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Often misattributed to Einstein or Benjamin Franklin.

In November I decided to try something different. I’d read about another routine. It was progressive and used less reps. Deep down I remembered the dogma– ostensibly science– I had retained from somewhere: that the eight to twelve reps to failure over five sets is the ideal weight lifting routine.

My Superpower Fails Me to my Shame

Mon, 20 Jan 2014 08:05:37 +0000

Sometimes my super power fails me. It failed me last February when I tried to read an opinion piece in the new york times. [1] It failed me big time. Normally, I can do something that most people seem to be unable to do. One of my Superpowers is that I can read articles written by people whose views I oppose and think rationally about them. Ok, not that super. But, in a world of filters and media that caters to every bias, it’s pretty easy to consume only content from the echo chamber of your choice. There are many articles and books on describing this as a sickness of culture and of mind. But there also movements that imply that finding your tribe is important. That’s where you can thrive. This is part of the tension in which we find ourselves with modern media.

As Eli Pariser discusses in his Ted talk, everything is becoming more and more personalized. Facebook’s feeds and google searches are being silently edited. Eli shows the results of two google searches. The searches are the same. The searchers are different. The results are amazingly and disturbingly different. And watching the video, one cannot help but agree that this seems a bad thing. People have news hidden from them, because it’s not the kind of news they want to see.

Fear and Loathing in Hipsterville

Mon, 13 Jan 2014 02:45:41 +0000

You know them when you see them. You know what you think: “Fucking Hipsters.”

There they are with their skinny jeans or their trucker caps. They’re sitting there with their artisanal fill-in-the-blank and just exuding contempt for you, because that’s their main characteristic. Because looking down their nose over their waxed handle-bar mustache with you or your music or your lifestyle or your appearance is their defining characteristic. That and being shallow.

But is it true?

Good Guys Bad Guys and Narrative

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 03:10:23 +0000

I think a lot about narrative. While I find reason and empiricism very important tools, we rarely use them, preferring narrative as a heuristic. It’s much more efficient–if often much less accurate. I’m fascinated by how much more we are influenced by narrative and allow it to blind us to others and ourselves. People are pattern building critters and what’s more they are narrative building critters. Your unconscious tries to discern intention and agency behind almost every complex piece of information you encounter.

At the lowest level, we’re wired to see patterns and our pattern recognition is dialed up so high, we see patterns even when they’re not there. Have you looked at the clouds and seen a rabbit or a dragon or some other shape? Have you mistaken a jacket hanging on a door for someone looming there? Have you ever jumped at shape that turned out not to be what you thought? The reason we work this way is often attributed to an evolutionary advantage: If you run away from a bush that moved thinking it’s a tiger and it’s in fact just the wind, you survive. If you don’t run away from a bush that moved and it is a tiger, you get eaten and don’t pass on your genes.

The New Pillory

Tue, 24 Dec 2013 17:35:24 +0000

Let’s get this out of the way: Justine Sacco said some loathsome things.

And twitter lit her up for it. Lots of well-to-do, highly connected twitterers and the rest of the mob jumped on her. They began throwing refuse and beating this woman who was locked up in the public square. A righteous mob abusing the person who stepped outside the social norms. It’s a pillory.

This is the economics of twitter. Create value for your followers, get more followers, and indirectly make internet money. Twitter rewards you for becoming the leader of that righteous mob. You get the retweets you’re craving. It doesn’t differentiate on the target of your abuse. If you aim the abuse at the powerful, some politician perhaps, you get the same economic benefit as aiming at some middle class person who was a moron. And let’s face it, it’s easier to jump on people the lower class they are. Some football player or politician has a PR corp to help them and the money to weather out any storm. No matter what loathsome thing they’ve been caught doing, they’ll bounce back. But you can destroy the life of that unconnected person. You can feel that satisfaction as you break their jaw as they’re hands and feet are locked in place by the pillory. So, middle class people are a better target for your righteous rage. You can actually hurt them.

Craftsmanship and Contempt

Sun, 15 Dec 2013 17:04:59 +0000

I came across Jeff Nolan’s post about Silicon Valley and DC. I loved it for a lot of reasons. It captures what’s wrong. While the valley values marketing, DC values marketing without anything to back it up. In the valley, the narrative is how you make the sale, but things have to work. In DC, only the narritive is important and the solution/engineering doesn’t just come last, it is something contemptuous that the “leadership” doesn’t want to get on them. I’m not saying something partisan here. Read the Clay Shirky post Jeff references. [1] This is the section that caught my eye, because I’ve seen it many times.

The thing that made this meeting unusual was that one of their programmers had been invited to attend, so management could outline their web strategy to him. After the executives thanked me for explaining what I’d learned from log files given me by their own employees just days before, the programmer leaned forward and said “You know, we have all that information downstairs, but nobody’s ever asked us for it.”

I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came clear: I was getting paid to save management from the distasteful act of listening to their own employees. – Clay Shirky

While at New Relic, it’s common that Ceo Lew Cirne pair programs with his employees. So, in one kind of organization, the organization’s leadership has contempt for its day to day employees. The other embraces their values and tries to learn from them. Guess which one is more agile, produces better results, and has any grasp on reality.

Non-Profits are crazy. Volunteer anyway.

Sat, 30 Nov 2013 18:43:15 +0000

For geeks or anyone else familiar with the corporate world, non-profits tend to be bafflingly inefficient and occasionally a bit irrational. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not arguing that corporations are the most rational, efficient places around. It’s just that, when you’re used to operating in a corporation or if you’re the sort of geek who “optimizes their workflow” with apps like Omnifocus, the culture shock of dealing with non-profits can be a bit overwhelming. Don’t believe me? Organize a group of people from your work to volunteer. I guarantee at some point, you will catch someone who is new to volunteering with a look of terror on their face. And you’ll be able to read their thoughts: “Oh, my god. No one knows what the hell is going on.” Embrace the madness. Non-profits have it rough in various ways. Often they’re staffed by a majority of volunteers, who may or may not have any business world experience. They frequently don’t have enough money, people, or talent. And we live in a world where you are increasingly insane for working full-time for a non-profit.

Don’t believe me? You should check out what Dan Pollatta has to say in his 2013 TED Video. [1]

What your company doesn’t understand about APIs

Sun, 24 Nov 2013 18:21:18 +0000

If you have a website or sell software with a UI, you probably have someone design the user experience. They might be on your staff or you might contract out to an “agency.” If they’re on staff, they’re a vaguely artsy person. They talk about information architecure and user experience. They mention design principles and they’ve read classic books like Don’t Make Me Think. They pull in graphic artists. They might do AB testing and you probably iterate on the wireframes they produce. They might be a little bit hipster. For some reason, that gives them some cred.

Why do you do all of this? Because after the second rise of Apple, everyone understands that capital “D” Design matters. It has value. Business value. It makes you stickier and increases the sentiment toward your brand. It improves your bounce rate. It makes it more likely that you’ll have a long term relationship with your customers/readers/whatever. It translates into money and success.

First Post

Sat, 02 Nov 2013 21:34:13 +0000

I’ve come late to blogging, but at least I made it. More to follow.