Although at this moment I am filled with excitement at again redefining and reframing myself, I have a big project I need to close out, and I'm going to have to refrain from blogging for at least a month. This is a good time to haul out my Pickle Jar, which I think is in the laundry room collecting coins that I find in the washing machine. The Pickle Jar is used for holding ideas that I don't want to lose, a sort of promise to myself to come back to the idea later.
Before I disappear, here's some updates on various initiatives:
I'm still working on that interactive museum project, and we're at the point where development should be hitting "full steam ahead" mode. I'm falling a bit behind on the technology side of things (I'm learning how to program 3D graphics systems) because I'm becoming familiar with the underlying development system. I'm also looking for programmers experienced with XNA on Windows, particularly on the model/shader development/animation side of things, to help out on a module-by-module basis.
One of the people I met at Starbucks teaches piano lessons, so I signed up for one to see if that will help with the Gospel Music experiment I started a while ago.
I've gotten several submissions for the freelance referral building, but I have not yet processed any of this. If there's anything I post about, it will be this.
I have Printable CEO-related updates that I'd like to make, but I don't know when I'll be able to get to them. This also includes several user submissions that I haven't had the time to virus-check, zip, and upload. The challenge with user submitted updates is that I end up having to provide the technical support for the uploads; links to blog posts are much easier to deal with.
Although the writing and blogging are activities that fill me with energy, they take a lot of time and I have to shift that to my paying work for a good chunk of time. At least afterwards, I'll have a whole new body of expertise to write about.
With the advent of Summer, I've been lulled into a feeling of well-being and camaraderie, and I'm feeling so good that I've been feeling like going on a few dates. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that I've been feeling like updating my OKCupid Profile to see what happens. It would be nice to share what I've got going on, such as it is, with someone remarkable.
It took a while to figure out how to approach this, as this is not the kind of writing I usually do. How do you make a positive impression, through text, on a smart and beguiling woman? The odds are stacked against us; I've heard anecdotal reports that women are bombarded with SO MUCH SPAM from ham-handed guys, not to mention the horror stories about outright lies about one's appearance and age that frankly, I don't see why anyone would want to use these sites at all. As a marketing channel, it's full of deception and noise. Still, for a lot of us the promise of real romance is a heady-enough draw that we keep going back to the well. A big online dating site has the appeal of playing the Lottery, with slightly better odds, if you're willing to plunk down your $19.99 a month and spin the wheel.
draft 1
Here's what I wrote:
I run my design business from home, so a big part of my day is sitting outside at Starbucks every morning. This is important because it makes damn sure that I'm in regular contact with real live people, which I've discovered I can't live without.
Over the course of the last two years I've gotten to know the names of the barristas and other regulars, chatting outside while savoring out minutes together over hideously-overpriced beverages, taking the scenic route to friendship a few minutes at a time. It's amazing what stories you'll hear from your fellow townies, if you just bother to show up at the same time and same place every day.
Here on OKCupid, I don't have the luxury of helping you to form an impression of me over months of casual observation. You won't have seen, for example, that I'm an enthusiastic and warm person that says "thank you" after every transaction. You will not have seen the piles of books, toys, gadgets, fancy pens, and other ephemera I haul in every morning, so you will not have had the thought that I must be possessed of an eclectic and somewhat alarming range of creative interests. Your curiosity will not have been piqued at the sudden outburst of snickering erupting from my table, nor will you have been slightly shocked at the heartfelt-yet-kindly use of cusswords to properly convey the nature of a situation. Therefore, you will not have had your initial impression totally thrown off by the care and intensity with which I counsel my friends through tough times, measured tones punctuated by silent listening. I'm sorry that you weren't part of our committee to roast an entire pig for our first luau; we've got the equipment and costs down, and we just need a place to do it with 40-50 hungry friends. And you missed last week's symposium on how to take over the world, WITHOUT spending a lot of money. Because you're not here in the room with me, I'm just some Asian guy with a couple of lousy photos. You don't know me at all, not one tiny bit. You didn't even get to see my new scooter...it's really cute.
Now, you could take a chance and message me back, but I don't blame you for not wanting to try. There are TONS of guys, some of them pretty good-looking, that are vying for your attention. The preferred strategy, I've been told, is to carpet-bomb every eligible female with compliments and invitations to hook up. And some of you are buying into that, when the photo is hot enough, but I'm not writing to you anyway. Still, I know we all want to feel that tingle of sexual interest as we scan the photo galleries, and there's a good chance that my photos didn't do it for you. It's my fault that you can't imagine us together, and as a designer I should know better. If you've ever compared the photography in, say, "Vogue" with the ads in "Men's Health" or "Maxim", you'll see that Vogue's spreads tell stories about relationships. Men's magazines tell stories about power and utility. My photos are more like the latter: I'm showing you that I'm a pretty average guy, so the best my photos can do is help you rank my desirability based on apparent fitness, fashion, and hair.
Or you could look past that. I clean up pretty good, and I'm getting more toned every day at the gym. What matters is that you and I want the same thing: We want that breezy feeling of possibility, built on a foundation of trust and passion. We want to be free to pursue what we individually hold dear to us, and at the same time be strong "together". We both have a unique blend of skills and experiences, and it's going to take you more than just a bad photo to tell you the shape of our possible future.
I could try to spell it all out, but I'm just going to be straight with ya: I don't know what you're looking for. What I can tell you is that I will not change myself to match what I think your expectations are. That's something we will discover together, over a tasty ethnic dinner in a strange new city, pairing local wines with our favorite artisan blue cheese. We'll find it in the forest, dwarfed by ancient trees, as we hunt for unexpected treasure. It'll come out when you admit to liking something pretty amazingly crappy and embarrassing, and I'm sure you won't be too impressed by what just came out of my mouth either. We might find it inside one of those mini rooms at IKEA, as we try to balance a tricky space constraint against our desire for ergonomic nirvana. And we'll zoom by it on the road, the GPS ticking off the miles, as we search for the only North American distributor of that specialty product you suspect you can not live without. We'll celebrate our experiences with our friends and peers, together dreaming and scheming our way to a shared prosperity. And when we fall asleep each other's arms, groggily looking forward to synthesizing a better tomorrow, we'll know that what we're doing would have remained mere possibility in the hands of another couple, the shadow of a memory of a path not taken.
So why not say hello? It's a small word, easily said, that just may open the way to something grand.
The interesting sensation I had, after polishing up this essay, was that I could feel it because instead of writing what I thought women would respond to, I wrote what I would respond to. It's a narrow filter, I suspect, but I am hopeful that anyone who is so moved will be more likely to be compatible, at least on the level of personality. That's niche marketing, applied at the individual scale. Of course, I'm just a guy that doesn't really understand women, so if any female readers want to set me straight, that would earn you big karma points from me and any other hapless males that stumble upon this page.
draft 2
After all the brutally excellent commentary in the comments, I shortened the essay and tightened it up. Hopefully, it is now truer to certain aspects of myself while still retaining a core of dreaminess that is important to me. Big lessons learned: anything that is not strong or is self-deprecating is automatically interpreted as weakness, aim to get the introduction, not the relationship, shorter shorter shorter, and have a call to action. I retained some of the verbosity because that is actually something that is part of my personality; perhaps the right woman for me would have the soul of an editor ;-)
Since you're looking at my profile on a computer, you don't have the luxury of forming an impression of me based on chance observation, as local people can when they see me every day at the nearby Starbucks. Therefore, you won't have noted that I say "thank you" after every transaction, nor will you have intuited that I'm an enthusiastic and warm person from the way I smile at the barristas that know my name. Your eyebrow didn't arch skywards when I hauled in that odd collection of books, gadgets, tools, and other surprising ephemera to share with my friends; the passing thought that I must be possessed of an eclectic and somewhat-alarming range of creative interests therefore didn't flit across your mind. And sadly, you missed the opportunity to sit-in on last week's informal symposium on how to take over the world--just enough of it, anyway--so we can fund our own ideas of purpose, fun, and adventure. If I'd caught you looking our way, I would have invited you to come sit with us. And that would have been the beginning of our friendship.
I'm looking for a long-term relationship with a partner who can also be one of my best friends. I realized long ago that trying to define exactly WHO that would be is an absolutely futile exercise because THE SPARK is mysterious and unpredictable. It's something we will discover together, perhaps over a tasty ethnic dinner in a strange new city, pairing local wines with our favorite artisan blue cheese. We'll find bits of it in the forest, our presence dwarfed by the grandeur of ancient trees, as we search for unexpected treasure. It'll start to come out after you admit to liking something pretty amazingly silly, both of us choking on our own laughter when I confess to something even worse. We may find it at 90 miles per hour, GPS ticking off the miles, as we seek out the only North American distributor of that specialty product you suspect you shouldn't live without. And when we fall asleep each other's arms, groggily looking forward to creating our better tomorrow, we'll know that what we're doing now would have remained mere possibility in the hands of another couple, the shadow of a memory of a path not taken.
So why not say hello? It's a small word, easily said, that just may open the way to something grand. I'm very personable. I'll show you my favorite table at Starbucks, and we can take it from there.
The rest of the profile has also been tightened up and is less wishy-washy. I have a tendency to water down the strength of what I believe in certain situations because I worry about sounding pushy. This profile will likely now become the model for updates across other online personal profiles I'm maintaining.
I don't have the energy to write a detailed report on the sessions of the day, though I will say that I did attend the "Textbooks of the Future" and "20 Ways to Woo Your Users". "Textbooks of the future" covered the ongoing efforts made by cnx.org, wikibooks, and the olpc foundation. "20 Ways" marked the return of Kathy Sierra to SXSW, which is gratifying to see after the unfortunate events of 2007. When she took the stage and said she was glad to be back, the entire audience gave her an understanding and enthusiastic cheer. We are glad to have her back; she has been one of the highlights of SXSW for me. Both panels I found inspiring.
A quickie equipment field test report:
- For my new camera bag, the Urban Disguise UD-60. It's does a nice job of carrying my camera with my accessories and laptop, particularly when using the shoulder strap.
- The XO Laptop is fairly slow in the field, and I find it difficult to tell when the WiFi is going to drain the battery. The Wifi appears to keep going when the lid is closed, which sucks battery juice rapidly. The keyboard is OK for pecking but writing long pieces of text requires a two-finger pecking technique. Compounding the problem is the extreme sensitivity of the trackpad, which tends to make me overshoot the "resume" control on the screen. This wouldn't be so bad if the UI didn't draw a special border arond the currently active object, due to the use of "frame activation" commands baed on the position of the mouse.
- The XO Laptop has also drawn a lot of attention from people, who ask to see and play with it. It's a great conversation starter.
- My new "lens down" camera sling mount is pretty usable. I got hassled by a SXSW staffer named Matt for having a "semi professional digital camera" without a green press pass label, though I am not press or looking for press benefits. He was just doing his job, I recognized, as he understood it. I went to the press area and they apologized for the mistake; the woman there said that I shouldn't be hassled for just carrying around my camera. They gave me the press camera badge anyway to keep other misinformed staffers from delaying me again.
I had several great conversations today. Looking forward, sleepily, to tomorrow.
On the flight, I had taken some notes about "who I am" so I could better figure out how to describe myself, and had a slight shift in perspective: my blog tagline isn't really accurate. If you go to the home page and look at the title, you'll see it says David Seah: Design, Productivity, Empowerment, Inspiration. Categorically speaking, these are all topics I write about fairly consistently, but the implication is that this is the "purpose" behind my writing. That and the current structure of the website has me feeling boxed in, until I realized that it wasn't that big a deal and I should just start writing again regardless of my worry of further confusing visitors stumbling across the site. Anyway, here's the shift in perspective I experienced: while I do write about those topics, the purpose of this website all along has been to have conversations. This may have been apparent all along, because the way I write tends to be conversational in the first place. One of the first comments I ever got, back when only a few people knew about my tentative steps onto the web, was from Ged, who I hadn't talked to in years. He said something to the effect that it was fun to follow my ramblings because it was like I was "right there". A few readers who have met me in person have commented (favorably, I think) that the way I write on the blog and the way I am in person are practically the same. At the time I took that as a sign that I had finally gotten comfortable with my writing, but in hindsight it might mean that I just like having conversations with people no matter what the medium.
I've never felt 100% sure about the focus of this blog, but I think I'm on the right track to say that I am pursuing conversations on topics that I find interesting, and it is the conversation itself that I enjoy. This dovetails nicely with the other shifts in perspective I've had lately:
- On Design and Development: I design not because I like making things look nice; I design because I like making stories.
- On Business Focus: Just because I am skilled at "interactive development" and "graphic design" doesn't mean my business focus follows. Those are just part of my kit of tools. I am really in the business of investigating the real story and fabricating a physical plot device that moves everyone along toward the happy ending.
and now:
- On Purpose of the Blog: I'm not creating a resource for productivity tools, etc. I am creating a repository of daily conversations around selected topics. While there are some useful tools here, my focus should be really to create a site with conversational magnetism. If people stick around, I'd like it to be for the reason that they feel like they're welcome and the conversation is stimulating.
So I've flipped a few things around for me, and it's starting to feel right. I have no idea how I'm going to boil this down into a 30-second hallway introduction, so I'll probably just go with my strengths: "I'm a productivity tool designer and blogger". Not 100% accurate or comprehensive, but enough to get a conversation rolling.
I'm finding I have to hunker down and seriously reduce the number of activities I'm engaging in to push past an important milestone, so my posting frequency will be (if you haven't already noticed) drastically reduced. I was feeling very guilty about this, until I thought to myself that there was no reason to. My life is my own, right?
Well, not really. My life is now intertwined with dozens of other lives, and participating in the blogosphere has been very positive. I'm loathe to let go of it even for a short spell to again don the black clothes of the itinerant freelance codeslinger, but it's what I need to do. I call it "hermit mode", and last year I recognized that it was a kind of luxury to be able to shut out the world and focus exclusively on just a few things. As more of my friends start families, I see how their priorities change and how their schedules shift with the need to juggle many more balls.
I've never been particularly good at juggling, or perhaps more accurately I've never liked feeling the stress and fear of dropping the ball. My coping mechanism has been to run silent and deep, like a nuclear submarine on patrol hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, alone with my work and shut out from the world. It's during these times that I lose contact with the natural day, staying up later and later until I'm going to sleep at the crack dawn and waking up at noon. There's just a couple of balls to juggle then, and there's few distractions. It's actually not so bad a life, if you have a few 24-hour supermarkets near you, and with the Internet you're never completely isolated. Now that I think about it, since adopting the early waking schedule about a year ago (yes, I'm still doing it) I've lost touch with quite a few people that I used to talk to regularly in the wee hours of the morning, fellow hermits tapping greetings across the slumbering Internet.
I'm faced with a decision: I could manage my time better by applying any number of techniques I've used in the past, though frankly I don't really want to do it. I'm tired. Or I could shut out the world and pour all my attention into the tasks that I want to get done.
The advantage of managing my time is that it's more sustainable---if I accept that what I get done every day is going to be incremental and feel very small. I personally have little patience for incremental change, which is why I probably suck at it. The one exception to this is when I am actually observing incremental change in PEOPLE...that fascinates me, because each small change in a person's behavior can indicate something much larger. I guess I am naturally curious about what makes people tick, not the number of ticks I can count.
The advantage of shutting out the world is that it is a more exciting commitment to action; kind of an adventure, really. I like getting ready for adventures, strategically planning my moves, getting everything ready for the big push. The problem is that it is an expensive contextual switch, on the order of planning a vacation without the relaxation, and it always burns me out at the end. This may, however, be the natural way I work by myself. It is a recurring pattern.
My gut reaction is that I should avoid going into hermit mode, but instead triage what I am focusing on. Blogging is going to have to go on the sideline for a bit, because there is a lot of other stuff that I need to get done for both the business and for my projects.
I'm also considering my energy levels. Last week I tracked my hours using my excel timesheet and added two additional fields: energy level and what I ate. I had the feeling that I wasn't doing the right work at peak times, so I wanted to see if there were any patterns at all to my day. I discovered that in the morning, after going to the gym, I was at peak alertness. I checked my email afterwards and followed up with people, and found that after a couple of hours of this my energy levels were again drained. Surprisingly, activities like washing the dishes seemed to recover some of that energy. What I ate didn't seem to make as much of a difference as I thought, though the quantity might still have something to do with it (overly full = sleepy).
My tentative conclusions:
I am getting eyestrain from looking at the screen, and this is making me dizzy. I can go maybe a couple of hours before the slight headache starts distracting me. I just ordered a larger monitor to alleviate this, hopefully it will get here tomorrow.
I need to pace my eating so it's smaller amounts, more frequently. I hear this advice a lot from people who are optimizing their metabolism, and it's high time I did the same. This is a whole new kind of process I will need to learn. Also, I should be drinking a lot more water. Remembering to do this in the winter time is more difficult, for some reason.
I need to shift the priority from communication to project, which is a reversal of my current values. I like to read email and respond to it, and I like chatting with people to see what they're up to. For the past half year I've been pretty bad at replying to email in a timely manner because I've been busy with more projects, and I've felt guilty and inadequate. I will have to face up to the fact that I don't have the bandwidth to spend 4 hours a day just writing back to people and exploring interesting opportunities. The "golden time" right after my workout should be devoted to project work, no exceptions. Email will have to wait to the end of the day, along with blogging. When I was responding to email, it was right after my workout. I'm still going to get eyestrain and dizziness after a few hours of staring at the computer screen (assuming the new larger one doesn't alleviate this), but knowing this I can at least make sure my best hours are devoted to project work.
I don't know how this will work out, and I've already frittered away some prime "work time" by writing this post instead of doing project work, but at least I am laying the groundwork for future productivity this week.
In other news, the initial wave of people who have pre-ordered Emergent Task Planner Pads has dwindled, and the remaining people who haven't yet ordered either have decided not to or have non-functioning email addresses. I am now going to start the process of collecting the names of people who have expressed interest in leftovers. I also need to figure out a better way of doing order fulfillment, as PayPal's initially-promising merchant tools are cumbersome and painful to use. The biggest obstacle to just opening up a store is the ability to track inventory levels; PayPal does not offer this, and I do not want to accept money when I do not have product in stock. Someone must make a combined ordering, payment receiving, inventory-counting e-commerce front end with integrated postage and packing slip management. Eventually I will probably go with Amazon Fulfillment, but for now I want to continue to ship myself as I work out the best way to package these boxes. Until that time, there are so many shopping cart options out there that it's going to take days to research them all. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears.
