Love Styles and My Two Guts

Although I was born in New Jersey, I spent a formative part of my youth was as a missionary kid overseas. As soon as I got back to The States for college, I stopped going to church because I didn't like the petty political aspects of organized religion. Over the past several years, however, I've been noticing that many of the "good" people I've been coming across are Christian, are not boring, and are not trying to recruit my soul so my body will pad the pews. A few nights ago I had a really excellent time chatting with a Christian friend of mine who is active in several churches, so I thought I'd brush up on my understanding of Christian fundamentals via Wikipedia. Serendipitously, I came across the mention of C.S. "Chronicles of Narnia" Lewis' book The Four Loves, which "explores the nature of love from a Christian perspective".

It wasn't Lewis' opinion that I found interesting; rather it was the Greek source material regarding the nature of love. In today's usage of the word, "love" is used as a kind of catch-all phrase. The Greek philosophers (modern Greek too, for that matter) have more words for it, describing a range of human emotional connections from the superficial to the sublime. Browsing through the concepts of agape, storge, philia and eros was very educational. And I saw answers to one of the current great conundrums of my life: the lack of a romantic partner:

what I believed

Like many single guys, I'm searching for "romantic love", but have of late been rather discouraged at the seeming impossibility of finding that magic combination of attraction, excitement, compatibility, and contentment. Part of this despair, I suspect, has been the worry that I don't really know what romantic love is. At some point I decided, like many people do, to have faith, create situations that I can enjoy and share, and above all trust my gut. However, while the gut may react strongly, it's still up to the brain to figure out what to do about it. On top of that, I think there are at least two components of my gut:

• The emotional gut, which I don't question--I'm either intrigued or I'm not.
• The thoughtful gut, which I think of as intuition. Intuition, however, is a kind of crap shoot based on what we've experienced before (finding patterns) and what our beliefs/expectations of how things "should work". Having browsed through these different love descriptions, I can see the nature of my own limiting beliefs about what "true love" is, and perhaps can now grow beyond them.

I tend to believe in authentic connections between people; a great deal of my design work and emphasis on story-based inquiry is my professional attempt to create them. Naturally, I want my partner and lover to also possess a "true connection" with me, and I very strongly identify such connections with the spirit of friendship. I have fantastic, amazing friends, and I wouldn't be a tenth of the person I am today if we didn't have that critical mutual inspiration, respect, and support. My exploration of the topic of love led me to Aristotle's deconstruction of friendship into three types: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure of company, and friendships of the good. The latter, which is described in English as "true friendship", is friendship that is based on the enjoyment of each other's character. This is really what I look for in people and in myself; everything else that is positive flows from that. As I have been blessed to have many true friends throughout my life, I expect my romantic partner to also be my true friend. Together we will create the story of our life as characters in a book of our own making, testing our mettle against negative forces and overcoming multitudinous obstacles together, secure in our love and affection for each other, and passionately living. This is the baseline of interaction I already have with my best friends; how can I settle for anything less? It seemed like a no-brainer to make friendship a precondition for romance. "It will just happen", I told myself, some 25 years ago, "if I continue to pursue my path. Whatever the hell that is."

As it turns out, there is a love style called Storgic Love that actually describes how I thought I would fall in love. Storgic lovers are "friends first" and hey, THAT'S ME RIGHT?!

I read on with great interest, frowning slightly as I read the final paragraph:

Some advantages of storgic love can be the level of friendship, understanding, and intimacy in the partners, while disadvantages can include potential boredom and lack of passion in some couples.

That boredom part didn't quite fit...I don't want to settle down and live in a cottage for the rest of my life. I want to become something greater! However, because I value friendship so much, I had naturally settled into this pattern and ran into a massive internal conflict: because I value "true friendship"--that is, friendship based on character--I perceived other love styles as a failure of motive .

Let me explain myself: There are a lot of women who I find sexually enticing, cute, and so on, but to me character is everything. I am just not interested until I see the evidence of it. Once glimpsed, it takes time to draw out the subtleties across multiple interactions. Interests, behaviors, and physical appearance are somewhat secondary in importance; and it's the inner beauty and idiosyncrasies of a person's character, as I perceive it, that finally draws me close and captivates my heart. The giant insight is that my romantic interest tends to express itself as explorations of character, and I suppress the other "love styles" to "maintain the purity" of my quest. That tends to exclude such pleasantries such as flirting, winking, swooping in, sweeping away, and so forth. What most people would regard as the fun part of getting to know someone, but in my snobbery I thought EVERYBODY already does that...I'm looking for something more, and I'm doing things my own way! Or so I would tell myself, as I battled myself internally. My logic was that if I liked a girl because she was cute I wasn't living up to my own character values: true connections and good character above all else, because I believe everything is possible through this. It never occurred to me that I could think both. Yes, I'm dumb...blinded by principle, yet again. Maintaining such an attitude, however couched in idealism, is ultimately boring and dispassionate. This can lead to a good friendship, but not romance.

And so I come back to my two guts:

• My "emotional gut" is 100% accurate at telling me when I like someone and find them attractive.

• My "intuitive gut", however, did not have the breadth of experience and self-knowledge to see me playing out the same pattern over and over again, and instead assumed that "if I thought up the idea, and the idea affects only me, it must be right". Well, no, probably not. The idea in this case was: "true friendship is based on true character, therefore my romantic search will be strictly dictated by the parameters implicit in this directive."

the moral

I still feel kind of dumb right now, but at the same time I feel a sense of relief because I've identified a limited thought pattern. Now that I know it, I can break it and replace it with something less boring.

I know what my real romantic directive is: It's far better to live in character than to merely search for it. This follows naturally from my belief that when you put that energy out there, people can actually tell that you have it. After all, attraction of character needs to work both ways.

The role I want to play in the world is as a connector of true passions, to have the freedom to let allow random aspects of life catch my eye, and create the situations where passion and living can express themselves at a higher level. That's what great design is. That's what productivity is. That is what inspiration and empowerment mean to me. And next time I see these qualities embodied in a pretty girl, I will need to remember that although character is super sexy, it's just as awesome to tell a woman how beautiful she is in a meaningful, creative way. Even if she already knows it.

If you were paying attention, you might have noticed that I said there were TWO great conundrums in my life. The other one is the missing sense of mission, but I think I stumbled upon it while writing the previous paragraph. And I feel that I have to give Christianity some props for that; the entry for Holy Spirit, a concept I used to have difficulty accepting when I thought it meant a literal ghost flying around inhabiting people, had this tidbit (emphasis mine):

The first overt appearance of the Holy Spirit in Christian theology is in the words of Jesus, speaking to his disciples (John 14:15-18) shortly before his death. He characterizes the Holy Spirit to them as the 'Spirit of Truth'.

Further reading leads right back to the notion of agape, which is a kind of love that benefits the world we live in. It starts with you and me, and perhaps it can be expressed through the creation of more awesome design and the telling of each other's stories. Everyone, I believe, has a true way to express this kind of positivity and joy, if they can only find the means through which they can see just how possible it is. The trick is finding it authentically, but that will be a post for another day.

On Hiatus

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.

Niche Personals

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.

Day 2: It’s All a Blur

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.

Day 2: Pre-Festival Insights

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.

To Running Silent or Not

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.

Why I Design

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed how it's changed its focus from the personal to the productive. In the beginning, when I first started blogging out of a kind of quiet desperation to once and for all figure myself out, the entries were short clippings of my thoughts on whatever happened to catch my eye and interest. As time went on, and I discovered that long-lost friends were starting to stumble upon the webby shores of my site, I grew a little bolder and started writing in more depth about topics that were interesting to me. Blogging for that small audience was the outlet I needed.

At the beginning of 2005, I was starting to just come out of a two-year period of negativity, and was comfortable enough about writing online to make a few rambling journeys into personal introspection. These felt quite daring because they were so out of character with the other posts, which tended to be more detailed, hard-edged and technical. I remember posting about feeling negative, and a couple of my friends actually emailed me to make sure I wasn't about to lose it. While I find those posts to be somewhat embarrassing in retrospect, they are also as honest as I could make them, so I leave them up as signposts of my online journey. And it was through this journey that I really started getting to the bottom of what was important to me so I could create solutions to my problems. This is what lead to the original Printable CEO article, with its bizarre merging of psychology via video game design philosophy. I think one reason people like it, other than its sheer geekiness, is that it was designed to help you care about yourself. Fundamentally, I think of it as a design that is all about caring, inspiring, and empowering individuals.

Lately I've been avoiding writing the long introspective posts, because I've been aware of the growing contingent of productivity enthusiasts who have come here through sites like LifeHacker and Web Worker Daily. These are very popular, tip-focused sites that link to the various forms I've created to address the different inefficiencies I've faced in my freelancing career. Every time one of these sites links to an article here, I see a bump in RSS subscriptions. A few days later, I see a corresponding dip as people realize that I tend to write about other stuff like sandwiches and they unsubscribe. This used to bum me out, but I would tell myself that my writing is not for everyone. It's hard to describe exactly what keeps people here, actually, but I figure the people who stay are the ones I want to talk to in the first place. It's been tougher recently to stick to that line because I'm starting to realize that there is a lot I could do to drive traffic and build a real "web property". I'm starting my 4th year of blogging, and over those years I've learned quite a bit about how to write content and how to maintain a website. I've seen other websites that have started at around the same time I have flourish and explode into full-fledged enterprises, far beyond what I've done here. It was for this reason that I switched from WordPress to Expression Engine, because Expression Engine offers me the ability to start expanding my site facilities without a whole of painful integration work. It will allow me to start compartmentalizing my writing into focused, ad-friendly packets of content. It's a good media strategy.

You might be surprised to know that I don't spend every day reading RSS feeds to suck down the latest productivity and design news. I know that stuff is out there, but I get most of what I know through other people mentioning what's hot in passing. The sites that I do visit are ones that share the stories of someone's life. If there are any tips, they're offered in context to what someone has done and how it affected them. This is what I am drawn to, and recognizing that changes the way I deploy my shiny technical skills. I design because I like stories. And the kind of stories I like best are ones where someone has a dream, meets an obstacle that seems unsurmountable, then finds that greatness in themselves somehow to get past it.

I recently reread Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life?, which is his book about ordinary people who have asked this question and what they did about it. I originally read the book sometime in 2003, before I knew what a blog was and before I knew what was important to me. All I knew was that I wasn't particularly happy or inspired or motivated, though I wanted to feel that way. I wanted a calling, and the book reassured me that I wasn't alone or crazy in desiring this. Then I forgot about the book and went on with my life. 2004 kind of sucked, but 2005 offered possibility. 2006 was pretty good, and 2007 was better still because I've met people who have made a difference in my life, and have given me fresh perspective. What I lacked, though, was a sense of being part of a greater movement. What Should I Do With My Life? (a book about individual calling), along with Why Do I Love These People (a related book about family bonds) has reconnected me with the notion that it's really the people making their lives work that inspire me every day. And so, if what I can do with my life can help them make their stories better and make a good life...that's precisely what I want to do. I just need to make it pay.

I'm not exactly sure why I wrote this, though I suspect it's partly a reaction to my NOT having written a rambling personal post in quite some time, and it's probably also part of my processing of my Po Bronson weekend. I think maybe this is an affirmation of faith, and maybe it's also a beacon. As an experiment I've tried linking this post to the forum that I just installed this weekend for the C# Study Group. If there's anything I've learned, it's the small offerings to connect that lead to surprising opportunities. You just need to keep making the offer, and not have expectations on what comes back. It's both scary and exciting. It doesn't always work out or last, but heck let's see if anything happens. You can register here.

Merry Catmas!

My sister says this picture reminds her of some kind of European rock album cover.

OLPC XO Laptop: First Impressions

I was pleasantly surprised to receive my XO Laptop, formally known as the $100 Laptop for the One Laptop Per Child non-profit, and I just spent a couple hours playing with it. It is the cutest, coolest piece of gear I have in the house. I would venture to say that it's WAY cooler than my MacBook Pro 17" which is, basically, a production workstation. Sure, the XO is not very fast, is made of the type of plastic that's used for toddler toys, and the "keyboard" is a chicklet-style membrane that is not designed for touch-typing. There isn't a hard drive, and it doesn't run Windows or a window system for that matter. So what good is it you ask? It's good for getting education and computing into the great outdoors, that's what. It is the most exciting thing I've seen in quite some time. Yes, I even think it's cooler than the iPhone.

Admittedly, it is designed for smaller hands than mine, and in terms of speed you can practically feel the tiny processor grunting to itself like a jogger huffing I CAN!!! toward the top of a mountain as tourists stare curiously at him from their air-conditioned rental cars. Fast, it isn't. It reminds me a lot of one of the microcomputers I wanted when I was 12, the Sinclair ZX80. Like the Sinclair, the XO makes thrifty use of its limited memory. And like microcomputers of the early 80s, the XO is open. Open Source, in fact. The guts of the software are accessible, so this is a machine that people just getting introduced to computers will be able to learn on. What's really exciting, though, is the quality of the I/O. There's a camera, microphone, speakers, a high-res sunlight-readable display, and self-organizing mesh networking all built in. For expansion, there are USB ports and a memory card slot. You can take this computer on outdoor adventures with you, take pictures and notes, and share your findings with your peers around you. I find this incredibly exciting.

I haven't really played with the software at all yet, but I'm looking forward to trying to use this machine quite a bit as my primary "on the go" laptop to see what it's like. When I'm traveling around I usually just take notes anyway in my reporter-style Moleskine. The wireless networking capabilities of the XO should make this a good coffeehouse companion, though the keyboard is not suitable for touch typing at all.

Fortunately for me, the XO recognized my treasured IBM Model M 84-Key Space Saver Keyboard, which I plugged through a PS2-to-USB adapter. Seemed to work fine with the machine. When you put the XO into tablet mode, you end up with a very compact word processing station that is high-resolution and usable in direct sunlight. While the XO is supposed to run for quite a while on batteries (especially with the backlight off), the additional current drain of the Model M keyboard might reduce battery life further...I have no idea.

Anyway, it's here in time for Christmas, so I'm looking forward to spending a bit of time looking at the development environment. It might be neat to develop some portable tracking tools for the machine, if only for my own amusement.

Information Capture and Geek Dinners

Friday is my last day in San Jose, which was pleasantly sunny but chilly--chillier than I expected, actually. I shouldn't complain since I have been hearing that New England is getting hammered with snow. Here's hoping that I don't end up camping out in the Chicago Midway airport Food Court tomorrow. On the plus side, Midway has a pretty decent food court, as airports go. But I digress! Here's what's going on:

Geek Dinner

We had a small gathering of five productivity nerds on Thursday night, meeting at an open air mall called The Pruneyard in Campbell, California. My fellow productivity enthusiasts informed me that The Pruneyard is a popular meeting place for events in Silicon Valley, particularly because there are several good restaurants right there. After convening at The Coffee Society, we moved on to a diner-like place called Hobee's, where I had a club sandwich served with TORTILLA CHIPS on the side instead of fries. It's these regional differences (or perhaps it is just a Hobee's thing) that I find fascinating about new places.

The conversation opened up with an inquiry into The Great Big Mess that all the information capturing we do seems to create. After a great deal of inquiry about job text, performance metrics, and the tossing around of the word "orthogonal" more than a few times, we came to a tentative conclusion that the ideal system would have the following characteristics:

• minimal overhead in note taking and information capture
• not necessary to do a structuring pass to make the notes useful
• available everywhere and anywhere

This is the DREAM SYSTEM, and on first glance it seems untenable. Note taking is essentially the entire scope of information capture; anything we think we should be able to recall later is fair game. This includes conversations in the hallway, planning meetings, things on the Internet, email email email, and pieces of documents scattered across dozens of computer systems. A great deal of our time is spent processing all this raw input into useful resources (or it should be); the seminal information system designer Douglas Engelbart had observed that much of our time is spent just doing clerical work. TThe percentage of time spent being CREATIVE (like, actually making something) is pretty small. Once you have your nuggets all in a row, you naturally want to have them accessible. This is a form of magic. I think the reason devices like smart phones, PDAs, and even Moleskines and Hipsters are so popular is because they are arcane artifacts in a mundane world filled with ordinary information. At least they would be, if they actually worked. Right now, these systems function because we spend a lot of energy maintaining them with methodologies like Getting Things Done and 7 Habits. That isn't quite magic, though...what we want is something we DON'T have to work at constantly, because we're lazy and believe we have better things to do. Even if we force ourselves to do them, we don't enjoy it.

I've written about productivity systems in the past in terms of the importance of context, but lately my emphasis has shifted to continuity as being even more fundamental when it comes to doing stuff.

1. If you are just doing without thinking, you'll make progress, but maybe not the right progress.
2. If you are doing within an understood context, you have an idea of how your work will be applied; therefore your work is theoretically better.
3. If you are maintaining continuity in doing, you have a form of momentum that tells you what to do next, because it follows from what you just did.

The better user interfaces I've seen have addressed context through intelligent screen layout and functional grouping, but I haven't seen anything that really pays attention to continuity. My paper-based tools tend to enforce continuity probably because I need it; I don't have a manager who's job would be to direct my energies along fruitful paths. The modern knowledge worker has so many things going on that it's impossible to maintain continuity of everything, so you're forced to do it very badly or learn to shut things out. For people who want to do more, they turn to a methodology that ensures that they ARE maintaining continuity; this is one of the strengths of GTD, though it doesn't help you with WHAT you should be doing to achieve your desires. That's a different system.

After realizing that we were chasing a system spec that was basically asking for the moon, our brainstorming became more animated. Some of the suggestions (that I think I can share):

• Maintaining several distinct information data streams, based on "beautiful filters", that create themselves without you having to be involved. Instead, you use days of the week as continuity. When you need information from a particular area, you go and dip back into it.

• Creation of a universal work/life filtering language that imposes a standard continuity description language on different information sources.

• Capture metadata about the day by recording what you see throughout the day with Tivo-like camera glasses; when something important happens, you press a button to timestamp that moment and say something about what it is. Since a lot of interesting information is recognized only after it has been observed, the digital rewind capability ensures you don't miss anything.

• Get email programs to re-implement really excellent conversational threading, and provide a visual overlay tool that you can use to create a continuity of relevance and context. In other words, methods of organizing who conversations, not just tagging individual items. Nerd analogy: Sort of like using Ethereal to isolate HTTP packet traffic, filter out the non-http stuff, and reconstruct the actual back-and-forth between client and server.

• Create "Project Manager ELIZA", a chatterbot that can be used as a tool for continuity reflection and conversational memory storage. The theory is that maybe all we need is someone to talk to about what we're doing, constantly, to maintain our own continuity. ELIZA is known for taking the user's text input, extracting nouns and ideas it recognizes through simple pattern matching, and then spitting back a canned reply using those words. The results can sometimes be very insightful, and certainly they are just as good as the average "bad project manager" :-) Combine this with conversation logging, and the ability to just tell the chatterbot to remember things for you, and you might have a pretty decent personal assistant that doesn't cost you anything.

There were various products mentioned throughout the night in this context: OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, Microsoft OneNote, 37Signals Basecamp / HighRise / Backpack, That Mac Program That Keeps Track Of What You Are Looking (name?), Tablet PCs, and Moleskines are what I remember.

RSS Feeds

Some readers have had problems with the RSS feed updating multiple times for the same article. I've started seeing this too in the email subscriptions, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why certain posts kept reappearing. I finally dipped into Expression Engine's RSS template and looked around to see what actually goes in there, and after some reading have tried changing:

<guid>{title_permalink=blog}#When:{gmt_entry_date format="%H:%i:%sZ"}</guid>

to

<guid>{title_permalink=blog}</guid>

From what I can tell about RSS feeds, the "globally unique identifier" (GUID) is supposed to be unique but is otherwise just a string. I don't know if there are strange inconsistencies happening in the way {gmt_entry_date} is producing its output as a HH:MM:SS...maybe my server is wobbling slightly on the way seconds are being reported. And wouldn't the date of the post be a more stable GUID string? Anyway, I just nuked that whole part and I hope the RSS problem fixes itself.

Hot Sauces and Yummy Tacos

Two culinary food finds on this trip. First, this is an excellent spicy hot sauce:

My cousin Ben, who tries every hot sauce he comes across, turned me on to this. He warned me to use only a little bit. I spooned on just a bit more than he suggested, and my mouth was scorched in the most loving yet alarming way. The entire top of my scalp started to sweat profusely and my eyes filled with tears of joy and consternation. At the same time, it was more than just heat...there was flavor and warmth and a feeling of some accomplishment. The heat lingers too, becoming stronger over the next 5-10 minutes, so be careful. Really yummy.

We also had lunch at a place called Plaza Garibaldi in San Jose, which had these tacos:

They were good in a way I didn't expect: as an ensemble cast of ingredients, each offering its own contribution to the overall taste. For me, my reference point for tacos are Taco Bell and the numerous so-so Mexican restaurants scattered around New England. The tacos were not intensely flavored, and because of that there was a much more interesting flavor arc. It was subtle like a quiet passage in a piece of classical music, requiring you to listen carefully so you can catch what is going on. I liked them quite a bit, but in a reflective way.