This is an on-the-fly thought journal, containing my day-to-day reflections on what I'm doing. You probably shouldn't subscribe to this journal, unless you have a high tolerance for internal monologue.

I find that I work much better when I'm writing at the same time, so this journal is an important part of my process of synthesis and review. It's also a "behind-the-scenes" look at how I puzzle things out, in a way I don't usually share on the main blog. Feel free to observe. Comment if you dare.

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07
May 12

The Morning After, Looking Ahead

I went to sleep at 8PM last night, and woke up 12 hours later. I’m refreshed, and dehydrated; today’s goal is to rejoin the gym and drink 64 oz of water.

I’m super re-energized by the events of the weekend, and this morning am facing the mountain of tasks with pent-up inspiration bursting at the seams. Usually, I am facing the mountain when I have a low supply of inspiration, having instead to draw on a sense of duty or the desire to stand for something. The mountain of tasks, I’m realizing, looks the same no matter what my energy level or attitude is. I want to do things, but I find the task of breaking down the mountain into some kind of approach to be energy-draining.

It occurs to me further that I really don’t SEE the mountain clearly. That would imply I know what I’m doing. It’s more like I sense the MASS and SIZE of the mountain, so I assume it’s there and gigantic. And I know I have to go climb the mountain if I want to get things done, but you know what? I’m not sure what mountain I’m climbing.

The mountain is not a mountain. The mountain is my labeling of a set of uncertainties and expected hardships. Hardship is guaranteed, but to shy away from hardship in the abstract is not a character-building attitude. To not define the set of hardships is to give into uncertainty.

Let me try to simplify this further:

I know I have a lot of things to do, and it’s going to take time and energy and perhaps be unpleasant in the following ways:

  • It will make me feel trapped by the situation until it’s done
  • It will take a long time
  • I won’t possess the skill or resources to do a great job the first time
  • I may never get it right, and I will disappoint someone
  • I may fail, and it will have been a waste of time

These are guaranteed feelings I will have, and they loom large in my mind. However, I should think about how I will feel if I do get something done:

  • I will have learned something
  • I will have a new story to tell that draws from life experience
  • I will have something new to build with, sell, or show to people
  • I’ll be one step closer to a goal
  • I will see new opportunities
  • I can see one more data point in the larger patterns of life

These are good feelings. The combination of the unpleasant feelings with the pleasant feelings reminds me of a contraction followed by an expansion. Repeated over and over again, progress is guaranteed. It’s as simple as the contraction and concentration of effort, followed by release. I can get behind that, I think.

That leaves the what mountain and also the myriad commitments I have? These represent piles of related tasks. There are many piles. There is also a main theme that ties all these piles together, that of leading my best and my productively fulfilling life. That is measured by what I can build, what I can refine and polish, making the best communities and contributing in them, and bringing in enough money to fund all those dreams.

What comes to mind is that the client commitments fit into the overall commitments. There is one product: a Dave Seah that can create useful things and garner revenue from this activity while maintaining a flexible and free lifestyle in a community of like-minded people. The challenge is to manage all those engagements with people while making progress on building the machine that supports me. That is the peak of the mountain, and the client commitments are subpeaks and basecamps scattered from sea level on up to the top.

The actual climb consists of hitting all those peaks and basecamps successfully, and this is a sequencing and logistics problem. It’s not related to the action or produced experience; it’s a management issue. To be able to plan this, though, requires an intimate understanding of the terrain and environmental factors as they impact the available ability to perform.

Since I lack an intimate understanding of the terrain, I’m reduced to guessing. This is a bad strategy when it comes to mountain climbing, I would imagine, unless you are in the process of EXPLORING. Exploring can be thought of as way of converting uncertainty to certainty, or adding more knowledge about a particular activity with the intention of improving something. Exploring without these intentions is just entertainment or looking for inspiration. This is probably what a vacation is supposed to be, giving one’s brain a rest from trying to change the world all the time.

So, what does the mountain look like now? At the peak is a successful David Seah, doing creative things with a like-minded group of collaborators to generate the revenue and expertise to expand the scale of the operation with style. To reach the top, I have to identify the basecamps and develop the logistical plans that link them together. I have been doing that for the past 15 years. I think what I need to do now is start the real planning to pull the logistics together.

Task management strategies, then, probably will become clearer.

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06
May 12

Wrapping Up New England Give Camp

It’s getting to the end of New England Give Camp, the “coding for charity” event being held at the Microsoft NERD Center this weekend. Sunday morning was spent reviewing what we’d got done and wrapping up loose ends. After lunch (which was delicious mini-burgers made with locally raised beef), we finished up and started writing documentation. I actually fell asleep while I was doing this, so I didn’t finish before it was time for PRESENTATIONS.

Each team is given around 3 minutes to stand up and talk about what they worked on, which is a nice way to provide closure. I’m sitting in the audience right now, and it’s great to see the reaction of each non-profit who have started with little and ended up with a whole lot of organization-supporting website. In some cases, it’s needed basic functionality. In others, it’s content organization and branding. Seeing the breadth of the organizations and technical approaches is like a crash course in web development. It’s very interesting to see just how much a small team can do in a fixed period of time with complete access to the client, and to see what the shared problems were. From the NPO’s perspective:

  • Promotion!
  • Simplifying the message!
  • Serving both NPO partners and newcomers!
  • Automating tedious organization functions!
  • Getting the community to respond and take action!
  • Changing content so it looks good and doesn’t hurt!

From the team’s perspective, I’ve noticed these issues:

  • Level of familiarity with a platform (WordPress and Drupal were popular) to get started fast
  • How to achieve the NPO’s needs with specific application of technology
  • How to say things…writing and content strategy
  • How to show things…visual design
  • How to teach the client NPO how to use the site
  • Finding out what the team members do
  • Sharing good process
  • Finding the synchronicity in every interaction

The greatest experience, however, which is just dawning on me, is really the gratitude and appreciation that the NPO organizers have for the whole experience. From my perspective, I felt I wasn’t really giving up much in exchange for the chance to hang out in Cambridge and get free food over the weekend, but I was reminded that the collective might of the 100+ volunteers was a tremendous force for positive change. I tend to think of skills in dispassionate terms, but to see them applied toward community causes that people really, really love and are driven to support…it’s very motivating. A lot of my personal grumblings about doing web development work has kind of evaporated, and I am kind of jazzed about establishing the best practices I’ve observed this weekend.

I have quite a bit more mental processing to do about the weekend, but for now I can definitely say this was one of the best work experiences / events I’ve ever attended. One remarkable thing about the GiveCamp event is that everyone here is generous and accepting in some way. This struck me on Saturday, because I suddenly became aware of the complete lack of drama. And maybe I am finally mature enough to appreciate how important that is.

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06
May 12

Wrap Up Day 2

It was actually quite a busy day after lunch. Our team tackled a number of issues that I at first thought were more trivial than they turned out to be. No big surprises there. What I did find novel was the experience of working with a team that possessed overlapping skills again, instead of being the lone specialist in one matter or another. This was very refreshing, and had me thinking about the pros and cons of the freelance lifestyle.

The problems we looked at today were:

  • Making sure that the website was automatically backing up (BlueHost does).

  • Troubleshooting the social media plugins that had stopped functioning, which involved tracking down some extension conflicts in Firefox.

  • Resolving some CSS issues that stood in the way of recreating the home page with a particular layout that the project manager had in mind. I learned a few things about stacked floated DIVs. I provided some insight on the use of CSS selectors.

  • Cleaned up some website cruft: old WordPress install and databases, for example.

Mixed in with this was a lot of snacking, Cinquo De Mayo celebration (though the caterer forgot to bring meat), movies, and prize draws. I wandered around a bit more to see what other people were doing with their coding and their design, which was gratifying. Again, I rarely get to work with people that have overlapping skills with me, and it’s apparent that it’s a wonderful thing to have available.

It’s 1AM and I’m about to crash. I know I have Groundhog Day Resolution to catch up on, but that might have to wait until Monday.

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05
May 12

Initial Interviews and Assignments

Everyone is here now so we’re now going through the task list as it exists. We’re also going through the fundamentals to find out the needs of the organization itself. Clients, in my experience, often are fixated on the specific fixes they want to see, so designers / developers have to ask for the reason behind the requests.

  • List of Organization Needs
  • Contributing Factors to Program Success
  • What “Interactivity” means to the Organization

One thing that came up is that EV currently isn’t sure how people are using the website. There has been very little feedback. Interactivity, from the organization’s perspective, means getting people to interact with the site. Me, as a former game developer, thinks of interactivity as getting the computer to respond to users, and so I tend to think about solving a particular information challenge with appropriate code and design.

Ultimately, EV would like to see more feedback, comments, and so forth. There are some comments on the site, but they are a source of mystery: there are actually NO comment forms on the site currently. This means that the comments are bypassing the interface by calling the scripts directly. Akismet, the spam filtering plugin, isn’t catching these for some reason. We could install more aggressive filtering plugins that try to detect robot behavior, but I find that sometimes these prevent legitimate comments from being posted.

LUNCH was wraps. I had a very good Italian wrap and an OK chicken wrap. Could have used some more mayonnaise. Had a tasty cup of clam chowder while looking across the Charles River at the Prudential Center. Feeling pretty New Englandy!

…

It’s now around 415PM, and we’ve been knocking of a few of the small changes:

  • Facebook / Twitter Integration: FIXED (a weird combination of javascript script rot and Firefox AddOns)
  • Reworking the front page layout
  • Going through some CSS 101

We also got “Rip van Wafels” cookies, or Stroopwafels. Dutch syrup-soaked cookies, or something.

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05
May 12

Theory of Knowledge

After breakfast came in, I had an interesting conversation with our project lead, Adam Caron, about our experiences in meditation, which led to to a discussion about the role of meaning and identity in our daily life. I related the experience of trying to meditate in a Theory of Knowledge class in high school, which ended in uncontrollable laughter and expulsion from the classroom. I’ve had a bit better luck since then.

Our client, Brian Thompson of EVKids.org, arrived just a few minutes ago. The immediate task list is a combination of technical fixes for his WordPress-based website + the addition of “interactive elements”, which we need to dig into a bit deeper this morning.

In the meantime, I’ve installed BackWPUp, a WordPress backup plugin, to see what it’s capable of doing. It’s Multisite-compatible, which is nice since my own main websites are WordPress Networks; not every plugin can work with them.

Looking over the settings panel for the plugin, it seems that it’s based on the creation of backup “jobs”, which is perhaps too jargon-y already to consider for our client. Clicking the “Add Job” button revealed an enormous number of options related to the database tables to back-up, file folders, etc, and the manner with which to back up the resulting archive file. It also does not seem to do restorations of the database.

Checking out XCloner next. It failed to run properly on my test installation, and the means of accessing its menu is different from the usual ways WordPress plugins operate. I just canned it…don’t like it.

I’m going to take another sweep through the plugin directory for backups. Noting that the WordPress backup page is a useful starting point for the client, potentially, to understand the need for backup.

After scanning through the backup plugins again, nothing obvious jumps out. If I were backing up the files, the simplest would be to just tar-gz my wp-content directory (after nuking any cache directories) and use some MySQL commands to make a database dump. Restoring a backup is more of a pain, but is straightforward. I guess using BackWPUp for the client is an acceptable solution in that it appears to do what it needs to do, though it’s not end-user friendly. If I think of it as a failsafe, but requiring an experienced developer to restore, that is probably good enough…will have to confer with the rest of the team to see what the consensus is.

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05
May 12

Up and Away!

After about 4 hours of sleep at New England GiveCamp, I’m up and groggy, but feeling like working while my mind is still kind of mushy. Does that even make sense. Gar.

Anyway, there are a number of technical tasks on the list today. One of them is to back up the database on the client’s site, and arrange for some kind of automated backup.

I use a plugin called Adminer that is like a mini-version of PHPMyAdmin, but this is probably overkill. So, I’m looking to see what’s new in the world of WordPress plugins. The plugins xcloner and BackWPUp look promising. The criteria I look for in a plugin, when first scoping out the field of potentials, is somewhat subjective initially:

  1. Has it been recently updated for the latest version of WordPress, and does it have a history of such updates?
  2. Is the description of the plugin comprehensive, with some sense of “excellence” in the tone of writing?
  3. Does it have more than a few positive 4-star ratings?

Plugins that match these criteria tend to be well-known, mainstream solutions that many people use. For something like backup, that’s probably a reliable indicator of probable technical excellence and usability. For more esoteric problems like caching, opinions tend to split along popularity (“it works, and it’s what I’ve always used”).

So, I might as well install these plugins in my own installation and see how that goes.

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10
Apr 12

Recentering

I’m aware of a giant, ever-shifting cloud of possibility. I like having this cloud nearby, as it is the host of all experiences that I excitedly anticipate. Many of my own dreams and desires live in this cloud, too.

On the other hand, the cloud of possibility is so massive that it tends to overshadow reality. Reality, unlike the world of dreams, takes time and resources to change. Moving an idea from the cloud of possibility to the real world takes a huge amount of energy compared to the ease of just dreaming about it.

Learning to cope with that disparity of effort is a major part of my struggle to be productive. What might be helpful is some way to definitively measure what’s getting done, and letting the pile of real things create its OWN world of possibility from what’s there.

By example, the dream world allows us to imagine what we can eat based on any criteria whatsoever. We can imagine delicious foods prepared using exotic techniques we’ve read about, prepared with unworldly skill in exotic locations. It’s fun, right up to the point where you decide to try to do it.

The real world, by comparison, attaches a statistical likelihood of success plus a cost to every dream. It’s easy to rack up a huge time and resources bill when in the dream world, because you can pay with dream money. In the real world, it’s easy to get stuck on just the first step.

Then there are the possibilities that come not from dreams, but from what you have. If you have two eggs and a skillet, the possibilities pretty much point to some kind of fried egg dish. If you find some cheese and maybe some mushrooms, then omelets are starting are looking likely. However, just because the omelets are arising out of what’s right in front of us, that doesn’t mean it is any less exciting if you know how to look at the situation. You can make phenomenal eggs and strive for perfect prepared omelets.

Learning to anchor myself to the possibilities offered by the real world, but using the dream world to help guide me toward new capabilities to develop, might be the way to go. It might result in less feelings of inadequacy, if I accept this. It’s a form of designing within constraints.

Combining this with the recognition that making progress in the real world is orders of magnitude slower, especially along difficult paths that few have traveled, may help. Using a recipe-based approach to generate quick-and-dirty assets might help maintain a sense of progress.

I should review the game work. How to organize it?

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18
Mar 12

Picking the Right Projects

I tend to pick projects that either have high-need time-limited attributes, or are in a new area that I’m interested in and would like to learn more about. The two primary stimuli are, in these cases, response to human need and the desire to learn knew things. The common element, though, is my perception that there’s a unique contribution I can make because I’m the one with the crossover skills to make it happen. I often seem to end up in that position.

There’s a problem with being the only person with the crossover skills, and that is isolation. When you’re the only person who can initiate a deep process, you are doing it alone. And I find that I don’t function very well alone. I require, apparently, both a tangible sense of external need and the freedom to explore new fields. If there’s anything I thrive doing, it’s figuring stuff out and creating tiny experiments. However, I seem to enjoy it most when I’m with an equally-excited person who’s willing to work. I don’t enjoy it when I am working by myself on behalf of someone else’s need. I guess I like to work with other peoples INTERESTS and PASSIONS, not their abstract needs.

I’ll have to keep this in mind. It may be that I need to start working with people again in lead role, directing energy and the work of others, and take myself out of the critical production path.

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26
Feb 12

Dealing with PayPal, Customs, and Shipping, Revisited

So having written the post on “Low Threshold of Inconvenience”, I’m putting some steps into practice. I made this list:

  • entering the bubble
  • don’t take inconvenience personally
  • maintain a neutral, observing, experimental mindset
  • put other thoughts out of my mind
  • commit to 15 minutes to start
  • as troubles and inconveniences pop up, note them down

I attempt to apply this to a big hairy inconvenient mess: setting up PayPal for a smooth selling experience. Continue reading →

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26
Feb 12

Low Threshold of Inconvenience

As I slowly woke from a deep slumber, I idly ticked through a list of possible things to do. All of them, worthwhile! All of them, just a little too much to get excited about. It’s a long-standing pattern, this, and I’ve at various times ascribed it to:

  • a lack of intrinsic motivation
  • a lack of external feedback
  • a missing sense of mission or calling
  • depression at the amount of work required
  • Seasonal Affective Disorder
  • being “interesting” rather than “exciting”
  • not knowing where to start
  • not immediately knowing how to make it work
  • lack of energy / sleepiness
  • lack of water / nutrition
  • back workspace
  • other projects sapping energy from me

Today, though, I think I can wrap these all up under one malady, which I’m dubbing “Low Threshold of Inconvenience” or LTI. I have a remedy for almost all of the things I’ve listed above, but every one requires some effort on my part. When I’m feeling good or am “feeling the moment”, I can deploy any number of countermeasures and get through something. When I’m not, however, it’s tough. My basic proclivity, when I’m by myself in the comfort of my own home, is to avoid things that are inconvenient to start, unless the result is quite salient. Preparing food falls in that category.

When the productive choices in front of me are all inconvenient, then the non-productive pre-packaged choices are easy to fall into. Watching TV. Playing a video game. Driving somewhere to do some window shopping. Surfing the net. These are all rewarding with new ideas and inputs without having to do anything other than click a button or get into the car. It’s a noxious habit to fall into, especially if you’re desire is to build something new for yourself.

I was thinking about my particular level of LTI. The following things are inconvenient for me to the point I will not do them unless I am in the mood to push, or are being pushed:

  • Opening more than one window on my computer.
  • Looking for a file in a directory.
  • Having to remember anything.
  • Starting to design.
  • Writing a program.
  • Coding a website.
  • Reading what I have already written.
  • Doing a second draft.
  • Drafting a report from multiple sources.
  • Picking up something on the floor.
  • Going to the mailbox, because I have to get out of my car and carry it back.
  • Doing the dishes.
  • Exploring a new town.
  • Taking out the trash.
  • Dusting.

The top of the list are things that are more work related, while the bottom of the list are more like chores. The list is pretty embarrassing…it seems that I find EVERYTHING inconvenient. I have no inherent desire to go out and do these things. The only thing that keeps it from becoming a desperate pattern is that that I like good stuff. And I’ve found that I can create good stuff, when I apply myself. And the ability to make good stuff is the gateway to being able to buy more good stuff, as well as create some stature for myself. In other words, I value good stuff. That desire to have good stuff means I either have to create it, make the money to buy it. The resistance is that I don’t particularly like the process because it’s (wait for it) NOT usually a good process. Every interaction pains me because it’s in some way not optimal or good. This drives me nuts.

For example, starting to write a program means that I need to have a collection of skills and software programs, with the ability to apply them intelligently. The skills are not difficult, once you find them and understand them. Most of the educational material out there is piecemeal, just fragments of the big picture, and lacking the organization to make the material truly accessible. That offends me on a basic level. The software programs themselves are often obtuse and poorly documented, and sometimes are shoddily coded or conceived. I find offense in that also. It fills me with such frustration that I often feel like giving up. I feel limited by factors that are beyond my control.

This is probably why I’m such a poor student, because I’m such a judgmental deconstructor of everything from presentation to accuracy to communication style. I used to be confused by bad material, thinking that I was stupid. Then, realizing it wasn’t me, I took it personally. These days I’m more relaxed about it and can go with the flow to privately construct my own understanding, but the frustration is still there. The making of things can be easy and obvious, I keep dreaming, if only the material was cleanly presented and explorable.

For stuff I know how to do, like design a page or make a webpage, there are many small inconveniences. I hate looking for files on my computer, remembering where I put them. My project filing system is fairly efficient, but it’s still a pain in the butt. I don’t like opening explorer folders, finding where the window pops up, and drilling down into a directory structure. It’s all so awful, the user interfaces. I’d write my own file manager if I knew how, but then I’m back to the problem of dealing with all that bad documentation to learn how, which doesn’t help me. What kills me is that I know I can do it; it’s just that there’s so much crud to wade through. But I digress…the next step to making something is managing all the thousands of bits of code and the dozens if not hundreds of graphic assets, each one a tiny gnat-bite of inconvenience. Compounding this are all the unknowns that have to be resolved, and the result may NOT be good.

For other chores like picking stuff off the floor, the frustration is a little different. First, I never see stuff like that unless there’s a reason to be concerned (like, someone ELSE might see it). And then, when I really look, I really don’t like what I see. I hate my kitchen floor, for example, but am too cheap and too judgmental about contractors (and even a too much out of my element) to take a chance and try to fix it with real effort and money. It’s a big project, in my mind, to get this done right. So I just seethe quietly inside, and don’t do it. If it really capture my attention, I will do something and spend a few hours on it, but it’s rare.

For less epic chores, like cleaning the cat box or doing the dishes, I’ve learned to just shut my mind off and do it without commentary. In fact, when I’ve done this, I end up coming up with ways of handling it more efficiently and with less stress. This is the “on-the-fly systemization of process” that I tend to do when locked into a task that I’ve given my promise to complete.

This isn’t quite where I thought this post would go, but I’ll sum up the takeaways for me:

  • I am highly sensitive to inconvenience. Almost every worthwhile thing I can think to do seems inconvenient, and therefore I don’t do them.
  • I am highly judgmental of the tools and references I use to do things, which creates another barrier to using them to do things.
  • I tend to be offended by bad stuff, and am easily irritated by chores that are not in themselves a contributor to excellence.
  • In other words, I take a lot of process very personally, and not in a good way.

Realizing this, I think the following realizations are helpful:

  • Relax, don’t take inconvenience/mediocrity personally, and know that my first pass through will systemize it so it’s better next time. This happens automatically for me.
  • Having the willpower to push past inconvenience is kind of MY HERO MOMENT. Immediacy and external factors can also provide an assist, but when it comes to my OWN SELF IMPROVEMENT, the willpower is necessary. It’s my own journey.

By not dwelling on the inconvenience, and focusing on the systemization pass, I may be able to push few a few more projects. In a way it’s a distraction from the actual task, but I think for someone like me it’s probably necessary. I loathe inconvenience and inefficiency, and have to deal with it eventually. It’s probably my greatest challenge!

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