Tuesday, August 30, 2016

GADGETS FOR THE TRAVELING TECHIE


tools from Ötzi the Iceman over 5,000 years ago
from age-of-the-sage.org
(http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/archaeology/otzi_the_iceman.html)
    "This Stone Age man [Ötzi] has four pieces of stone on him (and one very exciting piece of futuristic copper metal), but almost all of his kit is totally biodegradable. If he'd been buried properly and dug up nowadays, we'd have known nothing at all about his tailored pants, his raincoat, his belt, his backpack, and especially a couple of dozen different thongs. ... The guy never made a move without a handy reservoir of string."

      — "Tomorrow Now" (2003) by Bruce Sterling

In his non-fiction futurist manifesto "Tomorrow Now," science fiction author Bruce Sterling spends some time going through the pockets of Ötzi the Iceman, concluding that five millennia ago humans liked their gadgets just as much as we do now.

Here's what I said about gadgets in my book, A Survival Guide for the Traveling Techie, in section 2.17, SHOPPING FOR TECHNOLOGY:

    An early reviewer of a draft of this book complained she'd expected more in the way of reviews of the latest handheld and mobile gadgets. Now, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool techie and I love gadgets, but I'm also a technical pragmatist and so I tend to ask 'what will help me do my job?'

    If it's up-to-date gadget reviews you want, check my blog...

I was referring of course to this blog, and though I've been writing it since 2014 I have yet to talk about any gadgets. Oops. So here we go, with the whole truth on my favorites and why.

Pioneers


image from
www.appledorebookshop.com/
pages/books/8187/william-o-steele/
flaming-arrows

I sometimes hear techies say "Pioneers end up with arrows in their backs." I hear this more frequently from sales people and managers in tech industries. I've also heard, "It's hard to be on the bleeding edge and not get cut." These homilies are arguments against being an early adopter of technology. And yet as a techie aren't we supposed be out there embracing the new?

Here's the big picture: I've found you have to divide your gadgets into two categories: early tech and late tech. An early tech gadget is one from a technology that isn't ready for prime time, and you're using it because:

  • you think it represents the future, so you want to get in on the ground floor

  • you want to learn all about it

  • let's face it, you love it

You can only afford a few of these. The pros of being an early adopter of a new technology are:

  • You get to learn all about it first.
  • You get to impress your geek friends with your new, bleeding-edge gadget.
  • You hopefully gain a new capability before most other people.
On the other hand, the cons of being an early adopter are:
  • It can be very aggravating.
  • There is no guarantee that the technology will ever deliver as advertised.
  • Even if you pick the right tech you may end up with the wrong vendor, becoming proficient in a proprietary solution that goes away.
  • You can end up being very annoying if you don't learn to curb your enthusiasm.
  • You may end up learning the wrong lessons, including some "learned helplessness" if you conclude that X is hard, and later it becomes easy. (This happened to me with voice recognition, optical character recognition, and some other low-level Artificial Intelligence applications.)
So carefully choose which early tech you devote mindshare to.

With me my early tech gadgets and fads have been Personal Computers (PCs), 3-dimensional computer graphics (3D CG), Visualization, Digital Video (DV), Global Positioning System (GPS), Smart Phones and Big Data. I'm sure you have your own list.

The rest of the gadgets in your life are late tech, you have them because you need them and you want the minimum amount of nonsense from them, so you get mature technologies. I have been this way about (non-smart) cell phones, laptops, databases, cars and pocket knives. Again you have your own list.

My List of Most Useful Items


image from the cover of my book
"A Survival Guide for the Traveling Techie"

Some of the items listed you can't take on a plane, so don't.

In my family we used to say all you needed was duct tape and WD-40. If it moved and it shouldn't, duct tape it. If it didn't move and it should, use WD-40.

Later when the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, wrote a magazine article attempting to summarize his massive catalog on surviving and thriving in Western Civilization, he listed duct tape and WD-40 and a Swiss Army knife.

If you scrutinize the photo above, most of the items I used to carry around as late as 2005 (GPS, camera, music player, flashlight, flip phone, maps, reference books) are now incorporated into a smart phone. Less romantic I guess, but more efficient.

Here is my high-priority list of what's on my "Bat Belt":

  • Swiss Army knife
    I prefer a model with scissors, awl, corkscrew (useful for untying knots), can opener, toothpick, tweezers, bottle opener, flat blade and Phillips screwdrivers, and two knife blades, and without a saw (too many knuckle cuts)
  • WD-40
  • duct tape
  • iPhone
    apps:
    • GPS/navigation/maps
    • NOAA Weather
    • Wolfram Alpha
    • TouchTerm
      can actually ssl into a shell
    • Yelp
    • Runkeeper
    • Starbucks
    • Facebook & Twitter
      to stay in touch with family and friends; also remarkably good at alerting you to breaking news events
    • Netflix & Hulu
    • SoundHound
    • Tango
    • Find iPhone
  • iPod classic
    content:
    • music mixes
    • videos
  • iPhone/iPod accessories:
  • backup maps

    for when your phone dies or all the phones die; I like to carry Thomas Guides when I can, otherwise I print out local maps from Google and get regional maps from AAA

  • backup phone list (hard copy)
  • surge protector
  • 3-wire extension cord
  • 3-wire to 2-wire adapter
  • battery powered analog alarm clock
  • good luck charm
    I have a Mushu dragon plushie my daughter gave me which is remarkably effective at preventing hardware failures
  • backpack
    or laptop bag, for carrying laptop and etc.
  • books to read
    or you may prefer a tablet or e-reader
    currently reading: Death March (2nd Edition) (2003) by Edward Yourdon


    and Neutra (2004) by Barbara Lamprecht

  • pointer (telescoping or laser)
    I once worked for an old-school CEO yachtsman from Pittsburgh kept saying you should never point with your finger
  • office supplies:
    • portfolio
      pick a color scheme: silver and black, or gold and brown (ranging from burgundy to tobacco)
    • pad of paper in the portfolio
    • nice pen in the portfolio
    • fine point permanent pens
    • colored pencils
    • "magic" tape
    • scissors
    • hole punch
    • stapler
    • golf pencils to carry in your pocket — never put an ink pen in your pocket
  • gum
    to chew if you start to fall asleep in a meeting or driving

My List of Nice To Have Items


image from dailymail.co.uk
( i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/02/24 )

These are things I usually leave home but sometimes bring on the road as needed.

  • MacBook Pro 13 inch with external disk drive (Touro brand) used by Time Machine backup software, HiDef monitor, cables, external mouse
  • printer/scanner
  • Compac PC laptop with cables and mouse
  • Linux system with cables and mouse
  • mouse pad
  • Apple TV with cables
  • HiDef video projector with cables
  • Xbox or other game system, with cables
  • disaster/survival preparedness kit:
    • water
    • compass
    • 12 v water boiler
    • cups, bowls and utensils
    • ramen
    • snacks
    • cans of Spaghettios
      for hungry kids especially
    • mirror
      if lost in the wilderness you can signal planes with a hand mirror
    • bedding
    • space blanket
    • waterproof matches
    • crowbar
      rescuers in earthquakes report needing these

A Final Note: Narcissus Narcosis


Narcissus taking a selfie, from
stephendpalmer.com/selfies/

If you don't know who Marshall McLuhan was you probably should. He was a self-styled media critic, and gave us such aphorisms as: The medium is the message. He began his career as a literary critic in Toronto, specializing in Edgar Allan Poe, but ended up a world-acclaimed expert on the effects of new media on people's behavior and perceptions. He died in 1980, but when WIRED magazine began publishing in 1993 it adopted him as a sort of patron saint of the internet and interactive technologies, spreading his fame and influence further.

In his speeches and writings he was amazingly prescient, and he manages to shed some light on our 21st Century gadgets. He predicted what sounds amazingly like an internet-connected smart phone in the 1960s and '70s, as described by his biographer Phillip Marchand in 1989:

    "He told an audience in New York City shortly after the publication of Understanding Media that there might come a day when we would all have portable computers, about the size of a hearing aid, to help mesh our personal experiences with the experience of the great wired brain of the outer world."

McLuhan used the term "Narcissus as Narcosis" to describe our obsession with images of ourselves reflected in our gadgets. (In Greek mythology Narcissus of course was the ultra-attractive man who fell in love with his reflection in a pool. His name comes from the same root as narcotic.) Recent bloggers have noticed the similarity to the phenomenon of "selfies."

McLuhan wrote in chapter 4, The Gadget Lover, Narcissus as Narcosis, in "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" (1964):

    The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves...

He elaborated in 1961 in an interview in Playboy Magazine:

    ...all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self-protective numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what's happening to it. It's a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.

    This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not done so in this age of electronics is what has made this also the age of anxiety...

Something to ponder as you find yourself sucked into the invisible web of your connected gadgets...

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Saturday, April 30, 2016

WORLD WIDE WEB THE NEXT GENERATION
~ OR ~
WHAT I LEARNED AT SAN DIEGO STARTUP WEEK


Startup Funding Milestones from Startup Garage (artwork by Nicole's Design)
nicolesdesign.com/evolution-of-audience
    Web 2.0 describes World Wide Web sites that emphasize user-generated
    content, usability, and interoperability. The term was popularized by
    Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference
    in late 2004, though it was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999.

      — "Web 2.0" Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I wish I'd written this last summer when the events were fresh in my mind, and when the news I have was less stale, but life intruded.

A Paragraph With Footnotes About Hypertext


image from user.xmission.com/~fozz/
features/GuideToWWW/ChapterOne

Ah yes, hypertext. We get the concept from Ted Nelson [1], who mostly drew comics [2] about his ideas. The first widely-distributed implementation was Hypercard [3] and then the first Internet-based implementation was the World Wide Web (WWW).

It makes sense to say that the Web 0.0 began with Tim Berners-Lee [4] at Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) [5] in Meyrin, Geneva, Switzerland, and his simultaneous invention of these protocols:

  • the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) [6],
  • the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) [7],
  • the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) [8],
as well as these programs:

  • the first prototype web browser, WorldWideWeb [9],
  • the first prototype web server, HTTPd [10].

His browser did not include the ability to embed images in a page; you had to click a link and the image opened in a separate window. His web server did not allow the creation of any dynamic content, serving up only static pages.

Marc Andreesen [11] improved upon this with the creation of the Mosaic web browser [12], while at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) [13] in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, which did allow images on a page — an innovation I have compared to the photonovela [14] in Spanish language publishing.

Add in the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) [15] which allows dynamically generated content, and you have all the pieces of what many call Web 1.0.

And of course Andreesen and some investors and associates formed Netscape Communications [16], and productized Mosaic as the Netscape Navigator browser, and then added the JavaScript language [17] to it — an event which I'm pretty sure no one at the time realized would lead to the popularity of JavaScript today, and all the tricks that programmers have learned to do with it as the web has evolved.

This section is a metalogue, in that it both explains and illustrates a concept. The original "spec" for the WWW was basically clickable footnotes, like you see here.


image from
mamund.site44.com/talks/2014-apidays-paris/talk.html

Notes:

Onward


image from onlinemarketingscoops.com

Wikipedia tells us above that "Web 2.0 describes World Wide Web sites that emphasize user-generated content, usability, and interoperability." This includes sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, social sites such as Facebook and Snapchat, collaborative sites such as Yelp and Wikipedia, and other innovations like multiplayer games and sites where you can caption cat pictures, crowd-sourcing everything from music curating to mate selection.

The pundits then predicted that Web 3.0 would be the "semantic web."

I think they're wrong and I'll tell you why. I have found that when people break a problem in language processing down into "syntax" and "semantics" what they really mean is "the part we know how to automate" and "the part we don't know how to automate." Whenever we make a breakthrough in the semantics column it moves over into the syntax column. You see the problem.

A more pressing problem is that the whole Semantic Web field is foundering in academic doldrums, and the chances of getting the billion web sites in the world to add some kind of "semantic sugar" to make the semantic web work seem slim to me.

Instead, it is clear to me, and some other self-appointed experts, that Web 3.0 is the mobile web, running on mobile devices, GPS-enabled, and inter-operating with the ecology of mobile apps, especially on Android and iPhone.

As for the challenge of getting billions of websites to add some "mobile sugar" it turns out that Google is accomplishing that with economic coercion — more on that later.

One of the best examples I've seen of a "killer app" for web-enabled mobile devices is the restaurant wait system from Waitlist.me, which my wife and I experienced on our last anniversary at a charming outdoor restaurant on Mission Bay called the Barefoot Bar.

The hostess asked for my cell number, and then texted me a link to a smartphone-friendly page to track our progress.


6/21/15 iPhone screen shot from the
Waitlist.me mobile-enabled web app

Instead of giving us a bogus wait time estimate, since who really knows how long each table will be full, we were shown a list of the parties ahead of us, their size, and how long they had been waiting, so we could form our own conclusions. There's something refreshing about not being lied to. I realized we were seeing the way of the future — single-function web ecosystems with very well-solved problems presented with excellent user experiences.

I later found out Waitlist Me was launched in 2012, founded by ex-Googlers, and financed by the Venture Capital (VC) fund Andreessen Horowitz among others. Remember Marc Andreesen (above)? Now he's picking winners for VCs.

Meanwhile Back at the Meetups


image from blog.meetup.com/press

I have been involved with a computer graphics society called SIGGRAPH

for almost thirty years, helping to run the San Diego professional chapter for a dozen of those years, and also attending local meetings in Los Angeles and a number of international conferences. I've also attended meetings of the Final Cut Pro user group in L.A.,

and the Kernel Panic Linux User Group (KPLUG) meetings in San Diego.

One thing that all of these events have in common is that they are mainly publicized by web sites and email lists. In our local SIGGRAPH chapter meeting attendence has been slowly declining for years. Then something interesting happened. We got a new chairman and he began holding workshops on building digital gadgets, and they were very well attended. I assumed at the time that the content was more interesting to folks, but one significant detail was that he publicized the meetings through the Meetup web site.

Only later did I begin to wonder if that was also a reason for the larger attendance.

In June of 2015 my friend Steve P. peer-pressured me into attending a meeting of the San Diego JavaScript Meetup. Now, I don't even like JavaScript. I've mostly ignored it since Netscape slipped it into the browser, except for a few small chores it was good for, but good golly Miss Mollie this language has exploded, and I learned a lot about its modern usages and associated tools from the meeting. But there were also some things in general that I noticed:

  1. incubators

    The meetings were in a corporate "incubator" called The Vine in the expensive heart of downtown San Diego. Now, I have seen startups in cheap spaces like warehouses, barns, and old factory lofts, but never before in a downtown high-rise.

  2. subsidized downtown space

    This lead me to the discovery that this incubator was sponsored by The Irvine Company, which I know well because my wife's job has them as a client. Apparently they are giving free space to some qualified startups. This caused me to wonder, what's in it for them? Are they getting future commitments of rent, or equity, or are they just trying to keep vacant commercial property from looking abandoned while trying to kick-start the San Diego startup economy?

  3. open plan

    I also noticed, and verified through other recent experiences, that the new way of office layout is the open plan, in which workers have less space than they would sitting at Starbucks. I've always worked in software jobs where an office with a door that closes was a perk, and a cubicle was what you got otherwise. These "open plan" workspaces, without even a place to hang a family picture, make cubicles look good to me.

Inspired by the high information value of this event, on a topic I didn't even care much about, I attended some more meetups in the next couple of months.

  • another JavaScript meetup, at which I learned that (according to a show of hands at two sequential meetings) the number of JavaScript jobs is increasing and exceeds the number of job seekers, which is decreasing

  • a Big Data meetup, at which I learned that it is a constant struggle for both employees and companies to be perceived as white collar tech and not blue collar tech

  • a Kickstarter meetup, at which I learned you need to have a thriving, professionally-managed social media presence before you launch your Kickstarter project

But the most important thing I learned, no doubt, was that in a few weeks and event was coming called San Diego Startup Week.

Startup Pub Crawl


image from sandiegostartupweek.com

My initial motivation in attending San Diego Startup Week was to search for a list of San Diego startups, to which I might pitch my consulting services. I did find that, on their web site — I actually didn't need to attend to get it! Out of 85 attendees who listed institutions, some were VCs, some were journalists, some were in academia, some sold consulting or catering, but a handful were small local startups. (By my analysis, the typical San Diego startup is Zesty.io.)

But there were things I learned by attending that were pure gold. A few things I noticed (and also at the above-mentioned meetups):

  • it was a young crowd, with more women and minorities than I have seen at tech events in the past

    That same summer I went to a Linux user group and counted 23 attendees, all male, most over 30 and Caucasian. That was an event about IPv6 packets. But here at SD Startup Week there were very many nationalities, many women, and a conspicuous absence of the "pointy haired boss" trope from Dilbert comics. For a long time there have been attempts to get more diversity into tech. I wonder why it's happening here and now.

  • round portraits and first names

    Every web presence associated with this event seemed to have little round portraits of people and only their first names. The pages looked great on my iPhone.

  • beer-fueled

    Everything seems to happen over beer. Beer is served at meet-ups. There was a "startup crawl" involving beer. Pub crawls are common working/social events. San Diego's reputation for microbreweries probably feeds into this.

  • eager to help other businesses

    Many startups sell services of crafting business plans, getting funding and running social media to other startups, often as a sidelight to their original product plans. They also tend to give away free information as a lure. See the diagram at the top of this blog for an example.


One session I attended was called "Website Creation and Useful Tools" presented by Desiree Eleanor and Nicole Leandra of "Creators Ink." I thought this was going to be about web site programming, but instead it was about getting workable web sites up without programming. A few highlights:

  • almost everything can be done with web-enabled tools, often free

  • those round portraits I mentioned are part of a new mobile-friendly look for JavaScript-powered web pages, with expanding sections all in one page, vertical scrolling but no horizontal, all made possible by HTML5/CSS and increasing memory on most people's computers/phones

  • at the lowest level tools for this "new look" are often created with the Angular.js toolkit

  • most users are engaging at a higher level, with themes (templates) from web hosting sites like Wordpress

  • to be mobile-friendly a user must select a responsive theme for their web site, which is a code word for "mobile-friendly"

  • Google is "holding a gun to the head" of commercial web sites by down-ranking them if they are not mobile friendly, as of April 21, 2015

  • the response of the Venture Capitalists has been to aggressively fund start-ups that are solving this problem

Here as a public service are my raw notes from Design Ink's session: 


San Diego Startup Week notes 6/19/2015
Website Creation and Useful Tools

- DesireeEleanor@stcrnmdesire.com
- NicoleLeandra@nicolesdesign.com (http://nicolesdesign.com)
#hashtag: @creatorsink
bit.ly/CreatorCommunity

simple: GoogleSites, Weebly, Bigcommerce, Squarespace * (more robust)

bit.ly/CMSchart
justhost.com - hosting
check out zesty.io
{ theme forest }
PICK A RESPONSIVE THEME to make Google happy
{ crazy eggs }

** audience member: blitzmetrics.com/all "Facebook For a Dollar a Day"
   "growth hacking event"

* A/B split testing bit.ly/ABsplittest

nugget:
-------
image titles!  make your home page title full of keywords

tools:
------
* mailchimp
* google analytics
* bit.ly
* FB advertising
* IFTTT if this then than [zapier]
* click to tweet
* Wordpress Plug-ins -- SEO Ultimate, Woocommerce & Extensions, GA

Follow-Up


image from tympanus.net/codrops/2013/07/17/troubleshooting-css

Well, I've had most of a year to think about what this all means. I relate it to my experiences with HTML5 and CSS. I tried my hand at these core level tools after much study, and created some pages like this one:

They looked great on Mac and PC laptops with Firefox and Chrome, but on an iPhone with Safari they were kind of hinky. I looked on Craigslist for a consultant who could help me — preferably someone with graphics arts skills and CSS chops. Well, I didn't find such a person, but I found many organizations were looking to hire such a person. Things that make you go "Hmmm."

I recently explained my problem to friend and HTML5/CSS instructor Jodi R. She said I should be using a responsive theme at some site like Wordpress. Ah-ha. We talked about the bigger picture. Every little shop trying to use CSS formatting hit problems like I did, with having to test and debug on every platform. This created a "tier" in the market for the Wordpresses of the world, to hire the best CSS talents and create themes for the rest of us to use. So I guess I should go with the flow.

And meanwhile, Google has just tightened the screws yet again:

Disclaimer

I receive a commission on everything you purchase from Amazon.com after following one of my links, which helps to support my research. It does not affect the price you pay.

This free service is brought to you by the book:
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Tuesday, December 1, 2015

A Traveling Techie's Tale: NO OUT-OF-THE-WAY PLACES


World's Largest Hockey Stick, Duncan, British Columbia
mixednutslinks.blogspot.com/2015/10/worlds-largest-hockey-stick-puck.html


Rock Cafe on Route 66, Stroud, Oklahoma
mapio.net/s/9931569/

    "...the windows are completely covered
    With the decals from all the places where we've already been

    Like Elvis-O-Rama, the Tupperware Museum
    The Boll Weevil Monument and Cranberry World
    The Shuffleboard Hall Of Fame, Poodle Dog Rock
    And The Mecca of Albino Squirrels

    We've been to ghost towns, theme parks, wax museums
    And the place where you can drive through the middle of a tree
    We've seen alligator farms and tarantula ranches
    But there's still one thing we gotta see

    * * * * * *

    We're gonna see the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota"

      — "The Biggest Ball Of Twine In Minnesota" (1989) by Weird Al Yankovic

On my business travels I always like to take the time "stop and smell the flowers" as they say, if I can. As I wrote in my book A Survival Guide for the Traveling Techie, in the section called "THE FINE ART OF THE MICROVACATION," it is good for one's mental health to find quick but engaging diversions now and then.

A Cornucopia of Delights

Finding diversions is pretty easy in big cities, which offer a cornucopia of delights. For example:

  • In Chicago, Illinois I was able to find the Eastern terminus of Route 66, the ornate art deco Chicago Board of Trade building, and a monument to the first controlled nuclear reaction on the campus of the University of Chicago.

    ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Energy_%28sculpture%29 )

  • In Atlanta, Georgia it was easy to find Olympic Park, from the 1996 Olympics, with its Coca-Cola museum and nearby CNN Center, but a little more digging got me to the Old Fourth Ward, home to a revitalized restaurant district, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center, and Oakland Cemetery with the grave of "Gone With the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell.

    ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Fourth_Ward )

  • In Austin, Texas one can watch a million bats fly out from under a bridge where they've made a home, and visit the historic nightclub Threadgill's, where Janice Joplin first performed. Try the cheesy grits!

    ( www.threadgills.com )

  • In the greater Los Angeles, California area, which probably has more tourist attractions than any other metropolis in North America, there is a unique bookstore and art gallery called Wacko, devoted mostly to pop culture, that is absolutely fascinating. The Paley Center (formerly the Museum of Broadcasting) in Beverly Hills had a vast library of vintage television shows you can watch. And hidden in Griffith Park is the old miniature railroad maintenance barn from Walt Disney's back yard.

    ( www.laughingplace.com/News-ID500820.asp )

Hidden Gems

Smaller cities also have hidden gems. It pays to ask around. Among the treasures I have found:

  • In Columbus, Ohio there used to be the original first location of the Wendy's fast-food chain, complete with mini-museum of advertising. (Remember "where's the beef?") The house American humorist James Thurber grew up in is now a museum dedicated to him — the actual location of the story "The Night the Bed Fell" that many of us read in grade school.

    ( www.thurberhouse.org/thurber-house-museum-and-thurber-center.html )

    ( www.newyorker.com/magazine/1933/07/08/my-life-and-hard-times-i-the-night-the-bed-fell )

  • In smaller Cincinnati, Ohio (which inexplicably has nothing commemorating the beloved TV show "WKRP In Cincinnati") I found, down by the river at the Cincinnati Public Landing, a scale model of the Ohio River in its entirety, and nearby a replica of the largest steamboat paddles ever built and a grove of steamboat whistles at the National Steamboat Monument.

    ( cincinnatiusa.com/things-to-do/attractions/national-steamboat-monument )

  • In Athens, Georgia I mentioned to a nice lady at a customer site that I had some time before my flight and she directed me to several things worth seeing. The town is the origin place of two rock bands, the B-52s and R.E.M., and the latter used a photograph of an old ruined railroad trestle for the back cover of one of their albums. They also named another album "Automatic for the People" after the slogan of a small and hard to find but wonderful barbeque restaurant, Weaver D's. (It was reported to be closing in 2013, but Yelp.com says it is thankfully still in business, probably after being sold.)

    ( www.eater.com/2013/11/5/6336657/athens-ga-restaurant-behind-r-e-m-s-automatic-for-the-people-to-close )

Why Is This Here?

I've found that it often pays to ask folks you are visiting why this place is here — what was the original reason for the founding of the town? Usually the first few people you ask have no idea, and maybe even never thought about it before, and possibly think you are nuts for wondering. But if you keep asking, often someone eventually realizes you need to talk to "that guy" (or gal), another nut, who works in their office. And then you hit the mother lode. You have the local history fanatic, who can fill you in on the whole story. You may find, for example, that the town was founded because of a sea port (like San Diego, California), or a bend in the river where a cargo dock was built (like Bend, Oregon), or a pass through the mountains suitable for a railroad (like El Paso, Texas). Other examples:

  • Columbus, Ohio is at the confluence of two rivers.

  • Barstow, California (originally called "Forks in the Road") is at a major wagon road fork that later became a huge railroad switching yard.

  • San Antonio, Texas was founded near an irrigation dam that was the first Spanish waterworks in the United States.

  • Las Vegas, Nevada (Spanish for "the meadows") had a spring which created a marshy green spot, evidence for ground water suitable for water wells in the arid Mojave desert.

  • The Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolis is there because (before some dams were built) if you paddled up the Mississippi River from New Orleans the first obstruction to stop you was St. Andrew's Falls in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Places I Never Heard Of

Some of my most fascinating discoveries came in places I'd never heard of before I visited (or so I thought):

  • I asked folks in Bellingham, Washington if they had a claim to fame, and they told me comedian Ryan Stiles of Whose Line Is It Anyway? fame and alternative band Death Cab for Cutie both hailed from there. Stiles founded the local Upfront Theater. Upon returning home I mentioned all this to my wife, and she pointed out that in science fiction novel Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle — which I'd read — the town is destroyed as collateral damage in a war between Earthlings and elephant-like aliens.

  • I found out in Evansville, Indiana that the town was the setting for the TV sitcom Roseanne, with many establising shots filmed there, and also portions of the movie A League of Their Own were shot there. Nearby in Santa Claus, Indiana (48 miles) is Holiday World, a theme park based on the Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, which I would like to visit one day.

    ( www.holidayworld.com )

  • When I was sent to Stroud, Oklahoma I had to look it up on a map to figure out how to fly in, and found it was on old Route 66 halfway between Tulsa and Oklahoma City. I flew into Oklahoma City because the airport is larger, rented a car, and drove the old highway to get there. When I came upon the Rock Cafe in Stroud (pictured above) I stopped for lunch, and from the menu I learned that the building was made of rocks dug up to build the old highway in the 1930s. I also learned that when John Lasseter and his crew from Pixar toured the old highway researching for the movie Cars in 2001, they arrived after closing but proprietor Dawn Welch opened up her kitchen and made them all dinner. They took a liking to the place and to her, and used it as their headquarters in susequent Route 66 explorations. The character of Sally the Porsche in Cars was based on her (a fact confirmed in the "making of" featurette on the DVD).

    ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Caf%C3%A9 )

  • My first visit to Binghamton, New York seemed incredibly out of the way. I was also visiting central Massachusetts (Lunenburg, near Worcester) and to get to Vestal, a suburb of Binghamton where I had a brief appointment, I was going to have to drive an hour back to Boston and then fly for five hours via New York City. I elected to drive directly there for four and a half hours instead. (I was visiting to resolve a customer problem, which it turned out took about 30 seconds, but I stayed for a about four hours to provide additonal software training and then took him to lunch since it had taken so long to get there.) But I found to my amazement that Binghamton had a number of claims to fame. It has the largest collection of wooden horse merry-go-rounds in the USA. Nearby Endicott was the birthplace of IBM Corporation (originally the International Time Recording Company, which made time clocks and other punch card machines). In the airport while departing on a subsequent trip I saw an old Link Trainer, a failed carnival ride that was repurposed as the first aircraft simulator for training pilots in World War Two, and from the display learned that simulator company Link Miles, which later merged with Redifusion, got its start there. (Upon my return home I mentioned this to my dad and he told me he'd made a number of business trips to Binghamton when I was a teenager, to arrange for his employer Pacific Southwest Airlines to buy some flight simulators. Apparently he told me about this and I'd forgotten.) But the weirdest connection was that it was the home town of Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone TV show, which I was very fond of. I found some monuments and exhibits devoted to him througgout the town, including a plaque commemerating a bandstand and merry-go-round which inspired the episode "Walking Distance." (Later I told all this to an old friend who responded, "You knew I went to high school in Binghamton didn't you?" Cue Twilight Zone music.)

    placard honoring Rod Serling in Recreation Park, Binghamton, New York
    ( www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g47320-d103777-r288196796-Recreation_Park_Carousel-Binghamton_New_York.html )

    The Tip of the Iceberg

    All of this has convinced me that there is no such thing as an "out-of-the-way place," at least anywhere with human inhabitants. Every place has a claim to fame. In preparing this article I had so much material to choose from that I had to leave out far more than I put in. So rest assured, if you find yourself with two hours to kill because of an early finish to an appointment, or a delayed flight, there is probably someplace within a few miles of where you are that has a fascinating story to tell, if only you can find it.

    Disclaimer

    I receive a commission on everything you purchase from Amazon.com after following one of my links, which helps to support my research. It does not affect the price you pay.

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Wednesday, April 8, 2015

A SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIMENT


'80s Fabrese shampoo commercial

    "Facebook isn't helping you make new connections, Facebook doesn't develop new relationships, Facebook is just trying to be the most accurate model of your social graph. There's a part of me that feels somewhat bored by all of this."

Dear readers, I have a request to make of you. As most of you know, this blog's purpose is to promote my new book, "A Survival Guide for the Traveling Techie," which has been for sale on Amazon.com since late last year. Perhaps some day this blog will have a gazillion readers, but for now I'm pretty sure that all of you are one or two "degrees of separation" away from me — in other words, you either know me or someone who does.

Meanwhile, the latest report from Amazon tells me I made three sales in November of 2014, and one sale in March of 2015, for a total of four. One of those was me; I bought my own book just to see how the buying experience went. I know who two others were. This is not exactly "going viral" so far.

If you're worried I'm going to ask you to buy the book for charity's sake, rest you mind at ease. I want happy readers, who will recommend the book to associates. No, I'm just going to ask you to pass along a link to this blog to anyone you know who might be a good fit: someone who travels on business, and/or does technical work, or perhaps a student graduating soon who plans to go into a related field.

The reason I am doing this is because of something I read about the mathematics of social networks a few years back. Since the onset of the internet we have much better data on social networks, and so theory has been improving quickly. The fact that jumped out at me is: most successful networking is done through weak connections. If you're looking for a job or customers or even a date, the people closest to you probably are already aware of this. It's the friends-of-friends who are most useful for finding new opportunities in such a network.

$10 Rebate Offer


Alexander Hamilton

And why am I doing this? Well, I don't know much about marketing, but I've been trying to learn, and I asked a coworker who I thought did it well for advice, and she recommended "Marketing for Dummies" (1997) by Alexander Hiam.

From this book I learned that you must be able to measure the effectiveness of a marketing effort, in order to be able to learn from it. I am paying this rebate to find out how effective it is to ask you all to promote this blog entry for me. We shall see.

And one more promise: I will make sure to report here how this turns out. Maybe we can all learn something.

So, you might be wondering, why should I care about this book anyway? Here is a short explanation from the Foreword, called "WHO NEEDS THIS BOOK?"

    You need this book if you travel on business in the United States and Canada as a technical expert, or if you are a sales person or other representative for a small company and must function as your own technical expert.

    You need this book if you have ever been faced with a demo on your laptop and a projector in some other company's conference room that wouldn't work with it.

    You need this book if you've ever had a sales prospect tell you, "We have to make a decision in three weeks or we lose our money."

    You need this book if you've ever run a long phone cord down the hall to the nearest FAX machine and hijacked its phone line so you could dial out to the Internet from a conference room — or, if that's too old school for you, if you've ever pirated a WiFi signal from a business next door to a client site to get a demo working.

    You need this book if you've ever spilled a latte on the carpet of your company's brand new, beautiful trade show booth.

    You need this book if you've ever missed the last exit to Cambridge and ended up on the causeway to Revere, or gotten off a freeway "temporarily" in Oakland and discovered there was no corresponding onramp, or gotten stuck in a severe traffic jam on the Hollywood Freeway and then seen a "Haz Mat" vehicle passing on the right shoulder, or been caught in a torrential downpour trying to get to your car at the Orlando Convention Center, only to be unable to tell your rented red Cadillac from all the other rented red Cadillacs.

    Whether they call you a Systems Analyst, Systems Engineer, Sales Engineer, Customer Engineer, Consulting Engineer, Consultant, Chief Architect, Chief Scientist, Vice President of Software Development, or the owner of the business, you need this book if it's ever been your job to show up somewhere and make something work.

      — "A Survival Guide for the Traveling Techie" (2014) Alan B. Scrivener

P.S.

If you'd like more detailed information of the branch of math called graph theory which applies to social networks, see the article "Excursions in Graph Theory" in my e-Zine "Cybernetics in the 3rd Millennium (C3M)" Volume 10 Number 2, July 2012.

( www.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_1002.html#sec_2 )

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Saturday, February 28, 2015

IN MEMORIAM: AUBREY DUNNE

Aubrey Dunne

    "Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here: three hundred forty two minus one hundred seventy-three. Now remember how we used to do that: three from two is nine; carry the one, and if you're under thirty-five or went to a private school you say seven from three is six, but if you're over thirty-five and went to public school you say eight from four is six; carry the on so we have one hundred sixty-nine. But in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer."
      — "New Math" by Tom Lehrer
        on the album "That Was the Year That Was" (1965)

        ( ISBN-10: B000002KO7 )

The other day I saw a "sig" line on somebody's web post that said something like: "I became successful because someone was counting on me and I didn't want to disappoint them." I thought that sounded about right. I remember back in 1993 when I went to my first conference devoted to scientific visualization. I decided to take advantage of the collection of luminaries in one place, and I began asking people what had inspired them to enter this new and innovative field.

The most common answer I got was a mentor or teacher who had taken an interest in a student at a critical time.

I've been thinking about this again lately because last fall one of my most important mentors passed away: Aubrey Dunne, who was my seventh and eighth grade math teacher at Parkway Junior High in La Mesa, California, near San Diego. I think the first time I laid eyes on him he was visiting my elementary school (grades K-6) with the junior high school glee club, and they performed "Stout Hearted Men."

When I arrived at junior high school, or middle school (grades 7 and 8 in my school district) it was our first year going to different classrooms all day instead of staying in one room with one teacher. On the first day they had us move from class to class and only spend about 15 minutes in each one, just for practice. Most of the teachers just told us their names and said hello. Mr. Dunne was different: he made everyone stop chattering and told us firmly that we were to report the next day with two W. S. pencils. "What's W. S. stand for?" he barked. Some hands went up. He asked these kids who their older siblings were, who'd been in his class before. He called on one who answered, "well-sharpened."

One the requirements for his class was that we keep a notebook of what we'd learned, and turn it in at the end of the year. I did a great job on my notebooks, and then didn't have to turn them in because I got high test scores, but I insisted on being graded on them anyway. I kept up the habit and the notebook evolved into a journal that I have kept my entire life.

I first heard an example of the comedy music of Tom Lehrer in Mr. Dunne's math class: he played the song "New Math" from "That Was the Year That Was" (quoted above), and provided a visual aid on the chalk board to follow the subtraction problem, first in base 10 and then in base 8.

Recognizing that I was a bright but rambunctious kid, a possible source of either joy or grief for a teacher, he distracted me with projects. The biggest was a bulletin board on the history of mathematics he asked me to make, to fill an odd triangular space above the chalk boards. I went at it with gusto, and so learned how the Egyptians invented geometry to re-survey farms along the Nile after flooding each August.

"One Two Three ... Infinity" cover

He encouraged me to read the mind-expanding math book by George Gamov, "One Two Three ... Infinity" (1947), and other writings by the same author.

When he volunteered to be adult supervision after school when students were departing on foot and bicycles, I used to hang out with him instead of going straight home, and we would talk about various blue-sky ideas. Once I asked him if light, which has mass, could orbit a body. We talked about that for a long time, and concluded the body would have to be extremely dense, but the orbiting light would not escape and so it would be dark. Later we realized from news articles that we had reinvented the black hole in astrophysics.

Once he gave me some excellent career advice, which I still quote; it's on my LinkedIn page.

One Halloween he wrote his address on the chalk board and invited us all to come by and "trick-or-treat" at his house. He and his family had an elaborate presentation ready (including an organ and a coffin) for those of us who were brave enougn to accept the invitation.

Now that I knew where he lived I started dropping by occasionally. It turned out he stayed up late, and encouraged me to come by any time. Sometimes I brought friends. His wife would serve us snacks. It was at one of these late night gatherings that he started playing us the unusual audio stylings of Ken Nordine, who invented a sort-of talking blues style he called "word jazz." One of the pieces was called "Roger," and Aubrey could recite it by heart. He loved to quote:

    "Oh, he had a game, by the way, that he played with me. He had me go to the piano and strike a chord. And then with his back turned on the other side of the room he'd name all the notes. I'd start with simple chords like a C chord or an F chord, and then I'd get a distended eleventh chord or an augmented seventh or a perverted twenty-seventh ... Still he'd name all the notes until I wanted to lean on the piano. He had me on my bloody knees in front of his superiority. And I hated him for having absolute pitch..."

When I got into high school I invited him to social gatherings at my house. I'll never forget the time he showed up for a pool party in a Victorian era swimsuit, knee and elbow length, with red and yellow stripes, and a felt hat and wire glasses that had no lenses. He leapt into the pool off the diving board in this getup. Later he claimed that he'd worn the same outfit to a tour of a new school opening in the district, and wandered about asking, "Where does the learning take place? Show me where the learning takes place."

We continued to be friends for the rest of his life. I would come back to visit, even when I didn't live in the San Diego area, and keep in touch. He also frequently came to birthday parties and other gatherings we invited him to. I made it a point to drop by his place on Halloween to see how his household decorated. The last time I saw him was Halloween 2013. He was in poor health, and the next time I called to check on him, regrettably almost a year later, he had passed away the day before.

His daughter Desiree Dunne Hall asked me to speak for about 10 minutes at his memorial service. Here is approximately what I said:

a goofy picture of Aubrey

    Hello. My name is Alan Scrivener, and I had Aubrey Dunne as my math teacher in seventh and eighth grades at Parkway Junior High in La Mesa, California. I graduated Parkway in 1967.

    After he passed away I posted to Facebook about him, on a page about growing up in La Mesa. I was quite surprised at how many comments it got and how quickly. In just one day there were over 200 follow-up posts.

    One of the common threads I saw was that Aubrey was goofy, or zany: he was fond of pranks, and he sang in a barbershop quartet called "the Sweatermen."

    the Sweatermen (Aubrey Dunne on far right)

    So when Aubrey's daughter Desiree invited me to speak today, I realized I had to come here to defend his reputation. [laughter]

    Aubrey was Up To Something. He was a great teacher. He believed in the idea of "no child left behind" before it was a political slogan. I want you to know that what he taught me has stayed with me. I looked up here today and saw that we are reading Psalm 90 and singing Hymn 671. I immediately thought to myself: "Ninety is ten times nine, and ten is two times five while nine is three times three. So ninety is two times three squared times five, and those are its prime factors. Six hundred seventy one has two factors, eleven and sixty-one, and they are both prime, so those are its prime factors."

    There must be thousands of students who took math from Aubrey at La Mesa Junior High, and later at Parkway Junior High, and of them probably hundreds who are like me, who see a number and immediately find its prime factors.

    Sure, he could be zany and goofy, but those were just tools in his chest. He also be harsh, scary, even mean. He would use whatever technique was needed to connect with an individual student. Let me give you two quick examples.

    This first one I didn't experience, I read about it on Facebook from another one of his students. One year there was a fad at school of students making rubber band guns. Most of the teachers banned them in class, which meant as soon as they turned around to write on the chalk board they got a barrage of rubber bands in the back, and then spent class time trying to figure out who the guilty parties were. Aubrey instead announced that the first five minutes of class were for rubber band wars, and then the guns were to be put away. But if any rubber bands were fired after the five minutes was over, rubber band wars would be cancelled. You didn't want to be the student who spoiled it for everyone else.

    The second example was something he told me about. He used to volunteer for difficult projects. That's how he became a math teacher, even though he didn't take any math in college. Nobody else wanted the job. But one year they had a class of emotionally challenged students that nobody wanted to take, and he volunteered to work with them. After a few days of chaos he concluded that it wasn't just that they didn't want to sit down and be quiet — he thought they literally couldn't do it, because they didn't have the skills. So he gave them concentration lessons. One by one he would bring them up to the front of the room and have them stand still and silent while he would try to distract them with goofy faces, noises, pantomimes, stupid jokes, lurching to startle them, etc. He would time how long they could last until they lost control. Over time they got better.

    This was what he was up to: finding a way to connect with every student. Thank you.

Afterwards the minister lead us in prayer, and we turned our hymnals to 671 and sang "Amazing Grace."

Disclaimer

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Saturday, January 31, 2015

A Traveling Techie's Tale: MANHATTAN TRANSFER: SOUL FOOD TO GO

World Trade Center in fog

illustration for a web recipe

    "We got / Cool and hot / Just for you / The pleasures of the soul
    Come on / Come in / And check it out / Soul food to go"
      — "Soul Food To Go (Sina)" by Djawan;
        performed by Manhattan Transfer on the album "Brasil" (1987)

        ( ISBN-10: B000002ILX )

Many of my stories have a moral; not this one. It's just a strange but true tale. It begins by way of background with a discussion of the former World Trade Center in Manhattan, then tells of a quest to find soul food on business trips, and ends up connecting the two through a pointless coincidence. And yet this tale haunts me, so I keep telling it.

* * * * * *

When I lived in Massachusetts in the late 1970s, my wife and I took occasional visits to New York City to sightsee, usually on a tight budget. One gloomy Saturday afternoon we ended up down at Battery Park looking across the harbor at the Statue of Liberty. We then proceeded to wander the lower west side until it became so cold and windy we decided to catch a subway back to the Port Authority to take a Greyhound back home. The problem was we had a low-quality map and no familiarity with the terrain, and we ended up on the wrong side of a complex of skyscrapers. After several false starts trying to cut through the complex we finally went around it, which cost us several blocks. On the east side was a sign at ground level that said, "World Trade Center." I asked my wife, "What's a World Trade Center?" She didn't know.

About a year later we'd wised up to the fact that if you want to see New York, you need a New Yorker to guide you. (This principle is, of course, true many places.) We went back on a weekend visit with a coworker of mine who was born and raised in Brooklyn. He took us to see and do a number of wondrous things, from Times Square after midnight, to a neighborhood Jewish deli, to the Museum of Holography (now absorbed by M.I.T.'s museum in Cambridge, MA) and the Transit Museum (still in NY). He also took us for about a mile walk on the old West Side Highway, abandoned at the time and covered with political graffiti from a protest there, and we ended up at the twin towers of the World Trade Center. He took us to the top to enjoy the view, though he stayed in the cafeteria because he was afraid of heights. It was quite a great way to see Manhattan. Down be low us we spotted brightly colored geometric shapes on the sandy land next to the Hudson River. When we descended we walked over to discover they were painted grape stake fences — an art project designed to be appreciated from the skyscrapers above.

Well, that was delightful, but the buildings themselves were unimpressive to me aside from their record-breaking height. About five years later I read "From Bauhaus to Our House" (1981) by Tom Wolfe.


an old cover of "From Bauhas to Our House"

From this I learned how "Modern" architecture, begun in the 1910s and '20s, had managed to paint itself into a corner by the 1970s and was tyrannized by a long list of "don'ts" — don't use curves, don't use color, don't use decoration, etc. These skyscrapers were merely symptoms of the creative bankruptcy architecture had stumbled into after declaring that "ornament is crime." (This was "fixed" by the Post-Modern movement, which is a whole 'nother story entirely.)

* * * * * *

And now for something completely different. Though both my parents were born and raised in Memphis, TN, I was unaware of Memphis' claim as a birthplace of the blues until about the year 1999. That year I began to learn about the history of the blues — its origins in the cane flutes of slaves (who could be killed for possessing any musical instrument), used to play the three note melodies of their native Africa, the three chord guitar music that evolved out of those early melodies, and the electric guitar riffs of rock 'n' roll pioneers who incorporated blues chords into their work.

Along with this new interest in old music, I also began to appreciate more the southern cooking of my youth. My grandmother, who we called "Grann," used to make my parents, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles and me food like country ham, string beans, biscuits with sorghum molasses, and all kinds of pies: lemon meringue, banana cream, chocolate cream, and my favorite, Karo pecan.

In 1976, on visit to the town of my birth (Gainesville, FL), I was directed to a soul food restaurant on the edge of town called Mama Lo's. Literally on "the other side of the tracks" in a railroad shack, this old black woman had an antique iron stove on which pots of food were bubbling: ham hocks, collard greens, black-eyed peas, grits, etc., and cornbread keeping warm in the oven. As I recall everything was twenty-five cents per serving, and we tried everything.

In my business travels in the '90s and oughts, I began a search for authentic soul food. I'd eaten at places like the Blue Chalk Cafe in Palo Alto, CA, which offered a California Nouvelle cuisine reinterpretation of southern cooking, but that wasn't going to cut it. At the other extreme there was a chain of restaurants in the southeast called Black Eyed Peas, which was sort of the Denny's of soul food. It might do in a pinch.

In the year 2000 I found myself working a trade show at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL. We were staying at the upscale Omni Rosen Hotel next door, and so I asked the concierge where I could find soul food. She was perplexed; I guess nobody ever asked that question before. Next I tried the Yellow Pages (this was of course before smart phones or Yelp) but all I found was Black Eyed Peas. Upon calling several locations I found all of their numbers were disconnected. Since they were still listed in the phone book, I assumed they had closed down within the last year. I finally ended up at the House of Blues in Downtown Disney, which was more California Nouvelle cuisine. Don't get me wrong, the pan seared gulf shrimp with chipotle blue corn mayonnaisse drizzle (or whatever it was) tasted great; it just wasn't Mama Lo's.

* * * * * *

About a month later I was working a trade show at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. For some reason we were staying at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square. I remember the Marquis Theater was on the ground floor; there was a huge poster advertising Bernadette Peters in "Annie Get Your Gun." Our hotel lobby was on the fifth floor up an elevator. (I guess this was to discourage homeless people from using the restrooms.) And in that lobby, in the gift shop, I found a little book called something like "101 Places to Eat Southern and Soul Food in Manhattan." Of course! (Slaps forehead.) What was I thinking, looking for soul food in the south? I should've been in New York City! I pulled out my pencil and notebook and noted a few possibilities. That night I took a cab to Greenwich Village and found a little restaurant called the Dew Drop Inn. The decor was amazingly retro. The owner was a fanatic for American regional cooking, and had traveled down Route 66 searching for recipes. I had the Dr. Pepper chicken, which was very good; the sugar in the Dr. Pepper was caramelized into a glaze.

Afterwards I went off in search of another southern food restaurant for dessert; I no longer remember the name. I think I was looking for an address on Greenwich street. The blocks seemed to be a lot longer than I expected. I remember passing a UPS warehouse where brown trucks were busily loading up for the next morning's deliveries. Soon I was out of the village, and somehow ended up on Broadway. Except for the fact that I was pretty sure I was still walking south, I was lost. Fog rolled in. On I trudged. Finally I saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center looming ahead, shrouded in grey, looking like a scene out of "Escape from New York" (1981). I figured I could catch a cab there back to Times Square. But first I ducked into the lobby of one of the towers to warm up.


marble tiles in a lobby of the World Trade Center

The lobby was "decorated" with marble tiles, one of the few nods to aesthetics permitted by the Modernist canon. I remembered reading in Wolfe's book how often the grain of the marble was ignored in placing tiles, so as to not seem too eager to create something visually pleasing. As I stood and looked at that marble, I thought to myself, "These really are hideous buildings; they should never have been built."

About a year later they were gone. I feel a little guilty about this. I know I'm not responsible for 9/11 attacks, and I never would have wanted them to happen, but I still feel like I should've been more careful what I wished for.

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Friday, December 5, 2014

I WROTE A BOOK, AND YOU CAN BUY IT ON AMAZON!


"Don Quixote in His Library" (woodcut) by Dore

    "Fortunately, following the turbulence of winter comes the season of activity and opportunity called springtime. It is the season for entering the fertile fields of life with seed, knowledge, commitment, and a determined effort. However, the mere arrival of spring is no sign that things are going to look good in the fall. You must do something with the spring."

      — Jim Rohn, 1981

I've always wanted to write a book. Actually, I've written quite a few technical manuals during my career, on a "work for hire" basis, but I wanted to write my own book, under my own name, and sell it to the public. It's finally happened. You can order it here:

If you want to know what it's about, and why you might want to read it, see the web site:

The process has been way more arduous and time-consuming than I ever dreamed, but now that I'm through it, I thought I'd share what I've learned.

What to Write


"The Time Machine"

Since I was a boy I've had a yearning to write science fiction. I've managed to write a few short stories, mostly unpublished, but never a novel. I would love to enter the pantheon of the sci-fi greats, which includes the likes of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, &etc. Perhaps someday I will.


"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

I was also inspired by Douglas Adams' science fiction satire, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (1979).

Not only would I be delighted to one day be as funny as he is, but his concept of a universal guide book gave me a yearning to write my own guide books someday. As I worked at a variety of "traveling techie" jobs over the decades I began to hatch the idea of a guide book for people like me.

Why to Write


"Multiple Streams of Income"

Since I read it in the late '70s, I was inspired by electronic hobbyist Don Lancaster's book "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" (1978),

which recommends a strategy for creating what he calls "a steady stream of nickels" to achieve greater financial independence. Another book, Robert Allen's "Multiple Streams of Income" (1998),

gave a plan for doing this is well, including the idea of writing specialty books with knowledge that is in demand.


"Lakich: For Light. For Love. For Life."

So I decided to write to make extra money. I was given an additional reason by my friend Lili Lakich, who is a neon artist. She told me a story of how she wrote a book about her work, "Lakich: For Light. For Love. For Life." (2007) and got it into bookstores, only to find that it didn't sell as well as she'd hoped.

But then an art patron in Japan read it and contacted her, and it resulted in the biggest commission of her career. She said it was important to do these kind of things for more intangible reasons, because there would be good unanticipated side-effects.

How to Write


"The Writing Life"

It is important to learn to write well, and the best way I know to do that is get a lot of practice. I once saw Ray Bradbury lecture, and he said to write every day.

But there are a few helpful books. The classic "The Elements of Style" (1920) is irreplaceable, and should be on every writer's shelf.

And Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's "The Writing Life" (1989)

has some hints on how to work with problems like writer's block.

My own failure mode for years is that I would start writing a short story, then have it turn into a novella, then a novel, then a trilogy, all the while still working on the first chapter. I was lacking convergence in my work. The cure for this, for me, was to write blogs, which forced me to come to an end in order to get them out the door. I worked first on "Cybernetics in the Third Millennium"

and then on this one. It worked. Now I can get projects to converge, and I can finish them.

I still remember when I made the commitment to write my book. I was sitting in a seminar in Orlando, Florida given by Robert Allen on his "multiple streams of income" ideas. I'd used frequent flier miles to get there from my home in the San Diego area, and the seminar was free (because it was mostly up-sells), but I was still spending my time. I realized that at some point you have to stop getting more advice and just start doing stuff. I pulled out a blank piece of paper and began designing the outline. Self-help pioneer Jim Rohn might say I'd moved from a Winter to a Spring of my life, by planting a seed.

How to Self-Publish


"Dan Poynter's Self-Publishing Manual"

It took me two years to write the book, and ten years to publish it. I had to keep going back and rewriting parts as they got stale. I couldn't say "recently" and mean 8 years ago. I had to change advice about using a Dictaphone to using Siri. The delaying problems were:

  • I was working day jobs, often with intensive business travel

  • I had no idea how to do what I was doing and had to learn as I went along.

I got a lot of help from two self-publishing authors. Dan Poynter started out writing books about parachute jumping as a hobby and self-publishing them, and as he learned the process he began writing books about how to self-publish. They turned out to be much wider in appeal (though he still calls his company Para Publishing). I first found his "Self-Publishing Manual: How to Write, Print and Sell Your Own Book" in its 14th edition in 1979; now it is called "Dan Poynter's Self-Publishing Manual" (2007).

The other author, Aaron Shepard, started out writing children's books and self-publishing them, and followed a similar trajectory. A friend of mine gave me a digital copy of a pre-release version of his book "Aiming at Amazon" (2007),

which explained how the rules of publishing have changed in the digital era. (I bought a paper copy when it came out.) He also did two more books I found very useful, about "Print On Demand" (POD) publishing::

  • "Perfect Pages" (2006)

  • "POD for Profit" (2010)

    He says both of these are obsolete, and now recommends Kindle publishing. He has several new books (on Kindle only, naturally) about how to do this. But he gives away the older books as PDF files on his web site.

    If I was starting the whole thing right now I might go with Kindle-only, but maybe not; I'm an old school kind of guy. I want people in airport bars to see other people reading my book. I want people to be able to read it during take-off and landing.

    Aaron steered me to a company called Lightning Source as my Print On Demand supplier. So far I have been quite happy. They have a lot of useful information on their web site.


    my first box of wholesale books arrives

    In the last week I've gotten my first order fulfilled by Amazon for one book (just to see it work), and my first wholesale order of 20 books from Lightning Source.

    I've learned a lot of things the hard way on this project. For instance:

    • Obtaining permissions to use quotes and artwork is a royal pain in the neck, requiring many months of correspondence and some detective work. Some rights holders are quite unreasonable, and don't believe in "fair use." If I had it to do over I would have far fewer inspirational quotes.

    • In making decisions about layout, font, structure (does the dedication come before the Table of Contents?), just pick a book you think looks good and copy its visual style.

    • I couldn't do the conversion myself from HTML (how I chose to write the book) to PDF in the format Lightning Source wanted. I didn't have the time or the patience. I had to hire an experienced graphic artist who'd done a book with them before.

    • Good graphic artists are golden; cherish them.

    • If you're selling on Amazon, don't agonize too much about pricing and discount; they're easy to change. Just get the book out there.

    • Lightning Source says it takes 6-8 weeks for a book to appear on Amazon, but for me it happened in 3 weeks.

    • Marketing a book is probably as much work as writing and publishing it. That's what I must do next. This blog is a step in that direction. There will probably be some sort of press tour, book signings, and of course, social media.

    More to Come

    Now that I've been through the process, I am re-energized about writing, and I feel I have some more books in me, including more non-fiction:

    • "A Survival Guide for the World-Traveling Techie" — a sequel I would need help to write

    • "Garage Visualization" — data visualization on a shoestring budget

    • "A Curriculum for Cybernetics and Systems Theory" — based on my web site of the same name; possibly the best thing I've written

    • "Surviving Orlando: A Guide for Dads" — a guide-book for the poor sap who usually pays for the trip

    • "Somewhere Near Barstow: A Guide to the Drive from L.A. to Vegas" — a love letter to the East Mojave desert

    • "How to Raise a Genius in Ten Easy Years" — based on my parenting experiences

    • "How to Run a High-Tech Startup Into the Ground" — a humorous book based on my business experiences

    • "Melon Crate 442" — a memoir of my high school years

    • "Between K-Mart and Jupiter" — a memoir of my college school years

    as well as some fiction:

    • "Tales of El Ciervo Blanco" — a collection of short stories which is mostly written, inspired by Clarke's "Tales of the White Hart"

    • "Macronesia: The First Astrogators" — a science fiction saga abut polynesians colonizing the asteroid belt with solar sails

    • "SOB Trail" — a trashy novel set in central Florida about a science fiction author trying to reclaim his muse

    Stay tuned!

    Disclaimer

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