Oblomovka

2004-10-04»

So what am I doing at the moment? you ask, gripping the edge of your seat.

Well, for those of you who remember as far back as my first application for permanent residence, I'm now at the point where I can write for U.S. companies, which I'm doing with my closest personal approximation to abandon. I'm writing a little bit of stuff for the O'Reilly people, and I've just filed a story for Wired News. I'm feeling my way a little here, working out what stories work best for each publication, trying to not mix up everybody's house styles. Or fuck up. Very important not to fuck up.

What I'm trying for is a bit more of a spectrum between my usual Proper Media work (where I carefully and as non-scarily as possible explain the edge of technological culture to new audiences. Or at least, that's the idea.) and the free-wheeling, private-jokey, LOOK AT ME I'M SLAMMING MY FACE AGAINST THE WALL OF IGNORANCE. LOOK! I DID IT AGAIN! words that we make NTK out of.

Weirdly, the best medium for that middle-ground so far has been Linux User and Developer, the magazine that went bust, and now lives again. I continue to write their back page. The deceased previous company owes me money, but the new lot seem to be paying up okay. It's one of my favourite jobs right now.

In other anti-news, no, I still haven't updated the Life Hacks site. Maybe the next deadline will jerk me into activity - Merlin "43 Folders" Mann and I will be speaking at the MacOS X conference on Thursday October 28th, 2004. This session will primarily consist of Merlin leaping around high-kicking Macs on stage and typing in QuickSilver command sequences with his knees, while I stand behind him describing the geeky sociological and API basis of these tricks in a steady reassuring monotone. It'll be like the KLF meets Anthony Robbins.

I quit a bunch of UK net.politics. I was thinking about doing this last year when partner-in-crime Stef Magdalinski took nine months off from the same projects. He came back looking so refreshed that instantly I regretted not taking the time myself. Apart from anything else, it had got to the point where I'd say yes to anything, whether I had the time or ability to do it or not. And standing around saying "ooh I'd love to help but..." doesn't help anyone. So I helped myself to the unsubscribe notice.

TheyWorkForYou seems to have survived perfectly well without someone to write overly jocular body text for them. If you want to see the internal workings of how something like this gets done, they've just opened up their original dev wiki. (login: theyworkforyou, password: novemb3r ).

If I was still involved, my job would have have been to make impassioned speeches about why we didn't really need to password-protect the wiki to fight off spammers, thus winning a decision which would bite us all on the arse six months down the line.

Oh, and if you want to have a go at a project like this, but worry that you're not glitteringly professional enough, check out Stef and Tom's first sketches.

The fame piece got a big reaction, and has been looking increasingly fascinating topic for me. Like Life Hacks, I've got this strong sense that this is rich new topic that may be too big for me to explore on my own. I'm doing my best.

At the moment I'm just trying to listen to people as much as I can. There was all kinds of layers of irony when I tried to do this at Foo Camp this year. The year before, having a slot there to talk about life hacks (which was then called "Secret Software") worked very well, as nobody knew what the hell it was about. So only a handful of people turned up, and we quickly brainstormed a lot of ideas. This year, the fame talk gathered a big crowd, which meant I had to quickly scale up the presentation. That worked well in some respects, not in others.

One of the problems was that I really want to talk to people about their experiences being micro-famous. But it's a bit like talking about your salary - one-on-one it's fine, but in a big audience, you risk sounding like you're boasting or archly disingenuous.

What I really need is something concrete to hook the whole question on. With Life Hacks, that was sending a questionnaire about, but I suspect the Fame question needs something a little harder. I've thought about doing some stat analysis of how many names appear in, say, the New York Times over time. That doesn't seem quite right yet, but may point in some good directions.

2004-09-09»

So a lot of people (including myself, late at night, staring at my ceiling) ask me - when are you going to finish off the Life Hacks site? After all, most of them don't say, isn't it a bit ironic that the guy who lectured people about how to be organised can't even get around to putting up his notes?

My line here is what I've always said: Life Hacks was about the techniques of super-organised geeks, by someone who is spectacularly not one of them. But, you know, that's not as helpful as a bunch of Perl scripts to tidy your bedroom, is it? So it's really nice to be now point people to Merlin Mann's new site, 43 Folders, which is clearly written by somebody is one of those geeks, and is really accomplished at describing and illustrating how he drives his life. It's a bit of a relief to discover that it runs along the same lines as the Life Hacks talk indicated - text files, little scripts, Getting Things Done, index cards, all that jazz. And a bit humbling too, given that he's uncovering stuff I never found out, even when I tortured people with hot tongs to find out their secrets.

So, hopefully I'll be able to copy and paste enough cool tricks to get the fuller notes to Lifehacks up soon. In my continuing chasing of my own tail, I've now developed an unhealthy interest in the other side of the geek organisation equation: What motivates geeks? And given that, how can you trick yourself into doing stuff that you'd otherwise run screaming from, like paying bills on time and going to bed at a sane hour?

(Looks at clock.)

A-ha.

2004-06-11»

If you're in Los Angeles, come along to the Westin LAX LayerOne this weekend for a fantastic-looking conference. It should be fun. It will be for me, for I get to go to someone else's con and imbibe like an overclocked imbibamatic-o-mat. As the invite says: free beer!

This will also (barring being boo-ed off stage) be the canonical version of the Life Hacks talk. I will try very hard to not handwave arbitrary statistics when in full flow. Nor will I guilelessly slander/fawn over prominent Net celebrities in the search of a good joke. Consecutive Life Hack talks have featured me describing one correspondent as a "genius" and inventing a fictional mano e mano fist-fight between us in the next. Neither are strictly true, as this canonical version will make clear.

It also means that I'll finally slap up the MP3 and PowerPoint of the complete presentation, ending the mystery of the eight or so words that Cory has failed to meticulously transcribe in his notes.

Not that I'm unhappy he's so detailed. Lacking any memory of what I say on stage, I reconstructed my original talk for NotCon from Cory's Etech notes. I'm now adding bits from his NotCon coverage for the LayerOne talk. He's the Boswell to my Mr Pooter!

Doctorow isn't here for this rendition, which should hopefully stop us getting into a screeching feedback loop. But that's all irrelevant anyway. Come tomorrow, there will only be one Life Hacks talk. All the rest were imaginary stories taking place on alternate worlds - which never happened. Excelsior!

2004-02-12»

Two weeks ago I mentioned - in passing - that it'd be a great idea to have an informal evening affair in San Francisco where people could braindump what they'd learnt at Emerging Technology and preview the sort of stuff that they'd see at CodeCon . There's more people who should see this stuff than just people who can scrape up the fare and ticket to go to San Diego.

Well, it's done. Rachel "Moonbase University' Chalmers , Marc "rotten.com " Powell and Karen "dorkbot sf " Marcelo magicked it through a flurry of emails. It's happening this Monday the 16th:

Post-Etech Decompression -
Pre-CodeCon Quickening 
RX Gallery
132 Eddy Street @ Mason
San Francisco, CA
Monday 16th, 7pm-10pm
Lightning talks, Old Skool Arcade Games, BYOB
5$ suggested donation
no one turned away for lack of funds

The best bit of this ConCon may well mirror Etech: meeting new smart people between the official talks. Then again, the five minute lightning talks look to be great too. Here's who is set up to speak so far:

• Jonathan Moore, Hacking Social Networks Cory Doctorow: E-books: Neither E- nor Books. Discuss.
• Me, doing the Life Hacks talk with all the jokes taken out
• Ralf Muehlen,A Tale of Two Wireless Cities
• Kevin Marks,Technorati Hacks
• Kevin Marks & Tantek Celik realworldsemantics
• Schuyler Erle : Hey, Free Maps!
• Jo Walsh : FOAF -- It's Not YASN
• Scott Draves electric sheep SPOTWORKS
• Mike Leahy preview of SCREAM
• Jason Harlan: review of Locative events at Transmediale and Emerging Tech
• Kevin Burton : Social Network Export and Sync with Exportster, FOAF, and RDF

I'm not sure we'll have time for many more speakers, but if you'd like to talk about either Etech or CodeCon and you're near San Francisco, stick your name down on the Wiki. I'll try and get to you. I'm compering. I'm easily bribed.

When this started actually happening, I got a little bit guilty, as this is exactly the sort of spontaneous Bay Area event that I used to look very bitterly at when I lived in London. It was a mixture of irritation that San Francisco thought the whole world revolved around San Francisco, and envy that we couldn't do something like that in London.

Amusingly, when I got to SF, lots of people told me about how much more vibrant they thought the geek community was in Britain, and how they wished they could do the same kind of events as they'd seen talked about in the UK and Europe.

So, anyway, there were enough Brits at Etech to pull off another spin-off braindump, so now I'm pushing my luck and hand-waving them do the same thing in the UK for next Monday (the 23rd).

Here's the Wiki page where people are sorting out a venue. Go to it, my helpless puppets!

(No, I don't know why I'm calling it Etech and not Etcon now either.)

2003-10-22»

Everyone who knows me - and many of their therapists - knows that I am the most disorganised, undisciplined wretch on God's green earth. I have a 159 things to do in my todo list; he oldest ("learn to drive") is 15 years in the todoing. Earlier today I managed to slam the "snooze" button on my alarm clock twelve times. I don't know where my mobile phone is. The last I saw of it was in a cafe in San Francisco - maybe two weeks ago? I should cancel it. Hold on, let me add that to the todo list. There. It is as good as done.

This is by way of conveying quite how much horror should be expressed at the subject of my talk at next year's Emerging Technology conference. I will speak, it says here, on the Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks.

As a colonel in the underprolific geek army, I am the worst-prepared person to talk on this topic. Which is why I'm doing it, of course. Instead of coming up with my own fruit-loop theories, I'm going to spend the next few months asking other far more efficient geeks what they do to get through the day.

This has a number of advantages. First: hopefully, by retaining my aloof incompetence, I can safely research "the top ten habits of effective infovores" without becoming yet some muscly overachieving Tony Robbins coach. (and if I do, please kill me, preferably while I am pointing enthusiastically into a camera.)

Second: I've no preconceptions. Well, I'd be surprised if people said "Oh, we just do what you do, only slower", but apart from that, I'm clueless.

It might be that there are no patterns, no learnable behaviour. It may be that some people are just better at coping with information overload than others. This will make for a depressingly darwinist ETCON report, but hey, the nazis were all over genetic determination, and Nuremberg was still a blast, right? Okay, bad example.

Finally, I'm curious. There are hundreds of little tricks, habits, desktop arrangements, and hacks being invented (and I suspect, reinvented) by people to organise their life using today's technology. We very rarely get to see any of it, because we all assume no-one else would be interested in the dull rigmarole of our lives.

Because of my flawed nature, I'm really interested in these secrets. I find well-organised people fascinating, like aliens. I think everyone is curious about one another's desktop. If there was a soap opera for geeks, it would be all about people juggling sixteen projects while filtering sixteen thousand emails on twenty monitors. It would be called "Shoulder Surf" and would be on at five in the morning and to save time it would be broadcast in fast-forward.

Anyway, I digress. I'm going to grit my teeth and do some real work on this. The first step is to find people to interview. I'm building up a little list, but I would love to know who you would suggest. My list has big blindspots - not enough Windows people, not enough non-Webby folk, too many of the usual suspects - and I don't want to shut out any corner. My only, very rough rules, at this stage are:

• Got to be geeks. There are plenty of books and guides for people who are managers or generally interested in organising their lives. I think geeks have their own problems and solutions. I leave "geek" deliberately undefined. You know what I mean.


• Don't got to be famous. If you know someone who you think is the best-organised geek you've ever seen, put their name down (or mail me, if you'd like to preserve their privacy. Famous people get picked for this list because we've both heard of them. There are plenty of my friends I'll be hobnobbing for this, and if your friends fit, I'd like to chat to them too.


• Don't worry about the genius thing. I'm well aware that Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds get most of their work done just be being naturally very good at programming. Doesn't matter. I'm still curious to see how they work. And why shouldn't people who are fantastic at coding get some hints on how to organise their lives from their peers, too? Just because you can code a reverse compiler in your sleep doesn't mean you pay your phone bill on time.

Stick your suggestions down in this here discussion pit. I've suggested a few at the beginning, but really only to give an idea of how broad a spectrum I'm looking at here.

Good, done that. Tick!