When I was a kid, and I didn't understand a word my dad had used, I'd ask him for the definition. Invariably, he'd tell me to go look it up. "You'll remember it better if you look it up."

Sure, I remembered it better. And, sure, in the case of looking up words, doing it myself is better.

However, when I'm helping a client, and he tells me to go look up an answer to a question I just asked about his specific site, one that directly relates to the design of his site, one that, oh, I don't know, maybe, only he can answer, telling me to go "look it up yourself" seems a little retarded to me.

If I could read your mind, I wouldn't have asked the question in the first place.

Date:   	Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:53:39 -0800 (PST)
From:  	Mark Smith 
To:  	Kitt Hodsden 
Reply-to:  	mark@markandmeg.com
Subject:  	Re: [MisChiEf] disregard any suckem email

Kitt,

Although your identification of this problem may seem second nature to
you, this is actually a very valuable skill that few people have. I wanted
to let you know that you continually impress me with your general
excellence.

-Mark

< You may get a UPA email saying you have been added to team SuckEm.
< Have no fear.  Warren is testing out the UPA rostering interface
< and demonstrating a clear problem in the import players workflow.
< Clearly, a confirmation page should have appeared, allowing Warren
< the opportunity to remove the players that aren't on his new team
< when he imports the old team.
<
< Big THANKS to Warren for the problematic workflow demonstration!
<
< Kitt.
<
<
< Quoting warren.schechter@gmail.com:
<
<< You may get a UPA email saying you have been added to team SuckEm.
<< Have no fear, if you are not playing with suckem or don't know what
<< they are ignore it.  I am lazy and didn't want to type in people's
<< names by hand so I imported the mischief roster hence the email.
<<
<< as you were-
<<
<< warren

"I dreamt last night that we were putting a new box into the colo because myCrap was doing so well, the servers we had couldn't handle the load."

"Really? Cool!"

"Yeah."

"So, what's our business model?"

blink

blink blink

"Uh..."

Kris often tells a story of his high school baseball coach. Actually, he tells a lot of stories about the guy. Enough that there might have been more than one coach, and I just blur them all together.

The most entertaining of the stories is the one that ends with his coach commenting to Kris, "McQueen, I time you running to first base with a calendar."

But, the one relevant to me at the moment is the one where he talks about the coach's yelling. When the coach became frustrated (usually because the team wasn't winning, as in not-winning so well, they were on a losing streak that stretched across half the county), the coach would start yelling. As Kris puts it, he was mad from the beginning.

Eventually, where that "eventually" amounted to the second day of practice, all the players would ignore the coach. Let him scream, no one's listening.

I recently experienced much the situation. A message I received contained LOTS and LOTS of CAPITAL LETTERS, indicating annoyance, perhaps anger, directed at me.

My first reaction was complete stress. My heart rate shot up, my limbs flooded with adrenalin, my blood pressure jumped. My second reaction was one of, well, resignation. The issues being YELLED SO LOUDLY weren't any I COULD FIX, nor were they that much of A BIG DEAL.

The whole thing kinda annoyed me. The best thing was that it helped me make a decision to end my relationship with the sender of the message. I'd been unable to decide for a while now if the relationship was worth saving. With the YELLING message, I've decided it's not, and have begun the split.

I should have learned how to tune out the noise sooner.

So, I have a lot of tabs open at any given time in my browser. I normally use Mozilla, but am slowly switching to Firefox. At some point soon, I'll switch over cold turkey, shut down my Mozilla, and join the Firefox movement.

My normal browsing includes leaving tabs open with interesting content, bookmarking all of the tabs at once and coming back to them when I have time. Problem is, I run out of browser-top real estate, having more than 20 tabs open at once.

Best to process them more quickly than I would normally.

Take, for example, Messina's post about finding/having his voice in his blog. It's been the second tab in my browser since the sixth. I found it interesting because (damn, I really wish I were writing this with flock, and I'd be able to quote Messina easily...) he comments about writing his posts as if he were talking to his four readers ("his mythical four readers"). Before, he didn't have a well-defined, well-known audience (he has lots of readers, he didn't know who they were), and so may have not known who to write to:

... and I’ve realized that my blogging voice so far has been somewhat forced, a bit too apprehensive, much too self-conscious (this is an offline issue I’ve got as well) and I think that’s because I didn’t know who I was writing for.

The idea of “conversations” from Cluetrain has liberated me to write more freely and openly, I think, since I now feel like I’m only talking to a small, close, tightly-knit community of readers.

I can believe this technique works, but it ultimately means his blog is for those people, and no longer for himself. Instead of being a place for him to put down his thoughts, things that are interesting to him, observations, conclusions, puzzles, plans and artwork, the blog becomes a more of a, darn, I'm not sure, a political (in the proper definition) chore of catering to the whims of others to please them. It's no longer a personal site, and more of an assigned task; less of a passion and more of a job.

I've said again and again, this site is for me, so it's full of things interesting to me, about me and for me, but much of my original content is an imaginary conversation to someone. 70% of the time, the conversation is with me (I'm unable to explain that one well, but, basically, I write as quickly as I can the thoughts in my head, then drop out and edit the words later), and the other 30% of the time the posts are conversations with someone else (usually Kris, though often my mom, Jenny, Jessica, Mike or Doyle).

Every once in a while I write about something when I'm not particularly in the mood to write, much less write about that topic. When I go back to read those posts, the writing style is different. It no longer feels like my thoughts. In this vein, I think people find certain authors appealing because the writing style mimics the construction and style of their own thought processes. The similarity and familiarity breed enjoyment and comfort.

I also found it interesting that Messina recognized the vulnerability that comes with an open journal like this site:

And I imagine that this will become pretty obvious the more I blog. I’m sure I’ll get burned for this at some point, but that’s part of it. That happens offline too, as Ben pointed out. You just gotta roll with the punches and know that the more you make yourself vulnerable and on a level with everyone else out there doing the same thing, the more likely you’ll have friends to back you should the need arise.

Still struggling with that one. Can't say I'll ever be completely comfortable with it. I want my family and friends to be able to see what's happening in my life, but it has to be easy, or it isn't going to happen. At this point, I have no plans on running for office, but, who knows what I'll be embarrassed about in ten years.

Or what pages I'll be tabbing.

Continuing in the "wow, it's the same, but different!" trend of the SuperHappyDevHouse events I attend, last night's (this morning's?) SHDH was different from the rest. The first one was very much a par-tay, and tons of fun. The second one was awkward and uncomfortable, as I was recovering from personal conflict at the time, and trying to make sure Kris was enjoying himself (while he didn't want to be there).

This one was very much what I wanted all of them to be: an evening of devlopment. Kris and I listened to the early presentations (Jeff on Vantage, Jesse on writing Firefox extensions (using XUL) (and again with a brief introduction to Ruby on Rails), and Kevin Burton on feed parsing (in reverse order). Then, we dashed off to work on myCrap.

For years, I've been asking Kris to work on a web project with me. He has always been willing, and asked, "okay, what do you want me to do?" but we've struggled with finding a project we're both interested in doing.

myCrap solves this dilemma well, because it's a combination of the freecycle site I've been wanting to write for a long time, and web-lend, a site that Bharat did a long time ago (6 years?) to handle books and videos he's loaned to friends. We're scratching the "Where is Disc 1?" "I don't know. Who did you loan it to?" "I don't remember." itch with this site.

There will be nominally two sites: http://take.mycrap.org/ for the former give-away functionality, and http://borrow.mycrap.org/ for the latter loan part. We'll be using flickr for image management, and tags for category control. Amazon will be used to look up items via the ISBN and UPC symbol. And, in the spirit of all new sites, we'll have FOAF, trust/feedback/rating user networks.

Did I mention we're launching all of this on the first of the year?

Probably not.

Everyone I've mentioned this project to has been excited about it and the potential to help people manage stuff (their crap!). That Kris is excited to be working on a project with me has me jazzed, too.

The downside is getting Kris up to speed on my preferred community website application platform. I hadn't realized how hard creating basic functionality in a Drupal module is, having been doing it for years now. Working with Kris was a serious eye-opener. Need to get groundr off the ground sooner than later to make that much easier.

The jokes with the site are fun, though. We're definitely not going to take ourselves seriously on this. The site is going to be all crap. "What are you working on?" "Mycrap." "Oh, well, can we work on my crap instead?" "Uh, I am." "Oh."