Dyepot, Teapot

I came home from a fun evening of loud music and TA movie promo just a bit ago. On the way through the parking lot, I noticed that the only lights seemed to be on the other side of the building, but didn’t give it much thought. Until I tried to flip on a light switch, and nothing happened. “Huh,” I thought, “Did we burn out another lightbulb?” Nope. Half of the apartment building has electricity. Half doesn’t. Guess which side I’m on?

I called PGE, which confirmed that I’m one of 4000 lucky customers spending the night in the dark. I wasn’t going to try to get online, but the laptop battery is charged still, and for once there’s open wifi somewhere nearby. So I logged on just to post this. Obsessed with connectivity? Hmm.

I made it through a week of self/un-employment without freaking out. (Regular paychecks? What’s that?) The first two days were taken up just kind of getting comfortable, getting the right software on the MacBook, handling a couple zine orders, etc.

Tuesday I went to a Social Media Club meeting at Someday Lounge (a little dark in there, but a nice space):

Dan Harbison, Internet Marketing Manager for the Trailblazers, talked about the ways they’re using blogging and podcasts and social networking to connect with fans. They have a site called I Am a Trailblazers Fan, billed as the “official online community” of the Portland Trailblazers.

The part I found most interesting is that Dan said that even when fans are negative or critical of the team, they’d rather have them giving that commentary within the sphere of the team’s blogs and networking site. Even angry fans are still important to the organization. Apparently they only take down posts if the language is abusive or not PG, and even then the person will get an explanation and be asked to play nice, instead of being automatically kicked off the site.

Afterward, I talked with someone involved with the Platform International Animation Festival, which is happening this summer in downtown Portland (June 25-30). They’re going to have a really incredible lineup of work there (the schedule isn’t on the website yet, but the person I talked to mentioned John K. and Scott McCloud as participants), and they really want to connect with fan communities like anime clubs, as well as bloggers/podcasters/etc. If you’d like more info, let me know.

Wednesday I had two things on my calendar: a booksigning by the lovely authors of Mason Dixon Knitting, and the Dorkbot meetup.

Totally different venues and crowds. Both fun.

Yesterday, pretty quiet. Worked on some code for a blog aggregation project. Had lunch with Dawn at Cup & Saucer.

My plan for today was more code, but I woke up feeling kinda tired, so instead I’m putting together flyers for BarCamp.

Logo by Patrick Sullivan of Lov.li.

If you’re even slightly interested in tech, the internet, geek stuff, etc. you should consider coming to BarCamp. I think it’ll be a really interesting event. It’s May 11-12 at CubeSpace (that’s another neat thing I keep meaning to talk about. It’s a workspace for the self-employed, with meeting rooms and desks. The place reminds me of the grad student research cubbies in university libraries.)

Tonight Lucas and I will be at a Timbers pre-season event at the Bitter End. The $6 cover goes toward a Timbers documentary a friend of ours has been working on, and they’ve lined up three bands, a bagpiper, a raffle, plus a sneak preview of the documentary. We’ll have copies of Yog’s Notebook for sale, too.

Busy busy.

Now that I’m halfway through my first full week of not having a day job, I’m starting to notice a couple of problems. I have this huge list of things I could be working on, some of it even income generating, and none of it automatically gives any organization to my day. I can work on anything I want! Which means I can also spend all day reading blogs and accomplishing nil.

And since I’m a complete dork, I decided the solution to this was to make a little checklist of things I should be working on a regular basis, so I can see whether I’m getting anywhere.

Most of this should be self-explanatory. I put fruits and vegetables on there because it’s something I don’t automatically remember to eat (vegetarian != only eats vegetables). The secret projects aren’t really, but it’s more fun that way. Personal online presence is shorthand for doing something to keep my website up to date and generally be visible online.

Most of my plans to track what I’ve been doing last about a week, so it’ll be a little while until I know if this works. Worth a try, right?

My laptop arrived this morning. I’ve been struggling to keep the kitten away from the power cord–yesterday he chewed through a speaker cable (stupid cheap wire is hard to splice back together), and a few minutes ago I had to chase him away from a mini-DVI adapter (at least the plug will still work even if the casing has teeth marks). I don’t know what the deal is. Do I need to get him one of those chew toys they make for hamsters?

To continue on from yesterday… One of the sf/real-life tech crossovers I’ve been thinking about is the “fast folk” in some of Ken MacLeod’s work (other people have used this idea too, but it first caught my attention in one of his books). It refers to people who’ve been uploaded into computers, and with that augmented processing power rapidly diverge from the rest of humanity, creating things that sometimes impact everyone else (usually not in a positive way).

As far as I know, no such augmented folk are actually out there, but the interaction he describes makes me think of how technology creators and promoters relate to the general public. So often we spew out all this stuff, programs and blog posts and trends and controversies, and little pieces trickle out into schools and workplaces and the mainstream media… but most doesn’t. It isn’t relevant or useful or interesting. I’ve been trying to figure out what that means for the work I do.

Last… This kind of intimidation is not okay. Mean kids? Do they miss what it was like to be 13? (I sure as hell don’t.) Hand in hand with the discussions of blogging, and Twitter, and all of this tech that can give strangers a window into our lives, people ask “is it safe? will something bad happen if I expose myself in this way?” I’ve been sitting around talking about the subtle ways the tech industry discourages women, but nothing says “fuck off” more than seeing Valleywag reprint an image of a prominent female blogger with lingerie Photoshopped over her face, while spinning the story of said photo’s origins as a petty feud. Wow.

Yesterday’s release party for Yog’s Notebook went well. We sold a few copies, hung out and drank and talked with friends, and everyone seemed to have a good time. I completely failed to take pictures, but I think Lucas will have a few to post soon.

Monday is my self-imposed “get back to work” day, so even though I did work on the zine last week, tomorrow I need to call a few places about maybe getting it into local stores, send out the comps and review copies, and figure out what else I can do to continue promoting it.

I was talking to a couple of people last night about viral marketing, and how it’s really funny watching big corporations try to get in on the action, because they think there’s something special, almost magic, going on. It’s just word of mouth. Two rules: do something interesting, and tell everyone you know. And if you don’t know anyone who’s into the something you’re trying to promote–maybe you picked the wrong area to work in. I’m not saying you always have to be part of the market you’re selling to, but it certainly helps, and it seems impossible without at least some kind of personal contact with said Market. How else do you know if you’re getting it right?

My brain’s been a jumble the last few days, still churning over Accelerando and other assorted readings. I’m in the middle of Perdido Street Station, but it’s hard to read large chunks at once, because the setting is so extreme.

There’s a bit of a backlash against the idea of information overload right now. Last year, the news was “all these things trying to get your attention all at once are rotting your brain!”. This year it’s a combination of “no, just go with the flow” and “who cares what everyone’s eating for lunch anyhow? I don’t have to read this stuff.” Eh. I bet everyone’s been in a situation when their problem was too little available information, not too much. (Watching the news on 9/11/01? Waiting for that hot guy/girl to respond to your email?)

The problem isn’t that there’s so much information on our screens and in our inboxes and feed aggregators and so on, it’s that we don’t know how to find the information we want right now, and how to get rid of the stuff we don’t want to deal with now (or ever). Better filters will help. Learning to skim for content and not read every word will help. I know a bunch of people who’ve been clamoring for a smart news agent for years, one that will make sure the stuff we want to see is front and center. It’s do-able, too, but the readily available tools still barely even acknowledge the problem. It’s like the people creating them don’t believe we want to track this much information at any one time. Well yes, we do. I do.

I have more things on my “write about this list” but this post is getting long enough. I’ll do the rest this afternoon, or tomorrow. Whenever.

After two months of hard work and steep learning curves, Yog’s Notebook issue 1 is now for sale.

If you’re in Portland, we’re going to have a little release party this Saturday at Lucky Lab on SE Hawthorne, from 5pm till whenever. Email me or leave a comment if you’ll be there and would like us to hold a copy for you. And spread the word!

I’ve been meaning to do some kind of a roundup post with the public sites/services I use, to link to later.

AIM: einespinnerin
Amazon wishlist
Blog: Dyepot, Teapot
ClaimID
Etsy
Flickr
Gmail/GChat: spinnerin
LastFM
LibraryThing
LinkedIn
Skype: einespinnerin
Twitter
YouTube

This is the current list of places I have content, can be contacted, etc. I’ll update things as needed.

I was reading through the hundred dollar business yesterday, and I spotted an interesting bit of advice on starting a business and organizational roles.

It caught my attention because employee roles were one of the big issues we struggled with during my ~5 months at PA, and I am always eager to avoid hitting the same problem a second time. So: Rob Merrill said

At the earliest stages, while you’re still fresh in the “entrepreneurial seizure“, you need to determine what the mandatory roles in the business are. In a startup, of course, there is no room for bureaucracy or drag of any kind. 100% of the resources need to be maxed to 100% or more. Vanity is death, though entrepreneurs by nature are often susceptible to vanity of some-kind or another. Beware! However, you need to reach out into the future to predict how the different “legs” of the organization are going to grow.

Take each group or functional area of the company and work on each “leg” planning out the infrastructure. Physically DRAW these out on an organizational chart.

For now, you (yourself) may occupy all or many of the roles in the org-chart. No problem. What’s important is that you know what’s next in line and, while you’re doing the shipping clerk’s job, you’ll be working hard to be sure that, when you do hire a clerk, you will have a system in place to ensure that you don’t spend all your time training them–and that the level of service you expect will still be achieved.

I’m going to try this as a planning exercise for Yog’s Notebook. It’s still a (very) open question if and how much the zine will grow, but as I’ve been looking at the possibilities, I’ve become more concerned with making sure I don’t write myself into a corner. I want to make sure it can succeed at whatever size turns out to fit best.

I just finished reading Accelerando, with main themes including the pace of technology, generation gaps, and our ability to cope. When I put down the book and went online to catch up on news/email/etc. I discovered that there’s been another flare-up of discussions about Twitter, reflecting a slice of the same issue.

Twitter lets people broadcast small pieces of information about what they’re doing throughout the day. Some people love this, as exhibitionists and voyeurs. Some people think it’s asinine. There’s also a large group in the middle, using it because it’s kind of fun, and it fills one of the gaps created by modern computer-driven lifestyles: a lack of in-person contact with people throughout the day.

I think we’re in the middle of a technological and cultural shift that’s both very alien and very familiar. If the 50s and nuclear families put us into small, isolated social bubbles, then email and IRC and the web and everything else are bringing us back the other way. (Sort of. But the caveat can wait for another post.)

Having this kind of always on contact with other people is noisy. It’s invasive. Modern computing allows it to happen at a much faster pace than we’re used to registering. But–when you grow up with it, you adapt. I spent every free waking hour possible from ages 15-21 immersed in an online social environment (a set of MOOs, less popular these days due to a lack of a graphical interface). It was addictive. It had a huge impact on what happened in my life during that time period, good and bad. It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t have access to a laptop back then, so I had to take breaks when I left the house. Eventually I logged out because it didn’t feel healthy anymore.

I don’t usually talk about that, because it feels sort of embarrassing to admit you spent your teenage years online, but certain aspects are immensely useful in retrospect. Having overdone it at one point means I know how much isolation I need to do mentally intensive work, and gives me a sense of how many streams of information I can process before I’m overloaded.

And this is also why I think all of the debate over Twitter is really silly. People are confusing the medium with the event. What’s happening is that we’re learning to negotiate always-on connectivity. Some people are going to need more distance than others. Some are going to opt-out completely. But I think people who grow up with this sort of thing just take it for granted. They still struggle with information overload and needing personal space and so on, but I suspect that the actual services that provide all of these things are going to seem irrelevant except in terms of “does this give me the kind of connectivity that I need?”

I don’t play futurist often, because it’s too easy to lose the larger context. If Twitter is a small slice of the pace of technology and how we cope, that issue is an even smaller piece of modern life, even in my own geographic community. I like to have my feet on the ground most of the time.

Morning Edition had an interesting segment in their business news this morning: a woman wrote in to say that she felt her boss was too interested in her personal life, and wanted advice on how to respond. The part that caught my attention is barely summarized in the story’s page on the NPR website, though. At the end of the conversation with Kathy (the employee) and Ben Dattner (a workplace consultant and psychologist), Ben asks, “Have you thought about why her interest in what you do outside of work feels like prying?” And they talk for a minute about how our past experiences, and family experiences in particular, affect how we interpret people’s actions when we interact with them at work.

It’s a short piece, and you can hear the whole thing on the website (linked above), so I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in this topic to go listen.