Why SOPA / PROTECT IP will break the Internet -- Great video explaining everything.

You probably know a lot of people who will be asking you why all their favorite sites are down. This video explains why. Send it to them.

Another way you could help educate people on why this is important is Tutorspree's Explain SOPA minisite. They'll connect you with people who don't understand it. Send them the video and answer their questions. 

Remember: all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

EDIT: Hellofax is also sending faxes to your representatives and senators for free on your behalf. Just enter your address and a message, and we'll clog their pipes so they know they can't ignore us. 

I'm the luckiest man in the world

Stephanie and I were wed in Palo Alto, California on Saturday, October 15, 2011. The weekend before, we got together with our fantastic and talented photographer Kien Lam to do a time lapse video all around San Francisco. Some of our favorite haunts, including North Beach, where Stephanie and I had our first sort-of-maybe-date at Jazz at Pearl's. 

Here's the fruit of our many hours of labor:


Understand, I’ll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I’ll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, First Poems

Many many thanks go out to our friends, families, and all of the people who helped make our special day the epic and amazing day it was. 

If you can't remember why onions are in there, take 'em out.

Reading an old article by Paul Graham about the origins of Arc -- written about 3 weeks into the development of that language:

In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi tells a story that happened when he was working in a varnish factory. He was a chemist, and he was fascinated by the fact that the varnish recipe included a raw onion. What could it be for? No one knew; it was just part of the recipe. So he investigated, and eventually discovered that they had started throwing the onion in years ago to test the temperature of the varnish: if it was hot enough, the onion would fry.

By the time Primo figured this out, modern thermometers rendered onions inessential. PG says that Arc will be the Lisp dialect that tries to avoid the onions. The inessential things that creep into our lives. How did they get there? We can't even remember.

This strikes me as a useful story for life. What are the onions in my varnish? Lets get rid of that stuff.

The empathy center of the brain

Rebecca Saxe delivered this fascinating speech at TED in 2009. She has discovered the one part of the brain that gets engaged when we are evaluating the intentions of other people. 

Of note:

  • Children don't develop a sense for morality and evaluation of other people's consciousnesses and intention until after age 5.
  • Using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, Saxe and her researchers were able to disrupt this part of the brain and that it has a significant impact on the ability of people to make judgments about other people's intentions.

This seems to have wide-reaching impact for product designers. Designers must spend time inhabiting the consciousness of others -- to feel their pain and empathize with what they would feel at any given moment in an interaction. 

I would suspect the overdevelopment of this part of the brain is one of the key differentiators between designers who make things pretty and designers who make things well.

The Machine That Changed the World: The Paperback Computer

The Machine That Changed The World was a 90's era PBS documentary that I taped to VHS tape when I was probably 10 or 11 years old. I watched this 5 hour documentary on loop, over and over again. Move aside Disney, it's was all about the computer revolution.

Episode 3 (linked above) was my favorite. In it: interviews with both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak about the dawn of the paperback computer.

RIP Steve 1955 - 2011

When telepresence will finally be viable

Skype is pretty good for talking with people. Due to schedules these days, it's almost the only way I can meet most of the people who want to meet with me. It works relatively well. It saves everyone travel time. But it doesn't work perfectly for the simple reason that the Internet doesn't work fast enough. For a while I thought Facetime would be the thing that brings us to the telepresence age. Now I'm not entirely sure, though I wait with bated breath hoping that Apple releases better presence indications and multi-party calls for Facetime. Well, any update would do, really. 

Telepresence is a tremendous holy grail for computing. What's better than email? What's better than screen sharing? Actually being able to look into someone's eyes and trusting them, and making a deal. 

In order for it to really work, it has to be:

  • Ubiquitous - like Skype, or better than Skype. This means it has to be a desktop and/or mobile software play. Hardware telepresence works really well today, but only for the well heeled. 
  • High Quality - I mean, the point of telepresence is to have a personal experience of meeting someone without actually moving the atoms there. So 720p HD seems like a reasonable goal. Uncompressed 720p is about 100 megabytes per second, and compressed Bluray is about 15 megabytes per second. The real effective optimized HD telepresence codec of the future I suspect will be someplace in that range of 15 to 100 megabytes per second. 
  • No skips - not even a little bit. This means the bandwidth needs to be overprovisioned... possibly by a lot. You need bandwidth headroom to absorb spikes. 

My guess is Skype or Facetime will be the software/mobile platform for it. Unless some intrepid soul comes along and shocks us all, which I very much hope will happen. Apple may yet amaze us. Skype is useful and probably good enough, but not great.

So then the question basically falls to point-to-point bandwidth. To avoid skips, you need a lot of bandwidth. Especially if you want high quality. Uplink speed on the last mile will be the constraint, since that's typically the slowest link. Modern online speedtests (e.g. speedtest.net) indicate average broadband speeds are coming out to 2 megabytes per second (~15 mbps). Eesh. My Comcast cable modem in California seems to rate limit me to a dismal 500 kilobytes per second.

Randall Stross recently wrote that you can buy 1000 megabits per second broadband for $26/month in Hong Kong. That is awesome! Perhaps telepresence within cities will be viable on a much shorter time frame, a matter of years. The same article mentions Google will be experimenting with gigabit within cities too.

If you wanted to know when real telepresence would really disrupt business travel and be a viable replacement for face-to-face communication, you'd need to do a forecast on broadband speeds. My uneducated guess: anything above 5 megabytes per second bi-directional cross country (e.g. SF to NY) for regular consumer broadband would be the point where you'll start to see technology massively shifting society.

At current rate of broadband speed improvements, it might be a while.

How Steve Jobs handles trolls (WWDC 1997)

An audience member at WWDC in 1997 trolls Steve Jobs in front of everyone, but Steve responds with grace. (Bold emphasis mine.)

Question: I would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms how, say java, in any of it’s incarnations, addresses the idea (inaudible). And when you’re finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last 7 years. 

Steve: You know, you can please some of the people some of the time, but…. One of the hardest things when you’re trying to effect change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas.

...

The hardest thing is: how does that fit in to a cohesive, larger vision, that’s going to allow you to sell 8 billion dollars, 10 billion dollars of product a year? And, one of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology”. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it’s the case. 

...

And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?” Not starting with “Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that?” And I think that’s the right path to take. 

Hat tip Dharmesh Shah at onstartups.com and Vic Gundotra's Google Plus

What Babe Ruth teaches startup founders about conviction and recruiting true believers

October 1, 1932: Third game of the World Series, with the Yankees taking on the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Two strikes, two balls. The Cubs are one strike away from stopping the greatest slugger who ever lived.

Babe Ruth points to centerfield. That's where the ball was going to go. The pitcher grips the ball, winds up the pitch and fires a curve ball. With a swing and the crack of the bat, the ball sails in that direction. Going, going, gone. He homers the ball 440 feet into centerfield, just as predicted.

--

CONVICTION

This is possibly the finest example of conviction ever displayed. Babe Ruth's conviction is illustrated in two parts -- telling people you're going to do it -- then doing it.

This should mean a lot to you if you're a startup founder. That's because telling people you're going to do it means believing it and getting others to believe. If you are hiring or looking for a cofounder, my number one advice is to look closer at the people you already know and trust. Few teams seem to push on this nearly enough. 

It seems as though people are afraid of transferring their idea into other people's brains. But that's the entire point of what we're trying to do -- when trying to put a dent in the universe. People close to you are always the best people to try to recruit. As an added benefit: If you can't get your best friends to join, maybe you actually are crazy or wrong. This is your best way and sometimes only way to tell. 

I know you are thinking... people have their own stuff going on. Close friends have jobs and sometimes their own startups. But let me tell you -- if you really know this other kind of world that you have in your head is going to exist, then you are doing them a huge disservice not to tell them about it.

If you can infuse your belief into others, then you will succeed. We all know that true believers can move mountains. Small armies of true believers can conquer mercenary armies of any size. This is why small teams of half a dozen people can take down goliaths.

OBLIGATORY STEVE JOBS REFERENCE: Steve Jobs has called himself a recruiter in interviews. This is not surprising. Everything past the first earliest stage of the garage is about care and feeding of the organization. The company. Steve Jobs is a master at making true believers, and true believers can do truly great things.

As for Babe Ruth... I consider him one of my most revered startup heroes.

From a speech first delivered at Designer Fair last Friday -- thanks to Enrique Allen for the invite and for coming if you attended! Also thanks to Dustin Curtis for inspiring the ideas in this essay over lunch.

Lessons from a stolen laptop: Let this be a warning to you my friends

Friday night, Steph and I were hanging out with good friends in downtown SF... ironically enough, watching blockbuster car heist movie Fast Five. Around midnight, we headed back to our car and found that our car had been burglarized... both of our laptops were gone, along with a number of other random things the thief must have thought were valuable or resalable. No sign of forced entry. The police mentioned that Honda Accords were often burglarized since thieves sometimes use a 'master key'  that unlocks all doors for a particular car-- they case the area and strike. 

Two homeless guys witnessed the whole thing, but the thief was nonchalant enough that they just walked right up and looked like they owned the car. We got a physical description: 5'10" caucasian/latino man in a baseball cap going from the club at 111 Minna to another down the street. It happened just 45 minutes before we got back to our cars. 

Both Steph and I were shaken a bit. Neither of us had ever really been the victim of a crime of this magnitude before. The worst was that Steph lost a hard drive that contained years and years of her past writings, photos and memories. The rest may well be covered (*crosses fingers*) by my renter's insurance policy, but TBD. 

We headed to the police station immediately to report it and file a police report at South Station. The officer was helpful and polite, but didn't hold out much hope for us. 

I *did* install Prey, an open source spy tool for exactly for tracking down laptop thieves. I flipped it into "Missing" mode and hoped the thief would slip up. By the morning, we had a few reports from the software. Steph and I sprung into action. But it looks like we're dealing with pros here -- or at least not complete amateurs. Unlike Joshua Kaufman's successful recovery of his laptop from a thief in Oakland, the thief was smart enough to block the webcam...

That was all we saw. We did, however, track him/her to this specific location in San Francisco, just blocks from Civic Center BART in the Tenderloin. The address was 280 Golden Gate-- at least on the map, it looked like it was a deli of some sort... but we arrived to see the deli closed and boarded up. Above the deli was a seedy San Francisco SRO motel, and the track went cold. The cops shrugged their shoulders but were sympathetic. Not enough info to track down the thief. They advised us to just keep watching the software to see if we could catch the thief in the open. 
Unfortunately, the suspect must have wiped the machine, or just hasn't used it since. The homeless guys who witnessed it told us that the laptops and various things were probably all sold by the next morning, each for about $100-200. "Anything for a crank fiend to get a fix," they said.

I've pretty much given up any chance at recovering our stolen stuff at this point. We've been trying to look at the bright side -- we've learned some lessons, we're alive, we're safe, and tomorrow is a new day.

A few straightforward lessons that I hope you can benefit from:
  1. THE CLOUD
    Use Dropbox, Backblaze, and make sure everything is backed up to cloud. Your data isn't safe unless its in the cloud. It's 2011 -- you have no excuse. 

  2. TIME MACHINE
    Invest in Apple Time Machine or other backup tools -- for anything larger than what you can place in the cloud.

  3. FIGHT BACK
    Install Prey or Hidden, no matter what. It might just let you get your stuff back and get justice. Maybe.

  4. YOUR CAR ISN'T SECURE
    Never ever store anything of value in your car AND trunk. Assume your car has no locks and is accessible to thieves. I had always assumed it was perfectly fine to throw valuables in the trunk. I know better now. 

  5. PROTECT YOUR PERSONAL DATA
    Thieves may steal your identity if they've got all the info stored on your computer. If you're a victim, sign up for free fraud alerts. You could probably skip LifeLock and the like; according to Consumer Reports, the Fair Credit Reporting Act states we get the benefits of these services for free

  6. GET INSURANCE
    Boy was I ever relieved to know I had renter's insurance. I picked it up last year through GEICO, which resells Assurant Renter's insurance. I'll let you know later with a strong recommendation if the claim goes through smoothly. 
Stay safe, friends! An ounce of prevention here is worth... well, in the case of data, once it's gone, there is no cure.