garry’s posthaven

Me and PG above, taken by Jessica Livingston's iPhone, and posted to the Y Combinator posterous.

Good times tonight -- really amazing how many innovative, driven, badass hackers there are.

Kind of like Sunshine / 2001: A Space Odyssey. Badass.

It's filmmaker Duncan Jones's first film.

It's Sam Rockwell's first lead role. Sam says his performance is inspired by 70's alienation pics like Taxi Driver. He's the only actor you see for 97 minutes.

Looks to be brainy and cool. I wonder if the computer is on the good side this time.

Here are my semi-verbatim notes out of this great 27 minute talk (listen, it's good for you!) --

Don't worry too much about the process.

Before you become awesome at something, you've got to do something. And you're going to suck at it for a long time. It's just the rest stop to being awesome, though.

We create mental barriers around ourselves before we get started. E.g. if I just had this one little thing that was a little different, I'd feel so good about starting this project. I can't begin to start on this project before I work out the tagging taxonomy!

There's a part of you that is incredibly afraid of people seeing you sucking at something. You see people who seem to create great things the second they touch the keyboard, but actually they're just used to letting other people see how much they suck.

My fingers have to move for about 20 minutes before anything good comes out. You have to write your way out of a thinkng block but you can't think yourself out of a writing block.

Stop creating barriers for yourself that it has to be awesome your first time around. There's a mean Dad voice in your head shouting you down -- I don't have the right tools, I have to watch this video, I don't know how to do ___.

Trick from 43folders: I'm not allowed to go to the bathroom / go to Reddit / get a drink of water until I ___ -- e.g. write 100 words, etc.

Constraints matter. You can sit in your office for 16 hours and not write a word. But if you say you're only allowed to write for 2 hours, then you'll get a lot more done.

Develop an insane amount of tolerance for having no idea something is turning into. Don't sweat monetizing it. Don't sweat AdSense. You don't know what it's turning into. If you let your brain give you ideas, then you can execute on them.

You have everything you need right now to start. You don't need that crazy space pen or that Tablet PC.

Once you get past starting -- you've got to start polishing. You have to start, then have something, and only then add the judgmental part of it. If you judge before you create, then you'll end up just leaving mean comments on people's blogs. (LOL)

"I gotta go make something now, and I'm not going to take any more input until I make something." Stop reading wikipedia and stop doing research.

"If I only had a little bit more time, this could be really good." We put ourselves in self-defeating scenarios -- that's why we turn papers in late. We have an excuse this way.

Great talk -- reminds me of Ira Glass on storytelling

Barry Ritholtz (who is an avid Posterous user, by the way, go subscribe!) puts together yet again some sobering news for those interested in what's really happening out there.

In 12 months, we've outlayed more public funds than the largest, most expensive government projects in 206 years.

Dang, we should have just gone to Mars instead.

Jeff Bezos is a trailblazer of the first order. In this Wired article he explains why the Kindle breaks from the traditional business models of subsidized hardware (e.g. cell phones for 99 cents)

It makes so much sense for Kindle. People are willing to pay more up front if it means no hidden fees later (no monthly fees for the connected Whispernet service, and no additional markup on each book). We are opened up to the unlimited nature of this sliver of a device -- imagine, every book at our disposal for cheaper than we'd pay for the treekilling one!

The alternative sucks. Yeah the device is free, but I gotta pay for connectivity and even more for books? Yechhh.

It's emotional marketing at its best.

A great addition to this explanation would be some discussion about modes.

A few examples they present include: a) a Microsoft Windows wizard experience, b) date choosers that use two separate month and year combo boxes instead of just one combined combo box.

In both cases, you take away control while introducing additional modes, which are invisible states that the user must divine through context clues around the implementation of the user experience. That's partially why engineers can make such truly awful UI -- but it makes sense to them because it matches their mental model.

Wizards encode modes into the fixed, rigid "choose-your-own-adventure" style of navigating seemingly disconnected questions that don't connect me with what is really happening. (GROSS!)

Ultimately the most telling slide is the one around progressive disclosure -- hide things where people will find them.

As an aside, I've been quite impressed with how Slideshare and Scribd have made Powerpoint docs super accessible. It's simply unprecedented how easy it is to absorb information in bite-sized chunks from such beautiful and well designed presentations.

Really cool video by Daniel Carbone, so retro, but you can tell its totally modern because early in the shot there's a Nissan Altima.

Makes me want to run out and play with a Super 8. Can you imagine the possibilities of Super 8 + nonlinear editing?

Stereogum has republished Trent Reznor's final note to the raving masses that have driven him from his social media experiment.

With over 600,000 followers, Trent Reznor flexed the star power that comes with being the voice of a several generations of angsty youth. It seems as though a tiny fraction of his fans have ruined the party.

Could it be that the classic Hollywood fear of over-engagement be true? Celebs are struggling to figure out what role they want Twitter, Facebook and their social media presence to play. Reznor says:

I approached that as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and "human"... If this has bummed you out or destroyed what you've projected on me, fair enough - it's probably time for you to leave.

Figures of music represent lifestyles and amorphous identities. It's hard to be larger than life when you're also a real person. Is the NIN frontman the first casualty in a trend? We'll see.

Think about the scale -- at worst the trolls numbered fewer than 600 people, or 0.1% of his followers. Given any large enough collection of people, you're going to have some ugliness. But suddenly these 600 had a way to reach out and ruin someone's day.

We're definitely still figuring out this computer thing. For now, trolls win.