Working for a startup is heads-down work most of the time. I’m in the city often enough, but I stay in just a few places. I’m more familiar with what the subway stops look like than anything above ground. Still, when you’re working on an event search engine, sometimes it is good to get busy at night doing something besides work. It is times like these when we eat our own dogfood. This time, that worked out really well. Steve Wozniak is traveling around promoting his new book iWoz. We found out he would be speaking in the city thanks to the magic of our crawler. Being an office of geeks (and mostly Apple users, at that), we decided this would be one of those rare times we stepped out of the office together. I was hesitant at first. I tend to be a homebody. Stick me in front of a computer and I’ll happily ignore the rest of the world for hours or days, but once I got over my initial inertia and got out the door, I had a fantastic time. I had never read or heard about Woz’s early life, but he talked about how he taught himself to build computers starting in grade school. To me, this was simply amazing. He was able to learn so much because his father (an engineer) would bring home magazines about computers (in the 60s, when such things weren’t common) but ended up teaching himself all this without his father’s knowlege. I look at my own kids and wonder how much creative energy and time is drained away by video games and TV. (Hopefully not too much since I can’t bear to let them do those things for too long, and keeps them off the computer.) I see how much “education” is about spoon feeding kids predigested chunks of information. And then I go listen to someone like the Woz, and it gives me hope. I know my kids are curious, so I hope they’ll find something to explore and love, like he did. I can only imagine the surprise and pride Steve Wozniak’s father must have felt when he found, when the Woz was in college, that he had taught himself to design these systems. I can only hope that my own children delight me in the same way ten years from now.
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The following is a lightly edited copy of an email I sent to a friend. He suggested that I post this. You’re uncomfortable with Dogma. So am I. Dogma is one of the reasons I love the Orthodox. Yes, there are plenty of bad apples, but, the good stuff is completely Orthodox. The triune God and the divine man Christ. That’s all I need to be Orthodox. Well, yes, I do have to be comfortable with Liturgy, otherwise Orthodoxy isn’t going to “speak to me”. But that’s the point: orthopraxis is absolutely as important, if not more important, than orthodoxy. What we believe is important. But what we do is absolutely vital. I remember clearly when I started to see that we (“we” being the western church, especially prots) put to much importance on orthodoxy and not enough on orthopraxis. Somewhere in high school, I was involved in my church’s Evangelism Explosion program. “You believe in Christ,” was the verse we were using. “Good! The devils believe… and TREMBLE!” I’m sure I had begun to grok this sooner, but I remember this clearly. We don’t practice what we preach. If we really believe this stuff, it would be reflected in our action. If we claim to believe something, but don’t follow through, then we don’t actually believe it. All this is a long way to say that I’ve come to believe (and I think the church teaches) that godly action is more important than getting all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed in your belief system. I think I read River of Fire (RoF) for the first time about 10 years ago. It was an eye opener. Reading the RoF was the first time I encountered a spiritual authority that I felt comfortable with who said “God is entirely Love” and didn’t couch the terms. Everyone else said “God is Love, but…” and felt the need to explain an angry God who was so pissed off about sin that he had to send people to Hell. It provided me with a way to reconcile my belief in the reality of Hell with the belief in a loving God. We’re the ones who choose God or not. He doesn’t force himself on us. And, as a loving God, I think he recognises cultural and geographical limits. I don’t think he automatically condemns someone to eternal torment simply because they’re a Hindu who’s never heard of Christ. I think God has some subtlety. So, I’m not really interested in judging Mennonites, Christian Scientists, Mormons or Scientologists. Each of us has a conscience. We instinctively know what is right. If we seek God, I think he will, in Love, respond to us despite our limitations. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still critical of each of the above. But I’ve at least gotten to the point where I’m not going to smack them over the head with the Gold-bound Gospel book from liturgy and force them to repent. And I absolutely agree that we should be able to find truth and beauty (From the philokalia: truth is beauty, beauty is truth) in other spiritual traditions. We should be able to respect the Buddhist Koans or Hindi poetry. “Be able to”, as in “go ahead and appreciate it” not “everyone has to do this”. Most people aren’t comfortable with that sort of ambiguity. We claim to know the Truth and anything outside our tradition makes us uncomfortable. God said, “I AM”. Not “I AM ONLY FOUND IN EASTERN CHRISTIANITY”. Jesus said “I AM the WAY, TRUTH, and LIFE” and he showed us true love. Anger was a rare thing for him. And he didn’t tell his disciples “Go tell everyone about me because they’re condemned to hell without knowing my name.” His words were positive statements: “He who believes in me will be saved.” And we’ve assumed that the converse is also true. In fact, this brings me to another thing I appreciate about the Orthodox. The focus is almost exclusively on me and how I don’t measure up. It is clear that I’m loved and I bear the image of God, but it is clear that Deification is the ideal, that it is what we all desire (even if we don’t know it), what we all strive for. Theosis is the goal, but God is Love. He doesn’t demand Theosis of us. And never have I felt it necessary to judge a good person simply because they haven’t achieved Theosis. Nor have I felt judgement because I haven’t yet been deified. What I have felt is envy for those with a closer relationship with God. I’ve envied other people’s devotion. And I freely confess that since I don’t feel it is a sin to envy spiritual achievement. But I still feel loved. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by guilt. I hold myself responsible for my sin — sin contrary to my true, image-of-God nature. And I fall short of the possible Glory that God placed within me. The glory that he enables me to realize. But the focus is on me and my shortcomings. I can see how others fail, sure, but they’re sin isn’t my responsibility. And when they find beauty, its a good thing. “All Truth [beauty] is God’s.” Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, but I don’t really see seekers. I don’t see people who desire God. I see people angry at God (just as the RoF said), people building mudpies when the entire beach awaits them. It is those people that I’m concerned about, not the devout Muslim or the God-fearing Baptist. And when I say “concern”, I don’t mean “concern for the eternal state of their soul”, though, hrm, I do wonder if they’ll be a dwarf tasting hay. I mean a sadness. There is so much more than this. And they reject it.
“Take drugs or lose your job!”
Give me one reason I shouldn’t fire you? You’ve been lazy, done crap all, and yes done nothing much of anything lately. Why do I keep you employeed here? Sometimes I wonder. You’d better change your attitude and get to work. Maybe it’s your life outside of work, I am not sure, but smarten up. I suggest you start taking something to help you concentrate more and start eating right. I am telling everyone that is on the cutting board to start taking these supplements. I know these work because I have have used them on a few of the others over the past few years. Take them, they work. Otherwise you’d better focus a hell of alot more or you’ll be looking for a new job fast. Get the the stuff from the website below. We’ll subsidize your cost with a receipt. Yes I am giving you the stuff free when you purchase. If you don’t send in a receipt to payroll in the next week then I will have my eye on your performance from now on. Take my advice or leave it, up to you but you’d better start doing things right.
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[Update: Read the postscript at the end of this post.] I hate hardware. More and more that has become my mindset. I had flaky disks, incompatible controllers, and buggy drivers. And I hate ‘em all. The final straw came tonight. I slurped in my email and, an hour later, went to send some email. Nothing. My server decided it didn’t want to live on the ‘net any more and had taken a vacation. This is the last straw. I love having my own server. I love having root. I love the fact that if I want to play around with a new web toy, I can install it and see it live in a few minutes. But, I hate colocation. I hate backups. I hate hardware that fails in the night. So I’m chucking it in. First thing tomorrow morning, I’m going to go to the colo in New York City and boot my box one last time (it better boot…). I’m going to be moving everything to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Luckily, I have a fairly recent backup of this box. Its on a little USB disk that I’m backing up the Amazon’s S3 as I type. I’m using Brackup by Brad Fitzpatrick (of Livejournal fame). The storage fees are absurdly low and I have more confidence in Amazon’s disks than I do in my own. (My own disks have worked wonderfully for 5 years straight.) If you use this server, what does it mean for you? Hopefully, it will mean more stability. It will also mean a dynamic IP address, but DNS should hide that from you. It will mean that we’re going to rely on Amazon’s resources instead of mine for bandwidh and processing power. It will mean that, if you want, I can set you up with your very own server. You can have root if you want it. You can set up your own EC2 server and we’ll copy your data over. Or you can continue to rely on me to host your services. Either way, I’m done managing sometimes flakey hardware in a remote location.
Postscript: When I arrived at the colo, I found that someone had accidentally knocked the power cord out of my server. So all was not lost. I’m going to be trying out EC2 over the next month or so. At the very least, I want to have it available for providing a backup for my server when someone knocks the power cord out, or a disk fails. Which is to say, I’m not switching to EC2 yet, or maybe at all.
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Lily rides!
This is the LilyCar, otherwise known as a skateboard. |
Nothing to see here. Just testing the security settings of my photo sharing.
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This weekend, I upgraded my livejournal installation and installed the FotoBilder software that Danga produces. Compared to some of the other software I’ve used, it is very nice. It even has several Ajaxy touches that make using it even more pleasent. There is even a desktop Windows client for uploading pictures. Also, I moved the LiveJournal installation to a server with gobs of disk space. Now I just need to figure out an easy way to pay for the colocation. If you have an OpenWeblog account, go to http://pics.openweblog.com/ to try out the software. Or you can just look at these pictures that we took at a Mardi Gras parade a while back.
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Last week, I said I was going to start using a planner and a budget. I thought I’d give an update on how well it has gone… Partly to let you, my faithful readers, have something to read, but mostly to keep myself using these tools. First, the budget. I know a lot of people do just fine without budgets. Some of those people have fewer expenses than me (my childless friends, for example). Some make more money than I do. Perhaps the rest only deal in cash. In any case, and I have had many long discussions about finances. We had “budgeted” our money several times. We were very comfortable with the numbers. And it never worked. My current thinking is that I need a tool to help me see where the money is a few weeks into the future at a time. This way, I don’t feel flush and forget that I have bills to pay. (I’m very forgetful that way.) So, a week ago, I used GnuCash to set up a budget with scheduled payments for known expenses. I set it up put entries in the ledger a month ahead of time so I know a month in advance how much money I have when. Then, I set up funds. Some expenses (like dentist’s visits or car repairs) are sizable, but I should still save a little each month for them. So, I set up sub-accounts in my main checking account. Each paycheck, GnuCash automatically moves a bit of my paycheck into each of these sub-accounts. In reality, the money is still in the checking account, but when I look at my ledger for the checking account in GnuCash, it is hidden from me, so I don’t spend it. This is kind of like cashing your paycheck and putting different amounts of money in various envelopes. When the money in the envelope is gone, you can’t spend any more on that item. So far, this has worked out pretty well. Still it has only been a week. I’ll let you know in a month how well it has gone. The other bit of organisation I added was planner-el. I even read a bit of the manual! The biggest change so far (besides using a planner in the first place to create and schedule tasks as well as measure how long I spend on them) has been using another Emacs package that works with planner-el: RememberMode. In the past, whenever I read something in my email, I would mark it as important and, every time I opened my email, there it would be, staring at me (my email reader only shows me unread messages and those marked as important). The only time I did anything with these was when I was feeling bored and wanted to get rid of some of the visual garbage. That is to say, I didn’t do much with it very often. In fact, most of the time, I would mark a message, ignore it for a while, and then unmark it without doing anything. In an effort to clear my own mind, I went back through those messages, read through them and, using RememberMode and planner-el, created planner pages with links to the messages. This cleaned up a lot of mental detritus and helped me to organise those things into tasks. Another nifty way I’ve used RememberMode is to keep track of items I want to buy. The other day on IRC, there was a discussion about slimline DVD writers … something I’m looking to buy shortly. I used RememberMode to mark the webpage and make a note of it on my shopping list. Now, most people will read through this description and shake their head. “Why don’t you just use little scraps of paper?” Well, my handwriting is terrible and, not only that, I write slowly. I type slowly, too, but I live in Emacs and all this functionality is just a few keystrokes away no matter what I’m doing. I spend most of my day looking at this screen and I can’t see a good reason not to use it. Still, planner-el (along with RemindMode) works just like any Franklin Covey or GTD planner. It can adapt to whatever method you want to use and make things easier. Oh, and I lied. While I have used it to set up tasks for myself each day, I haven’t really spent that much time scheduling those tasks or keeping track of how much time I spend on them. But after reading enough planner books in the past and then coming across the same advise in a “staying focused at work” post (that I read while not focusing on work), I decided to give it a try. So, tonight I’ve set up some tasks for myself to get done tomorrow and I’ve scheduled them out. I’ll let you know how it goes.
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When I first became interested in planner-el, John Wiegley was still the author. Then Sacha Chua took over and her boundless energy and love for hacks that help people took us a long way. Now, it looks like the baton has passed to John Sullivan. Still, Sacha makes the best evangelist for planner-el (and emacs in general) because of her infectious joy of hackery and the fact that she publishes her online journal using planner-el. I spent this weekend organising myself money-wise. I’d rather not think about money, but it seems when I don’t think about it, I spend way too much worrying over it. So, fresh from the euphoria of a budget unsullied by day-to-day implementation and with some means to put it into place, I decided tonight to give planner-el another look. Emacs greets me each day with planner-el’s layout (left over from the last time I thought about organising myself). So, I bounced over to PlannerLove.com to see what they suggested. After a bit of unorganised bouncing around, I ended up on Sacha’s thoughts about having it all. This sort of stuff is the most interesting kind of writing I’ve found in online journals and weblogs. People writing about what they want, how they can achieve it, the alternatives they’ll discard. I almost never write like this unless it is past tense. Instead of planning out what I’m going to do and carefully calculating a route, I tend to just dive in. It works well enough much of the time. But there are times that I really need to plan more. (Ever try to remodel a kitchen by just “diving in”? Not a smart move.) In a sense, this is how I ended up with a smart, beautiful wife, four wonderfully intelligent kids, a house that needs a ton of work and a job at a startup. None of that was planned. It was all just “living in the moment.” How can you argue with success? But this afternoon, I visited a retired friend who just had knee surgery. I apologised for not visiting sooner (it’s been a couple of months since I said I would), but he dismissed it. “You’ve got a lot of irons in the fire.” Which is true. So now, instead of letting my house of cards fall apart, its time to manage it a bit more. Till now, I’ve done a decent-enough job. I’ve learned to let some purely recreational hacking fall by the wayside while I concentrate more on stuff that matters to more people than just me. Now I need a tool to help me prioritize the things I want to get done. I’ve seen how just prioritising and setting deadlines helps a me get more done at work and I want to apply that to my personal life. Still, I fear I’m inherently lazy and scatterbrained. Using any tool takes discipline, something I don’t have a large reserve of. But I do have a clue for how to fill my reservoir. Sleep helps. Good night. (sleepy update: Genehack seems to have almost the same planner-el/emacs setup I do. Except he’s chosen to run his EmacsOS on a Mac for some reason.)
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At BusyTonight, trying to see how much bandwidth we can consume crawling sites. Bandwidth tends to be pricy, so we haven’t had much chance to really test our wings till now. We got a colo’d server with a 10mb unmetered pipe. Problem was, it had RedHat installed and our software is written to be installed as Debian packages on Ubuntu. So, how do you manage convert the operating system of a server you don’t have physical access to? Well, Debian makes it (relatively) easy. The debootstrap tool that Ubuntu inherited from Debian make it possible to set up a spare partition (swap, if need be) as a boot disk into which you can temporarily install Ubuntu. Once you have that up, you can tweak Grub, reboot with your fingers crossed, and — provided everything works smoothly the first time — you’ve got a Ubuntu system running. Of course, nothing works smoothly the first time. Luckily, I had kvm access for a few hours. So, I used it to struggle with the kernel. Too late, I realized I needed a custom kernel. Since I didn’t have to figure out which bits were missing from the Ubuntu kernel or what bits were included that shouldn’t have been, I just used the stock RedHat kernel to run the Ubuntu OS. It works enough to test out some ideas we have. And, if we need to do this in the future, I’ve a good idea of where to start.
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