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By johnq, February 20, 2012 2:38 pm

My son just summarized the last 20 years of my work life in one sentence:

Him:  ”So all you do all day is type some words (programming) and go to meetings, right?”

Me: <Long pause>      Yes.

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By johnq, July 10, 2011 2:59 pm

Paul Graham has an old post here describing the difference between a maker’s schedule and a manager’s schedule. It’s very insightful. I’ve been living these schedules for most of my life. I always gravitated toward being a night owl and many years ago I thought about why. My conclusion was that when the world was asleep I could finally get stuff done. The implication being that I wouldn’t get interrupted while trying to focus. I’ve always compared programming to sculpting while trying to juggle 10 balls all at the same time… the balls being all the concepts, variables, pitfalls, and edge cases that you have to keep in your head as you create a program out of nothing. When you get interrupted, all those balls fall on the ground and it takes time to get them all up in the air again such that you can start being productive again. People whose work doesn’t involve that kind of focus don’t understand it. A single question can blow the next few productive hours because it makes the balls drop. Similarly, if I think the likelihood for interruption is high, I won’t try to get all the balls up in the air.

It’s why I’ve always been pretty protective of my desire to sleep late in the morning… because it means I can count on staying up late when everyone else is asleep and get into the zen state required. People understand “don’t wake someone up” because they understand the value of sleep…. they can relate to it even if it isn’t on their schedule. They just think you’re quirky. People don’t understand the need not to interrupt because of the time needed to get all the balls in the air again and the high potential you’ll have lost the momentum and decide just to stop and thus feel very frustrated at losing hours of productive time… not just the time it took to address the interruption.

As I’ve moved up the ranks of various companies, inevitably I end up managing teams. I find that the daytime hours are inevitably interrupt driven. Meetings, explanations, arguments, scheduling, budgets, more meetings. These are necessary to drive the organization forward incrementally.  But I am at heart a “maker” and don’t feel fulfilled unless I can chew off big chunks of stuff and get them done. So this has to be done at night… usually 9pm -2am. It’s why I get hired again and again… because I can manage a staff to complete large projects while also being highly productive as an individual.

Having a family, children, and all the other “normal life” things tends to make keeping those 9pm-2am maker hours hard. It is… but being a maker is also fundamentally who I am. The interruptions I get these days tend to shave hours off of sleep in the morning (morning meetings due to int’l meetings, taking children to school, etc.). Yet I’m unwilling to give up that 9pm-2am slot because it’s where I finally get back to being me… creating. Every once in a while someone who is just meeting me says, “You look tired.”

I bet I do.

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By johnq, February 15, 2010 9:51 pm

Before Jasmine was born, we decided to go to Japan and Thailand for one big trip before “the arrival.”  I have been to Japan many times and always enjoy it. Wasn’t quite sure what to expect with Thailand but we had a great time.

We stayed on Ko Phi Phi at the Holiday Inn Resort. Fortunately, it’s not like the Holiday Inn chain we’ve all come to know in the U.S.  This was a really nice place and, better yet, completely isolated from the main town so it was very peaceful at night… just the sound of the waves.

There is one restaurant on the beach there called, fittingly enough…. Jasmin’s.

[View with PicLens]

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By johnq,

… Jasmine !

This post is primarily for family… expect the usual baby pictures.

[View with PicLens]

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By johnq, November 4, 2009 7:32 pm

[Note: Ribbit was acquired by British Telecom and they're focusing more on the enterprise space now, so not sure how much longer the examples below will actually work as they're targeted to the consumer market.]

Ribbit had a big launch yesterday which was pretty well done. A lot of new functionality and features launched. From http://apps.ribbit.com looks like they’ve got some interesting additions. Texting & visual voicemail  from facebook. Chalkboard phonebook. Nice designs.

Plans are that I’ll be heading up the engineering team for Ribbit Mobile shortly, it’s going to be pretty fun digging into all this stuff.

Note: these aren’t screenshots… the items below are functional. You can create a conference call right from this page (you’ll need to set up a Ribbit account but that’s pretty painless).

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By johnq, October 29, 2009 8:01 pm

I have a theory… I developed this theory a long time ago. The theory goes like this. In the early days of Windows… 3.1, 3.11 and the immediate versions thereafter there were really a lot of problems. There was also another OS… the Mac OS. The difference was that no one knew about the Mac OS … it wasn’t branded… it just was. So you didn’t really know how to refer to it or even identify it independently of the Mac itself.

Windows was different. It was branded and, because it had so many problems, you had to talk about it a lot. Whole discussion groups sprang up overnight to discuss Windows problems. User groups formed. Consultants started charging money. Lots of people became “experts” at solving the problems… they made whole industries out of thin air. All because Windows had a lot of problems.

So my theory is that Windows actually gained a lot of mind share in the early days because it had so many problems that you had to talk about it.

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By johnq,

Recently, my 2.5 year old black MacBook died.

Fortunately, I had just upgraded to a new MacBook Pro (with a 256gb SSD drive, sweet!) so I had already gone through the pain of doing a secure wipe of old personal data off the old MacBook. Even so, I pulled out the hard-drive on the dead MacBook to see if it was just a hard disk controller or something. The drive was fine… so that wasn’t it. I tried resetting the ram and various other tricks. No joy.

So I booked an appointment at the Apple Store’s Genius Bar. To be honest, I wasn’t sure why. I was fairly certain the old MacBook was a brick at this point. Anyway, went down there and had two really interesting experiences.

The first was this. My wife is interested in a MacBook Air and we wanted to test the weight and see if she liked it. The Apple Store in San Francisco is always very busy and, not unusually, there were two people checking out the MacBook Airs that were on display. What I noticed, though, was that they were doing email and generally browsing. By the looks of the person in front of us, she had been doing email for a while. My wife said, “Nevermind, let’s just hang out.” I said, “Let’s wait until they’re done.” in a voice loud enough that I was sure they heard. No movement.

About 1 minute later an Apple associate came over and asked if we were interested in anything. We said yes… specifically the MacBook Air… we wanted to test it out for weight difference, etc. Then the most amazing thing happened. Instead of just saying, “Oh… well, it looks like they’re all busy.”  Instead of that sort of lameness, the Apple Associate realized that the people on the MacBook Airs had been there a while. He approached the woman doing email and said, “Hi, I need this computer for 5 minutes for a demo. Can you please shutdown what you’re doing?” The woman said she was in the middle of something. He replied that she could just minimize the window and it would be there for her later. She said nevermind and left.

AWESOME !!

Here was a person who was pretty clearly ignoring the “share” rule we all learn in kindergarten and the Apple Associate called her out on it. Here’s why this is awesome. Yes, I could have done it… but it puts everyone in an uncomfortable position and leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Has nothing to do with Apple products. Has to do with the experience. It is what you’ll remember when you leave the store. It is what you’ll talk about on the way home… INSTEAD OF THE PRODUCT. I’m not sure if this was Apple policy or just the awesomeness of this one Apple Associate. Either way… good for you.

The second great experience was this. My old MacBook was definitely toast. HD was fine, display was fine. Wouldn’t boot. The Genius Bar guy took it in the back for about 10 minutes… tried resetting the ram and a few other tricks. Came back out and announced it was a brick…. BUT … for $280 they would guarantee to return to me a working MacBook. That sounded pretty good actually… for $280 I can get this repaired and give it to my son as his first Mac (and that sort of hand-me-down, in and of itself, is a reason that Apple should keep the repair prices low).

Now comes the interesting part. At some point in the 10 minutes in the back, the Genius Bar guy scratched the top of my old MacBook. It’s black… so it shows up pretty easily. I had been pretty careful over the years so that this didn’t happen. I had just cleaned the old MacBook not 5 minutes before bringing it in… so I was 9000% certain it happened when he had it. It wasn’t a big deal… but I pointed it out. It looked like cat scratches on the lid. I think he must have swiveled the laptop around when it was on a bench or something. Anyway, he saw it and said, “Oh, I guess so. Ok, we’ll replace that for you for free.”

Huh??  Say what?? Where’s the fight? Where’s the, “Oh no I didn’t!  Oh, yes you did!!  Oh, no I didn’t!!! OH YES, YOU DID!!!!” That’s amazing! In addition, he noted that where the lid stops contacted the base the plastic had fatigued and broken off. I knew this… it happened a year or so ago… but he also noted that as something to repair.

Lastly, after sitting there for about 15 minutes I remembered that the DVD drive has a really bad problem… it can’t eject the disk… and when the disk is in there, it really sounds like it’s getting shredded. Quite literally, it sounds like when you send a credit card through the shredder. Sound notwithstanding, it was the the problem getting CD’s and DVD’s out of the drive that was the issue. This happens 100% of the time. I have to bend the plastic and get a fingernail in there at the right time or I have to use the magic “tape” trick to pull the disk out. The only reason I didn’t address this years ago is that I hardly use CD’s or DVD’s. That said, when I do it’s urgent (i.e., mac installation disk or upgrades or similar).

Anyway…  I mentioned this and he noted it as well. I think it’s just an alignment problem… but he said, “no problem, we’ll take care of it.”

Wow. For $280 I’m basically getting a completely revamped MacBook that I can give to my son. I’m thrilled.

Nice job Apple – this is what I’ll remember for the next 10 years when shopping for computers.

Now to all the Windows readers who will note that for $280 I could almost buy a completely new Windows-based laptop. I have spent years and years with Windows. I have written retail games for Windows. I have spent more of my life troubleshooting windows than I ever want to do with any system ever again. It’s not worth it. Really – it’s not worth it. I was professional grade at this… and it’s still not worth it. My Mac is based on unix. Every minute spent understanding unix is a minute spent future-proofing myself. I have never had to troubleshoot my Mac except for this one time … literally, haven’t had to do it. That’s a lot of hours I reclaimed just in the last 2.5 years.

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By johnq, August 27, 2009 12:16 pm

The first time I visited Tokyo was in 2002 as part of a work trip. Immediately, I fell in love with the city. I have been back several times since then and even rented an apartment there for 1 month in 2005 just to get the feel of living in Tokyo. There is so much to take in.

There are innumerable guides that can point out the beautiful sites, great food, and incomparable shopping. While those things are immensely pleasurable and immediately gratifying… there is a larger reason why I fell in love with Tokyo. Decorum is still alive and well here.

• When I sit down in a cafe in Tokyo, the thing I notice most is the lack of the loud cellphone talker. In fact, in a city with one of the highest cellphone-to-person ratios in the world, I have yet to run across a loud cell phone talker. People know better.
• In an outdoor park, there are 4 clusters of benches… 3 of which are marked “no smoking” and one of which is marked “smoking.” When someone lit up near one of the non-smoking benches, they immediately noticed, apoogized to everyone around them and moved over to the “smoking” area. This wouldn’t happen in the U.S. Instead, if anyone pointed this out to the smoker, more likely than not the smoker would become belligerent and talk about how they had a right to smoke wherever they wanted and how they were being persecuted.
• When you go into a store, the salesperson is not on the phone and doesn’t make you feel like you’re bothering them. You don’t get the feeling that the salesperson has innumerable other things that they’d rather be doing instead of helping you. Literally, you get the sense that they would actually like to help you. They are focused on their job of the moment. It’s such a refreshing change.

Overall, I’d say that people in Japan are more cognizant of their behavior and how it effects those around them. This has become the exception rather than the rule in the U.S. … for those of us that can still even notice.

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By JohnQ, June 1, 2009 7:38 pm

When I was growing up, geek culture was local and existed mainly in the form of D&D, Star Trek, and the occasional scifi/fantasy convention. With the advent of the personal computer and the internet, geek culture became more pervasive and more creative. Now, geek culture is mainstream. More people understand the jokes.

Living in Silicon Valley, geek culture is at the heart of what happens here. I knew immediately that this was home when I saw a huge billboard on the highway that said only, “FPGA2ASIC”* and a phone number. Not everyone is supposed to understand. If you do, you do. If you don’t, it’s not meant for you.

Sometimes, however, exemplars of geek culture come across my desk. To me, this one… “Kill -9″ … is one of the best. Stanford PhD student performing at Stanford. What remains appealing about this is the broad range of terms he hits in his analogies. Brilliant.

By the way, let’s not confuse the term “geek” with its more disparaging cousin “nerd.” A nerd (generally) is someone who is involved in tech culture but suffers from a severe lack of social graces. A nerd does not necessarily excel at anything. A geek, on the hand, is usually someone fairly normal who is also technically adept. Calling someone a geek can usually be considered a compliment. Calling someone a nerd never is.

*Doing this from long-term memory …  FPGA2ASIC = Field Programmable Gate Array converted to Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Companies making hardware can test out their program by loading it into an FPGA chip on a circuit board… the advantage being that they can erase it and reprogram it many times during development and even in the field (the “field” part of Field Programmable)… the disadvantage being that it’s a more expensive part and not meant for mass production (i.e., what lands in your house). When the program is determined to be ready, it needs to be “burned” into an ASIC. Once burned, it can’t be changed… but it’s a cheaper part for mass production. This company was advertising its services for mass producing the final chips. Now… being from long-term memory, I’m not sure the economics still work that way.

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By JohnQ, May 31, 2009 7:39 pm

One wouldn’t assume that a documentary about the typeface Helvetica would be a discussion of emotion. One would be wrong. While knowing it would be interesting, the documentary about Helvetica sat on my Netflix instant playlist for at least 2 months. “Instant” indeed. It would be interesting… but not really that interesting. It was more interesting to think it would be interesting… and thus keep it in the list… waiting to be interesting.

It was actually interesting.

What makes it interesting is the depth that is revealed behind what is, to many of us, invisible. I have a new appreciation. The documentary shows the life and activity behind this font that is still going on today. Listening to the designers that actually came up with Helvetica in Switzerland in the 50′s reminded me of talking to old game designers reminiscing about the artistic and technical design challenges they faced. In order to understand fully, they have to explain the constraints of the day and the leap their creation represented from what came before. And in this respect, it’s like talking to any group that is creating something new… there’s serious passion behind it.

These days, for the majority of us, fonts are like air… freely available, everywhere you go, hardly noticeable. They are whatever is in the dropdown list in Word or Photoshop. Not many people think about where they came from and the work behind them. Everything from the designers to the people in the salesforce responsible for selling them. In the early days of the PC and Apple computers, I remember having to buy TrueType fonts and how annoying the whole process was. Apple and various others started licensing the fonts for us, so we didn’t have to think about it and for most of us, since then, fonts just are. Designers, of course, think about things like this a lot… but that’s a great minority in the world of today.

Helvetica is everywhere. New York City Subway signs, your iPhone, U.S. federal forms, the space shuttle. Almost all the signage you will see today will be in Helvetica.

Who knew?