We went to Wired NextFest in Millenium Park in Chicago a couple of weekends ago. It was a great reminder of the value of freeing oneself from expectation.
Some allowance should be made, I suppose, for the fact that it was the last day of the event. Still, the majority of the exhibits were of the no-touch, no-interaction variety. What’s the point of exhibiting a maglev chair if you don’t let people sit in it? Or a panoramic camera that you don’t let people try out? Too many of the exhibits were sealed off behind corporate flyers and plexiglass.
Almost all of the exhibits that were supposed to be actual demonstrations were largely unmanned. So the much-touted robots and animatronics were still and lifeless, much like the event itself.
Overall, NextFest came across as a corporate version of a high school science fair: the displays were either intriguing ideas that didn’t seem to work, or poor ideas that worked well but were pointless.
Case in point: the Toyota i-REAL, a “personal mobility” vehicle that looks like a cross between a wheelchair and a Segway. The promotional video talked about how a commuter in Chicago could climb in from his driveway, sit down and wheel himself from the suburbs to his work downtown, even going so far as taking the thing into a building, up the elevator, and to his desk. A wave of giggles and jibes drifted across the crowd:
“Yeah, for the three months that it’s actually warm here.”
“That thing on the street with Chicago drivers? Ha!”
“Um, What about when it rains?”
The video goes on to show the guy riding his i-REAL to meet his date at an outdoor cafe. After dinner and drinks, they ride off hand-in-hand along the waterfront.
I was reminded of the humans on board the Axiom in Wall-E. Generations of never rising from their BnL HoverChairs left them with a serious obesity problem and practically vestigial legs.
Is this the future that Toyota wants for us?
Some of the other concept Toyota vehicles looked vaguely interesting, but again, you couldn’t even touch them, let alone sit in them.
The only bright spot was Mind Ball, a game in which two players strap on headbands that read their brain waves. A computer uses the readings to control a ball’s movement across the game table. The object is to relax your mind so that the ball moves toward your opponent; when the ball crosses the line near your opponent, you win.
Just before sitting down at the table, I took a few deep breaths and put myself into the same state of mind that I do while meditating. Sure enough, I was able to keep my thoughts calm during the match and handily won.
The Mind Ball attendant looked at me with respect and said, “Man, you’re like some kind of Zen warrior or something.” That felt good.
While Mind Ball is interesting in its application of biofeedback, it’s more interesting as a game concept: the stronger you concentrate on competing, the worse off you are. So relaxing and freeing yourself from expectation is the key to the game.
And to NextFest itself.
About a month ago, I replaced my old SVN GUI client (svnX) with the excellent Versions SVN client from Pico. I won’t rave about it now; check it out for yourself and bask in the goodness.
One of the unfortunate side-effects of using Versions, however, was that after the mandatory upgrade of SVN from 1.4 (OS X default) to 1.5, BBEdit’s SVN support was broken. I kept getting the message “svn: This client is too old to work with working copy“. Grr.
I looked around in BBEdit’s preferences and even .plist files, to no avail. This morning I even filed a bug report with Bare Bones. Turns out that that was premature… BBEdit was doing the right thing all the time, using the system’s SVN. The problem was that I had multiple versions of SVN installed.
From the command line:
Cerberus:bin bantik$ which svn
/usr/local/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ svn --version
svn, version 1.5.1 (r32289)
compiled Jul 25 2008, 12:47:20
...
As expected. However, this was less than expected:
Cerberus:bin bantik$ find / -name "svn" -print | grep svn
/opt/subversion/bin/svn
/usr/bin/svn
/usr/local/bin/svn
OK, but maybe some of those are links?
Cerberus:bin bantik$ ls -al /opt/subversion/bin/svn
-rwxrwxr-x 1 admin admin 788520 Jul 25 14:05 /opt/subversion/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ ls -al /usr/bin/svn
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 23 Jul 13 09:41 /usr/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ ls -al /usr/local/bin/svn
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 23 Aug 3 19:39 /usr/local/bin/svn
-> /opt/subversion/bin/svn
Aha! I’ve got an old version of SVN at /usr/bin. So let’s replace that with a symbolic link to the new version:
Cerberus:bin bantik$ sudo rm /usr/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ sudo ln -s /opt/subversion/bin/svn /usr/bin/svn
That should do it. I restarted BBEdit just to make sure, and now, like magic, Subversion integration works again.
Boing Boing Gadgets did a great post yesterday on 101 classic computer ads. Looking through the grainy images of futures past, I saw my own history of computing writ large.
I was really lucky as a kid to have so much technology at home. It started with our first computer, the Radio Shack TRS-80:
My dad taught me the BASICs of programming on that thing. When I ended up monopolizing the silver plastic beast, he got me a computer of my own, the Timex Sinclair. It plugged directly into a TV and had a membrane keyboard with BASIC commands printed right on them.
While my school was well-equipped with Apple ][ computers and the first Apple clone that I recall, the Franklin Ace, we ended up with a Commodore 64 at home. That opened up a lot more programming possibilities for me, and I ended up teaching myself assembly language so that I could render “hi-res” graphics. I also did my first hacking/cracking on that machine.
My school got its first Macs in 1984, which I immediately adopted for graphics and layout. I remember waiting for Aldus Pagemaker to catch up with my typing as I worked furiously on a variety of zines.
In college, I didn’t have a computer of my own, but I worked at a print shop and had access to top-of-the-line Macs. After college, when I was in Austin, my friend Dave from Team Fat was kind enough to give me his Atari ST, the first (only?) computer to have MIDI ports built right in. The machine had a modem, and I used it first to dial in to local BBS systems, and finally, the Internet… So this is the box that I used to create my first web site in 1993. Remarkably, I’ve still got it stored up in the attic– the computer, not the web site.
I eventually replaced this with my first personal Mac, a 33 MHz Performa, and discovered Adobe Photoshop. I used to start Photoshop rendering an effect, go to dinner, and come back to see how much progress it made. Amazing that my bloody phone has more processing power than that thing did.
Once my career got going, I treated myself to higher-end machines, but always sticking with Macs. Now, of course, our house has three times more computers than people, and that’s only counting the ones that we actually use.
Maybe when I retire I’ll open a museum or something, since I can’t bring myself to actually get rid of old tech.
Last week I responded to a general media posted online request looking for people who “made it” via self study:
I am looking for professionals who developed their particular expertise by intense focus, discipline and self study. You didn’t necessarily learn what you know and what you’ve become good at (and known for) at college (although you could have learned the basics there.) You may not even have a degree. Whatever it is you’ve accomplished, you did it “your way”–and it has worked. If this fits you or someone you know, please send me a BRIEF description of:
- what you do
- how and why you fit my description here–please be specific
- your name, city, company and if I can use your full name, city & company
I’ll follow up with questions via e-mail later today.
I promptly wrote up a bio and sent it off:
I think that I’m a great fit for your column regarding professionals who developed their expertise by self-study as opposed to traditional learning. Here’s a brief summary of my story so far.
I was a brilliant student through high school, graduating third in my class (with only a .5 point spread between the top three graduates). I attempted college but fell short in terms of finances and maturity– I was 17 and really not emotionally ready. I ended up dropping out and pursuing my technology interests on my own time.
I had been programming computers since I was 7 years old, and continued working on technology projects that interested me into the early 90s. I got online in 1993 and immediately found the ideal new venue for my efforts. I built my first web site shortly thereafter, and by the time the rest of the world discovered the Internet– and particularly the web– I had quite a head start.
I did freelancing for a while before taking my first corporate job working in web development in 1995. Over the next 13 years I worked directly for companies like National Instruments, Houghton Mifflin, and Leo Burnett, while always keeping my skills honed by exploring new technologies and pursuing side projects. In my career I’ve had the chance to work with clients and partners like JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratories), NASA, Starbucks, Wieden+Kennedy, Morgan Stanley, Apple, Adobe, Thomson Learning, and the US Army.
Although I’ve had trouble getting past HR screenings with a lack of a degree, once I am in place in a company I’ve always excelled– rapidly rising to positions of management and leadership, from director-level to C-level executive.
In December of last year I struck out on my own again and co-founded a web development business called Hapax Labs, and we’re now in the process of being acquired by Mir Internet Marketing. I’ll be joining the Mir team as a part-owner and Chief Solutions Architect.
I like to think that I’m following in the footsteps of other passionate technologists who made their name without a degree hanging on their wall– Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates, just to name a few.
You can find details of my career on my resume at http://www.idolhands.com/resume, or by checking out my LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyehmke
Although I never heard back from the journalist, my story must have been what she was looking for. Look what turned up yesterday in the Clarion Ledger: While degree still preferred, it’s certainly no requirement
Update: the article has moved, so here is the updated URL: Changing Careers: No degree or “wrong” education?
I’m in the second paragraph under “Seizing Your Opportunity”. (I’m pretty sure that my comments about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were helpful in writing her article, as well.)
I was inspired this week by a post on the Rails Google Group by Melvin at 48hourlaunch.wordpress.com, who was asking for suggestions on a software problem to tackle with 48 hours of effort.
I’ve got what I call a “magic notebook”– several, to be precise– full of app ideas in various stages of ideation. So I decided to take on this challenge as well and see what I can do with one of them.
Like Mel, I’m taking on a project that meets one of my immediate needs and is well within my area of expertise. So I’ll be creating something that is useful to me and also has a broader market appeal.
One of my defining characteristics is the inability to do things halfway; unfortunately, this can sometimes manifest as “analysis paralysis”, overengineering, etc. Although Rails inherently short-circuits a lot of these tendencies (as does my business partner, for that matter!) the strict time limit I’m putting on myself makes this something of a competition between completion and perfection. At worst, I will move one of my unrealized applications one step closer to market, and hopefully learn something about my internal process along the way.
So what’s the big project going to be? Can’t talk about that yet, but if all goes according to plan there should be something public in within the next 30 days (48 hours / 2 hours per day = 24 days). I’ll also be posting notes about my progress as I go.
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