as the ipad takes over my daily web life, using email as a posting tool makes the most sense. and since the best service for that is posterous, i’ve moved this blog to there. update your links!

the new site

to make life simple, i imported all the old blogs from here to there, and now you can use facebook connect to like, comment, etc.

it’s quite possible i may move all my tumblr blogs over, but for now just this as a trial.

or how i learned to love no desktop

as some of you already know i’m not the most adaptable guy in the world. I carry with me a collection of psychological idiosyncrasies and a variety of physical ailments and sensitivities that to some extent have molded my computer experience.

in an effort to kill the desktop i’ve tried:

• moving my computer to the couch. monitor on coffee table
• routing my computer through the tv
• switching to laptops
• switching to macs
• switching to mac laptops

and each failed for various reasons of either physical discomfort ( early arthritis in the shoulders ) or just a general ability to modify my mindset to using new devices in a regular way.

enter the ipad.

first lets review the main functions my computer serves for me:

• programming and web application development + server administration
• photo editing ( lightroom )
• social interactions (email, blogging, twitter, facebook, flickr, chat )
• online reading ( blogs, technical reading, photo browsing, research, videos )
• playing music
• watching video ( yes, it’s mostly porn—i port real video to my xbox )

with that now mapped out lets review the typical start to a morning:

• review + respond to emails
• get updated on facebook, add witty comments to otherwise boring streams
• review twitter 
• use netvibes to catch up on the 150 or so sites i follow via rss feeds

while all this is going on there is a constant play of either reviewing related content such as related web pages or videos and the subsequent web spiral of focus that goes on as one link leads to another, etc, and folding new found content back into any of the possible outlets like facebook, twitter or blogging.

i’m also almost always listening to music. which is coming under questions as i read ( on my ipad, thanks kobo ) “In pursuit of silence”.

this entire process, depending on the quality of inward data flow, and the urgency of work can take anywhere from 10 mins to 2 hours. it’s also repeated in mini-form throughout the day as new data flows in and new opportunities to mock @doug_springer become available.

because i’m a geek, and an information addict ( my daughter calls me ruzzipedia ) my information consumption may be higher and more fluid than yours. results vary but i think a safe estimate is to say at least 3 hours a day is spend consuming, ordering, sharing, exploring and digesting information of some sort. that may be work related, or it may be learning about a new type of bug, or following the moment by moment changes to #nodejs. but it’s spent principally upfront at the start of the day—then in small bursts throughout the day.

i have no problems with this amount of time being spent. I enjoy information and knowledge, and following trending ideas is part of what keeps me employable. the bulk of my life is a digital life. i have no qualms about that. you spend your life how you want, and i will tweet. fair?

since i lost my main text buddy recently the largest part of my interaction with friends now occurs through facebook, twitter, and gchat. some people congregate and consume alcohol then stumble home, i prefer to share 140chars and move on.

i get my kicks above the waistline, baby.

back to the entrance of the ipad though. When I purchased it i had no expectation it might change my day in any meaningful way. i thought it would be a fun gadget that would serve mainly the following purposes:

• allow me to convert to electronic books. i have about 600 paper books and it grows by 75-100 a year. becoming a serious space hog and don’t even get me started on moving
• serve as a couch-side way of reviewing a lot of more indepth online reading that i never get to on the desktop
• serve as a couch-side browser for real time lookups of stuff as im watching movies or tv, or playing xbox.
• serve as a couch-side way to tweet, facebook, browse the web
• serve as a couch-side way to browse my photos, etc.

that’s principally what i expected from it and with the addition of a few key tools it’s doing all those things:

• ReadItLater (for bookmarking on the PC, reading on iPad)
• twitterific
• wikipanion
• imdb
• kobo ereader (i want to write a seperate post about the ipad ebook situation so check back on that)
• reeder (for my news feeds, but didn’t expect to use it much)

As i explored the terrain of ipad applications my ideas of how to use it for things i hadn’t considered started popping up everywhere

• as a digital sketchpad (Autodesk Sketchpad Pro is like crack)
• for mocking up applications for work (iMockup)
• for finding/making recipes (epicurious)
• for editing photos! (tiffen photo efex ultra, shakeitiphoto, etc)
• as a digital note pad (penultimate) 
• to read comics and online magazines
• to watch video anywhere i feel like plunking my ass
• as an application planner and planner in general

the exciting ones are sketchpad and editing photos, obviously. but more valuable to me is the cohesiveness of using a touch device to interact with media and the readability of the ipad. these two things change the mental focus and effort required to mine massive information streams and filter then use (distribute) them.

readability

reading anything on the ipad is much more enjoyable than a computer screen. i’m not sure if its a contrast issue, or size, or format. but i’ve found i no longer dread longer documents in the same way. i find less eye strain, less internal friction to the media and that means more focus and clarity.

cohesion and mental clarity

I saw a lot of complaining about how the ipad can only do one thing at a time. i heard everyone go on about how this constraint made it somehow a less interesting device but i’d like you to consider how most developers have responded to that. by creating deep delving apps that handle different data types while staying inside a single application.

take any example you like for localized app data on the desktop, like tweetdeck, or a news reader and you find you’re spawning browser tabs all over the place. each tab breaks the cohesion of the data flow. each tab is a huge distraction from the flow you were following.

apps like tweetdeck for the PC do have built in handlers for things like photos or websites, but i find them very slow, and the implementation visually is painful. you feel like you’re boxed into a secondary app inside a tweet app.

on the ipad, in my reader (reeder) for example, i can quickly click a link from a feed and it just opens to the page with controls to do something with that page in context to reading a feed, i can share it with every service available in one or two taps then quickly return to exactly where i was in my reading.

this cohesion means more sharing, less distraction and reduces the cost of following links, following thoughts to next to nothing. back in the early days of windows there were many times users would get so many windows open they couldnt figure out where they began, or where they were. I believe this model translated to the tabbed browser. you’d get so many tabs open you’d get lost. not lost in relation to a start point, but lost in relation to a stream of focus.

if you delve deeply into web reading on some level you may build up an internal resistance to clicking that link at a certain point. you can have open in your mind only so many useful nodes before the next one scatters everything.

this is where link garbage collection comes into play and sites like delicious or ReadItLater find their customers. open a tab, mark it somehow, close it and promise yourself some sunday you will get back to it. it almost never happens and you find yourself with an impossible list of links that you no longer remember context for.

readability, cohesion + breaking the tether

improved readability causes less eye and mental strain. cohesion causes less mental strain and less reluctance to information as the cost of exploring is very low. breaking the tether from the office chair + desktop means potentially more physical comfort while doing all of the above.

readability, cohesion, breaking the tether + touch

lets just accept that human beings are touch focused. there’s little need to go into how on some primal level we are all comfortable with touching things as a means to interact. swiping pages, tapping, etc, these are all muscle memory activities. great athletes in any field will tell you the more of your game you can commit to muscle memory the more focus is free for precision and “flow”.

it’s impossible to commit mouse actions into muscle memory because it’s always more or less the same action with a different visual context. because of that it requires visual focus to determine the correct muscle actions. this reduces focus. focus and attention are spent deciding what actions to perform rather than performing actions from memory.

readability, cohesion, breaking the tether, touch as salve

anyone who’s experience is primarily digital knows there is a residual effect of long term digital interaction on mental focus. clarity is reduced as exposure is increased and i’m going to assert this reduction in clarity becomes ingrained and expressed as a sort of non-specific resistance to new information or new data. 

this non specific resistance manifests itself in mental fatigue, burn out, information overload, disorder, and a general malaise towards the vast array of learning opportunities available at all times through the internet.

combining the above features seems to act as a bulwark of some type. a salve for a constantly stimulated mind in fine degrees of improvement.

and now the downside

 the primary downside ironically is touch. you touch objects. you touch things. and our digital world is primarily not objects or things. it’s words. and words mean we’ve only half escaped the existing model of computing.

we escaped the mouse through touch. as an interactive tool the mouse was focused but grossly limited. a device which expressed nothing in the terms of how humans think about things, and i think this is why touch is so immensely popular.

but we have yet to escape the keyboard. and i see no time in the near future when we do. and so we are now wedged half-birthed into a new world of computing. and this is where the downside comes to front.

while the virtual keyboard on the ipad is very usable, and functional for short bursts of writing i cannot see myself writing something this length with it. i’d be more inclined to write it with my micro-keyboard on my blackberry.

it seems a great irony that they did away with one limited input device (the mouse) and took away one expressive one (the keyboard) at the same time, replacing it with a non tactile simulacrum. i gained touch for navigation and flow, and lost tactile touch for the single most important part of computing. translating my thought to some digital form.

what next?

it seems very unlikely to me through a confluence of failure on the part of man to lift us out of the text editor as programming tool that i will be developing any sort of meaningful application using anything but a desktop computer. this means, while some part of my day is radically changed, the largest part remains the same.

it seems fascinating to me that the tools we use to build the most modern applications in the world (touch based apps galore) are written using words. we’ve created an object oriented development world but it’s only oriented. it’s an abstraction in the mind. there are no physical objects to interact with. it’s words pretending to be objects.

perhaps the breakthrough in touch focused devices will herald in a new generation of touch driven visionaries that can lift us from modeling code in text and bring us to modeling with touch. maybe the nascent field of touch will set off an explosion of imagination.

they say it’s turtles all the way down but in truth, it’s text. and until we can add a layer between the compiler and the display that understands real physical objects in 3D or even 2D space we’re writing novels not crafting sculpture.

and since we are writing novels we require keyboards as our primary method of input. which makes this only part one of what’s to come.

having said all that, part one is pretty fantastic.

bone, heart, womb (c) 2004-2010 i.im. ruzz

(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz

playing with making digital sketches. first try. pretty interesting. I’m thinking i may try a pencil sketch.

var my = function ()  {
  var real_heart = "xxxx"; 
  var fake_heart = "is_a_mirror"; 
  return { 
     heart: function () { return fake_heart;} 
   };
}();

>>> console.log( "my_heart " + my.heart() );

>my_heart_is_a_mirror

a speed chess implementation using nodejs, express, websockets, etc. snazzy.

SWDC 2010 NodeJS Talk by Tim Caswell featuring Connect (by Patrick Liess)

points to consider:

1. wow. real time collaboration via a web page. exciting.
2. these node kids think a lot differently than i do.
3. where does real time fit in in our current web life?
4. pubsub stuff is seriously cool. but beyond chat, games, etc, where does it fit. how could i use it today to improve my clients lives?
5. these guys and their cleverness activates that old programming excitement for me.

it’s kinda wizzy, but, i’ve temporarily redesigned ruzz.org using some CSS3 magics and a bit of jquery. i wanted to explore some of the new CSS stuff and i’m planning to reorg all my sites so this was a good morning spent.

(c) 2004-2010 ruzz

“People know you for what you’ve done, not for what you plan to do.”  ~Author Unknown

it’s been 15 months and 3 days since my last confession, er, unemployment. two and a half years ago i had a little dance with my own frailty, learnt some stuff about the consequences of living life in single-serving installments of cash. found the hard side of commerce as explained through the poverty that comes from a serious illness and the subsequent year long recovery.

before i got sick i had quietly worked as a contractor for nearly 10 years. building my skills, contacts and experience to the point where I was actually starting to thrive pretty well. A lot of those years were lean—read abject poverty—and only in the two years leading up to illness did I start making any real money.

I came through my little brush with death okay. it’s pretty easy to die. your body does all the hard work while you just sit there only partially engaged sorta interested in these new experiences. the hard work is living.

the hard work is coming back from being near dead. you come back a tenth of the person you were physically. emotionally you develop a keen desire for stability and security. I came back to nothing but pain and a world that kept on humming like it always did—churning out the usual costs of existing—while my ability to produce anything i could trade for money was dead for almost a year.

the physical recovery was hard but natural. it just happens. over time you recover. you live and your body comes round in time. maybe not all the way round, but round. but while you do that your whole world comes apart.

a year after I got out of the hospital i was still dealing with nearly crippling pain on a daily basis, had amassed a massive debt, lost many of the trappings of my hard work (my car, my camera, my nice home, my sexy little mac notebook, etc). and, more importantly i had lost the sense that I was in control of my own life.

i had always felt my experience was entirely determined by my will to craft reality to be what i wanted. but a year after, everything had changed for me. I no longer felt i had any access to that wellspring of energy and power to craft. moreover, i felt as though all the risks i had ignored without much thought—like living without a nest egg or an endgame—had literally come home to roost.

so i made a pretty simple decision. get a job. a day job. a nice stable, two cheques a month day job. no more fighting it out daily for my existence. no more challenging myself to be smarter than the world. trade those challenges for the challenge of commitment, of not getting border or antsy. of swallowing down my reluctance to be directed or used for my energy and just settle into a job.

it turns out i lucked into a pretty good job. i got to work from home which made keeping my life pretty much what it was. I had a good manager who cared about the end result which meant i could do things like set my own hours and more or less work when i felt inspired to work. he gave me lots of room to determine my experience in exchange for delivering on my promises. sometimes that backfired, but on the whole it worked because i also lucked into a position that offered an endless stream of challenges. tight little complexities that needed to be untangled. possibilities to use creativity and experience to solve actual problems for users. and the freedom to draw on my experience to help shape the future we were building.

a heady combination. almost unimaginable in a job that gave you nice regular pay.

but it turns out running things like that isn’t the most sustainable business model. we spent over a year chasing the whims of our boss; trying to be everything to every customer. we had no core focus for our work, and while each project built upon what was already the lack of focus made it practically impossible to get to the point where we were taking cash off customers for our hard work.

meanwhile, our competition hacked out some pretty crappy code that was focused, and was ready for users and made money.

then they bought us.

oh the bittersweet ironies of the market economy. I literally lived the experience of having a better product beat by better marketing and better senior management (better at taking money off people, at least).

I wouldn’t have hired most of their developers to program my PVR yet they won. they owned us and the expression of our best ideas. that stung.

when they offered me a position with their company, apathy and probably mourning the change compelled me to take it even though i knew it was a horrible mistake. I was being asked to develop in a platform i felt was all but dead even if it produces cash by the truckload. I had to step away from my core technology stack. step away from a merit based employment. step away from freedom. step away from my experience and skill mattering. but, at least i still had regular pay, right?

i made it a total of three paycheques before i quit. I have no replacement for that income. i have no clear plan on how to survive. I don’t even really know what i want. I just know what i don’t want. I don’t want to be a cog in the machine. I don’t want to be divorced from everything i’ve learnt about programming over the last decade. I don’t want to give the best part of my day so some ass-clown can drive an escalade and live in a 4000sq foot house.

so maybe i didn’t die after all.

this may sound more principled than it really is. an important facet of throwing yourself into the unknown is couching it in a romantic ideal of some sort or other. it comforts the terror that rouses when you watch your bank account dwindle with no real plan for filling it back up again.

in truth, selfishness played a much larger part in this than i’d care to admit. Arrogance too. Its a flaw of my character that i can’t take orders, direction, or it seems pay from people I feel are less intelligent than me. I can’t submit my will to what i think are stupid choices, wrong-headed intentions and i can’t seem to quell my ego to play nice with someone above me in the food chain just because they happen to be higher than me in the food chain. I have to respect how they conduct themselves. I never had a single problem like this in my 13 months at my old job.

that’s the surface level reaction anyways. below that was deep sense of dissatisfaction at having parts of me i’ve worked very hard on just dismissed as not relevant to their cash objectives.

primarily, my experience building applications for over a decade in many languages and platforms. my experience working with users and customers on usability. this new company felt it was more important that i log into msn right at 9am than i wrote extend-able, clean, elegant code. they thought it was more important i did things the way the little dictator who ran my app thought things should be done usability wise than if i knew anything about usability from working with tens of thousands of real users for over a decade.

i felt so deeply negated and interchangeable. i went from feeling like a vital part of the future of a small business to a faceless code monkey. paycheque or not, i couldn’t do it.

so now i’m unemployed again. first time in 15 months and 3 days. my mother is filled with terror about my future. my mind is fighting the conditioning of thinking i have another tidy cheque coming in a few weeks. my heart feels anxious but rewarded.

i’ve outgrown the childish rebellion of just doing what i want because i want to. after getting sick i really internalized the value of security. you could say i learnt how cold this world can be to your need and i never want to be back there again. and as i sit here, free to do what i want, poised as i am on the ledge of complete uncertainty i am wedged neatly between my desire to define my own experience and my complete terror of not being up to that task.

i’m doing it anyways though.

i may be the old man on every programming team. i may not absorb new technology as fast as i used to, or have endless months of 18 hour days left in my body. but i learnt one of the hardest lessons you’ll ever learn as a programmer. that writing ideal code in a bubble will get you bought by someone writing crap code with a good sales team.

and i think that little gem is one you can only learn by flushing a years worth of your best ideas and most beautiful work down the shitter. I also think it’s the lesson you need to learn to draw hard lines around where good enough is good enough and not living in a fantasy world.

so now i’m going to embark on a couple things that can put that lesson immediately to work. one my pet project which i’m still not telling you about, and the other is doing contract work again. I always failed at contact work because i was being paid to get something done, and i was trying to get something done perfectly.

the two shall never meet.

more than anything though. more than the fear of uncertainty and the unknown. more than a knee jerk compulsion to watch my bank account as i spend. more than my sneaking a look at monster for the comfy protection of a day job, im eager to see if i still have it in me to push myself to define my own life.

I walked away from myself after i got sick. i saw how frail and weak i could be. I lost faith in myself and my ability to fashion a the world the way i wanted it to be and i don’t know if i still have what it takes to force reality into the shapes i want it to be. I don’t know if i have the will, energy, and motivation it takes to fight back against a never ending tide of entropy. but i’m willing to try. i’m wiling to ask the question of myself and give myself a little rope to answer it. 

just don’t tell my mom.

(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz
model: kara yerex

still have a lot of photos that are ready to show, so I will probably dump them here.