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The internet was born out of research for the U.S. military on how to create a network which could withstand a nuclear attack. The instructions for how the internet gets your data from your computer in Peoria to a server in San Francisco are still based on that early 1960s research. Recent research shows that the internet has retained this resiliency in the face of network damage. In December of 1993, John Gilmore famously quipped "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." I don't know if this is the first time that someone has treated a social rule of the internet as being as factual and inviolable as a simple network algorithm, but it's certainly one of the more notable ones. With a large enough mass of users, we can treat all internet users as one organism and make predictions about its behavior. This is what I thought of today when the Mozilla Corporation released the Facebook Container Extension for Firefox:

This extension helps you control more of your web activity from Facebook by isolating your identity into a separate container. This makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity on other websites via third-party cookies. [...] When you install this extension it will delete your Facebook cookies and log you out of Facebook. The next time you visit Facebook it will open in a new blue-colored browser tab (aka “container tab”). In that tab you can login to Facebook and use it like you normally would. If you click on a non-Facebook link or navigate to a non-Facebook website in the URL bar, these pages will load outside of the container.

This is fascinating. The internet is starting to treat Facebook as damage and is starting to route around it.

Last month I participated in the Minneapolis St. Paul Mini Maker Faire! This was my third year exhibiting. (I have to dig through the archives to find pictures of my previous years exhibits and post those at some point).

This year, after the faire was over, I remembered to do a little video that demonstrated my "analog" synthesizer. Here it is:

I say it's "analog" because I use microcontrollers to emulate analog synthesizer components. The 8 bit VCO/VCA uses an 8 bit micro controller, but it takes in real analog voltages and outputs an audio waveform, effectively compressing a full VCO and VCA into a tiny little board. [2019 Edit: I've since learned the right term for this is VCDO: voltage controlled digital oscillator]

I'm working on these as products, and I would love to hear your thoughts during the development process. Write me a comment below with any questions you want answered or ideas you have.

Thanks!

In a more loving world, the Christian bakers would bake cakes for the gays in order to demonstrate unconditional love, and the gays would avoid going to a Christian baker if they knew it would offend the baker's sensibilities.

(Obligatory position statement: I would bake the cake, no sensibilities offended. And yes I understand that in some states (the deep south, for instance) it would be impossible to avoid offending someone's sensibilities. In a more loving world, everything would all work out.)

My wife claims that I am oblivious to "what needs to be done" in order to have people over to the house.

In the house I grew up in, people coming over is not an Event for which one needs a checklist. People came over, almost every day. Often, entirely unannounced. Sometimes all at once. Pull up another couple chairs, I'll start another pot of coffee.

So my mental model of having people over is quite a bit more... informal than hers is. I'm certainly not oblivious to what my wife thinks needs to be done, do I see the toys on the floor? Yes. Do I think that it matters? Not as much as she does.

Even so, I enthusiastically welcome the checklist. Getting the checklist out where I can see it is much better than having the checklist only exist in her head.

Further reading:
Why Scruffy Hospitality Creates Space for Friendship
How to Host a Crappy Dinner (And See Your Friends More Often)

I was listening to an interview with Louis CK earlier in the week. The interview itself is fairly mediocre, but there was a question and answer session at the end that was very good. The Q&A session is nearly half of the whole video linked below, and I highly recommend it.

I've been thinking about one thing he said in the Q&A session. First, a little background.

Louis CK has a television show on FX called Louie [wiki] [imdb] [official site]. It's a dark comedy, hard to describe, and there is nothing else like it on television. In part, this is because Louis CK is the writer, director, main actor, and editor (!) of the entire series. As such, he has incredible creative control over the whole series (he points out that FX has, legally, the ability to do anything they want to with the series, but he has a verbal agreement that they won't interfere with how the series is made.

In one of the questions, he described his writing process. One of the problems with the modern TV show, is that it is overwritten, for the most part. There is a rough draft, it gets sent over to a team of writers, and perfected, and perfected, and perfected. The issue with that, is that everything is perfected in the same direction. And it lends a sameness to all of the shows on TV these days.

So what he does is write everything, get it out in a rough draft format, and just leave it. He does very little re-writing or script revisions. (One of the things this helps with is keeping that initial spark of an idea intact.)

Then later, during the directing, he is very meticulous about how he deconstructs the script and splits it up into scenes, not just in terms of blocking out the scenes, but also working with the cinematographer to get exactly the right lens for the scene to get the optical effect he wants that scene to have.

It's almost as if the re-write is taking place during the production, but in a more principled, disciplined fashion, because he was the original writer! He's not just going in and rewriting (have you ever rewritten someone else's work? It's hard!), he's working with the script and bringing it to life.

And of course, he does the editing, which is absolutely critical. Editing is what gives a film a fine grained sense of emotional tone. Holding a cut a frame or two too long, or cutting something up a frame or two too short, can just destroy the emotional connection the viewer has with the movie.

Here's a great example of what I mean (although it focuses on physical comedy, which is only one small aspect of what I am talking about.)

To maintain that emotional connection with the viewer, it really is all about every single little detail. Everything matters, even the things you had no idea could possibly matter.

I came across this article by Tommy Chong, on how he got started in the entertainment business.

When we were introduced to the club manager, he said “Boys, there are two rules here: you eat in the kitchen, and you don’t mess with the waitresses.” I got the clear idea we weren’t to have sex with the attractive women! As you may gather from his opening warning, we looked like a fearsome punk blues band – and did indeed live the rock-n-roll lifestyle, we five rough Canadian brawlers. “So, where are the waitresses?” popped out of my mouth.

But we were really not right for this club. [...] That gig lasted one night before we were fired, but two of the waitresses, Joanne and Marlene, left with us. The next night, five gangsters came to see us at a Chinese restaurant while our drummer and manager Sonny was out looking for a new gig. Each of these enforcers had a baseball bat in hand and they took positions behind each of us. “We want the girls back.” It was a very tense moment, and clearly a consequence of our flouting the instructions to not mess with the waitresses. They took the two women away in their car, and we breathed a sigh of relief. Moments later, the girls ran back into the restaurant, announced they had hopped out the bruisers’ taxicabs at a stoplight, and had returned to stay with us.

That’s when we decided to get the hell out of there! We left the restaurant and piled everything from the Astoria into our bruised and battered Buick. All of our equipment and six people were stuffed in this sorry excuse for a vehicle, and as we pulled up to a red light, we thought we saw the gangsters inside a cab next to us! ...

Look at all of those things he tried, and did, and failed at, and made happen! It seems the zeitgeist of the present day is you have one big idea, one app, one major, one business model, relentless focus, one career, one specialty. And, I mean, there are people who are the best in the world at what they do, or at least right up there. And focus is important. But there is a time for focus, and a time for action. In the zeitgeist that often gets lost, I feel like there can be too much emphasis on singular focus and not enough emphasis on action.

Another way of putting it. What are you focusing against? Not what are you focusing on, I am not asking that. A lens is a thing in the middle between two other things. The thing that you are focusing on, and the film or digital sensor that is receiving the image. I posit that if the thing you are focusing against is your mind, and not your actions, you can burn a hole in it, metaphorically speaking.

Always keep shipping.

[Related Seth Godin post]

I greatly enjoyed this interview with Jackie Chan.

"I cannot think of anyone else who has risked his or her life as much as you have, making films..."
"I don't want to. I have no choice!"
"Was there any one point when you thought that, I might have gone too far?"
"Uh... many, many times."

Don't miss his extended description of how he prepared for and how he felt during his famous helicopter jump stunt:

As we finished, a young waitress began clearing our table. She stopped to listen to the conversation, and finally sat down, abandoning her work. After a while, when there was a pause, she spoke to the Dalai Lama. "Can I, um, ask a question?" She spoke with complete seriousness. "What is the meaning of life?"

In my entire week with the Dalai Lama, every conceivable question had been asked—except this one. There was a stunned silence at the table.

The Dalai Lama answered. "The meaning of life is happiness." He raised his finger, leaning forward, focusing on her. "Hard question is not 'What is meaning of life?' That is easy question to answer! No, hard question is what make happiness. Money? Big house? Accomplishment? Friends? Or..." He paused. "Compassion and good heart? This is question all human beings must try to answer: What make true happiness?" He gave this last question a peculiar emphasis and then fell silent, gazing at her with a warm smile.

Originally from The Dalai Lama's Ski Trip; this condensed version is courtesy of my November 2014 copy of Readers Digest.