I recently experienced a lot of encouragement and support from two wonderful friends of mine. It goes a long way to combat discouraging thoughts, procrastination and despair about ones situation in rough times. It can be a call to action that gets the wheels of the mind turning again and inspires you to get back on the horse. I’m not talking about generic “be all you can be” or “believe in yourself” comments, but the type of attention that only someone who knows you can give.

I’m addressing you guys specifically because I know you’re in the same boat as me. We are all trying to make it on our own right now: starting businesses, selling our talents and trying to carve out a place in the world for ourselves, on our own terms. This brings on a roller coaster of doubt, anxiety and excitement that makes it tough to stay on track.

I have known each of you for a long time. I have worked with all of you in one capacity or another - so I say this from experience. You each have something to offer the world and you’re on the right path. You can make it as an author, Abe. You can make it as an artist, Bryce. Your business will work, Dave (and so will your music). Keep going. We’re in this together.

If you aren’t one of the three people I’m addressing, you might be asking yourself why this is an open letter. I’m simply suggesting that you encourage a friend. Now!

Crispy Lettuce: Some of these dudes in Asimov’s piss me off. 3 degrees, have awesome jobs and write reems of scifi in their spare time. wtf
Cookie Monster: haha, yeah, some people I think are born to withstand distraction. can you imagine living in a time when geniuses were legends, like Da Vinci, Franklin, Tesla. fuck, Ben Franklin still intimidates me
Crispy Lettuce: Be nice if that came about again
Cookie Monster: the dude was a 1000 year champion of the universe
Crispy Lettuce: Instead of ashton getting the attn he does
Cookie Monster: like an age of legends
Crispy Lettuce: Mmmm
Crispy Lettuce: I need to go to space and mine things. Need scientists to get lots of money to make that possible. I can’t have a deflector shield without them
Cookie Monster: I want a space game to come out. something rad
Crispy Lettuce: Haha
Crispy Lettuce: No, CM, no. Stop glorifying game makers. We want real ships
Crispy Lettuce: No more sim space mining, no more sim space mining!
Crispy Lettuce chants
Cookie Monster: maybe my childrens children can do the mining
Cookie Monster: well, what are you doing about it? you should be a lobbyist and try and bring down the military spending and redirect it at intergalactic operations
Crispy Lettuce: yeah!
Crispy Lettuce: Uhhh being enthusiastic about the privatization of space?
Cookie Monster: get the fucking lead out
Cookie Monster: enthusiasm doesnt make spaceships. try and get in at an aerospace company
Crispy Lettuce: I have checked them all
Cookie Monster: your enthusiasm may be too low
Crispy Lettuce: They only want Space Avionic Commando Machinists LVL 3. I’m missing like 6 degrees in particle physics
Cookie Monster: dude, Ben Franklin would have 8
Crispy Lettuce: I know, I suck
Cookie Monster: you are not doing Ben justice
Crispy Lettuce:
Cookie Monster: epic life fail. I am ashamed to know you
Crispy Lettuce: I have failed u, Ben!
Cookie Monster: I will just get in my space game. you can go get more degrees
Crispy Lettuce: Nooooooo! But who will manage the mining drones?! I can’t do it all!
Cookie Monster: I dunno man, maybe some other dork, I will be on patrol around Ganymede. blasting space shit
Cookie Monster: into space shit
Crispy Lettuce: That’s it, no space for u
Crispy Lettuce: No u stay here and live in ur games
Cookie Monster: I have a space shit transmutifier
Crispy Lettuce: No Ganymede
Cookie Monster: F U, I go where I want
Cookie Monster scoots around Ganymede

Another thing I learned was that URL compressing services flag your URL after awhile as being suspicious. I have no idea what the criteria is to warrant being flagged, but it happened to my links a couple times. They redirect you to their site and say the URL has been flagged for being shady and then let you click on through to the actual page. Maybe they scrape the Twitter timeline and look for their links? If a message containing one of their links is repeated past a certain threshold it gets flagged? I’m always thinking about the logic behind stuff like that. Usually the real answer is boring and unsophisticated, haha

I think this is a good example of why failure is important. I would have never learned these things unless I had tried out my idea. It was also really cool to see my friends jump in to action without any questions. I’m not calling you all sheep of course, but you were ready to help when I asked. Thanks peeps! *hugz*

While I haven’t heard anything from Twitter yet, I did get an interview for some contract work. That pretty much consumed my weekend - getting a portfolio together and all that. I’ve got a ton of resumes in the water and I’ve had a few bites here and there. Hopefully something will materialize in the next couple weeks.

On to the next adventure!

I’m a huge fan of Twitter and they currently have a job open that fits me like a glove (Product Manager). I’ve sent my app in but I want your help with improving my chances of getting an interview. My plan? Simple. Get as many people as I can to tweet @twitter a message about interviewing me! Who knows, with a little luck, maybe we can generate enough noise to get some attention.

I’m certainly not expecting anyone to recommend someone they know nothing about. To help that out a little I have posted a copy of the cover letter and resume that I submitted to Twitter.

Are you in? Simply tweet out this message and lets see what happens!

@twitter Please interview @crispylettuce for your Product Manager position. We love him like we love Harry Potter!

What’s with the line about Harry Potter? Well, I’m no Oprah. I don’t have millions of followers. I think the only way I can climb above the chatter is to hijack a trending topic. Hopefully this message will get mixed in to the Harry Potter feed and more people will pick it up. It certainly can’t hurt

Thanks in advance if you decided to participate! I will of course post updates as to what happens.

“How is Corporate America fucking my life up now?” you might ask. Well, they’ve shackled all our feet in to shoes. It’s as simple as that. Shoes cause your arches to fall and an assortment of other issues like back and knee problems. Evolution crafted our bodies in to long distance running machines. We come equipped with shock absorption and mechanisms that recharge our muscles and conserve energy as we run. The grand irony on the front stage is that most of the running injuries we try to prevent, with more sophisticated running shoes, are caused by running shoes.

I realize this post has started out like so many unsubstantiated conspiracy theory rants. Before I go any farther, let me #BlameDrewsCancer for that. It’s insidious and makes us all crazy.

Now, the only way you will believe this is real and that I’m not ridiculous is if you read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall (or listen to it via audiobook like I did). It’s a new book, so you might have not heard of it yet. It’s the ultimate “You’re doing it wrong” message to runners and anyone interested in living healthily. It’s a multistage mega-firecracker with science at its core wrapped in many layers of epic running stories!

Alright, enough with the book review one-liners. The great thing about this book is that the evidence for all of this isn’t coming from a single source. More than one scientist and researcher (in different fields even) corroborate the conclusions. The author even talks to a Nike research scientist that arrived at the same conclusion. Ditch your running shoes.

It’s not a book written by a crazy hippie who wants everyone to get along and run al natural through the streets. The author’s only agenda is to find a way to keep running. All the people that show up in the book are people who love to run. After years of running, they are tired of the constant cycle of injuries.

Instead of trying to inaccurately repeat all the facts and statistics that are so well represented in this book, I will leave you with one delectable tidbit from the book. Arches. Specifically the ones on your feet.

What do we know about arches? If you don’t know much then read up on them real quick. To review, arches are damn strong. They are the reason the Roman Aqueducts and other famous structures have stuck around for 1k+ years. And guess what? We come equipped with living arches that can adapt to the ground! Ok so to take this to its natural conclusion. What’s the best way to weaken an arch? Support it from underneath. Stick a pylon in the middle of it. “Arch Support” is now a four letter word in my book.

I’d link you all blue in the face but if you search “running barefoot” you’ll be at the same place as me. Learning to walk again. Thankfully the revolution has already started and the barefoot Jedi Masters are out there. Waiting.

Our focus previously was to have a server we could develop custom sites for through our company (Binary Moon Studios). Having a Dedicated Server allowed us to host our client’s sites and have a sandbox that we had a lot of control over. It worked out pretty well. As BMS is a freelancing outlet, the throughput of business varies widely based on what we are all up to with our regularly scheduled lives. We’ve all been pretty busy so we haven’t sought out new contracts or clients. These days we are mostly hosting personal sites and that has shifted our server needs.

This time we decided to get away from having a Dedicated Server and move to a managed/shared solution. I keep seeing tweets about people loving Media Temple. I checked them out and now we’re in the middle of migrating to them. The two big factors in choosing them was their virtualized “grid” structure and the fact that it was a managed account (we are no longer responsible for maintaining the server). Most hosts have you rent a physical box and you don’t have an easy way to upgrade it - upgrades usually mean migrating to another psychical box. With Media Temple we aren’t stuck with a piece of hardware that is aging and will eventually require us to migrate.

However, it doesn’t matter how well a hosting company is put together, migrating from one to another is always a painstaking process. Half of the reason for this post is to make sure my site is functioning properly now that it has been moved I have the tough part (database portion) figured out and now its just a matter of rinsing/repeating a few times and we’ll be back to normal. Back to command line land for me!

Each weekend I try to go out at least once and find a new place to ride. I’ve been using a combination of online trail reviews and maps, plus a book I picked up. None of them work 100% of the time. I combine forces to insure I find something and don’t end up wasting my time.

In my experience, the various trail review sites are hit and miss. Most are user entry and instruct you to “keep going down Road X until you see a rock on the left. Pull off and park. Trail picks up right by the rock.”. Seriously. That’s shitty.

The book I am using is entitled Bay Area Biking and I find it a useful place to start looking for trails. The difficulty rating the author uses doesn’t really make any sense to me. Being a beginner, I’m looking for the easy stuff right now. More than once I’ve been duped by comforting pics of reasonably elevated terrain and the ever deceiving “low” difficulty rating of 2. Only to arrive at the location and wonder WTF IS A LEVEL 5 LIKE IF THIS IS A LEVEL 2?!! I HOPE A BEAR EATS ME, ANYTHING TO STOP THE PAIN!

Once you find the starting location, it’s usually in a park. The park will inevitably have a bunch of trails inside it. Another shortcoming of the book is that it doesn’t show you the suggested trail in context to the off-shoots and other trails. When an intersection appears it’s not always clear which path is the one you are trying to follow. Is it the big Fire Road that goes up the hill, a trail that cuts back…sort of in the direction you came from or that vaguely defined deer trail to the left that looks like it might lead you off a cliff? I can’t wait until I can just carry flexible, digital paper that lets me zoom in and out on maps when I’m in the middle of no where. Enhaaance!

On every outing, I have had my camera with me. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve kept any of the photos so far (that’s on par though). I did take a pic with my phone last weekend. I had just reached the end of one length of the trail. I decided to turn around and go back the way I had come. As soon as I turned around to get back on the trail I saw this sign. It’s a stereotypically bad camera phone shot, but it gets the point across, “The odds on this trail are stacked against you. Enjoy!”

While getting this shot off my phone, I realized it says “No Weapons” on the top right. Are you fucking kidding me?! If I find a sign at a trail head giving me instructions on how to duel a Mountain Lion, I’m changing out my backpack for a flame thrower.

Why doesn’t the GPS in my car update itself from a satellite or open wi-fi signals I drive by? Why don’t you have texting enabled on your phone? Why can’t I just IM a sales rep from your website? Why the hell are you using MapQuest?! Why aren’t you blogging about your business? Why can’t I point my phone, like a Tricorder, at any product and get details about it?

And on and on. None of this is really impossible. It’s not like I’m demanding my own spaceship with an FTL drive. Granted, when it comes to the level of personal involvement in technology, each of us has to decide how wired we want to be. I’m just going to make a grumpy face at you when you tell me you aren’t connected for at least 18hrs a day.

Businesses, on the other hand, have no excuse. Well…they spew plenty of excuses. Too costly, too complicated, “we’re working on it”, etc. Businesses that haven’t figured out that technology, specifically the Interwebs, is key to their survival are quickly dying off. Many are lagging behind and don’t even seem to know what to do with all the options available to them. Take this tweet I saw from @AcmePhoto this morning –

“Marketing failure w/ company I love & trust. They did it wrong w/ email blast. From line “customer-service” subject line “Email blast” ;-(”

If a company can’t handle a technology that has been thoroughly explored, such as email, what are they going do when the Social Web eventually comes charging their way? All they will hear is “I’m the juggernaut, bitch!” and then the lights will go out.

I actually worked for a company that handled email campaigns for big brands like IBM, Polaroid and Sony. There was no sophistication with how these campaigns were prepared and processed. It was embarrassingly low tech and management wasn’t up for investing anything to make these efforts more accurate and profitable. Oh and guess what! They went under! Hahaha, that fact gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

If you have suggested that your company start blogging, that they setup a live video stream, that someone should man a Twitter account or expose their culture via photos on Flickr, thank you. You’re not alone and we all appreciate your efforts. If they looked at you like you’re crazy, it’s ok. Just envision them eventually being tossed in to the Bonfire of Ignorance with the rest of the technologically illiterate companies.

The reason I decided to write about this is that I keep finding organizations that have Twitter accounts and are using them effectively. They are actually interacting with their followers like a normal person instead of only spamming robotic updates (one of the rare situations where I’m not advocating robots :P). Quite a few high profile companies are tweeting. Technically. The number of companies that do it right are few and far between in my experience. If you use Twitter, you’ve experienced the bots that come through and add everyone and have nothing to say except prepared messages. Thanks for making more spam, asshats!

A couple of the good guys I’ve found recently are @goldengatepark (de facto park site) and @scifri (Science Friday on NPR). Now maybe a slick ad agency person convinced them to venture out in to the Twitterverse or maybe someone listened to a “crazy person”. Either way, someone did a good job

I’m not feeling like writing much of a story to go along with these photos. I feel more like getting back outside and taking more pics. Know what I’m sayin’? I picked up a mountain bike a few weeks ago. It’s now in a state where its ready for the trail. The weather has continued to be really nice out here and I’m itching to ride out somewhere with my camera.

I spent Thanksgiving Day with my mom at a place called Safari West. I definitely recommend that place if you’re interested in getting really close to animals that you only get to see on Discovery or 10 feet away in a cage. And as usual, I took a lot of pics and only two really turned out, haha. It’s happened so many times I’ve just accepted it now. I have no idea what this bird is called, but it’s gnarly looking. There were quite a few giraffes hanging out, waiting for people to feed them tasty plants. This guy was not afraid to ask me for tasty leaves two inches from my face.

I found my way to the Berkeley Pier one day. If you read that article, you will see that it’s incredibly long and it extends towards the skyline of San Francisco. I walked out as far as they let people go to try some pics of the city. It was nighttime, so I took my tripod out and equipped my telephoto with IS. I couldn’t for the life of me get a clean, steady shot of the city. It was really windy and I have a shitty tripod, I’m guessing that was the culprit. I imagine that the motion of the pier could effect photos on long exposures as well. I plan to try again some day from that spot (maybe with a heavier tripod?), but for now, I will have to settle for this happy accident.

And because I like linking photos, here’s a quaint shot of a pumpkin patch, lol

1. I saw the trailer for the new Star Trek on the front of Bond this weekend. Maybe its the Trekkie inside me that can’t resist…but it looks like it might be awesome. We may have to ignore some stupid shit in the film, like another emotional train wreck for a Vulcan, but I’m willing to give it a chance. The shot of the enterprise being built planet-side was amazing.

2. Our new president is video blogging. That is fucking rad. It only took our government 8 years to join the 21st century. There might be hope after all. http://change.gov/newsroom/blog/

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Ryan