I’ve set up a short survey where you can express your preferences for a particular design candidate, along with a few questions about binding options and usage. Let me know what you think…I really appreciate it!

I’ve already sent the survey to subscribers of the DAVE SEAH NEW PRODUCT MAILING LIST; which I use to send out information about new products that are coming to market. If you’re interested in getting on the list, sign up here!

So I made two new alternatives:

Revision 3 removes the orange bubbles and replaces the vertical dot lines around 12 and 6 with solid ones to help provide some structure.

Revision 3A adds explicit times to the form, which looks cool. The back side of the form still uses fill-in bubbles for the time, since people might want to use them to extend either the early morning or late evening.

You can download these revisions on the main ETT 2013 post if you’d like to try them out.

UPDATE: If you’re interested in printed products, take this survey and let me know what you’d like to see.

I woke up late on Monday, muscles sore from moving furniture at my friend Sid’s studio over the weekend, and proceeded to have the fuzziest of days. It took enormous effort to even list the major to-dos of the week in my Scrivener journal:

• International Fulfillment
• Shopify Setup
• Organizing Digital Content
• Various Website Projects

Instead, I spent the day being very tired. I woke up at 11AM, and every time I sat on the couch or stroked a purring cat thereafter I would find myself sputtering awake amidst furnados of cat hair a couple hours later . Groggily, I managed to do a little research on IOS programming, and in the process discovered that there was a local Adobe Users Group Meetup in the evening. I almost blew that off, feeling that I needed to redeem myself for the day’s sloth, but then realized that I was just being lame about meeting new people. So I went, learned about PDFs, and discovered where all the digital media freelancers had been hiding in Nashua. Awesome! I finished the day with a quick 15 minutes at the gym (really all I could muster), then went home.

Tuesday I rose at around 9AM, having had the presence of mind the night before to turn on my alarm clock. Facing the great to-dos of the day, I found myself feeling very bored and unmotivated. Journaling a bit in Scrivener to explore the feeling, I identified the source of this soul-crushing weight: I was not allowing myself to enjoy myself at all because I had placed such importance on the business-oriented goals. I was, in effect, burning myself out. The business work is not the goal itself; it’s merely the path through which I can attain my real goal of having a leisurely creative life. In other words, working hard now so I could play later in style. Ironically, this is exactly the kind of rat-race existence that I’ve been trying to avoid, and here I was gaslighting myself with feelings of not being fast enough or dedicated enough for the business work. Pah!

Still, this insight didn’t get the work done. What I really want right now is superlative experiences that excite and drive the creation of superlative works. Too bad that the tasks at hand, such as figuring out the maze that is international fulfillment and payment processing, seemingly lacks anything superlative in itself. It’s just hard to get excited about. So in the meantime, I thought that the wise thing to do would be to avoid burnout by insisting on the fastest production times as the worthwhile metric, and allow myself to take the time to explore. This was the general impulse, I think, behind my inclusion of “Happy Bubble Time” in the daily schedule I designed a few weeks ago; I had not realized that this was the specific reason I wanted it.

That said, I managed to get through a client call and visited Sid’s studio, which was coming together quite nicely under the new floor plan. Then I got home, cooked dinner, and fell asleep after requesting an email quote on printing 250 Emergent Task Timer pads from Papergraphics, my commercial printer.

Wednesday had to go better, right? I burst out of bed at a reasonable-ish 845AM (better than 1130AM, I thought) and popped open the laptop to start my continuity journaling in Scrivener. The words didn’t come through the fog. Was I dehydrated? I quaffed down some gulps of icy water, and felt slightly better, but I was pretty sure that my brain was in full-blown super procrastination mode, fighting all efforts at structure. I wasn’t even using the pretty new Emergent Task Timer forms. I wrote down some notes, trying to describe the foggy feeling:

• There was no clarity or definition, and part of me was refusing to seek it out.
• There was a sense that there was nothing to look forward to.
• There was stubbornness due to lack of certainty about anything worthwhile.

Even if I were to tackle the big tasks of the week, it felt like there was no “big payoff” likely to happen. Nothing easy, anyway. No sense of mission, either. While I was no longer filled with resentment about having to do these tasks—the insight of last week—there was no positive feeling to replace that vacuum of emotion.

I had half an hour before a call with Amplifier to discuss their fulfillment services, so I decided to take a walk around my condo development. It had been raining all week, and a brief window of sunshine had opened up. Perhaps the walk would do me some good. At least I wouldn’t fall asleep again.

As I walked, I felt a sense of peace. The condominium development I live in is one of the nicer ones in the area in that it has a lot of grass and trees, as it abuts a protected bird sanctuary and a small river. Strangely, there was no one else walking around, so it felt like I had the entire development to myself. It takes about 8 minutes to do the loop, and at minute 4 I had an important realization: what I really craved wasn’t excitement or freedom from work at all. What I really needed was mental stimulation. I had found the tasks of the week to be boring, and therefore I wasn’t mentally engaged even though I was no longer resentful. The need for mental stimulation also fits with this month’s Groundhog Day Resolution to connect with more people. Actually I don’t want to connect with people in the networking sense. I want to be mentally stimulated by conversation and camaraderie. Screw meeting people for the sake of being social! I want my brain to be tickled, every day.

A Subtle Shift

This may not seem like an enormous insight on first glance…of course people want to be mentally stimulated, right? This is just another way of saying that I don’t want to be bored, right? That I want my work to have meaning and value, and so I do it out of a sense of duty and honor to the holy quest for self-actualization?

After thinking about it, I’m starting to believe that as important as purpose and personal values are in my life, they don’t provide me with energy. They are instead shapers of my energy, guiding how I apply my powers toward particular end goals. The energy comes from somewhere else: mental engagement and curious optimism, perhaps, mixed with the desire to see what happens and how it ends. It’s about the hunt for undiscovered powers that can be understood and controlled. I love that stuff.

I had written some time ago about how I realized that maintaining a good attitude was essential in being able to tackle the hard work, which is on the same axis as the need to remove resentment toward it. A good attitude, though, is about generating positive energy that presumably leads to greater self-motivation. Up to now, the best I’ve managed was to “fake smile” my way through difficult times, telling myself how “lucky I was” to have the opportunity to do so. This energy only went so far before collapsing, as it did at the beginning of this week.

It seems to me that seeking mental stimulation is actually a better way for me to energize myself. The trick is to find what IS mentally stimulating in the work, then focusing only on that without regard for “goals” and other such managerial nonsense. There’s a time and place for that, but not while one is doing the work. Separating the creative energies from the smothering management mindset is necessary.

This is an important shift in strategy, and it feels a bit diabolical. Before, I was trying to muster my sense of responsibility as a productive citizen to make me do my work, almost out of a sense of duty to myself. That was an important step, realizing that my own goals are not to be treated as a second-class priority in life. Now, I am going on step further and saying that my goals aren’t the drivers of my actions; instead, it’s my desire to feed my own brain and stimulate the hell out of it, because it’s only then that is produces useful work. It is the creative side of me. Goals are the managerial side, and the best that it can do is to feed the creative demons and harvest the good bits from the ensuing carnage. Perhaps I’m not a manager at heart…instead, I might be a monster! Rarrrh! :-)

I’ll put it into action on Thursday, and I actually got quite a bit done. Experimentation will continue tomorrow and through next week.

Reader Nancy solved a problem with the hour columns in the revised for 2013 Emergent Task Timer. The hours are now written in directly above each column, instead of over the hour boundaries; the image above shows the difference. It’s subtle, but I think it makes it a lot easier to make the connection between quarter-hours and the time. Thanks Nancy!

Here’s a quick link to the download on the original post if you’d like to check it out.

I also got a preliminary quote from my commercial printer, and I think I’ll take a chance and print 500 75-sheet pads for sale on Amazon. Once I’m happy with the wording and sure that the design is good, I’ll send it to press and see what happens! If you have any feedback or suggestions, now’s a good time to chime in! :-)

I’ve been tracking my time to see if my “feeling unproductive” was supported by data; as I wrote in the Assessment section of last week’s Groundhog Day Resolutions Review, it seemed possible that I was over-emphasizing the number of negative moments and creating a false sense of slackness.

I’ve been using the Emergent Task Timer (ETT). This is the older cousin of the Emergent Task Planner (ETP), and it was originally created so I could see where my time actually went in the foggy early days of my productivity journey. After a few days of using the ETT again I was surprised to find it wasn’t as easy-to-use as I remembered, so I’ve made an enhanced version to match my current design thinking.

Introduction to the Emergent Task Timer

The ETT is a stack of “task tracks” containing 15-minute bubbles of continuous time. Each track represents a distinct activity. Although there are multiple tracks, we can only focus on one task at a time. By using an interval alarm that chimes every 15 minutes, we note which activity gets the bubble. For example, when the alarm goes off at 3:15PM, I fill in only one bubble in the entire stack of tasks: the one that corresponds to 3:15PM, which is the first bubble in the group of four between 3PM and 4PM.

When I start the day, I list what I am supposed to do at the very top, and start my interval alarm. If I catch myself doing something that isn’t on the list—say, I catch myself surfing the Internet for examples of outdoor clay oven cooking—I add that item to the bottom of the list and fill-in the bubble. Over the day, the “distracting activities” start piling-up at the bottom if I’m particularly unfocused.

When I am really focused, I’ll have solid lines of bubbles at the top of the form. They’re easily counted for the daily total. However, when I am sidetracked a lot, my bubbles get scattered around lower parts of the form. The great thing is that you don’t have to add up any stupid numbers at the end of the day, and you’ll see the pattern of your time emerge as you are working. After a couple of weeks, you’ll have the data you need to figure out what needs to change, and you can show your manager what the hell is really going on.

The New Version for 2013

The old design is perfectly adequate, but I had the following issues (see image below, left side):

• I was initially confused by the time marker positioning: “which bubble is 3:15PM?”
• I found myself wanting to write in-line comments near the bubbles I was filling in, as opposed to writing them down in the NOTES area.
• The sameness of the entire bubble field made it more difficult to find where I was in the day, particularly if I’d been away from the form for a few hours.
• I missed the three tasks focus of the Emergent Task Planner.

Here’s what’s new. The image below shows the new form on the right side.

Briefly:

• I’ve respaced the lines so I now have room to write notes between them.
• I’ve adjusted the hour boxes so the boundaries are clearly BETWEEN groups of bubbles. Before, you had to infer this from the position of the vertical background boxes.
• I’ve removed as many extra horizontal lines as possible to make it less-busy.
• I’ve adopted the Emergent Task Planner three important things to do section at the top, and numbering of each task line.
• The ETP-style colored bubbles break the day into morning/afternoon/evening, so I can see at-a-glance where I should be writing.
• I’ve added ETP-style task indexing. There are 17 total task lines.
• New Feature: full 24-hour tracking on a single piece of paper (printed double-sided)

Here’s some pictures showing the filled out forms.

Regarding second photo:

The front side has 16 hours, and the back side has 8 more. There have been times when I’ve needed some extra bubbles due to starting late in the day. Instead of getting another sheet and rewriting my task list, I can now fold over the task list from the front and not have to re-write anything!

The back, when it’s not folded-over, looks like this:

You’ll see there’s a note area that incorporates the folding guide, splitting it into two columns. I think this works better as a dedicated note-taking area for phone numbers. The use of space on the front side is now completely devoted to capturing context around each task.

Evaluate the Prototype

As I mentioned before, I think the Task Timer is good for situations when you are diagnosing where your time goes. I also find it useful when I don’t feel like planning with the Task Planner. With these new changes, though, you can still emphasize what you’d like to do and see what you spent your time on. You could probably make the argument that the ETT is for slacker productivity and the ETP is for planned productivity, and I would believe you. I’ll be using the new form this coming week and see how it works out.

Download Links

Here are the available design candidates. They are all 2-page, 8.5″ x 11″ LANDSCAPE PDFs.

• Revision 1 ETT03-PROTO-0D691.pdf – The first revision
• Revision 2 ETT03-PROTO-0D6C1.pdf – Different hour labeling
• Revision 3 ETT03-PROTO-0D6D1.pdf – No orange bubbles
• Revision 3a ETT03-PROTO-0D6D2.pdf – Fixed times and orange bubbles

Take the Survey

I’m thinking that this double-sided version will be the next printed product. If you have some time to express your opinion, I just set up a product survey where you can express your desires regarding the ideal format for you.

Once the finalized version is done, rest assured that I’ll make full package will contain A4 and B&W-optimized versions for download in addition to the physical printed version.

Enjoy!

What I Said I Would Do

Last month, I emphasized taking my existing work here on davidseah.com and converting them into a more accessible form. I also wanted to keep moving on creative projects. Here’s the list:

• Start a content audit, to identify the best works to possibly repackage into ebooks and new related writings.
• Define a framework for understanding my forms, to help people understand which forms were useful for what.
• Think about restarting “A Product a Day”, because this was my most productive time in recent memory.
• Revisit the Index Card Blocks, because I feel I have not been using my hands creatively for a long time.
• Revisit 3D, Game Programming, Music Composition, and Learning Chinese, because these are areas that I think would bring me pleasure and opportunity.

At the time I thought this was a doable list that featured areas of concentration, the theory being that progress in any of these strategic areas would produce a feeling of satisfaction. However, this wasn’t the case. For most of the month I felt behind schedule, unmotivated, and short on energy, and it didn’t feel like I was being productive at all.

After I wrote a lot of diagnostic blog posts (tagged xpr-2013a), I came to the conclusion that I was fighting myself a lot, and this may have been the cause of my lack of motivation. How?

• I had built up a great deal of subconscious resentment toward some tasks, which produced negative feelings that bummed me out. It’s hard to do good work when you are feeling resentful toward it.

• I also identified two warring personalities, a “Dr. Jekyl” of Management and the more spontaneous “Mr. Hyde” of Creativity. The goals of Management are timeliness and getting things done quickly. The goals of Creativity is to explore and assess, finding the true way by being fully in the moment. By trying to meet both the needs of management and creativity, I created a conflict.

Once I recognized the resentment and split-personalities clashing, a lot of the inner friction disappeared; the summary goes into more detail. However, I still didn’t have much motivation to begin with, and it still felt like my productivity was low.

What Got Done

With the assessment out of the way, I was ready to grit my teeth and see how much I really got done. I reviewed a month’s worth of Trello “Task Complete” lists plus my email records, and when I listed everything out it actually looked like a lot of stuff. Here it is in detail if you really want to know:

The Stationery Biz – With the addition of the new ETP notebook, I’ve seen a modest increase in monthly sales volume. This confirms that more products = more volume = more revenue = more freedom. I also received my first inquiry for wholesale, and now I’m trying to figure out how that works. Fulfillment of goods outside the USA, though, continues to be a problem. The elusive $100/day profit edges nearer, averaging around $53/day when looking at Amazon sales. That’s not bad. If I add in the small amounts of digital sales, that adds another $7 or so. I am 60% of the way to my goal!

Blog Life – Creating a more accessible and interesting blog is part of the be a bright spot on the Internet strategy. Most of the effort here were small fixes: an updated favicon, re-adding search, adding a balloon to point out the “latest blog posts”, tuning the navigation pop-overs, and rewriting the front page copy. Content-wise, I also wrote 23 blog posts in the past month, which is probably at least 35 hours of thinking and writing. I also processed a good chunk of my reader email queue, which provides future material in the form of modified forms and personal submissions.

External Projects – Since I’m not at my $100/day target, I maintain a trickle of interesting client projects. Most of these projects are related to website development, which is something I can do reasonably well though it is not my business focus. More relevant are the information graphic design projects, such as a request to adapt the Creative Cootie Catcher into a book launch giveaway. Cool!

Happy Bubble Time – These are the exploration projects that are driven by impulsive curiosity. They’re usually tied to something I want. For example, I have been wanting a super-strength ginger ale, and have been gathering resources. The most recent acquisition is a Sodastream which I got for $59 at Staples. The tomato plants are back in the sub-irrigation planters for round two. There’s a few new pieces of gear I’ve gotten in for measuring the thickness of paper stock, and I backed a few Kickstarters that were doing cool creative stuff that I wanted to get into someday. Skill-wise, I installed Visual Studio 2012, Scrivener, and Modo 701 and ran through some basic tutorials. I even attended a Chinese language meetup, a first because I have historically been very embarrassed about my accent, but apparently it no longer bothers me. I’m learning, and there’s no reason to be embarrassed about that.

Social Days – The number of days I spent by myself numbered in the 20s, which is high. I need to get out more. I did do some things with friends: Pancake Day! Friend’s Daughter’s Graduation Day! Star Trek: Into Darkness and spicy Chinese Food Day! Beach Day! I caught up with my new friend Aaron Mahnke in Danvers, spent a nice long weekend with my sister, and attended Memorial Day cookout. I believe that I need to make a greater effort to connect with people who are on the similar wavelengths. I won’t know until I try!

Home Maintenance and Chores – I am terrible at doing regular cleaning or household maintenance. So moving old chairs out of basement storage and recycling cardboard are kind of BIG WINS as far as I’m concerned. I also ran the garden hose from the downstairs floor up to the deck, which makes it much easier to garden. It’s a pain in the butt, but for the rest of the summer it will be convenient. If only I could remotely turn-on the faucet without going out the basement.

While I know that every hour of the day was not productive, a certain amount did get done. It’s hard to really assess after-the-fact, so this month I have started using Emergent Task Timer trackers to see how each day breaks down.

Ongoing Improvements

I’ve also been evaluating my processes, actively looking for ways to improve them.

PROCESS

• Kicked off new two-week productivity sprint – I documented this extensively on the blog. Unsure whether it would stick, I treated it as an experiment; I like seeing where data takes me, and it seems less like a chore than had I said, “OK, BE RELENTLESSLY PRODUCTIVE AND DON’T SCREW UP”.

• Review two-week productivity sprint – As I mentioned, my sprint didn’t feel particularly productive. My notes tell of lack of motivation and energy. Instead, there were hours of restless clicking on Facebook, Email, and Popular Websites and energy, like I hoped some thing that would pique my interest would give rise to action. Similarly, I spent about 10 hours playing Star Trek Online, ostensibly to evaluate their revamped gameplay as a professional interactive designer, but really it was just because it was something to do without having to think too hard. I found I was taking a lot of naps at odd hours, particularly after I finished a chunk of work.

  I never got into a super-efficient productive cycle, and this was a kind of failure because I felt highly-susceptible to the doing of consuming mindlessly instead of creating triumphantly. I did, though, identify some new resistances, the aforementioned resentment and conflicting manager-vs-creator mindsets. Having dropped resentment from my mindset, getting started is easier. Also, my new understanding of how I can separate “creative mindset” from “manager expectations” in the day-to-day work has removed the underlying anxiety of not being productive. In its place, there’s the knowledge that practicing creativity needs a kind of isolation bubble, and the the role of management is to allow that to happen predictably and nurture the results.

• Met with a CPA – After doing last year’s taxes, I have wanted to bring in professionals to help with my accounting more than once a year. A trusted friend suggested that I talk to someone I’d met through her from a local music jam, and so I’ve bitten the bullet and am seeing what this will bring about. I have no idea, but I am using the money generated from the Stationery Business to pay for it. With luck, I’ll have a way of more accurately figuring out what to do with my business.

TOOLS

• Scrivener – I started to wonder whether Scrivener, the much-loved writing software used by novelists, might be good for handling of my long blog posts. I installed an evaluation copy, went through the interactive tutorial, and was very impressed. Right now, I’m trying to use it for projects where I have to do a lot of thinking, polishing, and rearranging. The content audit is one such project. Maintaining a journal about what I’m doing every day is another project that benefits from this.

HEALTH

• Started Gym Routine – Amazingly, I held to this. Yay for me! After about three weeks, I am starting to regain my cardiovascular fitness, which means I can start to intensify. Not dieting, though, so I haven’t lost weight. About half the days I didn’t want to go, but applied the “15M, and then you’re done” rule. There were two days where I just did 15M of cardio and left, but the second time I actually wasn’t feeling well and made a judgement call. With elevated cardio, I can now start really sweating.

LONG TERM ASSET CREATION

• Start Content Audit – The content audit is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time…just what is here on davidseah.com that is worth dusting off and packaging for 2013? The first chore was to just get a listing of posts to read and comment on systematically. I started by just picking the “productivity” category and copying/pasting hyperlinks to each post. Then, I copied that into a text file and started reading and keeping notes. I had no idea what I was noting; I figured I’d find a pattern and then start again. My overall takeaway, though, was that I had written some very obtuse stuff to the point I was horrified. Granted, this was early 2005 stuff, but I’ve known since high school that I have a tendency to leave details out. The content audit’s main takeaway was that I needed to start writing more clearly. The secondary takeaway was that I would use the Content Audit to mine for patterns and ideas, possibly to collect into a “State of Dave” productivity document. I don’t know yet exactly what that is, but in the spirit of being comfortable with the uncertain artistic process, I’m just going to keep scratching.

PERSONAL WELL-BEING

• Actively Build Community Connections – As I alluded earlier, I spend more than 2/3rds of my days to myself without communicating with another person. This doesn’t include shopping or working by myself at Starbucks. I need to recreate connection with people who are doing what I’m doing: doggedly building a small creative business, learning new skills, and applying lessons learned the hard way toward one’s distant goals. I know that there are people who WANT these things, but matching energy levels and schedules between possible collaborators is the problem.

The Assessment

Reading everything I’ve done last month, it actually does seem like a lot. So why did I feel so unproductive? Was it just that I was hyper aware that I was wasting time as I wasted it? Maybe I spent less time actively procrastinating than I actually did, amplified by the knowledge that I was not living up to my own goals. This feeling is compounded by the lack of hard assets produced even when I was being busy. Why was this happening?

By chance, I heard a piece on NPR last weekend with two alcoholics, a mother and her adult son, who had co-authored an autobiographical book about what it was like to be drunk for years and years. The son made a comment that even though he’s been sober for 30 years, there’s this part of him that feels entitled to have a drink, and it wants it. The mother said there is no reasoning with it, because it is beyond reason. Being sober is a matter of choosing not to give in, and living with it. Sobriety does not fix the impulse, and it does not make life any easier. You have to deal with it forever.

It occurred to me that perhaps I had a similar attitude toward Procrastination and Productivity. If I were to admit this out loud, it might go like this:

Hello, I am a procrastinator, and I don’t want to do work. I feel I deserve shiny rewards and that creativity should flow naturally from me, because I’m that good. Instead, though, I visit dozens of sites on the Internet and read about other people who are doing cool things, and I pretend I can do that too even though I don’t. I despise myself for not living up to my potential and for frittering away my time, but I keep doing it. If only I could find some better tool, some better process, or the right people to team-up with, then everything would be better and I would be productive.

Framed like that, and knowing that the desire to procrastinate has no rational basis, it comes down to a choice to be productive. That means not giving in to the part of me that complains when it can’t have instant gratification. Pressfield’s The War of Art gives us a name for it, the Resistance, and others have called it the Lizard Brain, which is a primitive collection of wants and fears that constantly challenges our rational intellectual powers. I’ve been watching it for years too, writing and writing to clarify how it worked. But you know what? I might have just been enabling the irrationality by trying to understand it. I’ve tried to reason with it. I’ve also tried to accommodate its many needs to create harmony. But this has been a waste of time. It can not be reasoned with. It is not reasonable. It just wants what it wants. It does not care about my future well-being at all. If I assume that it is here forever and it will never go away, the only thing to do is to ignore it. That takes a lot less energy than trying to have a conversation with it. That suggests to break procrastination, you have to pick a side and do the right thing for yourself. Picking that side won’t make anything easier at all; in fact, life will be harder and more frustrating. But perhaps that’s just the way it is.

The Coming Month

There is one observation that gets down to the nuts and bolts:

(1) I feel productive when I have something to show for my effort, something tangible that can be shown to people.

Now that I have done a pretty good job of purging of procrastinatory forces, it’s clear that I need to focus on actual productivity: delivering something new that people can interact with. These deliverables need to deliver tangible benefits to me in the form of new systems that support revenue generation.

There are a few tasks like this that come to mind. International fulfillment is a big nut to crack. I will make it June’s focus and try to make it happen. Another nut will be reorganizing the digital download section and refreshing the calendar offerings. Both of these will increase sales slightly, pushing me ever-closer to the magic $100/day mark.

As for supporting tasks, I don’t think I need to worry about blogging, maintaining the gym habit, or handling client work. These already happen, and I think they’re under control.

A third directive is the need to connect with communities, which means getting out there and meeting new people. This fills me with some trepidation, but I think that if I am also being more productive on the above tasks, it will help me feel more relaxed. One reason I dislike social days is because I feel I am behind on achieving “creative independence”, which is a core goal right now. I don’t like taking the time off from it, and I particularly don’t like talking to people who lack similar aspiration. But let me not fill my belly with resentment and disdain ahead of the meal.

So, in summary, June will focus on two deliverables that theoretically will improve the number of goods I can ship; these are pragmatic bottom-line goals that directly address the MAIN GROUNDHOG DAY RESOLUTION of being CREATIVELY INDEPENDENT:

• International Fulfillment
• Reorganized Digital Downloads

And so I don’t forget the reason why I’m doing this whole creative independence thing in the first place:

• Carrying on with everything else that I’m doing, in a way that brightens my little bit of the Internet
• Meeting People in new social arenas, finding people to share with

The day-to-day challenge is to identify which tasks are actually helpful and which are distractions. In a general sense, the most helpful tasks are ones that produce an asset that I can sell/trade or use to build a needed machine. Second-most helpful tasks are logistical chores (gathering what’s needed). Everything else is an indirect support task that doesn’t pay off immediately. The more tasks I do that produces real assets, the more productive I am.

To help maintain my day-to-day continuity, I’ll continue to track my work in Scrivener (as daily notes) and with the Emergent Task Timer (ETT) to see how distracted my days are. One challenge will be balancing external commitments with internal ones; I’m going to try to maintain the same structure as I had described three weeks ago, though I will replace “Content and Products” with “International Fullfillment/Reorganized Digital Downloads” to be more specific. That should help tighten my focus, and without the motivation-crushing resentment I have at giving myself homework, I have a better chance of making progress. Especially if I recognize the urge to procrastinate as an unreasonable voice that should be ignored instead of assuaged.

[Snip-ghdr2013]

• A skinny double-sided version of the Fast Book Outliner, printed in either pad or reporter-style notebook. I might use a different paper for this too, just to change things up. Target audience: people who are taking notes related to books for later reference, and want to make the task easier.

• An improved double-sided version of the Emergent Task Timer; I’ve been using this recently and see some areas for improvement. Target audience: grad students

• A test run of Compact Calendars, priced as cheap as possible possible. I probably would lose money on these, but I’d like to see if there were any buyers at all. I think I’d find out some interesting uses for them.

In the queue already are improvements to the existing ETP notebook in the form of a thicker cover; the printer is sourcing this for me right now. I’m also thinking about producing a limited run of ETP notebooks that are single-sided bound in a very thick hardcover. On the digital side of things, I’ve been reminded that the academic year starts in July, so it’s time to make updates of the 365-Day Almanac and Academic Calendar soon!

If there’s something that you’d like to see printed from my back catalog, let me know in the comments!

I’ve been using the Emergent Task Timer this week to see if I am really as unproductive as I think I’ve been.

The Emergent Task Timer (or ETT) is the form I use when I want to know what my day actually looks like. I’ve been laboring under the impression that I’m in a productivity gutter for the past month, but when I reviewed what I got done it actually seemed like a lot. Was it possible that just my awareness of less-productive low-energy moments was skewing reality?

The June 6 Groundhog Day Review will go deeper into this.

The interview, which is excerpted here on npr.org, gave me a glimpse into the mind of the alcoholic from two engaging conversationalists. Rob, the son, described how there’s a sense of entitlement within him, he says, that wants what it wants and that is part of him. His mother adds that there is no reasoning with it, because it is not based in reason.

I found this interesting not only because of the insights it gave me for talking to alcoholics, but also for the shared universal problem of self-defeating behaviors. I spend a lot of time trying to reason my way through my productivity blocks and frustrations with progress. While I wish I could say that I beat back the resistance every time, in truth it doesn’t. Every time I choose to watch TV instead of writing a blog post, or play a video game instead of learning how to make IOS applications, or decide that I would rather eat some snacks than cook something…this is a battle that is lost. I’ve spent years looking for patterns and reasons for it, and have evolved a nifty set of principles that generally keep me moving in the right direction. I don’t mean to trivialize alcoholism by comparing it to procrastination, but perhaps it really is just something unreasonable that is inside me that feels it is, as Rob Grimes describes, entitled to have what it wants no matter what the cost. By extension, choosing to act is a matter of effort and discipline despite that feeling always being there.

Secondly, Martha Grimes talks about what she liked about drinking, how it gave her a “connection” of sorts. When she stopped drinking, she had to face “the void” that the drinking covered-up. There’s the expectation alcoholics have, Rob further notes, that once one is sober everything will be better. That’s not true…the hard part is then dealing with the void like everyone else. Again, I’m not trying to trivialize this, but the notion of “the void”, which I think of as that emptiness one feels because something seems missing or has not been found, is something that everyone can identify with at some level. If I look into myself, I can see that I have a desire for connectedness and achievement because something is missing. This gives rise to some of the frustrations I’ve described over the past few blog posts. I wonder if the feeling is also “beyond reason”; perhaps it’s some neurological function that craves the stimulation of newness and the company of friends when I’m working solo in my basement for days on end. It may be more expedient to just accept the void as a common human feature, and re-route my thinking around it. I don’t think I can force the universe to fix it just by wishing it, but I can make myself more comfortable by being accepting of my desire to fill that void in as prudent a manner as seems appropriate.

I think one reason that procrastination feels bad is because of our awareness of this void. The void might be the gap between one’s desire to have a certain status due to perceived potential, or it might be impatience that arises from the sense of entitlement due to one’s self-assessment of cleverness. There’s lots of reasons to feel a void because of such-and-such pre-existing conditions preventing us from experiencing elevated happiness. When procrastination has the power, it’s because we haven’t imposed whatever willpower or discipline we have available. The battle is between our rational self that knows better and the willful irrationality that makes us behave in the opposite way. It’s not a fair fight when one side doesn’t play by the same rules, and then twists them to manipulate our reason to do its bidding. There’s one way to deal with it: don’t engage. Don’t make exceptions. Don’t be an enabler of the destructive behavior, and don’t get pulled into a story where you are made to think you are the guilty party.

I wonder if these musings will really stick. Is it possible to learn how to become “procrastination free” for 20 years? It may not fill the void, but at least we would be getting things done.

I’ve just posted a quick review of Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions by Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde with Sandra Blakeslee.

Reconciling Different Mindsets

I did not end up feeling very productive, as I was beset by lack of motivation and small frustrations. I informally assessed my level of “felt productivity” relative to my recent Product A Day Challenge, which was characterized by enormous personal engagement boosted by daily deliverables. So why didn’t just repeat the challenge? It’s because I believe that growth isn’t possible unless I improve the way I present the huge pile of existing unused material. It is necessary to engage tasks I regard as boring: engineering websites, writing marketing material, and building business processes. Because I don’t particularly like doing these things in a vacuum, motivation has been low. Productivity, therefore, has been a slow uphill slough.

As I mentioned yesterday, resentment had built-up inside me regarding these boring tasks, a kind of inner voice that mainlined negative thoughts directly into my subconscious. This created a fog of low-level anger that I didn’t know was there; I just felt it without conscious awareness it was there. After identifying the fog, I was able to de-emotionalize my reaction—or rather, I think I have—which has removed unnecessary friction. While I’m still not more motivated, at least I’m not making the tasks more difficult for myself.

For productivity reboot week 3—if you’re wondering what week this is, it is “assessment week 1″ following reboot week 2—I still want to feel more productive. The resentment I felt before is a good starting point for analysis:

Frustration by the stupidity of a lot of these tasks, which I would characterize as a distaste for poor system design and documentation that steals fun from my day.

From this, I can define what a good feeling might be:

Getting those boring tasks off my list, reaping the greater capabilities that completion of the boring tasks will make possible, and then getting back to the making of interesting content and products to share.

Yes, that’s what the feeling should be! However, there are no shortcuts available, for me anyway, that I think will reduce the burden of the boring tasks. The obvious solution is to outsource, but I don’t have the money to hire anyone even if I knew who could do the job. Money is the resource I am trying to generate by getting those boring tasks out of the way. A better website draws more traffic and measurable visitor engagement. Better marketing materials help visitors identify what they can take-away from the website and use. Better business processes will make products available to those who want them without enslaving me to the fulfillment center. Theoretically this should also generate an increase in revenue, which covers my living expenses and allows me to spend even more time learning and creating new stuff. That’s the middle-game I am building towards. The end-game is to have enough money coming in from all these improvements so I can afford to fund projects with other people. But first, I have to engineer, write, and build repeatedly over the next few years.

I wrote yesterday about the difference between a creator’s mindset and a manager’s mindset. It occurs to me that agile software development, from which I had borrowed the idea of the two-week sprint in the first place, is based on a clear distinction of the desires of the creator (who just wants to build good stuff that people will love) and the desires of the manager (who needs to pay salaries and wants to bank enough life-giving money as quickly as possible). I’m one person that has to embody both roles, and since I didn’t know better I squashed all these desires together internally. The result? Productivity-destroying internal conflict! For example, I can argue that it takes time to learn and create properly, and if I had just a creator’s mindset I would be fine with that; in fact, happy bubble time is the stratagem I use to create a space in my day free from such worries, having reasoned that it’s unlikely to be very dangerous. However, when I uncritically don my manager hat, I’m thinking that time is money and I’m running out of both. Anxiety ensues! Therefore, I want to get things done as quickly as possible and look for ways to do that. At the same time, I also know that not taking the time to do things right will always bite you in the ass later and take twice-as-much time in the long run. This creates anxiety and uncertainty that exists only in an imaginary future, and it doesn’t do anyone any good.

In other words, thanks to having both creator and management mindsets, I have a complete collection of conflicting desires. No matter what I choose, I can find a way to second-guess myself. Having a good time taking my time to learn and explore? I’m burning time and money that I can’t afford! Am I trying to rush through something, use sketchy shortcuts, or outsource critical processes that I don’t take the time to understand? I am then building a sucky product that I will hate. Such a product might actually sell well and establish a thriving business, but I don’t want any part of it. I want to make quality goods that sell based on their design excellence.

Statement of New Principles

Having started to let go of resentment and conflicting mindsets, I find that I can make the following statements:

• All tasks, boring or not, need time for study and experiment. This time is not wasted. If it is an unfamiliar task, it requires a creator’s mindset. Give it some space, and allow for exploration. Energy will ebb and flow. It will grow in strength as tangible results and perfected know-how are produced.

• Taking the time will not disadvantage you, if you have designed your business to survive without a timeliness requirement. Traditional project-based service businesses can not survive without practicing timeliness. Fortunately, my goal is to author and package original works based on my understanding of excellence. For this kind of business, I work to ensure exclusivity and availability, which are more flexible expectations to fulfill compared to timeliness. The actual delivery of goods is readily outsourced, too.

• There’s nothing to be gained by feeling resentful or creating internal conflict. It just makes the work harder to do because you burn yourself up with gut-churning emotion. Replacing resentment with appreciation and gratitude, or at worst feeling nothing at all, is my preferred conscious mental stance.

The New Structure for Week 3-4

Starting next week, my external structure will be mostly the same: I will keep to the morning planning + three areas of directed endeavor a day + Happy Bubble Time. The morning planning will identify tasks that will benefit from bubbles of 15-minute effort. The three endeavors will be defined as:

• Platform Improvements – the website organization, marketing, content generation. Anything that makes the website stronger as a platform for practicing creative independence. That means making it easier for visitors to find something interesting without having to do a lot of clicking.

• External Projects – making progress with existing client work and business relationships.

• Gym – maintaining the 3-times a week gym habit. I’m still building cardio at the moment, taking it slow. Ultimately, my goal is to build strength and slim down.

Instead of being strict about doing all three every day, I’ll make it a stretch goal to do at least 15 minutes in each area. Some days, like when I’m working with code I’m not familiar with, are very mentally taxing. Forcing myself to do a second task with the same mental requirements but with a completely different context results in poor work due to poor concentration. When I’m that wiped, I can force myself to do clerical work like collecting resources into one place so I have everything I need to start, but that’s about it.

Lastly, Happy Bubble Time is my undirected exploration and learning time. Surfing the net, looking for ice cream places, scheming ways to generate treasure maps, setting up an outside wood staining area…anything is fair game. A lot of these HBT interests pay off in the generation of content like this post, and the personal connections that ensue from shared interest.

There is still the need for management, but these moments are now reserved for the morning planning and periodic blog post reviews. The rest of the time, I will not think of it, and hope that “productivity happens” as I allow myself the time to think and explore my way through boring-yet-challenging tasks.

I don’t want to fail and be labeled as a dreamer who never got anything done. However, this feeling tends to put me into the manager mindset. To smooth over the gap, I think that I can transmute “manager intentions” into something more like self-nurture and creative support. That is, to be an enlightened creative manager, delivering what the creative side needs without imposing a lot of oppressive judgement about how things should be. Success will feel like I got things done by being in the creator mindset most of the time, with light management suggesting instead of controlling the methods of production.

So long as there is movement, there will be productivity. That is my prediction. We’ll pick it up on Monday, June 3 and run through June 15.

Other Articles in this Series

• Kicking off a New Personal Approach to Productivity
• Laying Down Process: First Pass
• Laying Down Process 2: Environmental Cues
• Productivity Reboot Week 2: Reviewing Options and Direction
• Productivity Reboot: Two Week Review
• Prepping for Phase 2: Changes to the Routine

Also:

• Related posts in the SOC Process Journal

• A promise to maintain a 15-minute planning session first-thing in the morning.
• Limit work to just 3 main areas of endeavor each day: website navigation improvements, client work, and going to the gym.
• The rest of the day allocated to Happy Bubble Time.

At the time, it seemed like a hugely self-indulgent way of structuring the day, and I wasn’t sure if it would work. Here’s what I found.

Observations

• I tried to eat a small chunk of protein (usually an egg) as soon as I woke up, as suggested by Tim Ferriss in one of his books as a weight loss measure. My cousin Leng is the one who actually got me thinking about eating more protein in the morning, and I’ve found that it’s been helpful in maintaining energy. When I used to go to SXSW, my routine would be to eat a huge protein-filled breakfast and avoid carbohydrates until dinner.

• The first 15 minutes of planning does help focus the day by setting its tone. The first few days took more than 15 minutes, actually, as I was working out my priorities and writing blog posts based on my thinking. After that, the planning session took about five minutes, and I would launch into the first task of the day.

• The first task of the day immediately followed my morning planning, before I checked email or allowed other distractions to derail my focus. Fully-rested and clear on my priorities with the entire day ahead of me, spending 15 minutes getting started was relatively easy. The work session would typically last 1-3 hours before I would break and read email.

• The second task of the day was considerably harder to start, especially after eating. Maintaining momentum on the task was also difficult, unless I happened to fall into a groove. I was much more likely to engage in Internet surfing behavior, looking up tools or researching topics of interest not directly related to the work at hand. If I took a nap, it was easier to re-engage but I was not always successful. In practice, my 3 tasks a day really were more like 2.25 tasks a day.

• Conference calls, social gatherings, and other events that required leaving the house tended to suck the energy out of me. I try to schedule calls all on the same day, but they are still tremendous drains. Not only do they lock me down in the home office, but they also create future tasks that I have to schedule.

• I did manage to get to the gym 3 times a week for light cardio and some diagnostic strength training later in the day. If I got to the gym, then workout ensued. I actually do kind of like it, though these first two weeks I’ve been holding myself back to avoid injuring or bursting important bits of my body.

So was the two-week productivity reboot successful? On first look, not really. I came away feeling like managing even 3 tasks a day was beyond me. I wasn’t able to consistently be in a productive state, and I found myself low on energy and motivation. In fact, I felt tremendous resistance to starting certain projects that I knew to be essential. However, after reflecting on this, I have come to some surprising conclusions:

• I know that a lot of my starting resistance comes from a dislike of uncertainty and deferred reward. I can get over that: uncertainty is part of the artistic process that one must embrace, and I can cope with deferred reward if I am journaling the process of getting there (“the journal is the reward” :-) The 15-minute momentum trick helps launch most tasks.

• Despite my stratagems for coping with uncertainty and deferred reward, I still could not easily initiate certain tasks. Eventually it dawned on me that I deeply resented these tasks, and that I had allowed this subconscious reaction to generate tremendous friction. The eureka moment was when I realized my usual trick of “de-emotionalizing my reaction” to tedious/boring tasks didn’t work.

• Additionally, I had expectations that did not match the creator mindset. There is a tension between “management mindset” and “creator mindset” that rages in my head. When wearing my manager hat, I’m thinking about production efficiency and hitting targets as rapidly as possible. That’s the job. When I’m not seeing those deliverables produced quickly, I get antsy. As a creator, though, I need to be scratching-out new processes and approaches and be in the moment of discovery. Production come afterwards.

I tend to have a manager’s brain when it comes to projects, probably because that’s the way I’ve experienced creativity for most of my early career. The emphasis was on RESULTS NOW OR THE COMPANY DIES. I was not good at dealing with creativity AND productivity simultaneously, and having my first few company experiences flop badly makes me more sensitive to the possibility of failure than the excitement of creation.

Concluding Thoughts

I wouldn’t call the two-week reboot a roaring success. I didn’t get a whole lot done, though if I take the time to list them it actually might seem like a lot. The major accomplishments are psychological:

• A lot of Resistance comes from Resentment. So, I am dropping that attitude. There’s no reason to resent anything. It just raises my blood pressure and helps nothing. So screw that!

• When I am learning to do something new, as is the case most of the time, I need to push away the manager mindset and adopt the creator mindset in its place. This is another aspect of the explore-learn-build-share “creative cycle” that I had identified in 2012. I knew that this was the mindset and the engine that seemed to work best for me. The manager mindset doesn’t need to go away; it just needs to know its place and support the creative cycle instead of making it conform for the sake of predictability.

These insights are useful in that they remove friction from my desire to produce. They do not, however, provide additional motivating energy. I am still feeling pretty unexcited about doing the chore-like tasks, and that’s something I want to address in the next two-week spurt that will begin in June.

Other Articles in this Series

• Kicking off a New Personal Approach to Productivity
• Laying Down Process: First Pass
• Laying Down Process 2: Environmental Cues
• Productivity Reboot Week 2: Reviewing Options and Direction
• Productivity Reboot: Two Week Review
• Prepping for Phase 2: Changes to the Routine

Also:

• Related posts in the SOC Process Journal

There’s one big problem, though: it’s slow going because it takes more passes to create writing of this nature. This post, for example, is the third simplification of the article I started to summarize the “two-week productivity reboot” I’ve been doing. I’ve probably put 7 or 8 hours into it so far, and I’m writing this blog post just so I can get something posted. Producing frequent-yet-shorter updates that helps communicate my ongoing interests is part of the 2013 Dave Seah Website Reboot; I also think this increased discipline will be good practice for writing a book. Scrivener is the software that I believe will make wrangling the hundreds of ideas related to the writing much easier.

Scrivener, if you’re not familiar with it, is a word processor that makes it easy to work with a document that is made up of many smaller chunks of text. Each chunk of text can be reordered with drag-and-drop, annotated, and tagged in many ways. That makes it possible to really play with the order of paragraphs and words without fear. With a word processor like Microsoft Word, you deal with a single long roll of text, perhaps broken up into chapters and section heads, but still one long document. Changing the order of paragraphs requires tedious and error-prone copy-paste operations. Scrivener by comparison organizes multiple text documents as easily-moved chunks in a list. You can focus on an individual section to clarify and decide where it goes later, or you can show the text in context with the overall flow. I’m just starting with Scrivener, but it already seems like it will be a great tool for organizing my “thinking-in-text”. If you’re familiar with using non-linear film editing software, you might think of Scrivener as Final Cut Pro for words: you are selecting, ordering, and combining many clips into a single linear presentation.

Anyway, much of my writing to-date (here on the blog, at least) starts out as an exploration, probing the root of an initial thought to see what conclusions might fall out of it. Because it’s an exploratory process, I rarely start with a conclusion or finding because I haven’t figured it out yet. Because of that, my writing can be very confusing if you don’t already have some context about my daily activities. I’d like to fix that, which will help new readers figure out what the hell I’m talking about. Blogging in this more-structured, to-the-point style is a bit new for me; I naturally tend to like winding conversations that eventually collide with insights to produce a useful takeaway, and I like to share the moment of discovery as opposed to packaging it as if I’ve always known it. The new approach will process those conversations into succinct, benefit-focused prose that is easier to understand and test, once the discovery has passed the Dave tests for authenticity and truthiness.

The real trick will be to produce interesting content regularly despite an increase in writing time. We’ll see what happens!

ARGH

It’s 7:30PM and I am inexplicably feeling wiped-out. I did go to the gym for about 30 minutes of age-appropriate high-intensity cardio, and I am not yet used to it. While I’m being careful about staying within safe limits while I ramp up my routine, I have not been so careful with what I have been eating. I had a 32-oz sugar-free sport drink (it was 69 cents, which is like 50% off the usual price) and then some chicken wings and potato wedges from the take-out section of the supermarket. When I got home, I ate dinner and then spent some time examining the new outside measuring vernier scale caliper (for measuring thickness of paper and card stocks) and did about 30 minutes of research into a web framework. I made a few notes and then thought I should work on my website. That’s when the mind fog took over.

Since writing doesn’t take much energy from me, I thought I would try to describe the mind fog to try to understand what it is. I am noticing, however, that the mere act of typing thoughts down is making me slightly more alert.

MIND FOG STREAM

• Finding that fog is a kind of friction and it is a kind of thought obscurer. As I sit here, typing with my eyes closed as I scan my array of senses, I am observing my thoughts. I trigger a reaction by thinking of something I should do: fix the CSS on my website’s home page so it will display a “latest posts” blurb. I feel an irritation, a kind of scowling muscular twitch, isolated on the left side of my head, on the side. about level with my eyeball, located between the ear and the eye on the outside of my skull. It fades as I type up my observation.

• I start to form another directive, and it’s actually hard to do so. The Resistance stops the thought from even forming into words. Wow. I’m aware of my nose, which is slightly stuffed up from allergies, and itchy. My eyes are itchy too. Both sides of my head are throbbing every so slightly, and kind of tension headache that is in my eyes and the sides of my head before the ears. I wonder briefly if it’s the wireless dual-band base station I have just swapped-in. I have noticed that when it’s on, I tend to have a headache. I could be imagining it, but I’m going to swap it out with the old one just to eliminate it as a factor.

• That took a good 15 minutes of time wasting. Let’s try to form the work directive again. I feel a great lumpishness, a desire to sleep. A kind of tiredness a little deeper in my head, behind the eyes, like there are pockets of sleep. In general I have a headache. I’ve forgotten the directive already. I never formed it.

• It occurs to me that I’m sitting here hoping that the directive forms on its own volition, summoned by willpower. Willpower is absent. Only desire and expectation for someone ELSE to set the tone of the evening is here. I will have to summon willpower explicitly.

• Aaaaaaaaa.

• Wooorrk. Must Wooooork. Aaaaaarrr.

• Work on…uh, CSS! CSS for front page of website!

• The CSS issss broken. I have to move the thought bubble from the left to the right. The css layout is wrong. There’s a tricky div nesting with relative and absolute positioning. How do I move it and not break everything else? I don’t really remember how the CSS that makes the speech bubble works either, so I have to review.

• But hooow? Launch Dreamweaver. Find the page and the CSS file that goes with it. Argh, it’s in the theme folder for the developer theme. Losing focus. I hate hunting for files. But get over it. It’s not so bad. One foot in front of the other, y’know?

• It’s not going to get any easier. Any hope for flow is a pipe dream, at this stage. I don’t even know why there’s so much drama over this simple thing, opening up a couple of files in Dreamweaver. SO MUCH DRAMA. Now that I’ve pointed it out, there’s a pause, like a naughty child waiting to see if he gets away with his misdeed.

• NO.

• initiate Dreamweaver open. click. A couple dozen clicks later (sheesh), I have the right files open after recalling where these files were located exactly. Instead of visualizing the steps before, which would have annoyed me, I just clicked on them once I had the application over. The irritation at digging for files remains, but it was controllable. So much drama over simple things. Why do I dislike it so?

• Back to the mind fog. I have these files open and ready for modification. The whole of my head is expecting some kind of move that tells it what to do. I’m having trouble forming it. Fix the CSS. Argh. That means diagramming how it works right now. Irritating.

• another irritation at wondering how I should do the breakdown. I need a piece of paper or something. Sublime Text is great for this kind of off-the-cuff noodling. As I can’t find a pencil or a piece of paper to write up. My tiredness is returning already and I feel like going to sleep early. But DISCIPLINE must be…enforced? Eyes itch from pollen. Need to put some eye drops in, but they can wait…

• opening Sublime Text. Looking at header.php. Transcribing DIV structure and position cascade. Picking place to start…

As soon as I started to deconstruct the DIV structure, I picked up where I had left off from the other day. While working, I had an epiphany about where I could store the custom text that I wanted to show in the box, which was cool And now, the work is actually done. It’s 930 now. I started this at 730.

I’m surprised at HOW MUCH RESISTANCE there was. It’s gone now, having been vanquished by the pleasure of having gotten this one thing off my plate. The change is small, but essential; look at the home page and you’ll see a “latest posts” bubble in the upper right.

ANALYSIS

My brain, apparently, did not want to deal with the initial messy task of looking through HTML/CSS to refactor the positioning chain into something that would work. I have such a strong aesthetic dislike for HTML/CSS and Javascript that I think this overpowered the actual work. I wish I’d noted when I started to actually get into the flow…my guess it was about 5-10 minutes of mind fog, followed by 90 minutes of focused hacking. Astonishing.

I don’t understand where the mind fog came from. My mind is clear now…where did the fogginess go? Did carbohydrates somehow work their way out of my system? I don’t think that was it.

From what I recall, the moment of clarity came when I started writing thing down and solving the problem. I had the tools and process to debug and refine the solution. There were a few missteps, and for a moment I thought I had blown away the front page when I deleted a page, but I was able to restore it. There was always one more thing to try, and this chain of activity drew me into its own flow until the job was done. The moment I could assess the change, other changes became obvious. I have been hyper-concerned about implementing this change until now, and now it’s over and I feel better.

I think I had built up the unpleasantness of the task based on a few factors:

• I really do think CSS is a terrible declaration language, so fundamentally broken in its conception. This makes me not want to deal with it. It also makes me think of all the stupid things I’m going to have to deal with to get it to work. I overestimate the amount of crap I have to deal with, and underestimate my efficiency in resolving it.
• I had built this one little task up in my mind to be something tedious, one more tiny step in a long to-do list.

But I can’t account for the tremendous resistance. Fuzzy-headedness. Fogginess. Sleepiness. Headaches (now gone). Itchy eyes. I had become hyper-sensitive to every sensation in my body that could be construed as negative. In fact, if sit still and listen to my body, I actually still do have a headache. I can feel the tension in my temples. And my eyes are indeed still itchy. I can feel the soreness in my back and legs from the cardio earlier today. The resistance appears to have drawn from what was already there, but amplified the signal into my brain. My brain was desperately seeing a way out, and grasping at anything that could feed my tired brain an excuse to not do anything. “But I’m not feeling well!” whined the Resistance, pointing out a number of aches and strains around the body. But really, it was just my attitude against it, a long-standing resentment.

A lot of the things I’m stuck on have great big pools of resentment tied up with them. The e-commerce and international fulfillment quandry I’ve faced for years? I really resent how obtuse and stupid the whole process is, and how difficult it is to find good clear information. Likewise with programming IOS or Javascript-based Web Apps. The languages involved are ones I’m particularly not fond of (Objective C…yeesh) or consider to be toys. Learning languages? I despise most language materials for their lack of clarity and nuance in speech. The same goes for MOST learning materials. They fill me with anger and self-righteousness. I am feeling it right now. I get angry at soggy hamburger buns and tasteless fried chicken, the poor quality of tomatoes and the price of garlic powder. I am so not the Big Lebowski. Or maybe I am, filled with silent rage but unable to really act on it because that’s not my thing.

Well, this seething resentment also seems to feed The Resistance. So I think I will have to let it go. Instead, I can look at materials not as examples of failed communication, but as raw ore from which to construct my own learning guides. The raw sources are there; they just need massaging into something I can use or perhaps (as in the case of bland food) learn to correct.

Recap

Last week I established some new routines designed to simplify my daily tasks under three focusing categories, allowing myself to define the tasks that moved these forward on-the-fly in small steps:

• Website Content Improvements
• External Clients
• Gym

Furthermore, I kicked-off each day with a 15-minute focusing ritual, before looking at email or anything else. This was to be followed by an immediate jump into Content Improvement or External Client Project work, with at least 15 minutes of work. I expected to work only 2-4 hours on these projects, allowing the rest of the time to be taken up by Happy Bubble Time (HBT is unstructured exploration project time).

I had a number of epiphanies, which I documented under the tag xpr-2013a on main blog and stream of consciousness journal. Overall I’d say that week 1 was not efficient even with the very generous schedule and (I think) light structure; my working hypothesis was that with less pressure to product RESULTS in an hour, I would be more inclined to just start the projects. This is the big sticking point for me, just getting rolling. A few things got done, but only 50% each day.

Today’s Assessment

Today, I’m struck by my overall reaction: I don’t want any structure, even if it’s structure I design myself. I suspect I really need to admit to myself that external motivation is indeed mandatory. There otherwise is no natural reason that I would want to go to the gym, work on other people’s projects, or work on my own website. Intellectually I know these are all good for me, but they are deferred rewards. Either I tighten down the rules and enforce them on myself (unlikely) or I accept a lower level of productivity.

The trick, as I mentioned earlier, is getting started. Reviewing my list of tasks, the emotion that I feel is boredom. Though, that’s not quite right either. When I deconstruct each task, I find they are actually somewhat interesting: reviewing some web technology to see what it could do, modifying my WordPress theme to improve blog visibility on the home page, and so on. However, “interesting” isn’t good enough, apparently. I need these tasks done, but in my eyes they are chores that need to be done so I can reap greater reward down the road: resources that can deliver freedom to me. In the interim, though, I’m not uncomfortable enough to really want to impose tasks on myself—that’s the opposite of freedom, after all—though I do reap the emotion of desire and frustration. SO MUCH I want. And yet I am stymied by this feeling of boredom.

Here are a few theories on why I am having the mehs:

• I might just need a vacation. Then again, I wouldn’t enjoy it knowing there’s so much stuff to do. That would be a good opportunity to practice some mental discipline in putting those thoughts out of my head.

• I have been very productive before, like during the Product A Day Challenge. What is different now? There’s no feeling of mission or accountability to anyone except myself. Perhaps I need an audience or some measurable concrete goal. That element of human connection and shared problem solving is sorely lacking.

• It may be that my desire for tremendous productivity is wishful thinking, naive, or merely an excuse to spend more time in my head analyzing it to death.

What jumps out at me is the second theory, though the others also resonate. There’s a desire for meaning and connection with people.

On the other hand, what I really need to do is make things, as this is the vehicle for financial and creative freedom. However, this desire to make is about the end product, not the journey toward mastery. I’m impatient, and want to have this all working now.

Hmm. To summarize:

I want to make things to achieve creative independence, but I’m bored by the idea of making the things I need to make, because I am feeling disconnected from people and from meaning. While the tasks themselves have interesting technical aspects, there is not enough of an overlap between “what I like” and the “purpose behind the task” to develop enthusiasm to start. This creates resistance to starting.

Creating Meaning and Connection

I don’t know if I can entirely deprogram myself to emphasize journey rather than end result, but I think it’s worth a try. Perhaps that was what I was getting at when I tried to make my simplified daily schedule. I reduced the workload and increased the amount of Happy Bubble Time because I wanted to harness playfullness that lead to a flow state. However, the way I tried to approach that was by just reducing the “required time” doing work-type stuff. What if instead I converted all the tasks to a form of play? Or directed play? I would have to let go of the idea that there’s any kind of schedule to product WIDGET X in a certain number of hours to be efficient (the project manager mentality).

The challenge, of course, is that when I look at these tasks on my task list, I still find them boring. To make them more innately interesting, I could try combining them with activities that I already am compulsive about:

• blogging what I’m doing
• creating original tools that make it easier
• solving multiple problems with one solution
• sharing and seeing what happens

My gut reaction is that this sounds really inefficient. It would be better if I could sit still and code for four hours, but I do need motivation for it in the form, perhaps, of:

• Another coder that needs what I’m working on to continue his/her work.
• Cross-training with another interested programmer or designer to develop our skills at the same time.
• Solving a problem for someone who plans on using my advice to move toward their own goals in real-time, if I’m being rewarded somehow (not necessarily monetarily) for my effort.

I’ve found this hard to find unless I am running the project or working with a peer. So maybe I need to really push the connect challenge by actually forming a team of interested people to work for me. While I can’t offer a lot of money, perhaps there are people out there looking for the same kind of shared mission, even if it’s just for a week or so. To attract a team in the first place, I need to show my work to show that what I’m doing is of high standards and of value. Transparency, commitment, competence, excellence, and accomplishment need to all shine through…

This could all tie together nicely…I’ll give it a try for this week. The challenge: demonstrate capacity for self-leadership as a beacon for those seeking a leader. Kind of frightening: do I have the stuff to do it? It’s like an interview and recruitment drive at the same time, and these are skills I know are necessary in the long run. Certainly, this focus can work as the THEME OF THE WEEK for giving an added sense of urgency to the work I am doing: to do the tasks on my task list like they are part of a leadership test.

Other Articles in this Series

• Kicking off a New Personal Approach to Productivity
• Laying Down Process: First Pass
• Laying Down Process 2: Environmental Cues
• Productivity Reboot Week 2: Reviewing Options and Direction
• Productivity Reboot: Two Week Review
• Prepping for Phase 2: Changes to the Routine

Also:

• Related posts in the SOC Process Journal

I love timers. This one (click the image above) is for a “Scientific 7-Minute Workout” described in the New York Times, counting down the intervals while showing you when to rest and when to do a particular exercise. The timer itself was created by Lindsay Silver and posted to Hacker News; its lineage is summarized by LifeHacker. I thought it was pretty cool, and I just like timers; haven’t tried the actual exercise yet :-) Hat tip to Eric Baumgartner for posting it on his Facebook page!

I let the alarm buzz through for two hours, only sitting up when I realized it had stopped buzzing. I also realized that I hate buzzer mode, and like to wake up to radio mode in the morning these days, as it gets the brain primed with enough thoughts to kickstart the body into action. Though I suppose it might also plant DISTRACTIONS too. Oh well.

Out of bed by 900AM, I went downstairs and did a very abbreviated 15M startup. It only took about 5 minutes to review yesterday’s notes and decide on what to do, so the rest of the tie I took the most unpleasant of tasks and started to plod through it. Once started, the task was no longer unpleasant as I flowed into problem solving mode. Again, it’s amazing at how much resistance builds up.

I think the resistance breaks because when I’m thinking of doing a task, I am thinking of how I would rather be doing something else, like work on new notebooks or designs. My resistances are born of impatience and a desire to have immediate results, but the work I must do is not compatible with those impulses. Basically, I’m thinking like a manager instead of a problem solver or a creative.

So, I fight the negative reactions by either attacking the early in the day when I am at my energy peak, or I try to enter a zen-like NO EMOTION state so I can mechanically just get going. Once past the initial barriers, my mind is engaged with the problem and the resistance is gone. Perhaps there’s a way to skip the resistance and move directly into problem solving mode. One way to do that is to drop the expectations of results that I have, and shift to learning. Allow myself the time to wander through a problem and try some stuff, rather than feel under the gun to spend as little time doing research so I can jump right into production. It’s going to take the same amount of time if I do fun research first, indulging my desire to structure information and set things up for efficient production, compared to just jumping into it and discovering that I have to redo the work over again anyway. My expectations, though, are really set by the manager mindset, which is a form of gaslighting.

I’m starting to wander here, so I’ll try to pull it together:

• The resistance I feel to starting unpleasant tasks are due to negative emotions and the desire to do something else. Or resentment at having to do the task at all for little perceived gain in the near term. I just want the thing done. However, resentment fades once I get into the actual problem solving. Then, it’s interesting because I’m no longer thinking I have to meet some kind of arbitrary expectation on speed of delivery.

• In other words, I tend to have a manager’s mindset when it comes to looking at tasks in the FUTURE, judging them on several criteria: estimated time, cost in resources, and the emphasis on ASAP. This is a dumb attitude to have for my own projects, especially if there are many unknown factors.

• Instead of having a manager mindset, perhaps I could reduce the resistance by adopting the creator or explorer mindset in approaching all tasks. Spend time exploring the problem in search of a solution. It usually doesn’t take more than an hour to get to a good ballpark estimate. And it’s OK if the first approach doesn’t work in my book. If you’re doing something new for the first time, estimates are basically guesses. It’s only after the process is formalized can you make GOOD estimates based on prior work logs. But I digress…the main point is that dropping the ASAP mindset would be good for reducing the initial resistance. Everything can be a fun puzzle instead of a drag on my time. It’s entirely a question of having the right mindset, and not letting people gaslight you into thinking you’re not doing it right.

With that in mind, tomorrow is going to be more of the same:

• Coding!
• Content Review!
• Learning New Coding Concepts!

I’ll try to keep the mindset of exploration at the forefront, and trust that the problems will get solved along the way.

Related SOC Posts

• First Day of New Routine
• Day 2 Not So Good, But There’s Always Tomorrow
• Prioritization Failure, but Ok Productivity on Day 3
• The 4th Day: An Epiphany about Negative Mindsets

The biggest resistance I feel right now is to a particular coding project that involves rewriting someone else’s code. I got about 15 minutes into it around 8PM, choosing a very specific task: find a file, convert it to the appropriate format, and figure out where to save it. This was far too late in the day. Tomorrow I am queuing it up first-thing so it gets some love. I am a reluctant programmer that is finicky about development process, As I’ve mentioned in other articles, programming for me feels likes being trapped myself in a tiny box, turning a crank for an indeterminate amount of time before something good pops out. It’s no wonder that my lizard brain / Stupid Head wants to avoid it.

Knowing that, it would make sense to do these code projects first thing but for one problem: I am also determined to prioritize my own projects as much if not more than other people’s projects. I know it sounds terrible, but as a small business owner that wants to grow a business I have to be very aware of what MY needs are, and treat the preciously. I have seen so many small businesses that have the desire to do something great for their own destiny, but they treat their internal projects as “would be nice” because it’s easier to punt them and work on something that brings in money NOW than speculatively sometime in the future. As a result, these companies never grow.

That said, there’s a BALANCE that must be maintained. The balance doesn’t have to be equal every day, though. In my original plan for the week, I wanted to split the time equally EVERY DAY between my projects and other people’s projects, like getting three square meals in a day, every day. Today, however, shows that I have to be careful about which project goes first, or at least be prepared to handle the consequences. Tomorrow I rebalance.

Related SOC Posts

• First Day of New Routine
• Day 2 Not So Good, But There’s Always Tomorrow
• Prioritization Failure, but Ok Productivity on Day 3
• The 4th Day: An Epiphany about Negative Mindsets

Though I was already feeling very behind schedule, I stuck to the general morning algorithm: take quick shower, feed cats, ignore email, and start a 15-minute push to clarify what I was doing. I spent about half the time reviewing what I wrote the previous day, refining it and breaking out the interesting bits into a list of 26 ways I felt resistance, which could be summed up as, I don’t WANNA do it! because It’s boring / I don’t have everything I need in one place / I am bad at it. The list has a few other nuances, so I’m not going to write it up here, but it’s an interesting line of inquiry. It’s been helping me move past most of my conscious resistances.

But alas, today was not a day where my resistances were conscious. It was one of those days where my mind wandered and just didn’t focus sharply on any one task. My mistake, in hindsight, was not to just pick something to do and do it. Instead, my attention wandered without any conscious control or purpose. I had one conference call via Skype, which lasted for almost two hours, and then after that I ate something and that was that.

I did manage to get a few things done:

• I rebuilt a sub-irrigation planter, layered it with potting mix and tarp, and transplanted a tomoato plant into it. I found all the hose hardware and snaked it from the basement spigot up to the deck, hammering supports into place to keep the hose off the ground. This had been a large task in my mind, but it got done.

• I attended, for the first time ever, a Chinese language group meetup. I had been nervous about going, and I accidentally almost caused an accident when I didn’t see a car in my blind spot, but the meetup itself was informative and got me thinking about how to once and for all become fluent in Chinese. In the past, I have been highly self-conscious about my terrible pronunciation, but with all my recent review of “fears, anxieties, and their names” I knew that it really wasn’t an issue. Go and make mistakes, and be merry!

I didn’t make it to the gym, though. Maybe Monday-Wednesday-Friday is OK to do this first week. I’m going to have to go to sleep at a reasonable time, too, so I’m finishing up the day with this blog post and have set the alarm to go off at 8AM.

Tomorrow, I want to set some specific to-dos with concrete deliverables. No more than three tasks. I feel some twinge of resistance as I type that…it’s the feeling that I’m setting myself up for failure, and that I’ll fall short. Though it isn’t JUST that…there’s a little bit of fear of being trapped or stuck doing something that I don’t want to do. It doesn’t entirely make sense to me, and I don’t think I am capturing the feeling accurately in words. It seems to be triggered by any promise I make that involves locking myself down to do something that I don’t particularly want to do. Though it’s funny…I haven’t even picked the tasks, and I’m still feeling the negative reaction. My subconscious is automatically associating “have to do” with “this sucks” even if I get to pick the tasks. Fascinating.

Related SOC Posts

• First Day of New Routine
• Day 2 Not So Good, But There’s Always Tomorrow
• Prioritization Failure, but Ok Productivity on Day 3
• The 4th Day: An Epiphany about Negative Mindsets

Sitting down to write, I thought of three things I wanted to get done:

1. Rewrite the copy on the home page of davidseah.com so it was less wishy-washy.
2. Get going on some client website maintenance work.
3. Go to the gym

I got all of them done. I attribute the success to maintaining a good attitude, which I managed to trick myself into action by doing the following:

• When I thought of something to do, I considered why I shouldn’t do something about it at that moment.

• When I felt resistance or negative reactions arise, I wrote them down as best as I could to understand what the feeling was or was coming from. I then asked myself if they were really important. It turns out that I just dislike having to gather, hunt, remember, calculate, sequence, or organize anything because it takes time. And why does this bother me? The best I can figure is that it seems like a waste of time, and I just want to get things over with without having to think about it. However, I couldn’t think of why this should stop me from doing what I had to do, other than wanting to be pissy.

• Having determined that my resistances were coming from a petulant place, I then chose to put them out of my head. It was like ignoring someone who is whining about having to work. I just moved my hands, because it was the thing to do. Sure, I didn’t particularly enjoy having to search for a list of ancient passwords or remember how a particular website worked, but I accepted the chore as necessary. An interesting side effect was that I regathered the material in a form that would be more efficient to use in the future, with everything I needed to know in one password-protected spreadsheet along with any workings notes. That felt good to do, and this helped lift my spirits. Efficiency!

Another interesting realization of the day was that the three tasks provided scaffolding for related tasks. As I performed the work on them, I opportunistically took care of other tasks along the way. For example, going to the gym entailed driving near the supermarket. I remembered that there was a tomato plant there that had looked sad and unloved, so I bought it. I then drove to Home Depot for some potting mix, and saw that the other tomato hybrids were available. I got everything home, and over the course of the day I found the missing bits of the gardening kit. I didn’t get everything potted, but I made significant progress and that felt good. It wasn’t even on the list!

As it was the first day, this was more of a light assessment day than a real push to get a lot of work done. I’ve been very gentle with myself when it comes to demanding high levels of productivity. Stuff got done, I was in a good mood, and I maintained a sense of continuity from the previous weekend’s writing. So far, so good.

Tomorrow I am going to revisit the same 15M writing I did in the morning about my daily plan. I’m going to read what I wrote yesterday, then rewrite it for today (first saving a copy).

Related SOC Posts

• First Day of New Routine
• Day 2 Not So Good, But There’s Always Tomorrow
• Prioritization Failure, but Ok Productivity on Day 3
• The 4th Day: An Epiphany about Negative Mindsets

Although the memory is painful, I try not to beat myself up over it. I was a very sensitive kid, I realize now, and living in a foreign country (Taiwan) was more stressful for me than I think I knew at the time. I lived in a kind of protective bubble where I didn’t have to feel like I was a stranger in a strange land, where I could tune-out everything else and be by myself. It just occurred to me, as I type on my iPad in my empty house, that I’m still living in that bubble. I’ve punched a few new holes in it, but the feeling of being an outsider has never really gone away; communication with people outside the bubble remains muffled and distant. On the other hand, the bubble may have been just part of my personality, not a reaction to the environment. I share a personality profile with the so-called INFP type, and as youths we’re a really moody bunch. A different personality in the same situation might have reached out and enjoyed the strangeness of Asia, living a more vibrant life. That certainly wasn’t me!

But I digress; the point is that I try to be as my mother would be, and though our interests and approaches to life are different, I think the core desire to…well, I’m not sure what that shared desire is. Mom cared about me in a way that I never returned as an adult, and I think what I’m trying to do is care about people in the same way. Not judging, but supporting. With generosity. Because it’s the right thing to do, and it puts positive energy into the world. I learned these lessons too late to share them with Mom, to appreciate her love and return it in kind. So I keep trying, in other venues and in aspects of my work, to keep that spirit alive. I can only hope that Mom would have approved. I think we would have had a good time talking about it.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! I miss you so much.

Today I am doing a 24-hour fast as part of a physical reset, which I will break tomorrow morning. I’m only going to drink water and maybe some tea, then have a nice breakfast somewhere in downtown Nashua or at the Airport Cafe. I’ve read here and there than 24-hour fasts every other days seem to have positive health benefits in rats. I’ve done them before, and found the sensation of being hungry to heighten my senses. It also forces me to do something other than snack while building anticipation for the next day. I suppose it might also be another way to develop discipline by deferring reward, a meme that has been making the rounds in business and parenting circles. I hate waiting for anything, but apparently the ability to do this is strongly correlated with success. But really, I just feel like fasting today.

Yesterday I declared that I was starting a new two-week sprint focusing on 3 main goals + Happy Bubble Time. I can’t remember exactly what they are, so let me take a look…ah yes, they break down as follows:

• Improving the Blog – Finding Content Collections, Form Descriptions, and Producing an Improvement Every Day
• Client Projects
• Daily Gym Habit
• Happy Bubble Time

If you’re not familiar with Happy Bubble Time, it is the pursuit of interest in a singular, stress-free manner. The basic approach is to make a “bubble of time” where I don’t have to worry about other stuff, and allow myself to play. This is harder than it sounds, since I’m accustomed to thinking about entire projects and their constituent components at once. It’s a good way to freak myself out, and it’s a terrible mindset to have when one is trying to be creative, a vestige of having come in through art as an engineer/manager instead of through play.

Since both my 715AM Morning Ritual and Wave ritiuals are in hiatus, I have decided to use the Stream of Consciousness Journal (SOC) the new outlet. As I mentioned yesterday, I seem to function better if I’m writing about what I’m doing. I also like sharing these thoughts, as it forces me to think about what I’m writing and I’m always curious if something will come back. That’s part of the fun of sharing what you do: seeing what comes back. It’s almost always a surprise.

I’m going to incorporate a few elements from the Ritual and the Wave into my SOC journal entries:

• It’s the first thing I do in the morning, and I do it every day to maintain continuity. This is one of the best parts of the Ritual.
• I write as if I’m writing to a friend, which is a takeaway from the Wave and also from my earliest years of blogging.

As for daily scheduling, I haven’t thought yet about what that will be. I feel the urge to make a decision and stick to it, but instead I’m going to run an experiment for the day and note what I do. I woke up at 830 without the alarm going off, and it’s now 900AM.

I’m not quite sure what I should do, and this is creating mental friction. I appear to associate the feeling of uncertainty with the fear of being trapped by something not-fun. Not-fun is either something I’m being forced to do based on someone else’s expectations and desires, or it’s being responsible for delivering something that I don’t yet know how to do.

Fortunately, I have methods for coping with this anxiety. First I have just named the fears, and this allows me to tame the lizard brain with a rational mind. Next, I know that writing helps me through uncertainty, and that daily continuity helps with progress. I actually have a text file where I maintain daily continuity on projects, and I merely need to remember that.

The biggest unknown, which I can look at now without the underlying sense of dread that I had in the previous paragraph, is what specifically I should do. Or rather, can do, as there is no “should”; no good comes from gaslighting myself through another anonymous boogeyman’s expectations. Rather than plan everything out, I think that I can apply a time-blocking approach to each of my four daily goals. Actually, “goals” might be an overstatement; “activity playtimes” is more like it. Goal implies a set of measurable achievements with corresponding benefits, whereas “Activity Playtime” more accurately implies time spent without those expectations. From past experience, I know that allowing myself to engage in such playtime eventually leads to more concrete planning later. I just need to play with the goals for now so I can gather the information I need to both materially and emotionally understand the nature of the work. Then, I can do more formal structuring if it’s needed.

For today, it’s just activity playtime.

UPDATE

It’s now 2:52PM, and I have been spending HBT reviewing some old Apple II circuit reference manuals. I never really learned how to apply any practical hardware building knowledge when I studied computer engineering, because I had moved into software and then design. Reviewing the Apple II stuff now is a way of picking off where I left off.

Anyway, I also wrote some posts on the main blog detailing the thought process behind this new push. I wrote down a process and listed a few tools that I would use. However, these tools are accessible only from a computer. What do I use for offline notekeeping? A paper notebook? My iPad? Right now I’m updating this posting through the WordPress app, using an external bluetooth keyboard so typing isn’t painful. I need a PHYSICAL KIT to go along with the SOFTWARE KIT..

I also figured out a way to tape post-it pads to my door that works pretty well. It might be worth a blog post in itself.

I thought I would start off the day by diving right into some project work, but instead I felt a tremendous desire to sleep in. This happens to be the first rainy day I’ve seen in 17 days, too; the entire time that Dad was visiting with his foster son had been bizarrely sunny, without the usual mud that accompanies the typical New England spring. I managed to strip the sheets from the beds upstairs, falling asleep on the futon couch only once, and get them to the laundry room. THat has so far been the highlight of my day, and I’ve decided to not beat myself up over my lack of productivity. This is a day I need to myself, I think.

Still, I feel the desire to do a bit of writing. I know from experience that when I take the time to write, my thoughts become clearer and I gain a renewed sense of purpose. I haven’t been writing for myself at all for many weeks, other than the occasional mandatory blog post. Writing is the driver of my thoughts and actions; if I don’t write, I don’t do anything. Writing is the way I can productively spend time alone.

Now that I’m a few minutes into the writing, I can see that I’m feeling some resistance to doing work. I’m also feeling kind of blah about my goals; maybe some stream-of-consciousness writing will help me figure it out.

Unpacking Small Resistances

I’ve been thinking that I haven’t been writing on my website as often as I should for an odd reason: I don’t feel like I can write anytime or anything as I used to be. I also realized that I didn’t particularly enjoy writing at my desk. I like sitting somewhere else with my laptop and just letting the words come out. Or at least I used to. The Stream of Consciousness blog is intended for this; I have to get over the feeling that I should be making Epic Content and allow the words to flow.

I’ve also been avoiding my laptop because I’ve found the experience of using it rather unpleasant. This may be a resistance factor also. I’ve just reinstalled MacOS X on it fresh, with a newly-partioned hard drive, in an effort to get it to run at a reasonable speed. Previously, I had used my laptop primarily in Windows 7 through bootcamp, as I wasn’t ready to make the switch from PC to Mac. It didn’t help that Mac OS X ran universally slower than Windows 7 for the things I wanted to do, and that I didn’t have a Macintosh license for Adobe Creative Suite. Now that I’m on the Creative Cloud, this is no longer and issue, and so I am making the effort to use Mac OS X as the main operating system on this laptop.

Since reinstalling Mountain Lion, I’ve gotten a bit more used to Mac OS X, and I think this is helping lower my resistance to booting it. Next, I have noted that I am not enjoying the typing feel of this keyboard. I hadn’t really noticed that it was creating a tactile feeling that I was subconsciously reacting to. I just hit it with some windows and paper towels, scrubbing down each individual key. While they still feel kind of gross compared to my $150 desktop keyboards, they are now tolerable. Small improvements like this are incredibly important to me. Call me fussy.

The next small resistance is the act of writing itself. Lately I’ve not been enjoying the writing activity inside WordPress, because browser windows feel impermanent to me. It doesn’t help that the browser editing experience is awkward. Scrolling up and down requires that I have clicked in the right window to activate the right set of controls, and I find this aggravating. I’m not a big fan of the distractionless writing mode in WordPress either. Not sure why. So today, I’m writing this blog post in Sublime Text 2 as I sit on my couch. I’ve expanded the size of the font several times, and it feels quite comfortable now. I’ll copy/paste this into WordPress later.

Unpacking the Big Nuts

Now that the small silly resistances have been dealt with, I feel that I can start to piece together a new routine for the next two weeks. I have some immediate client work to take care of, but I can simultaneously start to address the big nuts that I wrote about in my recent post on Groundhog Days Resolutions plus a few more:

• Content Audit / Continual Website Improvements
• Form Organization & Explanatory Materials
• Index Card Blocks
• Making Products Every Day
• Game Programming
• 3D Modelling
• Music Composition
• Learning Chinese
• International Fulfillment
• Going Back to the Gym

This is a lot, so I need to structure my approach so I am not overwhelmed by everything at once. It’s easy to make a big list and think the solution is tobe more efficient and disciplined. That is a high-stress and energy-intensive solution, and I would rather avoid it. Instead, I’m going to designate Content Auditing, Forms, and Making Products Every Day as my main “job”. This will be accompanied by another chunk of client projects or reader requests. The last chunk will be going to the gym; everything else will fall into place as “Happy Bubble Time”, which is my unstructured exploration time. I’m going to place extremely low minimal times on each of the three chunks: 15 minutes! From past experience I know that this is enough to get moving, and I’ll likely do more than 15 minutes. I’ll try this for a week, starting next week for certain. I may start the routine as a practice run tomorrow (Thursday, May 9) just to get a feeling for it.

The schedule may seem extremely light, but I am not interested in packing my days overly full. My theory is that if I keep the minimums low, I will actually be more productive than if I try to schedule more. When I’m working with other people in a leadership role, a challenge list is more exciting because the team is also the audience, and I am fascinated by interpersonal dynamics. When I’m working by myself, however, I find a big challenge depressing because it takes a lot of effort to discover then build what is needed, and there is no audience to report to.

Which makes me think that this is why I’m thinking of taking up the daily blogging again; I like solving problems and trying things out with a group, and this is one way of doing it.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings!

Regrouping

According to my notes, on March 23 (Day 16) I realized I was stuck on presenting myself. This isn’t a design issue, but a content issue. I was fretting over not looking good, and this was making me overly fussy and frustrated. Compounding this was my dislike of using Photoshop for any kind of layout, so I “got over it” and told myself that there are plenty of people who like it fine; let me just be sloppy with layers and adjust to the workflow it offers. I have a tendency to use Photoshop as someone who survived a Great Famine and am stingy with using memory; I grew up programming computers with 1MHz 8-bit CPUs and 48K of directly-accessible memory total, so I’m like your grandfather hoarding rolls of toilet paper because he remembers what it was like to not be able to get the stuff during the Big War.

But I digress. I recognized I was paralyzed by just not knowing how to describe myself. I knew what I wanted to describe, from the cloud-tag work I’d done in previous weeks, but how to make it look good and not make me look like an ass? That was still bothering me.

The solution: Back to first principles. Let me not worry about style and pizazz, and just speak plainly. In fact, let me just list what should appear, following a simple visual hierarchy.

Here’s how the work broke down over the week:

Day 16

Here’s what I drew on the 23rd, in Illustrator I think. From top-to-bottom, I start with the header, “Dave identity”, and framing statements about creative independence. This establishes who I say I am, and also is the gateway to a lot of the productivity writing. Next is the “What I’m doing”, as blocks of content. Last is the list of things I have for sale.

Day 17

The first barebone stabs at getting the HTML structure setup on my staging blog. This is the first layout I can start to see how the elements might look, and boy is it ugly. It took a while to come up with the skeleton text in the top section.

On the technical side, I did make a spreadsheet to calculate the CSS values I needed to construct perfect multi-column layouts, and I did learn a few bits about CSS floats. Floats are really stupid, but at least I understand their use a bit more. This took another couple of hours to work out.

Looking for the next hit of work to liven things up, I next worked on the product area at the bottom.

I wanted “Pinterest-style” blocks, and had never made anything like that in HTML. My new understanding of CSS floating, though, made this relatively easy to do. I was pleased that it went quickly, though I didn’t like the ragged heights. I would worry about this later…it had been a long day.

Day 18

I worked a bit more on the look of the product area, moving the title up into the image area. This was a look I’d seen on Ars Technica’s redesign, and I had liked it.

I worked on HTML-fying the header as according to my earlier design markup waaay back from Day 9. This went fairly smoothly; I rediscovered the power of line-height in getting consistent text positioning inside of DIVs.

I also got rid of the first sentence, and moved the template to my actual website so I can see it with actual content (eventually). Only administrators such as myself see the website with the in-progress theme. I’m using WordPress, if that isn’t obvious, and a plugin called Theme Test Drive to do this. I’m making the actual changes to a child theme of my main theme, a custom theme I made called “Seah Unified”.

I took a break from HTML and spent a few hours shooting and processing a new header photo, which you can see here. I tried to bunch a lot of things into one photo that had some meaning to me. It was shot in natural light on a tiny fold-out tray table, shot at f/5.6 at ISO100 with my Canon 40D, using a USB cable to control shooting from my desktop computer.

With the photo taken, I was able to drop it into the new header. Now it’s starting to look like a site. I still don’t know how to handle the difficult inner content sections, but I’m too fried to take it on.

Day 19

Not sure why this screenshot is less vibrant than the others; it is saved as 8-bit PNG to save space (me being stingy with bits again), but the others are too.

Anyway, the changes here are in the latest posts section. This little list is pulling recent posts using a custom query, and I’ve implemented fancy sprite-based graphical bullets on the list.

Ok, we’re starting to get somewhere. I’m not loving it, but I have to forge onward.

Day 20

I have made some significant changes. I added a placeholder image to the recent projects area, increased the number of listed posts to balance the columns. I also added a background color and indented all the content to line up with “DAVE SEAH”, which helps run the eye right to the bumper text. However, it also unbalances the page as a whole, which disturbs me. I let it go for now.

I also reworked the bumper so it appears above the “creative independence” area and wrote some initial copy. The idea is to immediate set a personal tone to the website. It was painful to write, but I am starting to get a feel for what works (or doesn’t) for me.

One thing that bothers me is that the site is starting to look way too TEXTY. There’s a lot of text. And the list of posts doesn’t really go with the recent projects area, though visually they look related.

This is the kind of design insight I was waiting for based on the actual content. Unlike a project where the content is already known, I was in the position to make anything I wanted. That is paralyzing when it comes to making a finished design, because the content isn’t even spec’d. But having seen what this looks like, I can now decide to make a different kind of content. I’d been working with a slider script called RoyalSlider for another client; perhaps this could be made to work?

Day 21

More fiddling with the top text, adjusting spacing and presentation of the “productivity – creativity – autonomy” blocks, which will become clickable entry points into some kind of “creative independence” subsection that I need to make. I might start by making this into a single page with multiple link anchors, listing pertinent posts. That would be easiest for now. It’s the basis of a very large content nut that I will have to address in the near future.

I also have integrated RoyalSlider, which has many options but many gotchyas, into the project area. It cost me $20 to get the WordPress plugin version, which was new to me. I’m still not sure at this point how to get the look I want with the slider, which makes assumptions about the aspect ratio of the images.

I eventually decide that this area should be a full-width image and fade-in-out. This helps rebalance the page, and becomes a second header.

Looking at this screenshot right now, I see that it probably needs to be a little shorter to match the height of the top header, or be slightly smaller even. However, this is only evident when looking at the page as a whole; this isn’t possible on most monitors because the header and slider areas aren’t completely on the screen at the same time. Still…a smaller slider area will save a few kilobytes of memory

I reworked the bottom part into a slider as well. It turns out that I actually probably wanted what is called an “image carousel”, not an “image slider”, to implement that properly. However, I am already freaking out a bit about the number of scripts that load on my home page, so I let it be.

This is starting to look finished!

A bit more space adjustment, and I decided to use (gasp) centered text on the bottom two sections. I may return to left alignment once I design the actual slides that go into “New & Notable”. Since this section fades-in rather than slides horizontal, I could maintain the left margin. I don’t know. I’m probably done with this for now. On Monday, I want to be ready to get this deployed on the website. There’s plenty of work to be done before April 4, the next Groundhog Day Resolutions Progress day.

Not to mention also that I have to back-fit the changes into the WordPress template in a clean manner. Ugh. Still so much work to do. Sigh.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Here’s a comparison of the current website’s home page and the new design.

I’m too close to this to really tell if it’s an improvement or not. Functionally, I think it will be an improvement; I’ll measure this with click-throughs using web analytics. Will it result in more people engaging with the content? I hope so.

One observation is that I’m still very tight with my whitespace. Part of this is due to the fear that too much content will appear “below the fold”. I think that this applies only if the top page fails to engage people enough to do something, like scroll the page to see more, but we shall see. And I still have been reserving the top-right of the header for some notifications of “what’s hot”, overlapping the image, which is well above the fold.

Yeah, I could stand to inject more whitespace and loosen up the design a tad. But I don’t need to worry about that now.

Wrapping Up

I think I am actually out of the website design woods for now, and in April I can get back to doing the fun stuff: writing and making things!

I almost forgot why I was doing this all in the first place: it’s too make it easier for people to figure out what me and my site is about, providing entry points to the best content I have. It’s also to establish the “Goods & Services” as a primary entry point, so people can actually find things they want to buy. This is what funds all my efforts to write and create, and currently I don’t have any way of showcasing them well. Now, they can be on every page if I want.

I’m not sure that I’ll have every part of the website perfectly converted by April 4, but the new home page is good enough to use now. With the new home page structure, it’s pretty easy to add another stack of content. I may add in the “latest posts” links at the bottom at some point.

In any case, it’s good enough to deploy now and refine later. There’s a lot of work ahead, but now the patterns are set and it should be much easier. Thank God. For the rest of the weekend, I am going to cook and eat a lot of things and get my energy back!

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

I’ve been stuck for the past week on actually pushing forward on my “Marketing Push” for March. To me, that means a revamp of the website to accomplish the following for visitors to my website, both first-timers and repeat visitors:

• Easy to tell what I do
• Easy to find something they know is here
• Easy to see what’s new
• Easy to find past topics of interest and explore

The general idea is to increase engagement, and also make it clear that I have a few things for sale. To sell those things, though, I believe I need a modicum of credibility. This I have, if you look at what I’ve written; I know that there are some good blog posts and insights in there. Finding it and making it easy to browse/download/buy is a huge usability concern.

I think of the redesign as “marketing”, or “more effective presentation”. Improving the user experience along these 5 dimensions should lead to improved engagement.

I made relatively rapid progress at the beginning of this session, defining a lot of important high-level conceptual goals and metrics for “Dave Seah” as brand. I know what I want to present. WHere I’m getting stuck is getting low-level and implementing them. There are a couple blockages I can identify:

• I’m very self-conscious when I present myself or make any kind of statement
• I’m not actually sure what the best way to present myself is, which is complicated by the previous statement
• A lack of surety create huge resistance
• I’m impatient, and part of my brain is still in the high-level “boss” mode that mistakes clarity of goals and strategy as being the “hard problem”. The actual implementation is far more difficult and uncertain, and my own judgmental brain is imposing paralysis on the production part that wants to please.
• I don’t particularly like marketing, so that’s another contributor to internal resistance.

So, in other words, I’m kind of being a dick boss to an uncertain employee, and they’re both ME. I don’t intend to be a dick boss, and I am giving myself the time to explore the issues, but I’m also impatient. The uncertain employee part of me, wanting to deliver and prove competence, nevertheless is paralyzed with not knowing how to deliver to that expectation right away.

The above description would be right at home in many of my past work experiences. I have a strong desire to please, and at the same time I have a strong impatient streak. Uncertainty itself is a force that I’ve only recently identified, and I am still learning how to deal with it.

So…the solution? I have a few ideas that I’ve used in the past when stuck in these situations.

Manager mode: Relax, and Talk the Issue Through. When an employee is stuck or paralyzed, it’s probably because I’ve provided too much scope, implied that there’s a lot of expectation riding on it, and work side-by-side with the employee for a bit of time to push through the small issues until he/she gets into a groove.

Employee mode: Relax, put pressure out of my mind, and design in the small first. While I’m aware there’s an enormous amount of work to do to complete this transition, so starting with something really small, almost inconsequentially so, is a way to start. I have a tendency to like architecture and reasoning, which makes me a poor production employee, but for short periods of time I can put all that big stuff out of my head and just draw, say, a button with some text on it and not wonder if it’s the right text, or the right sort of button given the overarching UI design’s intent to sell more X.

Director mode: Balance the needs of the now with Employee Support. Time is a luxury that I can’t exactly afford, as I have to get these systems working and improving revenue as quickly as possible. However, I need to allow that building a new website and all its content takes time. What I can do, however, is bring Manager and Employee into my virtual office and review the progress, identify the positive stuff, get some estimates, and perhaps identify some near-term goals that will deliver results sooner without compromising the development and design process. I guess that is what I am doing right now, by writing this post. However, the reality is that the project seems like it’s “behind” and the longer this lingers, the most likely the company will fail. We want to avoid that!

So, having phrased the situation using a company analogy, specifically, what am I stuck on?

• I’m feeling bad and incompetent at getting my website going. I thought I was better than this.
• I feel this way because it’s March 22nd and nothing is public.
• I also am not energized by doing this kind of work. It feels like I’m doing something that isn’t me. I feel I should be able to get over that, but has never been easy for me.
• I feel I haven’t been using my time wisely or productively.

Overall..NO ENERGY. NO MOTIVATION. DEMORALIZED

What would help? Delivery of something. Anything. A short term burst of focus to deliver something that is tangible, part of the building process, and reusable. That feels like progress.

Specifically, what would that be? This morning I actually figured out how to implement the new changes on my current website by reconfiguring it to use a “front page”; that way I can put anything I want on it without recreating the main blog index. The question now is what to put on it. I’ve been stuck because the devteam is ready to move forward with HTML/PHP/WordPress implementation, but the content and marketing team are still battling each other trying to come up with wording, telling the design department to just “make something up” for now that they can fill-in later. That should sound familiar to any web developer / project manager / designer. If you can imagine all these groups talking to each other asking when X is going to be ready and why Y hasn’t been delivered with, you have classic organizational stuckness, where the messaging overhead makes it difficult for anyone to make any production at all.

Well, I can’t have that in my fake company.

Recovering

One thing I have been missing this month is the clarity of the Product-a-Day challenge in February. It was wonderful to wake up every day and know that I could just make something and post it. AWESOME, in fact. The reason I’m not doing it this month is because having a ton of products that people never see is not a formula for success. The marketing push this month is to create the platform so I can showcase all the stuff I’m doing and writing about, so people see it. That means building themed collections, packaging insights, and so forth. It’s like I’m turning a private collection of interesting artifacts into a museum-quality experience, with a really nice gift shop.

I can’t continue to try to think and handle everything at the same time. Sometimes it’s come in handy, but when it comes to processing the raw ore of possibility into highly-refined experience, I just need to keep an eye on that very limited scope.

I think I should do a creative reboot and just play for the next few days with regards to the dave seah marketing effort. Make it fun. It’s like the playfulness of the product-a-day challenge, except it will be copy, photos, etc. I’ll spend a little bit of time on that this evening and over the weekend. The mistake I have made is to try to be in the production mindset and be creative at the same time. It really doesn’t work. Happy Bubble Time is required!

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

This post is a review of the past 10 days as a sanity check.

What Got Done

It’s usually around the two- or three-week mark that I feel fatigue on a project, and need to take some time to assess. I don’t particularly like marketing myself either; it’s hard work and draining. However, it’s also necessary work, so I am trying to have a good attitude about it. Like any difficult work, it is worthwhile from a growth perspective!

Here’s what I’ve got done so far on the Marketing push:

• Day 01-03: Defining an Audience and Myself
• Day 04-05: Defining Entry Points into a Website, and by extension Myself
• Day 06-09: First Pass Visual Layout
• Day 10-11: Break from Visual Layout; Content Development Begins

If I were to guess, I’ve spent around an hour per day on average. The biggest chunk of time was spent on the first-pass visual layout, which ate around 4-5 hours. The other days saw anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes total; these were mostly writing days.

Am I On the Right Track?

As I mentioned, I’m finding the work difficult. That doesn’t mean I’m losing hope or stuck. It’s just hard work because I’m defining a lot of goals in the absence of certainty. This means that the processes I’m applying are exploratory ones that may not pay off. It’s an exercise in maintaining good attitude and keeping mentally energized. I’ve been taking a lot of power naps to refresh my brain, much as Edison apparently did.

In hindsight, I think I’ve done some important foundational work, but I have to ask myself whether there’s something I can do right now with the current website to improve usability. It occurs to me that yes, there is. I can build a better browsing experience right now based on the existing template, and update the PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS or ABOUT THE SITE section.

Going to brainstorm quickly in this post now:

What’s the Problem?

People come to my website and can’t find anything, and don’t know what the website is about. There is a lot of hidden stuff, particularly around forms and some articles, that are difficult to find. I can rearrange them to solve PROBLEMS, not just be categories. This way, I can also promote some of the things I have for sale, and increase revenue (that’s the whole point of this).

What is a Solution?

It’s a big category page, loosely mirroring my Visual Tag Cloud, but much more focused on delivering a download or chunk of knowledge. And also highlighting stuff for sale.

What Can I Implement Right Away?

I have the ability to code custom template pages, so it’s that easy. I have to figure out what the categories are, and how to present them. That’s maybe 15 minutes of writing to get clear on it, and then some visual design to make it happen.

…

So that’s what I’ll do sometime later today. Although I describe this as a change in course, it really is an extension of the content creation cycle; I would have had to tackle this topic eventually. It’s a mix of Information Architecture, Layout, and Coding.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

The above graphic shows the progression from the first ugly step (A) just getting some image and text down. Compared to the original thumbnail sketch (which itself is a bit vague), there are some differences, but the general idea is the same:

• There’s a BIG IMAGE at the top, which will be “responsive” in that it always fills the space from edge-to-edge in a browser. The image is a placeholder; ideally it will be an image that visually supports what I’m about.
• There’s a DAVE IDENTITY somewhere within that image, or next to it. Since it’s near this big image, I don’t have to lead with my face/name alone. Maybe this is a cop-out, but it is personal preference.

Also within the header are opportunities for additional supporting links. Right now I have a “what’s new” and “what is creative independence”. The image area might become a slider that cycles through several backgrounds, or there might be a small menu on the right.

Below the header are the content areas, which I will be constraining to 960 pixels wide centered in the frame. As this is the front page, the content areas will be stacked on top of each other and then divided horizontally according to whatever grid system makes sense.

I’m trying to get away from my current blog design, which is constrained in a white rectangle. I’ve admired some other website designs that have a more open feel by eliminating the edges, instead implying them through alignment. The result is a layout that feels more open, which is how I want to feel.

I’m thinking that the stacked content areas will give me some flexibility in design. As the content area is 960 pixels wide, this divides cleanly into halves, thirds, or quarters. It also isn’t a bad basis, from what I can tell, for a responsive design that crunches down to fit any screen. I’m not planning on making the design responsive, however. Perhaps in the future, but not right now.

Anyway, I’m thinking there will be at most two stacked content areas. The top one will be a slider that covers the three or four main features on the website using mostly graphics and large type, serving as a lead-in to inner pages. The bottom one will be more text-y, showing recent stories and whatever. This is what I have to design next.

Also in the queue, after the content areas are done to a rough pass, will be to design the inner pages: the blog templates, page templates, and shopping templates. Next week I’ll have to think about the minimum I need to launch with new content areas + shopping areas. I’m thinking I’ll be VERY lucky if I can get this all done by April 4.

For the rest of this week I’ll be quite busy so I don’t know if I’ll make much progress, but I can at least do the daily 15M on this to keep it fresh in my mind.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

• 30 seconds – rereading Day 5′s raw notes (see bottom of page for the raw text)
• 2 minutes of sketching
• 1 minute of being aghast at how difficult this was
• Doing a second sketch until the timer alarm went off

I’d started by first sketching the three main things that I thought needed to be present:

• DAVE SEAH + HEADSHOT
• CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE SECTION
• MAKER SECTION

When I tried sketching these into place like blocks, I quickly ran into a feeling of “wrongness”. What seemed clear in the abstract seemed very difficult to express. In the photo to the right, which is a half-sheet of paper, I wrote my name at the top and immediately hated it. I drew an oval to represent my head and hated it more! Then I started drawing rectangles below as smaller thumbnails, and realized I was hitting a major unexpected barrier. This was all in the space of about two minutes.

Stepping back, I analyzed the negative feelings.

• I didn’t like the idea of just starting with my identity and head, and them proclaiming CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE and MAKER. This seemed too forward, too much like TELL instead of SHOW. And I tend to not like to draw the limelight to myself; creating a more Dave-focused home page is something I am forcing myself to do. I like to SHARE information, but I don’t really like putting myself forward as a GURU or EXPERT. At the same time, I need to promote myself.

• Furthermore, I hadn’t really thought-through how the Dave identity (name, headshot) and CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE are related in a page-narrative sense. MAKER is more relatable to Dave Identity, but as I’m a noobie maker I am a little embarrassed to proclaim this as a major section.

My immediate negative reaction, it seemed, was just about proclaiming myself to be more than I thought I really was. The desire was to hide. Which actually suggested an approach!

In the second sketch (shown above) I stacked the sections. The top section is an IMAGE HEADER (which I like anyway) with a side menu of some sort that lists important cues to the site. Immediately below it is my tag, and the below that is a “content slider” of four different aspects: creative independence, process, making, and recent posts. Below that is the footer. I can optionally create an ABOUT DAVE between the footer and the content slider.

What I like about this is that I get to hide under the content. If I were to rationalize this, it feels better because the content is first, and then I am second. The image area can establish the tone and purpose of the website before my name/photo appears, which is probably the way it should be. This serves the audience first and helps them orient. I’m still visible on the site, but more like a host than the central attraction. Which is fine with me.

So the next step is to spend some time doing a Photoshop mockup in the main areas, then back that into InDesign or Illustration for the typography work. That’ll probably be the focus for this week.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

There are three main elements that together describe who I am. In detail:

DAVE SEAH – Eccentric Creative – Emphasis on Values and Joy

“Eccentric Creative” is expressed by the jumble of candy-like interests that will be organized across the website. I would like to use my headshot here somehow to drive home the personal nature of my site. Rather than list joys and values, I want to use short phrases and words that have an association with that; joyful-sounding text and imagery, not saying “I am joy. Rah.” An example of SHOW NOT TELL. Tell is weak, and smacks of insincerity. The same applies to “values”; they will be implicit in how I talk/write on the website. My personal voice and values come through everywhere, which is already the de-facto style I have.

CREATIVE SELF-IMPROVER and CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE – My Passion – My Personal and Professional Focus

“My Passion”, again, will be shown. Creativity, as broken into three parts (process, productivity, independence) in themselves form a new and significant subsection on the home page. The content here expresses itself as a structured subarea with its own sub-identity under the Dave Seah Value and Joy umbrella. Each of the three aspects could be a mini-site with its own leading essay and reading list.

MAKER – My Projects

This is a section that is a “work in progress” area. Projects that I’m working on, or have recently worked on, would be showcased here. These are the end results of applying my creative powers, which brings me joy. This area has its own identity too, but it is closely tied with the other two main elements. All together, they create the supporting triad of what the David Seah website (and by extension, me) is all about.

Next, there are secondary elements on the website that act in a supporting role. They aren’t main focii, but instead express values or interests that visitors find appealing. The idea is to establish that there is a certain KIND of content and a certain type of CULTURE that is at work here.

STORIES – This is the content from the past 7 years

The articles I’ve written are structured like little stories that end with some kind of takeaway insight, example, or nugget of understanding. Sometimes you get to download something for free.

The stream of stories is an important part of the website, but the current 2005-style blog format I’m using makes it difficult to make room for the three main elements I want to stand out. People should see that there is Commentary on creativity/productivity/independence, news from elsewhere, and practical experiences I’m sharing related to my skills and hobbies as a perpetual stream of content under the context of creating and making.

COMMUNITY – Making connections with people

Rather than creating community support through forums and stuff, I instead am creating a beacon that indicates that I’m part of a certain tribe. That tribe is comprised of people who find what I am doing interesting.

The ABOUT DAVE and CONTACT links are technically part of community in this way, inviting people to connect. Previously, I’d thought that these were about brand identity, but that is now expressed through the three main elements: “Dave is an Eccentric Creative, A Creative Self Improver Seeking Creative Independence, A Maker of Things”. Adding “That shares a LOT of stuff” is the community add-on, which itself is an extension of the associated value statement.

Finally there are the THINGS FOR SALE and THINGS TO DOWNLOAD. This is the transactional part of the website, and the primary vehicle for supporting myself through my work. This is a significant area, and I’ll have to do a lot of thinking about how to design this sub site so it supports ecommerce and casual browsing. Quite a conundrum.

FREEBIES – Create the semblance of value and treasure, a taste, a preview

Productivity forms! Collections of Forms! These are the things that people will link to, come back for, and pique interest. In terms of commerce, they provide the free sample with no obligation. They also serve to spread the creative / productive / independence messaging along with my statement. They are examples of me putting my money where my mouth is.

THINGS TO BUY – Products, eBooks, Etc

Because I need to live, and want to do it through my website-promoted work, I have some things for sale. These will be tasteful, similarly-styled elements that appear at natural endpoints on the website. There may be a free takeaway, a nugget of wisdom, and nearby will be a direct buy link in a STORE area that collects everything in one place. That’s a NEW challenge, I just realized. It’s probably what I really need to work on next.

And one last thought: how would someone summarize the website as I describe it here? Maybe something like:

Dave Seah’s website is for creative people who love learning and like him, are continually pushing themselves to improve. It’s a wonderful place to find ideas and tools that are inspiring.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

I reformatted yesterday’s overlapping interest thoughts into four main groups that seemed related. Not sure HOW they are related exactly, but this is what my intuition is saying, so let me start with this and see what I think after I see it all in one place:

1. Creative Independence

• Maintaining the means to support one’s creativity through creative works
• Happiness through Creative Process: Explore, Learn, Build, Share
• Happiness through Directed Action: Seeking Inspiration, Developing Mastery, Creating Opportunity … creativity
• Happiness through Shared Values: optimism, personal growth, connecting with like-minded individuals

2. Being a Maker, a Creative

• Putting what one makes out into the world
• Happiness through Connection: Sharing, Creating Opportunity

3. Tools, Techniques and Stories

• on Originality / Cleverness
• on Quality
• on Independence
• on Productivity
• on Excellence
• on Creative Process
• on Directed Action
• on Shared Values

4. Dave Seah

• Who is this mysterious, somehow compelling person?
• How is he doing what he says he’s doing?
• What can I take away from him?

5. Shared Joy

• in Creative process
• in Directed action
• in Creating, itself
• in Creators, themselves
• Supporting one’s self in the way one must
• Knowing you’re part of this small community

At this point, I need to make a visual map and think about it. This mapping I’m doing is outside the 15-minutes I spent this morning, incidentally, thinking about it.

Where are the Entry Points?

Taking a few moments to look at this. I think the message is CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE, BEING A MAKER. That’s the common goal. The specific offerings are tools, techniques, and stories. The bridging elements that provide context are myself as the conduit for stories and maintainer of the CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE vision as I see and share it. Underlying it all is the JOY of it, the part that drives the passion.

So the outward-facing mission statement might be:

• Spread the message of joy
• Define creative independence as my particular version of joy
• Establish myself as the host of this website and my vision as an accessible dude
• Guide people to tools, techniques, stories in the context of creative independence

It occurs to me that the entry points actually look like this to a first-time visitor:

This is pretty awful.

To arrange, label, enhance these entry points so the CONTENTS are apparent and desirable…that’s the next stage of thinking!

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

YESTERDAY, I got more specific about what people might want to see. In other words: what is their frame of mind? What do they desire? Do they want solutions? Patterns? To relate? Something to follow? Then, I started to get more specific about my values. To be clear, my “marketing month” IS NOT about changing my activities to meet other people’s desires, though this is a perfectly fine marketing approach. Instead, I want to create clear AREAS OF OVERLAPPING INTEREST between the audience that’s here and my values/activities. That is a meeting of interests.

So what are these “overlapping interests”? How do they relate to defining a viable market? Hm. Maybe the following:

• The OI can be succinctly labeled, and recognized as desirable by people who desire such things
• The OI, labeled, is a clear, tangible or visceral benefit that is desirable.
• The OI benefit can be quantified or qualified as being better or part of the road to being better.
• The OI benefit is transactionable, acquirable, or actionable.
• The transaction strengthens the bond between buyer and seller.

I had a list of personal values. Reversing them gives me some characteristics of the people who would also be attracted to my values, which forms the foundation of overlapping interest:

• People who want to succeed through excellence, originality, and putting things in the world.
• People who wish their work to reflect themselves.
• People who like optimism, enthusiasm, and desire to connect with like-minded people.
• People who practice “explore, learn, build, share” and the related “seek inspiration, develop mastery, create opportunity” activity structure.
• People who appreciate good knowledge and want to share it
• People who seek creative independence like myself

Converting the above into a set of benefits/artifacts/desires (sort of a jumble)

• The highest quality
• Originality
• Impact the world by putting things into it…a “maker” or “creative”
• Work reflects values: optimism, active personal growth and development, community of like-minded people
• A well-defined creative process
• High quality supporting knowledge and tools
• Creative Independence

Let me reprocess that into something more compact:

• Creative Process
• Creative Independence
• The Tools
• Technique and Know-How
• Happiness through Making: Exploring, learning, building sharing
• Happiness through Impact: Seeking Inspiration, Developing Mastery, Creating Opportunity

And let me try to distill that one more time:

Creative Independence

• Happiness through Creative Process: Explore, Learn, Build, Share … it’s the stages of creativity
• Happiness through Connection: Sharing, Creating Opportunity
• Happiness through Shared Values: optimism, personal growth, connecting with like-minded individuals

Being a Maker, a Creative

• Happiness through Directed Action: Seeking Inspiration, Developing Mastery, Creating Opportunity … creativity
• Cultivating a set of purpose
• Putting things into the world

Tools & Techniques

Imbuing the pursuit for Creative Independence with

• Originality
• Quality
• Independence
• Productivity
• Excellence

And that’s as far as I got before the timer went off. Still not at the point where this is feeling like a distinct statement or focusing point. Tomorrow I’ll try to achieve that.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

I realized that I don’t think mission statements are very effective when used as part of PR. They’re ALWAYS weaker, because they’re examples of TELLING over SHOWING. Telling is almost always BS until it’s backed up. What I need is more like a “framing” statement, something that helps people make sense of what they’re looking at. What I want to lead with is SHOWING things that are already appealing to an audience, and then give them a way to mentally compartmentalize it with a love they already have. Then, the next step is to feed the impulse to browse, participate, and buy. That’s engagement.

So I first looked at my list of people visiting the site already, and then started to build between what people liked versus what I liked. I’m part of the audience too, ya know, and it’s the intersection between me and visitors that will create the most satisfying connection. But then there’s the intersection between what I do (as opposed to “me”) and what people want (a solution, not a new buddy) that is also an opportunity; it’s those people who represent a market for goods.

• People looking for solutions: Market for goods! Make it easy for them to find, assess, then select.

• Subscribers who like what I’m building: They are looking for more than just goods that work. They want something that appeals to their inner sense of quality. Probably process or word-based people? People who learn in a particular way? They also need to be able to find-assess, select based on a DEEPER level than “this does this. download me!”

• Subscribers who like to see HOW I’m building: They are interested in process, the story, a bit more of the in-depth. They may be looking for examples to follow, and they recognize that this site has something they want to know more about. The HOW is part of my writing and presentation. It’s implicit. Does this need to be made more explicit?

• Subscribers who like to read what I’m THINKING: Process-oriented, empathic, compassionate people? Some people have said that what I write is what is in their head, given shape in the form of words. Also implicit in what I do.

• People who check in occasionally: They have come, or used to come, because of something I’ve done that they found interesting. I’ve been filed into a category of, “that guy who”, but it’s not really close enough to their everyday existence to come visit. Positive thoughts toward my work and website, but not relevant to their life in general. Curiosity sometimes.

From the above, I see that there’s a few windows and some implicit attributes of my so-called brand experience:

• collections of tools, processes, thoughts – These are locations on the website
• attributes of how, process, thinking deeply – These are common attributes of everything in the collection, and part of the appeal I think. Not for everyone, but for many.

Next there’s MY VALUES, the reason I want to get out of bed in the morning. How do I reframe this for people?

The easy first pass is to reverse:

• People who want to succeed through excellence, originality, and putting things in the world.
• People who have strong values and wish their work to reflect them. The above statement are my values.
• People who like optimism, enthusiasm, and are open to connect with like-minded people.
• People who like “explore, learn, build, share” and the related “seek inspiration, develop mastery, create opportunity”
• People who appreciate good knowledge, or the intent to spread it
• People who seek creative independence like myself

And that’s how far I got in 15 minutes. It took another 18 minutes to rewrite it into a blog post.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

First I defined what it was: making my website easier to use for particular audiences, which I described as:

• People who are looking for solutions. They arrive through Google.
• People who are subscribed, because they like to see what new tools I have.
• People who are subscribed, because they like to see HOW I’m building tools.
• People who are subscribed, because they like to READ about what I’m THINKING about.

There are also the following personal requirements that I think should be reflected in the website.

• I am standing for a set of values: the “Dave Seah Way” and “Creative Independence”
• I have a mission statement: I want to succeed by becoming as excellent as I can be, producing original works and seeding the world with them to see what comes back. To create, and connect, at the highest level I can.
• I want to extend optimism and enthusiasm to as many people as I can, because I want to be around people like that. Be a beacon!
• I want to celebrate creative independence as I find examples of it.

Then there’s the sundry necessities:

• I need to sell my digital and physical goods and make some money to sustain what I’m doing.

That’s as far as I got in the writing. More definition will follow tomorrow!

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

Today I looked at the HTML5 Boilerplate and KnockoutJS.

• HTML5 Boilerplate is an application framework, meaning it’s a bare-bones way of structuring the way your HTML5 app loads resources and starts up. The alternative is to come up with your own organization.

• KnockoutJS is a pure Javascript library that implements a “Model – View – ViewModel” pattern in a clean, declarative way. I don’t yet know exactly what the ramifications are, but there’s an awesome interactive tutorial that walks you through it.

Exploring these two environments today gave me additional insight into Javascript Weirdness related to its super-flexible object-oriented underpinnings. Basically everything is an object, even the ones that look like they might be functions or expressions. Writing Javascript is like living on the frontier, where STREET JUSTICE prevails over centralized language specification. There are no police. It’s up to you to enforce good programming habits, because Javascript doesn’t have any built-in to save you from shooting yourself in the foot.

As a result, you need to explore the Javascript community for a bit to understand what the law of the land is. Here’s some of the ones that I collected yesterday:

Functions and Parenthesis

The jQuery library is used everywhere, as it is one of those libraries that makes cross-browser DOM manipulation more “write-once” than “hope and pray it works in every browser”, which was the reason I avoided Javascript for so many years. To start executing your code that uses jQuery, though, you need to make sure it’s loaded. Since browsers load resources asynchronously, and also have slightly different ways they do it, jQuery itself provides a means to call your important startup function: $(document).ready(). The ready() call takes a function as an argument, which is executed when it’s time to run.

Unfortunately, in the non-trivial code examples, the ready() sometimes looks like this:

(function($) { 
    $(function() {
        // code using $ as alias to jQuery
    });
})(jQuery);

Note the enclosing parenthesis. WHAT IS THIS? The short answer is that it converts the function() definition into an object expression which is then executed immediately, with the jQuery object passed to it as a parameter. WHY IN THE WORLD would you want to do something as convoluted as this? It’s to make the variables in your code private through the implicit creation of a Javascript “Closure”, which is the variable scope/state within a function. Since scripts in a browser all run in the same global namespace, they can overwrite each other. The code here creates an anonymous function, which in turn has its own closure with the $ variable assigned to the jQuery object. Everything inside has its own private space to declare whatever variables it wishes. Furthermore, the variable state exists after the code finishes running (another aspect of closures which is a bit different from other compiled languages), so you can safely assign event handler functions that refer to variables inside; they remain persistent.

The enclosing parenthesis is not necessary, but is added so you can tell right away that this is the case. Technically, Javascript will do the closure thing because of the (jQuery) tacked on the end, but it is unclear that it’s not a function definition until the very end. Adding the explicit () around it turns it into an explicit EXPRESSION instead of a function declaration; this is pure coding style because the () at the end also turns the function declaration syntax into an expression, but you see it all the way at the end and then you’re like, “damn, this isn’t a definition that’s called, it’s something that runs right now”.

You also see stuff like:

!function($) { 
    $(function() {
        // code using $ as alias to jQuery
    });
}(jQuery);

I KNOW…WHAT? The ! is the unary negation operator, and it has the side effect of telling Javascript that an expression follows it. This is the same effect as using (), which is the arithmetic precedence operator. Both, being operators, turn the function into an expression, which is OK because expressions can be executed when a () is after them to turn it into a function invocation. That executes immediately. You could also use + or – as well and get the same effects…it’s purely for code readability.

It seems stupid, but it’s necessary to establish a private namespace (via closures) so you can write code without side effects like name collisions. Other languages have explicit ways of establishing a namespace, but Javascript does not.

Well, there is stuff like this:

var myNameSpace = myNameSpace || {}
myNameSpace.myProperty = 1;
myNameSpace.myFunction = function(x) {};

This creates an object with objects assigned on-the-fly. Although since I used var, it’s local to the closure that the namespace is declared in. If I didn’t use var, I think that means it would be in the global namespace. Argh.

Anyway, that is enough of this for the day. Here’s the links that helped me understand this:

• http://michaux.ca/articles/an-important-pair-of-parens
• http://blog.themeforest.net/tutorials/ask-jw-decoding-self-invoking-anonymous-functions/
• http://www.adequatelygood.com/2010/3/JavaScript-Module-Pattern-In-Depth

Yesterday I’d started to gather materials on HTML5 online before remembering that I had a book. I septn a little bit of time before going to sleep skimming the HTML5 and Javascript references I have, and came to the conclusion that HTML5 itself is just a bunch of new features. The ones I’m interested in are the Canvas, Sound, and Event models.

I need a very basic app to get focused. It might be instructive to write a simple GUI that gets something done. That would familiarize myself with a few things

1. Basic HTML5 Layout of Elements
2. Using jQuery to bind events to the Elements
3. Writing some Javascript core code to send events and data requests to my own server using JSON or something

I think I’d like to make a basic two-column text editor. This is something that’s been on my mind for a while.

I’m kind of tired, so I think I’ll do the setup of a framework later today or tomorrow. My testbed will be the davidseah.net server, where my other experiments live.

Here’s what the HTML5 page needs:

• HTML5 markup!
• A place to LOAD script libraries!
• A way to detect no javascript and gracefully degrade
• A way to debug!

That’s a good enough starting list.

I’m starting an HTML5 crash course for myself. I’m applying the 15 minute ritual to this. This is the first 15 minutes.

What I know about HTML5 is this:

• There are a bunch of new semantic elements, like <section>. I’ve read that this should be ignored because they’re really not the point.
• More interestingly, there is a refined DOM and new Javascript features related to new objects like <canvas> and <audio>.

To get my head wrapped around HTML5, I need to do the following:

• Find a good reference for HTML5 features, in a nutshell. I know I’ve seen them.
• Consolidate my Javascript knowledge and workflow for editing and debugging.
• Set up a development environment where I can play and keep track of samples, maybe in a VM
• Maybe pick a framework to start with?
• Or a project to build?

There are some issues with HTML5 that prevent adoption by a broader base of users, I suspect.

Getting Familiar

• HTML5 Rocks – some kind of aggregator
• HTML5 Test – for browser compliance, rated.
• HTML5 Demos – a questionable demo site…have to review
• Smashing Magazine HTML5 tags – worth browsing?
• html5.org – might be useful?

These references, so far, kind of really don’t give me a starting place. Let’s look for Javascript HTML5 next. Oh, I forgot I had this book:

• HTML5 Up and Running – by Mark Pilgrim. My cousin Ben recommended this to me.

Development

• HTML5 Shiv – some kind of IE9 enabling script
• CreativeJS – neat javascript examples.
• CraftyJS – some kind of framework, it looks like.
• Maintainable Javascript – by Nicholas C. Zakas, also recommended by Ben.

OOOPS, out of time!

Post Notes

• Dive Into HTML5 – Apparently this is the source for the HTML5 book, maintained by the community.
• Ben mentioned “Phonegap, HTML5 Boilerplate, jQuery Mobile”. What are those? Hm.
• HTML Boiler Plate – Ben said this was worth looking into.
• The question: Do I want to make HTML5 my new interactive platform for development? That’s what I’m trying to find out.
• Can I alternatively just have other people do my interactive work? My thoughts: no. I want control over this so I can wield it as an expressive medium for demonstrating my ideas. It would take a pretty exceptional developer to meet my needs. Perhaps if I could afford to pay someone, it’s worthwhile.

Feb 10 is the start of the lunar new year, which to me is “Chinese New Year” because of my Taiwanese ethnicity. In Taiwan a 9-day holiday officially began. There’s a number of traditions, such as cleaning the house thoroughly to welcome the new year, banquets, gift giving, wearing of new clothing, and so forth. Here in frigid New Hampshire, I celebrated by doing a bachelor-pass over the kitchen and living room, buying some appropriate candies from the local Vietnamese market, and cooking a nice-looking meal for myself with some pu-erh tea.

THE MEAL: Far from traditional, it’s a mix of white and brown rice, some frozen broccoli, some pickled Japanese-style radish, and marinated pork loin dredged in tapioca flour then deep-fried for 90 seconds in 350 degree oil. The marinade consisted of soy sauce, sugar, 5-spice powder, some dry sherry, and garlic powder. I just think it’s pretty.

THE TEA: It’s pu-erh tea that my Dad brought me several years ago. Earthy and subtly complex, it’s a milder tea that helps cut through the grease. I probably shouldn’t be drinking it with this meal, for all I know, but I had brewed some earlier.

THE CANDY: Although it’s from a Vietnamese market, it looks just like the stuff we would get in Taiwan: peanut squares, sesame seed squares, some peanuts coated in some kind of thick sugar shell, and a gummy sesame chew. The peanut squares are my favorite; they are like peanut brittle, but structurally are more like Rice Krispy bars.

Though I’ve had bad luck with W3 Total Cache in the past, I figured enough time had passed that I could give it another try. After all, Quick Cache hasn’t been updated since 2011, and W3 Total Cache (henceforth referred to as W3TC) was updated a few months ago. Plus, people rave about W3TC, and big ISPs like MediaTemple recommend it soundly. What could go wrong?

Well, the first bit of news is that W3TC is not, as of version 0.9.2.5, exactly “network friendly” as its FAQ implies:

Does this plugin work with WordPress in network mode?
Indeed it does.

It does work, but it isn’t designed for efficient administration of a WordPress Network. If you’re not familiar with WordPress networks, it’s a collection of individual blogs running the same installation of WordPress. It used to be called WordPress Multisite and was a separate version of WordPress, but in Version 3 they rolled it all into one.

My website here at davidseah.com is running in Network mode, which means I can make every sub-blog have its own theme and custom behaviors. It seemed like a good idea at the time to switch from single-blog to network mode, giving me a lot of flexibility (theoretically) in starting whole new blogs instead of trying to factor new content into the old hierarchy, which is a big mess. With Network mode, I can update a single WordPress installation and have every blog update. Otherwise, I’d have to update each one individiually, which I found to be a pain in the butt. ONE INSTALLATION TO RULE THEM ALL.

Anyway, when you start running a complex WordPress installation, you start to hit limits with your server. I’m running a Media Temple (dv) 4, which is capable of handling maybe 1000-2000 page views per hour without choking. Right now, I get a maximum of 500 page views/hour on a normal day, and the server keeps running without problem (I should note that there is another site that gets similar levels of traffic, so I’m seeing around 1000 pageviews/hour peak). However, in the event that a page on my website becomes very popular, the server will quickly start to slow down. Currently, it can handle perhaps 20 simulatenous page requests (each comprised of several complicated database transactions) before it starts to run out of working memory and get really slow (over 10 seconds to get a webpage back). With a caching plugin, we can store the results of one request and serve it again to another requester. So long as the requests are exactly the same, we can save a lot of server computation and memory usage, which increases our speed AND capacitity.

Two Levels of Page Caching

There are a number of ways a WordPress caching plugin does this. One basic way is to have the plugin intercept the output of a certain request, say the URL http://davidseah.com/compact-calendar and saving it to a file somewhere. The computational resources that rendering that page is substantial, taking several seconds for WordPress to generate and deliver it from scratch. Loading a file and returning it, though, is way faster. PHP, the web server programming language that WordPress is written in, is capable of doing this, and that’s what W3TC calls basic disk caching. It is the lowest common denominator of page caching. If WordPress works, then this probably will work too.

While this speeds things up tremendously, there’s still a problem: WordPress needs to load and run to deliver the saved page from the cache. This means the webserver needs to initialize PHP each time, load WordPress into it, and then execute the cache program. Each instance of PHP takes up a minimum of 32MB of memory and a bit of time to set up. What would be more awesome is if the webserver (itself a program) could find that cache file itself and return it without loading PHP at all. This is what is called enhanced disk page caching in W3TC, and it works by adding a chunk of code to your website’s .htaccess file. The code, contained in a mod-rewrite block, basically checks for the existance of a file in the cache directory that is based on the incoming URL. If W3TC has generated a file, then the webserver returns it and the request is completed. If the the file doesn’t exist, that means that URL hadn’t been visited before, so WordPress is loaded to generate the web page—with W3TC saving the output for later use in the cache directory. Most of the time, PHP is not loaded, saving megabytes and megabytes of memory and plenty of time. The tricky part is detecting when to update the cached file, because new posts change the content of the website. For example, the home page of davidseah.com contains the last few blog posts I’ve posted. If I add a new post, and W3TC doesn’t change the content of the cached file for the home page, then no one will see the updated file. Plus, caching isn’t desirable when you’re using the admin page or submitting forms; it screws stuff up. So a lot of the complexity of a WordPress cache plugin comes from reliably detecting these special cases.

In addition to the page caching described above, W3TC can also handle other website optimizations. One of them is browser-side caching, which tells your browser that certain files—say, the logo image—change very seldomly, so it shouldn’t even bother to request it; use the old one you have. This is done by sending special control headers as part of the response to a page request, tagging each image and file appropriately. There’s also compression, which crunches down long text files into a compact binary representation, often saving 50-80% of the space. Computers are faster these days at uncompressing files than transmitting them over the Internet, so that’s another way you can save. Still another approach is to packing so a bunch of small files are sent packed into one large one, then unpacked. It takes a fixed amount of time to initiate a file transfer, and only a small number are allowed at the same time; packing files can save huge amounts of time.

My WordPress Network Experience with W3TC

W3TC, I imagine, works great on a single blog installation. It has several problems on Network installations.

• You need to activate the plugin on every blog. You can’t activate it for the entire network. This is a pain in the butt.
• Enhanced Disk Mode triggers an Error. In truth, it seems to actually work from my testing if I look at what the browser is actually getting (hint: view source, and look at the bottom of the text). I spent a few hours trying to debug this before finally deciding that it was probably a bug in the plugin itself.

There are a few more other problems I’ve had with it:

• Minify options break. This might be an issue with the plugin in general, but every time I’ve enabled it the site has broken in peculiar ways. I avoid it. It’s always broken on my particular website for as long as W3TC has been around, but I don’t have the patience to debug it.

• Object Caching is a no-go with FastCGI. PHP code can be executed by the webserver (Apache, in my case) in a couple of ways: as a module built-into Apache, or invoked through an external PHP interpreter. For security reasons, my server runs PHP as the latter, using something called “FastCGI”. For speed, multiple instances of PHP are spawned so they can run simultaneously under their own “user”. When they are done executing their code, they then die off to reclaim memory space. The problem? There’s no way to share memory between these instances, which makes PHP acceleration unfeasible. If you’re not running PHP as an Apache module, forget about it here. This isn’t an issue with W3TC itself, but I’m just saying I can’t use it on my setup.

• Database Caching. I haven’t tried this, actually. It gives me the willies because some plugins do scary things to intercept database calls to substitute their own mojo.

There are also a few awesome things that work well:

• Enabling GZIP Compression. This is the compression + packing advantage. W3TC takes care of this for you.

• Enabling Expiration Headers. W3TC handles the complex setup for dozens of files and filetypes, so you don’t have to. Thank the heavens!

And there are a few weird things too:

• Setup requires that you understand that the configuration settings come in two flavors: preview and deploy. The UI is set up in a way that you think “preview” would work like preview everywhere else: showing you a one-time view of your page, without having to save your settings permanently and perhaps screwing things up. W3TC uses the word “preview” to mean both the preview mode and the preview action. The preview action only works in preview mode. Get it? No? Just remember to click DISABLE in general settings at the very top. This disables PREVIEW MODE, not the CACHING, which you set individually lower on the page.

• Detailed Settings are available if you click on them in the Performance tab. At first I thought that these referred to the settings when you first click on performance, but actually they are different.

Despite Confusion, It Seems to Work

In summary, W3TC’s features are somewhat unusable on my setup, and they’re confusing at times. Although I’m only using Page Caching with HTML Expiration and GZIP Compression, this is doing exactly what I need. The errors and at-times confusing interface are not confidence building, but after spending time with it I’d say it probably is doing a more comprehensive job than Quick Cache. In Quick Cache’s favor, it works with WordPress Network without complaining. There’s another cache plugin called WP SuperCache that I used a few year ago, but I dropped it when an update to it seemed to be causing problems. That’s when I switched to Quick Cache.

Followup: I dumped W3TC and am now using Super Cache

After living with W3TC for maybe a month, I nuked it from my system. As I said earlier, it’s probably fine for a simple large WordPress install with a relatively unchanging structure. My website, though, changes quite a bit. I’m constantly adding bits of code or refreshing images. W3TC does not deal well with this, and visiting every single blog in my network to flush the cache is a pain. The advanced caching features for browser caching, minification, and compression have been more annoying than helpful. I ended up disabling browser caching (a nightmare if you are changing any Javascript, CSS, or underlying wordpress template). While it is feasible to configure W3TC precisely to tune the setup, it is only slightly less fun than using Facebook’s Privacy Controls.

I’m now back to SuperCache. The main problem I have with it is that its cache refresh is unreliable. However, it’s relatively easy to just go into the Content settings and delete the entire cache at once. It doesn’t do browser-based caching, which in my case is a nice bonus. For GZIP compression, I followed these instruction from the WordPress Codex.

While this setup isn’t the absolute fastest I could get it, it’s fast enough. Google’s Insights Speed Test gives me an 89/100. Response time is generally under 3 seconds. A good portion of that is due to dynamic scripts (Facebook, for example) that run after the page has rendered its main content, so the effective pageload speed is between 0.5 and 1.5 seconds. It would be nice to combine some of those external CSS and JS files into fewer files, but it’s a relatively minor gain compared to the others.

Anyway, there’s always a little bit of magic involved in setting up a new “Hello World” style program. As is the norm, the official “Getting Started” material that I could find is simplistic to the point of uselessness…who writes these things? I don’t want to print “hello world”; I want to set up the basis of a rich flourishing application. Here’s the basic steps I followed with Flash Professional CS 5.5.

1. Create a New Project

Switched to the “Developer” Workspace Layout, which exposes the Project Panel. Created a new project, which creates a Flash .FLA stub file. We’ll be setting properties here later.

On a side note, the Project Manager is as terrible as I remember it from 2007, but at least it is just a mirror of an underlying directory structure. Nothing fancy here!

2. Create the Startup Class

The Flash file will end up holding any static library assets I create such as animations and graphics, but I will be using code attached to instances I create dynamically with my own scripting. Rather than stuff this all in Frame 1 of the timeline, there’s a way of binding a particular class to the Flash file. This is a class that is instantiated on startup. It’s known officially as the document class, and you set it under Properties for the .FLA file.

Class files in Actionscript 3 have the .as extension, and the filename must match the class name. There is also the notion of packages. I created a package path of dseah, which is implemented as a folder relative to the .FLA file.

project_folder/
    dseah/
        MainClass.as
    DaveTest01.fla
    DaveTest01.swf

My DaveTest01.fla file is at the same level as the dseah folder. Inside this folder I created MainClass.as, which is declared as follows:

package dseah { 
    
    import flash.display.MovieClip; 

    public class MainClass extends MovieClip { 
        public function MainClass() { 
            trace ('Hello World'); 
        }
    } 
}

Two Important Notes:

• See how MainClass extends MovieClip? That’s because the class we’re setting as the document class is a representation of the .FLA file, which is a MovieClip.
• When we go to properties to set the document class, we also have to use the entire package path, which here is dseah.MainClass.

3.0 Compile and Test!

I clicked the “Test Project” button and did see that the trace worked, outputing “Hello World” to the console. Whee! So that’s it. Took me 90 minutes to dig up these basic setup facts while I was at Starbucks. I suppose that if I’d had a copy of Colin Moock’s Actionscript 3: The Complete Reference I would have saved myself some time. Grumble grumble.

Shared hosting is kind of like living in a college dormitory, with many people sharing the facilities. Like a college dormitory, there were certain problems that come from many web sites living on the same server. While it’s cheap, it’s also prone to disruption. If one of the other websites on your host does the Internet equivalent of bouncing a golf ball on the floor at 2am, everyone is affected and mad as hell. If another website is not very conscientious about locking down security holes in its software, everyone is compromised. And then there is the sheer limited amount of space. At some point, you outgrow it and need a place of your own.

When you blog hits around 1500-2000 pageviews a day, that’s when you’ll start hitting capacity limits. A cheap hosting plan of $5-9 a month just won’t cut it anymore, expecially with WordPress. For a while, I was paying $39 for a very well-managed hosting plan from a host called FutureQuest, but unfortunately for me I got a few high traffic days that were exacerbated by some poorly-written WordPress plugins installed on my site. They gave me an option to upgrade to a $200/month managed host, or to go elsewhere. My elsewhere ended up being Media Temple, which is another well-known commercial host. While it’s not the cheapest nor the most technically advanced, I’ve found they offer a good balance of features and service for the medium-traffic website operator. Full disclosure: I’ve been hosting with them for about 4 years under a hosting partnership original acquired through the old 9rules blogging network, which allowed me to try their services at a slight discount. However, even without the discount, Media Temple has proven to be a pretty reliable and friendly solution for my needs, and I continue to recommend them to people who want a balance of control, ease of use, and stability without a high price tag.

Media Temple’s Service Offerings

At the time I switched to Media Temple, I had the choice between their Dedicated Virtual Server option or the (then) brand-new Grid Server. These are respectively known as the (dv) and (gs) hosting packages.

I started with the base (dv) system, which at $50/month offered 256MB of working memory in 2008 (it’s 512MB as of this writing). As I mentioned earlier, the (dv) is the “dedicated virtual server” option, which means that you have the equivalent of a complete server all to yourself. You can do almost anything you want to it as far as software installation goes. The (dv) option is inexpensive because you are actually sharing the space with other virtual servers. You can imagine the difference as follows:

• shared hosting = dormitory, with shared bathroom and common access halls to each individual room.
• dedicated virtual server = multi-unit condominium building, with separate access and privacy inside the walls, but with some shared facilities outside.
• dedicated server = your own building, inside and out

Media Temple also has another option, the (ve) server, which is like stripped-down industrial space that has to be built-out by you. Unless you like configuring servers, it is a huge pain in the butt. The (dv), by comparison, comes with several time-saving conveniences:

1. Pre-installed Control Panel – Like many web hosting packages, the Media Temple (dv) service includes the popular Plesk control panel, which provides a graphical user interface for configuring your web server. This is very important if you’re not comfortable using a terminal window to type in shell commands or edit configuration files directly. Web servers are fairly complex beasts, and while you still have to learn a lot of new concepts, you at least don’t have to worry about screwing up your web server configuration irreversibly. You can do things like add websites, website users, install popular packages like WordPress, and manage multiple users.

2. Pre-installed and Configured Operating System – Out of the box, the (dv) server is ready to start working. You just need to upload some files to the right place and you’re up and running. I didn’t realize how convenient this was until I was setting up a (ve) server for a client; you have to install and configure everything from scratch, which took me several head-scratching hours. With total control comes great responsibility, but with the (dv) option some of this is taken care for you.

3. Developer Tools and Full Root Access – For experienced administrators, you can install compilers and other software packages with root-level access. You just click a button to install the tools, set a password, and in a few minutes it’s all set up. The (dv) uses the CentOS operating system, which is the “community version” of the venerable Red Hat Enterprise Linux used by many companies. One caveat: if you are making configuration changes, you need to be aware of the way that Plesk integrates itself into the operating system (e.g. Apache virtual host configuration).

Between these three features, you have a ready-to-go web host that is, for all practical purposes, completely yours. You can scale up to use more memory if you need it (at a higher price, of course) and you are not locked into a contract.

Media Temple Support

Technical support is a big deal for most users of web hosting services. When your website isn’t working, or you’re stuck trying to get some piece of software to work, you’re going to have to use your web hosting provider’s technical support system.

Unless you are paying big bucks for “fully managed hosting” from a company that offers it (Rackspace, for example), it’s important to realize the most web hosting providers in the $5 to $99 range per month are responsible ONLY for maintaining overall uptime of the service. The deal is much like the one you have with your home’s electricity provider: if the power goes out, that’s a problem they deal with, but if you have a broken washing machine, or don’t know how to use your VCR, it’s NOT the electric company’s responsibility to fix it for you. You need to call an expert or get educated. This is the case also with web hosting with the (dv), though to Media Temple’s credit they do seem to go out of their way to help their clients. Another nice touch is that they estimate how long it will take to get back to you. I believe that the (dv) users have access to telephone support, but I’ve never tried it. UPDATE: Media Temple does provide telephone support to all customers, though I’ve never tried it myself. They are also available via Twitter and chat (thanks Drew for the clarification).

I’d say a key sticking point in the selection of a web host is how much support you need. If you are really clueless about how servers work and don’t want to learn (I really don’t blame you either), you should be prepared to spend several hundred dollars a month for a fully-managed solution. At $50/month for your basic Media Temple (dv), you’re not going to get the level of handholding you will need. Alternatively, you could put your money into a specialized host provider which can help with some configuration issues. For example, if you use WordPress exclusively, a host like WPEngine has their entire service built around deploying and maintaining high-performance WordPress websites, and they are more knowledgeable about the platform than your generic tech support person. My own experience with WPEngine has been mixed, with several broken installations and a demonstrable lack of knowledge regarding their own system features that dragged resolution out for days, but to their credit they fixed the underlying problems once caught, and made changes to their customer support system to prevent the problem in the future. And I probably should have just called them up. The vast majority of feedback I’ve seen on them has been positive, and I’ve been impressed with the features they offer.

But I digress…Media Temple has two main lines of support:

• The Media Temple Account Center, which is the online service area where you can make some service configuration changes yourself AND request support. The customer service system has been refined over time and is very good about keeping track of your issue. While they probably won’t debug your your WordPress installation for you, they will probably help you figure out what you might try to fix it. Again, it’s not their responsibility, and given that it costs between $50 and $250 per hour for a system guy to fix such problems, I wouldn’t expect them to either.

• The Media Temple Community Wiki has a lot of staff- and user-contributed articles about how to configure and use their services most efficiently. I have a few contributions in their system myself regarding optimization of server resources, for which Media Temple asked permission to include, and then they sent me a mug.

I’m a fairly advanced user and like to fix my own problems. Beyond the official channels, I’ve found that many of my questions can be answered by using a keyword search on Google, including plesk and/or centos in the query. For example, “How do I install WordPress Multisite Plesk Centos”. You can also try mediatemple and dv as keywords.

Media Temple Reliability

I personally haven’t had any problems with them for the time I’ve been with them, about 3-4 years. There have been two outages I can think of: one was related to denial of service attacks being made upon the entirety of Media Temple by unknown hackers. In the early years of the Grid Server (gs) service, I heard a LOT of complaints about the downtime and sluggishness of the system, which is designed to scale-up to meet demand. This was early in the history of cloud computing (before they were even calling it that), so these growing pains are perhaps understandable. Since I was using a dedicated virtual server, I didn’t experience any problems.

Of equal concern, especially if you are running popular software installations like WordPress, is security. Media Temple does seem to proactively check and test for security issues, but it’s also up to you to worry about it. The simplest thing to do, I’ve found, is use a website malware scanner like Sucuri.net and possibly use their cleanup services (fairly cheap for the peace of mind). On the (dv), you are somewhat more isolated from runaway malware infections than you would be on a shared host from another provider.

I’ve heard a lot of negative things about Media Temple uptime over the years. In my case, I’m not running a mission-critical website and I don’t monitor uptime, so I haven’t personally experienced any problems. That doesn’t mean that they don’t happen; I just haven’t noticed. After I tuned my server has been tuned, I just let it run and run and don’t think about it. In my daily use, I actually hit my server dozens if not hundreds of times a day because I have a common bookmark page on it so they are accessible from my multitude of computing devices; I haven’t noticed any downtime except when I’ve been fooling with the server. In the cases that there are loading problems, the problem is usually related to the network connection. The (dv) has been very stable for me; I would have left in disgust years ago if that hadn’t been the case.

Media Temple Performance

I don’t have wide-ranging experience with different server hardware profiles, so I can’t tell you how fast Media Temple’s (dv) are relative to the industry. Personally, I haven’t had any problems with it. I do know that the (dv) is periodically upgraded as new technology becomes available, which generally offermeans more speed, disk space and memory. I just upgraded to (dv) 4.0, and have been pleased with the beefed-up specifications.

Connectivity-wise, like most big web hosts Media Temple has multiple redundant connections to major Internet backbones. They’re located in both California and Virginia, so performance across the United States seems pretty uniform. I don’t worry too much about bandwidth; there are quite a few large clients that use Media Temple, so I presume the infrastructure is solid.

The biggest effect on overall performance has resulted from me making my own optimizations. To my knowledge, there are two major performance bottlenecks for your average web servers:

• Physical Memory – A web server runs multiple programs at the same time, each taking up a certain amount of physical memory. If there are more programs requiring memory than is available, a regular unix-style system will start “swapping” programs in and out of memory from another source, usually the hard disk drive. This can be very slow, and when there are a lot of people requesting information from your server at the same time, it will become unresponsive as memory is completely used up.

• Processing Power – The amount of time it takes for the web server to receive, process, and respond affects how long that a certain amount of resources are “locked up”. The shorter this response time, the more requests can be handled. Responsiveness is also quicker, of course.

Of the two, memory is probably the most critical. It’s also the easiest to fix by throwing money at the problem; if you find your (dv) is running slow, you can upgrade to a (dv) package with more memory. More memory means that more programs can run simultaneously. Optimizing the way your server uses memory is another way, allowing you to get more done with less. I spent several weeks learning how to optimize my first (dv) with 256MB memory, which allowed it to run as efficiently (if not more) than the 512MB version. However, if you’re running a business where your time is more valuable than money, just buy a bigger (dv).

There’s an important difference between a virtual server (the dv) and a dedicated server: You have an allocation of “guaranteed” memory with additional “burst” memory. Imagine that you own a condo unit with a deck and a shared yard. You are guaranteed exclusive use of your private deck, and if there is no one else in the yard you can expand into it for a short period of time. By analogy, your deck corresponds to “guaranteed” memory and the shared yard is the “burst”; it’s a short period of time where you need more space than you normally do.

It’s important to configure your server so that operates mostly in your guaranteed memory space, otherwise if your website gets hit by an unexpected spike in demand it will probably go down. There are some good optimization guides out there that can help you figure out what’s going on, but these are advanced topics. Several guides can be found by searching the Media Temple Community Wiki and Knowledge Base (try keyword: optimize).

Media Temple Competitive Costs

At $50/month for their base (dv) 4.0 offering with 512MB of memory, Media Temple comes in a little high compared to other host providers. For the same amount of money, I’ve priced other hosts offering the same dedicated virtual server services offering more RAM and disk space. However, I haven’t been quite tempted to jump ship because of several advantages I perceive with Media Temple:

1. Flexible DNS Configuration in the Account Center – Media Temple gives you the ability to edit DNS zone files yourself, using their domain name servers rather than running your own. This saves about 50MB of memory on my (dv) because I don’t have to run BIND, and it’s easy to connect my mail services to Google Apps. Running two fewer services on my server means two less things for me to worry about. Access to the name server may be common with other dedicated virtual server providers for all I know. I like it.

2. The Account Center looks great and actually works. I’m kind of a sucker for aesthetics, and I’ve always liked the way Media Temple presents themselves both as a brand AND backs it up with an attractive custom account management center. Media Temple also maintains an active knowledge base that is continually updated, and there are enough people using the Media Temple (dv) that I can usually Google my way to a solution.

3. Customer Service, the few times I’ve used it, has been unfailingly polite and professional, even when I didn’t like the answer. While it’s not instantaneous—responses times are within 24 hours—it has been reliable. I have not tried their telephone or chat support, but it is available as well.

Some other vendors I’ve looked at with comparable offerings are Slicehost (now owned by Rackspace) and Knownhost. Their costs are about 20-30% less last I checked, and they seem to get good reviews on the Web and on Webhostingtalk forum. Perhaps one of these days I’ll get a chance to test them, but for now I’m pretty content with Media Temple.

Summary

I’d say that Media Temple’s dedicated virtual (dv) hosting service would appeal to people who want a combination of both convenience and control:

• You’ve outgrown shared hosting plans but don’t want to pay too much more.
• You need the LAMP stack: Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP.
• You do not need a lot of help with basic Linux system administration.
• You are a medium-to-large website operator who is comfortable with installing and administering Linux-based web servers (or are willing to learn)
• You are a developer that prefers a standard Linux environment as opposed to a cloud-based one.
• You are fine hosting mail on another site (for example, using Google Apps), because a minimum-spec server just doesn’t have the juice to handle spam filtering AND serve lots of web pages. You will be very sad. Trust me.
• You want to manage multiple websites with different domain names and users.
• You like the convenience of the Plesk control panel, with the freedom to install their own software
• You are more comfortable with a larger known company than a smaller one (Media Temple does host several large websites for commercial clients you have heard of).
• You are prepared to occasionally do some digging into the server, or hire someone, to optimize and maintain the server during times of woe (security breach, performance tweaking, wordpress tuning)

If you are looking for a hosting company that will take care of your website operations on your behalf as quickly as possible, you need to find one that offers fully-managed hosting. You will pay a lot more for this.

If you are looking to pay as little as possible for a dedicated virtual server, you’ll have to navigate the uncertain waters of smaller hosts. Webhostingtalk is a good place to start; look for hosts offering “VPS services”, which stands for Virtual Private Server and is the same thing as a dedicated virtual server. The lower cost may come at the expense of the inclusion of the control panel (Plesk or CPanel). For me, the DNS zone editing on Media Temple’s own name servers is really handy, so I’d hate to lose that.

Again for the sake of full disclosure: I’m currently on a discounted Media Temple plan through an old partnership agreement through my former blog network.

» Check them out! Media Temple and their dedicated virtual hosting packages.

My Server History

I’ve done this type of move before between other web hosts and other servers, usually when I’ve run out of resources due to traffic. It’s not such an issue if you just have a few simple HTML pages, but if you’re running WordPress, you’ll hit the limits much quicker (today, I’d guess it’s around 2000 pageviews a day). You’ll know when your web pages start loading really slowly, or if your hosting provider starts telling you that you’re hogging too many server resources and are starving everyone else. I got kicked off my last shared host sometime in 2007 for a bad plugin that counted downloads by loading THE ENTIRE DOWNLOAD into memory, which brought the server to its knees. As a result, I was offered a choice between paying $200/month for a dedicated server, or moving. That’s when I moved to Media Temple, which is a web host that I’ve wanted to try for some time because they had a reputation of being designer-friendly (and they had cool graphics on their website :)

Because my website was part of the 9rules Network, which had a hosting relationship with Media Temple, I was able to get into a dedicated virtual server setup for a bit less than $50/month. While this was more expensive than the $29/month I had been paying before on FutureQuest’s impeccable servers, it also gave me the equivalent of my very own small server that wasn’t shared with anyone else. This is actually a trick; the (dv) is a virtual dedicated server, as opposed to a physical dedicated server. Through low-level software, one physical dedicated server can be split into multiple virtual servers, which has several advantages. I could go on and on about this, but the general benefit is that you can get a lot of control for a little more money. And, if you’re clever about how you configure your virtual server, you can achieve high performance.

Anyway, I’ve been using Media Temple’s (dv) service for quite some time now, and while there are other options like MT’s (ve) servers (barebones servers that you have to configure from scratch), their grid server cloud system (a form of demand-based cloud computing), and even Amazon’s Elastic Cloud thingy, I’ve stuck with the (dv) because they offer a good blend of direct control and convenient configuration through their control panel. The (dv) servers are configured with the software to serve web pages out-of-the-box, handle customers accounts if you’re doing hosting, and create multiple websites and domain names.

My (dv) 3.5 service is being retired this year, and so I’m forced to move to the newer (dv) 4.0. Exciting, and also daunting! There are newer versions of server software available, and the configuration has changed here and there, so I need to make sure my old setup works on the new server. With 20-odd websites to move, some of them quite complex, I allocated an entire week to carefully move and test each one. And it ended up taking the entire week. I made some configuration changes to make it easier in the future, and have made extensive notes here so I’ll be better prepared for the inevitable future upgrade to (dv) 5.0.

Preparation

There are two guides that were helpful in getting my head wrapped around the entire enterprise. The first is Media Temple’s official migration guide and tips on migrating from (dv) 3.5 to (dv) 4.0 articles on Media Temple. This is what I generally followed. The second resource is Jeff Starr’s (dv) migration experience, which per his usual standard of excellence is detailed and insightful.

Offloading Services

The more services you run on your server, the bigger the headache when it’s time to move. I long ago had dropped the following services from my (dv) for my own sanity:

• mail – Handled by Google Apps for Domains for the past 4 years
• spam filtering – When handling your own mail, this crushes your server because of the huge volumes of spam. With mail gone, so goes spam filtering.
• DNS – Media Temple already gives you access to their domain name server through Account Center, so there’s no need to run this service on your machine

Since these services are already configured elsewhere, I don’t have to move them. However, there is one last service that I till was running, and that was the version control software Subversion aka SVN. After consulting with various people, I decided to dump SVN and upgrade to another system called Mercurial. I converted to Mercurial, and then set up my central repository on bitbucket.org so they hosted everything. The result? One less thing to move.

Establishing Procedures

The general order of operations for moving a website from one server to another is as follows:

1. Copy Files from old to new server
2. Copy Databases from old to new server
3. Configure the new server so it recognizes and responds to your domain name
4. Test locally, resolve any errors
5. Update the Domain Name Server to point to the new server
6. Test again
7. Repeat for each website

There is a built-in “migration tool” that handles everything except for testing and updating the domain name server, but it doesn’t always work because the configuration parameters don’t exactly match between the old server and the new server, and this sometimes breaks the migration process. It tends to work for simple websites, but not for customized setups like mine.

Planning the Site Migration Order

Because I had a couple dozen sites to move, I decided that I’d test the migration tool on the simplest ones. This covered about half the websites, which used very simple HTML and no PHP or fancy server features. For the more complex sites, I would move them one-by-one.

To prepare to move these sites, I had to go to the into the Media Temple Account Center and edit the DNS Zones for each site I planned to move, lowering the Time To Live (TTL) for entry. This values tells users of the Internet that the domain name (e.g. davidseah.com) is going to be changing much more rapidly than usual. The default value is 12 hours, and lowering TTL reduces it to five minutes. You can think of it as telling the Internet to not assume that “davidseah.com HQ” is at a fixed server address, but is about to move. If you don’t lower TTL and point your domain name to the new server, it will take 12 hours for the change to be noticed, and a lot of traffic will go to the old server for that period. It’s a pain in the butt for testing, so that’s why I lower TTL first.

Ordering and Prepping the New Server

You’ll need to have your old server active in addition to the new server. That means you’ll be paying for both servers for the period of time that you are actively moving your websites from one to the other. The Media Temple Guide mentioned earlier details the process; it ends up not being very expensive if you can move your sites quickly.

After you have the new server, immediately request installation of developer tools and shell access. While developer tools may not strictly be necessary, they’re handy when you want to install a few additional packages. I try to keep my server installations are vanilla as possible to keep things simple, but at very minimum you’ll want shell access through SSH, and maybe a favorite text editor if you don’t like the default-installed editors nano and vi.

If your server had more than one IP address, you can contact support and request it and Plesk Migration Manager will be able to use it. The alternative approach is to go back and change your dedicated IP to shared instead before doing the migration. This will break your SSL during the transition, however, if you had it set up.

Save Old Configuration Data

Because I’d customized my old server, I made copies of several key files, just in case I needed to check something after cancelling the old server.

• /etc/passwd, /etc/group – to make sure I didn’t forget any special users or groups that I had created
• password files for .htaccess authentication
• php.ini, my.ini, and other initialization files for important services, so I could compare them to the new server setup

Doing the Migration

The Plesk Migration Manager is a great help in transferring files, account names, databases, and passwords. It also will transfer the contents of /root and all stats and logs that are stored within each domain’s statistics directory. Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s the (dv) 4.0 fancy new control panel! I have highlighted the migration manager entry.

The choices for migration are simple. When you first start, you’ll get the choice to start a new migration. If you have some migrations going on in the background, you’ll see them listed here, as they can sometimes take a long time. In my case, a big site with about 3GB of data took about 45 minutes.

To start the migration, you need to provide the root access credentials to the old server. You can use any domain name that’s on that server; the migration manager will be able to see all websites created with Plesk. I also only chose to migrate parts of the server at a time (see check boxes toward the bottom); I left everything else mostly alone.

The next screen gives you the opportunity to choose which domains or clients to move. I zapped out the other websites in this listing since I don’t think people need to know everything that’s running on my server.

When you first set up a new (dv), you get one IP address that’s shared between multiple domain names. The other option is to have a “dedicated IP” address, which is assigned to one and only one domain name. This is required for security (SSL) certificates, so I requested an extra IP address before starting the migration as I needed to match my old configuration. This allowed me to assign them appropriately on this screen. NOTE: this deviates from the recommended installation instructions, and in my case was necessary because my old server’s Plesk access has been completely broken for months, and I couldn’t change it if I wanted to.

Here is the aftermath of moving davidseah.com. I had an error related to the configuration file, which I was able to fix by going into the davidseah.com vhost.conf via SSH and figuring out that I didn’t have DAV installed on the new server. I just nuked the offending settings, and clicked the link, and the migration continues to completion.

When the Migration Manager Fails

About half the sites I moved, including some very simple ones, had some small configuration glitch. My methodology was to keep two ssh windows open, one connected to the old server and the other to the new server, logged-in as root. If I suspected a discrepancy, I used tar to package up all the files in httpdocs of that site, then used SFTP to securely copy the tar file to the new server:

on old server as root

cd /root
tar cvzf davidseah-files.tgz /var/www/vhosts/davidseah.com/httpdocs/*
sftp {ip-address-of-new-server}
sftp> cd /root
sftp> put davidseah-files.tgz
sftp> quit

switch to new server as root

cd /root
cd /var/www/vhosts/davidseah.com/httpdocs
rm -fr *
tar xvzf /root/davidseah-files.tgz

Be careful with that rm command…it deletes everything in the current directory! Make sure you’re in the right subdirectory!

The migration manager generally handles the creation of users and copying of databases without any problems, except in one case when the database was so large that MySQL timed-out and reported an error. In this case, I then used mysqldump to make a backup, used SFTP to copy the backup to the new server, then used mysql to restore the backup, more or less as follows:

on old server as root

cd /root
mysqldump -u{dbuser} -p {dbname} > dump.sql
sftp {ipaddress-of-new-server}
sftp> cd /root
sftp> put dump.sql
sftp> quit

switch to new server SSH window as root

mysql -u{dbuser} -p {dbname} < /root/dump.sql

General Observations on the Plesk Migration Manager

• It tends to choke on converting domain account settings and permissions from the old Plesk 8.0 in dv (3.5) to Plesk 11. This will require manual tweaking and some knowledge of both Plesk account models. The new thing in Plesk 11 is the notion of “subscriptions”, which didn’t exist in 8.0. If you have multiple domains and customers before, then expect to spend some time defining basic levels of service such as disk space, bandwidth, and other server features. You can override all this stuff for now, giving everyone lots of access to everything, just to make sure the sites work.

• Plesk Migration Manager useful for moving MOST files, including everything in each domain’s private directory, but not all files in the conf directory (if you have added custom files there, as I did for user authentication with htaccess, they won’t be copied. Users, including web users, were transferred. Groups, however, were NOT. Anything you added to your /etc directory isn’t copied. Plesk Migration Manager will NOT move anything that’s not part of the standard Plesk setup.

• For very large database transfers, Plesk Migration Manager can fail with a “MySQL server has gone away”. This might be due to a timeout error. In these cases, I just used mysqldump and then used SFTP to grab the file directly between servers (much faster than downloading and reuploading 2GB of data), then restoring the dump.

• The same server-to-server SFTP can be use to move files. If you use tar to create an archive of all the files in your httpdocs directory, this is fast and reliable.

• If you have added fancy Apache directives in your vhosts.conf file that depend on modules you added yourself, then you may get Plesk migration errors if you didn’t add them on the new server. For example, I had installed WebDAV on my old server, and the Migration Manager complained bitterly about misconfiguration until I nuked the related directives out of the afflicted vhosts.conf.

Other Critical Server Differences

I found that the (dv) 4.0 has a few critical differences that I had to understand before I could get my PHP and MySQL databases fully functioning on all sites:

• I had been using mod_php before, which requires that any directories that your PHP scripts needs to write (for example, cache files or image uploads) be owned by the apache user. Since the directories are usually owned by a different user, this creates something of a pickle: you have to essentially leave your front door unlocked on several directories; on my old server, I’d added the apache user to the psacln group by modifying the /etc/group file, which is sort of like installing a pet hatch in your front door.

• FastCGI PHP, unlike mod_php, has the advantage of not requiring writeable directory hacks. Instead, PHP runs under your domain’s user account, so you can just have them all owned by that user. However, Plesk Migration Manager will retain your old file ownerships…you MUST change their ownership with a quick chown -R username.psacln * executed inside the httpdocs directory, if you previously used mod_php instead of FastCGI. This is described in this MT knowledge base article.

• The nginx reverse proxy server was unfamiliar to me, which is another way of serving web pages to the Internet. It’s supposed to be REALLY fast, but as configured on the (dv) 4.0 out of the box, it is not compatible with WordPress Networks AKA Multisite. I just disabled the service, letting Apache take on its traditional role as main web server. There may be performance repercussions, but it was just easier for me to disable nginx until I had the time and inclination to study it. The problem seems to be that it doesn’t handle “wildcard IP address” assignment in the Plesk control panel, and it also breaks the ability to set a default website for each IP address you have. This is a known bug at this time.

• The default PHP security settings have the OPENBASEDIR option set to “default”, which can be a pain in the butt for some scripts. If you see errors where a script cannot open some file “above” it, it’s probably this. Set it to “none” or figure out what paths need to be added for extra security. My understanding is that OPENBASEDIR is not really a security panacea to begin with.

• The (dv) 4 hardware platform is a 64-bit architecture, compared to the (dv) 3.5′s 32-bit architecture. This has ramifications for some MySQL database types, so if you are relying on max/minimum sizes for unsigned ints, they have changed. This affected my realtime web analytics package, Mint. Fortunately there was a fix provided. WordPress was unaffected.

• The new Plesk makes some operations, such as adding options to php.ini, a little different. For example, instead of creating a custom vhost.conf in your /var/vhosts/yoursite.com/conf folder, you can add them to the Website Advanced Setting / PHP Settings in the “Custom Directives” box. This is more Plesk friendly, and I imagine it will migrate with you in future moves.

Adapting to the new Plesk

As I mentioned earlier, Plesk 11 adds a new “subscription” model layered on top of the familiar domains and customers. Basically, a subscription a set of server presets that’s assigned to each domain. For example, the included “Simple Website” subscription specifies 100MB of disk storage, 1GB of network transfer, and the ability to use PHP.

Since subscriptions don’t exist in Plesk 8.0, the Migration Manager either can jam each domain into an existing subscription, or it can just assign a “custom setup”. You have to play with the website setup for the domains to get a feel for what’s available, and consult online Plesk documentation to figure out what each option does. This also requires a fairly advanced understanding of web server technology for it to make any sense.

• You can create a number of subscription profiles and then assign them, though it’s not necessary. In my transition, I assigned custom setups during the initial transfer, and later created subscription packages that made sense for me.

• Beware use of “the expiration date” feature, because Plesk will calculate the expiration based on the expiration + the original account creation date. For example, if your client example.com was created on September 15, 2005, and you set the length of the subscription to 1 year, it expires on September 15, 2006. You won’t see this until Plesk does its 2AM accounting, and everyone will get a “your domain has expired” email, which is very hostile. I just set everything to unlimited for now.

• Plesk now has three control panels instead of one. The main ones are at https://yoursite.com::8443, and the “Power Control Panel” which manages the nuts and bolts of your server is located at https://yoursite.com:4643/. You will need the admin password you created when you first ordered the new server for the regular Plesk panel, and your root password for the Power Control Panel.

• New Copy Database feature, great for cloning databases for quickbackup. However, be warned that a cloned database does NOT clone users; you’ll have to recreate them.

Previewing your Server Changes Without Changing Main DNS Records

Once you’ve moved your files, databases, and configurations for a particular domain to the new server, you have three ways to test it:

1. You could go to the Media Temple Account Center and change the DNS for the domain so it points at the new server IP address. However, if it’s broken it will break your website for all visitors.

2. A neat alternative trick is to edit your own computer’s local hosts file so only it knows about the new server. This overrides the DNS that the world sees with your new value, which allows you to see the site as if it has already be transitioned. Everyone else will be unaffected. If everything looks good on your browser, then go to option 1 and change it for real.

3. The Plesk Control panel has several forms of site preview, but I can never find the icon for it and it doesn’t work very well. Go with option 2.

Editing your host file on the Macintosh or Windows is the least disruptive way. Just remember it works only on your computer, and that you should remove your changes once you’ve transitioned your website completely to the new server and made the DNS switch. Be warned also that some browsers do additional caching of DNS entries (Chrome, for example), so you will need to disable “DNS pre-fetching” or “network optimization” in the advanced settings, somewhere.

Optimizing and Tweaking the Server

I disabled a few services from autostarting, because they’re not needed. This performance tuning article is helpful in getting started.

To disable additional services, you can dig into the etc/init.d directory and chmod 644 any startup scripts you don’t want running. You can also do this through the Plesk Power Control Panel, but I find the chmod approach easier. I disabled the following scripts:

• named – this is the local nameserver service, which is totally unnecessary
• spamassassin – since I don’t receive mail on this server, I don’t need this very resource-hoggy service running
• psa-spamassassmin – this is the Plesk version of spamassassin, which I didn’t notice before
• nginx – this is the front-end web server

Before applying the chmod 644 to these scripts, you first want to shut them down (if they are running, which you can check with a ps aux or by running top) by typing:

    /etc/init.d/named stop
    /etc/init.d/spamassassin stop
    ...

…and so on. Then, apply the permission change with chmod to prevent them from ever running again.

Simple Transition Monitoring

I let the both sites run for two weeks afterwards, to make sure that everything was working properly. By keeping the old server up, I had the ability to go back and check its configuration files to see if there were any differences.

I also kept top running in a terminal window during the transition test period, watching memory usage and looking for anything weird. Here’s an example of what I look for:

The yellow line at the top shows the overall memory usage. The number that concerns me is the memory free line, because if it dips below 50MB (it’s around 940MB here) then the server is in danger of running out of working memory, which will result in a massive slowdown. The key variable that contributes to memory use is the number of people browsing webpages on the server, which includes not just visitors to davidseah.com but also the other 20-odd websites.

I’ve highlighted the three main users of memory on my system:

• Purple shows the number of Apache webserver processes. Every time a web page or image is requested, there is a “httpd process” that is serving it. Each httpd process takes up about 20MB on average, and the number of them is determined by how many requests are active at the same time. For a site like mine, not very many people are hammering my website unless some larger news site links to it, so this “peak usage” must be accounted for if I don’t want my server to go down during extreme traffic events.

• Green shows the memory of of MySQL processes, the database server that helps power the dynamic websites on the server. These numbers don’t change often. My server actually runs two MySQL instances, because I’ve isolated the davidseah.com database from the other sites to see if it helped performance. It doesn’t really, so I may switch back to the single instance. Here you can see around 245MB is used by both MySQL instances.

• Blue shows the memory use by PHP running as a FASTCGI module. Each PHP process runs PHP scripts that power dynamic web pages with MySQL, and this number rises and falls as well with the number of simultaneous web page requests at a given time. It’s closely tied with the number of active Apache processes (purple).

There are some other memory resources that aren’t shown by top (interprocess communication buffers, for example, which is a limited resource). You can see those by going to the Power Control Panel and looking at the Quality of Service (QoS) Alerts.

To tune my server, I need to check a few configuration files:

• The Apache Configuration, particularly MaxServers and MaxClients settings. In the past I’ve found MT’s recommended settings to be overly aggressive, failing completely under extreme server load, so I use my own recommendations to avoid exceeding my guaranteed memory allocation. Running out of memory, at least in the past, exactly a much greater performance penalty than making a web browser wait a few seconds more. I have yet to really test this, though. The pertinent configuration file is at /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf; don’t forget to /usr/sbin/apachectl restart or /etc/init.d/httpd restart to make the changes take effect.

• The number of FastCGI PHP processes can be limited as well, though I haven’t had any practical experience tuning this. The pertinent configuration file is located at /etc/httpd/conf.d/fcgid.conf. This article on fcgid installation and tuning is worth studying.

Tuning is an ongoing process, and optimizations at the website and software level can yield large gains in performance. What I’ve described here is the basic approach: know how much memory your critical web server processes are taking up, and make sure that they don’t run out of memory in extreme conditions. You can slim down the processes themselves with clever configuration and other software optimizations.

Back to Business

After working out the aforementioned issues with server configuration differences, everything is working smoothly, and I’m ready to turn off the old server and let things go. I really do like the (dv) setup. There may be a few extra configuration tweaks to make; it might be nice to learn how to configure nginx to see if I can lower the average memory use of the server, but in the meantime everything appears to be working fine without it.

The (dv) 4.0 continues to offer me a good balance of cost, performance, control, and ease of configuration…the next step up is a dedicated server, or perhaps some cloud-based approach. There are a lot of other companies offering similar hosting packages that I’ve been intrigued by, but they seem to be smaller players and I don’t really want to change my hosting if I can avoid it…as you can gather, it’s kind of a giant pain in the butt! I’d rather just let it run and not think about it :)

…

There were a few bugs leftover from the last attempt. I needed to specify the data directory, get rid of some overzealous try/catch exceptions which masked some important errors, and also add a specific enclosing XML tag in the data files. Updated the GameData.XML reader routines in BaseGameData, as well. Its XML reading is set up differently that in SettingsManager, which bugs me a bit, but I’m going to leave it alone.

And that about does it for the XML reading. I now have the following capabilities:

• Read key/value pairs from an XML file for common settings
• Read Game setup data from an XML file

Next up: Exporting a textured 3D model from Modo, Importing into XNA, Refactoring the View and Camera Classes.

Packaging

The shipping package was pretty typical of a printer. I liked that they included a copy of the proof on the label, so you could tell what it was.

First Impressions

I had ordered a quantity of 250 cards, and since this was a small run it was printed digitally instead of offset. A digital press is like using a giant computer printer, whereas offset printing uses etched plates that are inked and run through a traditional printing press. I had been attracted to 4over because they use a 500-line screen, which is somewhat similar to “pixels per inch” when judging resolution; I was wondering if their digital press also used the same screen approach.

I used a 50mm macro lens to magnify the detail:

You can see the dots here, which are allegedly 20 microns in size, smaller than the diameter of very fine human hair. To the unassisted eye, the dots run together and create the illusion of smooth color…it’s impressive! The black (far right) also looks pretty good. The only problem I see is that the registration of the cyan layer is not perfect with respect to the yellow and magenta layers, and it may be close enough not to matter with the naked eye. If I had been using strong yellows / magentas right next to a mostly cyan element, though, I might have seen a subtle fringing effect, but I am also being very nitpicky. NO ONE WILL SEE THIS FRINGE unless they’ve got 10x to 30x of magnifying power in their hand.

Of more serious note is the heaviness of the card stock, which is 16 thousandths of an inch (16pt) thick. This is regarded as thick premium stock, and it feels even thicker if you UV coat it. However, I went with matte 16pt stock, and it’s OK. It’s not ridiculously thick like I had hoped. This isn’t 4over’s fault, but it does make me want to hunt for some thicker options.

Just to be sure, I compared the 16pt matte stock in the 4over sample book with my cards (image right), and it’s indeed the same. The page feels more substantial mounted in the book…perhaps it’s the overall weight or the direction of the paper grain that makes it feel different.

Comparisons and Other Thoughts

Looking at these cards fresh after a week of being away from them, I think I might agree with the comments on round 3 about the outlines on the yellow boxes. This should go! I also have the feeling that they need to be a big bigger, but I’m flip-flopping on that. The desire for something to plus the card—that is, push it into a higher orbit of design—is still with me. Simplifying the lines slightly will help.

I can also see that I can use lighter tones without them breaking apart, thanks to this 500 line screen technology. Here’s some examples of older cards from 1995 to 2009 that use old-school screening.

The cards from left to right represent 1994, 2001, and 2009 printing. The first two cards were printed using local printers under strong direction from the designer. The last card, on the right, was printed using an online printer. As you click on each example, you can see the relative quality of the screening from none (left) to mushy (right). I’d say that the 4over.com output is pretty good for an online printer.

Finally, I looked at the color differences between my proof (left) and the actual printed product (right):

It is fairly close. The printout (left) is printed on whiter paper, apparently. However, the relative differences between the yellow and orange are pretty close, if a little blurry. The blues are pretty close too. The text thickness, however, is slightly more refined on the printed version; I’ll need to take that into account for the next run, as I feel they are just a bit too unsubstantial.

First…don’t trust your monitor or your printer when it comes to color, unless you’ve calibrated it. I haven’t calibrated my monitors, so I grabbed my trusty Pantone Process Color Guide and used them to verify how the colors I had selected would actually print.

This picture was taken at my desk under half sunlight, half artificial light, which is terrible for color checking because of the unnatural color spectrum; lamps are either reddish (halogen, incandescent) or somewhat greenish (fluorescent). So I went outside as it was a bright clear day and ideal for color checking; natural daylight is the standard. An overcast day or standing in shadow would have imparted a blueish cast to the colors.

My Process Color guide shows me how colors actually look on paper. Process color is a combination of 4 primary colors used in color printing: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. With these colors, you can create a pretty good mix of hues, but it’s not perfect. What looks good on the screen will usually look dustier and less intense on paper, especially when printing on uncoated paper stock. An uncoated paper is naturally dull, whereas coated stocks tend to show colors brighter. I’m planning on printing on uncoated stock because I want to write on the back of the cards, so I may have to get them printed by the local full-service printer to get them the way I want.

I selected some likely oranges, yellows and blues from the process color guide that looked good together, sharing the same saturation and tone so they all stood equal in weight. I picked colors that didn’t have black added to them, because adding pure black tends to make colors look muddy.

I also tinted the blacks. While I could have specified 100% black for everything, it’s common to add a bit of color on top of it (but not too much, otherwise the ink might smear from overloading). I again checked the Pantone process color guide, looking at some examples of rich blacks, and added 35% blue to the black text running under my name (thus unifying them by subtle hue grouping), and adding 35% yellow to the text inside the process boxes. If I’d used pure black in the yellow boxes, I think black text would have knocked-out the background color, and look a little disassociated. Adding a little bit of yellow might help. We’ll see.

With the colors squared away, it was time to reassemble the Illustrator into something print-ready.

This document has been sized to the dimensions of the card (2×3.5 inches). Colors are defined as global masters, so changing one swatch changes all objects that are colored by it. Outside the document in the non-printing area are instructions about this particular printjob. Additionally, there is an additional layer for text that has been converted into outlined shapes. By doing this, I don’t need to supply font files to the printer, which simplifies the way this works. The original text layer, which remains editable should I want to make changes in the future, is set to “not print”, as is the printing guide layer.

On a side note, it’s interesting to compare the screenshot above with the printed image from my home printer:

The screenshot shows much more difference between the inner yellow and the outer orange than what actually shows in the print. It’s hard to predict exactly what will happen at the printer without doing a “proofing print”, which is their best guess at how the actual print job will come out. If I was super anal, I would do a “press check” to look at the prints as they were coming off the actual press, which gives us some flexibility in adjusting some parameters. Anyway, as my home printer isn’t calibrated either, that’s why I’m relying on the Pantone process color guide as a reference and winging it.

Checking the card again, I decided to shift the entire card right a tad, to help optically center the design a bit more. Before, it was centered mathematically, but the dotted line jagging to the left shifts the center balance slightly.

Now…to have the card printed! So many choices to pick from.

To recap, here’s round 1 and round 2:

And here’s round 3:

H: This is the combination of the round 2 feedback, fixing the bottom text address and trying a different slogan, which I ended up not liking because it seemed to try too hard to wedge everything in.

I: Having all the elements decided upon, it was time to come up with a final set of proportions and spaces. I noodled around for about 90 minutes at Starbucks, resolving balance and fixing weights. One problem that kept coming up was the balance of space between the top half and bottom half of the card (you can see how unresolved it is in H). So I tried splitting it, increasing the weight of my name from bold to semi-bold, and then tried crossing that void from the diagram to my name with a dotted line to draw a more immediate connection, centering the name to create a strong focal point with more whitespace around it. It battles the diagram in terms of visual weigh, but with the dotted line and separation I think it actually works pretty well. I also increased the weight of the contact information lead-in, so they would more actively draw attention from the bold name. I eyeballed a lot of the spaces to get a kind of consistent unit spacing with horizontal and vertical gaps by squinting at it…I think I have a pretty good balance (the name might still be a tad low, but it’s hard to judge with the dotted line).

Revision I is the release candidate, barring any horrors that come to light.

There are a few things I need to check, like whether the process colors I’m using will actually print anything like I hope they will, and making sure that I’m within the safe frame of the card edge (I think it’s 1/8th or 1/16th of an inch; it depends on the printer).

I’m working with my friend Al Briggs on an iPad version of the Emergent Task Planner, primarily on user interface concepts and layout. Al’s doing the coding. As is the case with these kind of projects, programmer Al is excited to see graphics, as designer Dave is excited to see working code. Al suggest that I start designing an application icon, and while I’m not sure exactly what the icon should be, I started doing some sketches.

The concepts above are the result of a quick 15-minute sketch session at Starbucks, playing with the following concepts I’d written down on a previous page:

• Emergent
• On-the-fly
• Low resistance
• Freeform
• Nonjudgmental
• Focus without strictness
• Planning
• Encouraging

These words are some of the associations I have with the Emergent Task Planner, so I then tried to think of visual ways to portray them. On the left are the idea of something that “emerges” from a collection of parts; the metaphor is that of a puzzle or tower of pieces (sort of like Jenga). Then on the right side, there are notions of buckets that can be filled with marbles, and multiple paths leading to a structured resolution. There’s nothing really here yet, but I am thinking of jumping into a 3D program and moving some stuff around to see what can arise. So begins the design process!

UPDATE: Hoo, here’s the Apple Icon Guidelines…I didn’t realize how high-res we could get. Exciting!

July 3rd – Two weeks of growing, the sub-irrigation tomatoes are looking good.

July 7th – First flower buds appear on the sub-irrigation planters.

July 9th – About to head to California for a week of work, deployed these capillary house plant feeders to keep the upside-down tomatoes watered.

July 29th – First sign of tomatoes growing on the sub-irrigated tomatoes.

August 8th – The upside-down tomatoes finally show flower buds, a whole month later. This is due to the reduction of sun and lack of consistent watering with the upside-down planter design.

August 8th – Here’s the state of the upside-down tomato plant. You can see how the design of the planter actually shades the plant too much until it gets to a certain size.

August 13th – The upside-down planter flower finally open.

August 16th – In the meantime, the sub-irrigated planters are doing pretty well. That first tomato from July 29th is now the size of my thumb.

You can see how much taller the plants are compared to 6 weeks ago. I had to start tying the plants to the supports, and then run stay lines like the rigging of masts on a sailing ship to keep everything from falling over.

August 20 to 23 – More and more tomatoes appear on the sub-irrigated tomatoes. There are at least 15 or 16 of them, all growing. I now need to water the tomatoes every day…they are very thirsty.

The current size of the tomatoes. I wonder when they’ll start changing color?

Anyway, what’s in the current codebase is this:

• A startup sequence that works within the confines of XNA’s notion of a Game Loop + Initialiation.
• A pretty well-defined procedure for handling the creation of my own main game objects of various type and vintage within the context of the XNA Game Loop + Initialization.
• A rudimentary Debugger and Console, though I haven’t rewritten the command stuff yet
• An Input Manager
• A Settings Manager
• A package hierarchy
• A Mercurial repository and central Bitbucket.org repository
• A rudimentary event listener structure and inter-object communication setup for main game objects
• Graphics Initialization and Debug messages written to the console

What was most important to me was to get the procedures, settings, and debugger setup so I could start building the rest and have some way to debug it. There are a lot of different things I could implement next, and I’d love to just dive write in and port the graphics routines. However, this routines are already written; what I should work on first is a new object creation language.

Currently, game engine 1.0 uses XML files to define everything that appears in the game at the Piece, Visual, and Player level. However, all this does is declare and name pieces and their associations visuals, along with players and their associated pieces. Also, the XML definition is a bit cumbersome, requiring multiple definitions to set up even a simple test. What I’d like for it to do is be a lot less redundant, and scale from very simple declarations of a handful of pieces in a space to complex hierarchies with behaviors attached to them. This GameXML language should be strive to minimally describe any game startup sequence. Each GameXML file also should serve as the defining datastructure for any level, presuming there are multiple levels in the game.

I’m thinking of something like this:

• [piece name="uniquePieceName" [attributes]] is the way to declare any piece. This automatically adds the piece to a global piece dictionary if the name doesn’t exist, or updates its attributes if it already does. If the name attribute doesn’t exist, the piece is created with a unique name.

• If the piece declaration occurs inside a [player] declaration, then the piece is created as described above AND it is added to the player’s piece array.

• A piece can appear in multiple contexts like [player] and possibly other groups that are of interest to the game.

Pieces have the following attributes:

• name = unique identifier of this piece
• template = a piece name to copy attributes from

Initialization that may execute a script somewhere to complete the initialization as well as tagging the pieces with this role

• type = type of piece, as defined in the game
• visual = the type of visual to associate with this piece
• role = logical role(s), comma separated
• tag = logical tag(s), comma separated
• behavior = an AI behavior
• init = an initializing script to use to initialize any other parameters

3D world representations

• position = vector3 coordinate of where this piece exists in space
• scale = the size of the piece, defaults to unit 1 meter
• direction = vector3 pointing
• speed, maxspeed = how fast this can go up to maximum
• turn, maxturn = how many degrees per second this object is allowed to turn

So, the next step would be to write the parser that reads this information and calls a myriad of functions and factories to set all this stuff up. Not the most fun, but it will make creation much easier. After that, we’ll port the visual classes to verify that it’s working correctly. Then, we can port the physics engine and AI behaviors. Then, we can write game logic for the referee classes.

…

AFTER SLEEPING ON IT

The very minimal piece would be to do the piece reading, and maybe read player and visual data structures. So let me start by porting the GameScreen.Prologue() routines XML reader, and see what I can do to encapsulate it.

Where to put this routine? GameScreen.Prologue() is executed as soon as the screen is created and pushed on the stack, which is handled in the LoadContent() part of the call. So that’s where I’m going to put it in the new architecture, except we don’t have a GameScreen to hold this data. So where does this live now?

For now, I think it makes sense to store this information in BaseGame somewhere. Creating a BaseGame Data.cs partial class and a Game.XML file. I also need to create a rudimentary piece class now.

PORTING

BaseGame Data has a new InitalizeDataStructures() and LoadDataStructures() methods that are called from the corresponding BaseGame.Initalize() and BaseGame.LoadContent() master entry points.

The piece-building logic is built around XmlReader, and there’s the option of having a validating reader that using an XmlSchema. I’m going to disable this for now. Related to this, though, is a class called StringUtility that converts the strings in the XML file. The current implementation uses default values in case the attribute being read doesn’t exist. This makes the code not only harder to read, but it also will mask problems with the game initialization XML file. I’m going to remove this feature.

First thing first…setting up!

1. Installed Mountain Lion, Clean, on my MacBook Pro 17″ from late 2007. It’s old, but it works.

2. Installed Xcode via the App Store.

3. Installed GitHub for Mac.

4. Downloaded the project from Github.

5. Tried to open the project file and run it. BOOM. Missing header files. I wondered if I had to install the TestFlight SDK, so I emailed Al.

6. He emailed back that he was using CocoaPods, which is a “library dependency manager” for Objective-C. You can specify the library you want to use, and CocoaPods takes care of grabbing everything that this library needs to work properly so you don’t have to do it manually. It relies on something called /ruby, which is a package manager for programs written in the ruby language, which I needed to install.

After some farting around, I found I had to go to XCode’s Preferences and under Components select “Install Command Line Components” so I could run the sudo gem install cocoapods command (gem was already installed as part of the dev tools, I believe), followed by pod setup. I also had to run sudo gem update --system to get the most up-to-date version of whatever gem is.

After that, I went to the directory where I downloaded Al’s source, and typed pod install per Al’s instructions. It started doing this:

    Installing Objection (0.13.0)
    Installing TestFlightSDK (1.0
    Installing OCMock (2.0.1)
    Using Objection (0.13.0)
    Using TestFlightSDK (1.0)
    Generating support files

Al then said to look at the “workspace file” that has been created, which I’m guessing is the file that ends with .xcworkspace. I double-clicked it to see what would happen. I was able to build the project and run it in a simulator. Very exciting!

I poked around the file explorer in xcode, and was reminded of just how old-school Objective-C is compared to C#. I’ll have to read up a bit on this.

ROUGH NOTE CAPTURE MODE

Ok, I have a ScreenDisplayList and that maintains a list of things for it to draw. Subclassers of the base Screen class can use that to handle the Load(), Unload(), and Paint() virtual methods to handle a display list. However, for our console screen, I think it will work a bit different and hold lines of text.

I just realized that the DisplayList class I made is really just a List . DUH.

DELEGATES?

Anyway, let’s grab the old DebugManager implementation for the console. It has a HandleKey to manage the text structures. We need to register DebugManager for Key events. Do I need to use a delegate? What’s the way to do this in C#? A delegate is a TYPE that can hold a reference to any function that matches its signature.

public **delegate** *function signature*

where an example would look like this:

public delegate int MyDelegateFunction(int x, int y);

In this case, MyDelegateFunction is the delegate’s name. I’d declare it like this:

MyDelegateFunction myFunction;

and I can assign it to any other function declaration that matches the original declaration’s function signature. So if I had a pair of functions like this…

public static int PlotPoint (int x, int y) { blah blah blah } public static int PlotPoint2 (intx, int y) { more blah blah }

…I could do something like this, if I’m understanding this right.

MyDelegateFunction myFunction;
myFunction = PlotPoint;
myFunction(1,2);
myFunction = PlotPoint2;
myFunction(1,2);

You can pass a delegate as an object! So you can use it for asynchronous callbacks to handle events. A delegate object can also hold MULTIPLE methods to invoke. You can also assign a Delegate object a method within an object instance, and that works too. Pretty swanky. It’s described here.

So what do I know now that helps me write my thing? I need to add some delegates support to the InputManager class. However, if there are multiple listeners, I need to check the return value of EACH listener, and abort if the key event is handled. After doing some digging, I used the Delegate.GetInvocationList() and just called them one after the other. This seems to be what you’re supposed to do.

So now, the DebugManager needs to hook itself up to the InputManager and do some wiring in BaseGameINIT and BaseGameRun. Now using Console.WriteLine() to see if I’m capturing anything…cool! It works!

• There’s some interesting stuff here with Asynchronous callbacks…hmm. Any delegate type has a method called BeginInvoke added, which takes your parameters PLUS an AsyncCallback delegate and an object that “passes information into the callback method. It’s of type IASyncResult, and has some data in it (and probably other interesting things). More of this is described on the Calling Synchronous Methods Asynchronously page.

• On a side note, you can also create a delegate by calling new() on the type, initializing it with an existing function or method.

  delegate void MyDelegateType ( int index ); MyDelagateType delegate = new MyDelegateType( someobject.somefunction ); delegate ( 10 );

Mysterious and cool! I’m capturing text. Now I need to DRAW it.

PRINTING OUTPUT TO OUR OWN CONSOLE

Another source of text in our DebugConsole window will be a regular DebugManager. I just looked at the built-in System.Diagnostics.Debug and Trace classes, which seem to do a lot of the same thing. However, I’m not seeing a way to actually redirect the output back into our system so I can write it to the screen as an overlay.

I’ll sleep on this a bit and tackle it again tomorrow. I might as well just port the old code and use that, as it does work.

AND WE’RE BACK

Each type of Screen (ConsoleScreen, for example) is designed to integrate with a certain kind of visual data. They are what keep track of all the visual-related classes that draw things. I’m thinking that a GameScreen probably maintains the list of Visuals as associated with Pieces, and Pieces no longer maintain them. Each Screen-derived subclass would be initialized with a list of pieces it was interested in, and it would then create the visuals that go with each of those pieces. The pieces may have hints as to its appearance, name, and other unique qualities.

A slight detour: The GameXML file that defines all the elements of a working game will be split into multiple files. Pieces can be defined within various context like Player, etc. They have at minimum a unique Name. If a piece is declared for the first time, it is added to the global piece list, and also added to whatever context (e.g. Player)’s list.

Screens also declare what pieces it is interested in, though it can refer to any containing context (e.g. Player) also to read in all the pieces as needed.

Handling RenderPasses: A Screen may have several renderpasses. I’m not very clear on the architecture of HLSL shaders and renderpasses, so for now I’m going to just assume every screen has one renderpass, during which all visuals are drawn.

Ok, let’s get back to consolescreen…

BaseGame.Draw() is where the magic would be happening. It needs to tell the ScreenManager to draw. Let’s let’s add that.

… hours pass …

Ok, I have implemented the following:

• Diagrammed the correct startup sequence for the XNA Game Class. Initialize() is followed by LoadContent() which is then followed by Update() and Draw() in a loop, until the game quits.

• In Initialize(), called the constructors of all “main game objects”, which create local data structures only.

• After all main game objects are constructed, each of them gets their Initialize() function called.
• After all main game objects are Initialized(), they are allowed to MakeConnections() with other game objects

Then, XNA Game called LoadContent(), which is when other major game objects get their LoadContent() called as well.

This is a bit messy and confusing, so let me think about this a bit:

• What is a Main Game Object (MGO)? Generally, they’re singletons that perform some function, and there’s only one of them. They’re usually a manager class of some kind.

• There are different categories of MGO. Some are System-level, like GraphicsDeviceManager, ContentManager, which are responsible for implementing the XNA subsystem and loading content that it can use. Related are MGOs like a SoundManager and InputManager. Let’s call these the HARDWARE LEVEL MGOs that encapsulate what the hardware and operating system can provide in a game-friendly package.

• There are some high level MGOs that aren’t related to hardware/OS, such as DebugManager and SettingsManager. They are foundational and are used by everyone else.

• The other MGOs implement systems that are used for the game portion. ScreenManager manages Screens, which uses the A/V MGOs to draw graphics. PhysicsManager imposes physics on pieces in the game. Players also manage pieces. Referee monitors the state of the game.

• Game Loaders, Persistent Storage, Level Loading and State Preservation are high-level MGOs that manipulate the state of the game-related MGOs above.

There’s some fishiness with the way I’m creating the ConsoleScreen. Currently, DebugManager is the data holder, and it maintains a “DebugBuffer” class with all the string tables and offsets that it needs to keep track of. It’s a class because they can be passed by reference to ConsoleScreen, which keeps its own reference to that datastructure so it can draw from it.

ConsoleScreen is created by a call to ScreenManager by DebugManager sometimes after DebugManager is fully initialized. This means:

• all MGOs constructed!
• All MGOs initialized!
• All MGOs have loaded content

At this point, any MGO can request information from any other MGO and be confident that it’s ready. Right now, that is handled in the Start() method, which is called at the very end of BaseGame.LoadContent()

And that closes out this phase of development. We have a clean, ready-to-use base that can print text to the screen.

Here’s the image from Round 1:

Here are the new Round 2 tweaks, based on feedback from readers both on the site and on Facebook. Thanks for all the great comments!

AA: I’d changed the way the tagline looked, replacing the & with a +, and removing the spaces to make the line more compact. The use of a plus sign creates a compound word, sorta, instead of the “Sanford & Sons” association I have with the use of the ampersand. Plus, it just looks tidier to me. I like this.

C: This is a suggested tagline change. I actually tend to use this construct in my writing; it’s a habit I’m trying to break, actually because it’s “listy”. Great for ending a paragraph with authority. However, it spills to two lines, and makes the card just a bit too dense for my liking. I also feel that it’s somehow become less focused in the offering…are productivity, workflow, and learning all related? Sorta. It seems a tiny bit less credible than just having productivity+learning. Or workflow+learning, which might be better.

D: This is a change in the phrasing of the blue words, converting them from action verbs to categories of action. I don’t really like this, because it seems now that there are two conflicting hierarchies. Before, the blue words (deliberately less bold, and a cooler color) were intended to be descriptive of the process to the right. Now, they seem to be two systems that are implied to be related, but the linkage is not clear. Confusing, I think. But that’s just my interpretation. For all I know, my original diagram makes sense only to me.

E: It was suggested that I add a gradient. Usually I don’t like adding gradients to printed designs, because they’re tough to reproduce smoothly in paper and can be super-cheesy if overused. The gradient is one of the first things that a stuck graphic design student will do to a background to try to add some life and interest…it’s sort of like adding reverb to a bad recording, or using a synth pad to create atmosphere in a piece of techno. However, when applied subtly, it can add dimension and bring visual elements forward. And if I’m going to graphic designer hell, I might as well add a drop shadow! I applied a light one to just add a bit of dimensionality, and it does change the nature of the card…I kind of like it. So, I guess the moral of the story is don’t poo-poo the gradient until you’ve tried it. But do it after you have a strong layout concept, and are using it for a reason other than “filling empty space”.

There is a practical worry: the smooth gradients may look great on a screen, but they could break up into visible bands when it’s printed. The printer I’m considering for this run, 4over.com, is using process color, which ordinarily means that I need to be very careful about gradients. However, this printer is also using a 500-line screen, which means that the gradient pattern dots will be very tiny, and maybe will blend well. It depends on the resolution of their RIP, too, which is unknown. That determines the number of fine gradations that can be reproduced, unless they’re using a stochastic screen, which would eliminate the banding altogether. If I were really serious about this I would do my own stochastic black plate in Photoshop, but now I am really getting into the weeds.

Oh, this revision also has digital hearts, or what could be interpreted as heart. I didn’t feel they worked on the non-gradient designs because it creates more complexity in the interstitial spacing of the word boxes, which grabs our attention and breaks the flow of reading a little too much. I don’t want these to be focal points. I want them to attention guides that read once, then fade away from conscious sight.

F: One commenter said something about the text alignment being distracting. I wasn’t sure exactly what was meant, but this is one interpretation: the ragged left edge interfered with the flow of the card. So, flipping the graphic horizontally is one was of fixing that. I had deliberately reversed it, though, because I liked how the eye moved diagonally from the upper right to the lower left, taking a detour through the blue text. More eye movement is interesting. When I have the card laid out like this, you can just read straight down from top to bottom very fast which is…somehow diminishing. The original layout is like an IKEA store, which makes you wander through a maze so you see everything. The flipped layout is like straight slide, and it’s more difficult to catch the blue words the first time around because your eye is being pulled down that left edge so fast.

Incidentally, this card does have verbiage change to seek inspiration, which I didn’t think would work but it actually IS much better. Gotta see things in context, sometimes.

G: This is another interpretation of the alignment comment. I left-justified the text in the boxes and then was forced to move the diamonds. I really don’t like this layout.

SO FAR:

I’ve ported some really basic stuff, refactoring along the way:

• BaseGame.cs split into partial classes BaseGame Init.cs and BaseGame Run.cs
• Singleton Pattern, made less twiddly to use, the basis for all Manager classes
• SettingsManager.cs, cleaned up

I’m now at the point that I want to port over something that actually draws on the screen. This is a complex subject, because we need to have a system for drawing, with a well-defined order of operations coordinated between multiple system objects.

THE OLD SYSTEM

Just about every modern video game uses multiple framebuffers, showing a completed frame while drawing on a hidden one before switching. Drawing a frame usually consists of multiple drawing passes, such as a 3D view with a 2D user interface superimposed on top of it. The drawing process itself may require multiple passes as well for special effects.

In our old game, we had the notion of “Screens” managed by a “ScreenManager”. Screens shared a common subclass that defined typical game loop behaviors, namely:

• Update() – processing time to do calculations
• Paint() – the command to draw to the current framebuffer
• HandleButtons() – event handling for gamepad button presses
• HandleKey() – event handling for key presses
• HandleRepeatedKey() – event handling for repeating key presses
• Prologue() – pre-run initialization of data structures
• Epilogue() – post-run cleanup and release of data structures

There were three types of Screens defined: GameScreen, GUIScreen, and DebugScreen. ScreenManager managed them as a stack, drawn in the order listed.

What I didn’t like about this arrangement is that GameScreen is essentially the game program. It’s buried in the class hierarchy under Classes/Layout/GameScreen. I would never have thought to look there for game initialization and running, expecting it to be more top-level in the hierarchy. The second issue I had was that a Screen seems more like a display device to me, not something that would even have high-level logic in it. I can accept the notion of a Screen being smart enough to draw a display list, but I don’t like it having player AI and level logic stored in it. I’d prefer that to be somewhere else.

The other main screen is DebugScreen, which is what draws the debug console. It works in concert with the DebugManager, which is what keeps track of all the debug messages and processes commands. DebugScreen knows how to display that data using drawing commands, which I have no problem with. It is a cleaner separation between display code and data management. GUIScreen is a hacky screen that draws between GameScreen and DebugScreen, and was used for display giant bitmaps as signage when no one was playing the game in the museum space. It’s used by WorldPlayer, which is what implements the game logic through its various stages. This is a little screwed up too, so I’d want to clean it up.

THE NEW SYSTEM

I’m moving the game logic out of GameScreen. Screens and the ScreenManager will be implemented differently, as sets of display lists that are bound with data from other system players and objects. Instead of having game-functional names, they will have be organized by displaytype. For example:

• ThreeDeeScreen – draws a 3D world from its displaylist consisting of Visuals
• ConsoleScreen – draws 2D text from its displaylist consisting of lines of text and other properties
• SpriteScreen – draws 2D sprites from a displaylist consisting of sprite elements

The ScreenManager will maintain a stack of these screens, and will also be called directly by the Game Loop. ScreenManager will know how to construct its screen stack based on XML files. Screens can be active or not, toggled by external controllers.

To handle actual text input, there’s a new class called InputManager that consolidates the gamepad button and keyboard state into one place. It’s called once during Game Loop so that all interested subscribers can receive notification. The DebugManager will be one of these, as will any Players that may need control input. There are some additional complexities that may be added, but for now we can just implement this pretty simply.

I’ve just written InputManager, and at a minimum I need to rewrite the Screen and ScreenManager so I can write ConsoleScreen. While the ScreenManager will eventually be initialized from a config file, for now I can just hard-code the creation chain.

SCREEN CLASS

Has notions of visibility, event consumption, viewport, and name. Virtual methods are Load(), Unload(), and Paint().

A Screen needs to have a source of data to draw, the “display list”. Should the base class have the notion of a DisplayList bound to it at creation time? Maybe something like ScreenDisplayList , ScreenDisplayList generics. ScreenDisplayLists would accept an ADD command. The subclassers of Screen are responsible for implementing storage of a ScreenDisplayList .

This might be overly fancy for what I need, but we’ll see how it goes.

Intentions

The name of our Visual Studio 2005 project, started in 2009, was “BaseSystem” out of no other reason than it was the base. I’ve named the new version BaseSystem2.

The strategy will be to port function from the old into the new, cleaning up along the way. There are some basic 2D graphic routines I want to port just so we can write text on the screen and support our console functions. Then, I would like to add some basic 2D GUI functions that make more sense than the old widgets. Toward the end of the project, we came up with better ways to organize 2D screen content on top of the 3D.

There is also a matter of just revisiting the game initialization and setting of XML-based runtime parameters. There’s plenty to do. I’ll document this step-by-step, and clean it up later.

Create the Project

I installed Visual Studio 2010 Professional, and then XNA Game Studio 4.0 Refresh on it. Created a new C# Windows Game solution called BaseSystem2. This created a few default program files:

• Program.cs
• Game1.cs

I also opened BaseSystem under Visual Studio 2005, and did a side-by-side comparison of Program.cs. This is the stub program that contains the Main() entry point in the Program class. It’s a static entry point, and I think all C# programs start like this.

The only thing it really does is create a new Game instance, and then calls its Run() method. This is where all the XNA magic happens, so that should be far more interesting.

Comparing this to the BaseSystem (hereafter referred to OldBase), there’s some additional things we’ve crammed in here that I’d forgotten about. There is a global exception handler adopted from doogal.co.uk. This writes our error logs to disk for us. It’s part of our Utility classes. I think we can create a place for it in a Debugger namespace. I might as well move that code now.

Ooops, have to download the OldBase code, so I can copy it to NewBase. Ugh, I don’t like the way that VisualStudio named the various components…too many folder named BaseSystem2! I renamed the files and directories, then edited the .sln and .prj files to refer to the new directories after double-clicking the .sln file showed that there were reference errors. Double-clicking the solution file didn’t open Visual Studio 2010 the first time, though, after making this edit. Somehow the “default program” was set to use “Visual Studio 2010 Version Selector”, which didn’t do anything, as a result of that error. I just reset it to use VS2010.

Ok, now I can copy/paste some classes in! Creating “Debug.Logger” for these logger classes. I first tried to “add existing item”, but this didn’t create the folder hierarchy. I had to create the folder structure first, then add the files to that folder. I guess that’s OK…the folder hierarchy in the Solution view doesn’t have to match the disk layout. That’s probably more flexible.

I probably have to rewrite the namespace declarations for these files too. I’m also noting that TextFileLogger and LoggerImplementation can’t see the System.Windows.Forms package. VS2010 suggests I’m missing a reference. Let me see what references are here in the Solution Explorer:

• Microsoft.XNA.Framework.*
• mscorlib
• System
• System.Core
• System.Net
• System.Xml
• System.Xml.Linq

It’ll be interesting to look through this later and see what’s in those references. A reference is how one links to a library, I guess, in Visual Studio 2010. I wonder how they are implemented or exist as files? Looking at the properties for the “System” reference:

• It’s an “Assembly”
• C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework.NETFramework\v4.0\Profile\Client\System.dll

A C# program maybe isn’t statically linked as in the old days. Perhaps this library is a hardcoded path and the system loads it on demand. Will have to read up on that. ANYWAY, let me see if there are difference references in OldBase:

• FarseerPhysics
• Microsoft.XNA.Framework.*
• mscorlib
• Softimage.XWImporter
• System
• System.Data
• System.Web
• System.Core
• System.Net
• System.Web
• System.Windows.Forms
• System.Xml
• System.Xml.Linq
• XSIXNARuntime

So there are some differences. Three of these are game-specific (Farseer, Softimage, XSIXNA). The others might be new to Net 4.0 or renamed. I see I have to add System.Windows.Forms here. But how? Let me try right-clicking.

Add Reference -> .NET -> System.Windows.Forms…. that was easy. Let’s see if the errors have gone away in the loggers…yup.

At this point, we should be able to build…oops a few missing references. A function called HttpUtility.UrlEncode() doesn’t exist. Doing a google, I find it’s part of System.Web. I add that reference…but wait, System.Web isn’t listed. STUCK! A quick google, and apparently System.Web is part of the .NET 4 framework, but Visual Studio defaults to something called the .NET CLIENT PROFILE, which is a subset of the complete .NET framework. The idea is that it’s smaller, and therfore deploys smaller. Changing the “Target Framework” can be done by going to the project properties (Project Menu) and selecting the Application tab. I changed it from “.NET 4 Client Profile” to “NET Profile”. Now I see a lot more System.Web references available, including the one I want. Success!

The two remaining errors refer to missing stuff from OldBase. One is a reference to BaseGame, which is called Game1 in NewBase. I need to move this, actually, into my namespace hierarchy and clean it up:

• My ‘Engine’ solution has a classes folder, which might not be good practice. I probably should just let the folders live outside of this.
• However, there are other folders in this same level, the bin and obj folders. I’m going to rename them to _bin and _obj so they sort toward the top by modifying project’s Build properties…however, i don’t see a place to set the obj output. Hm. Google shows that you can add two properties to change this by editing the .csproj file. I did this, and it works.
• I’m just trying to make a clean directory here…sigh. I’ve made a directory manually called _src, and will try adding an existing item. Argh, this is annoying. The folder hierarchy in the solution explorer is what matters, apparently.

Oh well. I reverted all those changes and will live with “source” being in my namespace. It seems retarded…I must be missing something. I supposed I could manually rename all the namespaces as I create new files, but I would rather not.

…

I’ve added the stuff in, and commented it. I added a Singleton class based on Bretton’s original, except I added an “S” accessor variable in addition to the verbose “GetSingleton()” call. Also documented some of the interesting features he’s using with the Generic class.

So what do I have now? The beginnings of BaseSystem with a skeleton outline.

After getting my iPad, I installed Square Register so I could accept sales by credit card in-person. It also has a cool “Favorites” display, so you can just tap the things you are selling, and they’re added up right on the screen before you swipe the card.

There are two kinds of sales I’m making: physical goods in the form of the various Emergent Task Planner printed products, and also face-to-face consulting and on-site production (graphics) time. Square Register allows you to take pictures either from the camera (this is buggy and unreliable, currently) or from your stored photos, so I designed a set of icons for this.

The criteria that they were visually distinct from each other and not too hard to draw.

• I stuck with simple shapes and geometries. For the ETP products, I just used Illustrator’s 3D Rotate tool for the page and text, then drew in the pad thickness with the pen tool. For the time-related services, I drew a simple hourglass with a couple of triangles manipulated with the ROUND CORNERS filter, pathfinder UNIFY tool, OFFSET PATH, and CLIPPING MASK.

• The one conceptual idea I put into this was having the “thought bubble” on the left of the hourglass to imply “thinking comes first”, and the “brick stack” on the right to imply “production comes next”. But this is subtle reasoning; it actually just helps distinguish the two icons a bit better, as they have similar elements, element weightings, and proportions.

• To impart a little motion to the images, the hour glass dripping sand is spaced to imply acceleration. The stack of bricks also has the top brick tilted and placed as if it’s going to drop. The strong pyramid pattern creates the desire for shape closure (our friend “gestalt” at work), so I think that helps sell the idea of something in the process of being assembled.

The hard part was figuring out how Square Register imports the images. While it appears to accept a square-aspect icon, it actually clips the image in a way that was difficult to predict. If you import a square-aspect picture (e.g. 256×256), Square doesn’t show you any cropping that it will perform. In actuality, it WILL crop it to allow the app to put a TEXT LABEL at the bottom of the icon. Strangely, if you upload a pre-cropped icon, Square will THEN show you the cropping tools…it seems to want to crop the image square, and then screw it up later.

To get around this, you need to design with a safe frame at the top and bottom of your icon. The aspect ratio of the final cropped image is 200×158, so you want to make a 200×200 icon with a buffer of 79 pixels at the top and 79 pixels at the bottom with 21 pixels of dead space at both the top and bottom. Here’s a visual representation of what happens:

After that, you just need to figure out how to get those images onto your iPad’s photo application. Either sync it with iTunes or whatever. I use DropBox for all my project file synchronizing, so I used the DropBox iPad app to do something similar. It can copy image files from your DropBox account into the iOS Photo Album thingy, which then can be set in the Square Register App.

On a side note, Square Register seems to be a little flaky about remembering the images you set, sometimes forgetting the image or reverting back to the text-only label. It also gets confused and sometimes crashes when using the camera to take a photo. But once it’s set up, I have my pretty icons :)

I’ve been wanting to grow tomatoes on my deck for a few years. After considering hanging upside-down tomato planters last year—nixed because I couldn’t hang anything without nailing into the siding, which was against condominium regulations—I’ve gone ahead an purchased a Suncast standing tomato planter from Amazon.

It’s basically a raised platform on four legs that allows you to plant your upside-down tomato plant without hanging it from something. It cost me about $45.

Next, I purchased a bag of potting soil and six “Big Boy” tomato seedlings, which I have come to learn are probably not the best for a hanging tomato planter. What I want is something called a “determinate” tomato plant, which stops growing in length. These are also called “bush tomatoes”. They tend to be early tomatoes; a species called “Early Girl” is apparently a good bet. The Big Boy is apparently an “indeterminate” type of tomato, meaning it’s going to grow and grow. Uh oh.

Tomatoes apparently need a lot of sunlight and water. Sunlight I’m not too worried about, but the water is going to be a problem. I can run a garden hose from the first floor up to my deck, so daily watering shouldn’t be a problem (especially since I’ve rigged a harness to keep the hose off the ground and out of the way, so I can leave it connected). However, when I am travelling for business I’m going to need an automated watering solution. Preferably one that is not expensive.

I first looked at irrigation systems that required pumps. There are indoor house plant watering machines, such as this Claber automatic watering system, but they are a bit expensive and I wanted something that didn’t require electricity to operate. Plus, the system needs to exist outside on my deck, not inside the house. I looked to see if I could find parts to build a gravity-driven drip irrigation system at DripDepot, which has affordable kits, but it seemed a little more complicated than what I was looking for right now.

Then I remembered that there irrigation systems that use capillary action, and found these Austrian self-watering probes. I’ve placed an order for the five-pack, and I’ll see if all 5 of them can keep a tomato plant thriving.

I also made two sub-irrigated planters (aka self-watering planters), which have the water supply underneath a suspended soil bed in a closed container.

The water is wicked upward into the soil through capillary action, and is very water efficient. The DIY approach I’m taking has cost me about 25 dollars in parts: a big plastic tub, some supporting pots, and some PVC piping. Buying an actual Earthbox from their website isn’t that much more; I may buy one just to see what it’s like.

This is the difficult part of design for me, when I don’t know what to do that will deliver a result. I’m used to thinking through problems to come up with a hypothetical solution, but in this case the solution isn’t clear or obvious.

The trick to get past this is to just do something anyway, and count on spending a bunch of time on it. I know from past experience that it takes me between 40 and 80 hours to create a polished prototype of a brand new idea. That time is spent trying a lot of things until you find a few pieces that seem to fit, and then those fragments crystalize into a whole organism. Sometimes that organism isn’t viable, but it’s a stepping stone to the next design.

So here’s my first stepping stone, only partially complete and not organized, but it started to give me an idea that the big picture is like a game board divided into realms and portals.

I think the big picture I need becomes a place that can accept attachment of ideas and activities. It’s the missing bedrock of my to-do list landscape. It reminds me a little bit of the visual model approach to business planning, but highly personalized to what I need to do. Perhaps it’s more of an operations map.

So, it’s slow going, but I’m posting this as a reminder to myself of how far I’m going to have to go, one idea at a time.

I spent part of the day doing some personal logo work, and though I didn’t get to a place where I can call it DONE, it was a surprisingly enlightening exercise. I don’t usually take on logo work for other people because I think they are such personal things, and my approach to this kind of design can be very drawn out, and therefore expensive in terms of my time. There are other people who are much better at it than I, anyway.

That said, I figured it might be interesting to share the process. Read onward!

Dave Seah, Functional Stationery Designer

I’ve been trying out a new description for what I do: “I make functional stationery” or “I’m a functional stationery designer.” I like this because it includes the word “stationery”, which is something that people understand more intuitively than “information graphic designer” or “investigative designer”. This revision to my small talk algorithm is part of my journey for 2012l; I’m getting used to the idea of being someone who identifies himself by being someone who makes things instead of being a service worker.

Anyway, I was planning on spending some time today working on me-stuff, and of course this ritual begins with the selection of the proper bag. As I was reviewing my choices, I noticed that one of them still had my business cards, and this reminded me that they are all out of date. It’s time to make new ones. Seemed like a good place to start.

I decided to try having breakfast at my local municipal airport, which has a cafe overlooking the single runway that serves breakfast all day. I love airplanes and airports, and as I waited for my unexpectedly enormous breakfast to arrive, I doodled a few things in my notebook (above). Like any 1st year design student, I just took the letters F and S and jammed them together. Perhaps the F and S could be made to look like the same letterform, and maybe by making it look something like two nodes connected by a line would imply “functional”. Or, if luck smiled upon me, I could at least make it look interesting and mysterious.

The idea of functional stationery is something that everyone probably can appreciation, but for me is kind of a secret pleasure. This got me to thinking about secret brands, as described by William Gibson in his book Zero History. The idea of a secret brand is that it’s small and exclusive, not known by many except those who are really into it. This is kind of how I think of what I do; I’m not interested particularly in a traditional path of company growth. I just want to make something cool and obsessive that I liked, that would earn me enough living income so I could continue to make these things. That stationery is kind of my version of art is really bizarre, but I figure I might as well see where this idea goes.

So, I thought about secrets and symbols. The visual identity for a secret brand doesn’t have to be obvious. It just needs to be recognizable, and perhaps even a little cryptic. The f and s could be merged into a single totemic figure, perhaps, while conveying the idea of “function” as something moving from point A to B.

I moved into Illustrator and made some vector versions of my scribbles. These weren’t working for me at all. They looked more like instructional diagrams, and after a while they started to resemble dancing worms wearing skirts. Idea (C) resembles some kind of moonwalking snake creature with arms.

As I was constructing the vectors for pass 1, I did notice some pleasing repetition of the curves. I wondered if making some kind of companion form would work, so I made an “s” (figure D) to experiment with it. It’s a weird S too; if you look at the curves up close you’ll see they’re not exactly symmetrical, but I wanted it that way. I retained a tiny bit of a tail on the f, to let it have some forward slinking motion like (C) does, and gave it two crossbar arms (I think my reasoning was that if there were two next to each other, they wouldn’t read as arms). The slant of the arms adds a strange perspective effect (I’m fond of that), as does the slight offset between the baselines of the two letters. They start to take on a slight runic appearance or some weird logo from the 1920s that you might find on the bottom of a piece of pottery. A maker’s mark, in other words.

If it was a mark, then it belonged in a lozenge. And in the 1920s they might have made some kind of reference to stationery, so I stuck something that looked like a fountain pen nib on it, and tried a few variations (E-G). I showed these to my friend Sid, who liked (G) because it started to look sort of regal, like it was wearing a crown. Adding the vertical line to split the nib helped add some complementary line detail that helped balance out the letters.

I wasn’t really satisfied with the way that the fs pair was filling the lozenge, so I tried various sizes. Figures H, I, and K were the original scaled sizes. H feels peculiarly flat, while K feels too contained. Figure J was my pick, as it feels comfortable to me.

Looking this over, I started to wonder about the f. Did it read as an f? Probably not. In version L and M, I played with the letter a bit, removing the tail (which made it look like a letter “J”) and removed one curve detail. In N, I wondered if I could bring back the idea of a system node by replacing the crossbar, mirroring the round cutout of the nib. This was kind of interesting by seemed unresolved; I tried flipping the nib on the other side so the balls were more on opposite sides of the logo, but it really did nothing for me.

After the second hour of working on this, I took a break and came back. I decided I didn’t like the pen nib, and removed it to see how the lozenge stood on its own, thinking of a secret, clean maker’s mark. This looked much cleaner, though the dot really didn’t work. I added a crossbar through it, asymmetrically bisecting the lozenge to make an f, but it started to look like the UPS logo or a drug capsule (Q). Tilting it helped break that look, and then it was a matter of playing with line widths. While I liked the fine line, the thickness really needed to match the letters, which ended up with (S2)

I wondered if I could get a more robust feeling by cropping the lozenge, as T through V show. I stuck the nib back on it to see what it would look like. Seemed overly ornate, but with additional treatment it might have been the basis for some kind of fancy engraving approach. I decided, though, that (S2) was the mark I’d try to work with.

The mark by itself, I found, didn’t really work with the typography I came up with, and it’s a bit awkward to use on a business card. And it’s lost some drama too. I find myself looking back at (P) and thinking that I like this better, because it just seems more mysterious. I don’t know…I’ll have to take a break from this and look at it again in a few days. For example, instead of a lozenge I could make it looks like stacks of paper. That might be more obvious. I may have to rethink my choice of typeface too, but I’ve pretty much standardized on Proxima Nova Condensed as my “official” font. I just like it.

Skype, despite its bloated user interface, works fairly well out of the box once you figure it out. The paradigm is familiar: click a name to call, or find the latest hiding place for the “call phones” keypad. Google Voice, however, is a bit different.

First of all, there are actually three voice-enabled products. Google Voice is the one that handles the telephone call connections. Google Talk is a voice enhancement of Google Chat, an instant messager (IM) client that runs like a normal desktop application. Finally, Gmail has the ability to send and receive calls, in addition to serving as your browser-based email client.

Google Voice works with GMail to place calls. Instead of connecting from your computer to the phone number, Google Voice is like a switchboard operator that sets you up with a two-person conference call. You initiate your call to a number with Google Voice using the Google Voice web page, and then Google Voice calls YOU back to make the connection. Once you answer the phone, Google Voice then calls the phone number you’re trying to reach.

To make a call from your computer, then, you need the ability to answer the incoming call. Google Voice allows you to designate “Google Talk” running on your computer as the “phone” it will call. You may have it installed as a desktop client, as it works as a messenger client. However, Google Talk does not answer calls if you have Google Voice open on your computer. However, if you also have GMail open, you will get a ringer alert there. Once you answer the Google Voice call with GMail, you are connected and the other phone number is dialed, and things proceed rather well from there.

It’s very weird and convoluted. It may be that Google isn’t interested in creating and easy point-to-point calling solution that works completely on a computer like Skype, but it may also be typical Google disorganization with regards to their family of overlapping solutions, additionally hamstrung by the lack of concise, well-curated documentation.

In summary, to set up you need to:

• Signup for Google Voice with your Google account
• Set up Google Talk account, if you don’t already have one
• Register Google Talk as a Phone in Google Voice
• You may have to make an outgoing call first in GMail to activate the calling feature
• You may have to add credit for dialing numbers outside the United States/Canada

Then, to make a call:

• Open Google Voice in a browser window
• Open GMail in a separate browser window
• Use Google Voice to place the call to a phone number
• Use GMail to answer the Google Voice connection, which will then proceed to call the phone number

To receive a call:

• Google Voice will attempt to ring all your devices registered to it, and it will do so all at the same time
• If Gmail is not open in a browser window, I presume that the Google Talk IM client will pick up, but I’ll have to test that.

Although this is a lot of hoops to jump through, the Google Voice product is technically pretty good. Call quality is good for me, and the voice mailbox and transcription services are cool. It’s nice to get an email when you get a voice message.

The left side shows the half-sized ETP overlaid on the 4×6″ template. The right size shows the resized version. I had to make several more adjustments, and ended up redrawing most of the form.

Challenges

I started shrinking the A5 design, as that design went through a group test to find the smallest size I could make things. However, for the ETP to be useful for a day of planning, I needed at least 12 hours visible. That wasn’t going to happen with the existing day grid. So, I simplified it by shrinking the hour boxes and eliminating the 15-minute boxes of the original. The resulting design can show 19 hours, which two lines of planning per hour. This means that the level of detail you can record is lessened, but I think that isn’t going to matter much for the way I imagine this will be used.

I got rid of the secondary line of 15-minute boxes, sticking only with the hour boxes. Half hours are designated by the dashed lines. There’s not a lot of room here to write things down, so I would encourage the use of numbers to note when you plan to do a particular task. For example, if you are doing task 01, then write an 01 on the day grid.

Other missing elements: I decided to us the “7 Task” design as a starting point, so there are no time tracking bubbles. I think that’s OK for an on-the-go form, and it turns out that the 7 Task design is the more popular one.

Design Changes

I defined a grid size of 0.15 inches to use for spacing and sizing purposes. The width of the day grid hour box is 0.15″, and this is repeated across the entire design in multiples and dividers. This helps create a feeling of harmony in spacing across the design. This is not present in earlier versions of the form; I pretty much eyeballed those to look good.

Alignment helps too. I tried to align as many edges as possible while maintaining consistent spacing. All the horizontal lines line up to something else. Even the text elements align in some way to one of the horizontals.

One place that feels off, still is the positioning of the THREE MAJOR TASKS and WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON blocks. The way to fix that would be to raise the header a bit, so the space above the THREE MAJOR TASKS block matches the WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON block. As it is, visually the title block looks low compared to the horizontal rule to its left.

I altered the typography slightly. The numbers are now all 100% orange, instead of the 65% I had used in earlier printed designs. I wanted it to be a bolder form. There’s also more emphasis on the three most important tasks through use of background shading.

Scale

You can get a sense of the size difference between the various sizes of ETP from this photo:

The bottom-most pad is the regular US Letter pre-printed ETP. The middle pad is a custom job contracted by a company in Spain, in the A5 size. On top is the new 4×6″ design, sitting on a stack of large index cards.

For a better sense of how big this pad is, here’s a picture of it next to a fountain pen:

Step 1: Recreate the Current Logo

As I didn’t have immediately access to the website’s graphic source code, I just decided to redraw it instead of bothering Kelley, one of the main organizers of the event:

Sure, I could have asked for the original vector or photoshop files, but the typography for the overall Barcamp organization is well-known: the font is Century Gothic, and the vector artwork itself can be downloaded with a little Googling.

The Barcamp Manchester logo is a little bit different from the “official” template, as it’s something of a tradition for local organizers to put their own twist on it. One year, organizer Ian Muir decided to turn it 90 degrees; it’s so that has been a consistent thematic element.

One element that was new this year was the placing of the BarCamp symbol (still rotated to resemble a campfire of sorts) inside a box. You can see this on the main barcampmanchester.org site.

When remaking the logo, I took a few liberties with it—heck, it’s Barcamp, right?—and made the following adjustments:

• Moved the symbol box to the left-hand side, and made it a square instead of a squashed square.
• Used a single master tint for all the colors (all shades of that dark cyan, instead of dark cyan + gray), so there would be no surprises in printing (old habits die hard…
• Tweaked the kerning in “barcamp”
• Shrank the height of “MANCHESTER” because it was taller than the x-height in “barcamp”, and created weird visual hierarchy.
• Increased the size of the symbol box a bit relative to the type to increase contrast.

The result is a little boring, but it’s clean and will print well. The signs I made will also benefit from the clear shape, I think, when someone is trying to see it from across a parking lot or down a hallway.

Playing with Variations

Since it’s our sixth year, I tried to wedge a “6″ or “six” somewhere into the logo where it would look OK. Nothing really worked. I even tried to construct a 3D block with the BarCamp symbol on one face and a big 6 on the other, like a wooden block. It looked awfully trite, so I gave up on it.

As I was looking at the boxed symbol and the boxed 6, I naturally imagined a third thing. Manchester is nicknamed The Queen City, and I thought I’d see what a line of three blocks would look like. I downloaded a suitably ornate Chess font and extract the Queen symbol. The result looks like a nice coded block of symbols, and I used the original BarCamp typography below it.

I added the “NH” to the end of the city, because people sometimes confuse us with Manchester, England.

As I reviewed the logo, the other Manchester nickname came to mind: Manch Vegas. I’m not sure where this nickname comes from; apparently it’s a more recent nickname than “The Queen City”. In this case, though, the 3 symbols had a resemblance to slot machines, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try to sell the Manch Vegas line at the same time:

I tried a number of different ways to imply that the three symbols were spinners, using some cross-hatching and extra boxes. It ended up being too busy, so I just added two tall light lines between each symbol. Since they’re taller than the boxes, this creates the impression of a track; the horizontal motion is redirected by these two lines, which helps them read as slot spinners. The staggered heights of the symbols reinforces that a bit as well.

The arrangement I chose of two symbols higher and one symbol lower is to make some symmetry that I thought would be pleasing. And it IS pleasing. However, there’s a problem: the pattern is so symmetrical that the three symbols now read as a single group of playfulness. In fact, they look like three banners or three flags. So I tried this:

Two of the symbols are “locked in”, and that helps the divider lines read more clearly. The last spinner, however, is still in play, just about to drop that 6. The asymmetrical layout creates more of a desire for completion of action, which is more like gambling in spirit. I played with several heights; I found that aligning the top of the 6 block with the top of the line creates maximum motion in the available space. I thought that having a little extra line above it just seems sloppy, which weakens the tension between top and bottom. Or so I imagined as I looked at it.

One last thing I tried (not shown) was staggering all three symbols to create a kind of time-lapse effect. This looked interesting, but drew too much attention to a WAVE SHAPE I thought. What I have here seems to be a good compromise, but it’s too early to be sure. I have to sleep on it and look at this again in the morning.

But is it Good?

I don’t know. It feels like it’s an 80%-complete design to me; there is some missing flourish of love that needs to happen to the shapes. Maybe another round of simplification? An adjustment of lineweights or spacing? One more pass at kerning those letters until they are rich with rhythm and harmony?

Maybe it’s just stupid or cutesy. I’ve never really liked the Manch Vegas nickname anyway…maybe you have to be from Manchester to really appreciate it. I live down in Nashua (“The Gate City”, twice voted “Best Place to Live in the USA”) so what do I know :)

Concept aside, the logo has a few things going for it visually:

• It’s a single color
• It’s bold
• It has decent proportions and spacing, which are chosen to reinforce a pleasing repetition between letter spacing, word spacing and line spacing as multiples of line thicknesses and implied grids created by the size of the graphic elements. It’s not quite perfect, but it is there.
• It’s pretty clean, with few awkward or ugly shapes.
• There is good balance between type and symbol, so your eyes swim over the entire thing with ease.
• The visual hiearchy mirrors the information hierarchy, simple as it is.

I’m too close to it now, so hopefully when I look at this tomorrow the parts that are wrong (and invisible to me now) will jump right out.

I have permission from the writer to post this letter; I’ve removed specific references to names and places in case these are sensitive. If Will is fine with such details, he can contact me and I’ll stick them back in.

Hi Dave,

I’ve been reading your various blogs for a while and have really appreciated your writing, humor, and insights. Flattery aside, I find your design and conceptual work to be very inspiring. A little background: I graduated from [...] in May with a degree in psychology and English literature. I’m currently employed at [...] as a project coordinator at the [...] (think entry-level business consultant, like for McKinsey, but paid a lot less). While I enjoy my work, I’m also thinking about pursuing other avenues of work and enrichment.

One of my jobs during college was working as a copy writer for our communications office. I really enjoyed the work and found it fulfilling. As I look for additional funding during my post-graduate life, I’ve once again turned to the idea of being a copywriter-for-hire. I also enjoy editing and wouldn’t mind editing other people’s copy, but I think that business would pick up more after building something of a reputation or portfolio of writing.

So, to my question(s). What advice can you offer someone who wants to get started advertising freelance services online (I have a web site)? More specifically, how would you go about starting to build this kind of a business? I’ve had a few thoughts, such as needing to pick my target audience, build a portfolio, and maybe some mockups.

If you don’t mind sharing a few thoughts I’d appreciate it very much. If the scope of my question extends into the realm of your paid business, please let me know.

Thanks,
Will [...]

Hi Will,

I know a few people who’ve been through [...] at [...], so that’s cool!

So, to my question(s). What advice can you offer someone who wants to get started advertising freelance services online (I have a web site)? More specifically, how would you go about starting to build this kind of a business? I’ve had a few thoughts, such as needing to pick my target audience, build a portfolio, and maybe some mockups.

The timing for this question is excellent, as I’m facing this very issue myself! Let me address each point one-after-the-other and see what comes out.

Firstly, I don’t feel I’m particularly successful in advertising my freelance services online. That’s because I’ve never defined them very clearly. And the reason for that is that I didn’t want to be pinned down into a line of work for purely business reasons. Instead, I wanted to give myself the freedom to explore, and was willing to take the financial hit. It has been quite expensive, both in terms of potential income lost and in time spent.

So let’s assume you don’t want to waste time tweaking the line-of-sight between your inner eye and your own navel, and want to make some money! I’ve already outlined what I think has been my barrier to successful self-promotion: lack of focus. Or, as my friend marketing raconteur Colleen would say, the lack of having a “handle” that people can use “get a grip” on me; if people don’t know how to wrap their mind around what I do, they’re unlikely to be able to think of a reason why they’d want to hire me for anything.

I pause, because I’m about to say a whole bunch of stuff that I haven’t professionally vetted or “successfully” put into practice, because I haven’t followed it myself. It’s basically the opposite of what I’ve done:

• Pick one key audience/market which you will target by being as good as you can possibly be.
• Make it clear what you offer, and how to get started
• Book the work and get compensated fairly (not necessarily the same as being “paid”)

You’ll have to:

• Figure out what “good” and “credible” is, from the point of view of your target audience.
• Create tangible proof of that “good” online in a way that the target audience really understands, fro their point of view.
• Spread the word of the good work you’re doing across the Internet, gathering incoming links and positive reviews.
• Tell the people you meet in person of the good work you’re doing, sharing your enthusiasm for the work.

Ultimately, you’ll want to establish yourself as a rare, high-value commodity provider…when you are in demand, your rates will rise accordingly because people will be willing to pay for them.

There may be many people who do what you do, but you’ll want to be THE person people think about when they need work done (and this may be a small group, your target niche). To get there, you’ll have to prove your mettle by being the consummate professional that delivers the results reliably. Word of mouth can then carry you on personal referrals and word of mouth.

That’s the process side. It’s pretty much the same as all the advice you’ve probably seen already.

The hard part, I’ve found, is figuring out what GOOD means, discovering who my target audience REALLY is so I can define GOOD, and the ultimately determining what it is that I’m offering people. This is, I suspect, something you just have to learn by doing. There will be failure and heartbreak mixed with elation and success, but remember that this is part of the process. You will get there only by doing the work, pounding out those articles day after day, and creating a mass of experience that makes you into the powerhouse you are capable of becoming.

I encourage you to look into the works of Seth Godin (“Purple Cow” comes to mind), Hugh McCloud (either “How to Be Creative” or his expanded book version “Ignore Everybody”), and Josh Kaufmann’s “The Personal MBA” for a concise nuts and bolts review of marketing to help convert those concepts into doable steps. These are the first books that popped into my mind, because they are most closely aligned with what I think. If you find the process tedious and unrewarding, remember too that it takes a crapton of time to get anywhere doing your own thing; for encouragement, Steven Pressfield’s, “Do the Work” (or even his earlier and lengthier classic “The War of Art”) might help you out there. Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” might also give you a sense of what being a true stand-out is.

So I don’t know if this really answers your question. If you’re looking for more of a recipe, it would be to do the following:

• Create a website.
• Pick the keywords that describe copywriting + specialty.
• Post collections of your writing on your website as a portfolio.
• Apply basic semantic SEO: page titles, links, headers, and writing that targets a subject.
• Pick an “angle”, and reinforce it throughout your materials.
• Inject some personality so people can remember you as, “that guy who…” if they forget your name.
• Post resources that are genuinely useful, so people have a reason to visit. Good for organic search, too.
• Make it easy for people to contact you.
• Install Google Analytics and watch your incoming search terms and track hits.
• Create collections of your related works in easy-to-find sections on your website, cross-linked for easy navigation.
• Use your website as a personal identity vehicle when posting your comments.
• Refer to your website samples when approaching people for work.
• Keep posting new website content, generating more and more words, every week.
• Repeat for two years, and see how it goes.

It’s up to you to provide your own clever take on the above steps. It’s based on the idea people will hit your website either as a referral from you or through an organic search for “copywriter plus keyword”. They may also just stumble upon something clever you’ve posted somewhere on the Internet. When they get to your website, you want them to know right away what you’re about (copywriting) and your personality/style. If they want to hire a copywriter, I’m guessing they’ll want to know the same stuff that any business wants to know: availability, rates, turnaround, process, etc. in terms they are used to, with some way of estimating costs so they can budget you into the project. So talk to some copywriter industry people and find out what that is.

Dave

“You see, my external hard drive has just kicked the bucket…with all my files still on it. It randomly started making a clicking noise. It will no longer connect to any computer for longer than 40 seconds. I’ve gone around to a couple different places to see what they could do without sending it out for it to be taken apart to retrieve my data.”

I received the drive already removed from its IOMEGA 1TB enclosure. The drive was a regular 3.5″ 1TB SATA drive.

Low Level Disk Recovery

The first step was to stuff the drive into a bare PC rig and run Spinrite 6 on it. Spinrite is a hard drive utility written by Steve Gibson, an old-school assembly language programmer whose relationship to computers is similar to the way a master swordsmith relates to steel. Spinrite fixes any problems it finds at the very deepest level of the hard disk, below the operating system layer, so it works both for Macintosh drives as well as PC drives. It is very highly regarded. However, it only runs on PCs, not Macintoshes, so if you’re a Mac user or are a PC user that doesn’t have an extra throwaway PC lying around, you are out of luck; there is no comparable software for the Mac that goes as deep as this. Best bet: make friends with your local PC tech! This thread about disk recovery on Macintouch, while old, still gives useful information about the use of SpinRite with Macintosh hard drives.

After a 4.5 hour run at level 2 “data recovery” mode, Spinrite found no unreadable sectors. The drive was, as far as level 2 scanning was concerned, just fine. Furthermore, I didn’t see any signs of disconnecting or hear any weird clicking noises.

MacOS X Disk Utility

I booted up my MacBook Pro and used a USB SATA connection kit to connect to the drive. It mounted (appeared) on the desktop just fine.

Next step was to do a VERIFY DISK operation on it with Apple’s Disk Utility program. Disk Utility can check whether data on the disk is organized as expected. Every disk drive in a computer has data on it that describes how it is organized. Files, for example, have file names and other properties, and these are all put into an index that is stored in addition to your data. If the index gets corrupted, then the operating system can’t find files anymore. The data is there, but the pointer to the data is gone.

After a few hours, Disk Utility reported a minor problem (volume size mismatch), which it reportedly was able to repair. There were no other errors at all. I returned the drive to its owner to try to copy the data from it.

If Disk Utility had reported significant problems, then I would have had to purchase a utility like Disk Warrior to do a more comprehensive disk recovery. Unlike Disk Utility, which can only make minor repairs to an existing disk index, DiskWarrior looks at the hard drive like a giant jigsaw puzzle and attempt to reconstruct a new disk index from scratch through smart analysis of each sector and figuring out where it should go. This is a time-honored technique.

As I was not familiar with the current crop of Macintosh disk utilities, I looked for insightful commentary:

• One non-technical computer user tried all five major repair tools: DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, Data Rescue, and Techtool Pro. Unfortunately, his experience did not have a happy ending. His despair, however, is our gain: he describes the difference between each tool, as he learned by trying out each one.

• Old-school Macintosh user and tech writer Ted Landau writes about the fading-away of disk utilities in today’s marketplace. The comments provide additional insight into the use of each tool.

My assessment at this moment is that DiskWarrior is the program to buy, to be used after running Spinrite 6 on the drive on a PC. Like Spinrite, DiskWarrior is a single-purpose tool designed to repair the disk indexing structures. However, it does not fix unreadable sectors on a disk; that’s what Spinrite does. The combination of the two should be powerful enough to handle any data recovery situation where the drive is still physically operating. The other programs mentioned–Drive Genius, Data Rescue, and Techtool Pro–appear to be more like Swiss army knives, and are sold with dozens of functions that have more to do with broader disk management and general computer maintenance.

The mystery, however, is why Spinrite detected no errors and Disk Utility reported only a volume size mismatch. This is a non-critical error, akin asking someone how much money they have in their wallet and getting an answer that is a few pennies off. It should not have caused the clicking and disconnection problems reported.

Diagnosis?

As I mentioned, the disk itself was received already removed from its enclosure. Since the disk worked fine in my PC rig through the SATA port, and mounted without trouble on my Macintosh via a SATA-to-USB adapter, that means that it’s probably the enclosure itself that is faulty. There are two major components other than the disk drive itself: the logic board and the power supply.

Unless there was some kind of electrical surge event, every single external hard drive enclosure I’ve owned since 1994 has failed due to the enclosure. The symptoms: the drive works intermittently and shuts down unexpectedly, or disappears from the operating system while you’re trying to use it. The drive itself is fine, so transplanting either the power supply or putting it in a new enclosure (which includes a new power supply) has worked. I haven’t been able to find references to “power supply degradation over time”, so I’m not sure how much of my experience is coincidence, but practically speaking I’ve had good luck swapping the drive with a newer power supply or enclosure.

As my friend had already purchased a new external hard drive, I didn’t bother to test the old enclosure by putting the drive back inside. However, I did check to see whether Iomega sold replacement power supplies (they are external AC-DC adapter “wall warts”), and they do. He may test the enclosure with a different power supply to see if there’s any difference. He’ll need to match voltage, current, plug and polarity.

Tools Mentioned

Software

• Spinrite 6 – PC ONLY commercial software. Use for low-level data recovery/repair before doing anything else, as this verifies the physical data integrity (“whether data can be read or not”) of the disk. Requires a PC that can boot from either CD or floppy disk into FreeDOS. Although Spinrite 6 was last updated in 2004, it works with any hard drive in a PC that can be accessed from DOS. To use it, you must plug your hard drive into the computer, and then boot the Spinrite CD or diskette. It takes about 4 hours to scan a 1TB disk with no errors. If there are many errors on the disk, the scan/repair time can be measured in days; the software shows you the estimated time to completion. Price: US$89.

• Disk Utility – Available in your Mac’s Utilities folder. Run DISK VERIFY on the Spinrite-recovered disk to ensure that the logical data integrity (“whether data is organized correctly”) is OK.

• DiskWarrior – Commercial software that is highly specialized in fixing scrambled Macintosh hard drives, and nothing else. Doesn’t handle recovery of unreadable disk errors, so you would use Spinrite for that first. It’s possible that other Mac software such as Drive Genius, Tech Tool Pro, or Data Rescue can do that, but it seems unlikely that they are a match for Spinrite’s low-level approach. Price: US$99.

Hardware

• Handling a Hard Drive Safely – Once you have removed a hard drive from its enclosure (be sure to handle it carefully to avoid damage). A drive that is outside of an enclosure or case is called a “bare drive” (as in naked).

• SATA or PIDE – You need to see what kind of hard drive you have. Drives manufactured between 1990 and 2006 are probably going to be IDE drives. Such drives are described as ATA, PATA, or PIDE. They have a wide ribbon cable that plugs into the back, with a 4-prong power blog. Most drives today use SATA connectors, which are a lot smaller.

• Hard Drive to USB Adapter – This is a device that allows you to temporarily connect a bare drive (either SATA or PIDE) to your computer through a USB port. There are many, many cheap kits on the market, but this one from the venerable Cables to Go gets high marks for build quality. I like that it also has an additional power switch. When you use one of these, you should be careful NOT TO MOVE THE DRIVE while it is operating, unless you really want to trash it permanently. You should also carefully power it on and off as you would any external drive. Price: About US$20 for the Cables to Go version, US$10 for the cheap-o versions.

• Hard Drive Dock – Unlike the adapter, a dock allows you to plug a bare hard drive into a slot like a toaster. They’re useful if you like using bare drives for backup purposes. This is an option, generally speaking, only for SATA drives. If you have an older PIDE / ATA drive, then you need to use the adapter. Like the adapters, they plug into a USB port. If you are transferring data between bare drives, you might find the dual slot dock version more useful. Price: Between US$40 and US$80.

There is a legendary pencil called the Blackwing 602, first manufactured in the 1940s by the Eberhard Faber company. Eberhard Faber was founded by John Eberhard Faber, himself part of the “ancient” Faber family of pencil manufacturers in Bavaria. In the mid-1800s, he started shipping American ceder back to Germany for pencil manufacturing, then established the first American pencil factory in NYC. The company’s pencil operations were acquired from Staedler by Faber-Castell in the late 80s, and then by Sanford (a division of Newell-Rubbermaid) in the late 1990s. The Blackwing was manufactured until 1998, when parts for the eraser ferule—the metal band that holds rubber to wood—ran out [1]. Individual pencils became very desirable, fetching high prices on Ebay.

I first became aware of the Blackwing through artist friends, though I didn’t pay much attention because I like mechanical pencils. Recently, though, the pencil has been recreated by California Republic Stationers under their Palomino brand, and there’s been some buzz on the Internet about it; I became aware of it through BoingBoing. Curious, I ordered a box to see what all the fuss was about.

I’m not an expert pencil collector by any stretch of the imagination, and although I like mechanical pencils for their consistency, I do love the feel and smell of wooden pencils. The crunchy-crisp sound of wood being carved away sharpens my hunger to create, and there’s something therapeutic about carefully maintaining a point as you draw. It forces you to slow down, and contemplate the shape of the lead as you sketch. And for such a simple object, there are a lot of subtleties. The graphite formulation is critical, as is the method by which it is held firmly by the wood. There are beautiful details in the quality of the paint and eraser ferule, the lettering, and in the feel of the lead as it moves over paper.

One of the selling points of the Blackwing 602, both for the original and Palomino’s homage, is that it expresses a dark line for relatively little pressure, and yet retains a reasonable point. Apparently writer John Steinbeck loved the 602, as did Loony Toons animator Chuck Jones. While I have never used an original Eberhard Blackwing 602, I thought I’d evaluate the Palomino version of the pencil to see what it was like. At $20 a box, it’s a relatively-affordable way to connect to the history of creativity while trying something different. I purchased mine at Pencils.com.

Initial Impressions

The pencil itself is a dark-gray, with a black eraser held in a square holder (the “ferule”). It resembles a flat paint brush. It’s distinctive and a little weird. I found the shape to be helpful in switching between spot and wide-area erasing, though I didn’t do much testing.

I see on the back of the box that these pencils are manufactured in Japan. The Japanese take their writing instruments just as seriously as the Germans, you know, so it’s not surprising. Over on the Kaufmann Mercantile store, there’s a good synopsis of the Blackwing 602′s reissue (with citations, even), which is worth reading.

I read that some people recommended a two-stage pencil sharpener, so I grabbed this one when I ordered through Pencils.com. There are two holes. You use the first hole to sharpen the wooden part of the pencil; it doesn’t sharpen the lead core at all. For that, you use the second hole, which works solely on the lead to create a nice sharp point, tapering to a slightly-different angle than the wood. It’s an interesting idea; this particular sharpener is designed specifically for Palomino-brand pencils and will prevent oversharpening. In the image below, you can see how the lead is left relatively-untouched (middle) until it’s sharpened in the final pass.

Cosmetic Details

After reading some criticisms online about the pencil, I took some macro photos of various details. Zoomed up close, you can see that it’s not exactly perfect in printing detail and alignment, if that sort of thing is important to you on a mass-produced pencil. I do not know how this compares to an original 602.

Then I took some comparative pictures of unused Dixon No. 2 pencils that I had in a box. These are mass-market pencils I bought from Staples several years ago:

The major difference I see is in the quality of the wood finishing and the paint. The Blackwing’s paint job appears to be slightly metallic, though it could be sensor noise in my camera. The surface finish is also considerably smoother. One of the mass-market pencils has the slight depressed lettering, with a bit of ink creep around it.

Writing

First, I tried writing with the Blackwing, outlining some business strategy that had been on my mind, so I could see how the pencil’s point degraded over time. I found that it was good for about 70 words before I found that I really needed to resharpen, which isn’t too bad. Given that a page is about 250 words, that means I’d probably want to sharpen 4 times. 250 words is enough to completely relate one thought with two or three supporting points, if one is writing fairly efficiently. I wonder if the desire to conserve the point and write clearly would affect the way I compose my writing? I will have to give this a try; as much as I like typing on my Model M keyboard (clackity clack), the ease with which I can type makes for some verbose writing.

Evaluating the writing, I was struck by two things:

• The writing was dark. Not amazingly dark—as I’m used to using a fountain pen loaded with Noodler’s Bulletproof Black, a pencil isn’t going to look super-dark to me—but pretty good contrast even in bright sun filtered through a huge plate glass window at Starbucks.

• There was surprisingly little smearing. If I wiped my thumb across words it would smear, but overall I didn’t see much crumbling of lead (a problem with soft pencils) that I might expect. I’ll have to compare to other pencils I have to see if this is normal.

My overall impression: Since this is my first critical use of a wooden pencil, it establishes my baseline for future comparisons. I didn’t notice any operating flaws such as scratchiness or failure to maintain a good writing point. It didn’t irritate me, and I didn’t feel I was lacking for anything, which I suppose is a good sign. It’s a pencil. It writes.

ADDITIONAL NOTES

I sharpened the Dixon Oriole 287 (a 2/HB pencil I bought from Staples) using the same sharpener and compared it head-to-head with the Palomino Blackwing 602.

1. The Dixon wrote well, producing a black consistent line. I wondered if I was imagining the superiority of the 602.

2. Switching to the Blackwing, I was immediately struck by the smoother feel. While the Dixon didn’t feel gritty at first, it was harder and scratchier. The Blackwing almost felt “cushioned” by comparison.

3. Switching back to the Dixon and writing a couple sentences on a piece of thick paper in a hardback journal, the variation in the tip’s sharpness was pronounced as I rotated the pencil shaft. I also reduced my hand pressure by half (apparently I was pressing harder in step 1 and 2) as I warmed to the task of writing several letters rapidly.

4. Switching to the Blackwing once more, and writing with the lighter pressure, the difference in feel was a little less pronounced, as my hand was already getting tired and that was the main sensation I was experiencing. Line quality and darkness was very close to the Dixon. Looking at the writing under the sunlight, I can’t really tell them apart.

What it seems to come down to is a subtle difference in feel. The lead is a bit smoother and perhaps a tiny bit darker for the same pressure. The tip wears more evenly than the comparison pencil. The weight is a little different, and the wood is possibly a little denser. But it’s hard for me to quantify. I tried weighing the pencils but my desktop scale isn’t sensitive enough.

Drawing

When I was a kid, I used to draw a lot of spaceships on graph paper, and developed a humongous callous on the side of my middle finger because I am a “hard presser”. With that in mind, I wasn’t sure that a pencil that required “half the pressure” would really work for me. For comparison, I grabbed a couple other writing instruments that were in my bag, a Lamy Safari medium-nib fountain pen loaded with the standard Lamy Blue cartridge and a Staedler 0.7mm mechanical pencil loaded with HB lead.

I was pretty rusty at drawing, over-shading and not maintaining a particularly clean line. Overall, though, it felt like I was really the culprit rather than the pencil. I didn’t find that I wished the pencil would go darker, nor did I feel that I couldn’t get what lightness I needed. The Blackwing just laid down the tone and I was not equal to the task of managing it well.

I used the eraser sparingly, lightening up some areas and trying to do a bit of cleanup around the edges. Usually the on-pencil erasers are kind of awful and gritty, but this one was fairly soft. The rectangular shape, actually, gave me finer control, which I liked.

Drawing with the Lamy fountain pen afterwards was kind of shocking. The Lamy, with its medium nib and smooth feel, is one of my favorite pens to use because ink just pours out of it. I kind of blew my drawing, having been thinking in terms of pressure-based toning as opposed to using stippling or cross-hatching (which is kind of difficult with a medium nib anyway). However, this did accomplish my main goal of “resetting my hand” after drawing with the Blackwing.

The Staedler 925 mechanical pencil I had with me uses a 0.7mm instead of the usual 0.5mm lead. The reason for this is because I use more pressure than most people, and 0.5mm lead tends to snap. 0.7mm is more resistant to it without giving up too much in fineness. I was surprised at how HARD this lead felt after the Blackwing. Through all high school I’ve used HB lead, and found it pretty good for what I used to draw. The linework was much lighter, and I found that I had to dig into the paper to get the variation in tone I wanted. I think in the past, I used to use single sheets of graph paper on a hard surface, which made it easier to get the darker lines. Drawing in a notebook, though, makes it a bit tougher because the layers of paper tend to act as a cushion. Then again, when I looked at the other side of the sheet, I didn’t see any signs of pressure. The HB lead is just harder than whatever is in the Blackwing.

I tried using the Blackwing to darken up some lines around the edges, but I wasn’t that happy with the results. It was around this time that I looked back at the writing I’d done earlier, checking to see if there was undue smearing. Nothing noticeable. That’s a good sign.

Thoughts

The one thing I can definitely say is that I liked drawing with the Blackwing more than I did with my Staedler 925, which I find SHOCKING. The Palomino Blackwing 602 writes pleasantly dark with no noteworthy irritations, though this may be the way that all pencils are. I have a few mass-market pencils lying around that I will compare them to. Until I evaluate more pencils, I can’t really say whether the Blackwing is an amazing pencil or not.

Aesthetically speaking, I like the ungainly proportions of the Blackwing very much. It looks like a writing instrument from another time, resembling more a long paint brush than pencil. The square ferule erase rocks; whenever I see this pencil, I think of a platypus. And it’s cool having a pencil with a history going back 70-odd years, reverse-engineering the subtleties of old-world craft in an affordable package. I dig the old-timey slogan, “half the pressure, twice the speed”, which I can also buy as a productivity war cry. YEAH! MORE WITH LESS!

Where to Buy

• Blackwing 602 Pencils on Amazon
• Manufacturer’s website Pencils.com – Box of 12
• Kaufmann Mercantile – Box of 12

My friend Duncan turned me on to compact wallets several years ago. What I like about them is that they’re stylishly compact, forcing me to carry less junk in my wallet. The wallet I’ve been using recently has been a Jimi wallet, but there is one thing I didn’t like about it: I wanted it to carry just one more card plus some folded bills.

A few days ago Duncan showed me his new Flipside Wallet, which carries that extra card and is designed specifically to carry US dollar bills neatly folded in half. Not only that, but it is also RFID shielded to prevent crooks from scanning your credit cards remotely. While the FlipSide costs over twice as much as the Jimi–$39.95 compared to $14.95–the build quality is sturdier and the mechanical action is more refined.

Because of the heavier build and extra capacity, the Flipside is actually fairly large compared to the Jimi. It’s about the side of a Blackberry or iPod Touch, and it dwarfs the old Motorola RAZR in the comparision picture. It’s actually not that much smaller than a regular wallet. However, it does a great job of organizing my cards and bills into distinct area of use. There’s a dedicated slot for my driver’s license, two storage areas for my commonly-used plastic ID/credit cards (holding 3 cards each), and a small compartment that can hold up to 12 bills. No room for receipts, coins, or keys, but I don’t want that stuff in my wallet anyway.

The advantage of this wallet is that it’s easy to get at your cards. There are small ramps engineered into the design of the card holding areas to make them easy to slide out. While the Jimi does a pretty good job of doing the same thing, the action is slightly less smooth. On the down side, this is a larger case than the Jimi. I’ll have to carry it with me for a while to see how it compares.

I love products that are the result of someone getting fed-up with the status-quo. The Clean Bottle cyclist water bottle was designed by David Meyer, who got tired of cleaning out the mold from the bottom of his water bottles. His brainstorm: what if you could unscrew the bottom?

I got a sample in the mail courtesy of one of their representatives. The bottle is made of a plastic that does not contain BPA, an organic compound used in manufacturing that has been linked to health issues like erectile dysfunction and hormonal inbalances. It’s present in most metal cans in the form of an inside plastic lining, but has fallen out of favor with the water bottle industry. Be assured that Clean Bottle is sticking with the trend.

Still, plastic is plastic, and I usually favor glass for my water; I am sensitive to the taint of plastic or metal that these containers often impart. To my surprise, Clean Bottle didn’t carry the plastic smell after I’d used it a couple of times. I’d rinsed it out thoroughly and let some water sit in it for almost two weeks, then dumped it out and filled it again. It’s been two weeks since then, and when I opened it up just now there was no weird smell. Your mileage may vary.

The sturdiness of the plastic gives it a functional edge over my beautiful Takeya Modern Glass Water Bottle, which I worry will break if I carry it around with me.

Because of the double-ended design, I was curious if the bottom would be as strong as the top, so I filled the bottle with seltzer water to see what would happen under some pressure; the bottle isn’t intended for this use, mind you. My kitchen survived the experiment, and I’m pretty confident that the bottle is engineered well. One interesting thing about the top valve is that you can suck down the water and the bottle doesn’t collapse from the vacuum. Usually, when you are drinking from those disposable water bottles, they crunch up from the vacuum and become difficult to hold. The Clean Bottle valve is a semi-soft rubber that you can put your mouth around, seal with your lips, and drink easily. The valve seems to allow water to flow one way while allowing air to flow back in the bottle. A side effect of this is that the water is somewhat aerated in the process, which can be nice.

Clean Bottle has been selling well, according to the representative I talked with. I wish them well.

Available from: Clean Bottle and REI.

I’ve been wanting to hydrate more frequently, but face a personal hangup: I hate the taste of water that has been sitting in a plastic container. And I also have issues with water from metal bottles; apparently I am one of a small percentage of people who can taste stainless steel. So, I’ve been looking for a stylish glass water bottle that transports well and is relatively tough.

There are a few options for toughened glass. I was looking at the heat-tempered products from Hercuglass and LifeFactory, but I happened to stumble upon the Takeya Modern Glass Water Bottles and liked the overall feel of the design. However, I wasn’t sure if I would like the screw-on cap; it was difficult to get a sense of what the cap was like from the photos I’ve been able to see online, so I tabled my search for a while.

Starbucks Ice Green Glass Water Bottle

One day at Starbucks, I caught glimpse of a rebrand of Takeya’s Modern Water Bottle with a different cap. It’s called the Ice Green Glass Water Bottle from Starbucks Coffee, and is available from their online store and retail locations. Cost: Around US$16.

The bottle and protective silicone covering is the same as the one on the Takeya Modern Glass Water Bottle (if you look on the bottom of the bottle, you can even see the Takeya imprint on the glass). Instead of a twist-off cap, the Starbucks version has a pop-up cap which allows you to take a gulp of water more quickly: just press the release button, and the top-half of the cap pops up. The construction of this cap is pretty solid, though I can see it breaking if dropped or stressed too much. However, for my home use, it’s perfectly fine and a great deal more convenient than a twist-off cap. It has rubber or silicone seals on the inside, and the width of the mouth is about two inches. If you are a practiced drinker of ice tea from Snapple-style bottles, you probably won’t have any problem with it. It would be more difficult to manage in a car while driving, though.

Takeya Modern Glass Water Bottle

I also ordered the Takeya Modern Glass Water Bottle through Amazon. My justification was that with TWO bottles, I would have 32 oz of water to go through a day, twice, for the target 64oz a day that one is supposed to drink. But really, I just wanted the other color :-)

The cap on the Takeya Modern Glass Water Bottle is a screw-top, and it’s a rugged piece of plastic. It’s BPA-free, of course. It takes longer to unscrew than to pop the top on the Starbucks bottle, but if you’re not in a hurry it’s just fine.

Both bottles are serving their purpose in helping me drink more water. I love that the glass imparts no plastic or metallic taste to the water. While it’s not as durable as plastic or stainless steel, the glass is at least protected by the silicone sleeve, which absorbs shocks. It’s approximately 1.5mm thick and is considerably thicker on the bottom to absorb shock.

These glass bottles are for use only with cold beverages. For hot beverages, you’d need something made out of borosilicate glass or something with similar thermal properties.

The construction of the bag is sleek and stylish, and it does hold a MacBook Pro 17 very nicely. The fit is snug, to the point where my Speck-encased laptop makes it a little difficult to lock down. There are no external pockets at all, so you need to lift the front flap to access the inner pockets. While the bag doesn’t hold an incredible amount, you can certainly carry pens, a couple of notebooks, and a fair number of accessories (iPod, charger, small digital camera, cables, etc). The bag is actually wedge shaped, the bottom wider than the top, which allows one to pack in more stuff in the bottom pockets without unsightly bulges.

Functionally speaking, one drawback of this bag is that it has a tendency to lean forward (toward the front flap) when you set it on the ground. It falls over fairly readily. To compensate for this, you just turn it around, but it makes accessing the pockets while at Starbucks slightly awkward. There is no top handle on the bag either, which helps keep the lines clean but makes repositioning slightly awkward because you need to grab the long seatbelt-style shoulder strap. However, on my shoulder the bag is very comfortable and close-fitting because of the vertical briefcase style.

The form factor of this bag is more well suited for traveling light to a meeting. When I need to carry a ton of gear, I use the Think Tank UD60 with backpack straps. I may use the LEvertigo as my permanent day-to-day laptop transportation solution, and keep the UD60 for the digital camera and supplies, but that sort of defeats the purpose of having a single bag that can carry both.

A few months of use later

This bag is aging fairly well, though the soft pocket material seems to have developed some very slight wear. I’m not sure how well the zippers will hold up over time, but they are not under a lot of stress. When I’m just carrying my laptop, it holds everything I need plus a couple of notebooks for writing in. I think this bag has been replaced by something newer last time I was visiting the sole North American distributor in San Jose, but I haven’t yet really had a good look at it.

CON: I walked around Campbell, Northern Cal in February 2009, loaded with the 17″ MacBookPro encased in a Speck clear case (it still fits!). The bag’s fasteners were squeaking very loudly and annoyingly. I am going to try to put some graphite on it to reduce the noise. It appears to be coming from where the loops meet each other; they are a kind of textured metal that are rubbing against each other.

AESTHETIC WEAR: The striping around the edge of the bag is getting worn and ratty-looking. I think it used to be white, but now it’s gray. In patches.

LINK: Be.ez LEVertigo 17

This is currently my favorite larger bag. You can see some [photos of the bag][ud60photos] to see how I configured the internal compartment for the Canon EOS40D. I’ve taken this bag to South by SouthWest (SXSW), carrying around about 25 pounds worth of gear, and have shlepped it between the east and west coasts as carry-on luggage.

• 17″ Mac Book Pro w/ Power Transformer (about 8-9 pounds)
• Canon EOS 40-D with EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM + Lens Hood (not reversed, either) (around 4 pounds)
• Small Fuji FinePix F30d digital camera
• Chargers and Media Reader tucked in the sides
• Books, Magazines, Pens

With the optional backpack strap accessory, walking to and from the convention center (about an 8 minute walk) was not bad at all. Even better: when it rained, I could drape my light windbreaker over the bag to shield it from rain. I could have optionally used the included Rain Shield, which is a waterproof covering you can put around the bag. I’m not sure how it would work with the shoulder strap though. The back pack attachment is definitely worth it for hands-free carrying of heavy gear.

Six Month Review

I’ve brought the bag with me to San Jose. It fits nicely under the airplane seat, has plenty of pockets. The build of the bag is a little lighter than what I’m used to, but I’m pretty happy with it. No tears, no problems, no signs of wear or impending collapse. I’ve mostly been hauling it around by the shoulder strap (no sign of fraying) in the back of my Volkswagen GTI.

Nine Month Review

A few observations with the bag:

• The padding in the bottom corners of the bag is a little thin, so if you hit a corner just right it can impact the corner of my laptop. This has only happened once at an airport. The Think Tank bag philosophy seems to lean towards more capacity with less padding, and typically I have found this fine in my day-to-day use. Compared to my Briggs & Riley 17″ soft brief, the UD60 is lightly-armored but carries a LOT more, more flexibly. If tend to be careful with your bags, as I am, you probably won’t have many problems. The outer pockets actually seem to work pretty well as armor with the cables and what not I have in them.
• The backpack straps are really useful when running through the airport, but they are a little cumbersome to use when the bag is filled with 25 pounds of gear. They tend to flip inside out while shrugging them on (especially if you are wearing a heavy wool coat), and it can be trying to figure out which way they’ve flipped to correct the problem. Otherwise, the backpack straps are comfortable once on. I loosen the straps all the way and tighten them once they’re on my back. If the buckles were a little more oversized it would be more convenient. Also, the backpack straps interfere with the opening of the bag, so you have to detach them from the carrying handle. This is fairly quick, but it’s one thing that gets in the way.
• When fully loaded with laptop + accessories in the pockets, the bag does tend to slowly fall over if I put it on the ground. I may be overstuffing it.

Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with it. The one functional drawback, though, is that with my camera loaded in the bag I don’t have much room for magazines or regular notebooks. There is one inner pocket that can take a notebook and a few magazines, and the outer pouch can take another one, which I’m finding merely adequate. I sometimes use the UD60 primarily as a gear bag, and use a Briggs and Riley Vertical Brief for paper + a netbook. Or, I use the LEvertigo 17 for the notebook + accessories, and use the laptop compartment of the UD60 for additional folder storage.

One other note: the shoulder strap that this bag comes with is just AWESOME. I have thought of ordering extra ones for my Briggs and Riley 17″ Computer Brief, which I used to think had a decent shoulder strap but it’s horrible by comparison.

LINK: ThinkTank Urban Disguise Site

35 minutes elapsed. Standing temperature of water, measured with RayTech MT4, was 160 degrees. Chicken interior temperature 140ish degrees, which means it isn’t cooked to death though not high enough temperature to kill salmonella. Ya take your chances for the sake of taste. Ate with a bit of soy sauce and sesame oil. Delicious.

Will derive energy estimates later.

Monitored temperature of oil and pan with RayTech MT4 as the slices cooked. I was looking for the point where browning started to occur, indicating caramelization. This started around 310-325 degrees. Noted that number of pieces in pan determined equilibrium of pan temperature (reinforcing the rule of thumb about “crowding the pan” when browning). About 6-minutes per side, at 325 degrees or so, produced reasonably browned and cooked sweet potato slices, which I blotted and then sprinkled kosher salt upon. Then, inspired by recent experience with Australian meat pies, doused with plenty of Heinz Ketchup.

Followup experiment: how can I determine the heat output of my burner to a particular pan, and reliably set how much power is needed to maintain a particular temperature given a certain type of food with a certain amount of coverage, given a particular piece of cookware? First, repeat experiment with magnetic induction cooking plate, which has thermostat-controlled surface.