Over the last couple days, I transferred my life organizational system from a simple text file to using Evernote, in order to have automatic back-ups, organized lists (as in, by project, rather than just one long list), and other features. I also made a list of all the things I have left unfinished since I started this so-called vacation. Things like abandoned websites trended toward the top while phone calls I had forgotten to make clumped at the bottom.

To be perfectly honest, I am not too shocked I underwent burnout. So I decided to dedicate today to taking an official hiatus from trying to work on anything – an official day to laze around doing nothing.

But then the fancy struck me – I need to be productive. I’ve been feeling lazy and down on myself for long enough now.

I’ve noticed the less I do, the more cranky I get, while being superproductive and efficient and getting a million things done in a day makes me feel happy.

So I ask you, dear readers: How on Earth do you stay sane?

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I have been reflecting an awful lot lately on how and I am. I want to know who I am and how I think and to understand everything that goes on in my head because I know that is the only way to be successful and happy. One of my many discoveries is that I have failed many more times than I care to share. While reflecting on these failures, which I will consider learning experiences, I have discovered a deadly concoction I am about to share with you: my personal recipe for disaster, absolute failure, and misery.

It starts with feedback

One unfortunate thing about me is that I absolutely love constructive criticism and seek it out constantly. As such, I hear a lot of destructive criticism from acquaintances who lack empathy. This is where failure begins: as soon as somebody dislikes me or something I have done or created, my mind begins its dark voyage into hyperpersonal (is too a word!) land, a place where every off-color comment ever is intentionally seeking to dethrone you and is absolutely true in all cases. So, “I think the spacing is a little off,” means, “You think you’re good enough to be designing websites, huh?” which suddenly transforms into, “You suck,” which is a comment that I hear often in my own head, usually a few seconds after somebody mutters something about a logo placement.

Hyperpersonality (is also a word!)

When taking things hyperpersonally, a person generally senses something that does not exist. For instance, jealousy. A healthy (hah!) person taking a slight, such as a rejected credit card application or a comment about color schemes, hyperpersonally will think, “He’s just jealous of my awesome skills. I’ll just ignore him,” and carry on with her day. Meanwhile, when I take something hyperpersonally, I internalize it and think, “Oh my goodness there must be a reason for this,” and point out every single flaw within the realm of the physical, the mental, and the emotional to myself, trying to identify which one is the reason for the failed credit acquisition or why somebody would hate me enough to insult my taste in fonts.

Exhibit 1

As an example, today, I scrapped a lot of decent material because of my recent rejection from a position with a call center. I felt like maybe I couldn’t do anything right. It was as if I was a failure, rather than a person who had failed. So I “knew” that everything I had done was wrong and I needed to start fresh. So away went months or years of work.

I came to my senses a short while later with no idea what happened. I had lost a lot and I was in shock. It was time to rebuild. So here I am reflecting on what I’ve done and feeling bad for it, and Googling for a solution to deleted files.

How do you know when disaster is about to strike? You can’t. But what you can do is know what causes these personal issues to come upon you. I know now that little failures and poor feedback can set me off, so I can either learn to roll with the punches or do my best to avoid them altogether. If I figure out that latter one, I’ll let you in on my secrets.

What leads you into disaster?

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Just kidding. After pouting for a good five minutes (bad words may have been said), I got over it. A few hours later, here I am. I have decided that if people do not want to hire me, perhaps it is a sign from the universe that I am meant to be in business for myself. Very early in 2009, my partner and I started our own business doing web development and marketing/PR work. We failed to follow through on doing anything, as always. It became our favorite pastime some time in 2008 to start projects on a whim whenever bored and never follow through. MNP Hoppal was only one of these projects.

However, with much meditation, and sensing a sign from the universe, I have decided to return to business for myself as a web designer and a writer (a la Jen Lancaster). Sure, the pay is not great. And perhaps I should still be finding a day job (goodness knows I probably won’t have much luck there). But for now, I think freelancing it may be my best bet for both developing skills and qualifications and for paying bills.

I’ve already recently met with a client, and when I return to Ruidoso from Denver, I will begin soliciting business. Wish me luck.

As always, if you find me particularly awesome (I know I do), I can be contacted for work at michael@hoppal.com.

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My name is Michael. I am ambitious. I’m a programmer. I’m a belly dancer. I like cake just as much as the next person. And I have a nasty habit of starting projects and then dropping them after a very short amount of time.

For example, the longest I have blogged on a schedule without missing a single post was three months. Shortly after that, I dropped it and didn’t touch it for the same amount of time. I have only recently begun writing again on it, feeling refreshed and ambitious all over again.

I’m hoping this time I actually follow through on it.

As another example, I made it a goal of mine to write in a personal journal every single day for three months to reflect on my day, in order to have a running archive of what I’ve accomplished, so that I could look back and be proud of myself. I made it about two months and then skipped one day, then another, then two months later I was returning to try again.

But, this is supposed to be a professional blog, and I came here for a reason. I have come to announce that I officially succeeded at finding a programming gig, and I’m very thankful for it. This is one project I am positive I will follow through with and complete. It has a finish date – I can make it through anything that has a deadline and ending. Now it’s just a matter of remembering.

Kick me if I fail!

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On the GNU Foundation’s website is an article by Richard Stallman, one of the open source movement’s more vocal celebrities, entitled Why Software Should Not Have Owners.

Stallman became somewhat of an MVP by being well-heard. His voice was one of the major so-called war drums in the movement against proprietary software, but has now become an obvious target for naysayers, due to his tendency to embellish arguments with somewhat melodramatic language. Examples are found all over the aforementioned article, including:

It’s elementary that laws don’t decide right and wrong. Every American should know that, in the 1950s, it was against the law in many states for a black person to sit in the front of a bus; but only racists would say sitting there was wrong.

I find this comparison – open source opponents v. racists – unnecessary. I believe it actually hurts our case, as it is no secret that those who lack logos tend to go for pathos. In Stallman’s soap-box moment, the attempt at pathos can quickly turn to bathos (For those of you who have forgotten English 102, bathos is, in Twitter form, drama turned humorous or ridiculous due to overstatement or hyperbole).

I believe software should have owners. I believe Stallman’s argument, the views of most proponents of the open source movement, and the opinions of many proprietary pushers are incorrect. For those who have not yet gained the wisdom only discovered as a 19-year-old, the world is not black and white. Pagan religions teach this, Buddhism and Hinduism (and presumably Taoism et al., though I do not know for sure), Christianity, Islam, and Judaism… They all teach this. In fact, splitting such as this is associated with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Nor is software black and white. Some software should be open source. Most of the software available today should be open source. Even in this case, however, software still has an owner: the users. Who owns the code? No one individual. But, as GNU says on most of its website, open source is about the community – society in general – maintaining their freedoms. The community is the owner. The software has entered the public domain. Similar to Mozart’s Requiem or any celebrity’s career, the world owns this software.

Sometimes, software should not be open to the public. I am an American and have been raised on laissez-faire, so forgive me. I believe competition is a good thing, because this is the mother of invention. We never would have achieved space exploration (or at least, it would have gone much more slowly) had we lacked the desire to pioneer. If every software company has the same code, there will be no difference. Sure, they will contribute to a massive group project, but there will be no drive behind it. There will be no motivation to push out new updates. There will be no competition.

Some great innovations and lessons can be found within the software cracking community. Many individuals endeavor to stroke their egos by being the first to provide a torrent to a cracked version of the latest PhotoShop. People stay up all night digging through pages of scribbling on DRM and checkpoints just to figure out how to get an iTunes purchase on more than a few computers. This is how some people learn: the kinesthetic challenge.

Maybe it could be different, though. Maybe someday, there will be a few forks of a dominant open source office suite. Maybe GIMP will be absolutely mind-blowing, Flash will be passe (web designers rejoice), and Adobe will die. Maybe the cracking method of education will be the task of improving algorithms in artificial intelligence or decrypting 64-bit encoding. Maybe every software developer will somehow manage to make a living off selling custom versions of their open programs, like Stallman claims to have done.

But maybe it should remain the way it is. I find the rants amusing.

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For my first entry, I have chosen rule #796, which concerns writing on the Internet and spam.

Anybody who reads the Internet frequently and has even the most passive interest in writing, promotions, public relations, marketing, or earning revenue online has probably read approximately 14,000,000,009,321* top 10 lists of social networks which promise to boost viewership and get omg so much money for you. Around 99.8%* of these lists mention StumbleUpon at some point, mostly as #3*.

* Fact-checking is for pansies and newsroom directors.

Twitter version: StumbleUpon allows users to click a button and view a random article submitted by anybody.

Marketers seem to think this is the holy grail of viral promotion.

I think this is nonsense.

Two things here: I am an almost-daily StumbleUpon user. I don’t like spam.

Sometimes, there are many interesting things. Sometimes, the articles are trite and overdone and give a sense of, “Didn’t I read this already? Yes, I did. Five times. On five other sites.”

Sometimes, however, a website has little readership and its author has a hankering for some attention. A would-be innocent article comes up. The author clicks the “Thumbs-up” on this website, and so opens a theoretical can of worms exposing the topic to thousands overnight. Something to note, however: this doesn’t usually happen. SU has done well to narrow stumbles to specific interests of users. If they aren’t interested, they don’t thumbs-up, and the article dies off relatively quickly, especially if nobody picks it up within the first few days.

Now, the effort behind marketing is to generate interest and eyeballs, so I won’t name any names here, as their purpose would be served and they would continue their abuse. All I will say is I’ve seen an increasing number of spam-tastic sites which are so blatantly commercial even Aphrodite would want to hit somebody. I report them as spam. Most people just hit the Stumble button again. Few are banned, but the ones who are serve as a good lesson: don’t spam.

But rule #796 is not about the spammers. It is about the marketers and the authors of those would-be innocent articles: Don’t encourage them.

Spammers are stupid. They take a very niche or otherwise useless product, fail to get any juice behind it, and then decide it will be brilliant to send a million emails to nobody in particular, hoping even one will buy a $350 Kirby vacuum cleaner hose cozy.

Spammers don’t come up with ideas on their own. They desperately search Google hoping even just one page will give them the magic answer. More and more, the answer is becoming social media.

SU can be used for great promotion, as long as the promoter has truly taken the time to target an audience, meld the content into something genuinely useful for the audience, and successfully reach said audience (and only said audience).

Don’t encourage them. Keep my service clean and useful. And for spammers, if you didn’t come up with the idea on your own, you probably can’t execute it correctly. You are wasting both my bandwidth and your own. Stop.

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I realized how many volumes it speaks about me that the high point of my day and article-inspiring material came from watching a show. So I decided to be more exciting.

And what do exciting, confident, slightly arrogant people do? They coin their own terms. I skipped the Tyra brand of crazy (Like “smize”) and went with something more practical: GNDETIRRTAWLS.

GNDETIRRTAWLS means Getting Nothing Done (Even Though I Really, Really Tried A Whole Lot) Syndrome. Every planner, organizer, and office-supply fetishist should appreciate this term without explanation.

We’ve all had (or been) that one person in the office who is always re-copying birthdays and holidays into their new planner. “Another trip to Wal-Mart, huh?” is the only way to begin small-talk with this person, who, in their efforts to remember and structure everything, has managed to forget what even his own name is.

The syndrome even has a DSM-style diagnosis:

• (The patient) has tried all the popular productivity systems (namely, Getting Things Done and 43 Folders); and/or
• Owns no fewer than 20 between the following: planners (and planning applications), calendars (and calendar applications), to-do lists (and applications), time-tracking means, and inboxes; and/or
• Has read Eat That Frog et al. more than twice each; AND
• Still gets nothing done.

For example, that person in your office who is always transferring static dates between calendars suffers from this syndrome due to the sheer lack of productivity caught from owning too many systems and never sticking with one long enough to benefit.

If another person is wise and keeps things in some format which allows for quick and easy transfer, she still probably never gets anything done… she just blows things off more efficiently, with all time spent in learning the system itself.

Tell your friends. Royalty pending.

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I recently introduced my parents to Linux.

I don’t use Linux regularly. I have Vista installed on my fancy new HP laptop. I have Ubuntu installed in a virtual machine. I use it for… well, nothing right now. (This is a tangent:) I installed it so I could test out code for desktop apps to ensure cross-platform working-ness. I spent about five hours installing, updating, fixing, etc. and haven’t written a single line of code yet. So much for productivity. I failed to install LFS three times. I also tried Gentoo. And Open SUSE and Fedora. And Mint…

Anyways, I introduced my parents to Linux, which I installed on my old, not-often-used desktop. After a quick, “This is what you click to check online banking and watch youtube,” introduction, away they went. Well, I should say away my step-dad went, because my mom is technophobic enough using Windows that she isn’t allowed to touch anything after warranty.

Four months and a Windows XP laptop later, and my step-dad is convinced he doesn’t actually have any business installing anything that won’t run natively on Linux. As an aside, their old desktop was bought in 2000, still has Windows ME on it, and was loaded to the point of “Not enough memory/disk space” for any little thing due to his nasty habit of clicking on banner ads and installing whatever it suggests, especially if that is a poker application.

So he was browsing and finding his comfort zone, and he “heard about this awesome application that boosts productivity, looks awesome, runs on Linux, is fully customizable, makes dinner for you, changes diapers” etc. Well, maybe not all that, but along those lines.

My ears perked up because I am lazy and thoroughly enjoy things that will double my output while halving my input (and proving him wrong with my jaded sarcastic ‘wit’ isn’t bad, either). “Oh, really? What was it?”

“It was a foot.”

There was no “and.” There was no explanation. A friend suggested I provide context. That’s it. He must have lost his ability to interpret my facial expressions, because even with the supreme “Huh?” pasted on my forehead, he continued to stare blankly waiting for me to respond. After much deliberating, I sufficed:

“Huh?”

“Do I need to say it again?” he responded.

It was a foot…

It was a foot…

It was a foot…

It was a foot…

“Huh?”

You see, humans are commonly known to be driven by symbolism. We want things to be represented by a sign or symbol, because they’re “easy to remember.” A red light means stop. A red circle with a line through it means, “No.” We should all recognize the USB symbol (context may be required), or the sign for hazardous materials.

But sometimes, we get it wrong. Sometimes, we start a business, we’re making business cards, and we just want a symbol, so we open up PhotoShop and use random bits of letters in various fonts to make one. Sometimes, like in the case of the triquetra, a symbol means any number of things. The fleur-de-lis, while beautiful, means nothing to all but a handful of people who study heraldry.

If you want a logo, it must:

• Be simple
• Be original
• Be related
• Be memorable
• Be recognizable

“The Foot” appeared to be a symbol, based on the previous statement of humans, and a few eliminating questions.

It was simple, I suppose. We can all agree a foot isn’t too complicated (podiatrists not included) . It was obviously memorable. And probably original, unless Procter and Gamble decided to make a new logo for a very specific cream.

But was it related? Or recognizable?

Upon finding the answer, it was absolutely not related:

GNOME

Yes, it was GNOME.

Anybody familiar with Linux will know that symbol immediately, so it is the golden arches or check mark of Linux desktop environments.

However, it should apply in all situations.

Is there any American over the age of, say, 10 who won’t immediately think McDonald’s and Nike when reading those two? If I just say, “Some chain that claims they’ve helped a lot of people… It was a big yellow M,” won’t you be able to narrow it down pretty quickly?

I can’t do that with GNOME, and I certainly can’t do it for well over half the symbols I’ve seen.

If you want a symbol, make it apparently related in some capacity. No funny story, unless the symbol is representing the funny story behind creating the symbol for the story (I use recursion here simply to please any would-be disappointed nerds).

GNOME fails that test. Do you?

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At the time of this writing, my interests include web development, writing and editing, marketing, business, accounting (as hard as that may be to believe), and, most of all, programming.

Right now, the last one is the most important to me. You see, my ultimate goal at this point is to win a Turing award, aka “The Nobel Prize of Computers.” This goal came about a few years ago, when I first read about what it was, realized I was a nerd and should goal-set as such, and picked up my first book about programming.

While my “competition” (strictly speaking about my peers, of course) probably began programming a decade ago when Windows 98 was released. That means they’ve had a lot of time to learn. Fortunately, with the ever-changing nature of programming, that also probably means they have a lot of BASIC to un-learn.

So, dear reader, take note to revisit, for I will cover a lot here, including everything you’ve read above, as well as my quest for a job and my experiences as I begin writing my very own game engine (It should be ready in about 20 years or so, give or take).

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