I was lucky enough to get to go to the XOXO Festival in Portland this past weekend, and I’ve read a lot that’s been written about it since, and, yeah, pretty much all of it is true. It was a wonderful time, special in a way that each person is putting his or her own spin on: it was the anti-South by Southwest, it was a love letter to the Internet, it was “disruptive creativity” made real. XOXO felt like each of those things, and many more. But to me it was the lack of something deeply familiar that marked it as unique:

It didn’t feel lonely.

I’m an introvert, not a particularly distingiushing trait among computer programmers. I generally don’t like crowds, and I especially don’t like crowds of people I don’t already know. I don’t like having to interact in real-time. All of it makes me feel tired and nervous and stupid. Oh, I’m sorry, excuse me — I’m faking a data center emergency on my phone so I can go over to the corner and read Twitter.

At XOXO, there were 400 people all together in the same room. Four hundred unique, potentially problematic souls and I knew maybe 5% of them. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a bit of a wreck going in.

And then it started, and it flew by and not for one second did I feel awkward or adrift or lonely. I didn’t second-guess myself. I didn’t want to crawl into a hole and die. I don’t think I can say that about anything like it before.

I’ve been to a handful of festivals and more than a few meetups and the odd couple of professional events over the years, and without exception there’s been a moment at each where I think, “What the hell am I doing here?” The people — their conversation, the agendas that underlie that conversation, the motives that underlie those agendas — eventually feel otherworldly, and usually sooner than later.

I attended a “founders meetup” once, during a failed entrepreneurial phase, and lasted all of half an hour, including the time it took me to drink a beer in the hopes it would numb the intense urge to flee. But after a handful of conversations about funding and VCs and term sheets and a whole host of other crap that nobody interesting could possibly make the primary motivator of their life, I did flee, out the door and off on a long walk that consisted largely of the glacial realization that this was not a world I was cut out for.

After that happens enough times, you start to feel like maybe there isn’t any world you’re cut out for.

XOXO itself was a pleasure. The logistics were astonishingly well-handled, and everything from the building to the food to the A/V to the after-events to the bathrooms appeared effortless. As a physical reality, XOXO worked.

But, more importantly, as a collection of like-minded people, as the expression of a philosophy, as a new and powerful approach to work and art and achievement, XOXO shined. I’ll leave it to others smarter and more articulate than me to describe the details — each speaker took a turn removing marble that wasn’t part of the statue — but the upshot is that if you are of a particular mind, a particular bent, there is now a place for you. A place to talk and share and experiment and explore. A place to feel among friends. A place to not feel lonely.

He’s been here for two day, being fed antibiotics through an IV. He got bit by a bug, and staph got in, and it was MRSA, and the oral antibiotics he was on didn’t do a damned thing. We went back to his pediatrician and she took one look at the abscess that was still growing after thirty-six hours of standard medicine and her eyes got big and, bang, we were in the hospital.

This is how medicine is supposed to work. Everybody has been kind and patient and our stay has been nothing but reassuring and comfortable. Alerts were raised when they should have been, and professionals acted accordingly. Score one for the American medical establishment.

The bill is $23,800.

I’ll have to have to pay less than 6% of that, because I’m lucky enough to still have insurance.

Two years ago, the company I worked for up and skedaddled — that’s how you say it, right? — to Texas, for a “better business environment” than you can apparently find in California. I think that means that the CEO doesn’t have to pay state taxes and is allowed to hunt low-level employees for sport. I’ve been working as an independent contractor since — and having a good time doing it — but I haven’t been able to find private insurance. Everybody loves the small businessman, the fabled self-sufficient entrepreneur, unless he’s got a history of kidney stones and a ruptured disc and, delicately put, a “problematic height/weight ratio.” They didn’t say which way it was problematic, but I think it’s insurance industry jargon for “Tubby McLardass.”

But California — in an effort, no doubt, to discourage business — lets former employes extend their COBRA coverage for an additional 18 months after the federal limit runs out. I’m paying the full premium, but I and my family have insurance. We’ve got a strategy for dealing with the COBRA expiration, but it’s complicated and requires a lot of hoop jumping and is more than a little silly. If that falls through, we’ll insure my wife and kids and I’ll have to wait for the ban on exclusions because of preexisting conditions to kick in, in 2014.

And that number keeps swirling around my head: $23,800. For a bug bite.

Everybody did everything right. There’s nobody to blame here except maybe the damned bug. And that single random act — save for some lucky timing and California’s silly determination to look after its citizens — would have blown a hole in the side of our savings that would have taken years to fix. OK, kids, which of you wants to skip college?

I don’t normally like to talk politics. Not real politics. I’ll smart-ass on Twitter, but I get uncomfortable as soon as I feel the need to be earnest. I don’t trust myself when I actually care. But the Republican convention just finished up, and tens of thousands of people gathered in Tampa to cheer every mention of reversing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The PPACA is how literally tens of millions of Americans can avoid having a bug bite wipe them out financially. It’s how I and my kidney stones and my bad back and my big ol’ gut may end up protecting ourselves, and our small business to boot. Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, it’s complicated. Yes, it’s ugly. Welcome to running a country.

The PPACA is important. It’s vital. When a bug can bring down your family, when there are people who are willing to take away the shield that could prevent that, when we as a country have become so small and stingy and mean that we cheer the idea of ripping medical care away from fellow citizens, offering nothing in its place but sanctimony and self-righteousness… What are we? We’re not a country. We’re not a community. Oh, no.

We’re a zero-sum game. We’re the state of nature. We’re animals, gobbling down as much as we can, as fast as we can, swatting away the weak.

“I got mine” are just about the ugliest words in the English language. They’re also, increasingly, a mantra for the same people who shout “We, the people” out of the other side of their mouths.

I love this country, more than I can properly express in words. It’s my home. It’s my future. Its history and achievements are awe-inspiring. Its idea, its founding purpose, is the most important the world has ever known. We are bound together by the notion that we are all created equal, committed to one another as a single body politic, held by the strength of our lives and our fortunes and our sacred honor. We put a man on the moon and an SUV on Mars and we made sure that tens of millions of our fellow citizens can know that a goddamned insect — or an accident or a disease or any of a billion other random, faultless happenstances — isn’t going to send them to the poor house.

(Assuming social services still supports poor houses. Substitute “the streets” as appropriate, assuming infrastructure funding hasn’t gone to corporate tax breaks.)

We can make this work. We have to make this work. A bug bite cannot be the thing that draws the line between a middle-class life and poverty, between opportunity and the stagnant dead-end of could-have-been. Our friends, our neighbors, our children, the future of this country as a cohesive society — as an endeavor where we see each other as more than opponents, as more than competitors — depends on it.

Otherwise, we’re just waiting for the fever, and the rot, and for the bugs to pick the bones clean.

Yes, yes, the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the thrill of the hometown boys making good. But I’m a Dodgers fan, so what chance do I have of experiencing any of that this year? We’re rebuilding. Just like every year since 1988.

So instead of a World Series victory or the National League pennant or a .500 season, I’ll settle for a note delivered right into my Twitter stream, marking the occasion that — yet again — those smug, over-funded, media-driven divas have failed to do something as simple as win a game of baseball. And all will be right with the world.

Follow @yankeeslose on Twitter to join in the schadenfreude!

So of course, I’m starting something new today!

After almost two decades working for other people, I’m setting out on my own. Later this month, I’ll be starting my own business, doing iOS and Web development.

There are lots of reasons for this, of course, the usual litany. Half the people I know have the entrepreneurial balls to run their own businesses, and I’ve wanted to start something for as long as I can remember. But I’ve also wanted to, y’know, eat. And sleep. And pay the mortgage and have insurance and support at least some of the children around here who claim to be mine.

But sometimes events conspire to create an opportunity that’s too hard to pass up. Sometimes it happens on New Year’s. And sometimes it happens because of a podcast, of all things: Merlin Mann and Jeff Veen talking to Dan Benjamin.

Jeff was talking about being frustrated at Google, with the culture and his inability to change it. He said he spent two years trying to get a seat at the table, and finally decided that the best way to create the culture he was looking for was to go and build it himself: “I can make my own table.” (For the TL; DR crowd: start at 37:30 for a head-spinning discussion of corporate values and culture.)

There’s something about that story — among all the stories I’ve heard over all the years — that resonated. It was the last, tiny little push, after a series of hard shoves in the back and sharp kicks in the ass, from literally dozens of people whom I admire and trust and desperately want to be like. I’m not even going to attempt to name them — the list could double the size of this page and I’d still forget someone — but I’m grateful to each and every one, whether they know I exist or not.

It comes down to this: I’ve been sitting at someone else’s table for almost twenty years, and at some point they started serving comical plastic chew toys, because they’re cheaper than steak and most people don’t seem to notice.

But I can make my own table, too. Today, I start.

Who knew that the way to action was furniture-based metaphors? I was originally tempted to be less ambitious, maybe make my own stool. But that, um, sounded wrong.

And so here I am: Excited, nervous, with a two-decade head of steam built up and nearly insurmountable opportunity to channel it into. This company will be mine, cobbled together from my successes and my screw-ups. The soft, insulating layer of other people’s rules is gone and anything is possible. I get to choose my own work and create my own culture. I get to make something meaningful and I get to own it. It’s my table.

I should probably get some coasters.

(If you’d like to see how this all works out, the easiest way is probably to follow me on Twitter, at @gknauss, or subscribe this site’s feed.)

I just scratched my own itch… in my pants!

By which I mean, I was never able to find a particular iPhone app that I wanted, so I wrote it myself and it’s now available in the App Store for free. “Buzz Clock” silently vibrates at set intervals, so you’ll always know what time it is, without having to take your phone out of your pocket and have your wife glare at you. There’s not much to the code — it’s trival — but being able to inappropriately apply technological solutions to awkward social situations is one of the reasons I love being a programmer.

The app is open source, so if you’re curious what goes into a small App Store-approved program, feel free to download it and take a look. Any and all feedback is welcome.

P.S. And, yes, I already know I misspelled “discreet” in the instructions, thank you very much. Dammit.

So. Pop quiz, hot shot. Is this post about Old Media, the Tea Party or Cory Doctorow?

Is there any difference? All three have a vested interest in systems that are changing in ways they don’t fully understand and can’t control. And they don’t like it one bit.

Lord knows, more than enough has been written about Old Media and the Tea Party, but Doctorow recently planted himself in the same neophobic camp as the dinosaurs and the nutbags with a little rant on the unhackabiliy of the iPad. Cory’s not happy that what he’s comfortable with — what he finds value in — is suddenly going the way of well-heeled white men and well-heeled white men. And he thinks you shouldn’t be happy about it either. Alex Payne and Mark Pilgrim (and many, many others) have expressed similar sentiments.

My initial reaction is sympathy. I grew up in the same era as these guys. My first computer was an Atari 400, weaseled out of my parents after a year of camping at a friend’s house and playing with his Apple II. (Note: Apple II, not Apple II+, you newbie losers. We used Integer BASIC, and we liked it.) One of the very first things my dad and I did with the 400 was add a real, full-stroke keyboard using the instructions in ANALOG Magazine, issue 9, connected via a two-inch wide ribbon cable. It was a heavy, steel-cased thing, and you could have killed somebody with it if you had swung it at them.

God, I loved that keyboard. I loved that machine.

But there is exactly no way in Hell that I’d want to go back to soldering it into a 16K, 1Mhz computer spread across the kitchen table like the victim of a bad motorcycle accident. Just like there’s no way I’d want to go back to punch cards, or vacuum tubes, or mechanical rotors. Or polio, or fascism, or pre-agrarian nomadism. Or the Bush Administration.

There’s a reason most of us aren’t Cory Doctorow. We don’t want to open up our devices. We don’t want to hack them. We want them to just goddamned work, thanks, and if gluing the case shut makes that possible, bring on the Elmers.

Is that me abandoning my fate to corporate overlords? Is that an abdication of my responsibility as a goggle-wearing, becaped techno-citizen? Of course not. It’s me making a rational decision, getting something I care a lot about in exchange for something I don’t care quite so much about. It’s not dumb, and it’s not naive. It’s the market at work, and if my corporate overlords can’t make the trade worthwhile, then I’ll go somewhere else — the remainders bin at Fry’s, for example, or Richard Stallman’s office. But, honestly, the deal would have to suck pretty bad to get me back there. I mean, the smell alone. The freedom of the waves is great, but dying of scurvy sure sucks.

Hate that as much as you want, old-school corner-cases, but it’s the future, it always has been. It’s called “progress,” the continual refinement of the social contract. And it’s no more a betrayal of something vital than any other decision made in rational self-interest. Make your arguments about DRM and closed systems and “Wal-Martization”, but they still don’t come anywhere close to tipping the scale. The iPad (or something like it) is the future of computing for an enormous slice of the population — despite all its political and philosophical flaws — because it’s a pretty goddamned great future. It’s a future that we want.

Simplicity has a purpose, and complexity — “hackability” is just a form of complexity — has costs. The story of technology over the course of the past 20 years is the expansion of one at the expense of another. It’s been more than a fair trade, despite detours and disasters and greed and stupidity. To object to this positive (and historically inevitable) trend on the grounds that you maybe can’t trade comics anymore is to remove the benefits of technology from billions of potential users, for your own myopic ends.

This isn’t about the “easy enough for my mom” trope that Doctorow hauls out as a straw man. I’m an experienced technologist, and have been banging — often literally — on computers for twenty-five years. At least half of what I do, even today, is meta-work, effort that goes purely into keeping the goddamned things running. My wife is not a technologist, but uses a computer every day — and hates it. That she has to fight, constantly, to get her tools to do her bidding is insane. It’s all wasted time and wasted effort, and exactly none of it has anything to do with what she’s trying to accomplish. Her tools suck — all our tools suck — and there’s no excuse for it. Would she trade inscrutable and doesn’t work for inscrutable and does? In a heart beat. I would, too. Everybody would, and will.

Doctorow says that he learned to program using HyperCard — a program that was derided as a laughable toy on a comically closed platform at the time. I remember, because I was one of the arrogant SOBs doing the deriding. But HyperCard was a great programming environment, a sane introduction to a complex topic that expanded the population of programmers many, many, many times over. Some went on to bigger things. Some stayed happily where they were, because it got the job done. Excel, VisualBasic, HyperCard — these “toys” are all tools, and tools that work, for an enormous number of people. They offer a leg up, a start, a way in. Doctorow essentially argues that those benefits shouldn’t be available to others, now that he’s found somewhere that he’s comfortable. Infantalize that. If you need to change a battery to feel like a whole man, then perhaps you’re missing the point.

I have no doubt that the computing device that my kids will use is going to look more like the iPad than my beloved Atari 400, and that they won’t care one damned bit about how they can’t solder a keyboard into it. Maybe one of them will be interested enough to program it, learning Objective C or Newspeak or whatever Apple will command. Maybe someone will write a (compiled, Apple-approved, DRM’d) HyperCard for the iPad, and they’ll use that. Maybe there’s an iPad version of Rocky’s Boots on the horizon. Maybe the device will just be a beautiful, convenient interface to the great open platform of the Web, and they’ll program there. Maybe they won’t program at all.

Maybe they’ll just get stuff done, without having to worry about interrupt conflicts or file systems or DLLs or viruses or moths squished in relays. Maybe, instead they’ll write a novel, or paint a picture, or use technology in ways that we can’t even dream of, because some significant percentage of the crap that we currently suffer through just to get it going will be gone. To dismiss them as mere “consumers” because they may not be programmers — because they may not waste their lives fetishizing the rituals of a dying priesthood — is arrogant and insulting.

Yes, yes, this simplicity will come at a cost, of course, just like every other aspect of modern life. But for the benefits of cutting-edge technology in its full flower — to even begin to reap what the future has to offer — it’s more than a fair trade. It always has been.

As much as any civil libertarian feels put upon by the encroaching, omnipresent surveillance of the state, far worse off are their kids. Children — free of any such trivialities as Constitutional privacy protection — are monitored and cataloged and ear-tagged in ways that their parents can’t even imagine, and very often happily participate in. It’s all in their best interest, of course, the saying goes. But the implications of encasing our children in the physical and emotional bubble-wrap of good intentions are both profound and vastly under-appreciated. It’s not a new idea that kids today are coddled by perpetually terrified parents, but the extent of the coddling goes well beyond the home, into nearly every institution that makes up a child’s world.

An example: the other day, I dropped my kids off at their school late — Daddy needs his rest, dammit, and sometimes dawn comes too early — and by the time I got to work, I had this e-mail waiting for me:

Creeeeeeeepy. Creepier still, later in the day I got a phone call from a robot — a robot, operated without a hint of irony — that informed me of the same thing. My wife got the mail and call, too. And the record of this transgression — and the record of the notification of the record — sits, still, in the bowels of the Ministry of Education. Message sent and received: You just try skipping class, little mister. You just try. We’re watching you.

My children are now 11, nine and eight, and are coming into the prime years of adolescent mischief making. But in the age of computers and cameras and databases and twelve-foot-high fences and involuntary geolocation reporting and home drug testing kits and thermal imaging and full-body X-rays and God knows what else, is it even worth bothering? Is it even worth trying to bother?

I was never much of a teen-age troublemaker, and the risk aversion born in that time has followed me my whole life. Once, in junior high, I tried to forge my mother’s signature on an absence excuse, and the repercussions of that act — laughably minor from the safe distance of a few decades — left me with a disinclination towards anything that might cause someone in authority to give me a stern look. It hasn’t been a wholly bad thing, my adult timidity, but I can feel it hanging on my shirt tail any time I get anywhere close to the edge of what’s expected of me. It may be irrational, but it’s built in.

So, as part of the effort to give my kids neuroses entirely separate from my own, I want them to risk, to dare, to push boundaries, to test waters, to be pains in the ass every once in a while. Being late to class because your dad couldn’t drag himself out of bed in the morning doesn’t exactly pin the rebel-o-meter, but if that innocent, involuntary transgression brought down the full weight of the school’s monitoring system, gad, who’s going to even try cutting a class?

What’s important, and missing, is context. There’s no room for subtlety in a system designed for everybody.

When I was fourteen, some friends and I stumbled across a waterlogged copy of Playboy under a bush on the walk home from school, and — oh, my God — it was awesome. My kids, via the computer we have sitting out in the family room, have access to that very same 1982 issue. And every issue since. And every issue of every other adult magazine since. And endless, infinite terabytes of violent, degrading, revolting hard-core porn as well.

Do I shut down the computer? Do I log every mouse click? Do I worm my way into the very private world of their coming of age, with the best of intentions to protect them from all the filth that the world will eventually vomit up at their feet?

Of course not. They’re going to be teenage boys soon, and looking at naughty pictures is something they’re going to want to do, something they should do. News flash: Boys like boobs. And good for them — I’m a fan myself. I’ll watch, from a distance, as they explore their world. If they go too far, if they end up over the edge instead of at it, I’ll pull them back, of course, but not before. When and how depends on the context — I can’t tell you where the line is because we’re not there yet. But I do know it’s not going to be something the school district — or the church or my in-laws or any of the other tut-tutting, contextless, rule-bound institutions that teem and thrash like spawning fish — would approve of.

The goal is not to prevent them from making mistakes, but to allow them to. Risk assessment, trust development, value determination, responsibility, self-direction — all of these very important skills grow out of the opportunity to explore, to experiment, to make mistakes and correct them. Short circuit their opportunity to screw up and you’ve destroyed a chance for them to learn something new, about themselves and about how the machine works.

This is a terrified little world we’ve built for ourselves, and we’re far too eager to pass it on to our children, ringing bells and slamming doors the instant they step off the bright yellow line painted on the floor. But I’m going to try like hell to do the opposite: Open the cells! Take off the chains! Set them free!

And if they don’t come back, then you hunt them down and lock them up.

“Please calm down. Breathe deeply. Anxiety is a normal part of the temporal displacement field. It will pass quickly. OK. OK? OK. Now: Hello. I am you, from the year 2010, two decades in the future.”

“Aaaaaaaagh!”

“I said, calm down. The panic will pass.”

“Calm down? Calm down? You’re fat! And bald! I’m going to be fat and bald!”

“Hold up there, Sparky. You’re already fat. And will it help with the bald thing if I assure you that you’re, um, romantically involved on a regular basis?”

“But…”

“Regular basis.”

“Yeah, OK, fair trade.”

“I’ve come to the past to tell you two things.”

“Other than the bald thing?”

“Yes. Other than the bald thing.”

“Is it about nuclear war? Because radiation would explain why all your hair has fallen out.”

“In 2010, Apple will introduce a new computer, called the ‘iPad.’”

“Hee!”

“You’re thinking of a sanitary napkin joke, aren’t you?”

“Hee!”

“Would you like me to describe this computer to you?”

“Is Apple even still around? Microsoft just launched Windows 3.0 and—”

“It’s about the size of a piece of paper, half an inch thick and weighs a pound an a half. It has 64GB of storage, can play tens of thousands of songs and can display everything from photos to high-quality video. It has a touch-sensitive screen, is completely wireless and can connect to the Internet from just about anywhere.”

“Aaaaaagh!”

“Pretty cool, huh?”

“Holy crap! Oh, my God! Do you guys have, like, flying cars, too? Did aliens come and give you this technology? That means I can get USENET anywhere.”

“Um. Yeah. The Internet expands a bit from USENET, by the way.”

“Gopher?”

“Yeah. Gopher.”

“Oh, man. Can I see it? Do you have one?”

“Well, no, I don’t have one, because it won’t come out for another two months. But, here, I’ve got a smaller one that can make phone calls, too.”

“Aaaaaaagh! Oh, my God. This is so cool! All this, and I’m getting laid, too? People in the future must be so happy!”

“Actually, no. People are sort of disappointed.”

“What? How is that even possible?”

“That brings me to the second thing I want to tell you. In 2008, America elects a black man President.”

“What? Really? Like Morgan Freeman in ‘Deep Impact’?”

“No, you anachronistic goober. That movie doesn’t even come out until 1998.”

“So, he’s like Disraeli or Thatcher, right? Only Nixon can go to China? He’s really conservative? Please tell me you don’t elect Alan Keyes President.”

“No, no. His name is Barack Hussein Obama.”

“OK, now you’re just screwing with me.”

“No. Totally serious. He’s liberal, intelligent, deliberative, pretty much everything the country needs after Bush.”

“Bush? But Bush is President now. Please don’t tell me that he’s still around in 2008!”

“Oh, no. You’ve got the good Bush. The other one is who Obama is cleaning up after.”

“Wow! That’s awesome. That’s wonderful to hear. People must be really— Oh. You’re going to do that thing again, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am. A lot of his supporters are disappointed.”

“With what? A liberal black guy got elected President!”

“And in his first year, he prevented a second Great Depression, has stopped torture as official policy, is winding down an unnecessary war, has dramatically opened up the transparency of government and has gone a good way towards restoring America’s place in the world.”

“And people are disappointed?”

“They want more.”

“Like the people disappointed with the computer?”

“Yes.”

“So people in 2010 are dicks?”

“They’re cynics.”

“Oh, please. I’m a cynic, and all this stuff sounds incredibly great.”

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you, 1990 me. Your cynicism is important, even vital. God knows, there are times when it will seem like bunnies-and-rainbows optimism given what actually happens. Things get really, really bad for a while, and no amount of cynicism seems like enough.

“But I also wanted to make sure that there are some things that are, in fact, awesome. The world’s been through a hell of a lot, and I’m not sure I trust my own eyes anymore. I don’t agree with every one of Obama’s policies and I doubt that I’ll buy an iPad, but does that make their existence any less amazing? What would the bright-eyed, long-haired, involuntarily celibate version of myself from two decades ago think?”

“I think it’s amazing. All of it. And I’m even ignoring the fact that you can apparently time-travel.”

“Good. That’s good to know. I look at some of the stuff that’s going on, what we can do and what we’ve done, and I want to be astonished. But some small, mean, broken part of me thinks it will all go to hell, that it’s a trap.”

“Wow. You really are cynical, aren’t you? It all looks great to me. Magic. The future! Man.”

“OK. Thanks. Oh, and two more things.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t ever used the words ‘Meh’ or ‘Fail.’”

“OK.”

“And in a couple of years, when you’re deciding if you want to go on a blind date with someone’s lawyer friend, do it.”

“Seriously?”

“Talk about awesome.”

This was not without some debate. Joanne and I, as parents, have been leery of all the high-end electronics that kids have these days. This is partly out of economic necessity — good God, the cost of these toys! — and partly out of a sense that it’s all just, y’know, too much. There’s something deep down in both of us that says that a fifth grader shouldn’t have a $250 cell phone, though apparently a whole hell of a lot of them do. Tell you what, kid: When you can remember to bring your jacket home, we’ll talk about things to put in it. Maybe start with a rock and work up from there.

For a long time, we resisted video games, too, which is nothing but hypocrisy on my part. I shamelessly begged my parents for an Atari VCS when I was young and it took more than a year to wear them down to jittery, twitchy nubs, but I did it. And then I played the crap out of it. Did you know that the bomber’s expression changes when you get to 10,000 points in “Kaboom!”?

Which is my concern, of course. I don’t blame the evils of society on video games any more than I blame the evils of society on television or high-fat foods or anything else that I really, really enjoy. But I do know all the mistakes I made — all too well — and I’d like to steer my kids away from as many of them as I can. Console games led to computer games, which led to programming computer games, which led to programming in general, which led to my career. And, dammit, they deserve better. I mean, I can’t even afford to spend a few hundred dollars on a cell phone for a ten-year-old.

But video games are a part of adolescence and I do love them, and we’ve been slowly ramping up, trying to emphasize playability and value over the latest whiz-bangery. I bought an old PS2, and we pick up perfectly serviceable used games for ten bucks a pop, and that’s been tons of fun. Tom’s brothers bought themselves a couple of Gameboy Advances, all on their own, at steep discounts, because they’re now considered antiques. Learning the value of things is just as important has having the things themselves.

And yesterday, Tom bought a Wii.

He’s been saving for nearly a year — gathering his allowance and gift money and skipping souvenirs when we go on vacation to add the cash to his pile. He’s more than earned it — his patience and persistence beat the crap out of mine, and I’m theoretically the adult. He set his sights on something he wanted, balanced the costs against the benefits, showed the discipline he needed to achieve his goal, and did it.

And more important: It’s his — he owns it, and he can do whatever he wants with it. The pride of ownership, of achievement, trumps being handed something any day. I really want him to learn that lesson, because so much flows from it: Hard work has benefits. Don’t take the easy way out. You own something and nobody can take it away from you.

So this one goes in the plus column: my kid recognized value, exercised discipline, and took ownership. You’re damned right I feel smug.

Or at least I did. After the boys were asleep, I went upstairs to try the Wii, and the little jerk had hidden the controllers.

Well, his controllers.

If the name doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s because it’s a now-impossibly-obscure joke based on another now-impossibly-obscure joke. Alas, the actual contents of the piece have aged just about as well. Time is a brutal editor, and the past decade has rendered “My Ass is a Weblog” true in only one way: they’ve both gotten gigantic.

In the article, I claim that this new “weblog” nonsense, while useful in its niche, wasn’t deserving of all the hype that was being heaped on it. How could it be? People were claiming that weblogs — the word “blog” had been coined in early 1999, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it yet — would upend journalism, reach millions, bring people together, drive people apart, change the world. Blogs weren’t just a future, but the future. Blogs!, went the proponents. Blogs! Whatever that ultimately means!

Ha!, I spat. You naive, optimistic nincompoops. Ha.

Over the years, I’ve eaten my share of crow about “My Ass is a Weblog” — starting from its first anniversary — and all of it is justified. Out of everything I’ve ever written, this one essay is the most profoundly, spectacularly wrong — wrong in spirit as well as specifics. If anything, the most naive, optimistic nincompoops were too timid.

In fact, it’s how wrong “My Ass” is — and you can write your own joke here — that has given it life long past what it would have earned otherwise. Anybody remember my devastating takedown of WAP? No, of course not. Nobody’s writing books about the history of WAP. Nobody cares.

But blogs… Those of us who were wrong about blogs are cultural curiosities, the same way that those who cling to newspapers or the second Bush Administration are cultural curiosities — as oddballs and idiots who willingly stand on the wrong side of history. Heck, I’ve earned the title “dead horse” many, many times, but “My Ass is a Weblog” is the only reason that the Wall Street Journal called me one. Um, hooray? Yeah, sure: Hooray! You need some historical example of short-sighted, self-satisfied chimp? I’m your man.

Weblogs won, happily rolling over the petty doubts and even pettier cynicism of people like me, rolling over everything that could have kept them from becoming what they have become, both good and bad. Today, a decade on, I know countless people who have made their reputations from blogs, made their living from blogs, made their friendships from blogs, made their marriages from blogs. Blogs have figured into almost all our lives the way that schools and neighborhoods have, the way friends and coworkers have, the way good books and bad TV have. They’re integral to who we are, what we’ve become.

Blogs!, go the proponents, this time as valedictory. Blogs! Whatever that ultimately means!

And there’s a lesson in that. Passion won, enthusiasm won, being in the right place at the right time with the right tool won. World-changing won. I think that cynicism has a better record than anybody is willing to admit, but the people who created weblogs and the software that makes them go — and the list is too deep and too wide to even begin counting them here — won. And I’m glad for it.

My ass is a weblog, and somebody, somewhere, might want to hear what it has to say.

And that’s why we got a Roomba.

Or, rather, that’s the excuse I used to get a Roomba. I mean, I could replace the previous paragraph with “And that’s why I vacuum every day” or “And that’s why we continue to live in filth” but, come on, the cost of the Roomba was some fractional percentage of what we blew on the floor and it’s a freakin’ robot. In my house. Doing my unquestioned bidding, as long as my bidding involves vacuuming.

Which, somewhat disturbingly, it often does.

The Roomba works astonishingly well. It doesn’t do a human-good job, but for day-to-day cleaning — picking up whatever the combination of kids, dogs and 1960’s central air produces — it’s perfect. It’s too loud to run automatically in the middle of the night — “There’s someone in the house! And they’re dust-busting!” — but if you let it go while you’re out on errands, you came back to a cleaner house. Which is a pretty great trick.

And so I love the Roomba… mostly. I mean, it’s great and all, but… Geez. How do I say this? It… It sort of creeps me out. And not just in the way that something that cleans without complaining creeps me out.

This turns out to be not unfamiliar territory for robots.

“The Uncanny Valley” is shorthand for the revulsion that human beings feel when watching Robert Zemeckis movies. Or, rather, for when you’re watching computer animation or robots that come close to looking like humans, without actually getting all the way there. The jerky movements. The dead eyes. The inevitable malfunction and ensuing horrific slaughter. We love our robots R2-D2 adorable, not as walking corpses.

And, yes, OK, the Roomba doesn’t look anything like a person. But it does perform the function of one, and in performing that function, it enters an Uncanny Valley of Behavior.

The Roomba has a handful of different methods for covering a room while it vacuums. And, just by looking at the result, they work great. However the Roomba programmers picked these methods — and I can’t imagine that a group of nerds putting together a vacuum cleaning robot didn’t try every one they could think of — it all appears effective as the dickens.

But watching the Roomba run its routines is frustrating, in a way that watching a human vacuum isn’t. Or, rather, the way I presume that watching a human isn’t, because the only human I ever see vacuuming is me, in a mirror, and that’s incredibly frustrating.

Human beings, when they come across a patch of dirt — and, no, I don’t think that “patch” is over-doing it, not in my house — work the vacuum back and forth until all the dirt is gone. You’re there, you finish it. I don’t care how much you love your grid pattern, OCD Boy, you’re just not going to move on until the immediate area is clean.

But the Roomba will merrily roll right through the bad spot. Zoom. It comes back, eventually, following whatever commands its tiny little brain is giving it, and the floor ultimately gets clean. But watching it not behave like a human — and, yes, I do spend far more time watching the Roomba vacuum than I ever spent vacuuming myself — is… disconcerting.

It makes sense that the Roomba behaves differently than a person — it’s got a different design, with different strengths and weaknesses. But as robots make their way out of factories and into contact with the general population, there’s bound to be a disconnect, a brainstem-driven objection to how they go about doing what they do. They won’t look like humans — it makes no sense to design specialized robots to mimic the awkward shape of people — but they will be doing the work of humans, and doing it in ways that are alien to us, ways that that better suit their dumb, slow, nothing-but-time constraints. Ways that are going to seem creepy as hell.

With the rise of the robots, our world is going to be turned into an endless Uncanny Valley of Behavior. No matter how effective the machines are, some distant memory will crawl out of our lizard brain and insist that they’re doing it wrong. And we’ll squirm and fidget and ultimately get used to it and let the robots go about their business.

Because the alternative is doing the vacuuming ourselves, and there’s no way in hell I’m going back to that.

Zeus rattled the sky. Poseidon called forth earthquakes. Ares created war and its cruelty. Aphrodite created lust and its cruelty.

With the rise of the scientific method, ascribing particular aspects of nature to individuals, to individual personalities, fell out of favor. While the result is a clearer understanding of the true nature of the universe, it’s maybe a little too prosaic.

So I’d like to propose that we start assigning personalities to our understanding of nature again, to scientific laws. There are archetypes that perfectly embody not only how the natural world actually works, but our fears about it, too.

My dogs, for instance, are the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Bad, entropy! Naughty! Bad!

I am not a cancer survivor. I am not a Tour de France champion. I am not an inspiration to millions, a man who believes “in living every minute of your [life] with every ounce of your being.”

I’m a fat middle-aged guy with a dead-ending career who’s tired a lot. I forgot to shave this morning.

Lance Amstrong (L) and not Lance Armstrong (R).
Not Lance Armstrong is the one posing with a urinal.

But then I see a lot of fat, middle-aged, unshaven guys, and they’re all walking around with bright yellow LIVESTRONG wristbands, and I think, “Well, if they can be inspired to greatness by an exceptional individual’s story, can’t I? Can’t I?”

And the answer is, of course, “No. Don’t be stupid. Get back to work.”

So there’s obviously a need — a profound need — for more realistic goals for the rest of us. Overcome adversity? Break records? Change the world? Sleep with an apparently endless series of actresses and models?

I’ll settle for keeping the bathroom clean for a week. OK, five days. Three. Three days.

Dare to dream, people. Dare to dream.

Wristbands are easy, but actually living up to what they say is hard. So what’s the solution? No, not changing my attitude. Pfft. Who let you in? Change the saying!

Introducing the DIEFEEBLE wristband, in ashen gray.

DIEFEEBLE, for when the sofa and a bag of Doritos looks a hell of a lot better than a bike ride in the rain. DIEFEEBLE, for leading that life of quiet desperation that you keep hearing about. DIEFEEBLE, for being too tired to even have sex, for Christsakes.

DIEFEEBLE, for the fat middle-aged guy in all of us.

Man, do I need a nap.

A couple of weeks ago, on a lark, I wrote a Gresemonkey script to replace the Yankee logo on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball with something more appropriate. I didn’t encode the graphic into the script, instead calling it from a URL, so I could change it as time went on.

The Yankees enter the ALCS:

The Phillies win the NLCS:

The Yankees win the World Series:

All fine and good and totally on the right side of history and moral probity. Except that the baseball season is now over and my little joke should be over along with it, freeing Gruber to change his logo back to the one representing Communist China instead of something that crushes the human spirit. But, um, something like 1,500 people installed the script and because I hadn’t actually planned for mid-October, they’re still going to be requesting a graphic from my site every time they visit Daring Fireball. It’s installed software. You can’t make your users upgrade.

This isn’t an uncommon problem, especially off the Web. You release something, people adopt it, and only then do you start to realize the implications of what you’re now doomed to support for ever and ever and ever.

If I’d been smart — a reach, admittedly — I would have written the script differently, loading the replacement header independently from assigning it to the display, and then not doing the assignment if the replacement wasn’t available. This would have left the normal header in place if my version wasn’t there, with only a query and a 404 response traveling over the network. Elegant! And not what I did.

I had considered putting a date check into the code, to only replace the URL during the post-season. But that hard-codes something that could potentially change, which is always dangerous. Given what they keep doing to baseball, God knows when the post-season will be next year. It just felt wrong.

And so I’m stuck, serving thousands of 7K replacement headers to a site that no longer offends for a joke that’s over. Hijacking part of Daring Fireball in a fit of Yankee-loathing pique is fun, doing it permanently is bad form.

So, OK, absent a time-machine and good sense, there are a few possibilities about how to deal with this:

• Ignore it. There aren’t that many hits coming from the script, and each only generates a small amount traffic. If I host a proper version of the DF header, nobody will know the difference, probably.

  This is the easiest option, as it’s already done and my hosting plan allows me hundreds and hundreds of gigs of bandwidth that I’m not using. But while ignoring a problem can make sense from a business perspective, the inelegance of it can also stick in my nerd craw like, oh, a Yankee’s World Series victory.

• Set a long Expires header. Currently, the replacement graphic is only cached for the browser session, so that it will be re-queried often. I didn’t know when circumstances were going to change, and I wanted to be able to update the header as the post-season progressed. With the season over, I could set an Expires header on the image that would keep it locally cached in each visitors’ browser until late September 2010.

  And while this solution solves the network traffic issue, it still requires me to host a version of the normal DF banner, preventing Gruber from changing it arbitrarily, effectively continuing to hijack his site. And again with the hard-coded date issue.

• Encourage people to upgrade or remove the Geasemonkey script. Ha. While Firefox extensions can be automatically upgraded, Greasemonkey scripts can’t. For a lot of Damned Fireball users, the only time they’ve ever visited my site was to install the script. They’re never coming back, and so would never see an upgrade notice. And even if they did, the vast majority of them would ignore it. That’s just the way users are.

• Use an HTTP 302 back to the original banner. When the replacement logo is requested from my server, I can respond with a HTTP 302, pointing the browser back to the original, on Daring Fireball’s server. Since that version of the banner is already cached locally (from when the page was originally requested), the only network traffic incurred is the query and a 302 response.

  This “Found Elsewhere” idea is actually pretty good. It keeps the regular expiration of the graphic, so that it can be replaced should the Yankees ever luck into the post-season again, but it also doesn’t incur the traffic of constantly re-sending the replacement banner. It allows Gruber to do what he wants with his original banner since it just returns the browser to whatever was originally downloaded before the script ran.

In fact, this solution is almost as good as if I’d written the code right in the first place.

Which, in software, counts as a victory.