Drew Yates

I’m driving from Columbus, OH to Mountain View, CA where I will be living for the indefinite future. I’m bringing my camera, so I’ll take some pictures if I drive by anything interesting. I probably won’t be able to post or reply to email for the rest of the week or so. Wish me luck!

Prediction: I think that when this “cookie-cutter house in the middle of nowhere” cultural fad fades, it will be a DISASTER for American public schools, which are already struggling from mismanagement.

New suburbs grow because families want good schools for their kids. The suburb school is good because new housing developments raise property taxes. Tired rural schools suddenly become elite suburban schools. Meanwhile, city schools regress and, without funding or enrollment, decay and close.

Now, imagine these tax-propped country schools that have grown dependant on consistently rising enrollment, rubber-stamped levies, and rising property taxes. They are paying down new football stadiums or whatever stupid crap schools waste money on. Suddenly, these schools are with faced with falling enrollment, falling property taxes, and conservative voters unwilling to pass levies. The school panics and tries to pass an emergency levy. The levy fails because the voters want to “punish” school “mismanagement.” The neighborhood —its main attraction was “a good school”— now does not have such a good school. Families leave and are not replaced. Property taxes fall more.

The school funding falls, so the school gets worse, so less people move to the suburb, so school funding falls, so the school gets worse… Soon, you’re stuck with what you started: houses in cornfields. There is no infrastructure, there are no jobs, there is no community. And the school sucks.

Meanwhile… too late for the city schools, which have been deteriorating for the last 50 years from neglect.

All this during the “digital age,” when education and technological savvy are supposed to be paramount.

Oops.

I wonder what would happen if, say, 1% of people one day stood up and lived like this?

3 Million Americans

PS: Did you know that in Europe, the suburbs are considered the slums because the rich people prefer to live close to city-centers? I’m just saying, in case, you know, housing bubbles and re-financed middle-class houses and stuff. I’m not a real estate guy at all, though. I’m just throwing that one out there. I’m just saying it would suck if all of a sudden a lot of unaffordable yet unattractive houses suddenly appeared in suburbs that used to be the middle of nowhere… and you happened to own one such house.

Er, I mean, you own a debt for $100,000 for that house you live in. That would be lots of fun, living in a house that nobody will buy and that you can’t afford. I hope you like that house a lot. Of course, with all those “good suburban schools” funded by property taxes, I’m sure the “middle of nowhere cookie-cutter suburb” will continue to thrive just like it has everywhere since forever.

Oo! One more side note. I bet that college degree is going to be really valuable when looking for that “guaranteed +$30k year job” (as mentioned in my comments) — despite that most everyone has one in your “social class.” Too bad the education a “degree” represents is openly mocked. I bet it’s going to be even more fun applying for jobs solely on the merit of a degree when people with college degrees are losing their jobs because their value isn’t quantifiable.

I wrote this my sophomore year to get an A in my class Art 206: Principles of 2D Design. The art grad student who (poorly) taught the class never did respond to this paper, but I did get my A. Fun exercise: which parts of this are bullshit? Which parts are not? Try and guess! (use the comments. Bonus points if you defend yourself using some ratio involving semicolons. IP Bans for banal answers, one word answers, and everything else that I feel like depending on my mood)

note: This is verbatim from the paper I turned in because editing would be cheating. I think the prompt was: “Write a one page essay that defines 2D Design”)

Unity, emphasis, balance, scale, rhythm: 2D Design is not merely the arbitrary replication of visual stimulations that are familiar to us; rather, it is the culmination of these commonly-held design principals. 2D Design, then, is much like a science in that it consists of laws that are independently verified outside of our own personal tastes. However, unlike a science which arises primarily from “the bottom up” from explicitly defined laws, the principals of design seem to draw from “the top down;” that is, they are defined by their continued successful application. This seems to be true; all of art seems to be the continued exploration of what we define is and is not an example of successful application of these principals of design.

Since no elementary laws of art exist from which all art derives, art education is achieved by providing examples and critiquing their success. Through these critiques, we discover how the principals of design are prerequisites for success. Traditional textbook study of these principals merely names and thereby emphasizes what was already subconsciously self-evident.

The beauty of art is that seems to be a study of ourselves, since from whence do these principals derive? In this class, I have learned that art itself is independent of the process used to create it. Technique is merely a mechanical process. After all, the novelty of realistic technique quickly pales in comparison to its mechanical counterpart: the photograph. Then to create art and appreciate art seems to be something that intrinsically a part of who we are as human beings. It is a path of discovery. Only until we are able to explicitly define ourselves will art transcend to science, but until then, we have the principles of design.

Glaukai.com

I’m excited, and I’m pleased with the design. I hope this makes for a good shell-site! Now, so much to do…

EDIT: Just in case you thought I was bullshitting you, here is a screenshot of the website template.

I’ve designed the Glaukai website, and I’m in the process of converting it to HTML. I’m making this placeholder to fulfill my promise of a post by Monday night. However, I am going to take the extra effort and use XML / XSL to design this site as I think websites should be doing now that’s almost 2007 already (wow!). This will take me about an extra day.

Here is the (pending, preliminary) content for the main page:

Hi! This is Glaukai.

Glaukai (or ???????) is a new, better way to make financial transactions over the Internet. Features include:

• Free financial transactions
• Micropayments. Transactions can be made for as low as a one-hundred-thousandth.
• Superior user interface. Users never leave your website to make a financial transaction.
• Superior developer interface (API). Using simple Javascript and HTTP(S) requests, ordinary webservers and webpages can communicate directly with Glaukai servers.
• New security technologies to better protect your accounts and prevent spoofing.
• A common, international system for commerce.

The Glaukai Mission

• detax world financial transactions
• globalize electronic commerce
• economical feasibility for individuals to publish creative content online

So, you say to yourself, this sounds quite far-fetched. Perhaps. But the possible good is just too much to not pursue this with the zeal a mission like this deserves.

The gravity of not only dropping out of school but not saving myself everyday (I could still cram and save myself on the midterms) is really starting to hit me. I know I have to do this. But it’s not very fun to axe your friends, family, professors, classmates, class projects, future plans, and culture all within a few weeks.

So. It’s time to put up or shut up.

I want to make financial transactions free over the Internet.

Why?

I want to detax the world’s finances, globalize electronic commerce, and make it economically feasible for individuals to publish creative content online. I hope to, in the process, pull another “AT&T” on the banks that perpetuate this credit card facade.

I don’t care about anything else. I don’t care about my health, my personal relationships, or my wealth. I don’t care about these except as means to accomplish my goal. This 2-4% tax on every transaction needs to end and I am going to end it. If transactions are free, then micro-payments will be solved, and selling electronic content will be viable.

So.

Goal one is to get a proof of concept working. As some of you know or have guessed, I have applied for Y Combinator funding, but I would be an idiot to expect funding. I’m just some 22-year-old asshole from Ohio with a state school “software engineering” education and, thanks to my semi-Luddite family, only about 6 years of PC experience. I’m working alone, and my application read like a stoner’s nightmare. If I get accepted, great. If not, oh well, because I’ll be fighting the good fight no matter what.

Glaukai v.0 will be complete by next Monday night.

This will be my last post until then.

Click for Full Size (note: 1.5 MB)

I also have a CMYK PDF vector copy if anyone would like it.

The original Wall Art… this was painted over by the apartment complex when I moved out.

EDIT: After a year, I’ve decided that the smaller object in the bottom right unbalances the composition. That’s why I’m leaving it.

Link

Derived from Walls and Flagstaves, less the boring parts.

I ran this by Paul Graham, and he says:

Better, but there’s a conflict in writing in a sophisticated way about “software engineering.” The best hackers I know never use the term. So you’re in the position of someone writing about how to “dress classy.” The people who do don’t use that phrase or (more importantly) think about it in those terms.

I interpret this to mean:

Well, you’re not an idiot, but you don’t really know what you’re talking about. If you want to write about hacking, do more of it. You don’t know what you don’t know, but at least you’re trying.

That’s good enough for me for now. It seems I’ll need to unlearn my four college years of “Computer Science and Engineering” if I want to be any good at anything. In the meantime, I have no problem with failure. I’d just assume everything I do now is wrong as long as I get to keep the hope of improvement. It’s not as if I’ll get any better by doing nothing.

This website bores me. I’m not angry anymore. I am demoting this website to “sketchpad” and I building a new, better website with good content distilled from these sketches.

This website design displeases me. The font is too big. I thought I would like the font bigger because small font hurts my eyes late at night, but big font is too exhausting to read. The sketch on the left bores me, and I never liked the opacity “hack” I used to improve the contrast for the text. The left justification with so much space on the left looks silly. Pictures don’t fit well into the text.

I’m not Drew Yates of Columbus, Ohio anymore. That person bores me. I will be somebody else more interesting now.

This content bores me. Walls and Flagstaves bores me. I will write better content. This project bores me. I will make a better, bigger project. This post bores me. I will post something better later.