Drew Yates

I found Silicon Valley Moms’ Blog after following an incoming link from Technorati. I like it precisely because it’s an entirely different point of view from what I usually read (and think about). Check it out…

Anything that you “like” to yourself that begins with “dude” is circumspect for the risk of initiating a “character building” experience.

For example:

Dude, I should like totally bike from Palo Alto to Mountain View in the dark and cold while wearing a t-shirt. Dude! I should like take the round-about route through the suburbs even though I don’t know exactly where it goes. Oh dude, I should like totally stop at that sleazy “Buddah Lounge” bar-club-thing immediately after riding my bike for several miles in the cold, drink two energy drinks, and then start a conversation with that lesbian-looking woman trying to “sign girls for a strip club.” Dude! She want wants to like buy me drinks if I listen to how rich and awesome she is! Dude. I should like order straight shots of Jack Daniels with no chasers, but actually put them on that drunk guy’s tab because he tried to throw salt at the girl sitting next to me but hit me instead. Dude! I should like totally ride my bike home drunk and then try to write code at 2am! Dude, like, this code isn’t very good…

So… now I’m sick, and no work is getting done. Great.

My original mindset was that there are 16 hours in the day, and that if I could just tap all 16 everyday, I could conquer the world… since what’s the difference between playing video games and being productive?

I’ll tell you: stress.

See, “all work everyday” plan makes a few (wrong) assumptions:

• What you feel like doing and what is most logical for you to do always coincide
• Every hour of everyday is equal and interchangeable
• There is no pressure to accomplish anything at any particular time
• Your environment is always conducive to work
• You don’t get sick, get hungry, nothing unexpected happens, etc.

Hahahah… yah.

So here’s what happened: over time, little “misses” between what I “should” be doing and what I “wanted” to do kept mounting. As the discord between my conscious “this is what I should be doing” and my subconscious “this is what I want to be doing” grew, it became harder and harder for either “side” to cooperate. So either I had an increasingly hard time starting work and staying focused and procrastinated, or I couldn’t fully enjoy anything I was doing because of my nagging conscious. So even less was accomplish, even less stress was dissipated, and the discord snowballed.

I’ve noticed this for the past couple months. Frankly, I’m a little pleased that I’ve done as well with my stress management as I have, considering that I inflicted every “major life stresser” (moving, occupation change, family problems) on myself at once, and then started a business while running a consulting gig with no support network and dwindling savings. That’s because I’m awesome. But I’m not so awesome, apparently, that I can just permanently “will away” basic human psychology.

So the new plan is to get things back in balance, find a better, more supportive environment, and be more reasonable about personal expectations. Most of this means “have separate spaces for work and play.” We’ll see…

Hey all, I know some of you have been wondering what’s the deal with Glaukai and if I’ll have a beta available this winter.

Well, it looks like the answer is “no,” and let me tell you why:

My plan for Glaukai was to plow forward as far as I could go with what I had (an idea and youthful “idealism.”) I didn’t know how far I could get because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. There’s only one way to solve that problem (see above).

So in my mind, the most difficult and unknown “branch” of this game was integration with the banking network. Therefore, I tasked my business partner with handling the technology while I dedicated myself to finding a bank that would work with us.

Shopping around for banks takes time and patience, but it’s rather low-density work. A problem for me was that I would contact a bank and then get distracted by another, unrelated project while I waited for a response. Then, when it was my turn to respond, I would be already preoccupied and “leak” initiative.

Another problem with working with banks is that branch offices can deposit your checks, charge you fees… and that’s about it. Most people in a bank that a common consumer (me) have access to have no idea nor any interest about anything not directly related to their jobs. Even when bank employees seemed to legitimately want to help, they couldn’t because their power is carefully limited to placating you and performing well-defined bureaucratic functions. But unlike for, say, programming, the information that you need can’t be found with a Google query. The only way to this banking information was through people. People may enjoy informing people for the sake of being social, but institutions like banks are explicitly designed to limit relationships to only people who are obviously able to “help the bank.” That’s a fancy way of saying “have lots of money.”

In the end, I found a bank with good rates, got technical specifications that I would need to build the system, and I met the people who could grant me access to the banking network… but I was denied because I didn’t have the money or credibility that the bank required to open an account. The people at the bank seemed to like me, and they did seem to make an effort to make an exception, but I was so far out of the “margin of exception” that the answer was “certainly no… But come back with a better reason than ‘trust me, I’m from the Internet’ and we’ll talk.”

Meanwhile, my partner was busy with his full-time job, and nothing really got done of substance on the tech-end. We had both over-dedicated ourselves. I encouraged my business partner to leave the company so that he could concentrate on his family and his job, and he did. I hope that perhaps I could hire him back sometime in the future. However, I’m now somewhat leery about the capacity of “corporate programmers” in an entrepreneurship setting. The differences between programming for yourself at your start-up and writing code for a big company are so disparate that they may as well be entirely unrelated, expertise aside.

So is that the end? Hahahahaha. Of course not. I just need a new lateral strategy, and I have one, and I’m executing it now. I’ll tell you about how it worked in six months to a year.

But I’ve gotten somewhat established in the bay area, and I have a shiny, new Delaware C corp. But most importantly, here are the lessons that I’ve learned:

• Business is people. Period. Everything else is just a way to make people want to do what you want. This is just neutral fact, how you actually accomplish this shades the morality of it.
• Hard work isn’t free. You hear a lot about how success is hard work. But have you ever thought about where that hard work comes from? I’ll tell you: food, sleep, sex, fun, and health. Forcing your body to work on overdrive amplifies everything else, too. You might be able to eat Ramen noodles, sleep 4 hours a night, and be lonely, sex-deprived nerd when you piddle around for 35 hours a week. But try doing something as stressful as entrepreneurship and creative programming for over 80 hours a week. You might be able to pull this for a while, but your body will eventually just shut down. You might rationalize this as “procrastination” or “depression” or “a slump / writers block” or “a cold” or “being tired” or “this wasn’t a good idea anyways…” but you’re wrong. It’s called biology, and “trying harder” isn’t going to solve everything. Word hard, play hard isn’t just boasting, it’s a fact. Make sure you have the means and support network to maintain your high energy budget, or you’ll burn out.
• You can’t know everything, and you won’t know everything, and trying to learn everything yourself when you can find somebody who already knows is both wasteful and stupid. It’s far more valuable, from a leadership standpoint, to have a general understanding of what you should know, would like to know, and don’t know. This is entirely not a strategy that works in school, where you are only rewarded for knowing everything about whatever subject somebody else demands. Expertise is best for bartering, not leadership.
• Failure is more about expectations. You can’t know everything, and must not try to. You do the best with what you have, and you have to be satisfied with that. Success seems to be mostly luck, luck seems to be mostly being at the right place at the right time. Work hard to be where luck might find you. Take pride in that. Have the courage to remember that luck means “not you,” both in failure and in success.

So there you have it. Burn out is real… beware…

Recently, I was challenged to take a “genius test. You’ve probably seen something similar to these “riddles” before. They’re all in the pattern:

24 H in a D = 24 Hours in a Day

While it’s a proven fact that this genius test is 87.1% accurate in measuring intelligence, I saw this and thought: this looks like a good task for Google…

Behold! The Google Riddler! 100% pure shell script “goodness.”

The script searches Google’s top ten for the question, looks for the regular patterns that will match the riddle, and sorts the results by number of hits. All of the riddles on the “intelligence-test.net” site were answered except a few ambiguous ones that confused Google. For instance, Google thought that “2 M a P” meant “2 map.”

All Riddles: Questions

All Riddles: Answers

Some interesting results:

• If a word can be misspelled, it will probably will be somewhere. The worst offender was “32 is the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit at which water freezes:” which had 6 unique misspellings.
• The majority result, if it can be found, is almost always the best answer.
• If somebody “punts” because they don’t know the answer, it will almost always be about sex (even if it doesn’t make any sense). For example:
  • 2 ladyfwaps in a semeny pool of goo
  • 2 dicks in a whore
  • 18 harlots on a greedy clinton
  • 3 men to shag - clive, frank and kevin
  • 3 wankers on a tanker

Conclusion: wasting your time learning stupid trivia is far inferior to wasting your time writing stupid scripts to find stupid trivia. Also, sex.

I’ve always wondered how blind people judge attractiveness. Well, I still don’t know, but my blind friend Roger has mentioned some clues.

All men —all people— immediately judge each other by appearance. Men especially judge women by their appearance at the expense of all their other attributes. Women with clues all know this, and therefore behave accordingly. Who wants to be ignored?

Beautiful women can be powerful despite neglecting other personal attributes. For most women, beauty is power. But how can you be beautiful if you can’t be seen? I’m in no way saying that beauty is reserved for the sighted. I’m saying that visual attractiveness is irrelevant to blind people. That’s a problem if you are a woman who otherwise relies on her attractiveness to exert herself. For example: makeup.

Roger jokes that women are either attractive or functional, but rarely both. This makes sense. Not only do attractive women have little incentive to be functional, but beauty is hard work. With only finite time and energy, effort spent on beauty isn’t spent elsewhere. This is the same with men: men are either smart or athletic, but rarely both. It’s classic “nerds versus jocks.” But with women, it’s “homely versus babes.” Is it a coincidence that “functional in the home” also means “ugly female?”

You can call me misogynist (and I probably am somewhat, sorry), but remember, these are also the observations of a blind person. Roger intellectually knows which women are supposed to be visually attractive by other social cues. But he’s not psychologically affected by it —he’s blind. So his criteria for judging attractiveness must emphasize attributes that are often otherwise neglected.

Roger is too polite to say so explicitly, but I wouldn’t be surprised that if his opinion of many women in general tended to be lower than sighted men. What else would you expect from somebody who is oblivious to most womens’ prized feature? Do you expect computer nerds to be respected on the football field? Do you expect jocks to be respected in the lab? Of course not.

Free Bonus… for fun and for profit. Some people are being lame about “oh noes you said ‘bad’ things about women and blind people!!!1″ Whatever. The exact same argument can be made for either gender about any otherwise prized attribute that becomes irrelevant in some context.

This was too good not to share —especially since I often feel like I’m sucked into the general hype:

“Think about that, and then think about just how much panache WalMart has compared to google: Zero.”

I get this impression everyday, and I’ve come up with an answer: I am online everyday, and looks like always reading the same sites (a little bit of herd mentality, I guess).

I was reading someone talking about how “Google is the 3rd computer era” and he made some snarky comments about IBM.

You know, IBM? That small 100 year old company with 80 billion in revenues last year? Yeah, that one.

And when I read about how Paul Graham got ~$40 million from his “lisp startup” or the off-hours delicious got ~$30 million with “social tagging bookmark WEB TWO POINT WOW” and people go NUTS on this, like if it’s epitome of business, I just remember IBM makes daily deals of $200 million dollars.

Is it cool? Does it have free soda, candies and massages? No. But do they know how to make money? You bet. And it’s damn hard to make what IBM does too. If you play a video game from the next generation, you own them that :p

Source

Some people have sent me Linkedin invitations, so I’ve finally started an account. If you’re already a member, then make sure to add me.

(all names in this post are pseudonyms)

Tuesday night my old roommate that I hate walked into my regular bar and sat down next to me. Without looking at him, I called bartendress, who knew both me and hated my roommate, paid immediately, and left without finishing my drink. If I see that creep again at that bar, I’m never going back. I’m not sure I’ll go back at all. I don’t want to go to the bar where losers feel comfortable attending.

So, it being Tuesday night, all the bars were predictably sparsely filled with boring old men. Missing the university life, I tried the “hole in the wall” cheap bar. I forget the name, it doesn’t have a sign to even let you know its there.

I was in luck. I met Chris, and I forget how the conversation started, but somehow we got to talking about the business of engineering and colleges. It turned out that Chris was managing some engineering project at a defense contractor, and they were paying for him to get his graduate degree at Stanford while he telecommuted. He lamented the bullshit of industry and the helplessness of even the most otherwise intelligent engineers and he empathized with my entrepreneurship ambitions. He seemed to particularly like my “school incident.” (I would find out why later.)

So this Friday, we caught up and Chris invited me to meet him and his old undergrad-now Stanford grad student friends. So we were going to meet at a bar, right? Well, apparently not at Stanford. We met Chris’s friends, Jen and Sarah, chilling with a cooler of beer in front of the EE building. It was cold outside, so it was just Jen, Sarah, and some other guy who left soon after we came. We took the cooler of beer into the EE building and each drank one in the lobby of the EE building.

Digression: now, at OSU, most “students” are binge-drinking dumbasses. But on the OSU campus, alcohol is forbidden. You would probably spend the night in prison if you were caught drinking in an academic building… not that students even hung-out in academic buildings at OSU. Alcohol was forbidden even in my fraternity house. This wasn’t a “wink wink” rule. This was an actively policed and “serious consequences” rule. By the way, it was a lame fraternity.

Anyways, we piled into Chris’ new SUV and went off in search of the GCC to find Chris’ other friend, Anup (the Graduate Community Center, not the Gnu C Compiler…). After “exploring campus,” we finally found the GCC. It was a bar for grad students… on campus. We waited for Anup to finish his pool game and after a short “discussion,” we settled on visiting the Nut House.

The Nut House was a bar with unlimited free peanuts, Mexican food, and beer. We had all three. We had a good time because the old friends all wanted to share their old undergraduate adventures with each other, and I served as the “new guy” who was there to legitimize and prompt the storytelling. It turned out that Chris, Jen, Sarah, and Anup were the “resident trouble makers.” The best story was when Chris caught the bathroom on fire and passed out in Halloween costume in a storage closet. He was drunk and playing with a McDonalds toy in the bathroom when it fell into the toilet. Naturally, he remembered that the tiki torches in the room would make perfect “giant chopsticks” to fish out the toy. Unfortunately, in the process he spilled lighter fluid all over the bathroom. Chris’ roommate found out and got upset, and demanded that Chris clean the bathroom. So… what better way to clean the bathroom than to burn up the lighter fluid… right? The roommate had to use the fire extinguisher, making a huge mess, and kicked Chris out of the room. So Chris stumbled around campus, eventually finding his way into a storage closet where he put on pumpkin costume “because it was like a giant sleeping bag, and I was, uh, cold.” He stumbled into one of his friend’s dorm rooms, and finding it unoccupied, he passes out on their floor wearing the costume. The friend later returns, cracking Chris in the head with the door, and left him to sleep on the floor.

Recently, Chris and his friends (who were Indian) had yelled “Aryan Pride” while partying in front of Stanford dorms. Unfortunately, this was the night of a white-power convention. The friends referred to the deans as if they knew each other very well…

After the Nuthouse, we went back to Mountain View and finished the night in the hole-in-the-wall bar. The entire night was a lot of fun, and it makes me wonder about finishing school at Stanford. Everyone I’ve met there has been awesome, and it’s been brought to my attention that no young entrepreneur succeeded without either connections from school or their parents. Since I currently have neither… maybe I should consider a Stanford degree. It would be expensive in both time and money, but I’m not sure that I’ll be able to accomplish what I want without the pedigree.

Something to consider…

An older friend that I met at the cafe thinks that I should finish my degree at Stanford… probably because he used to be a staff member there in the computer department. Maybe… but unlikely. I would have to retake the SAT because of the new test structure, and I wouldn’t be able to enroll until 2008. Only up to 90 of my 180 credits could be transferred, I have no way to afford tuition… and I dread the thought of going back to any school, anyways. A Stanford pedigree would have been nice, but this isn’t a perfect world, and I have a life to live in the meantime.

Anyways, he took me and his blind friend to a class on Adaptive Technologies and Engineering this Tuesday. The lecture was pretty boring. I’m not particularly interested in having the definition of “disability” read to me off of a Powerpoint slide. Still, it was nice to visit Stanford, and there were at least some cute girls in the class. Regardless of the experience itself, I was happy that somebody actually cared enough to invite me to attend such a thing.

I did enjoy meeting somebody who was blind. One of my greatest fears is to lose my eyesight, and it was somewhat comforting to meet somebody blind who was smart, friendly, and respectfully accomplished. I hope to speak more with him since the difference between adaptive technologies and trans-humanist technologies is perspective.

After the lecture at Stanford, we visited the Computer History Museum to hear a special guest lecture by Bob Kahn, the “father of the Internet.” For a Tuesday night, the museum auditorium was packed with bald white men. I think that I was youngest guy in the audience. Bob seemed modest but confident. He had weathered decades in government research and now, though the future potential for the Internet was still great, he felt that he had accomplished much of the goals he envisioned when he first began work on ARPANET.

There was a question and answer session after the lecture. An audience member revealed that, in fact, a competing company had won the “popular vote” for the bid to build ARPANET, but somebody in authority ignored the board and gave the bid to Bob Kahn’s company. Also, some old man asked a “question” about charging $0.01 per email to prevent spam. Bob clearly thought that the heckler was an idiot, but there were some cheers in the audience. Never mind that if you wanted such a service, that you could register for one on a free Internet. (They have all failed). Never mind that somebody would have to be responsible for collecting those fees and authorizing emails. And never mind that anyone with any computer competence can install a freely available spam filter (like gmail) and use the fantastic service of email for virtually free and with almost no spam.

But… I suppose the term for people like me in “the industry” is “pimply-faced kid,” so what do I know…