Drew Yates

Tomorrow’s my warden unseen,
hope’s cruel lullaby.
habit’s slaves
—you an
d’I
I’d
—we can
push ceiling
into vaulted sky.
And roam Earth in omnipresence,

The Yahoo marketing director who frequents my favorite cafe didn’t look so healthy the other day. Perhaps stress at the workplace?

This post is short because this is too obvious to merit real discussion.

Yahoo: take a good look at your homepage. yahoo.com

Now: http://usatoday.com
Now: http://www.kansascity.com
… Now: http://www.google.com

DUH

Some people have asked about the “Internet Fast,” which really, is more of an “Internet Diet.”

I simply disconnect my cable modem and hide all the pieces around the kitchen. That way, when I feel the urge to procrastinate, it’s too much work to set up the network and I procrastinate procrastinating.

Obviously, I’m still on the Internet a few times per week. Sometimes I need to do some research or write an email (I can read emails on my cellphone). Other times I break down and visit all my procrastination sites (web comics, message boards, social bookmarking sites, etc.) But in general, Internet surfing procrastination has been replaced with reading and sleeping and bike riding procrastination, and I’ve been able to concentrate much better than before.

I also keep books all over the floor and on nearly every surface of my apartment. Those books are read eventually by almost accident. This assuages my American information addiction in the same way that gum and carrot sticks help smokers quit. I don’t smoke, but I keep fruit and carrots on my work desk. They get eaten by accident, too.

Another good new habit: I write down words that I don’t immediately recognize in a notebook while reading. I’ll make a contextual guess about the meaning, note the source, and then look up all the words in the dictionary in batches a few days later.

Bad habits: I still can’t keep a consistent sleep schedule. I’m beginning to assume that this is not a feasible goal. I still drink too many expensive and largely worthless energy drinks. I’m so acclimatized to caffeine that the taurine in Red Bull makes me sleepy.

This morning at the cafe I was speaking with a retired engineer who had earned his fortune saving money and investing in real estate. We were discussing “the world today” and I said that the proliferation of computers and the Internet made programming an increasingly poor career choice unless owned your own intellectual property. I cited the growing success of China and India.

My friend wanted to disagree because more engineers would mean more technology, bigger markets for technology, and a bigger economy in general. All true, but graduates today and American career engineers tomorrow will suffer still.

Drastic growth in engineering labor supply, especially considering extremely low comparative costs of living between China and San Fransisco, will make engineering a commodity. This is especially true for software since the cost of raw materials and transport are effectively zero.

The real power will remain with a few, lucky, niche experts and the people with the power to direct and own the consequences of labor.

The proliferation of computers and the Internet overseas is like the proliferation of guns. Armed with a gun, anyone can be an effective solider. Powerful career soldiers, samurai, were powerful because very few people could fight. When anyone could fight, the samurai, who lived like local lords, lost their power. People with power hate to lose power. In fact, feudal Japan outlawed guns.

But the art of warfare flourished despite the degradation of the fighting class. Without guns, there could be no modern nation-state, no Napoleon, and no World War 2. Power shifted from the fighter to the general to the industrialist.

I see the same tread in software. The people who own the intellectual property and the capital to pay programmers will be powerful, and the practitioners themselves will be marginalized. As a skillset to be rented by the hour, you are only worth as much as the lowest bidder. If you can be replaced, you will be treated as replaceable. The field will flourish, but the average programmer will suffer.

The great irony is that engineers and programmers tend to be nerds. A nerd is by definition socially inept and, much unlike samurai, they tend not to understand power. I don’t recommend artificially preserving the prestige of the American engineering profession like law firms do for lawyers. But I do recommend that skilled programmers today demand equity and ownership of their own intellectual property. An established employer would never agree to such blasphemy. A startup would, especially if you’re a founder.

In the meantime, I both eagerly anticipate the bounties of future technology and pity the suckers who believe that investing in a skill to rent is wise. That it was wise for this century, I think, was a fluke. A fluke like the power of the blue collar labor union.

Learn programming like writing: for yourself. Be a hacker and own something.

PS:

For the people who resent feeling like a “skillset to rent,” what do you think a resume is supposed to communicate? Just something to think about…

Hey all, can’t write too much, because I’ve only connected my Internet briefly to download a dataset for work.

I feel like I’ve been slowly letting this blog die lately and that I haven’t been writing anything neither particularly consumable nor genuinely interesting. It’s like a jam of half-formed ideas again. I remember this feeling… last summer. Last summer: when I was busy trying to cram the last of college with one more gruesome quarter to go.

That last quarter instead becoming the quarter I failed out on purpose.

So, it seems that I’ve fallen into another trap. This time, it’s freelance web contracting.

I don’t want to say that I haven’t made any progress. I’ve learned a lot the past few months about programming, people, and life, and I’ve made some tentative strategic contacts here in the Bay Area. I have more money (at least, I can charge much more for my time now, I live in a decent studio, and own many more books), and life seems to be progressing slowly but steadily.

But, clearly, I’m not where I wanted to be six months ago when I claimed that I would launch Glaukai in winter.

The fact is, I’m really starting to loath doing this contract work while, simultaneously, becoming even more desperate to escape it.

Hypothetically, I could simply work harder and complete the work I have now, which should earn me enough of a cash runway to get my now more refined startup plans hopefully in the air.

But contracting doesn’t work that way. I had written something more specific here, but thinking deeper, I think the problem is a mere difference of motives. My employer (let’s not mince words: effectively, the company/startup/person paying for your contract is your employer, and the freedom of “owning your own consulting business” is a delusion) wants a simple business transaction and realistically expects about a month —from “let’s start” to final payment— for a part-time contract estimated at about 40 hours. I want to purge this merc work from of my mind and cash out yesterday. You may think this makes my work poor. In fact, hoping to stave off extra work in the future, I’ll be even more lenient about contract scope and expend even more (unnecessary) effort on quality. This is bad contractor policy. Playing the Good Contractor Games means dispassionate, predictable, paced, and measurable work. I don’t want to play that game anymore.

I feel like until I can escape, exploring speculative thoughts about life isn’t a priority. That, and I question the merit of my own skeptical opinions. I’d like to believe that any opinion not founded in scientific fact is merely worth as much as the person who holds it, but realistically, I think that I value opinions by how close they match whatever I prefer to believe. I think that’s stupid.

See? Now I’ve trapped myself in a paradox. That’s why I just need to shut up and get powerful. Too much musing is for hacks, bums, and academics.

The other day I read that human psychology is such that because it abhors conflicting interpretations, the mind will go to absurd lengths to justify otherwise dubious or wasteful behavior if that person feels they are smart and prudent.

On that note:

I was working on converting a layout I designed for an X-ray diffraction device interface for a client when I realized that set of elements were a few pixels off.

Here is the offending CSS code:


#statusTab.tab {
right: 282px;
}
#dataTab.tab {
right: 188px;
}
#helpTab.tab {
right: 94px;
}
#settingsTab.tab {
right: 0px;
}


So instead of manually fixing each of these values (something that could be very obnoxious very quickly if I need to experiment with a few pixels), I wrote a little emacs regular expression (note: this only works with emacs 22+, and also note, emacs regex is not Perl regex)


Query replace regexp (alt+shift+control+5)
right: \([0-9]+\)px;
right: \,(+ (string-to-number \1) 3)px;


And ta da!


#statusTab.tab {
right: 285px;
}
#dataTab.tab {
right: 191px;
}
#helpTab.tab {
right: 97px;
}
#settingsTab.tab {
right: 3px;
}


Side note: if I start braying about all the fantastic features of an absurdly expensive new car or somesuch, please send me an email.

(write later)