I wanted to email Leo Laporte but he gets too much email. So I figured I’d make it an open email and then twitter about it. Talk about a backhanded way to get someone’s attention, but I guess when you’re as popular as he is you can only do so much.
Leo,
I was playing with some audio processing tools with a friend and we loaded up your latest twit and saw this. Did you know your intro looked so cool? That’s crazy!
On a side note, you can see this for yourself with iPhone app (and I know how you love these) called Spectrograph Lite. You can kind of see the same swigglies that sound so cool.
Enjoy your shows, keep up the good work.
-Francis
(Click the image for a crazy large png)
Really cool looking visualization of the intro to TWIT
I’m not one for promoting other people’s work if I haven’t gotten to really see it myself. But I really like Box Brown’s comic bellen and when he asked if people could promote his completely self published, done on a grant, support himself when he’s out of work book, I thought, “I can do that.”
Instead of writing up a nice post about the party and showing off my brothers awesome video he cut for the occasion I instead was playing with jQuery. Specificly testing out Ariel Flesler’s ScrollTo plugin which I think is pretty cool.
I present to you for your viewing pleasure, my slider test! I couldn’t help but use some of Sara’s throwie pictures.
Two years ago I got a crazy idea. For my twenty third birthday instead of the usual drinking and debauchery we’d do something different. Most of my friends thought I was crazy and it was a stupid idea, but since I was footing the bill I was able to convince a bunch of people to give it a try. If anything, good people, good food and good music usually makes for good times. =)
Now two years later I’m faced with my approaching 25th birthday. This year I’d like to do “throwies year two”. My only problem is that this year I don’t have the funds to buy throwies for everybody again. So after talking it over with my friends and going over what it takes to get the parts for hundreds of throwies, I’ve decided to put throwies up for sale at cost. I’m still looking at suppliers but it seems that I should be able to get you about 25 throwies for $20. I’ll know exactly how many after I see how many people get involved (you save in bulk of course).
My party this year will be on Friday the 20th and will have a $20 dollar cover which will include around 25 throwies. I’ll order some pizza and soda. We’ll meet at my place at 6:30pm to eat and build the throwies and then around 8pm leave for the east village tagging the city as go. Later in the night we will be stopping at a to be determined location to warm up and get something tasty. If you were there last time you might find this familiar.
So either pay me in person (please let me know if there’s a problem before the party!) or just use the paypal form below.
Occasionally people come to me and ask about websites.
“Francis, I need help on making website.”
“Well.. what are you up to? ”
“I have an idea of something I’d like to sell online.”
Usually it’s cookies, sometimes it’s t-shirts, a lot of times it it’s services they want to offer. Most of these people have zero programming or html experience. If I told them paypal had an api to allow your site to create invoices and process payments they wouldn’t even understand the non technical part of that sentence. When you get into the advanced parts of how the web works, they glaze over. I usually end up telling them about Shopify which can have you up with professional looking storefront with very little time and effort and as you go you can learn how to make it very pretty and you don’t have to worry about the perils of doing your own web hosting. Personally I’d rather use that $20 a month for my own server slice and spend a lot more time and money on it, but that’s not actually very smart if I wanted to grow a different business that wasn’t web hosting.
The real problem they want to solve isn’t “I want to know how to do a website.” it’s “I want to know how to start a business on the web.” and the core problem there is usually “I want to start a business.” which is usually formed around “I want to have more money”. And wanting more money is not a bad reason to start with, but because you like to do something or make something doesn’t mean starting a business around it is a smart idea. Most of the time your business will take you away from doing those cool things you like and force you to spend all your time doing something else you wont, running the business.
There’s a book I love that will either discourage you or encourage you to start a small business. Either way it will teach you a bit about what you actually have to do to start. I tend to give this book to people who I think it will encourage, as it usually doesn’t take a book to discourage people who would be discouraged. It’s called The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber, and it’s like $5 off amazon used so it’s worth the money, Its worth the read even if you hate the author’s writing style (figure a pound of gold in ten pounds of fluff), and it’s worth your time if you ever thing you might want to go into business. The E-Myth being the Entrepreneurial Myth that a technician can take their idea/product and just start a successful business around it. Most people do that without learning how the rest of the business works.
His book of course is not a blueprint of how to start a small business, grow it, operate it, and sell it, it just tells you that you’ll need one, and what it might look like. I’m rather new at this so it blew me away. The amount of planning and the possibilities you can come up with to make a business work is breathtaking. Its the kind of thing I love. It’s something I’m going to have to write more about. Not to give advice but to share experiences. I can only tell you there’s more to it then you probably know, but in sharing experiences you pool what you learn. =)
-Francis
PS (It’s been too long since I’ve been writing, feels good, but I’m also embarrassed at the writing style I presented above. It’s a silly feeling.)
GEM: The Global Environment Monitoring unit is a European commission that makes up on of six units in IES: The Institute for Environment and Sustainability. The IES is a group of scientists (about 65 according to their about page) that are devoted to making sure development in Europe and the world is done is such a way that it doesn’t cause problems. Today I stumbled upon a project they did called, “Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility” and boy isn’t it beautiful? Click on it for a much larger version, and click though to the project for information about what it means and what it doesn’t.
Travel time to major cities (in hours and days) and shipping lane density
I occasionally get into the discussion about why I haven’t finished college and why I never bothered to get certified in anything. I like to believe past performance is a good indicator for future performance. I have a decent resume with a few good jobs that I’ve put a few years in on. I try all sorts of things on my own all the time. I want to go for jobs that allow me to learn and keep expanding my repertoire. I worry that I don’t have the skills for those jobs but that’s sort of the point. I don’t think any piece of paper could show any of that better then my resume, certainly not a degree or certification.
Anyway (and yes I still think about finishing school mom and dad), I read this interesting article called After Credentials by Paul Grahm of YCombinator (an interesting VC firm specializing in startups). It’s a nice short read about this history of why he thinks they came about and where they’re going. Let me excerpt it for you. (I skipped everything, these are very non related paragraphs. Also I skipped the part about the dawn of the yuppie and how it’s not odd to see a 25 year old with money anymore.)
Before credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by family influence, if not outright bribery. It was a great step forward to judge people by their performance on a test. But by no means a perfect solution. When you judge people that way, you tend to get cram schools—which they did in Ming China and nineteenth century England just as much as in present day South Korea.
The obvious way to solve the problem is to make credentials better. If the tests a society uses are currently hackable, we can study the way people beat them and try to plug the holes. You can use the cram schools to show you where most of the holes are. They also tell you when you’re succeeding in fixing them: when cram schools become less popular.
This doesn’t work in small companies. Even if your colleagues were impressed by your credentials, they’d soon be parted from you if your performance didn’t match, because the company would go out of business and the people would be dispersed.
Credentials are a step beyond bribery and influence. But they’re not the final step. There’s an even better way to block the transmission of power between generations: to encourage the trend toward an economy made of more, smaller units. Then you can measure what credentials merely predict.
I’ve been using this avatar for years. Since early 2001 at the very least.
That’s as original as I can find it, its a 64×64 px gif that best as I remember came from a PHP-Nuke forum pack. It’s been my buddy icon, my profile pic, my tag. It’s probably one of the oldest piece of digital information I have. I even lost it at one point and had to find old backups of bthsnews.org to bring it back. Yesterday it was suggested to me by Andrew that instead of just blowing it up I should try to spruce it up a bit. I had tried to “smooth” it out by editing it by hand once. I got about halfway and gave up, it wasn’t worth it. This time I enlisted the help of Vector Magic which was a school project turned commercial venture. They’ve got a wonderful system (best I’ve ever used.. only I’ve ever used ;-)) to work out how to take that blocky pixel art above and turn it into this.
Which I happen to like quite a lot. Hopefully it will hold me for another 5-10 years. =)
My dad looks like a cross between my brother and myself. My grandfather… well he just looks young, and quite happy. This photo and a few others came from a new cousin that found us from Kansas City Missouri. I want to publish his collection. It’s not one we had ourselves. Also kudos to the kid with the Brooklyn Tech shirt, it’s still the same one they use for gym today =)
-Francis
PS I overlooked the 2 on the cake, he was two :-p I guess that’s closer to me looking like this.
Brian on 
Brian on 
