Sleep And Water

I spent most of last week over at Google I/O, a big Google-run event for developers, known for awarding attendees hot new gadgets, and treating them to exciting news. This year was not a letdown in that regard – I left with an HTC EVO 4G, and got to be there for the Google TV announcement. Google TV is actually really exciting, I’m optimistic about it and I think its approach is the right one.

Getting my phone was an unsettling experience. I walked outside after picking up my EVO to open it up and check it out. As I checked out its fancy camera and the amazing hi-def screen, I overheard a couple of conference center staff workers, out for a smoke break together. They were trading heartbreaking stories about their bad health care, caring for their aging parents, and their difficulty in amassing any savings. I went back inside, walking past all the other attendees sitting outside, unwrapping their own phones. When I got back, I sold the phone on Craigslist, and it went for $600.

I’ve visited San Francisco five or six times now since first stepping foot in California in January of ‘09, and it’s a beautiful place – but the divide between the Silicon Valley crew, and the people that their disposable income ends up going to, is surreal. And of course, Google I/O was not appreciably any less white or male than any other tech conference I’ve attended, something I noticed almost as soon as I walked in. I like a lot of things about San Francisco, but I fear the bubble of Silicon Valley.

In brighter news, my Congress app has been featured on android.com and on the Market app on phones for a week and a half now, and has been getting about 5,000 downloads a day. I’m getting a lot of good user feedback, reviews are appearing online, and it’s a great burst of momentum just as Google Summer of Code begins – my SoC student Evelina and I are doing a lot of work and releasing rapidly. It’s motivating, and timed well with the upcoming midterms.

Some of the user comments on the Market thread have been partisan or ridiculous or both, but nearly all of them, left- and right-wing alike, seem to love the app. After returning from a display of Silicon Valley’s excesses, it’s particularly refreshing to know that I’m working on projects that regular people use and appreciate.

Yes, it is definitely time to get back into the world of output. I don’t know why I shut down the way I do sometimes. I felt really inspired on my way back from Mississippi, which is the mood in which I wrote my last post on the iPad, but that faded away pretty soon. Rather than an essay, here’s a few things that have been keeping me busy these last few months.

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I’ve been going through training as a 2010 Fellow with the New Leaders Council, which is a “progressive leadership” organization. I’m pretty sure I’m not a leader of men, but it has been fun. NLC brings in some pretty amazing trainers to impart their experience and wisdom on campaign organization, national security policy, fundraising, and the like.

It’s a very different scene than what I’m used to. As you can guess, it’s the sort of thing that could be very awesome, or very douchey, based entirely on the people within. I was happy to find that the people are super cool, genuine, and smart, and I’m honored to be making the friends I am there. My class’ll be throwing a fundraiser with Van Jones on Wednesday to raise money to give another class the same opportunity next year that we had.

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Something else: somehow, Ohnomymoney got the attention of the NY Times, and my site and I will be making an appearance in the Sunday Magazine’s May issue about money. I went through a photo shoot in my apartment on Friday for the piece, so I feel reasonably confident that I’ll make the final cut (I’m one of 3 subjects). This is certainly the biggest media exposure I’ve ever had, for one of the most small-time projects I’ve ever done (it gets about 2 hits a day). So I’m worried that I’m going to come off as pretentious – a vulnerability of mine, which any reader of my blog is already aware of (see?).

I’m more just excited though, and it only makes me feel more strongly that every kid in the world needs to be given the skills to build a website on a whim at any time. If something that I cooked up in a week with rudimentary logic, minimal display, and chintzy graphs can get attention, imagine what kind of an Internet we’d have if the people building it weren’t so heavily slanted towards white male yuppies (which also seemed to exclusively comprise the audience of the Hot Chip show I attended Saturday).

Anyway, you can see just how rudimentary it is if you want, as I took this as motivation to rewrite the code for Ohnomymoney entirely, and open sourced it. That was all under-the-hood work, though. I’d like to expand the site before the end of May to have better graphs, with annotations and user comments and the like, but…we’ll see.

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I spent a ton of time over the winter adding information about bills to my Congress app for Android, which took a lot of work and was hugely satisfying to accomplish. This also resulted in the creation of a community service for the same data, friendly to mobile devices. It was enough work that I burnt out a bit and took a complete break in April, but I’m ready to start pushing again, to get full bill text and voting records out there.

I’ll also be fortunate to have help on it this summer, through Google’s awesome Summer of Code program, where students are paid to work on open source community projects. Google announced the final list of accepted students today. Evelina Vrabie, who is getting her bachelor’s in Computer Science in Romania, will be helping me make the app all kinds of awesome this summer. She submitted a great proposal, and now I’m doubly motivated to make a great app.

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Also, I played a lot of Final Fantasy XIII.

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So I’ve kept busy, but I still need to write more. I want to redesign this blog from scratch like I do every couple years, and I want another blog so I can put down my thoughts on politics – I even registered captiveslog.com for that one. I guess we’ll see how my ever-fickle output pans out this summer.

I had an awesome Christmas. Like usual, I went first to Catskill, NY
down to Dublin, Pennsylvania to spend time with all my family. I got to stay longer than last year, and even made a trip to the Q-Mart. Sadly, my Q-mart story from when I was 15, wherein I obtain a floppy disk filled with unofficial, animated, (and heavily pixelated,) Flintstones pornography, came out during gift-giving, and my family kept bringing it up for the rest of my stay.

Coolest gift: my hip mom spied me twittering about the comic chainsawsuit and got me the book! She even got it autographed for me. And this is only after me mentioning a few of my favorite strips. Wicked cool.

Upon first coming home for Christmas, I spent two very, very late nights working on websites. The first night I spent open-sourcing IsItChristmas, which now has a home on Github. Already, this decision is bearing fruit.

The other night was spent finally integrating Sir Kevin Burg’s redesign of my money site. Kevin actually gave me a mockup and HTML/CSS for the redesign back in like June, but my interests started veering in other directions and I stopped doing anything on the site. Maybe this will spark me into giving it some more attention.

Great holiday—very relaxing. It’s also been oddly grounding. My new weird freelancing lifestyle now seems somehow more real and “legitimate” after having been pierced by my lifelong holiday traditions. My world is not so different after all. One further effect: my two all-nighters were completely invigorating, and reminded me how much I miss working from internal motivation. These days, I regularly distract myself too much with books and games, and rarely binge on side projects. This has got to change…and now!

If you don’t use Basecamp for time tracking, or you don’t use a command line, you can ignore this post.

I made my first Github project today. It’s something small I made a few months ago for me and my coworkers, a command line tool to log your times on Basecamp. That’s how we do time tracking inside thoughtbot, so it vastly simplifies my life to not have to visit Basecamp in my browser 10 times a day, I can just log time on the command line. I named it Basecamper.

Go check out the README to see how it works and how to install it. It’s dirt simple, and there’s 3 of us at thoughtbot that use it exclusively. I even wrote myself an accompanying script (not in the repository) that does my code commits and time logging in one command, using the same message, so I don’t have to duplicate it. It’s a great boon to me.

Basecamper on Github

It’s been around for a couple weeks now, but it’s worth mentioning that I put up a website that shows all of my money. Specifically, it shows my checking account, savings account, credit card balance, and my total remaining student loan balance. That’s all I have; I don’t own stock, or have a 401K (by choice). The bank accounts and credit card are updated automatically each night, and I update the student loan myself monthly, since it only changes monthly anyway. There’s an RSS feed, so you can get daily updates, and I made it so I can embed it in the sidebar over there to the right.

As the site’s footer says, many of my loved ones saw no point to it and thought it would only bring me harm, no matter what I said to them. As far as I know they still all feel that way. But I did it anyway, cause I’m convinced that for the vast majority of people, money has no reason to be taboo, and I would like to see what happens if I violate that taboo in a very public way. So far, all that’s happened is I’ve received a few admiring emails, a couple emails of lengthy financial advice, and given a bunch of people some lol’s. I do, admittedly, still find it jarring to get an email from someone who somehow knows my financial state—my instincts tell me that no one should know these things about me. I’m pretty sure that the death of those instincts is imminent.

A few people have suggested that I put a PayPal donation link on the site. On almost any site I could think of making, like Isitchristmas, I’d consider that “selling out”, but there’s an argument to be made that it’s interesting and appropriate for Ohnomymoney. There’s also an argument to be made that people will then see it as a money making gimmick and lose interest. I don’t know. At the least, people would have to trust that I’m actually trying to make it into the black and that their money would be put to use doing so. Maybe I could accept donations specifically for my student loans, since that’s one debt which can only go down. I’ll keep thinking about it.

I do have one major planned feature remaining, which is to make available the history of an account, or of my whole worth, over time, and plot the data on simple chartz or graphz. I’ll use the Google Charts API. If you’re wondering how the site works under the hood, it’s written in Ruby and Haml, on the Camping framework, and works with the Wesabe API to fetch my balances each night. I make the source code available, so go take a look—it’s dirt simple.

I’m not trying to overhype this site, here; it’s a tiny little thing that just shows a few numbers, that’s all. Unlike Isitchristmas, it will draw probably no more traffic than my blog (which is about 30 visits per day, if you were wondering). I’ll be thrilled even if the only thing it does is inspire someone else to post their finances on their blog or something. Down with the taboo!

I’ve been promising this for a while, and I finally came through. Not with a battle-ready megafortress, but more a little teepee sitting in the desert. It’s missing more than it has, but at least it’s here. First off, let’s get something clear:

I will be posting once a day for at least the first year of this site.

While certain areas of my life have been flourishing and outright exploding over the past year, many have languished and stagnated. Of all of these areas, the most troubling one is creative output. Maintaining a blog does not alone sustain and grow the right half of the human brain, just as taking walks doesn’t constitute a full regimen of exercise. But for many people, a walk each day is all it takes to avoid getting fat, thus giving you more energy for other things. As you can see, I’ve languished long enough that this is the height of my analogistic powers.

I’ve designed this site to emphasize more than just written posts, but also songs, videos, images, quotes, whatever, all tumblelog style. It’s not like I’m all business. But I’ve written some good blog posts over the last few years, ones I’d be proud to use as writing samples or develop into essays. That’s really valuable stuff. The kind of backbone my brain could use.

And that’s alongside continuing development, especially in this first month, where I’ll be adding new features almost every day as well. A list of things to come would be way large, but the most imminent things are Textile support (for you and me both), comment previews, and IE/general visual improvements.

My CSS skills have heightened from my last two incarnations, and I think my aesthetic is a little more in line with the times now. I’m not ashamed to send people here anymore, which is nice. I’m actually planning on importing all of the data from my last site (not too hard), and my first site (like really hard). But once it’s done it’s done forever, and I can pick it up and carry it around with me like a lunchbox.

Some technical details: this site is written in Python, using Django. It was a real big change from working in my most common language (Ruby), and I experienced a lot of frustrations along the way, some that made me want to start the whole thing over in a more comfortable setting. But I persevered, and along the way have begun developing a grudging respect for Python and substantial respect for Django.

Everything here is still very fluid, permeable. You could probably break the site pretty easily if you tried. But don’t. Instead, tell me what you think! And be honest!