Zvi’s crazy idea #23: On improving the world around us

Here’s an idea I had today:

Assumption #1: fat kids would be happier and more self-confident if they were thinner, because let’s face it, we live in a pretty superficial society.

Assumption #2: unhealthy, processed, and calorie-rich foods are cheaper than nutritious foods cooked from raw ingredients.

Corollary #1: there are a lot of fat, poor inner-city kids with low self-esteem.

I propose we start a charity where you “adopt” a fat inner-city child and donate money towards having the child get liposuction. Bare with me here, please. This will result in thinner, happier, and more confident children, which can only be good for society in the long run.

As a great side-effect of all this liposuction, we will generate large amounts of unneeded human fat which can be burned as an alternative fuel source for our cars. The same company can run the lipo charity fund AND sell the resultant fuel for profit!

With one initiative we can both increase the quality of life of inner-city youth, and free us from reliance on oil. I foresee a future where the obese will not be stigmatized, but rather lauded for their effort to provide alternative sources of energy back to society.

This post is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but I challenge you to tell me why this idea won’t work.

Discuss.

On growing up

It’s shortly after midnight and I can’t fall asleep. I’m laying in bed next to my sleeping wife, hot and restless. In four months this will all change. In just four months we’ll go from being Zvi And Miriam, something I’ve enjoyed for nine years, to Zvi And Miriam… And Baby.

When we found out Miriam was pregnant this all seemed so remote and distant. Something for future-us to worry about. Now it seems like the last five months have just whipped by and our lives will change in no time at all. They already are changing. I feel the changes happening in my mind. I’m growing up, maturing.

Until recently I used to joke that I still felt like a twelve year old. I couldn’t believe that grown-up things were happening to me. Graduating university, getting my first real job, my own car, MARRIED! These all felt like things I didn’t have any right to claim as my own. I was watching people confuse me for an adult and giggling like mad about it. Then, something changed. I started thinking that being 12 was pretty immature. I’m now much more of a 15 year-old, but that phase lasted only a few months. And then, amazingly, adulthood descended on me. It still is. I’m married. I mean, I have a wife! Someone to protect. Someone to take care of. Suddenly a job is not just a thing I’m expected to do and something I enjoy, but a salary. A means to pay for a house. I have responsibilities, even more so now with a baby soon to arrive, I’m *needed*. The enormity of this is keeping me up tonight.

I’m not scared, strangely. I thought I would be terrified of this, and when I was 12 year-old me I *was* terrified of this. Somehow this rapid maturing took away the fear. I’m excited. Anxious. I want this little person to call me Daddy. I want to teach it how to be an awesome person. Awesomer than I ever was.

This is a post about growing up. About maturing when I have to and not a minute before. About getting to the right stage in life when I get there and enjoying the journey. I guess this is how it works. Knowing someone depends on you means you have a choice to make. Accept the responsability and provide, or stay 12 years old and afraid.

Any monkey can become a parent. I really want to be a Daddy.

But I still can’t fall asleep.

Lines

Wait in line to get on the train

Wait in line to get off the train

Wait in line to get down the stairs

Walk in line to get to work

Wait in line to get on the elevator

Workworkworkwork

Reverse

 

Wait in line to buy some food

Wait in line to see a movie

Wait in line to complain

Tweets as a unit of meaning

A “tweet” is a message on twitter.com, limited to 140 characters and referencing one idea, one piece of meaning. We can define the density of meaning in twitter messages by assuming that a tweet is always about 1 unique “thing”, and finding the average length of twitter messages. This will give us a new unit of measurement of the density of meaning in a body of text. Twitter messages can be a standard against which other texts are measured and compared for meaning density.  I propose that we name this unit of measurement the Tweet.

Shorter twitter messages will have a slightly higher Tweet value than longer twitter messages, but this variance might be fairly small. What might the Tweet value of a classical novel be? How about a scientific research paper? A political speech? 

This might be a fun project to work on. A bit of new software will be needed: first to find the average size of twitter messages and thus form a Tweet baseline, and then to analyze other publicly available texts in different genres to determine their Tweet value.

It would also be interesting to compare the Tweet density of public texts over time in similar genres so that we can see if, as a society, we are becoming more information-dense, or information-sparse. The difficulty here would be in finding a suitable basis for comparison. Certainly newspaper articles from 100 years ago and from today can be compared, but what about in other genres? What can we compare blog posts to? 

I hope to continue with this project in the future and come back with some numbers to present

Command line MSI parameters and spaces

I had to deal with an issue at work lately that was driving me nuts for a while, but I finally found a solution. If you’re having a similar problem, maybe this post can help you. My problem had to do with passing command line parameters to our installer when the parameters have spaces in them, such as when they’re paths to a location on disk. The short answer is that if you need to pass a double quote (“) in a parameter, escape it with another double-quote. However, I can’t stop here, or this would be a very short post.

 

I’ve been working on the installer for my company’s product and making certain improvements to it. Our installer is built using InstallAware. By default, InstallAware produces a .exe installer instead of a .msi installer because their technology provides certain enhancements over a basic msi such as stronger compression. Running this installer .exe from a command line is easy, and parameters can be passed like so:

setup.exe PARAM1="value 1" PARAM2="value 2"

So far, so good. The problem is that this installer can not be run through group policy on Windows Server, a technology that makes it easy for an admin to install the software on many computers remotely. Group policy can only run .msi installers in this manner. InstallAware includes a group policy wizard that will wrap your .exe in a .msi specifically for this purpose, which is great. The complication comes from passing those command line parameters. The msi generated by the group policy wizard can take a parameter CMDLINE which it will then pass along to the .exe inside, like so:

setup.msi CMDLINE="PARAM1=value1 PARAM2=value2"

We can see that double-quotes are needed to enclose the value of CMDLINE if there are multiple parameters. The .exe will then be extracted from the msi and executed:

setup.exe PARAM1=value1 PARAM2=value2

But what happens if value1 or value2 themselves contain a space? This is where we run into complications. 

 

The answer, as I’ve written at the top of this post is that we can escape a double-quote with another double-quote, like so:

setup.msi CMDLINE="PARAM1=""value 1"" PARAM2=""value 2"""

Notice the double-quotes around value 1 and value 2, with a third double-quote at the end. It’s awkward and unwieldy, but that’s the way it has to be done in this case. 

 

At the very least, clients need to be told about this and how to properly format the command line.

Execution and Follow-through

There’s a recurrent issue in my life that I keep dealing with. It comes up in my professional work, in my hobbies, in my personal projects. The issue is one of motivation, execution, and follow-through.

I think it’s fairly common for people in my line of work to get many ideas for projects they want to work on, start, and never finish. It’s ADD, writ large. We always chase the new and the shiny. Personally, I tend to work on a project just long enough that the idea is fleshed out and I feel like I’ve worked out the kinks, or just put in enough effort to convince myself that I could, if I really needed to, carry this off. I rarely seem to be able to pull through and finish the project. It’s not The Dip. This is pre-Dip quitting that I’m talking about.

Derek Sivers said that ideas are just a multiplier of execution. Without the execution and follow-through, the original idea isn’t worth much. There’s no point to start a blog if you won’t write in it. There’s no value to a great website idea if you won’t build it. It helps no one.

Here’s the problem: ideas are easy. Great ideas are hard, but you can’t tell the great from the mundane until you make it real and build it, write it, paint it, whatever. Implementation always brings up unanticipated challenges and it’s the process of working through those challenges and actually producing something that adds value to the world.

I’m convinced that execution and follow-through are critical, so why is it still so hard to get past the idea stage? The problem comes down to motivation. My day has two giant 8 hour blocks that are pretty much unmovable: work and sleep. As far as personal projects go, work and sleep are giant chunks of no-man’s land that eat up two-thirds of my day. The remaining time is precious and valuable, and personal projects compete with the mundane like, say, eating, cooking, and the dreaded cleaning. Somehow in there we need to squeeze in a social life, a family, and other needs. Writing a blog post or building a new web app require large dedicated chunks of time and concentration. I find that as I get older and real-life creeps up on me, it becomes harder and harder to put aside those dedicated times for hobby work.

I’m getting tired of leaving a trail of started but never finished projects. I need some simple advice on how to execute and follow-through on my ideas, at least some of the time so that I don’t get overloaded. I can take a stab at what’s needed:

1. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize: Ideas are easy and on a particularly creative day I’ll have several good ones that I want to pursue. I need to prioritize them along with my “real life” commitments and come to accept that I won’t ever work on some of them. Better than trashing them, write them down in a tickler file and look at them when I don’t have anything to work on and want to start something new.
2. Block off project time: I don’t think I’ll ever get project work done unless I can set aside a solid block of time to concentrate. Real life demands will always grow to consume any available block of time. By setting aside a chunk ahead of time, I can partition off everything else and keep it from spreading.
3. ???
4. Profit!

I’d love to hear any other ideas for increasing follow-through and execution on hobby projects.

Why I deleted my Facebook account

If you look me up on Facebook, you won’t find my profile. I did have one until recently, but now it’s gone. Goner than something that’s very gone. Deleted, in fact, not just deactivated.

I really had fun on Facebook for a while, and saw a ton of value in it. It seemed like a very good vehicle for keeping up with what friends are doing, and an even better way to shamelessly promote yourself and what you’ve been up to. Want to show off your latest vacation? No problem, upload some photos. Want to feel incredibly popular? Invite all 400 of your facebook friends to a facebook event for your birthday.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take advantage. I like taking photos when the creative urge overtakes me, and I use Flickr to put them somewhere public. Unfortunately, there’s almost zero overlap between my Flickr contact and my real-life friends, so the chance of any of my actual friends seeing my new photos on their own quickly approaches zero. I always felt like a bit of a tool emailing or IMing links to Flickr to my friends. Conveniently, my Facebook friends list is a superset of my real-life friends, and Facebook handled the notification of new photos FOR me, so I could self-pimp without feeling bad about it.

Of all the web 2.0 / social-network shenanigans and sites, Facebook seems to have the most penetration into every-day life in Toronto. If I lived in San Francisco everyone I know would have a twitter and a pownce account, but that’s not the case. Facebook rocked for me because literally EVERYONE I knew under the age of 30 had an account. It was as common-place as sliced bread. It was a given that if you met someone new at a party, you could friend them on Facebook and keep track of them. Mention any other web 2.0 sort of site around most of the people I know in Toronto, and you’d get a blank stare back.

So given all of the utility and ubiquitous-ness of Facebook, why did I delete my account?

The problem with Facebook is how closed it is, and how it totally and completly owns your social network. Information goes in, and it don’t ever come back out. Everyone has a Facebook account now, but how long will that last? What happens when your social circle moves on? It comes down to owning your identity, an idea championed by Joshua Porter and others at Own Your Identity. The data I put into Facebook is unarguably mine. It’s my contacts, my relationships, my notes, my photos, my writings, but as soon as I post it, I lose almost all control.

To me, the ideal solution is to host my content wherever I choose and to bring it together in a way I like on one site that represents me. This blog is hosted on wordpress.com, my photos are on Flickr, my professional persona lives on LinkedIn. In so far as there is a comprehensive online representation of Zvi Zemel, it exists among those and a few other sites. What’s missing is a good way to bring it together and show it off to my real-life friends.

I’ll write more on that topic later.

To iPhone, or not to iPhone

As a Canadian, I’ve been wishing for the chance to buy an iPhone north of the border for a while now. We all knew that the iPhone would be a Rogers exclusive here, because Rogers is the only carrier with a GSM network in Canada. Experience with Rogers has taught me to temper enthusiasm with disdain for Rogers’ frequent tramplings of consumers rights and expectations. So, it was no big surprise to anyone when Rogers announced their iPhone service plans, the cheapest one costing $60 (plus a system access fee) and giving only 150 minutes and 400 megs of wireless data. Even the most expensive plan at $115 only gave 2GB of data, unlike the unlimited data given by AT&T in the states. Useless features like call display had to be bought as part of a $15 bundle.

The outcry online and in print media was stupendous, and rumours maintained that Apple had cut shipments to Rogers to a fraction of what they were supposed to be. Finally, Rogers seems to have caved in and now has a limited-time offer in place. Purchase an iPhone before Aug 31 and get a 6GB plan added on to any existing voice plan for $30.

With the first set of iPhone plans announced, I had absolutely no intention of getting the phone. This new data plan is pretty tempting, though. I’m currently a Bell customer with a corporate plan. The monthly bill on my decidedly not-smart phone is about $25, with taxes and the system access fee rolled in. If I switch to Rogers, I can get similar voice features plus the 6GB of data (which might as well be unlimited, really) for $65. It’s not a crazy rip-off, but also isn’t very cheap, especially when you consider that Rogers requires a 3 year contract. For a total of $2340 over three years plus $200 for the initial cost, I can carry an iPhone in my pocket.

What to do, what to do?

There are a few questions that aren’t answered by Rogers’ press release for the new data plan. Is visual voicemail included? I can live without it, but it’s part of the full iPhone experience, and I would have imagined that Apple wouldn’t let their phone be sold without it.

Also, is the $30 price good for the life of the contract, or is it just a promotional price that will rise after one year?

Finally, without a crystal ball it’s impossible to know if this limited-time data plan offer will in fact become a permanent offer. It seems pretty silly to provide a deal like this for such a short time and then not replace it with anything meaningful. I’d hate to rush into buying an iPhone for this data plan and then see that some new “limited-time” offer supersedes it and gives a better value.

I think the best course of action is to wait and see.