Mary Panttaja

I finished the book today—read that last chapter, which might ought to be read first. WHY do you want a 4-hour work week? Because “work” is just the stuff you do to pay the bills, and you should be spending the bulk of your time on something more important—your “vocation”, your passions, living life, learning, and helping improve things around you.

Another way to spin this is that “making a living”, that is, earning enough money to meet some specified monthly financial goal is not a worthy endeavor if it does not also meet all those other needs and criteria. And maybe there are other ways to get freedom to engage in you calling than to buy it—even if it only takes 4 hours a week.

In Updrafting, we focus on finding that right thing to be doing—the most important and fulfilling activities of your life. If you find and execute on that, then you will have lived YOUR life to the utmost. Financial success may come, but it is not the key relevant goal of the story. Just as security is fine and all, but a concern for safety should not replace your life’s intentions. No one ever climbed a mountain with safety the first thing on their list of goals. One would never leave the bedroom.

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with safety or financial security, but to emphasize that we cannot let our concern for them blind us to what is really important for us to accomplish in this life.

And maybe we don’t have to buy our freedom. Maybe we just take it. Know ourselves to be free of whatever constraints we imagine—or, at least, that we recognize them as challenges to be met, not limitations on our possibilities.

We have a stack of books to read. The choices have come from a lot of different directions: lifestyle, business, new technology, programming, retirement. They all feed into the thinking process: what to create next.

Our process has included: watching what is going on in the blogosphere, attending conferences on new technology, trying to identify the most important thinkers and reading what they write, watching for interesting odd-bits and following their trails.

Tim Ferriss’ new book “The 4-Hour Work Week” came to my attention when he presented at the Ignite portion of the Web 2.0 Conference. His presentation “The Low Information Diet” was voted one of the top four presentations, and so he got to deliver it again at the closing session.

As a writer with books to publish, it has been interesting watching him go through the process of publishing his book, working the publicity trail using all the marketing tricks and techniques available. If anything, he is an agressive marketer and communicator. Something some of us frown at sometimes, though we are interested in the success it produces. This week he has been spoofed by Leno and then collected all the extra marketing appearances that such an event produces.

Reading his book has been on the list for two reasons: 1) Seeing how the publishing process works for him; 2) Learning what he has to say about a 4-hour work week. (Which is, of course, an intriguing idea.)

I was surprised at some of the really good ideas in this book, though I have some issues with some of the attitudes and techniques encouraged. For myself, I can see past the seemingly inappropriate recommendations (to daily manipulate your work efficiency to prove to your boss that you should be allowed to work out of the office, for one), and see that there are some ideas that really shift something about how I think about work and business:

1. It is possible to separate the ideas of earning a living (money to live) and your life and passionate work (see my work on Updrafting). You can build a business that generates the revenue and free time that allows you to dive into whatever you are passionate about. (This does not mean that your passion is not necessarily the same as the business that earns your income, but just that there is a possibility that you can separate them.) (I have done this before in my work, but not figured out Item 3: a strategic mistake; see below.)
2. If you are going to build a business to earn your income, it is most critical to really design a powerful and efficient business model. This is everything, for if the business is not financially efficient, it will not be efficient with your time and resources, and won’t generate income without a struggle. Been there and done that.
3. You can design and build a business model that doesn’t (after it is up and running) create a full-time job for yourself. This was really shocking—I always assume that what I am doing is creating full-time work for myself along with other folks. It was a very new idea to think about creating a business in which, as he says, “you outsource yourself.”
4. You can design an operational process that doesn’t care where you are—helped alot by the current technology platforms available. And he gives a lot of really specific tips, techniques, and references.
5. He gives a few business models for creating a totally outsourced business—they mostly focus around marketing products (things you can buy and resell at a good margin, or books and ideas). They don’t really get into the creative process: some of us are really interested in creating things—which somehow really does take time.
6. But the idea of creating a business the sole purpose of which is to automatically generate the revenue to support your chosen life style is an intriguing new, to me anyway, thought process.
7. If you created an automated income producing machine, then you get to spend your time on whatever you want. Travel and living overseas seem to be his passions, so he has lots of hints on how to do that on the cheap.

One theme that comes up is that where you live is an important part of the cost structure of the lives we have chosen. It is cheaper to live most other places in the world than it is to live here—thereby the reasonableness of really traveling—vagabonding. Many of the new retirement guides also suggest that life can be a lot cheaper for us if we intelligently chose where to live. The nix in the mix is that some of us have extended families that have inhabited neighborhoods for generations (like ours in Northern California), so picking up and leaving isn’t quite as easy as for some. (And though my children don’t live very close, they are also unlikely to follow us to Nevada or Arizona or Wyoming.)

Do I recommend the book? Yes and no. Some really challenging and useful ideas that I have not previously considered, but mixed in a bit with some shortsighted behaviors that are a little too manipulative. But that’s okay, take what’s useful and leave the rest. In general, it is a new angle from which to examine your life and make some decisions. What do you really want to do?

We’re off traveling again after a lovely beginning-of-summer party at our house. Magically, Saturday was the only cool day (in the eighties) we’ve had in a week. So lucky planning. And/or diligent prayers.

All seven us are snuggled into our SUV, an efficient way for us to travel. The aging Lexus only gets used when there are more than four of us to ride, or when we tow the camper. We manage most everything else with the Prius which has become our everyday car. I sold my darling Nissan 300Z (1991) to a local mechanic who can rebuild the engine himself. It was hard to see it go, but a good financial decision, and it was fun to see how excited he was to have it.

Meanwhile, after lunch, everyone is napping, except Jim, who is driving, and Gloria, who is four. Fortunately we are almost there so Corey (six months old) won’t have to tolerate the carseat much longer—which is not one of her stronger skills. We are off to spend a week in Ashland, Oregon at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I think we have six or seven plays planned over five days—a very busy schedule. The week is all about theatre (the plays, the actors, the direction, the music, the dancing), family (there will be eighteen of us here), and food. Okay, it’s all about the food. Choosing restaurants and menus is a critical part of the experience for us. The favorite restaurant by far is Thai Pepper. We’ve been eating there for decades and it ususally takes 4 tables assembled on the deck to serve us. It’s a beautiful place and no one ever seems to get tired of the excellent food.

Tomorrow night, maybe neuvo latino food at the restaurant Tabu with a performance of the Tempest.

(No, this is not about the current season giving way to summer.)

On the train Monday, the people next to us were having a business meeting/consultation of some sort. I couldn’t help but notice a beautiful application that was being shared. (One of the party had developed it.) It was a particularly appealing form of graphic analysis that I have been intrigued with understanding. The visualization is a network graph with dynamic movement. I have come across them in several contexts.

Erik Loyer has used them creatively in some of his digital artwork at his site, The Lair of the Marrow Monkey. Some of his work has been commissioned by MIT Press. A presentation on the book Writing Machines by Anne Burdick is here: Hollowbound Book. (Try moving your mouse over images to elicit interesting behaviors.)

There is a thesaurus available in a network representation: the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus. The intriguing thing about these network diagrams is that they have been animated—they react and self adjust, so they feel a little alive.

I have been searching for software for them and have been stifled by not knowing what to call them. Finally I found a developer, Mark Shepard of Adobe, who has created a Flex component. He calls them spring graphs. Of course, they have the advantage of being built in Flash/Flex which makes them even more intriguing.

They have something to do with the analytic work that has been tickling my brain. Something to do with structuring information, the origins of which have come from my writing requirements that I previously discussed. Jim and I have started exploring how we apply other constructs and constraint based concepts to the basic network structures. Not sure why, but we find it interesting.

The images from the train were also beautiful. Colorful networked gems moving and unfolding on a black night sky. Very intriguing and compelling. Who knows where it leads.

PS. Another source of information is the site TouchGraph.Co; they have Java-based Google and Amazon browsers.

We’ve been traveling light this trip—no car rentals, as few taxis as possible. In Boston, nothing but the T (the Boston subway system) and walking. Yesterday’s trip back to the Newark airport went as follows:

• A mile walk to the subway station with our roller bags and computers.
• A longish subway ride to the train station
• An Amtrak train ride from Boston South Station to New York Penn Station
• A New Jersey transit train from NY Penn to Newark Liberty Airport (on which I penned most of this post)
• A monorail, the AirTrain, across the airport to Portal P
• A phone call to order up the Day’s Inn hotel van to take us to the hotel

All in all, very efficient. Though it was a big day of travel (and today was more of the same: bus to Newark airport, AirTrain to the terminal, flight to LA and then to SF; bus to the car park, and the drive home), we got a lot done. It is really possible to read and work on the trains and subways, so the time is not lost. The airplane is a little more difficult to work on for several reasons (space, power, network access, and that grim sleepiness that overtakes me on the plane), so today was not quite as productive.

Meanwhile, New Jersey was just there gliding by the window.

To continue Jim’s thread:

Here is an illumination of the language in my novel Illumine, the largest dataset I own. I am pondering how this relates to the original concept of “illuminations” in text.

(You need to open the blog in Safari or Internet Explorer and then click through to the graphic.)

A tag cloud:

PS. I obviously have to research why the word “back” is so important.

It’s interesting to watch the updraft of my work change momentum. Some moments I can barely contain all the ideas and energy that is trying to get things to happen. Other moments, like today, I can’t quite figure out what wants to get done. It may be some mild tiredness from a week of travel, or just a flux in the flow. In those moments, I go to the to-do list and try to knock some tedious things off the list, or clean out my email, or edit the to-do list. There is always something that can be done. That way, those things aren’t in my way when I’m really ready to do something more creative.

We are sitting at a table on the train working, and the bays along the Atlantic Ocean are sliding by the window: boats in moorage, small harbors, sun and clouds, flat islands lying offshore, small towns and little parks.

Working while traveling has been pretty effective this trip. We could always find a way to use stray moments at coffee, at the station, on the train. The train is particularly great because it provides electricity with every seat (at least in business class). So with Jim’s Verizon wireless we have the whole working environment.

Okay. Now there’s a beach with sunbathers and bright umbrellas. We haven’t tried that working environment yet—always something new to try. Maybe with a mojito…

One of the blogs I read is Ryan Stewart’s Digital Backcountry where he covers rich internet applications. (He recently went to work for Adobe and covers Flex/Apollo extensively.)

There is a useful post on some new features coming out in Flex 3 that concern “deep linking” in Flash/Flex/Apollo applications. This has been an issue for web developers who come from the world where linking out of the application is possible and/or the user employing the “back” button is an inherent part of the application behavioral syntax. Flash/Flex applications, as “contained” application environments don’t inherently have a back button or a back button syntax and, up till now, the user couldn’t link out of the application.

Ryan writes correctly:

This also meant the back button wouldn’t work, so Flex/Flash felt very different from the browser experience and it was something that’s been criticized in parts of the community. There are some significant theoretical arguments about what the back button should actually do in the context of an application, and that has also been part of the problem.

In some ways I see this as an artifact resulting from trying to use one functional model to replace all other models whether or not it fit. The basic web technology (with its links and page sequencing (including back and forward)) was designed to present stand-alone objects (pages with text or whatever) in a sequential (or multi-linked-sequential) flow, originally without context or much control. Building functioning applications in this environment has always seemed like a bit of a kludgy hack to those of us who have designed contained and controlled application architectures. Of course, “web application” technology has evolved its capabilities to maintain application context and control behavior, but it has always suffered from a lack of true context control oftentimes because of behaviors like the back button.

So it is a “new” solution to a “new” problem: before the advent of the internet, application architecture enabled us exert control over content, context, and user behavior. Of course, they weren’t universally available over a ubiquitous universal network, so these days are better days in many ways. Adobe has published some really good talks and white papers on how application architecture took a large set of backwards steps, which are now getting addressed with several new offerings from many vendors.

Stewart reports that behavior that doesn’t reflect “browser” behavior is seen to be a deficient architecture. The reality is that every application needs to be able to control context and behavior as necessary within the requirements of the application, the user, and the proper control of the dataspace and context. Something as innocuous as the “back” button can’t be a sacred cow—elegance, usability, correctness, and common sense need to lead the day in building future applications.

The new application platforms that will allow applications to work on the internet and on the desktop (so far we’ve looked a bit at Adobe Apollo and Google Gears, though there are others) are exciting, but we have to get passed a need to hold them to a standard that only came to exist in the last decade and is a short term artifact of the current evolution of development capabilities.

And then there is the data management issue that Jim has discussed here, and which we will be exploring further. The models for managing the distributed dataspace of distributed applications (online and offline) are complicated and challenging.

The sign out front says Bed and Breakfast, but its called 414 Hotel. I found it by buying the Rough Guide to New York City to find out what they recommended in the less expensive range of hotels. Looking at reviews of other cheap hotels on line was very disconcerting—raves and awful pictures of mold giving conflicted and confusing images. But the 414 Hotel was listed in the Rough Guide as the best of the cheap hotels. (Cheap is not a good word for this place; it’s too clean, nice, and elegant for that.)

It has been created from two townhouses that have a little garden patio between them, where you can sit in the evening or morning air. The rooms are nice, modern decor (even a gigantic flat screen tv on the wall), full baths. Service is excellent. The only down-side, really is the dark gray covering the walls in the hallways.

It’s a west-side style neighborhood (sensible, since it is on the west side) though a little more business-like than the cozy upper west side. The block is lined with trees and homes, and the next block has an array of restaurants. It was only a three block walk back from our play last night, which is a dream after a long night at the theatre.

We will try to stay here often, though they seem to be pretty booked in advance.

We got a bit of exercise this morning, walking from midtown to Chelsea for a meeting (about 2. 5 miles). We are also having coffee later with our nephew, Andrew, who works for TPM Media as an associate editor for this important political blog.

PS. We are sitting at an outside table in the Chelsea district (southern end of Manhattan) on a beautiful summer-like morning, not too hot yet. The restaurant is called Pastis. Jim has his network working and we’re both working on our blogs. What a way to work, eh? LM

Or not. In the air, on a bus, now on a train from Newark to NYC for a day of meetings. What started out as a light trip has filled pretty much up to the brim: a morning meeting, a required trip to Roberto’s (purveyor of fine saxaphones and Jim’s current favorite sax shop), an afternoon meeting and then “Moon for the Misbegotten” with Kevin Spacey, Eve Best (up for a Tony), and Colm Meaney. Tomorrow, two more meetings and a train to Boston. The weekend is also filling with a social schedule—partly adopted from our daughter, Erin.

This is theatre month. For folks who live in the country we tally up a lot of theatre, mostly in one week when the entire family goes to Ashland, Oregon for the Oregon Shakepseare Festival (usually 6-8 plays in 4-5 days). Unknown by most people, half of the OSF productions are modern plays written by modern playwrights. We have a relatively serious relationship to theater in the family and everyone takes it quite to heart. Luckily my son’s wife and my daughter’s boyfriend are also into the theatre experience so everyone shows up. Nowadays someone has to hang out during each play to watch the babies, but that is also a coveted opportunity.

So adding MFTM in NYC to June is a kind of warmup. It starts at 7PM which must be for some reason—and we hope to be able to sleep in a bit tomorrow.

We are trying out a new, inexpensive hotel in midtown this trip. Hotels in NYC have priced themselves out of any sense of reasonableness—though as long as folks pay the price, I guess it’s fine. I love spending time in the city, but it’s hard to justify a $600 per night room. We’ll see how this place goes—I’m excited to find something reasonable ($200). I finally figured out how to really find a good cheap hotel (anything under $350 per night—we bought the Rough Guide to NYC—the book European travelers use to find their way around—it was a big help. All the web sites promoted the same hotels and advertised low rates that never panned out. So we’ll find out how 414 Hotel turns out. I’m very hopeful.

Crossing under the Hudson River. The day looks to be beautiful, not too hot or muggy. And not raining.