Mary Panttaja

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.

We attended the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs Launch: Silicon Valley yesterday. It was very interesting and helpful. They showcased the top 30 startups from 170 applicants. Besides the wide variety of business concepts and models of the most attractive of the presentations—which is an interesting thing in itself—it was quite interesting to note how wide the disparity was between these, the top 15% hand-selected out of the larger pool.

And they differed in quality along quite a set of variables:

• Strength and quality of the underlying technology innovation
• Power and diversity of the underlying financial model
• Innovative leverage of existing markets
• Presentation skills and ability to communicate

It surprised me that there wasn’t more depth in the group at this level, though this is just one place that such companies can showcase their work. It was a great event though and I really got a sense of the kind of topics that are getting attention.

And for me, after being holed up in my country hermitage writing for years, a little practice in working a room again. Never my best suit, but not impossible to revive I see.

We did run into two of our former associates who are now entrepreneurs in their own right. Very cool to see them and reconnect.

Jim is posting on this event as well at jim.panttaja.com.

Pamela Slim posted an article that gets directly to one of the problems with a over emphasis on measurement: Obsession with the competition is a luxury of the over-funded

It is great reminder for me that there are very practical ways to explain and apply the principals of AWM (the Arising World Model). If not, then it’s not very useful. It’s application needs to extend from mundane, practical problems to the spiritual and philosophic questions that we ask ourselves. Everything should work

So here we are. The second “developer day” in two weeks. Today we’re learning everything there is to know about the new Google developer tools and APIs. We did this two weeks ago at Salesforce.

It’s all fascinating and the technologies look like fun—though complex. One key element that I didn’t really appreciate until spending some time here is that these “development platforms” are significantly different from what we used to consider a development platform. Adobe Flex 2.0, for example, is a general development platform with which you can build any application for any purpose. This is traditionally what we thought of as a development platform.

These platforms (Google and Salesforce) are decidedly different. When you build with these platforms you are not only getting a platform with sophisticated tools. They are aimed at very particular types of applications designed around the core capabilities of the base platform—-search, maps, contact data.

The other element that is even more radical is that you are buying into an already existing audience. An application built on the Salesforce platform is intended only for Salesforce customers. Every user has to pay a monthly fee to Salesforce, a per person tax, if you will. Very few applications would be able to support that tax, but if they are already a Salesforce customer, the platform support is virtually free, Salesforce markets your application to them, it is trivial for them to subscribe, and you only need to charge a reasonable delta subscription. In fact, Salesforce will collect it for you.

What does Salesforce get? More sticky applications to attract and serve their customers without having to build or maintain them. So if you have some particularly valuable IP that serves this community you can dive in with a minimum of infrastructure and overhead. (One partner brought in $2-3 million in the first year with 6 company members—they have very widely useful IP—most Salesforce customers decide to buy it.)

Google has a whole suite of developer platforms that do maps, gadgets, mashups, etc. These are also targeted to Google users—a larger audience than almost anyone else has. Google provides the platform, the tools, the audience, the “marketing” (they list your app in the list of available components). The sofware is relatively easy to build—still takes wizards, but they can do things in record time.

Google, of course, gets more pages served. They hope that the gadget maker’s revenue model is to serve Google ads which bring Google revenue which they share with the maker. This seems to be the primary revenue model for these applications—ad serving, and perhaps some extended services or products served from the gadget maker’s base website.

And Jim points out that Google views the consumer as their primary customer. So you need to be interested in fulfilling a need in the consumer marketplace. That’s the target market. (It is interesting to me that it’s never been a market I really considered.) This has help me get a handle on what the “new 2.0″ world (“wisdom of the crowds”) is really about—meeting the needs and interests of the general public (consumer as a label is harsh, many of the services/features used are not just about consuming.)

All educational. Not sure where it leads yet.

Cycling our new “daily” loop the other day, an entire blog evolved in my head. (It’s that or a single song that pumps along with the peddles—I try to remember to chant, but often other things seem to happen on their own.) The loop runs to Geyserville on a tiny back road (actually Highway 128) and then back on a larger local road. 18 miles or so. Quite a bit of composing time—so my next “tool” is a recording device.

Here is my attempt to recreate the original—more thoughts on our proclivity to measure ourselves, which often means to rate ourselves against others (or even ourselves on another day). Why do we do this? So we can award ourselves with feeling good? Or punish ourselves by feeling bad? “We’re better than that” or “Look how truly sucky we are.”

The Trap

The first thing to notice is that the process itself is a trap. You are trapping yourself into a particular measurement of success. If you can measure it, it has limited scope. It’s about a simplistic measurable element of the whole: the weight, the time, the revenue, the count of customers. It is inherently not the whole thing—only a minor reflection of one element of what you are doing.

Now these measurable elements (the revenue, for example) are useful measures in their limited niche—used for precisely what they mean, but no more. They can be used to measure our skill level (how well we sell) or single facets of complex behaviors and their results. Since we learned to measure things we have used that information to evolve. This is good, useful, and challenging. Especially when we really know who we are—then careful measurement of our progress on our path can be a useful tool. But we need to remember, that the things we can measure are not usually the whole story—there are things in our lives, important things, that cannot be measured, but must be experienced and evaluated through our subjective experience.

Missing The Updraft

Last May, when I walked up (it is always up) the trail into Macchu Picchu, I really experienced how I could screw up my moment to moment life by comparing myself to others—even inadvertently.

The walking trail into Macchu Picchu is very difficult for regular folks: up over three passes, 14, 13, and 12,000 ft, with some radical descents in between. If you are lucky you’ve spent a few days in Cusco at 10,000 feet, which helps because the trail starts at 8,000. You are walking with several hundred other people scattered on the trail—the government controls the daily total—some of whom are locals (porters and guides) and do this every day. We never seriously compare ourselves to them—we can grant ourselves that leeway. But my experience was that almost every other person on the trail was stronger than I was. And walked faster than I ever do. Sometimes, it seems they walked faster than I can imagine.

As people would pass me I would find myself picking up some of their speed, unconsciously trying to keep up. I would subtly measure the difference in our speed, and my lack of capability was hard for my ego to absorb, and it would try to “pick up the pace.” Then, if I happened to walk by someone going slower that myself (a very rare occurance), I would “pick up the pace” suddenly feeling good about being stronger than someone else. Every time I walked faster I got into trouble—I would have to stop and catch my breath and recover.

What’s the problem? The problem is that when I did this I was not running my own race; I was not working with my own capacities; I was defining the challenge using someone else’s game plan. In the old fable of the hare and tortoise, it wasn’t the tortoise’s slowness that brought success, but that the tortoise executed its own game plan, ran its own race. This is how we get the most from ourselves and our organizations. And we can’t do anything more than to maximize our own capacities in the moment. So I could never walk up that mountain any faster than my capacities last May; that was all I had to work with. And to maximize my success, I had to walk my own speed, execute my own plan which acknowledged my capabilities, talents, skills, and motivations.

Choosing Our Own Manuevers

This means that we have to maneuver in our own updraft. The maneuvers we choose must be our own. They cannot be adopted from someone else—they are in a different updraft, with different skills, knowledge, and capacities. Adopting someone else’s maneuver can be a recipe for disaster—like walking too fast for your heart. Or using a particular flight plan that is working for “those guys over there” when in reality they are in a different air current than you are, not to mention that they are in a different aircraft.

The skill of getting stronger and more successful is always about knowing your own capacities and working your own plan—never about measuring yourself against someone else.

We did a couple of things over the weekend that made our exercise more fun by making it a part of another activity. Like one would naturally do if we lived in the city and walked to the store. (Here in the country, I just hike down to the garden before dinner.)

We still needed to buy two more replacement boats and we managed to turne it into an diversified activity. To try out the boats, we rented them and took the first pair off to Sailor Bar on the American River and paddled around 40 minutes in the current. We swapped those boats out for a second pair and set up a river run from Sailor Bar to Elmante—about 4 miles on the river. We only brought one car, so we set the shuttle up with our bicyles. You have to think it through (bike routes AND river routes) and decide whether to bike first (and have the car at river’s end) or bike second (and have to go after the car).

So here’s how it went:

• We drove to the boat take out and dropped the bikes off—locking them up of course.
• We drove to the put-in and parked the car, packed the boats, and headed down river.
• We took out, swapped the boats (locking them up with the bike lock) for the bikes (changed shoes as well) and headed back up river to the car.
• Then we loaded the bikes, drove back to the boats, loaded the boats and were ready to go.

It was a four mile paddle and a seven mile ride. The drive was a little longer because of the roadways, but not too taxing. It’s an economical way to do river runs, but you could also use it for any paddling—across a bay, along a beach, or around a lake. We’ve used this technique on the Snake River to great effect. It would be more challenging in hilly country where the bike ride could become a real challenging part of the day. (One secret is that only one driver has to actually do the bike ride! Everyone else could rest. We don’t let ourselves know that.)

Yesterday we rode into town (normally 7 miles, but we added 3 miles to the trip to make it more work), had breakfast, dropped off prescriptions, and rode back (added a hill). We got our exercise, but also got some chores done.

All good and the bike riding gets to seem like an normal part of the day.