WordCamp Events Friday

Events, WordCamp

There are two events happening before WordCamp officially kicks off on Saturday. Tomorrow at 1 PM there is a meetup at Crossroads Cafe which should be a lot of fun. And then at 6:30 there’s a dinner meetup organized by Niall at a neat place called Taylor’s Automatic Refresher, which is an outdoor beer and burger place at the Ferry Building. (Same place we met last year.) It’s cafeteria style, and we’ll be outside chatting. San Francisco evenings tend to get chilly near the water so bring a jacket.

Streak

Personal, WordPress

You might have noticed there have been more posts around here lately. Actually until yesterday (Oct 3) there was an unbroken string of at least one post a day since August 25th, 40 posts in total. It started with a tweet from Colin Devroe:

https://twitter.com/cdevroe/status/504630581117063169

Until now I forgot it was only weekdays, so I was doing weekends as well. Friends know I like doing personal experiments just to question assumptions or ingrained behavior, other examples this I’ve tried this year are giving up drinking for a month, going without a smartphone for 40 days, and more recently training for a half marathon with my friend Rene. I thought blogging every day would be a burden, but it actually became a great source of joy. It was more a shift in mindset than anything — every day I read things I think are interesting, share links with friends, have thoughts that are 80% of a blog post, and write a ton privately, it was just a matter of catching those moments and turning them into something that was shared with the world.

The tools besides WordPress that I found super-helpful in this were Simplenote, which was great for capturing thoughts and drafts when I was on the go, and I’ve been using the Editorial Calendar plugin to help me schedule drafts and keep an eye on my progress. The Editorial Calendar plugin is useful but I don’t love it — I wish the calendar view moved week by week rather than replacing the whole table, that it was responsive or worked on mobile, and that it would take over your publish button so you could define a desired posting cadence (in my case every 24 hours) and it would put a finished post in the next free slot, or let you bump something to the front of the queue and push all the other posts back a day. There were a few missteps along the way with timezones but overall I’m happy with how the experiment turned out.

So what broke the streak? It was actually one of the other experiments: running. I’ve never considered myself a runner, and never really done it in my life, but a few months ago I started trying it and have been training up for a half marathon on November 16. (It’s also a great opportunity to take photos.) Yesterday morning I woke up early around 5 AM and as the sun started to come up, and the weather was so nice after I rounded the Bay Bridge (planned turnaround point) kept going to Crissy Field where I saw the Golden Gate from afar and thought it would be fun to cross it. After crossing I was starving by and figured 3 more miles would be a half marathon and also put me in Sausalito. The last mile or two was really tough, definitely beyond what I was ready for and I walked a lot, but I was very proud of the result, finishing in around 2 hours 45 minutes. But I hadn’t planned to stay out that long, and the rest of my day was full of meetings. I had moved my scheduled post for the day out so I could talk about the new Childish Gambino mixtape (post coming tomorrow) but the rest of the day was so busy and I got exhausted so early I totally forgot to post.

So achieved one life goal while breaking the streak on another, which is not ideal, but today is another day and I want to see if I can break the 39 day streak next. Everything happens one day at a time. 🙂

Chicken and Eggs

Education, Essays, Personal

I’ve been reading Questlove’s Mo’ Meta Blues, and it’s an incredible education. The book is helping me appreciate an era of music that inspired the era that inspires me — the music that drove the Roots, J Dilla, Fugees, D’Angelo, Common, Erykah Badu, Kendrick Lamar, and so many more to create what they have.

Chronologically, I’m in a chapter covering mid-90s hip-hop, which is full of conflict. There’s a tension alluded to in the book of the musicians that made it and those that didn’t: does increased radio play make songs popular? There’s some science that suggests yes. Or is there something intrinsic to the record that puts it in that virtous loop of requests and airplay, the equivalent of usage and virality in a web product?

mometablues.jpeg

There’s a great ancedote in the book that I think is useful when thinking about products. All of the links are my addition, not in the original text.

There was one moment during the recording of Voodoo that really brought this home. We were recording DJ Premier’s scratches for “Devil’s Pie,” and Q-Tip had just let the room to go work on something else, so there were four of us left there: Premier, Dilla, D’Angelo, and myself. During the break, Premier asked if anyone had any new shit to play for the group, and D’Angelo went for a cassette and played a bit of a new song, and the whole room just erupted in hooting. Then Dilla put on some new Slum Village shit and it was the same thing: an explosion of excitement. Then Premier, who had started the whole thing, played an M.O.P. song and some new Gang Starr material that he was working on for The Ownerz.

I was last at bat. All I had on me was a work tape for what would eventually become “Double Trouble” on Things Fall Apart. It didn’t have finished vocals yet, didn’t have Mos Def’s verse. It was just a skeleton. I played it, and I will never forget the feeling that came over the room, including me. It wasn’t that they didn’t hoot and holler like they had for the other songs. They did. But they didn’t mean it. I know the move people resort to when they’re not quite into a song: they keep a straight stare on their face and bob their head a bit, not saying anything, not making eye contact. That’s the sign of death. That’s what they all did to me, and I felt humiliated. I was like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: I will not be ignored! I went back into the studio that same night and gave that song a radical, extended facelift. I refused to sleep until I had that thing up and running.

I love the idea of Questlove realizing the song was missing something, and going back to the booth to keep working on it until it resonated with his target audience. A song that doesn’t stand up on its own wouldn’t be any better when bundled as part of an album. (Or Samsung would have the most popular apps on Android.) Fans hear the care and quality of each track, and they become super-fans. The bands that break out weren’t bludgeoned into fan’s ears by radio play, they were pulled by these passionate few into a wider audience.

I love the mixtape culture that so many of today’s successful artists have come up through, and it is amplified online. Drake had three ever-improving mixtapes before his first album. It harkens to a line from PG’s startup canon (in 2009!): Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.

There’s this tension in everything we produce. Where’s the line to tread between 1.0 is the loneliest and a minimum viable product? Or is it about a minimum lovable product? Are we building a car with no air conditioning or a car with no wheels?

minimal-viable-product-henrik-kniberg.png

“Pivot” has become passé, but it’s much worse to assume that distribution will solve something core to your product that isn’t working.

Mark Cuban on HD

Humor, Review

Mark Cuban on HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future. Great read, I didn’t know that the HD content they film is higher quality than what they broadcast. I’ve gotten the full HD experience once at a friend’s house who had one of those giant 6 foot TVs and it was amazing, we watched golf and the nature channel or something. The junk they show on the TVs at the stores does not do HD justice at all. Cuban also thinks HD is the answer to piracy, contrast to this interview with Jack Valentini on Engadget.

Cookie Price Differences Explained

Economics, Web Standards

Well after much Googling, I found two definitive sources that say there are price differences in cookies. I found an article (word document, view as HTML) from the Wall Street Journal that talks about a price war in Michigan between neighbooring councils that had prices at $2.50 and $3.

Girls are told that if customers ask about the price difference, they should explain the economic factors at play — that the Metro council serves four times as many members as its “sister” council, and runs three more camps. Michigan Metro says its troops receive a profit of at least 45 cents on each box sold; in Macomb County, the minimum is 32 cents.

Oh that’s wonderful. Item 9 on this Girl Scout FAQ confirms that prices are set indivdually by over 300 councils.

Such scenarios have been repeated in other parts of the country, as many of the nation’s 330 Girl Scout councils go through their annual pricing debate. Officials say they can’t adopt the simple solution—setting one national price—because their parent organization, Girl Scouts USA, follows the Sherman Act, which prohibits price fixing.

With each council individually incorporated as a nonprofit organization, Girl Scout officials say the law, originally designed to rein in robber barons, could apply to them as well. “In being good citizens, we choose to abide by the spirit of the law,” says Girl Scouts USA spokeswoman Ellen Ach. At a national meeting of council leaders last month in San Diego, Girl Scouts USA officials reiterated their position that prices shouldn’t be discussed among local councils.

So there’s a legal reason for the price differences, but I think it’s highly unlikely that the Girl Scouts of America would be prosecuted under the Sherman Antitrust Act, though personally I think the prices are a bit high. It’s supply and demand, and I think people would buy more at a lower price. They are also outpacing inflation: my simple calculations using the GDP Implicit Price Deflator, which is Greenspan’s favorite measure of inflation, gives me that if a box of Girl Scout cookies was $2.50 in 1996 it should be about $2.80 now, give or take a few cents. There haven’t been any changes in quality I know of, they have a great distribution model, and I don’t see why their costs would have gone up at all to justify that sort of price increase. Just my two dollars and fifty cents…