Ideas, Execution, and the Rare Auteur:

It’s amazing how many sociopaths are out there dashing around, playing entrepreneur, and yelling into a phone about drilling-down — with what appears to be no idea how to actually get something amazing to market.

They sing themselves little songs and tell themselves little stories over ciabatta sandwiches and Excel, rhapsodizing about their personal Candyland where everybody starts using their goofy product because… just…because. It’s crazy. And it’s everywhere.

...An idea is no more useful than a coupon for a bag of sugar; show me the finished cake, then we’ll talk.

The bottom line is that if you don’t have an amazing, passionate idea and the means to make it superb, you’re probably just a douchebag with an expensive phone. And a stack of NDAs.

Aaand, just two days after purchase, just when things started to purr along nicely, my new laptop has two dead pixels. Good thing I bought the service plan. Bad thing it takes two days to even start getting a laptop up to speed around here.

Given sugarfilled's recent rejections from iStockphoto ("too much post" on a photo straight out of the camera), the fact that someone stole 80% of their iStockphoto portfolio off of someone else's Flickr account--photoshopping the watermark off of a 300kb image already compressed by open source server side scripting code on Flickr's servers--REALLY PISSES ME OFF.

To the point I think I'm going to use up the rest of my iStock credits and find a new stock image supplier.

This is the other far side from this thing and pisses me off far, far more.

Just ship. Seriously.:

Of course, telling people what they know (and believe) already is a time-honored tradition. It's a huge industry in the western world. Telling people what they already know—and thus making them feel good about their own prescience, confirming their belief that they are correct, and also (maybe) encouraging them to do what they should be doing—is sometimes referred to as "self-help." ...

Heck, I'd even argue that the small token amount of satisfaction we get from feeling correct and justified and thinking about doing what we already know we should do is actually antithetical to putting out the actual effort. It's like emotional satisficing--it feels good enough, but with no effort, so we're not moved powerfully enough by our remaining creative frustration to actually, well, move. ...

And it seems like the more we talk about doing it, the more we think about it, the more we know our approach is right and the more we pat ourselves on the back for it, the less likely we are to ever do the thing.

apophenia: does work/life balance exist?:

Increasingly, only those bent on workaholism are valued as employees. Those who don't push it to extremes are disregarded as lazy in many industries. There is pressure to work 24/7 and there are plenty of folks who take this seriously, even if it's not in their best interests let alone the rest of society's. I get so ravingly mad at my (primarily male) colleagues who work 14 hour days even though they have small children that they never see. It's one thing to be a workaholic as a single 20-something; it's another thing to be a workaholic as a parent. I get to see the flipside of that one - teens starved for attention, desperate to please in the hopes of being given attention and validation.

In addition to my artistic frustrations, I've also been having some serious professional dilemmas as well. This in a year when I am overall achieving more balance than I've ever experienced, and feeling more happiness and hope than I've ever been accustomed--in other words these frustrations exist, but I'm fully confident that their solutions await. I'm hoping that thinking aloud about both here in this forum will help. Both of the above pieces touched on some of what I'm feeling in the professional arena.

For some time I've concerned myself with working smarter, the goal to get more meaningful work done in less time. Unfortunately I have been frustrated in this goal more often than not. It does not help when the brunt of my work goes unrewarded, both from a monetary and wuffie standpoint. It does not help that the web has obliterated attention. It does not help that software design (what I'm good at) and software development (what I'm just ok at) are two very different domains. It doesn't help that there are a LOT more jobs in the latter, and that most of the people doing the former are businesspeople who understand the marketplace but have zero understanding of the human processes that make software first useful, then beautiful, and finally meaningful, consequently flooding us with mostly crap software that we either love to hate (hello twitter) or just hate, full stop (hello myspace).

So, I'm thinking about going into construction. Somewhere in Alaska.*

...most of which I will not have the time or right words to share with you the way I would like...

So last night after my set at White Rock Coffee, which I should jot down some thoughts about but will do so in a less public forum--suffice it to say for now thank you so much everyone who came out and especially those who sang along and pounded on tables when asked--I went to The Chemistry Set's last show.

I should preface all by saying that The Chemistry Set was (is the past tense really necessary already? It makes it sound more important for some reason) one of my favorite bands (and not just in Dallas), and I think I have a lot of support in that opinion. The songs and records are amazing, the musicianship flawless, the shows nearly perfect and Stephen is a great front-man. They were a great band without any inauthenticity or bullshit attitude. They were mostly perfect.

The turnout for their final show was good, but as usual most of the people in attendance considered the music as a background soundtrack for their very important social lives. There was some Art Conspiracy thing in the other room, and besides giantlemondrop I didn't see a single person come out into the main room for the show. Is it me or is that a little fucked up? I would have thought that artists, of all people, would have streamed out like children for the pied piper and stood in awe to soak the beauty that was the sound and energy coming off that stage.

So much of the Dallas scene just seems like pearls before swine to me, and it's discouraging. I guess I got really spoiled by my 10 short months in the Arlington (Virginia)/DC music scene. (Followed by a quite nice 4 months in Sarajevo {musically at least!})

I wanted to post some Chem Set mp3's but they're all so good I can't decide on which...and I gotta run...maybe laters...

It all started a while back when Lane Hartwell got frustrated. Friends spoke up on her behalf.

At some point she called a lawyer and enacted the DMCA on the offending party's asses. See Misunderstanding Copyright Law And Ruining Everyone's Fun and/or My statement regarding the Richter Scales "Here comes another bubble" video dispute.

So there was some mainstream media coverage, and of course the bloggers sang along like a gospel choir. Some offered "easy" solutions.

Finally, she just sent an invoice. And the video was remade without her photograph included.

Early on in all this, I bought thisphotobylanehartwell.com. I've been tracking and writing about the situation in a friends-only post, but in the end, less is more.

So go over to lanehartwell.com, er, I mean thisphotobylanehartwell.com. It is customizable so that whenever you need to provide attribution to someone you can do it in really big text.

Dear Jeff Bezos (one-week Kindle review) [Scobleizer]. Good lord. Yes, you are a geek. But the worst possible kind. There is a fine line between "This suxs" and "Fire! Burn! Loot!"

And as for one's reasons for wanting ebooks go, those are horrible.

The book is going to be very hard to beat. Yes, the "Web" has killed text--in the way of newspapers, fliers, instruction manuals, dictionaries and encyclopedias--but in terms of the aesthetic a well-designed book achieves in terms of

• Is typically a complete work
• Requires no other device to consume
• Utterly portable
• A consummate consumable: Can be both held on to indefinitely or thrown right in the trash

...it is going to be a long time before there is any technology that can beat it. I mean, come ON: the image above is from Amazon's own promotional shots! That's like advertising Arial by putting it right next to Helvetica.

If anything, the return of The Fray as a paper publication is the best content-tech news of the week.

All via I Started To Write About How Fickle We Are, But Then I Lost Interest

Today we lay to rest the best musician Dallas had. He was also an amazing human being. I still don't know how to process this loss.

Jenny woke up with something new (to her) on the brain. She swung her legs gingerly out from under the duvet and spread her toes on the hardwoods. With a brief detour to press the coffeemaker's "on" button, she settled at the computer. The Idea Copyright Database website was in her bookmarks, her search query submitted within seconds and with nary a touch of the mouse. The annoying "please wait" graphic a throwback to 2007, when the (then called) Apple computer popularized the hypnotic spinner. Government websites were always a solid decade behind the times. "This thing gets slower every damn day," she mumbled under her breath, and stood to retrieve a cup of tasty caffeine.

1004 results matched your request... "Shit," Jenny thought, "not specific enough yet," and sipped her coffee faster in an attempt to facilitate the process. She only had 15 minutes before she had to start getting ready for work. She managed two more keywords and searched within the results. This brought the list to a manageable two pages' worth. She scanned the abstracts and clicked through to a couple. Finally, towards the bottom of the second page she found what she was secretly hoping not to (having long ago stopped worrying about the ironic causality of the process). She mumbled some obscenities and clicked through to the Execution Permits. Already a three-year with two more years left on it, and three more in the queue.

"These," more obscenities, "people," Jenny said loud enough to elicit a groan and some rustling from her lover, still in the bed. "They need this shit like so many trophies on their shelf. What would they talk about at parties? How would they know how to feel about themselves, how to rate their self esteem against all the other similarly-but-not-too-similarly-now dressed people in their precious little peer groups? Oh, I'm sorry: communities. What ever would the world do without their precious little ideas, codified by Big Brother for all to see."

"Oh, for the days when a freakin' domain registration was as far as these nascent mental masturbations need freakin' go, when there were actually TLDs to be had."

things i learned about myself or observed or said last night:

last night I got very passionate during a discussion about the art community and pissed some people off. later in a sort of debriefing i said:

"I'm just sick of talk." 5 words. That was my point.

...and...

That's my problem, I either piss people off or leave them speechless.

Friday I think it was, I bookmarked a David Seah entry, Obsessing over Lost Ideas:

I tend to have a lot of ideas, which is a kind way of saying that I’m easily distracted. The way I control this impulse is by recognizing that most ideas aren’t worth much without the solid execution to bring them into reality. So when I talk to someone about an idea, I will assess our ability to work together with a set of rules like this:( Read more... )

Also, I was accused of being inappropriate/ineffectual because my board consists of three white men. Originally, diversity was a good idea -- difference creates difference! But what good does it do you to have multi-ethnic, multi-gendered people on your committee if they are all from the establishment?! Boards are like newspapers -- legacy*. They're the mainframes we have to deal with and might employ a few people while we create new solutions to new problems. They are, essentially, in the way, and in that sense need to be formed to best get out of the way. This is 2006, this is the 21st century...good ideas get turned into actions faster than ever, they get submitted to the commons of not just all ethnicities and genders but nationalities and geo-economic strata instantly ...and either absorbed and rewarded or chewed and spit and recycled like so many aluminum cans. While you are carefully selecting old money and power to have committee discussions about this or that world-changing idea, your idea is being done better by someone who is only worried about getting it done. They aren't thinking about marketing or budget or fame or status or career -- maybe in the back of their mind they are, but the thing is so demanding of their attention that they don't really have time for that kind of bullshit -- they aren't even thinking about sustainability**! If it doesn't work, they go back to doing whatever they did before, or do whatever comes next...whatever, because the idea is free, and for all our talking about the information economy, ideas by themselves are worth less than beer or milk or the computers we preserve them (the ideas) on or the time we take to do the preserving.

* I'm ramped up from listening to the Bruce Sterling talk from sxswi06. Go listen to it. I'm on my 2nd and there will have to be a third. I will burn a CD for you if I must. You will notice me ripping his style here.

** The thing I'm so hung up on...