Marco.org

It’s incredibly hard to ignore the toxic whirlwinds of negativity that crop up all the time in online communities.

There’s a lot of negativity out there, most of it unwarranted: personal attacks, gossip, rumors, trolling, and just plain hate. And it’s self-perpetuating: negativity breeds more negativity. The widespread appeal of negativity crosses all cultures and generations, from angry teenagers saying everything sucks to extremist fanatics teaching their children to hate people of other races or political views.

Those attacked have an innate desire to defend themselves, but it’s not always a good idea: to someone producing negativity, accepting anything but more negativity is defeat. If you’re telling the world that some people suck, the last thing you want to hear is that the reasons you think they suck are invalid and they’re actually pretty cool people. Once a negative opinion is formed, most people’s instinct is to defend and reinforce it.

People aren’t always this vicious in person, or you don’t feel it as much, because real life provides a few big filters:

• Most people abide by common courtesy.
• Most people are too cowardly to attack with their names and faces exposed.
• You’re far less likely to know if someone in a different room or a different state or a different country says something bad about you.
• A nasty uttered comment doesn’t have the reach and infinite preservation of online publishing.
• The would-be attacker is more likely to see you as a person, rather than a faceless corporation or blog author, and give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s hard to trash-talk someone after laughing and drinking together.

So online communities and media tend to bring out the worst of people, not because internet users are inherently nastier people, but because most common filters are removed. This effect also applies to a lesser extent when people are driving cars: they’ll frequently behave more selfishly than they would in person because they know you can’t see them and you’ll probably never be near each other again.

This is why communities that encourage using real names and/or photos for identities (Vimeo, Flickr, Amazon) tend to have much more civil, constructive, and valuable discussions than those that are usually anonymous or under fake names (YouTube, iTunes App Store, IRC). And, correspondingly, the majority of negativity online is written anonymously or under a fake name. There would be a lot less of it if the authors needed to provide a real name and photo.

Hardly anyone has clean hands. I sure don’t. I’m ashamed of a lot that I’ve written and said. Even in high school, I made fun of the few kids below me in the pecking order. (The social dynamics portrayed in Freaks and Geeks, where the bullies are just one rank above the people they bully and are still ultimately outcasts, are incredibly accurate.) I can’t believe how much negativity I’ve thrown out there, and I did much of it under my real name. And every instance made me a worse person.

Negativity is the only subject matter I’ve ever regretted publishing. And, as a corollary, I’ve rarely not regretted negativity that I’ve published.

It has taken me a long time to realize this, and it will take even longer to migrate away from it completely. (It’s also a problem for me in real life.) But I’ve started, and I’m making a conscious effort to withhold negative content and make amends for what I’ve said in the past.

The biggest challenge isn’t avoiding the creation of new flames — it’s resisting the temptation to enter existing battles and butt my opinion in, or defend myself with aggression and more negativity when I’m the one being attacked.

It’s been especially hard over the last week, as my company has been receiving a shitstorm from a few loud people. It’s been very hard to stay out of this, and I failed a few times and made a few comments — and I regret them all. Every time a new wave of shit hits us or me, my first desire is to retaliate. But it’s better for everyone, myself included, if I just keep my mouth shut. I have to accept that there’s absolutely nothing I can do to prevent negative people from saying nasty things about me, my friends, and my company. It’s a lot harder than I expected, which is why I’m not surprised that so many people can’t do it.

But one effect is clear: remaining positive and disarming yourself of negativity is the most effective way to avoid being hit by whatever others are flinging around.

It’s hard for me to walk away from arguments that I think I’m losing. And I’m right — most of the time, I’ve “lost” as far as the instigator is concerned. But my error was thinking that it was possible to win.

By giving up that assumption, I can define a new metric for success: staying out of it.

Many people take photos professionally, and I might look like a bit of a tool for buying much of the same equipment they do and posting my photos in some of the same places they post theirs while lacking most of their talent.

Merlin Mann recently wrote a great piece on why he takes photos, entitled Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking. Read the whole thing, but I liked this part most:

Yeah, I know, it’s no masterpiece, but I’m proud of it for reasons of my own. Because, last night, as I was splayed prone in the fog along Taraval Street, I realized I was getting a little better at this.

The key is that he’s taking photos for himself. And that’s my motivation as well.

Sometimes I share my favorites with the internet. But I’m not displaying them with any intentionally implied semblance of expertise: I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never taken a photography class. My framing and perspectives need a lot of work (Tiff is much better at those). My keeper rate is pathetic. I never plan or set up anything. Many of my best photos are the results of luck, not skill. And my subject matter is fatally dull for nearly everyone except me and occasionally my friends or coworkers.

But I’m not taking photos to create world-class art. I don’t care if my photos aren’t popular or relevant to other people.

I take photos to document my life and the people, places, and things around me. Most of my photos were taken in my office or at home, because those are the places in which I spend the most time.

I photograph people around me doing absolutely ordinary things, like working at their computers. I know it’s not interesting to you. But it’s interesting to me because I know these people, and this was my life for this time period. And when I look back at these pictures in ten years, they’ll bring back the good memories of this environment that I spent part of my life in with these people.

I love taking pictures of random things. I can take a picture of a CPU fan, and I’ll enjoy it, because I like the way that CPU fan looks, and I’ll know it was my CPU fan and it cooled well as part of this great silent computer I built. It’s documenting a minor accomplishment in my life or some thing I liked. To a pro photographer or aficionado, this would be the most worthless picture they’d ever seen. To me, it’s a valuable memory.

I could easily take these types of photos with any consumer point-and-shoot camera, and it would be far more practical: I could get a pocket-sized model instead of carrying around 5 pounds of equipment in a backpack wherever I go. I could spend a few hundred dollars instead of thousands.

But then the pictures would suck. Another side of my personality interferes with that idea: I’m absolutely ruthless about quality. I want all of my photos to be technically great: high sharpness, contrast, and saturation with low noise, no CA, and no unintended distortion.

Essentially, I strive to take technically great photos of the people and everyday minutia in my life for my own satisfaction.

To anyone who knows me well, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. And the reasons I write are very similar.

So I buy all of this big, heavy, expensive stuff to take technically good but compositionally mediocre pictures of boring things. But I do it for me, because I’m slowly developing a skill that I’ve always wanted to have, and the process is producing results that I value highly. Any enjoyment or praise of my photos by others is a welcome bonus, but not the goal at all.

squashed:

If I stir a cup of espresso into my brownie batter, what will happen? Carolyn has a paper due tomorrow.

Depends on how much you mean by “a cup”.

A 1.5-ounce shot of espresso has about 77mg of caffeine. By comparison, an average 8-ounce cup of regular drip coffee has about 145mg. But drip coffee varies a lot depending on what you make and how you make it. Starbucks’ 8-ounce “short” size, for example, is 180mg — but most people don’t know that size exists, so they get the 12-ounce, 260mg “tall” size that Starbucks gives you if you ask for a “small”. Then they wonder why it hits them so hard and why they get addicted to tremendous coffee drinks with stupid names from Starbucks and why they can’t sleep well at night which makes them get more coffee the next day to stay awake. (And that’s only if they order the small.)

Anyway, if you mean 1 cup for cooking purposes, that’s 8 ounces of espresso, which is about 410mg of caffeine. I’ll make some assumptions:

• One person probably isn’t eating the entire batch of brownies. One person will eat, at most, half of the batch.
• Caffeine content isn’t reduced by baking. (I actually have no idea about this.)

So each of you is likely to consume, at most, 205mg of caffeine, or about as much as one and a half cups of coffee.

That’s enough caffeine to keep most people awake for a while, but it certainly isn’t going to cause any extreme effects, although I’m not sure I’d recommend eating half of the brownies in one night.

lindsayneedscoffee:

I have a job interview tomorrow. Or today for some of you East Coast folks. Anyway, I am requesting, nay, begging for you guys to do the following:

[…wish me luck, etc.]

Thanks. I’m nervous.

It’s OK to be nervous about a job interview, but make sure you’re framing it with the right perspective.

• Good: Nervous because you’re excited about starting something new and great.
• Bad: Nervous because you’re worried about judgment and potential failure.

Remember, they need you more than you need them. Hiring and interviewing people is incredibly time-consuming and expensive. It takes a lot more time and money for them to interview you than for you to go on the interview. They need to fill this position, but you don’t need to be the one to fill it: you can just as easily take a different job.

There’s always another good opportunity for you to take. Maybe you don’t see it today and it’ll show up next week. But if you accept this job, you will miss tons of great opportunities during the time you’re working there, whether you know it or not.

This isn’t as much about you as it is about them. You’re interviewing them. This is where you’re going to spend the majority of your awake time every weekday, probably for at least a year or two. While they’re evaluating your potential fit in the job’s intended role, you’re asking a much more difficult question: Is this somewhere worthy of my time? There are tons of jobs, but I’m only [insert age here] once. Will I be satisfied spending this portion of my life doing this job for this company? Am I going to happily get out of bed every day to do this? When my friends and family ask me about my job, will I be proud and excited to talk about this? Would any massive portions of my education or interests be ignored or wasted here?

So drill them. Be picky. Ask questions about how your time and skills would be used and what you’d be working on. Observe everything happening around you: absorb as much as you can about the company and work environment. Is the work interesting? Does it appear well-managed? Will you be able to learn and grow professionally here, or would you be the smartest person in the room? Do the other employees seem friendly? Are you impressed by the interviewing process? (You’ll be working with people who got through it, whether that’s a good or bad thing.)

If they don’t offer you the job, oh well — it probably would have been a bad fit anyway. You’ll get another interview for a better job soon. That’s a much better outcome than the other failure direction: taking a bad or mediocre job and being miserable or bored for the next two years. Nobody can afford to risk that.

So let them be nervous. You have all of the control.

I love toaster ovens. Even when one owns a separate toaster and oven, the toaster oven is still one of the most useful appliances to have in the kitchen.

• For bagels: Even with wide-slotted “bagel” models, slot toasters always require a perfect bisection, fill up with smoking crumbs, and burn the backs of bagels — especially the seeds on everything bagels. (Anyone want to challenge me on whether the “everything” seed set should include salt?) But toaster ovens provide toasting-level high heat on top with low, even heat at a safe distance from below — low enough to even toast cheese-topped bagels such as asiago.

• For pizza: I’d never wish the mushy mess of microwave-reheated pizza on anyone. Oven-reheating is the way to go, but it takes far too long for most ovens to sufficiently heat up, so many people just give up and eat their leftover pizza cold or accept the inferior microwave output. Toaster ovens heat up quickly and reheat pizza almost as quickly as microwaves with far superior results.

• For large crumbly items that you may wish to toast: Try to slot-toast a muffin or scone. I dare you.

• For wide toast: Some of the best toasting bread is shaped a bit like a fat football. You know what I mean. These slices don’t fit in slot toasters, so you have to let it stick out the top and try to flip it in the middle of the cycle. You’ll never time it right.

• For multi-person toast: Big toaster ovens can fit 6-8 slices of bread simultaneously. With a slot toaster, when you’re serving toast for two people (or three if you have a fat four-slot model), you have to take turns. But it never works very well. You can’t eat together unless the earlier-toast consumers wait, but then theirs gets cold. And the toaster’s too hot after the first set, so it burns the outside and undercooks the inside of the second set.

I’ve endured many long years without one, but as part of the terms of my wedding, I’m finally allowed to get one — and I can pick whichever model I want, regardless of cost or size. I’ve done some basic research, and as far as I can tell, the best one is the Cuisinart TOB-175. Not only does Consumer Reports rate it the highest, but it has an impressive 4.5-star average from 520 Amazon customer reviews. Nothing else comes close to that record.

As far as I can tell, the only negative thing about it is that many reviewers don’t like how it cooks the top much more than the bottom for standard toast, seemingly intentionally and by design. This is illustrated very well in one of Amazon’s user-submitted photos. But I think that’s how it’s supposed to be. Slot toasters do this, too, which is why most of them label which side is “in” for bagels — they’re just so imprecise that you probably don’t notice the difference. I admit that the pictured difference is more than many people may want, but for me, that’s a strength: it’s probably going to do a great job on bagels, where you want a much bigger difference than “regular” toast.

Does this seem like a sane choice? Anyone have it? Or is there another God-toaster-oven that I’m missing?

Tiff and I are going on a week-long cruise for our honeymoon in 9 days. People keep telling me, “It will be so nice to be completely offline, unreachable, and disconnected.” Then they relate a story about how they went on vacation or something and had no cellular reception and no computer, and it was awesome.

This seems to be a prevalent feeling. To most people, the computer is an annoying tool that they reluctantly use because their job requires it, and mobile phones are a way for their boss to reach them wherever they are, creating an expectation of constant availability for “working”.

I’ve never viewed my connected technology this way. Yes, computers and phones are a way for me to be connected to my work. But they’re also my play, my hobby, my leisure, my education, my exposure to society, and my enlightenment. I like this connection.

When I wake up, I use the computer. During my commute, I use the computer and the phone. My job is the computer. Before I go to sleep, I use the computer. On the weekends, I use the computer. When I’m waiting on line somewhere, I use the phone.

When I’m using the computer, I’m not just working. When I’m using the phone, I’m rarely talking or answering work emails. I’m having fun, I’m reading, and I’m learning. I love knowledge and information, and my ubiquitous connection to the rest of the world gives me an infinite supply.

Most people imagine their personal paradises as something like sipping drinks on a beach and doing nothing. To me, that would be hell. I’d rot into boredom and depression from mental atrophy.

I don’t even drink a lot because I don’t like my mind to have reduced capacity for very long. I get bored and want to go back to interesting things, but then I get frustrated if I’ve had more than about 2 drinks because I can’t concentrate on anything.

Too many people never use their brains after they’re done with schooling. They go into boring jobs doing boring things that never challenge them, then they go home and melt in front of the TV or mentally sedate themselves (from what?) in a bar. It’s a tragic waste of life.

To those people, “vacation” means a complete disconnection from the world and further mental sedation.

To me, “vacation” means having fun and experiencing new things or places without the burden of a schedule or much responsibility. I can even be productive, working on new ideas or crossing long-standing to-dos off the list. This often requires a computer, but that’s what I want — that can enable my vacation. And a week of this is all I ever want before getting bored and wanting to go back to work.

After a weekend of vacation-forced brainfreeze and dealing with immense family drama, it’s incredibly nice to get back to my life of being surrounded by intelligent people doing great things and always challenging me to become a better person.

In the “real world” outside of my closest friends, I don’t fit in at all — in far too many ways to list right now when I should be going to sleep. I do a decent job of faking it when necessary, but I really don’t understand most people, and they really don’t understand me. I feel like I’m an outsider. An observer. I’m always completely puzzled (and often saddened) about why people are the way they are and why they do the things they do. The real America, away from young people living in trendy coastal cities, is a place where I absolutely don’t fit in at all — and I marvel that anyone actually does.

I’ve only ever found a handful of people through typical real-world situations who I can really associate with. But the internet is an incredibly efficient matchmaker. The same power that enables odd fetish groups to exist also enables me to find other people remarkably similar to me. I always thought I was the only one, and I was somehow incredibly weird (in a bad way) for that. But there are plenty of people like me out there. I follow 226 of them on Tumblr alone. And when I meet them in real life, I’m blown away by how easily we connect — especially compared to how poorly I usually connect with strangers. I feel like we’ve been friends for years, even for people whose tumblelogs I’ve only been following for a few months and who I’ve only met in person for a few minutes.

The internet shows me that my thoughts aren’t that strange after all. And that’s a great thing: I find acceptance, and I’m challenged to define, refine, and defend what were previously only vague notions. I’m not just some lone weirdo thinking these odd things about the world. I can’t look around and think “nobody gets it” because I know that all of you do.

Intellectually, it’s even better. I’m attacked, defied, outclassed, and proven wrong regularly — and every time, I become a better person. All of my personality flaws are called out, dragged right into the open, by complete strangers, who are really doing me the biggest favor in the world by making me improve myself.

If such a thing exists, I certainly have an internet addiction. And I don’t care. I have absolutely no desire to be a “normal” member of society, doing whatever normal people do with their time (go upstate and drive boats in circles, then come inside to watch “the game” and grunt occasionally?). I’m very happy here, doing what I’m doing, and being a part of something so amazing, challenging, and stimulating.

Warning to non-geek readers: You probably want to skip this post.

I have an 8-core Mac Pro, and I sometimes have a big list of CPU-intensive commands I want to run (image resizing with ImageMagick, video/audio encoding with ffmpeg, etc.), but they’re usually single-threaded or just very bad at using multiple CPU cores.

I assumed that there must be some clever little shell utility to run 8 of these commands at once from a big list until the batch is done, effectively utilizing my 8 cores.

I couldn’t find such a utility, so I wrote it myself. And I’m sharing it with you, because there’s a chance you’ll find it useful, too. (Even if it already exists, at least I got to learn how to use the pthread library and flex my atrophied C muscles.)

Here’s the C source code and documentation. It’s only 57 lines of code (preceded by 22 lines of documentation).

Works at least on OS X 10.5+, CentOS, and Debian. Probably works with any Linux or BSD system. (In theory, it should work with anything with pthreads.)

Usage:

parallelize {thread-count} < big_list_of_commands.txt

Demo:

(for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10; do echo "echo 'Delay $i'; sleep $i ; \
echo 'Done $i'" ; done) | parallelize 4

Let me know if you find bugs (especially parallelism bug potential), or if you just find it useful and want to say hi.

Rosie Siman wrote this detailed response on my criticism of Starbucks’ new “fresh roasting” campaign.

She makes many good points, but I think this is the meat of her response:

[…] if you ask most coffee shops when their coffee was roasted, they would have no clue. They wouldn’t know most likely because their managment doesn’t want to promote the fact that the coffee was roasted months ago. Coffee is (often) roasted in the beans’ city of origin: ie, overseas.

And:

Now having said that, the average coffee-consumer probably won’t even taste a difference in the beans, so it definitely is a PR effort.

That’s sad, but I recognize that it’s true.

As I said yesterday, most people don’t really like coffee — they like dairy and sugar. But even among those who take it black (I’m curious — do you know what portion of your customers do?), there’s a bigger truth here:

Most people simply don’t have good taste, or don’t care enough to be discerning.

Apple products are great because Steve Jobs and much of Apple’s upper staff has exceptionally good taste. Most people (with bad or no taste) don’t see what the big deal is, and they’ll buy the $300 Wal-Mart special. But to the discerning minority, there is a big difference.

It’s not like audiophile placebo — there are real differences between good computers and bad computers and good coffee and bad coffee. The only difference is whether people notice or care, and I recognize that most don’t.

But I do. I try to be discerning in everything, because I love it. I love the research and acquisition of specialty things, I love finding new and better versions of the things I like, and I love discovering the immense depth of hobbies and goods that most people never see.

I shave with this stuff when everyone else uses the Mach 3. I buy wine from this guy when everyone else drinks Bud Lite. I use these fancy headphones when everyone else buys Sony. I drink loose tea when everyone else is fine with Lipton dustbags. I carry around 5 pounds of camera gear every day because I won’t settle for bad photos. And I got this ridiculous monster because no laptop would satisfy me.

Most people aren’t discerning, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not allowed to be.

Finally, a perfectly valid question from Rosie to end with:

Why do you go to Starbucks if it disppoints you so much?

Most of the time, I go to coffeeshops that I like more. But I do go to Starbucks occasionally for the same reasons most Starbucks customers go to Starbucks:

1. Sometimes it’s the best choice in the area.
2. It’s usually closest, and usually open when others are closed.
3. Sometimes I’m with others who want to go there.

Starbucks is much better than any convenience store or fast food place. Starbucks’ coffee is also better than what I’ve had at some “real” coffeeshops. (They’re not all good, obviously.)

For what they are — a high-volume, easily reproducible, massive national corporate chain — they’ve achieved a respectable level of quality.

Their marketing keeps trying to tell us a different story, though. We’re told that Starbucks is our nice local cultured coffeeshop serving fresh, high-quality coffee that justifies its price premium.

But it’s not. It can’t be, and it never will be.

This $50 refurbished iPod Shuffle just took down my new Mac Pro for an hour.

The Shuffle started acting funny the other day while docked: it wouldn’t eject or re-mount, while Finder and iTunes gave strange error messages for it. I quickly forgot, since I hardly ever use it.

Tonight I powered down my Mac Pro to move some wires, and when I turned it back on, it wouldn’t get past the gray boot screen. It was pretty clearly an issue with boot devices. After an hour of troubleshooting, including the futile removal of all 4 hard drives and my extra RAM, I finally remembered that there was this little Shuffle docked to it from my desk.

The Shuffle, a USB mass-storage device, would have been questioned by the computer during boot. Here’s how that went:

Mac Pro: Hey, USB devices out there! Are any of you bootable?
Keyboard: No.
Mouse: No.
Monitor hub: No.
Epson thing: No, but let me make some unnecessary noises because I’m an Epson thing.
Scanner: No.
iPod Shuffle: …ugh… what? Oh! I think… wait… just… a… minute…

The timeout expires in about a minute.

Mac Pro: Shuffle?… ok, I’ll have to move on in a second—
iPod Shuffle: No! Wait! I… er… uh…

Another minute.

iPod Shuffle: Oh, I think I am bootable after all. Shit, hold on… Where did I put my keys?… aw man… I have no idea what’s going on…

(dramatization)

Lesson learned: iPod Shuffles aren’t very good.

(Photo by Tiff)

Me:

[The Mac Pro] is, by far, the most amazingly fast, spacious, capable, and well-designed computer I’ve ever used.

Casey:

I have no doubt that’s a nice machine, and I am certainly glad his all-too-familiar, all-too-painful wait is over. That said, can one of the Fanbois explain to me what makes Apple computers any better than a PC set up by an intelligent user?

I think I’m qualified to answer this because, as you know, I was a great Windows user. I maximized Windows’ potential for many years, having only switched to Macs in 2004. I was such a good user that I didn’t even run antivirus software because I hated the performance penalties. I was just smart about how I used it.

Let’s start with hardware. Sure, it’s cheap, but PC hardware is crappy. It’s badly designed, it looks tacky, quality control sucks, and it flakes out too often. I can’t even begin to count the hours I spent in high school and college screwing around with my (or my friends’) PC hardware, trying to get custom hardware combinations to work properly together. And just try to find a PC case that looks decent and is comfortable to work in.

The software world is much more divided. The quality of OS X, and its third-party software, absolutely blows away anything on Windows. The difference is huge.

Mac software follows design principles that you rarely see in Windows:

• Incredible attention to detail
• Simple, clean interfaces
• Justified, focused feature design (no “kitchen sink” apps)
• Respect for the user’s time (no stealing focus, no unnecessary prompting)
• Respect for the user’s intelligence (no “we’re protecting you from this choice”)
• High quality (if it says it will do this and work this way, it will)

These principles are everywhere: from OS X itself and Apple’s other applications to the third-party shareware and freeware communities.

The attention to detail is particularly amazing. I recently tried a Windows Smartphone, and it was clear that nobody at Microsoft had ever actually used one of these. Apple hardware and software engineers will take great pains to ensure that a screw is centered or a form field positions the cursor to require the least user effort.

Admittedly, I haven’t used a Mac for more than about 10 minutes in as many years, but I’m failing to see what a Mac can bring me that I can’t accomplish for half the cost with an equivalent PC, and Ubuntu or the Linux distribution of your choice?

Cost isn’t as ridiculous as many people assume. Most Apple machines are very competitively priced with similarly specced PCs. But Apple’s specs only match the high end of most manufacturers’ lineups.

The Mac Pro ($2800) is very reasonably priced for an 8-core Xeon workstation. The MacBook ($1100) is very reasonably priced for a midrange consumer notebook.

It’s not that Apple machines are expensive — they just don’t have a low end.

I get (from what I can tell) just as bulletproof a machine, on great hardware (I use a ThinkPad), without the Apple tax, and with 90% of the eye candy thanks to Compiz Fusion. What makes a Mac so much better?

You can put visual effect layers on top of Windows or Linux, but it’s just painting a turd. Instead of ordinary frustration and time-wasting, you get pretty frustration and time-wasting. (And that’s subjective — personally, I find Vista’s Aero and the Linux “eye candy” add-ons to be garish, ugly, tacky, and completely missing the point.)

We don’t use Macs and Mac software because of the eye candy. We use them because of the design. Design and eye candy are very different — design is a combination of how it looks, what it does (and doesn’t do), and how it works.

Use a Mac for 6 months, and you’ll wonder why you ever used anything else.