Donde encontrarme cuando no estoy aquí

This is an easy link to find but I haven’t really been publishing here, in case you haven’t noticed. I publish a decent amount of content on Yelp that documents healthy portions of my doings and happenings, share content through Google Reader, offer occasional blasts of swellness on Twitter, and play Mob Wars connect briefly with old friends on Facebook even. If you’re interested enough to find me here, I hope you’re also interested enough to find me there.  You’ll also find me back here sooner or later, I’m sure.

Existen otros medios para realizer sus objetivos

A tale relayed by some random fellow who walked into the Arcade Barbershop while I was getting my hair cut this afternoon. He came in, addressed a fellow patron with this story, and left.

“There’s an old man who lives down the block from the local high school, and as school has just started, the kids are coming by every afternoon, banging on every trash can they pass by, and it’s driving him nuts. 

So one day he walks out while the kids are coming down the street, and says “Hey kids. I love what you’re doing here – you brighten up my afternoons with these sounds and laughter every day. I want you to keep coming by, so how about I pay you each a dollar a day to come by?”

The kids of course are thrilled, and come by each afternoon that week, shouting and banging and carrying on. 

The next week, though, the old man walks out and says “Kids, I hate to do this to you, but times are tight, and I can’t afford the dollars anymore. I’m gonna need to cut you down to fifty cents.” The kids, still happy to be making money, don’t mind, and keep coming back. But the next Monday, the old man meets them again. 

“Sorry fellas – my Social Security check hasn’t come in yet. I can’t tell what happened, but I don’t have very much money. I’m gonna have to cut you down to ten cents a day.”

The oldest kid says “Ten cents a day? I’m not gonna bang on these cans for ten cents a day! Find someone else to do that for you!” They all leave, and never come back. 

Lesson of the day: There exist other means to achieve your objectives.

Mat Honan is my new paperback

My internet life is funny and seemingly different from a lot of my friends, a lot of which I believe stems from comparably long immersion in online communities. While the last few years have brought the idea of social networks into the public eye, online social networks date back decades, long before I could claim involvement. While a lot of people use their Facebook to catch up with people they’ve known in real life, I find myself more frequently meeting people IRL that I’ve known online for a while. 

The most recent of these is Mat Honan, whose many achievements include the recent publication of his first book, Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle. It’s a followup of the eponymous website and chronicles 366 nice things Obama ostensibly did for you and/or me.  A lot of them are pretty funny (Obama turned you on to David Bowie’s work from the 70s!) and a lot of them are internet-related; I haven’t finished the book yet but have already seen references to Twitter, Metafilter, Kottke, YouTube, FriendFeed, FP, etc. Which I think is why I find it so charming – I’m part of these same networks he’s talking about (albeit JV to his varsity) and I get the in-jokes that both make my internet experience funnier and maintain a lot of the divide between my online and offline friend groups, even as they begin to mesh. 

Since Matt Haughey left before I could try to tell him how low my original MeFi user number was and I can’t pick out Scott Beale in a crowd, Mat was the only person I found myself starstruck in front of. That’s not the best word, but I do hold him in high regard (see also) for the work he’s done and continues to do. Congrats to Mat for the book; it’s nice to put a face to an avatar.

Google Reader & FriendFeed – Ian’s shared items.

Google Reader -Ian’s shared items. Like I said, I’m trying to do less linkdumps, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop reading things I’d like to share with you. My reader page is where things I share from my RSS feed can be seen; my FriendFeed page is where things I do across the internet are tracked and concentrated. If you’re following those two feeds – perhaps in your very own Google Reader or FriendFeed account - you’ve got 90% of Online Me covered.  Plus, maybe then you’d start sharing too!

And it appears to be a long time gone

So, it’s been a while since I’ve even posted a link dump, with my last couple of posts being hastily written status updates to check out a new app or to help a friend run for political office. There’s a lot of reasons behind that, this month in particular, and I’ll get to some of them. But one of the reasons was simply a crisis of faith in my editorial stance, propelled by two excellent reads from the month – Warren Ellis’s post The Patchwork Years, and the Big Contrarian’s Tacky.

“The world does not need another linkblog,” Ellis writes in a discussion of the crazy web years of 2001-2007. He’s talking about the explosion of content that’s been enabled by the growth of personal weblogs, the boon of social media networks such as MySpace and Facebook, content hosts like YouTube and Flickr, and more. For a while, curating this was a necessary, useful role. When I think of the curated internet I think first and foremost of kottke.org, from whom a lot of the content here originates. He’s a day-one kind of blogger and for a long time was directing me to some of the best of the web – along with MetaFilter, BoingBoing, and others.

The thing is, while the world may not need another linkblog, it seemed like my likely readers did, or did from me. I’m frequently asked about what I’m reading and more often than not these days I’ll reply with something from my Reader, not a book. Regardless, even though I like the links I’ve been posting, people weren’t clicking through on them, they lacked cohesion of any sort, and other than being able to publish as soon as I had a dozen or so to go with, there’s been nothing particularly appealing about them.

In Tacky, Jack Shedd is talking about the problogging industry, in which I am not actor but spectator, but still found valuable ideas. “There are only three requirements I’ve ever sussed out from reading excellent sites. Write well, write often, and write with passion. It seems if you can manage that, you’ll find an audience,” he writes. Well, I’d like to think I write well, with all the passion summable, although I’m certainly not writing often. And I do want an audience, certainly, one beyond my friends and family and online networks, so I’m well suited to follow his advice. I don’t want to be immersed in the narcissistic parade of self-congratulation a lot of the blog world is, but I am interested in at least having people know my name.

So where does that leave me? Certainly, I need to find a balance of publishing schedules – enough to let people like my dad know I’m still here and keep the front page fresh, but not one so rigorous that I’m publishing crap for the sake of hitting Submit. I do want to do links to the external but not be tacky about it, which isn’t much of an issue unless I really start looking for a bigger audience. But I also want to provide some documentation of my life and thoughts, not just those of others. The thing is, there are a lot of ways for me to share content now – Google Reader, FriendFeed, Twitter and more – and it’s not always easiest or best to put them here. So look for less frequent content, but hopefully more to say than just what Kottke, Waxy and a few others had already found interesting.

Anyway, some updates that should but may or may not get their own post. July has been a busy but great month. I made it camping three weekends out of four, including Wright’s Beach in Sonoma State Park for the 4th of July, a private campground near Guerneville for which I need to track down info, and this last weekend in Big Basin State Park near Santa Cruz, which included 11 miles of excellent hiking, waterfalls, huge redwoods, and more. I also accepted a full-time position with Yelp and have agreed to sell my interest in ecomentum, which surely deserves a post of its own. There’s a post’s worth of my new favorite apps for the iPhone, certainly, and there will be others about two weddings I’m heading to soon – Emily and Drew next weekend in upstate New York, followed by Johnny and Sheri here in San Francisco in September. There’s an upcoming recap of my month in spending and some of the tools and lessons I’ve learned.

Which, to me, sounds a lot like “I still don’t know where this site is going.” True enough, at least not until a few more things settle out in the new job and routines. I’ve felt restricted enough by the free side of WordPress to look into investing in hosting, etc, but that’s money I need to be certain can be well-spent before I commit. Keep checking back and I’ll keep trying to improve.

And now, on to all the links I’ve saved in draft over the last three weeks or so:

• Is the word nabe ok? (More importantly, is the self-referential circle of some of my internet friends at times oddly hilarious and goofy? Yes).
• As a followup to my notes on budgeting last month, How to Open Multiple Accounts at ING Direct.
• I use a lot of computers – one at my desk at home, the laptop downstairs occasionally, my work machine, the iPhone, as well as being likely to check stuff on someone else’s computer sometimes – and often forget to log out of sites. Google now lets you sign out remotely if you need to, and see if other people are accessing your stuff. Neat.
• 50 things being blamed on rising gas prices. I like lists.
• Online acquaintance Matthew Baldwin made a muxtape of songs about nuclear war, called Back In the Day When We All Thought We’d Die.
• A pretty cool story from the folks at Pixar treating a customer right, in the middle of a dense argument on Wall-E (so yes, I’m pulling content fron an article I haven’t read about a movie I haven’t seen).
• Brittney linked me to a funny Wikipedia screenshot following the confession of Hans Reiser, who earlier this month led police to the body of the wife he killed. He’s a well-known Linux developer who I first heard about a year ago in this story, and there’s nothing really funny about it except for crass Internet humor.
• I think “Everything for a reason” is bs, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t ring true in this beautiful essay by Caitlin Burke.
• We’ve had a lot of fires throughout California this summer, and one of them claimed my favorite swim spot for at least the next year. Fortunately there’s a website to tell me where to find more – nationwide!
• The State of the Web, summer 2008.
• Oh No My Money combines two things I love: financial tracking and graphs.
• A profile of a well-known San Francisco face – Owen Dias, Powell Street’s No Sex Guy. He’s not the legend Frank Chu is, but I think most people would know him.

Waiting for The Dark Knight

Testing out the WordPress iPhone app while waiting for the movie to start. People are fired up and the Metreon seems poorly prepared for crowd control.

The app itself is pretty easy to write from. I imagine most posts will be somewhat rudimentary until I get to a desk, but it’s pretty neat to publish so daily from my pocket.

Running for Office: It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll

As refreshing as Obama’s run has been to me, it at best is a small cornerstone of the transformation I feel the country needs. I’m scared of career politicians, after all; that’s not how it was meant to be. 

An online friend of mine from Kansas is running for office. I support everything about him, platform and methodologies. And from what I gather, he has a legit chance to win. If you’d like to see some change in politics, I think you might want to give $8.34 to Sean Tevis. 

(On a side note, sorry for the lack of content lately. I’m up to some other stuff and trying to do other things than link dumps has proved harder than I thought. I shall be back, though).

Around the web in 80 lines

Before we get to the cool stuff I’ve seen around lately, some blatant cross-promotion. Brittney, my girlfriend, is the likely reason for nearly all the non-familial traffic around here, but if you aren’t checking out her sites, you’re missing some cool stuff. CBS5’s Eye on Blogs is where she writes professionally, sharing the best of the Bay Area bloggers as well as her own pieces, and despite it maybe not being everything she had hoped (I blame the lack of vitriolic hatemongers in this stupid, tolerant place) I think it’s a great site and a harbinger of our future relationship with local news. And last night before bed I read this summary of June on her personal page. Being an experienced traveler and a guy who’d already lived in four different states by the time I was 19, it’s sometimes hard to remember that all of this – this being California, or anywhere but Tennessee – is so new to her, and I think she does a great job of bringing perspective to the differences. I remember the days when I marveled at the weather and the ocean and the every day and didn’t take this place for granted, and it’s been invigorating to be next to that enthusiasm once again. It’s also always nice to see myself complimented in print. So make sure you check her out too; she’s way better than she cops to.

• OK, enough of the mushiness and more of the things I like. First up: An interview with Liz Phair about the reissue of Exile in Guyville:

I have no idea what a new listener would think of it. I couldn’t even imagine. Probably like, “she can’t even sing.” After “American Idol”, they’re probably like, “I don’t get it.” I have no idea, but it can’t be that different for a fan as for me. It can’t be that dissimilar. I think there’s something great about resurrecting your past. Each listener will have associations with it if they really cared about the record– that was the summer they were dating this guy or driving cross-country with their friends or whatever. It was far enough away that I hope it has that feeling and doesn’t threaten you. Good ol’ nostalgia.

For me, this record was all about my first year at Trinity University in Texas. I listened to a decent amount of female artists back then – Ani, Tori Amos, I even owned a couple Indigo Girls cds – and Phair was the middle ground, a closing argument when someone tried to tell me women didn’t rock. Here’s an excerpt from the reissue DVD and here’s the song Flower, which was about the boldest thing I’d ever heard a woman sing in 1996.  [via]

• Infoporn: Noise pollution in San Francisco [via]. Also, you might want to check out EveryBlock if it’s available in your metropolis. If it can be tied to your area code, it can be RSS’ed to you, including Craigslistings, Yelp reviews, Flickr photos, and many, many reports of arrests for rock cocaine possession.
• Anil Dash – the Jay-Z of blogging – wrote a very interesting piece on Bill Gates and his philanthropic work:

Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft’s success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria. That, effectively, is what Bill Gates has done.

• I met Nick Douglas very briefly last Friday, and the funniest thing I’ve seen on his blog thus far is The Friends with Benefits Benefit Summary Prospectus. That said, it’s cool to be able to find the best Lifehacker posts quickly and easily, but I was dismayed by the saturation of [this is good]. As funny as Nick is and as much as I like Deadspin I’m kinda grossed out by the Gawker empire these days.
• I’d rather never see the Twitter failwhale again, but this was kinda neat. [via]
• If you have the time to read Foreign Policy articles and the budget to afford them, I’d love to know what’s behind the walls of 12 things the next president must do.
• Finally, nearly every year I go to the hill country outside Austin, Texas, and spend a weekend with two families worth of friends that I’ll have known for 15 years next month. There’s a couple that’s part of this platoon that hasn’t been able to make in the past couple times I’ve been, in part because my friend Jana has been battling Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I’ll understand if you don’t want to read about it; I’m not sure why I’m linking to it. But Dr. and Mr. Reynolds, I’m thinking of you guys and I know you will pull through.

Enjoy the 4th, everyone. I’ll be trying to enjoy the great outdoors without a sense of entitlement or assumptions, with some really good friends, and fixing to find some new revenue streams.

Worldwideeyed Archives, Vol 1 – Hanoi

Ed note: the first real blogging effort I ever made was a website called worldwideeyed.com, chronicling my travels in SE Asia from late 2004 through early 2005. More public journal than traditional blog, I wrote near stream of consciousness essays every few days and posted them, with pictures when I could. The site wasn’t worth maintaining but I do like some of the stuff I wrote quite a bit, and so I’ve decided to publish some of the best stuff here. The following entry was written January 1, 2005, and is published without editing, for better or for worse.

I arrived in Hanoi Tuesday night, back on my own after a week in Laos. I was both psyched to be back by myself — Laos was amazing and I was with a great group of people, but at times felt crazy for some solitude — and concerned, because in the few weeks I travelled mostly by myself in late November, I found myself actually craving more company than I had.

The plane landed after dark, not an ideal situation for me — I try to arrive places early in the morning, as it is easier to negotiate and secure lodging and one is generally safer and more comfortable. After switching my money — it only takes about $60 in USD to be a millionaire in Vietnamese Dong, so now I’m a multimillionaire — I found the $2 bus into town. I was the only white guy on it, which felt great, a small win for the traveler.

There was a girl, I think she said her name was Ho An, seven years old or so with perfect command of English. We talked a very little bit, and she was extremely polite and well spoken. When I think of reasons the US might be hitting the downslope in global positioning it seems to be in, it’s things like this I think of — children here seem so much more versatile in terms of things like language. I realize that in North America one only needs two languages to excel and one to get by, whereas there are so many more in Europe or SE Asia, and that’s probably a main reason. But the world is becoming more global, and even though everyone wants to learn English everywhere I’ve been, I think the (lack of) ability to speak multiple languages will be a major thing. I’m glad I speak Spanish, but I feel a need to learn more if I want to be a part of a global community going forward.

Anyway, one of the most beautiful moments of my travels so far was riding from the airport into the city, listening to Ho An sing “This old man” in her soprano English. I was I had the ability to record it at the time, it was truly amazing.

Ha Noi, or at least the old quarter, is a charming little place. One of the things I’ve liked most both in Luang Prabang and here is the architecture — the upside of colonialism, I say to myself. The old quarter is filled with narrow little blocks and alleys, and in the past each street was the market for a different thing — one block for shoes, for example, another for silver wares and one for textiles. I am staying on the street for mortuary needs.

Traffic here is insane. I remember writing in Costa Rica that the traffic reminded me of a school of fish — everything moving in a group, not really restricted to lanes, filled with jerky movement but amazingly enough never colliding. The roads in Bangkok are stifling and slow. But here, ninety percent or more of the traffic is motorbikes, which are more agile and their drivers more fidgety and prone to sudden movements. Lanes are present but meaningless; people fill whatever available space in whatever direction they can, constantly honking as bumping into each other. The increased maneuverability means that things can get really jammed, to the extent that as a pedestrian, I actually got caught in a jam from which I couldn’t move for literally minutes the other day. Crossing streets can be a nightmare.

I am reminded of one of the lessons I read during a brief experiment in the martial arts last summer — move swiftly and with decisiveness of purpose. This is exactly how to navigate traffic in places like this. Look both ways, sure, but once you start crossing, keep moving. Do not hesitate. People will adjust to you, usually, but if you show fear and hesitate, their adjusted trajectory goes through the spot you were supposed to vacate. It works in Bangkok, but here, there are so many bikes that it’s almost impossible not to balk at one of them. It’s taken me minutes to get off a curb here. I’ll post pictures of some of the crazier intersections.

Anyway, I’ve sort of hit a writing roadblock, so rather than bumble lamely through a recap of what I’ve done here (Uncle Ho’s grave, the Hanoi Hilton, etc), I’ll save it for another session. It just hit midnight on the East Coast, so happy new year everyone — be safe and sound. I’m headed down to Hue on a train tonight and will be going a little further south to Hoi An in a day or two, then need to decide if I’m going all the way to Ho Chi Minh City or back up to some of the islands north of here. It’s so damned cold here I don’t see how islands can be that fun, but they’re rumored to be amazing, and I’ll make it there sooner or later regardless.

Ed note: check out this time-lapse video of Hanoi traffic. If this is where I think it is, it’s only a corner or two away from where I was talking about.

$2885.96

That’s my documented spending for June. That’s nearly everything – rent, utilities, phone, groceries, dining out, beers, everything I could remember for the month, minus the first couple days before I kept my budget. That’s the good news – I think that’s a pretty small number, given that I live in San Francisco, one of the pricier places on earth. The bad news is the relationship that number has with my income, which I’ll spare you the details of.

Having realized that I need to keep a much warier eye on my spending, I started keeping a budget using a spreadsheet I got from PearBudget* a while back. Now, in 2004, I kept track of every dollar I spent using Quicken – seriously, to within less than $150 accounted for by the end of the year. That was a valuable exercise in that it helped me identify where my money was going and how it could be better spent, but it was also extremely tedious in that every penny had to be accounted for somewhere. So I had categories for my different savings, checking, and credit accounts, but I also had to account for cash and the change tub. Going to the ATM required balancing two accounts and putting away my pennies at the end of the night had to be documented, and I grew tired of it. This system is much more simple for me as I can basically just track numbers. Plus, since I host my budget on Google Docs, I don’t have to have my laptop in front of me to keep up to date – I can do it from any computer and even my phone. If this doesn’t strike your fancy, there’s another pretty good spreadsheet at Get Rich Slowly.

(Sidenote – While we’re on Google Docs, here’s a pretty good primer from Leonard Lin on using it to track portfolios yourself. Google Finance is now to the minute instead of the usual 15-minute delay, and you can pull content directly from them in the formulas for your assets. [via])

Anyway, since I’m paying more detailed attention to my finances at present, I’ve also done a lot of reading and looking for sites to help me get right with my money. Some of the best I’ve found are the aforementioned Get Rich Slowly and I Will Teach You to Be Rich, both of which present money saving tips and discussions on spending and wealth management, but mostly provide inspiration. I’ve also been checking out My Open Wallet, and  I really enjoyed this post from The Simple Dollar, which explains how to use ING Direct’s account features to help figure and maintain a budget, and recently added the site to my reader. I have an ING account, but never realized you could set up subaccounts to help budget for specific goals. That’s a neat hack by them and one I shall look into, as until recently I had just been dumping a tiny amount from my checking account into the ING savings. Finally, I’ve been looking at BlipBlap, particulary this post of 38 thoughts on wealth and prosperity, even though I violated #2 when I stopped the automatic ING deposits. As soon as I’ve got my head all the way above water, those are back on.

But back to the lecture at hand. Money is going to be tight for a while, there’s no two ways about it. Looking at my budget, it’s not like I overspent on much. I spent $50 on taxis, which I can reduce some.  I spent about $480 on food (thanks to the subsidized work kitchen!), which also isn’t bad but can be cut back – half of that was in dining out, and even those $5 lunches can be curtailed. I bought new clothes this month for a total of about $190, but that’s the first expenditure of that sort in a while, and in fact I’ve even been endeavoring to extend the life span of some of what I already have.  $144 in entertainment? That’s less than a beer a day. I also paid some irregular expenses this month, so we’ll have to wait for a few months to get more accurate numbers. But the point is that I’m doing it, and looking more closely at what I have and have not. My #1 priority at this point is to get out of debt as soon as possible and start building towards the future.

*Pear Budget is now a webapp, but I still have a blank Excel spreadsheet version. Email if interested.