It’s dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it’s not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They’re the NCOs of the intellectual world. They can’t tell how smart you are. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that. (What you’ll wish you’d known)

Many things we teach in schools are going to be outdated in less than five years’ time. Some everlasting things got taught but some others did not. The modern schooling system made it inreasonably convinced that once it’s over the learning process is “over”, and with a clearly defined exit strategy (finish college, get diploma) it has became a behemoth.

I go with Jobs on this,

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, “Let’s start a school.” You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they’d start schools. And you’d have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

They’d do it because they’d be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don’t learn until you’re older — yet you could learn them when you’re younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?

God, how exciting that could be! But you can’t do it today. You’d be crazy to work in a school today. You don’t get to do what you want. You don’t get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn’t it. You’re not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school — none of this is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something to solve the problem with education.

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.

It’s not as simple as you think when you’re in your 20s — that technology’s going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won’t. (Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing )

Barker is updated with a jQuery-based replacement method (we added a lazy-loading mechanism with a callback) so now it works with Chrome.

Don’t quit your day job

Word. But maybe untrue.

That’s why the dubbed “C on Rails” is outright a joke. We can’t live without embedded software, but things start to get awry when people obsessed with embedded software start dictating how applied, consumer software ought to be done.

Perhaps because I’m obsessed with applied software. Perhaps because I love prototyping, and am bad at mass-producing. Time will tell.

Factoring Estimations

By anectodal evidence, it takes me approximately 1 week to churn out a full-fledged design, but that week is often scattered within a span of 2 or 3. That means my turnaround is not “one week” but 3. Rule of thumb: multiply the budget, and the time it takes to finish everything by 3.

A designer friend of mine goes this way:

“Two monthes of cushion time to the estimation, always.”

Word.

Get up, rinse and shower. Code. Make breakfast, have a round of tea. Do more design. Twit. Push some pixels. Email clients and customers. Do more coding. Checkout social networks. Twit. Occassionally meet people. Sleep.

Life, according to a junior

Get up, lie in bed. Twit. Code some more and twit, make breakfast while reading the Onion. […]

Generally speaking

Live according to the Maker’s Schedule if you want to ship stuff. Piss people off, play havoc with corporate drones in a non-offending way, or do whatever you could without risking your relationship with people… to fight for time you deserve for making your product.

Also, how to do what you love, emphasis mine:

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.

Rework

Read 37signal’s Rework on Kindle.app on two shortly borrowed iPads separately, once skimmingly and once immersedly. That’s it: change somebody can believe in.

Words merely wraps more-banal misdemeanors. Pronunced and written stuff simply has more power, for we still believe in oaths.

ipso pseudo-facto.

One more curio: blog theme¹ finally tweaked. No commenting as of now.

“Insightful, and not negative”

Reason why I adore living where the best and brightest of the swarm are. Alright — “covet”. New roomie was awfully exhilarated upon spotting Gruber’s new tagline. We spent a fine hour coming up with an ancient Chinese translation, in temporary vain.

Twitter Anywhere / mono.twitterEngine

Vincent raved much about it (“Fun, but it’s buggy”), partially because that I haven’t pushed a working copy of mono.twitterEngine yet. Now it seems that the low-level work could be completely avoided, and if everything is transposed we’ll have mono.twitterEngine concentrate on acting as a persistance layer.

I am thinking of this pattern:

var twit = mono.twitterEngine({

    account: 'evadne',
    retrieveMessagesNewerThanID: 16384,
    retrieveMessagesOlderThanID: 1048576,
    delegate: this

});

var twitDeux = mono.twitterEngine('foo', function newTweetHandler () {

    //  …

});

this.monoTwitterEngineRetrievedNewTweets = function (predicateObject, sender) {

    //  …

}

Alas, forgive my Cocoa-headedness.

“Looks like an engineer designed it”

This quote deserves its place within Clients From Hell². The most despicable aspect of this quote is that it was directed at a visual / UI designer who happens to write code that pawns what the peeps within that shop — which, miserably, developed a virtual keyboard for production, without designing an API for the much-adored “backspace” key — produces, from its supervisor. Turns out that working with a colleague might help immensely (“I am the front-end person, and he does the coding”, instead of “Oh hell yes it all comes from a single person, speaking”).

This aforementioned company pitches its solution as low-cost and “easy to implement”, and plans to sell it thru Amazon.

RGBA

Vincent and I regularly attend a weekly meetup called RGBA to catch up with a few web designer friends. We do run a blog and, though it might not be as insightful, it is definitely not negative.

On Iridia

The whole is larger than the sum of the parts; that is the sole rationale why Iridia ought to exist. More on this later.

—

—

Passing as a feminine entity today. Finally got hair magic working. Major goal of 2010 is to transition.

Got my “first” (in a more serious tone) polaroid developed, and am very happy about it:

See http://tuber.monoceroi.com for more information. Tuber lets you watch six videos simultaneously, but hackers can easily give it a twist. (hint: change tbConfig.dimensions, then hit tbActions.init(); to see as many videos as you would, if you have a giant display.)

I do feel like Leeloo while playing with this.

Next stop: a photostream visualizer that actually tells stories. This is quite difficult and may take a long time.

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Nota

The breeze that kisses my face in 4 a.m. visits paid to the streets around the habitat feels yet so cruel that I can see Neil (cp. Mysterious Skin) staring back in the reflection.

Feeling flat, I am well.

Those which are truly exciting does not actively arouse a wave before they came.

Same principle applies to the Cloud App, presumably the highest hyped and most disappointing Mac application of the year. Private betas were sent out delayed by an entire month, and when the second patch of 200 beta-testers were invited after the initial 1000 (add 2 more weeks) their infrastructure still isn’t finished.

“How do I access the files in the cloud and zap the ones no longer desirable?” One developer asked. “Hi, we’re working on this, ” a voice came from the cloud. True story from the vine.

Heck, Dropbox rules. And if you were going to show, show a finished product. Premature debut still is a debut, and people remember every debut fondly. Debuting in an unfinished fashion, Cloud is in hot water.

Let me digress and introduce some ideas presented in Agile Web Development and Joel’s advice on showing betas to customers (The Iceberg Secret). Show a finished mockup and people think your software rocks, even before you’ve written a single line of code. Show a sketch, and people understand that it’s only a sketch.

Instead of fixing their product, they are bashing a desperado who happened to like their blog layout so much that he stole the entire .css file. Dear, why the hell do you have to add a :before tag instead of simply renaming the file? And have I mentioned that its icon closely resembles MobileMe’s?

Cloud is dubbed every Mac user’s wet dream. My empirical, personal results say that a single programmer’s quote, or a line of overset text would ruin an entire wet dream . It is like playing in a theatre: everything must go in the right direction, and the slightest glitch would ruin the show. I quit playing in the Cloud after five minutes of initial use. Dear Cloud, please give me an opportunity to even love you.

—

v.i.

Must make an experimental piece based on Pamelia Kurstin, TED 2002. Amazing piece.

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Retake

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Watered