Buster McLeod

meta-fundamental purpose

I came to the realization that to the extent that we all have a fundamental purpose, we all have the same meta-fundamental purpose:

To be certain that we have fulfilled our fundamental purpose.

Though it appears to still leave the fundamental purpose unresolved, it does reveal to us a dependency of our fulfillment of our meta-fundamental purpose: there must be a mechanism available that provides certainty.

I think this leads to an interesting forking in paths, because I feel like most of my goals in life are subconciously trying to attack this problem of certainty, and in order to be certain of our certainty, somewhere down the line this certainty must take another form. The easiest way to be certain of something is to be aware of all possible choices. To have all possible choices, I need to have omniscience and omnipotence (maybe they are the same thing).

How convenient, because the core fundamental purpose that I work with on a daily basis is to prove myself--to show that I am smart enough, capable enough, able to make the right decisions, able to be certain of my path in life. There is a crossroads at which my daily working fundamental purpose meets with the path that I get to by stepping down from my meta-fundamental purpose. At that crossroads is a desire to have everything.

It's not really a stretch of my imagination to believe that rooted in each one of us is the desire to have everything beyond all limits of power, reason, and possibility. It's the same desire a small cloud of smoke feels when it is exhaled from our lungs into open space. Fill everything. Occupy every single space that exists.

The interesting thing, though, is that I think this desire is slightly misinformed. Our fundamental purpose is not really to have everything, but rather having everything is the "easiest" (depending on how you define easy... in this case easiest in the sense of number of steps between here and the end goal) way to be certain that we have fulfilled our fundamental purpose. The only reason it is the easiest is because we've never defined a real purpose or goal to our entire lives and so we have to instead attempt to reach a peak where all possible goals become possible.

If I could only articulate a single fathomable fundamental purpose to myself, then it might turn out that I did not have to step through the omniscience hoop in order to get there. The only problem is that I would have to solve the equation for obtaining certainty without being omniscient. For, without certainty, how can we ever know if we've done anything for sure? That may be the kicker. Help?

Days after the ETCON conference,

Days after the ETCON conference, the thing that sticks with me is the collaborative enviroment that was enabled by the use of internet technologies alongside standard group gatherings. Even though I work at an internet company and deal with technology every day, it was a first for me to experience being in a chatroom, posting to a weblog and wiki, moving a virtual me in a virtual map of the conference, and listening to a speaker in a room full of other people, all at the same time. I've heard other people talking about similar environments for years, but until I was actually there I didn't realize that information really could be passed around more efficiently (and what feels more naturally) than I had ever experienced before.

A speaker speaks at a table or podium. He or she mentions a website. That link is posted by another audience member in a wiki, and discussion about it pops up in an instant message. I get instant feedback about how the rest of the room is responding to the talk, disagreements surface, arguments unfold, and details follow up on topics that I was less than fluent in. This also worked (perhaps even better) in group gatherings (which they call BOF--Birds of a Feather) where a room full of people discussed a certain topic, like web services, or social software, or online games. In settings like this you typically listen to one person talk, and if you already know what they're saying or don't really care, you had no other choice than to silently grumble to yourself. Now, multiple layers of conversation can take place at once, and you can choose to participate in the layer that is most interesting to you.

I can only imagine how this will change schools and other group gatherings in the future. Does anyone know if any of this is already happening anywhere other than tech conferences?

Notes from Emerging Technology Conference 2003 (part two)

Back in sunny Seattle--boy, was California gloomy or what? I had a great time at etcon and have already started putting some of the new ideas to good use:

What I hope will be the next big thing: Hello Machine. Not much there yet, but sign up for the mailing list and we'll talk about it.

A couple more observations about the conference:

+ I'm slowly transferring my notes from my notebook into "universally accessible" form, but didn't realize how much of my note-taking consists of drawing pictures. Hey weblog-makers, why not think about adding an easy jpg drawing tool to the feature set? I think something like that was mentioned in Ben Hammersley's LazyWeb meeting.

+ Why are people putting up their notes as plain text files? To me, that's just more evidence that weblog tools still aren't convenient enough.

+ I found a meta-theme among almost all the panels: they're all "So you can..." applications. Whether on the level of making platforms so you can build web services (Microsoft), or on the level of making web services so you can build applications (Amazon Web Services, Google's API, Macromedia's Central, Laszlo), or on the level of making applications so you can be empowered to be more productive (Movable Type's TypePad, Google, and Amazon), it's all about people making things so that it's easier for other people to make things. The heirarchy is interesting because certain levels attract certain types of people. Large corporations are generally at the very top and very bottom, with smaller companies and individuals in the middle helping bring different types of corporate information together for new uses. It would be very difficult for me to begin defining standards on how web services should be built around the world, but not so difficult to make a tool that allows you to manage your own information with a simple web user interface. Still, from top to bottom, they're all "so you can..." applications.

+ Google's explanation of how they run projects was immensely interesting to me, as I'm thinking about the exact same thing at Amazon. Thanks for the insight.

+ David Weinberger's talk about groups was also great. He was asking the exact same questions that I had been asking myself (for a different reason), and he articulated the problem so well that even though he left most of his questions unanswered, think I found an answer to them as they apply to what I'm working on. Embracing ambiguity on the web IS the right direction to be going in.

+ I spent two nights at the hotel bar drinking gin and tonics by myself while everyone else talked and socialized. That was perhaps the most refreshing few hours of the whole trip--allowing myself to step back and be alone for just a little while before hopping back into the madness.

+ People I saw in the bathroom: PB, Stewart, and Rael. It's always funny to run into someone you admire in the bathroom, especially if you decide to take that opportunity to introduce yourself.

+ And finally, a conference wouldn't be a conference without having made some new secret plans.

Notes from Emerging Technology Conference 2003

I've been taking notes old-skool style with my paper and pen because I think I take better notes that way. Some notes about what I can remember about what I wrote notes about:

+ At the end of every panel I ask myself "what technology is emerging?" Then I ask, what is enabling that technology to emerge. Then I ask, how is that enabler emerging. Then I ask, what is enabling the emergence of that enabler? I do this because I feel like I'm looking for something. That ever-emerging enabler than enables all things to emerge. I need to find innovation's roots, because I just hate watching everyone else create emerging technology. It kills me. If those roots can be found anywhere, they can be found here, I think.

+ Surface themes: wireless networks, personal publishing and metadata storage tools (movabletype and chandler and foaf and blogger), the contantly growing enabler of harddrive memory and processing power, the constantly growing enabler of smaller sizes and bigger numbers (cell phones with powerful computers in them that everyone carries).

+ More subtle themes: the social network, the friendly banter, the awkward silences, the self-promotion, the defensive retreat from intimidating people, the fact that so many people here are young balding men.

+ The distribution of power. So many things are about distributing the power of the top 5% to the bottom 95%. Yet I'm finding that the distribution of power present here is largely following that same scale. The same four or five people are referenced or talked about in each panel, no matter the topic. In other words, power in the social network is still distributed poorly, and yet the people with that power got that power by creating tools to distribute power. It may be necessary, I don't have an opinion on it yet, just noticing it.

Things are beginning to make a little sense to me, I feel like I'm about 4 moves from solving the Rubik's Cube the difficult way, which is by making progress on all sides at once, where there are no visual clues to actually making that progress.

I am here.

I am here.

More tests. Does it seem

More tests. Does it seem faster?

Testing a new server. If

Testing a new server. If something looks broken, let me know.

decision-making

Decision-making seems to be a common theme in my thoughts lately. Every new thought, after being thought about, turns to the "decision-making" meme in my head and asks, "How do I apply to you, decision-making meme?"

Decision-making meme says back, "You are a metaphor for me. Link us together in the brain, for we will be stronger if we join forces, and you will get a percentage of the attention that I receive from the other thoughts who have joined me in the past."

And I go, "Shut up, you guys, I'm trying to go to sleep."

The latest meme partnership is between decision making, memory, and queue theory. I was think about something, maybe about buying a house or something, and realized that part of the reason that I'm thinking about buying a house is because so many other people are. Perhaps there is a "buy a house" feedback queue in my mind somewhere that is slowly lining up bits of conversations and small reasons in its favor. For a while now, I've been ignoring this queue as a viable option--I don't want to buy a house because I don't want to be tied to Seattle for the next 5 years. The competition between these two memes is based on queue size--I favor not buying a house (and remaining flexible about location) because there are better reasons to refrain from this purchase than there are to go ahead with it. At least, that's what I've thought up until now. I suspect now that the "weight" of a decisions possible choices may be the result of a calculation as simple as (sheer number of reasons) x (number of exposures to each reason). This means that even poor reasons, when exposed to them many times, gain weight in the decision-making process. That's why I think the decision-making process acts according to the rules of queue theory--the same advantages that a business gains by looking at the system in a simplistic manner (using certain assumptions) are also given to the brain when trying to sort a huge number of decisions and choices at once. Queues are filled with all kinds of things, things that are complicated and things that are simple, but in determining the weight (and implied importance) of a queue it's easier to judge this merely by the size. Now, it's possible that a queue with 10 really time consuming items might take longer to go through than a queue with 100 quickly resolved items (and we consider this when choosing between the express and regular checkout lines at the grocery store), but I have to admit that even when it's that explicit sometimes I'll get in the shortest line (even if it's not express).

When I start thinking about actions as switches (essentially the things which the queues are being processed by, which they're waiting for), and reasons as the items that make up queues, it becomes easy to quickly understand a lot about the way I really seem to act sometimes (for better or for worse). That's why this is a good metaphor.

I ignore almost everything that has a queue size below a certain size. For example, for a long time, buying a house wasn't even considered because I didn't have enough reasons and enough exposures to those reasons for it to justify my attention. All of a sudden, the queue gets above a certain size (Leanne's boyfriend went house shopping this weekend), and it gets promoted to "possible thing to consider". I'm not considering it because Sami mentioned it, but his mention of it pushed it over that threshold. Deciding to get married followed a similar pattern... and I don't think that diminishes the complexity of the decision at all, it merely moves that decision into the frontal lobe where it has to be resolved or put back into the waiting line.

Many times I'll be exposed to something, like a friend buying an iPod or a Mac, and I'll know that that's something that I would be interested in, but not necessarily now. I put the exposure in the "buy an iPod" queue and let it sit there until more exposures come in and it's time for me to really consider buying an iPod and buying it now.

Not all of them have to do with buying something. Other decisions, like getting married, that follow a similar pattern include: doing your taxes (between January and April, you let the queue accumulate reasons, and at some point it passes that threshold and gets done), going to the gym (sometimes I have to mentally invoke the queue of reasons to motivate myself enough to go on a certain day when several other things could take precedence), doing an errand, having children, etc.

Immediately I can see that this has a lot of relevance to trends. Everyone has these queues. There's a tipping point when the culture is at a point where almost everyone has enough items in their queue (whatever it might be... say, cell phones) that one extra marketing push can start a chain reaction. They reach 5% of the population, and those 5% send exposures that tip over their friends and acquintences (who were this close to buying one anyway), and on and on until a large percentage of the population suddenly has cell phones. Queues. This is so simple that I know most people already know this, it's just another metaphor for common sense.

Consequences of making decisions like this: the list of decisions aren't prioritized by importance but simply frequency. This means that we need to impose an artificial layer of "importance" to the list in order to make sure that the right things get done first. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to know the hidden importance of items that haven't yet met that threshold queue size in order to get noticed. This leads to an issue that comes up at work often: the cost of delaying an important decision that is hidden. An ex-director of our department at work recently reminded me of the fact that there could be a project worth 1-2% of sitewide sales sitting in the list of projects that we're currently putting off this quarter. Every quarter it sits there it costs the company money, money that it could have made. In some cases a project, sufficiently delayed, can never make up for the cost of the delay. Decisions are the same way... hence the midlife crisis. There are certain actions in our mind whose queues may be small but are actually very important decisions to make. Which reminds me of the Delmore Effect and our fundamental purpose.

Which important decisions are we paying for each day by not deciding on them? This question scares me to death.

So what happens when you have a queue full of exposures to a decision, so many in fact that it's constantly in your attention, trying to be decided upon, and you neglect to make a decision. That's what I felt like emerging from college--and I'm sure everyone has that feeling. "What do I do now?" is the overflowing queue, and it drives you crazy to have that constantly in your mind. Some people choose to ignore it, though. Either because it's been resorted by the prioritization layer, or there is a strong anti-decision-making queue battling it and all other decisions of a certain family out of the way. People who consciously go against the decision-making pressure often can't help but get obsessed by it, because it is such a noisy operation in our mind.

Add one more exposure to the queue of "our decision-making process is wacked."

password management

How people manage their passwords is very interesting to me. On the one hand, passwords have to be strings of text that nobody else knows. On the other hand, we're getting to the point where we have too many passwords to remember alone.

I have to choose a new eight digit password with one capital letter and one number every couple months for work. Some of my passwords have to be between 4 and 6 characters. Some require that I use a username that not be in the system already, some have been given to me by others, some are shared between people, and some can't resemble a word or phrase in some silly dictionary. The username/password combo that I'm forced to have for my medical insurance is completely crazy, and I only use it once or twice a year. I have no idea what my username and password are to access my paystubs online. I have a different password to log into my work laptop than I do to log into the work intranet.

And yet, I still hesitate to write any of these passwords down. At some point, it's going to be inevitable, otherwise I'll constantly be clicking that "forgot your password" link or photocopying my paystub and dragging it down to the finance department.

I may create an excel spreadsheet of codes. One axis will be usernames, and the other will be password "hints". That way, if someone were to find my spreadsheet, they wouldn't actually be able to use them unless they understood or could decipher the hint. My hints wouldn't be that difficult to decipher because I'd have to be confident that I myself would be able to decipher them a year from now. Maybe "What Christians say" could be one hint. Or "Anselm's city", or even references to other passwords like "Like my bank pincode but typed out twice" or "Like my Christians hint except with two letters turned into numbers".

What if someone knows one of my passwords? I've given some out in pinch to trusted friends, and sometimes even acquaintences when the password isn't to something very important. But I know several of my friends' passwords, so wouldn't it be safe to assume that my friends know mine? If they got a hold of this matrix, they'd be able to gain access to everything that had that password mapped to it, as well as have a pretty good chance of getting into accounts that have passwords based on the passwords they know. Maybe I'm paranoid--these are my friends!

Still, having a single document with all my passwords, slightly encrypted, seems dangerous. If I relied on it, where would I store it? It would have to be somewhere accessible to me most of the time--particularly when I'm either at work or at home, and yet completely inaccessible to anyone else. How many of those spaces do we as humans have? Could I put it on my server, where others may run into it? Could I store it on my home computer or my work laptop? Could I print it and bury it in my backyard? Other than in my long-term memory, where can my passwords be stored safely? Even in my long-term memory there have been occassions where I've said passwords out loud in a drunken stupor or in a tight spot, so how safe can anything else be? Should I put it in another password-protected account somewhere, and hope that I remember that one password above all other passwords? That seems like it may be the best option, but in order to make sure nobody could access that one place I'd probably have to create a new account somewhere with a new password, and then how could I be sure to remember it? I could store that super secret password in my wallet, hoping that nobody would ever be able to find out what it was for, but what if I lost my wallet?

Password management, to me, no matter how complex, and no matter how much of the storage you keep outside of yourself, still relies on some fallible assumption that you will be able to keep a secret even during your weakest moments. The only way to keep a secret is to make the secret so crazy that even you might forget it.

I just had a major

I just had a major breakthrough in the way I'd like to build the FOAF tool. It has become so simple that I can probably build it in a matter of hours now instead of weeks.