UltraNormal: Kevin's Entries

Shut Up, Indeed

Kevin Lawver — 2008-05-15T13:07:51-05:00

Next January can't come fast enough.

On Morale

Kevin Lawver — 2008-05-14T13:55:12-05:00

In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie's budget--but never shows up in a budget--is morale. [what's true for a movie is true for a startup!] If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

I've had this quote pretty much plastered in my subconscious for the past month. It's from Brad Bird, the guy who directed The Incredibles. You can read more from the interview over at Om's site.

You could replace "movie" with "project" or "product" and I think it's still true. It's next to impossible to motivate an team with crappy morale. It's like trying to light a campfire in the rain with just matches. Having a high-morale team is like lighting a campfire covered in kerosene. You just need a match, and then stand back.

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Almost Made the Top Ten

Kevin Lawver — 2008-05-09T13:25:02-05:00

The ratings from this year's SxSW panels are out and the panel I moderated, Career Transitions: From DIY to Working for The Man was the 14th-ranked panel of the whole conference (out of 105)! We got a 4.55 out of 5 overall. It was a lot of fun and, of course, the panelists should get most of the credit: Jason Garber, Leslie Jensen-Inman, Cindy Li, and Thomas Vander Wal.

Now, I need to figure out what I'm doing next year....

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Brian

Kevin Lawver — 2008-05-06T05:06:16-05:00

One of my favorite things about being a parent is making my kids make faces. I taught Brian how to do "blue steel" (go watch Zoolander). And with my fancy new camera, he looks like a star, doesn't he?

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A Musical Interlude

Kevin Lawver — 2008-05-02T11:03:37-05:00

This week has been one to forget at Chez Lawver. Jen, Brian and I have all had the stomach flu, and it hasn't been pretty. So, as a break from the disgusting offal-ness of it all, here are some musical recommendations for your Friday afternoon. These are all things I've picked up in the last couple of months, many of which are Canadian. I blame the recent Northern influence on my iTunes library on CBC Radio 3 and their wicked podcasts.

Holy Fuck - I prefer LP to their self-titled album, but this is some wicked butt-moving stuff. If you crossed Beck with The Chemical Brothers and took away the lyrics, you'd have Holy Fuck (sorry mom, that's really their name).
R.E.M.'s Accelerate - I love the band's early albums, especially Document, but this is a return to that style of garage awesomeness. Absolutely fantastic stuff, especially Supernatural Superserious.
Sunparlour Players' Hymns for the Happy - I first heard If the Creeks Don't Rise on one of the CBC podcasts. It's just good folksy rock - no pretense, just great vocals, lots of instruments and some harmonies.
The Polyphonic Spree - Jen calls them "Up With People for grownups", and I'm OK with that. They're an alt-rock band backed by a horn section, a full choir and sometimes strings, and they sing some seriously happy stuff. My current favorite, though, is their cover of Nirvana's Lithium.
And only because I can't remember posting it before, Great Lake Swimmers' Ongiara is one of the most beautiful albums I've ever heard. It's acoustic and the lead singer's voice is hypnotic. Where in the World Are You is one of my all-time favorite songs. It's heartbreakingly romantic and forlorn and never fails to choke me up.

There you go. That should keep you busy for a while. And yes, those all go to the Amazon MP3 store. It's cheaper than the iTunes store, and they give you mp3's instead of annoyingly locked down AAC files. Enjoy!

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A Small Favor: Have You Read My Book?

Kevin Lawver — 2008-04-29T10:25:24-05:00

I sometimes check the Amazon page for Adapting to Web Standards to see if anyone's rated it (and to see how it's doing, of course). It's been out for four months, and there are no ratings so far - good or bad.

So, I'm asking a small favor, if you've read the book, could you please go rate it? Good or bad, it doesn't matter. If you've got any feedback on my chapter (#7, the one on AOL.com), I'd love to hear it. It's the first thing I've written "professionally", and I'd love to hear what people think of it, how it could be better and where it goes wrong.

Thank you, please continue about your day.

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Half the Photos from China

Kevin Lawver — 2008-04-25T14:10:22-05:00

I'm not close to having them all up, and will hopefully be able to recover the ones on the
fried laptop's hard drive, but I've started uploading photos from China. They'll all end up at that URL eventually.

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The Many Misadventures of One Kevin P. Lawver

Kevin Lawver — 2008-04-24T21:02:17-05:00

I made it home. What a week. I posted before about what I did on the flight to China and that was the last you heard from me. Well, Saturday night, my laptop died. It suffered a complete hard drive failure. Even using Arun's system disk, it couldn't find the hard drive controller. Hopefully, this means the drive itself is OK and I can get the first day of pictures and all the stuff I worked on on the flight there off.

But, that left me in a tough spot. I had no laptop, spotty access on my blackberry (which is OK for staying semi-connected and consuming small chunks of data, but doesn't work very well as my primary connection to the "collective"), and I usually charge the blackberry with the laptop. Thankfully, I'd thrown a little USB power thing in my backpack just to see if it would work for charging the DS Lite.

So, I took notes in a W3C meeting longhand, on paper... yes, I stood out. Yes, my fellow nerds gave me a hard time about it (good-naturedly, of course). Yes, it sucked not to be able to upload photos, browse the web, read feeds and hack.

But, the worst part of the trip was my asthma. Beijing is extremely polluted, and I was affected by it. A couple times, I took a walk around the neighborhood (the hotel and conference center is right across the highway from most of the major olympic venues), and came back wheezing. The one free day I had, I took a "test" walk in the morning to see how I'd do, but had to cut my walk short and take multiple hits on my inhaler to stop the asthma attack that followed. So, I didn't really go anywhere or see anything outside of a four or five block radius of the hotel. I didn't want to get stuck somewhere having an asthma attack where I don't speak the language and didn't know where I was or how to get back to the hotel.

There was a great dinner, with entertainment provided by students from Baihong University, and I love hanging out with W3C folks. We even got a game of werewolf together. Doug Scheppers and I cleaned up the village as werewolves and won handily. It was only slightly unfair as Doug and I are both seasoned werewolves, and we "feasted" on a game full of first-time players.

Now, I'm home and it's going to take me a few days to get back on schedule. A twelve hour time difference is crazy, and I don't think I ever got quite adjusted to it, so maybe it'll be easier coming back.

I'm off to bed, hopefully to sleep for many many hours. I'll hopefully post pictures tomorrow once my laptop situation is taken care of.

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Losing Time, Gaining Time

Kevin Lawver — 2008-04-19T20:41:57-05:00

I spent fourteen hours on a plane yesterday, racing the dawn over the North Pole, getting from Dulles to Beijing. In my sleeplessness, I started thinking about how weird travel days are when you cross timezones. I lost almost a whole day, timewise, being in the air. A fourteen hour flight really took twenty-six hours off my calendar. I didn't get to "live" that day, and on my personal calendar, it's compressed to a tiny fraction of what it would have normally been. But, on the way home, I only "lose" an hour and forty-five minutes, so that day gets stretched out. It's weird, and something only crazy people trapped in airplanes or pot smokers should think about.

But, since I was trapped on a plane for fourteen hours, I decided that I should keep a little diary of all the stuff I did on the plane. Here it is, minus bathroom trips and meals (they fed us twice):

Read half of The Writing Life
Watched Wizard People, Dear Reader version of Harry Potter
Wrote a queue processor (it's so freaking cool, I can't believe I did it on a plane with no internet access and just my little Ruby pocket guide). This killed a good two or three hours.
Listened to some CBC Radio 3 podcasts and Sunparlour Players
Flew over the North Pole, but couldn't see anything because there were clouds everywhere... total white out.
Watched Ricky Gervais' Politics stand-up special
Watched The Amazing Screw-On Head (Mike Mignola series pilot about civil war robot secret agent. Yes, it's awesome)
Watched some Strongbad E-mails and Abigail's Teen Diary
Watched the first episode of The X-Files.
- Love that they don't wear seat belts, the smoking man really smokes in the office, and Scully has shoulder pads.
Played with hbase. I got it running and created a table, but didn't do much more than that.
Worked on the blog's admin interface.
- Bummed that in Firefox I have to wrap HTML5 elements in order to style them. Bah, humbug.
Stubbed out the blog main and entry page. Not how it's going to stay.
Played some Sudoku (*Brain Age 2* on my DS Lite). I'm trying to go back and redo games where I made mistakes and get all my times on the Basic and Intermediate ones under ten minutes. I have no idea if those are good times or not...
Finished The Writing Life. I love Annie Dillard. The Writing Life is a short little book, only 111 pages, but just like Holy the Firm, it's dense, packed with lots of great quotes, thoughts on writing and life and some of the most beautiful prose you're likely to ever read. I'm so glad I stumbled on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek last year.

Beijing is big, noisy and "hazy". Today, it's big, noisy and drizzling, so I don't think I'll be going out. Plus, meetings start soon and well, why go out when I can stay in and nerd it up with a bunch of... nerds?

I'm seriously jet-lagged. I did all that stuff above while pretty much everyone around me slept. I don't get how people can go to sleep at one in the afternoon and sleep pretty much straight for fourteen hours, but almost everyone around me did just that. I was there, trying to be quiet, either reading, watching something or typing. I got my upgrade to first class, which made things much more comfortable. I highly recommend it.

It's 8:30AM on Sunday morning. My internal clock is somewhere on a train between home and here. If you see it, please tell it to hurry up. I'd like to feel human again.

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How to Spend 14 Hours Stuck in a Chair

Kevin Lawver — 2008-04-18T07:17:40-05:00

I'm heading to the airport in a couple hours, with a very long plane ride ahead of me (well, two, but the second is next week). How long? Well, if United is to be believed, it's thirteen hours and forty-four minutes long. This will be the longest continuous flight I've ever been on (Dulles to Bangalore is twenty hours in the air, but there's a four hour "break" in the middle). Since I almost never sleep on planes, I've compiled a list of things to occupy my time:

A bunch of DVD's including the first season of The X-Files, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (so I can finally watch it with Wizard People, Dear Reader) and a bunch of other stuff that I can't remember at the moment.
I downloaded a ton of TED Talks and stuff from iTunesU.
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.
The old standby, the DS Lite
A bunch of silly programming things to play with:
- I'm going to try to write my own queueing server, or if that fails, play with Starling
- Work on the blog re-write
- Work on another top secret thingie I've been meaning to play with.
- Adobe AIR
A bunch of podcasts
And then, if I do all of those things, I can always watch whatever movie the airline provides.

Hopefully, that'll be enough to keep my occupied from Dulles to Beijing (for the W3C AC meeting). I'll let you know how it goes (if I can get to the internet from China... I hear they have some version of it).

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