ryan / Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:24:27 GMT
Tags notrocketsurgery, rubyjudo | 1 comment
I’m very pleased to announced a little fork in this blog, which will hopefully allow each segment of our seemingly bi-modal audience (business/design folk and programmers) to get the content that they’re interested in without the extraneous stuff.
I kept catching myself hesitating to post either too technical or too bitchy articles on NotRocketSurgery for fear of turning off one or the other branch of our theoretically bifurcated audience. Or perhaps I should say, our theoretical audience.
This blog, NotRocketSurgery.com is becoming my own forum for the sort of rants and foul-mouthed innuendo you’ve come to know and love from postings like The Mile High Club: 37signals, fuck yeahs, and productivity stock-art. I look forward to being freed by this greater focus to post much more frequently here on things like design, usability, life hacks, GTD, “enterprise” antics, and all the rest. Considerable gentle derision and loving sarcasm ensue.
All the juicy Ruby tidbits, brilliant hacks, and technical screeds are heading over to RubyJudo.com, where my colleagues Jonathan Dance, Dylan Fareed, Craig Schiffbauer, and the mysterious Kit can post their technical snippets and tutorials without having their code be sullied by my invective. I’ll also be posting technical and ruby-related stuff over there myself as well.
For my comrades in indolence, here’s the link to the new feed.
Huzzah.
jd / Thu, 07 Jun 2007 03:47:41 GMT
Tags cores, memory, threads | 1 comment
This article has moved over to our sister spin-off blog, RubyJudo, which focuses on more arcane technical topics than NotRocketSurgery.
ryan / Wed, 11 Apr 2007 19:55:01 GMT
Tags email, entrepreneur, PR, spam, unspam | 3 comments
The one mass e-mail I can’t wait to scroll every week comes from CinemaSalem, our local indie movie theater here in Salem, MA.
Every week, its author demonstrates not only what a brilliant informal humorist he is, but what a genius entrepreneur and PR guy (each month they give away $1000 of ticket proceeds to a local charity).
He doesn’t take himself seriously, and so he speaks in his own voice. So, even though I’m a Netflix nerd and don’t often go to the movies, I always look forward to these newsletters.
Spam that is the opposite of spam. I love it.
Here are just some highlights from this week’s message. (They’re always very long, which I love. Terseness is often a sign of a good writer, but it can also be a sign of someone with nothing to say. The true test of a good writer is whether he can say a lot without simultaneously saying nothing at all.)
Who else should attend these midnight previews? Anyone who loves movies and likes to have fun, including portrait photographers, car mechanics, tailors, diamond cutters, Supreme Court Justices, sign painters, roofers, and surgeons.
On the other hand, as a public service, we should point out that 8 am, Friday morning, May 4, might NOT be a great time for you to schedule your headshot sitting, root canal, tuneup, clothing alteration (especially involving straight pins), diamond cutting, final appeals, creation of your big billboard, roof repair, or open-heart surgery.
Besides the fun, energy, and excitement, the primary advantage of attending is enhancement of your personal coolness (which already is in good shape, subscribing as you do to this newsletter). There is a right and wrong way to exhibit this coolness. The wrong way is to go to work on Friday morning and exclaim, “I’ve already seen SPIDERMAN, you losers. It was a total blast, but I’m kinda wiped, so if you notice me nodding off during the surgery, by all means, speak up!”
The proper way to exhibit your coolness would be to wait until an annoying person says, “Hey, I’ve got tickets for SPIDERMAN tonight.” You reply, “Oh, cool. Is SPIDERMAN 4 out already?” The annoying person replies, “Oh, no, this is SPIDERMAN 3”, to which you reply, “Oh, I already saw that last night with a ton of my friends at CinemaSalem. It was great!” If the person is really annoying, you can add, “I think the most surprising part of the movie was [insert total, complete spoiler here]. Who would ever have seen THAT coming?”
...
The documentary, BEYOND EMPIRES, is targeted for the BBC and PBS, and is being directed by Christopher Gilbert, a native Australian whose accent is worth the price of admission ($5) for the 7 pm event on May 10. Other voices you’ll hear that night (in person and on videotape) will be Muslims, Hindus, and Christians of several nationalities speaking about the impact of this young German, and the relevance of his story to our troubled times.
In truth, most of the production money for this documentary is likely to come from corporations, foundations and major donors, but developing grass roots support for the film is an indispensable part of making it happen, which is why CinemaSalem has been chosen to host the first of five such events around the country.
The overall goal of the documentary is to tell the inspiring story of Ziegenbalg, and to make him a household name, even if it’s mispronounced in every household throughout the world.
(One final note, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning feature film, WILD HOGS, is still playing at the AMC Liberty Tree Mall Cineplex.)
Thanks for supporting CinemaSalem!
-Paul Van Ness
My favorite bit is that at the very end he recommends a competing business to his customers who might benefit from the information.
At the end of these newsletters each week, I keep asking myself whether there is a movie on the list I can go see just to support this guy’s awesomeness, even though I wouldn’t otherwise have wanted to go out to the cinema. Clearly, for me at least, this newsletter serves its purpose quite well.
kit / Sat, 07 Apr 2007 04:29:59 GMT
Tags MyOpenID, openid, SingleSignOn | 1 comment
This article has moved over to our sister spin-off blog, RubyJudo, which focuses on more arcane technical topics than NotRocketSurgery.
ryan / Mon, 02 Apr 2007 19:39:51 GMT
Tags 37signals, dhh, fuckyeah, jasonfried, stockart | 20 comments
I’ve been bemused (and distracted) all day by a little tempest that the ineluctable DHH stirred up in the SVN comments teapot today.
The post was titled You’re not on a fucking plane (and if you are, it doesn’t matter)! The question raised by the article was simple: should web applications really go out of their way to support off-line access, particularly given that most everyone doing real work these days (from cabinet-makers to “thought workers”) is hooked into a big fat bandwidth pipe at home, at work, and in between on a cell phone?
Saying “Fuck Yeah.”
The post encapsulates everything I love about 37signals. As I have written before, their delightful schtick is all about giving businesses the courage to calm down, to ignore the pressure to come off as a credible member of the “enterprise” community when doing so defies your every other intuition, and instead to use a bit of common sense.
In the world of online start-ups and small tech companies, they’re the ones who remind us when the emperor has no clothes, or when we’ve gotten so wrapped up in our own little narratives that we forgot we were naked too.
At the Getting Real workshop, Jason Fried & DHH shared with us their mantra of Done!, and intimated “done” tends to take the form of “fuck yeah” within 37signals. I’ve always loved this tidbit, and we’ve only half tongue-in-cheeckedly adopted it at SHN. Among the many flustered and sanctimonious commenters, my favorite was by one named “whoa,” who said “The title of this post: “you’re not on a fucking plane” is way off brand for you guys.” Notwithstanding how vapid a person you’d have to be to anonymously diss something by calling it “off brand,” I couldn’t imagine anything more to the core of what 37signals represents than what another commenter called the “f-bomb.” The 37signals folks have always argued that you shouldn’t check your humanity at the threshold of your cubicle. People don’t stop being people when they put on a tie. If they do, they stop knowing how to make products that will fit into real people’s lives. The same goes for your language.
Little Sammy Stockart is so Productive
But the broader issue at the heart of this whole acrimonious discussion about whether you need access to your software while on a plane (on the elliptical machine, scaling Everest, on the funicular to Montmartre, etc.) is that companies selling “business” products can’t resist the image of the stock-art “professional”. You know, those people on your online banking site who just look do damn thrilled to be sitting in front of a laptop in a suit reading about their latest finance charges. Or the painfully diverse group of young professionals you see in those de-saturated photos on “B2B” sites pretending to brainstorm up a heap of enterprise solutions.
One of the most salient and ubiquitous of these images is the one of that slick-haired asshole in a monkey suit, who’s often depicted kicking back in business class seat on a plane, one arm up behind his head, maybe chatting on the Sky Phone (which he has patched through his bluetooth headset or something), and all the while dicking around with Lotus notes his Think-pad (the IBM sticker covered with black tape) with his other hand.
You know this guy. The King of the World. The 24 year-old-pretty boy model who somehow manages to be a bit-shot Executive, controlling the universe with his little utility belt of gadgets. It makes you think of Audrey Hepburn’s great line in Sabrina about the tycoon
You press a button and factories go up. Or you pick up a telephone and tankers set out for Persia. Or through a Dictaphone you say, “Buy all of Cleveland and move it to Pittsburgh.” You must be clever.
Companies like Brookstone, Levenger, SkyMall, and PalmOne know that air travelers in particular like to think of themselves as the sort of intrepid, executive, multi-tasking folk we see in these pictures. That’s why you’ll find their productivity and “executive lifestyle” kitsch in Airport concourses and their literature in the seat pocket next to your vomit bag.
Sometimes I think we all secretly want to be that guy who’s so important that if he stops working for 30 minutes it’ll cause a thrombosis on the Hang Seng. But nobody is. I’ve never seen that guy in real life—and I doubt he really exists. Sure, people work on planes. I love to read, brainstorm, write, and even sometimes program on my laptop in flight. But to build an entire software infrastructure around these silly edge cases just so we can think of ourselves as slick road warriors is merely to bow to some marketer’s idea of how real people work. A notion some ad guy invented fifty years ago to sell a Dictaphone.
I’ve bought into this idea myself before. Ever since I was quite young, I’ve been known to lust after a fancy notebook or a swanky phone headset, with dreams of how stylishly productive it’ll make me. (If only I had a space pen in my pocket with me everywhere I went, I could do anything!) But more often than not I’ve learned that my desire for those things grew not out of need, but a misplaced longing to be the guy in the stock-art. (Which I’m happy to say I finally ditched all together.)
Quite simply: people don’t need offline access; they merely want to think of themselves as the sort of people who need offline access.
jd / Mon, 05 Mar 2007 19:19:13 GMT
Tags ruby, syntacticalsugar | 3 comments
This article has moved over to our sister spin-off blog, RubyJudo, which focuses on more arcane technical topics than NotRocketSurgery.
kit / Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:49:19 GMT
Tags shower | 4 comments
Yesterday I heard someone say that they did all their best thinking in the shower. Now, that would be fine if it weren’t simultaneously said with a tone indicating that the person saying it thought they were the most idiosyncratic individual since Andy Kaufman and the 8 billionth time someone has said something along those lines.
And so I ask this: does anyone NOT do their best thinking in the shower? Can we all agree that this at least very common?
ryan / Fri, 23 Feb 2007 13:42:02 GMT
Tags bdd, rails, rspec, ruby, science, scientificmethod, testing, tests | 5 comments
This article has moved over to our sister spin-off blog, RubyJudo, which focuses on more arcane technical topics than NotRocketSurgery.
ryan / Mon, 05 Feb 2007 17:38:44 GMT
Tags code, complexity | 1 comment
Rentzsch has a wonderful post about why programmers really don’t like to code (instead, we actually like to solve problems.)
...programmers get pissed when they have to write code. “I just want to update this field in this file, why do I have to write an XML parser?
If programmers liked to code, we’d all be writing in machine language to this day. You can write that stuff all day and get precious little of the real problem solved.
A true mantra for the Rubyist.
He continues by saying something that entirely explains why I so joyously chose to Lovetastic from scratch from the ground up.
Programmers desire to rewrite because they know that after starting with a clean sheet of paper and building it all again, at the end they’ll understand the whole. Programmers write code to learn.
“Real” programming isn’t about memorizing API calls, being a memory-management ninja, or mucking about in the lowest levels of the system. It’s about expressing design ideas, understanding complexity by rendering it elegant, building things, and, most importantly, problem-solving.
ryan / Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:44:24 GMT
Tags controllers, helpers, rails, ruby, shared | 8 comments
This article has moved over to our sister spin-off blog, RubyJudo, which focuses on more arcane technical topics than NotRocketSurgery.
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