Alan’s Kiloblog

It’s not really possible is it? Lately, I’ve come to find that I’m writing less, and thinking less of The Long Tail. The volume of my posts has shrunk. I’m without a digitial camera. I’m flat broke, so broke, it’s not funny. Ha! I’m in post K New Orleans, but that’s merely a little crufty. The opportunity is better in this New Orleans than in the one I left in 2004. There is a wider need for software design.

I’m wrestling with how to go about moving forward in this community.

A new Mac is not that far off. There is nothing to do this week. It’s Mardi Gras. Everyone is very busy. Next week however, a lot of small businesses ought to be feeling flush.
Need to talk plainly to you, Long Tail. When I don’t communicate enough, I start to get confessional. When I get back around to writing, it’s a beseaching.

There’s no need is there? I must admit, I’m awfully confused. One of the things that I’ve noted lately is that there is a path of least resistance that I almost never follow, thus it is a path of great resistance, however, the source of the resistance is myself.

Case in point, I’m having a heck of a time with the dead Mac. It means that I can’t program for a living. I might be able to program for the future, but not for the here and now. No more contract programming. For the time being, no more programming Java and XML, nor hacking Thunderbird, or any of that fun stuff.

This is a pity. I can’t stand to continue to watch the mass adoption of dynamic HTML pass me by. This is an area in which I’ve dabbled since 1996. The acceptance is killing me. The jingoism is killing me. This is another in a series of missed boats.

I don’t have it in me right now to get all punchy, to write about things in the happy snappy buzzword laden way that gets the links going in the blogosphere. My life is contracting after two months of expansion. There are no new people, really. I’m waiting for people to wind down from Mardi Gras before things can resume.

When someting fails, in this case a Mac, it removes possiblities. The one remaining programming project that I have is way, way to annoying now. I’ll finish it, but it will be very challenging to do so. I won’t be able to trust my Mac thereafter. Contract programming is finished.

Then, I have to ask myself, if there is a way to support myself through a more social endeavor, why should I program computers? What is the appeal? Is there an appeal?

I don’t think so. I’m not seeing it. It has never come off. I’m not a bad programmer, but I’m not a terribly practical programmer. There is a failure point there, but I’m not sure which. The one thing that occurs to me as I awake this morning, is that I’m Proving Myself through programming, which would explain why it’s not working out for me.

Proving Myself is a failure point that I’ve not blogged yet. In fact, I’ve not blogged many of my failure points, only the crux in Good People After Bad.

Back from my morning walk. This morning I did not buy coffee. I’m already wired for some reason.

In the ebb and flow, this is a low point. I am feeling defeated. The dead Mac. There will not be a new Mac. There won’t. Not for programming. The next Mac, okay, there will be a new Mac, it won’t be funded by programming, it will be funded by web design. I’m going to keep on putting together web sites. I’m going to be delivering on web sites, at an awesome price. It’s so unbloggable.

It’s so very unbloggable. It comes down to this idea that I have that I must do, not talk, or I must do in order to talk. I don’t think I program to make money. I program to prove myself. Which is reason enough not to do it. It’s all wonky. Cart before the horse.

Defeat. Will I ever get around to completing all the Java stuff that I undertook so long ago. If I wanted to field an entry into the world of Web 2.0, would I write it myself in Java and XSLT, or would I contract it out to someone?

What gets me, is this time of great panic. It is quite unappreciated by my neighbors here. Running on empty is a way of life in New Orleans. Why should I worry more than the next person? This worry, at the crux, is the worry that I’m too worried to find new work. That I’m going radiate uncertainty and blow the sale.

Why am I blogging this? Long, ungangly, stream of consciousness? Because it’s time to find a new story, one that works, and the old one has no ending. It’s simply pecking away at code and never finishing. Programming is a hobby for me. It doesn’t work as a profession. In fact…

When I’m done with all this anxiety, I’ll say that my life focus on programming is too narrow to be successful. Which has something to do with rethinking how I approach life.

My life has changed so drastically, by moving here, to New Orleans. There is no way that I’m going to be able to conduct myself in New Orleans as I did in Ann Arbor. For one thing, I’m not going to suffer cronic depressions, nor I am going to be able to seclude myself, since those French Doors are open to my courtyard, and my courtyard opens out to Esplanade, and I’m bang in the Lower Quarter and Faubourg Marigny. This is an exceedingly disruptive place in which to find myself. It wrecks havoc on the mild autism I’ve developed from years of interacting with the world through mailing lists.

Petulantly, I must ask, what has programming given me? Little in the way of financial success. The formula for contract programming is laughable. First I have to sell the software. Then I have to write the software. Then I have to give the software away. Insanity! What a pathetic business model! What am I thinking?

In Ann Arbor, I was thinking that I’d rather get a bartending job, than fun my day to day with contract programming. Regular old programming, as a hobby, still has plenty of appeal, too. The other point here is that there are only so many hours that I want to look at a computer, or that I should look at a computer, whether I want to or not. There is no way to write something for myself, or something that is open source, and still have time for contract programming.

The Ann Arbor life had some Zen to it. Sitting at my desk, with white Winter sunlight washing over my workspace, I’d wait patiently for the next task to complete, whether that was a compile, or some such. It was a peaceful existance. I felt good for making progress. It was nice to know that I could sort through systems, figure them out quickly, patch code as well as write original code. There were a great many interests. More than I probably could pursue, but I was intent to walk away with a handful of accomplishments.

Katrina changed all that, I suppose. I’m living here in New Orleans, and despite being nearly flat broke, I’m not at all depressed. I’m anxious as all get out. I’m trying to find a way to give myself the rationale necessary to push on, through all this typing write here, but I’m not too terribly uncertain about the future.

The dead Mac has made some decisions for me.

Back from a jaunt for coffee. Spoke with some friends at the coffee shop. I am so happy to be here. This is a great city. There is so much to learn from the people here.

Well, I’m pretty much done with contact programming. There is some remorse. It will move me away from programming. If programming was a matter of proving myself, I can think of better ways to prove myself, that have a better bottom line. In fact, that may well be the way I go about proving myself, through the bottom line.

Think New Orleans is about writing, face time, and sitting down with people, getting them to contribute, even if I have to stand over their shoulder. It’s a matter of bridging two worlds. No more contract programming. None. Let it end. Then, maybe, I can return to programming for the sake of programming, or maybe I’ll learn Spanish instead.

Met a mesmerizing young woman yesterday as I left FQTH. She would drown her stories in details, make cultural references that I could not follow, talk about how deftly she delt with drama, offer up character studies of the intricate people in her life, relate vinettes from her travels. Excellent orator. Oddly familiar.

It was not at all Southern. She was not from around here.

I’d been recalling to myself that life in New Orleans was a sitcom. I signed up for serendipity, did I not? What was the purpose of this articulate, egotistical special guest.

I think perhaps to show me what I was like when I arrived here in New Orleans on New Years Eve. The stories were fascinating, but upon reflection, no more or less dramatic than anything else I’d heard in the time I’d been here. It’s in the telling. It’s in the energy.

I felt like I was watching myself schtick.

Youth and self-confidence are a dagnerous cocktail.

She left me with instructions on how to remove heavy metals from drinking water, which I promptly disposed of. Hope that it is not meant to be serendipitous. Too many worries.

Yes, I’m going to Muses.

UPDATE: She calls me just now, while I’m in the middle of open Mac surgery. I ask if she’s going to buy me a beer. Meet her at enVie.

This time around, I’m not so enamoured. As I tell her about my trials with the Mac, the wonderful help I’ve received restoring my Mac, and a girl with the flu. She asks why I’m not waiting on her hand and foot. I tell her because that’s not what’s expected of me. She tells me that I need to wait on her if I want to keep her. I tell her she’s wrong. She posits that the woman is insecure. At that point she’s insulting not only me, but the people in my life.

She relates an anecdote about a girlfriend of hers where the friend is ill, and she is tending to her. The girl says “Get the boy”, referring to her boyfriend. This was supposed to be an example of appropriate behavior. A parable. I’m stunned however, that it’s acceptable to address a young man as “boy”, especially in a time of need.
The spell is broken. I’m non-plused.

We can agree to disagree, she says. No we can’t. You are wrong. You can have opinions about your life, but not mine. You are acting like a typical Ann Arbor undergrad. You feel you can hold an opinion about anything if you use enough turns of phrase.

Why did this special guest enter the sitcom? I recall a couple friends once telling me that when I approach a woman I do this. I noted above, this is my schtick. Blather about details that others don’t know, drop cultural references that others can’t get, and generally bluster. These guys were trying to tell me, do 10% of that, not 100%. You put them off. You leave them with nothing to say.

True enough. Moreover, my second meetings have been traditionally awkward. Now I can see why. When I call on a woman a second time, she must assume that I’m interested in her, might want to hear about her, and if all I can do is focus my bumbling intellect on her revealations, dissect her life, then she’ll be rightly disgusted.

When you walk away from this, you think of things you could have said. Not sure that there is anything that I could have said, however. The attempt to tell her off would have been a defeat. This little encounter was the source of my recent defeatism by the way. A recollection of all that is Ann Arbor, how easy it is to lose when you don’t really want to play. Don’t matter though, you’re still a loser.

The sky just broke. Thunder storm.

She’s off to rejoin her beautiful young friends, with all their adventures and stories, and I’m off to rejoni my aging cohorts. This sitcom is not Sienfeld. It’s South Park. I’ve learned something important today. Not sure what. Maybe that you shouldn’t trust anyone under thirty. More importanly, that I’ve rejected all that intellect for some reason, and I ought to catch myself doing the moth to flame thing. I’ve never had a decent friend that carried themselves in such a fashion.
Good people after bad, double down, quid pro quo, etc.

In any case, the heavy metals from the drinking water, just one more way to bring me down is all. Ann Arbor priorities the I can ill afford. This is New Orleans, my love, my home. I’m taking what she’s giving.

This evening in the midst of blather, the woman interrupts me and asks, in the most plaintiff tone, “Alan, what’s with you and school? I don’t get it. Why didn’t you finish?”

“Oh, you liked that bit? Was I being clever?”, I ask.

“Was it not challenging enough? Where you ADHD?”, she asks.

“No, just lazy and impertinent,” I say.

“Where did you learn all this stuff?” She’s big on questions.

“The Economist”, I offer.

The answer does not satisfy. Let me rethink. What follows is my best guess.

Gift of gab on the one hand, the gift of compassion on the other. I learn from relationships.

Heaven knows I’m woefully under-read.

Which is another way in which Ann Arbor and New Orleans are again, polar opposites. Ann Arbor puts its faith in the written word. New Orleans puts it’s faith in word of mouth.

My overriding failure point, my personal Groundhog Day, is throwing good people after bad.

In all matters I tend to reinforce failure. There’s an aversion to things that go right.

It’s time to double down.

Anxious me. It was a whirlwind trying to figure out what to make of all the human interaction after a year of Ann Arbor isolation. What’s my appeal? And in thinking about my appeal, a kind of low grade narcissism ensues. One where I reflect on my beauty from the vantage point of my ugly, gazing upon my reflection in awe and disbelief. Ever the fat kid alone by the fence at recess, unable to reconcile an ingrained self-image with this hansome image mirrored by none other than my peers.

Approval. You have it. I want it.

Throwing good money after bad is to spend money on a business that is losing money.

Thorwing good people after bad is to take the support of people that care about you and spend it in the pursuit of people that do not care about you.

Spent the day blogging, communicating. The big invoice was paid, with an advance, and now I have work to do. It doesn’t feel like enough money either. I’m wondering, how am I going to get these hours in? How do I do this?

Checked Google Maps, and I’m now 1.3 miles further from 1515 Poydras, the Quarter, the routine I was starting to enjoy. My crashing environment is comfortable, and intriguing.

I’m at Zot’s now. I’m listing to my Ann Arbor mix, Tori Amos up now, since we’re all so snug in this space, I don’t want to eaves drop on the conversation of the young couple next to me.

My blogging is going well. I don’t have a definition of success, although I’ve asked people what their definition may be. I know what I like, and I like what I see. The people that I’m conversing with are good people.

I’m hearing that it’s open all night. Zots. Awesome.

Three dogs again. Smaller quieter dogs, however. Funny.

Do I have enough money for a place in the Bywater. Maybe not too far uptown. Google maps?

Screed for Niti. Now where was I?

Oh, right, how am I supposed to blog like this, and communicate like this? When do I end my blogging day, because it is becoming incessant. For the last two days at least.

So many comments on my blog. I feel bad. My obligations are too many. How do I keep up with this conversation? I love this conversation. My phone rings. It actually rings. People call me. Strangers call me. There is suddenly more work than I know what to do with. I’ve got so many little obligations. Things I said I’d do, that I gotta do. Getting started in the morning takes forever. All the different chanels, mediums, of communication. All the different plans that need to unfold.

How do I set a resonable pace now, for development? What direction can I take that will combine these efforts? What are they?

• Asterisk Direct
• Apache mod_proxy and mod_tunnel
• Think New Orleans
• The Daily Beta
• Customer Relationship Management
• Klamath
• Computer Systems Analyst
• KHTML Win32

Then again, my weekends are full. Evenings out. At The Big Top. Sundry tiny commitments to help people with computers and blogs. This conversation, about Living the Long Tail.

It’s all too much this morning. I feel bad when I do not respond to each message promptly.

What do I do to keep focused. How do I put first things first? What are the first things that should go first? How do I quiet my mind so that I can get things done?