IT’S 2:02 A.M. ON A COLD SUMMER NIGHT.

I’m sitting in a book store next to a strip club.

Not that kind of book store. The inventory here is incredibly old and impossibly rare. And it has a secret—a secret that I might have just discovered.

I am alone in the store. And then, tap-tap, suddenly I’m not.

And now I’m pretty sure I’m about to snap my laptop shut, run screaming out the front door, and never return.

If you read any literature this year, read this story. A gold star. Five gold stars. A gold bar. This thing is amazing.

Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store (robinsloan.com)

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon...

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Open Coffee: Come one, come all - entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists, startup job-seekers: Open Coffee at Tech Square Starbucks on July 28th at 5PM.

Please: no service providers. You'll find most of the crowd are quite poor, and you'd just be wasting your time.

http://www.opencoffeeclub.org/

This is a good place to go if you've ever thought about starting a company.

Open Coffee at Tech Square Starbucks (Tuesday July 28, 2009) - Upcoming

Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute (EII) ATDC seeks a candidate to serve as a Manager of ATDC Venture Catalyst to manage the day-to-day operation of the ATDC Biosciences Center. For more specific information about EII, visit http://innovate.gatech.edu/. For more specific information about ATDC, visit http://www.atdc.org/. Salary for this position will be commensurate with education and experience. For this position, Georgia Tech offers competitive benefits including vacation accrual rate of 21 days per year, sick time accrual, plus one week vacation during the Christmas and New Year holidays, choice between two pension plans, several supplemental retirement savings plans, medical/dental coverage, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, and many additional benefits. For an overview of Georgia Tech�s benefits, visit the Office of Human Resources (OHR) web site http://www.ohr.gatech.edu/ and navigate to the �Benefits� section.

ATDC is Hiring Bioscience Peeps

The problem here is that Google is setting the platform that we are supposed to develop for a year or more before it exists. That IRRITATES the hell out of me. It is the same kind of egotistical douschebaggery Microsoft used to pull: pre-launching products to gain control before contributing anything.

Watching the Wave introduction video... when I see that semi-euro, T-shirt wearing trim-bearded fuck up there on that stage with his falsely elegant peppy smart talk planning a 'boating trip', and the scripted passing back and forth with 'the best project manager in the world,' I see one thing and one thing only in my mind: Ballmer's sweaty bitch tits bouncing as he stomps and screams, vibrating to the tune of "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!"

At least Ballmer had the good sense to be ugly, which gave him an odd kind of dignity.

Hacker News | Google's Microsoft Moment

I'm not sure Google's new Chrome OS announcement is that big a deal, or that the eventual product that gets released will actually have that much impact, but it's a useful milestone in marking Google's evolution towards becoming an older company with a distinctly different culture than they used to have.

This is, for lack of a better term, Google's "Microsoft Moment". This is the point when the difference between their internal conception of the company starts to diverge just a bit too far from the public perception of the company, and even starts to diverge from reality. At this inflection point, the reasons for doing new things at Google start to change.

The problem here is that in combination with Wave, Google is setting the platform that we are supposed to develop for a year or more before it exists. That IRRITATES the hell out of me. It is the same kind of egotistical douschebaggery Microsoft used to pull: pre-launching products to gain control before contributing anything.

Watching the Wave introduction video... when I see that semi-euro, T-shirt wearing trim-bearded fuck up there on that stage with his falsely elegant peppy smart talk planning a 'boating trip', and the scripted passing back and forth with 'the best project manager in the world,' I see one thing and one thing only in my mind: Ballmer's sweaty bitch tits bouncing as he stomps and screams, vibrating to the tune of "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!"

At least Ballmer had the good sense to be ugly, which gave him an odd kind of dignity.

I think I prefer this stagecraft http://bit.ly/pwGXs to this stagecraft http://bit.ly/15aSar because Google's culture of arrogance is starting to disgust me.

Google's Microsoft Moment - Anil Dash

Unfortunately -- you knew that was coming, right? -- Gentry’s scheme is completely impractical. It uses something called an ideal lattice as the basis for the encryption scheme, and both the size of the ciphertext and the complexity of the encryption and decryption operations grow enormously with the number of operations you need to perform on the ciphertext -- and that number needs to be fixed in advance. And converting a computer program, even a simple one, into a Boolean circuit requires an enormous number of operations. These aren't impracticalities that can be solved with some clever optimization techniques and a few turns of Moore's Law; this is an inherent limitation in the algorithm. In one article, Gentry estimates that performing a Google search with encrypted keywords -- a perfectly reasonable simple application of this algorithm -- would increase the amount of computing time by about a trillion. Moore’s law calculates that it would be 40 years before that homomorphic search would be as efficient as a search today, and I think he’s being optimistic with even this most simple of examples.

:(

Schneier on Security: Homomorphic Encryption Breakthrough

Scott Jehl has released jQuery Visualize, the plugin that groks HTML tables and generates lovely charts from it, all from a simple $('table').visualize(); (lot's of options for you to twiddle too if you want).

This is damn cool!

On a side note, when will Firefox get a "right click open in Excel" for HTML tables? That is one of the only reasons I open IE anymore.

Ajaxian » jQuery Visualize: Updated accessible charts and graphs

I spoke with Mark at Buck’s Woodside about how he conceived his successful products, the process of growing those sites into successful companies, and what makes a successful consumer Internet startup. The most interesting part of the interview was when Mark described how his first startup took off very quickly, once he arrived at a solid concept. Mark created ONEList and it took off overnight because it solved a fundamental pain many people were experiencing. Making mailing lists at the time was a painful process, and ONEList made it easy. Bloglines was another good idea because it solved a problem Mark personally was experiencing, how to keep up with the many blogs he read. Furthermore, Mark leveraged the marketing and PR relationships he had built at ONEList to get press for Bloglines which spurred their growth.

An Interview with Mark Fletcher, Founder of Bloglines and ONEList — TechDrawl

This is a collection of e-mails I have sent to people who post classified ads.

My goal is to mess with them, confuse them, and/or piss them off.

These are the ones that succeeded.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

E-mails from an Asshole