www.James-Strocel.com

Yesterday, my wife and I spent a couple of hours at the Powell Street Japanese Culture festival. Check out the photo gallery after the jump!

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Researchers at the University of Florida are working on an  video game that attempts to educate pre-teen Latina girls on how to resist peer pressure to have sex. Players will don motion capture suits to interact with the characters on the screen to practice proper social responses. Now, forget for a moment that it’s abstinence education. Forget that it’s the result of a $434,000 government grant. What we have here is a group of adults who have completely misunderstood children and video games.

The most obvious flaw in this project is the graphics. How is this game supposed to engage anyone if we’re scraping the bottom of the uncanny valley with these character designs? It seems like the researchers believe that realism is the most important aspect of engaging people through video games. Most best selling video games often feature cartoon avatars, or at the very least highly stylized human avatars. There is an entire genre of school simulation games like the Persona series that are based on simpler technology and would be way more entertaining and effective than this awkward monstrosity.

The game also seems to treat decision making as if it were some kind of pavlovian response. There are way more factors going into a child’s decision to use drugs or have sex than remembering to “just say no”. No matter how realistic the graphics might be, it’s much harder to model factors like the involvement of a parent, the availability of birth control, or the feelings you’ll have to manage when it’s a childhood friend applying the peer pressure. If you can express those concepts, your game might become entertaining, but then it’ll run the risk of being accused of glorification. Some parents think that just learning about a bad behaviour in an engaging way constitutes glorification. It’s a risk that educators run into more often than they should.

Dealing with peer pressure is an important part of being a child. The more education you have about peer pressure, the better equipped you’ll be to make good choices. However, if we design that education based only on adult assumptions about children and concepts adults are comfortable with,  all you’ll be left with is a half million dollars worth of creepy CGI corpse-children.

No one tells you how hard it is to write content. People think that just because you speak English and type using the home row, you should be able to dash off post upon post without breaking a sweat. Not so. Even if you have something to say, you need to undo years of academic conditioning. University will tell you how to write for the professor and how to make everything “correct”, but says almost nothing about writing honest, human communication.  That kind of writing takes training. When I need training, I head over to 750words.com.

750word.com was started by Buster Benson, a developer living in Seattle, WA. It’s a writing challenge where you sit down and write 750 words of free associative writing, a practice inspired by writing exercises and psychotherapy. Only you can access your words (although you can export them), so you don’t have to worry about taking down bad ideas. It’s a great way to experiment with your writing, and leaves you open to those “happy accidents” that are the soul of true creativity.

The site also takes down statistics about your word use and tries to figure out how you are feeling at the time of your writing. You can learn a lot about yourself by just letting your fingers fly across the keyboard. When I decided to show Sara what I had written, she was surprised learn exactly what was going on in my head. I mostly wrote about the move, getting my business going, and all the stress associated with it. I find it difficult to just talk about this stuff verbally. If I write it down, I don’t have to worry about stuttering or messing the words up. Correction is only a backspace key away. I used to think that writing about yourself was kind of narcissistic. While it’s true that having no filter can make people uncomfortable,  attention is not the only reason to reflect. Your own advice has more power when you write it down.  Your words don’t just stay inside your head. You can catch yourself in a lie, or better yet, you can catch yourself speaking the truth. That truth, once etched in letters, can blossom until your life is changed forever.

Do you ever worry that you’re basing your life decisions on bestseller books?

I’m talking about new, fresh off the presses books where the authors are still alive and doing press junkets on Regis and Kelly. The ones that sitcoms always warned you about following. I know it seems like everyone’s chasing their guru of the week, but lately there have been a lot of good gurus to read. You have Levitt and Dubner telling us why swimming pools are more dangerous in your home than handguns. Malcolm Gladwell says that success in the NHL can be attributed to something as random as a January birth date. Seth Godin has us looking at that resume and wondering if it’s even worth the paper it’s printed on when it comes to landing a job.

Right now I’m reading Nicholas Taleb’s book, “Black Swan”, which talks about the nature of improbable events and that lack of knowledge is just as important as knowledge itself. I’m sure my mind is going to be blown and I’m yet again going to take a hard look at how I make my decisions in life. What does that mean? Why am I willing to make choices based on something that millions have already read? If the ideas in these books are so good, the world should have already changed based on what we’ve learned. Traditional commercial advertising should be dead and buried already. We should know that easy access to birth control methods results in less crime. We should have a comprehensive energy conservation plan already. Yet we don’t. If most of the world can’t do anything with same knowledge that I’m getting from the exact same book they are reading, what chance do I have of doing anything different?

The problem with that world view is that it assumes that everyone has read the same bestseller I have. Most people don’t have the time to read them. The fact that these books are bestsellers has nothing to do with how the knowledge inside them could be used. Reading them is easy, but implementing the ideas in real life is something else entirely. Besides, we’re still in love with the idea that success is something magical, ordained by prophecies and other mumbo-jumbo. No one will laugh if you tell them that the key to your success was found in your local library. Unfortunately, no one will believe you, either. Your confession will end up as one of those quotations,  passed off as one of those trite particles of dime-store wisdom drilled into the heads of school children. It might even be used as a chapter heading in your biography, which by that time will be a bonafide best-seller.

The technology community is making much ado about the personal information land-grab that Facebook orchestrated recently. Basically, information that was formerly protected by your account’s privacy settings was now linked to public pages. This would make it easier for marketers to target users and possibly allow Mark Zuckerberg to finally make a profit. Those who were attracted to Facebook for its privacy features had been officially stabbed in the back.

Is anybody surprised by this development? Facebook has rallied almost half a billion users under service that charged absolutely nothing. Consider to time and money it takes to manage a user base of that size. The interface complaints alone could fill an entire rack server. Clearly, something had to give. Facebook needed money to survive, and that user info was the only way to get it. This leaves us with a question: Can free web software be trusted?

It’s the same trap that foiled many internet start-ups in the 90′s. Computers made the transit and storage of information literally too cheap to meter. It doesn’t make sense charging for a service that you put no effort into providing. Your competitors will just undercut you. However, just because one aspect of your business is plentiful enough to be free, that doesn’t mean the whole thing should be. Websites still need hardware and active management to provide any services at all. Free web software should only be a platform for other paid services that can support the free stuff.

Facebook’s example underlines the need for day-one monetization, if not profitability of any web service. Google, Craigslist, Flickr and Livejournal all have paid components which support stellar free services. There will always be free open source alternatives for the Facebooks of the world, but the time it takes to have software that is easy to use and Just Works™ will always require some kind of cash. So if you have website and you put a price tag on some of its features, don’t think of it as selling out to the man. That money is a symbol of trust and reliance on your expertise. If you can fulfill the promise of that symbol, then the world will beat a path to your door.

Why, as adults, do we over-analyze holidays? Christmas is too commercialized, dressing up for Halloween might offend other religions, or Valentine’s Day is so hurtful to the single people. This weekend, it’s Mother’s Day that appears to be on the chopping block. I’m still trying to figure out where people came up with the idea that Mother’s Day is celebrated to recognize the perfect mother, with the June Cleaver pearls and the dust-free living room, whose devoted husband and children have placed her on a pedestal as the angel of the household. I don’t know what day they’re used to celebrating, but it sure as heck is not my vision of Mother’s Day.

The Modern Mother’s Day began to be significantly recognized in the US by 1914. There had been earlier 19th century attempts to recognize a day for mothers, largely due to the idea that there should be a “Mother’s Day for Peace” to protest the atrocities of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. However, the event that allowed this day to be formally recognized by governments began with two sisters mourning the loss of their mother. At a time when most women remained in the home, Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis worked tirelessly to teach American women basic nursing and sanitation skills, and her efforts helped to save lives on both sides of the American Civil War. When she died in 1905 her two daughters, Anna and Elsinore, missed her terribly, and felt that children fail to appreciate their mothers enough when they are still around to receive said appreciation. Therefore, a campaign to establish an official Mother’s Day began, concluding with President Woodrow Wilson encouraging United States citizens to display flags on the second Sunday in May “as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country”.

So, let’s summarize:

• Previous Mother’s Day celebrations were tied to a need for peace and a wish to leave a better world for their children
• The official holiday began as an act by two sisters who loved her mother deeply and wanted the kindness of all mothers recognized

Now, nowhere in that summary does the word “perfect” appear. We do not celebrate Mother’s Day because a mother is the epitome of womanhood. We celebrate to acknowledge that mothers deserve to be recognized. Now, some might argue that Mother’s Day is also too commercialized (and Anna Jarvis would agree with you, based on the way she protested this commercialization in her later years). However, if it’s the commercialization that bothers you, I say change your perception of the holiday. Forget the Hallmark greeting cards. Create your own family traditions. Just quit complaining about how Mother’s Day does not demonstrate “real” motherhood. We all have different definitions of what that “real” is, and we would do well to remember that mothering is the most important job a person can be faced with, and a little recognition now and then for a lot of hard work shouldn’t hurt anyone.

So you’ve got joined a ruby club, installed the software,  signed up for github and Heroku, and finished some tutorials. Where do you go from there, Rails Developer? It is now time for you to choose a project to work on.

Projects are best way to learn a programming language because it forces you to apply your knowledge. Memorizing the API is all fine and good, but it’s not going to matter much if you can’t orchestrate it into something tangible. As I said, it’ll become your resume when you want to use Ruby on Rails professionally. Furthermore, the market for subscription-based web software is exploding right now. Your project has the potential to make you rich. Even with a small customer base of, say, 200 customers paying $20 a month, you are bringing in 6 figures of revenue with almost no marginal cost for more customers. Watch this presentation by DHH if you need more convincing.

The project I’m working on (for the purposes of this blog series, at least) is called Dramathea. It’s a website where community theater companies can promote their shows online. I plan to monetize it by selling preferred access to the front page and taking online ticket sales. It started out a few years ago as a PHP project, but now that I’ve discovered Rails, I think it would be a great way to learn the framework. Here are some tips that will help you choose your own project to work on.

1. Keep it Simple

37signals is making millions right now with this philosophy. Your project shouldn’t be complex, even if you are planning to monetize it right out of the gate. No one is going to use your software if it has the learning curve of a Boeing 747. This is probably the hardest guideline to follow because any application can turn into an over-bloated mess within a 10-minute requirements meeting. Have a core function, like listing plays in a certain city. If your users demand more features, by all means, add them, but make sure your site still does that one thing it was supposed to do.

2. Tempt Failure

The rush of gambling doesn’t come from winning alone. Losing a grand at blackjack and then doubling down is the experience that practically built Las Vegas. I don’t know if Dramathea is going to make any money. Community theater people are known for being cheap, so why would they spend money on my site when they could advertise on facebook for free? Then again, what other website is completely dedicated to community theater? What if my site is the easiest to use? I don’t know what’ll happen when I ship this site, and that’s all part of the fun.

3. Solve Your Own Problem

Many web app success stories come from people solving their own problems. My problem is finding live theater in the Fraser Valley. What’s yours?

3. Follow the Stress

If you can’t think of your own problem to solve, look around you. Listen.  It could be in conversations with your friends and family. It could be on threads in Reddit. Keep an eye out on fmylife.com. Wherever you find stress, headaches, and inefficiency, you will find your project.

5. Don’t Worry About People Stealing Your “Idea”

Industrial progress is being held back by myths like the Coca-cola formula and KFC’s 11 secret herbs and spices. You can’t really own an idea any more than you can own the equation, “2+2=4″. What you can own is the work that makes the idea a reality. You have to maintain the data, manage hosting, market to your initial user base, and yes, code the thing in the first place! Anyone who says you can make money from your ideas alone is probably selling you something.

6. Ship

As you can see from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s l337 coding skills in 2001, it doesn’t matter where you start on the programming totem pole. You’ll be known by your time spent with the framework and the code you post on the internet. Those faltering first steps will only serve to inspire the developers yet to come.

Feel free to post links to your projects in the comments.

Here is the address for Dramathea: http://www.dramathea.com

Here is the github repository: http://github.com/jstrocel/Dramathea

The controversial chairman of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, has made plans to announce a pay subscription model for his publications to be viewed on the iPad and other such devices. The plan is expected to include the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and the New York Times and will expand into News Corp.’s entertainment properties.

All I have to say is: Good for Rupert Murdoch. News Corp lost 5 billion dollars last year. You could say he’s only doing this because he’s old and the pay subscription model is the only thing he understands, but really it’s either this or shutter the newspapers entirely. That move would certainly cause more shareholders to flee, further reducing News Corp.’s share price, causing him to shut down more divisions, and on it goes until the company implodes. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of situation.

It’s going to be interesting to see if this works. Subscription based services have failed in the past, but that was at a time before you had online payment methods like paypal and 1-click. Today, millions are being made through subscription-based web software, a situation unthinkable in the last decade. It’ll also be a true test of where political opinion lies in the world today.  There was a time when companies like News Corp. could hide their inviability through cheap debt. Now thanks to the recession, we are actually going to see if people are willing to pay money to keep the conservative echo chamber alive.