Riges Younan recently Twittered about an interesting article by Eric Ries entitled What does a startup CTO actually do? Having been the CTO at a handful of startups – and it’s what I’m doing now – I can say the list is pretty much spot on, with just one exception: etc. Et cetera is all the other stuff that needs to be done, but no one’s been hired to do it yet.

Usually a startup has one or two people (including the “CTO”) in the technical department. As tasks get too big or too complicated for the CTO to do by themselves, they need go and find someone to do them. Hopefully, this search is planned for, and there’s budget for it. Having a CTO that does too much “etc”, makes for an unhappy and unproductive CTO, and the company as a whole suffers because of it.

I farted, and it got me thinking about names.

Names used to have meaning, over and above the person to whom they were given. Several North American native tribes had a concept called “spirit name”, which is given to a tribe member later on in life. You might have one name growing up, but at a coming of age ceremony, you’d get another name, carefully selected by tribal elders. It might reflect your nascent personality, or perhaps give you an ideal to work towards – hopefully both. If your name was “flying eagle”, you’d better set your sights high – you need to live up to your name.

In European traditions, one was often given the name of someone in the family. The original idea here was twofold: one was to honour the ancestor for some reason, and the other, I believe, was to give the young child someone to look up to, someone of quality character to aspire to be. This really only worked well if the family was close, and the kid with the name got to know and respect the ancestor like the parents obviously did.

With society getting more and more self-centered over the past few generations, those ideas are getting lost. Names are pleasant-sounding, fashionable labels – a way to differentiate yourself in a group of other humans. Names used to serve as a connection to something outside of yourself, something bigger, something to aspire to.

I farted, and it got me thinking about names. Mine would be “Farts Pungently”.

I’ve had the same basic email address for about 15 years now, and in my misspent youth, I was doing some fairly unsafe things with it (the Internet wasn’t evil then!). Upshot is, I get a lot of spam. This past month, I got over 42,000 pieces of spam. Apple Mail does a fairly good job of figuring out what is spam and what isn’t, but some still gets through the cracks. My favourites are the Nigerian scam emails, mostly due to their laughably bad English and overall implausibility.

The one I’m about to share with you now, gentle reader, is particularly good – mostly due to its refreshingly blunt honesty. I won’t republish the entire thing, but here’s some good bits:

We are the Comptroller of Fund movement Terminal and Director of Statutory Department of Inter Banks Credit Commission. My Department is affiliated to FSA, UN, WORLD BANK, W.A.F.

Imagine this guy’s business card! How big would it have to be to fit all that on?

Fortunately, our Terminal in New York has been monitoring the routing of your fund for seizure’s became sympathetic to you for such attempt to carry on.

I’m glad there’s some terminal in New York that is sympathetic to seizures. Perhaps the Epilepsy Foundation ought to be notified?

For this reason, you must not inform anybody about this letter or my contact with you. You must keep my relationship with you to be topped secret and highly confidential.

Oops.

But here’s the best part – the only actually honest part of this whole email (emphasis mine):

Therefore, further details will be furnished to you and my identity will be forwarded to you as soon as I deceive your reply.

Freudian slip there, Mr Nigerian Scammer? Or a wave of subconscious guilt, forcing at least your fingers to do the right thing? We will never know.

Now if you’ll excuse me, gentle reader, I must go send my credit card number to this Russian doctor selling penis-enlargement pills from a 100% real Canadian pharmacy…

I’m a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest. There, I said it. I like Eurovision, for all its tacky, over-the-top flag-waving bad music – it’s really pretty good entertainment. Sure, there are some boring songs, but for all those, there are some absolutely fantastically bad ones, ones that are obviously taking the piss and ones that you’re really not quite sure what to make of them. Then, of course, there’s the turkey, and the less said of that, the better.

Usually, someone that’s a bit deserving wins. Two years ago, it was Lordi from Finland. They rocked, rocked hard, and most importantly, rocked interestingly and entertainingly. But what is this Russian winning song ? It’s garbage. It’s certainly not very good, but unfortunately, it’s not exactly very bad either, and that’s really what I have the biggest problem with. If I want to hear boring music, I’ll turn on a commercial radio station. This is Eurovison, for Wogan’s sake! The epitome of tacky! I watch it to be entertained. I think I got up to clean the dinner dishes during the Russian performance. Snoozefest!

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

This man knows exactly what’s happening in new media today. I’ve not read anyone else who has managed to sum things up so well. He talks about points in history where big changes happen, and society’s reaction to those big changes. The most recent big change is this notion of free time – the ability to decide for oneself what to do for hours on end.

Starting around the 1960s, we mostly spent that watching TV. Taking the view from 100km up, we’re collectively getting bored with that, and trying other things – blogging, making videos on YouTube, playing World of Warcraft, making LOLcats – anything. These are all activities enabled by the Internet; collectively “new media”. New media is about enabling your audience to be creators as well – it’s about ultimately dispensing with the notion of “audience” and “creators” as separate groups of people. We can all create (for better or for worse). The tools are widely available and the barriers of entry are very low.

Read more about this from Clay Shirky.

As seen in The Age today:

I’m pretty good at working up a nice presentation (Keynote rocks my socks). The main rule for doing good prezo is don’t show up naked. You’d be surprised how many people here forget that one.

No, the actual big rule is don’t read your slides. Gruber linked to an excellent step-by-step guide to making sure the presentation you’re making is a good one. There are some excellent tips in there on how to design slides and the language to go along with them.

This dovetails nicely with what I’m up to now in real life. I’ve signed up for the PBS announcer’s course, with a view to eventually having my very own radio show on a real honest-to-goodness radio station. Golly. Last night, we learnt about writing for the radio – it’s similar to writing for presentations, which I’m used to. It’s important to be quick and punchy, far more conversational and simplistic than traditional journalistic or fiction writing.

The film critic Roger Ebert once said that a measure of a good film is the idea of wanting to have dinner with the characters in the film. If sitting around and having dinner would be an enjoyable thing, it’s more likely to be a good film. As flippant as that may be, there’s some truth to that, and I think it applies to other types of media as well: blogs, books, television.

I like watching Top Gear. Not really because of the car stuff, but because the hosts are so good. Using Ebert’s measurement, I’d love to have them over for dinner. Same thing with Spicks and Specks, Rockwiz and (the subject of this entry) Vasili’s Garden. I’m not really into gardening, but Vasili and his guests are always so entertaining that they end up rating quite well on Ebert’s eat-dinner-with-them scale.

I just read in The Age that Vasili will be moving back to his community-TV roots on Channel 31 from national broadcaster SBS. This means less fame and fortune, probably less money, and less access to high-end production facilities. There was a dispute about the style of the show: SBS wanted polish and glamour, and Vasili wanted to keep doing his successful home-movie style stuff. So the stubborn so-and-so ditched SBS and went back to Channel 31 where he (presumably) has more creative control over his show. I can’t wait to see him back on the air.

The World Question Centre has released the results of their 2008 question, which is:

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?

There are some exceptional answers to this question, and while I haven’t read them all, here are some highlights I’ve read so far:

It is a simple fact: hardly any of my software even still runs at all!

– Some typical self-important wank from Kai

These [local experts on human behaviour] are the thousands or millions of bright professionals and practitioners in each of thousands of different occupations.  They are the people who went to our high schools and colleges, but who found careers with higher pay and shorter hours than academic science.  Almost all of them know important things about human nature that behavioural scientists have not yet described, much less understood.  Marine drill sergeants know a lot about aggression and dominance.  Master chess players know a lot about if-then reasoning.  Prostitutes know a lot about male sexual psychology.  School teachers know a lot about child development.  Trial lawyers know a lot about social influence.  The dark continent of human nature is already richly populated with autochthonous tribes, but we scientists don’t bother to talk to these experts.

– Geoffrey Miller is smashing down the ivory tower

I realised too that I had to learn to evaluate opinions separately from those who were giving them: the truth might sometimes come out of a mouth I disliked, but that didn’t automatically mean it wasn’t the truth.

– Brian Eno questions himself.

[Doris] Lessing urges us to take pause and to reconsider the capacity of our language and cultural systems to proffer knowledge to those outside of our immediate public.

– Museum curator Hans Ulrich Obrist brings up something I’ve been thinking about myself: What good is all this stuff we have? (Artists, of course, call them “objects”).

Growing up as a young proto-scientist, I was always strongly anti-establishmentarian, looking forward to overthrowing the System as our generation’s new Galileo. Now I spend a substantial fraction of my time explaining and defending the status quo to outsiders. It’s very depressing.

– Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at CalTech realises he’s part of the scientific establishment, and why that’s okay.

Russian America was a social and technological experiment that worked, until political compromises brought the experiment to a halt.

– George Dyson looks at something I’ve often wondered about: What was Alaska like while the Russians were there?

The problem for me was that just as I couldn’t find any evidence that there was a god, I couldn’t find any that there wasn’t a god. I would have to call myself an agnostic. At first, this seemed a little wimpy, but after a while I began to hope it might be an example of Feynman’s heroic willingness to accept, even glory in, uncertainty.

– Alan Alda works on the God question.

Give me 100% not-cotton clothing, genetically modified food (from a farmers’ market, preferably), this-year’s laptop, cutting-edge dentistry and drugs.

– WELL co-founder Stewart Brand is trying hard to piss off his disciples.

A sentence of Ludwig Wittgenstein from his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (5.6) was like a dogma for me: “Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. — The limits of my language signify the limits of my world ” (my translation). Now I react to this sentence with an emphatic “No!”.

– Neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel doesn’t know why he changed his mind about this, and that’s a good thing.

I thought that it would change people. I thought it would allow us to build a new world through which we could model new behaviors, values, and relationships. In the 90’s, I thought the experience of going online for the first time would change a person’s consciousness as much as if they had dropped acid in the 60’s.

– Douglas Rushkoff can’t see the forest for the trees.

In addition to the myth of two nuclear bombs bringing the war to an end, there are other myths that need to be demolished. There is the myth that, if Hitler had acquired nuclear weapons before we did, he could have used them to conquer the world. There is the myth that the invention of the hydrogen bomb changed the nature of nuclear warfare. There is the myth that international agreements to abolish weapons without perfect verification are worthless. All these myths are false. After they are demolished, dramatic moves toward a world without nuclear weapons may become possible.

– Freeman Dyson seeks to rewrite modern myths.

Imagine if your company or organization had one fellow [the CPU] who sat in an isolated office, and refused to talk with anyone except his two most trusted deputies [the Northbridge and Southbridge], through which all the actual work the company does must be funneled.

– In descibing his change of mind, David Dalrymple accidentally comes up with a wonderful way to describe the modern computer.

As for me, I’ve changed my mind about cars. Four doors are good.

I’m going to tell you about a guy I know. He’s really smart and clever. He cares about all the right things, and is quite pleasant to know. However, at some point in the past, he’s decided that computers are magic.

They’ve got fairies inside, and if you shake them too much, all the pixie dust dribbles out the cracks, and the whole thing stops working. Fucking magic! This is not a problem, really. I myself have decided, in similar fashion, that cars are magic. Put petrol in, and the goblins under the hood drink it and push. Or something. Magic! Isn’t it great. Because things are magic, they cannot be understood – so one really ought not to waste too much time trying to get one’s head around them. It’s magic! You’re not supposed to understand what’s going on.

The odd thing is, this guy (remember him from the first paragraph?) seems like the type of person who would be interested in technology for the sake of it. He’s curious, interested in new things, and generally very aware of what goes on around him in the world.

I decided that cars were magic when I was 16 or 17. Around the time most kids are thinking about getting a cool car, I was thinking about getting a cool computer. Zowie! I had a 16” monitor back then, and it was eeee-nooorrr-mus. I was so cool. I even had an SE/30. Yeah, baby. I rocked. I understood computers pretty well. Bits of thing fly around in there, sending messages to each other, asking other bits of thing to do things for them. Simple. Look under the hood of a car? Goblins! Magic! Bad smells! Dirty!

I wonder if first-paragraph guy feels the same way about computers, and when his magic moment was?

The real point of this essay is this: even though computers aren’t magic, MySQL is. Evil, black, dark magic that silently and randomly refuses to update tables whenever it feels like it. No pattern, no rhyme or reason. Poof. Magic.