Matt Mazur

There are things all around you that you don’t notice and don’t question. We all have preconceived ideas and notions about what things mean and why certain things are the way they are. But every now and then you learn something that changes the way you see things… something that just blows your mind.

Growing up we had a small, colorful tapestry that my parents used to help decorate our laundry room. It was about two feet wide and three feet high and had a woman and a boy on it and the woman was holding a fruit basket on her head with one hand. On the bottom it said Hecho en Mexico.

Until I was about 15 I thought this meant Woman in Mexico. I must have passed it hundreds of times growing up, never questioning what it meant. Then one day in high school Spanish class I learned that hecho actually meant made in, not woman. It said Made in Mexico. Doh.

I went home and told my mom who had a similar “hrmph” reaction. We had held this idea in our head for such a long time and just like that, with a little bit of new information, the tapestry changed.

Here’s an interesting little exercise that Andy Hunt told us to try at the Philly Emerging Tech conference:

Close your eyes for a few seconds and think of the color red.

Open your eyes and look around.

Everything that’s red should stick out.

How do you know what to look for if no one tells you to look for it?

Fortunately, there’s an easy, often neglected way to broaden your knowledge: try something new.

Read the same blog everyday? Try a new one.

Been using the same programming language for 10 years? Been there… Try a new one.

Take the same route to work everyday? Try a new one.

Is English the only language you know? Try a new one.

Same wife everyday? Try a new one. (Just kidding honey)

Bottom line: the more experiences have the more things you’ll learn along the way. And the more you know, the more Hecho en Mexicos you’ll discover in your own life.

Read this.

Quote:

If every child was unschooled — given the chance to explore and discover and learn in the real world what they love to do, what they’re uniquely good at doing, and what the world needs that they care about — then we would have a world of self-confident, creative, informed, empowered, networked entrepreneurs doing work that needs to be done, successfully. We would have armies of people collaborating to solve the problems and crises facing our world, instead of going home exhausted at the end of the day seeking escape, feeling helpless to do anything that is meaningful to thems or to the world. We would have a world of producers instead of consumers, a world of abundance instead of scarcity, a world of diversity instead of what Terry Glavin calls “a dark and gathering sameness”. We would have a world of young people choosing their lives instead of taking what they can get, what they can afford, what is offered to them. We would have a world of people who are nobody-but-themselves, and who know who they are, and how to live and make a living for themselves.

The discussion on HackerNews is excellent too.

Yeah, I hated school too. It’s not ever going to change because it’s for the masses. That’s its sole and express purpose. Why is anyone trying to redesign the system or otherwise shoehorn exceptional people into a system designed for the masses? Either drop out or shut up, in my opinion. Massive social structures don’t have time for unique butterflies. That’s the Reality of the situation with a capital R.

The optimum solution is to just get it done at an 75-90% level until you graduate HS or college and get on with your god damn life instead of fighting it for years and years and years and pulling yourself and others down in the process. Just give them the bare minimum of what they want while pursuing your own interests. It’s politics 101.

This is why many, many successful people say “I dropped out”, or “Oh, I was only a B and C student” instead of “I spent every waking moment of my life trying to rebel against the system in which I had no place in, attempting to reforming it form the inside to suit my specific needs to a tee.”

octane

I’ve been giving my last post a lot of thought.  Its incomplete.

I don’t like being tired, but I do love working on projects that I’m truly passionate about and if that causes me to lose some sleep, so be it. We only live once and I don’t want to sleep my life away. If I get to a point where I can spend 80-90-100 hours/week working on projects that I care about, I’ll consider it a success.  I don’t mind missing out on some things as long as its while I’m doing work I love. 

There is a rush.  In 100 years, we’ll all be dead. Better not waste it.

The most finished man of the world would be one who was never irresolute and never in a hurry.

Schopenhauer

I wake up usually 15 minutes later than I should, quickly shower, dress, and head to work. I speed most of the way there.

I get to work and spend most of the day moving fast. There’s a lot of work to do and usually not enough time to do it.

When I get done with work, I speed home while busily planning in my head how I’m going to spend the next five hours before I need to go to sleep.  The later I get off work the faster I tend to drive. I drive 10-15 over the speed limit because it shaves 5-10 minutes off the drive, which is an extra 5-10 minutes I can spend with my wife or programming each night.

On nights that I’m short on time, I don’t program and I spend the time with her instead.  It’s not a hard decision, but its one I wish I didn’t have to make.

When I program I code fast. I don’t particularly like writing test cases because they take time. Usually the code is hacked together. Usually it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

I like Five Star notebooks. I keep one at work and one at home. I use them to track the things I’m working on. I make small squares next to the tasks I need to do and check them off as they are completed. For the times in between work and home, I have a todo list app on my phone. It can be helpful to track all those random ideas that come up when you’re not trying to come up with ideas.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot the past few days: I need to slow down.

I took a look around on the drive to work today. I never noticed most of the stores I pass on a daily basis: dry cleaners and audio equipment stores and a sub place I’ve heard of and even a place that sells sheds, to name a few. I bet that sub place is pretty good, but I never noticed it because I wasn’t looking. There’s also beautiful vast cornfields that I’ve never really looked at before. If I wasn’t running late, I may have even stopped on the side of the road to watch the sunrise. It’s really quite something if you catch it at the right time and the right place. Call me a sissy, whatever.

Work’s kind of the same way. I’m so busy focused on getting the next task completed that I’m missing out on all the really amazing people and things around me.

Programming too. I’ve gotten so absorbed with Domain Pigeon that I forgot why I started it in the first place–to learn new things that’ll help me found a start-up one day.

On that note, I’ve been trading sleep for programming and I’ve come to one conclusion: it’s a terrible trade off. I get to program for a few extra hours a week but I become a walking zombie the rest of the time. Ironically, the lack of sleep also results in more typos when I do program which costs more time in the long run. And for what? Is it that big of a deal if I found a company at 30 instead of 28?  I’d rather spend the next six years taking it slowly and enjoying myself than work my ass off and miss out on the best years of my life. Taking it slowly helps in other ways too: you won’t get burnt out, you’ll have more time to learn, and should you fail, you’ll still be able to look back and remember all the good times you had along the way.

Lesson learned: Enjoy the ride.

Yeah:

I don’t do new years resolutions, and it has been my policy since I was a kid.

My rationale: if you want to change your life or do something, don’t procrastinate – start right then. Putting an arbitrary date on things you want to do never made sense to me. You just have to write it down and then follow through.

Excellent presentation given at the Le Web conference:

The actual title is “Employees Suck”, but I prefer the recommended “The Traditional Employment Model Sucks.” There’s also a video of it on ustream, but he was rushed for time and it’s not as good as just clicking through the presentation.

Domain Pigeon will aim to make slide 53′s “Hunt for Unique Names” objective a bit easier (hopefully).

What an interesting day.

It started off with a long conversation with my boss about work related issues. The only thing to say about that is that for some reason the more I want to impress someone the stupider I seem to sound. When I talk to my brother, for example, I am clear and deliberate and speak with a kind of verbal alacrity that I seem to totally lose when I’m talking to someone I’m trying hard to impress. I much rather have it been the other way around, but, what are you going to do…

I left work a bit early to head out to Philly for this month’s Ruby meetup. The group, formerly known as Philly on Rails and now known as Philly.rb (due to interests in frameworks other than Rails), meets twice a month: a pub night, where people sit around, drink beer, and talk about geeky things, and an instructional meeting, where people get together in a classroom environment and talk about more geeky things. Today was the first instructional meeting I’ve attended.

Getting there was a bit of an adventure. Due to today’s nasty weather in the Northeast, traffic was slow as hell. The drive to Philly took about three times as long as it should have normally taken. Stop and go, stop and go, stop and go all the way. Then, when I get there, I have to deal with city driving, which I’m not terribly fond of. Somehow whenever my Garmin says “Turn left in 200 feet” I always either turn too early or too late. After several wrong turns and angry honking horns later, I found my way to my destination… almost. I found a parking spot, walked another 15 minutes to the address I had written down and wouldnt you know it: it wasn’t the right address. Great. I walked back to my car, paid my parking ticket and attempted to leave the garrage, but putting the ticket stub in my wallet reset it so that when I finally got to the gate and attempted to exit, the ticket reader machine rejected me. I had to politely ask the six people behind me to back up so I could go back and talk to someone. I got that taken care of and made my way to the right address, and finally, after a long adventure, I found it.

I arrived at about 7:40. I had planned on getting there at 6 when it started. There were about 15 guys gathered in a dimly lit basement classroom at the college building where the meeting was being held. I quietly walked in as a guy was finishing a presentation about iPhone development. I didn’t understand most of what he was saying, but got the impression that iPhone development is a complicated beast.

When he finished the organizer — Colin — asked if anyone else was interested in talking. I had previously mentioned to him demoing Domain Pigeon. I thought it was very tactful of him to ask if anyone was interested even though he knew I was there and I had mentioned demoing. He could have called me out, but did the polite thing for me and the other guy who mentioned talking and just asked if anyone else was interested.

I said sure, he said something like “Oh yeah, you wanted to demo your domain site.” I got up, hooked up my Macbook, and started talking. I had a rough idea beforehand of what I wanted to say but mostly winged it.

On a scale of 1 to 5 I’d say I was about a 3. Not bad, but not great either. I noticed myself saying “uh” a bit too much and I hunched over the podium more than I should have. I added unnecessary details to my explanations and omitted important things. There was a general flow of the demo, but I should have practiced a bit more beforehand. After a few minutes of heightened self-awareness I loosened up and things were good, but I feel like I’ve got a ways to go in this area. My philosophy on things like this is that you have to do something and suck at it for a while before you can become proficient and eventually good. Some people may be able to jump directly to good by sheer talent, but for me at least with this, I have to do it for a while, however poorly, before I pick it up. It’s kind of frustrating to know you’re doing something poorly but lack the knowledge or skills to do better, but I’m happy that I at least realize it and know that it’s part of my process. It’s similar with web page design. ALL IN Expert was probably a 2 on the 1 – 5 scale. Domain Pigeon will probably be about a 3.5 or 4. Without taking these steps I won’t be able to get to the 5 one day, whatever that may be.

The feedback was generally positive. They asked some very good insightful questions about how it would work and gave me some helpful feedback on a few usability, coding, and design issues.

The two meetings I’ve been to have been very humbling. While I consider myself a pretty good programmer, these guys having an amazing amount of technical knowledge. Most of them talk way over my head when it comes to the intricacies of a programming language and how one languages compares to another and what not. I recall some of the terminology from my computer science education, but have forgotten a lot of it. It made me realize I care more about what I can do with the language than how it works. There are pros and cons to that but overall I’m happy with my bent towards practical vs theoretical considerations.

Afterwards, I got into a conversation with a guy named Eric. Eric’s a 50 year old serial entrepreneur who now specializes in buying and selling small businesses. He’s got a strong technical background, but doesn’t limit his work solely to that area. I started picking his brain and when it was clear that we enjoyed the conversation we decided to walk over to a nearby Starbucks and continue it over some coffee.

It was quite the discussion. We wound up talking about the significance of leverage and its current role in the economy, using neural networks for speech recognition, the philosophy of science, the long term value of an MBA, mobile phone startups ideas, the ideal size for a tech startup, differences in business structures, personal guarantees, the importance of passion for your job, equity considerations when raising capital, and the risks of getting married in your early 20s, among other things. We talked for over an hour and I walked away feeling that the night was well spent despite all the earlier difficulties.

And now I must sleep, as I have to get up in 4 hours… =)

Rather than studying business, what about starting a company from scratch? If history is any guide, a significant number of people who are laid off over the coming year will do just that. Carl Schramm, the head of the Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit organisation that promotes entrepreneurial activity, points out that start-ups tend to flourish in the year that follows a sharp downturn. Rather than head back to another corporate bureaucracy, some of those made redundant will take a shot at being their own boss.

from The Economist

I’ve been spending some time the last few days thinking about ways I can improve my overall productivity. In general, I’m not working at a pace that I’m satisfied with, and while part of that is due to long hours at work, a lot is also due to not fully taking advantage of the free time I do have.

Accordingly, I made two major changes today that should:

News. A few months back, per Marc Andreessen’s advice, I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal. At first I attempted to read it on a daily basis. Now, I’m lucky if I scan it through twice a week. The problem is twofold: 1) I don’t understand a lot of it and 2) It takes time. The original purpose was to learn the important things going on in the world and in the tech industry. I think a combination of Hacker News, Inc magazine, and a few of the major blogs take care of the tech half of that goal. Usually, when my time was limited, I would just flip to the Business section and see if there were any internet related articles. For the news half, I’m going to subscribe to Time, which I think is excellent. Since they’re a weekly publication they generally avoid a lot of the irrelevent news, and they write less in one issue than the WSJ writes in a day. Starting tomorrow, I’m putting the WSJ on hold. There will hopefully come a time when I have the time and the need of reading it on a daily basis, but that time is not right now.

Computer Usage. I’ve been using InstantRails on Windows Vista in conjunction with UltraEdit for learning and programming Rails. InstantRails, as far as I can tell, is a hack that let’s Windows developers work with Rails. It gets the job done, but it just doesn’t feel natural. And so, today, I took the plunge and bought a Macbook, which I’m currently writing on. It is a breadth of fresh air; I wish I had made the switch earlier. It’s taking a bit of getting used to (I didn’t know what the traffic lights at the top of the windows were), but it’s incredibly straightforward. Usability was clearly a focus for the Mac developers, which is why it’s been such an easy transition. The plan is to do all my web development on this computer from now on.

My goal is to launch Domain Pigeon by the end of the year.

I’m going to try to write more often, as I find that it helps me to write things down.

Thanks for reading.

Even though I haven’t seriously played poker in some time, I still browse the 2+2 poker forums often. There are a boatload of really smart people on the site. While most of the conversations are about poker, there are often great discussions about success, philosophy, happiness, & life — topics that are usually on my mind.

The general note to everyone is stop spending so much time grinding/ on two plus two and spend more time doing fun stuff you want to do. I have realized playing poker gives you the freedom to do a lot of **** that you could otherwise couldn’t and most people don’t take advantage of it. A simple example is I wanted to start working out, my trainer said what times are good for you? My answer was any time because I have nothing to do all day. I suspect this is true for a lot of you. Focus less on poker, focus more on life. Take advantage of your freedom and do stuff you want to do. If there’s a skill you want to learn, or something in your life you want to improve. Just ****ing do it, stop wasting your time browsing 2p2 and get useful things done in to improve your life. Personally I have realized there is no point in me saying I would like to do XYZ or I should try and do XYZ my new answer should just be I will do XYZ because if I want to do it there is no reason not to.

- Eagles on this page

And:

There was an episode on the twilight zone, where a ruthless criminal was killed running from the cops, and is greeted by an angel that was sent to grant his every desire. He couldn’t BELIEVE that he was in heaven, and was skeptical at first. Over time he began to ask for things, a mountain of money, beautiful women, naked fish sushi, etc, and was granted everything he asked for, and life (or death), so it seemed, could not have been better.

As time passes, the pleasure he receives from his constant indulgences starts to fade; the ease of his very existence grows dull. He asks the angel for some challenging work to mix it up a bit, but is told that in this place he can wish for anything and will be granted it – except the opportunity to work for the things he receives.

Without any struggles, living a purely blissful life, the criminal becomes more and more irritated. Eventually, in a fit of desperation, he tells the angel ‘I want out, I want to go to the OTHER place’. The criminal, assuming this is heaven, wants to go to hell. The angel turns to him, with a wicked grin on his face, and with the booming laughter of the devil says ‘Fool, this IS the other place.’

Raptor, same thread

There’s another thread in the High Stakes forum discussing the merits of playing poker, going to law school, or pursuing a career in finance. I enjoyed the thread to so much that I submitted it to HackerNews, something I rarely do.

My brother is currently struggling with some major life life choices. In a conversation with my mom he asked her, “If you had to choose between doing what you should do and what you want to do, which would you do?” My first answer, had he asked me, would be to tell him he ought to go with what he should do. But after considering it, I don’t know if I could tell him that without being a bit hypocritical.

We have a choice between stability and risk. From my perspective, my brother should choose stability. He doesn’t fully see the consequences of the risky path or how the stable path has a much higher chance of success.

Could it be the same for me?