Race Against Time

We've talked about this problem I have, the problem of procrastinating by figuring out how to do other work more efficiently. But my friends, the problem has finally solved itself. It's come full circle. It's self-destructed.

Minuteur! For all your timing needs.

Because I was thinking about this idea of "timed dashes." Merlin Mann's "(10+2)*5" hack comes immediately to mind—the one where you set a timer for 10 minute intervals of work, followed by 2 minutes of play, and repeat 5 times. You've just worked a 50-minute hour! Which is much, much better than the 5-minute hour. Or the, "I just got the urge to reply to every e-mail thread on every list I'm on!" hour. Or the "pressing random on xkcd is just so fascinating!" hour. (I've had a few of those lately. We'll talk about that soon.)

So Merlin's format is charmingly geeky, and his article about (10+2)*5 isn't bad either, and I love 43folders and all, but the idea of timed dashes isn't great because it's new. It's great because it works. Which, coincidentally, is quite possibly the BEST JUSTIFICATION FOR A LIFEHACK EVER.

I've been using a variation on the timed dashes method for the past few days, and already, I see a huge difference in the way I work. 15 minutes on, 5 minutes off. It helps me from falling down the endless rabbit hole of e-mail, for one thing. And all of a sudden, my work seems much less scary, because it doesn't come in hours. It comes in adrenaline-soaked dashes! Much more fun.

I've been trying to use the least gadget-tastic timer possible, which so far has meant Online Stopwatch. It's exactly what it claims to be, and does not have lots of fun menus and tags, and I can appreciate that. However, in the process of re-reading Merlin Mann's post, I also came across this great little Mac app, Minuteur, pictured above. It's very cute, still pretty low on the gadget appeal, and also will enable me to finally shut my browser windows.

I would write more, but the timer rang a while ago. I mean. My hands are tied.

The Original Mashup Artist

Way back in 1998—before Google Maps, before mashups like Gridskipper and Rotten Neighbor, before GPS in our cars and our telephones—Denis Wood was making maps. And they were beautiful.

This American Life never fails to disappoint, but their recent rebroadcast of this 1998 show on mapping was just incredibly moving. I love how the site describes Denis Wood's project to map his neighborhood in its every aspect:

Denis Wood talks with host Ira Glass about the maps he's made of his own neighborhood, Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina. They include a traditional street locator map; a map of all the sewer and power lines under the earth's surface; a map of how light falls on the ground through the leaves of trees; a map of where all the Halloween pumpkins are each year; and a map of all the graffiti in the neighborhood and of who was mentioned most often in the neighborhood newspaper. In short, he's creating maps that are more like novels, trying to describe everyday life.

It's amazing to listen to Denis Wood talk about how all information can be made more useful by locating it spatially. I love how he looks for the poetry in patterns, linking together people and places and symbols by distilling them into unexpected images. I'd say he's the Original Mashup Artist, but he's so much more than that. Just look at those pumpkins, and tell me they're not a secret story, waiting to be told.

For more mapping joy, check out the entire Denis Wood map set. While you're at it, I also recommend taking a look at this amazing book—Transit Maps of the World. Book via boingboing.

What's Russian for 'Payback'?

Why no blog posts lately, you ask? Wasn't this supposed to be sort of a regular thing, like a running compendium of my thoughts on the Internet and/or history??? Well. Yes. But you see, I was building suspense. By...um...not writing anything.

Until now.

But why now?

Well, I am just going to answer that question with another question, discovered via an article in today's New York Times, sent to me by my ever-attentive roommate. (Hi, roommate!) The question: What's Russian for 'Hacker'?

(Picture found through a Google Image Search for "Russian Hacker." I like that the image is titled "evil Russian hacker." Although I assume he's just posing, since he looks pretty innocent to me. Via eurobsd.)

My favorite part about this article—besides, you know, its absolutely stellar reporting on the deepseated hacking industry in the former USSR—is that it never even answers the question! How DO you say "hacker" in Russian? Brace yourself, for I am about to reveal all...

(I'd like to point out that I am, once again, building suspense.)

The Russian word for "hacker" is....
hacker.
Actually, if we're going to be precise, it's хакер. But just pronounce the "h" with a little bit of throat-clearing, and it's basically the same.

Although I'm aware that it was just a rhetorical question, I think that the presence of this Americanism in the Russian language is indicative of some of the deeper dynamics that create this hacking culture in Russia. For me, the most interesting part of this article was its attention to Russia's anti-Western attitude, its soreness over the status of the U.S. as internet epicenter. The most revealing moment came at the end of the article, and really accesses an undercurrent of anti-U.S. technological resentment, that, frankly, threatens to bubble up and become a much bigger deal than the credit-card scams and phishing outfits that it already spawns.

On a Livejournal Russian forum last week, The New York Times asked participants why Russians have a reputation for Internet crime.

“I don’t see in this a big tragedy,” said a respondent who used the name Lightwatch. “Western countries played not the smallest role in the fall of the Soviet Union. But the Russians have a very amusing feature — they are able to get up from their knees, under any conditions or under any circumstances.”

As for the West? “You are getting what you deserve.”

Ultimately, these hackers "inhabit such a robust netherworld that Internet-security firms in places like Silicon Valley have had to acquire an expertise in Russian hacking culture half a world away."

Evidently, "payback" in Russia means fishing not just for credit card numbers, but for attention. And, maybe, revenge.

Paying Attention: The New Old Business Model for Media

Tonight, Harvard Free Culture hosted a panel on copyright in the digital age in conjunction with Digital Freedom. Digital Freedom, from what I gathered tonight, is a "neutral" group that aims to build consensus around fair use rights for consumers and their digital media. Its goals might not be quite as revolutionary as those of the Free Culture movement, but I think that working together, our group and theirs managed to get a pretty good conversation going between a law professor, a consumer electronics representative, and an NBC executive. I also think that the "consumers hate DRM" stance is a better common ground to start from than "all media should be free to all people everywhere." (Which isn't what Free Culture's all about, by the way, but apparently most people miss that point?)
Why is it a better common ground? Because NBC executives don't want to hear that their old business models have to go out the window. Especially the business models where they make money. But they do understand a little something about supply and demand, and also about how large audiences=large audiences for advertisements. And those make advertisers happy. And if the advertisements are good, relevant, fun, and to the point? Consumers should be happy, too.

As I sat there tonight, eating free Thai food and thinking about copyright law, a couple things occurred to me:

1. People could always make copies of books, even before Xerox machines. Even before the printing press! You know how? They copied them by hand. What we're talking about with the digitization is mostly an incredible simplification and streamlining of the process by which copies can be made. BitTorrent is not all that fundamentally different from recording a show on your VCR, as far as I can tell; it just lowers the barrier to entry and enables effortless, perfect copies. It's the effortlessness and the perfection that are new; not the urge to copy. People 50 years ago didn't have a deep moral sense of copyright—at least not any deeper than we do today. They were lazy, and copying was hard. Buying was easier. Today, we're still lazy, but there's one small difference: copying is easy. It's buying that's hard.
   
2. I grew up thinking that media should be free...and that was before the Internet! Because, if you'll remember, the way that TV used to mainly work was through antennas and televisions that you could buy to access the signals that were already in the air, everywhere. The content was "free;" I paid for it by paying attention to the other messages that came along with it. A lot of the time I watched the advertisements, too— whether because of inertia or because of my consumer obsession, (which, as you'll remember, began rather early for me.) The thing is, the company who was advertising never would have known whether I stayed and watched the advertisement or left the room to get a snack of cheese cubes. They would have just trusted that the sheer numbers of people watching television, reported to them by Nielsen through "representative" sampling, would yield a certain quantity of potential consumers. The Internet offers incredible tools to track audiences, clicks, attention, and audience response; just look at Google AdWords and AdSense, and the value they provide to advertisers. (And even, sometimes, customers.) There's definitely a business model there. It's all about monetizing attention, and letting consumers pay for their content not with money, but with time. This is not new. But it's good to remember.
   
3. Intentions matter, in the law. Copying a song for yourself means something different than copying it for a friend, or for all your anonymous Internet "friends" who snag pieces of copies of songs through BitTorrent and then reassemble them for listening pleasure. The guy from NBC tonight kept saying that we can use DRM to manage people's intentions, to keep "bad guys" from doing their bad things, while letting "good guys" get away with only a minor level of frustration. The thing is, copying a song for yourself looks pretty much the same as copying it for a friend, if you're the computer. I don't think DRM is the answer. We can't "digitally manage" people's rights without pretending that we can know their intentions from a string of 1's and 0's.
   

There's plenty more where that came from, but I think I'm going to have to put copyright to bed for the night. If only so that I can get some sleep, too.

Until next time, in the valiant fight for the future of media!

The Résumé Revolution

Often, instead of actually doing work, I will figure out how I could more effectively do the work that I'm not doing. It's a nice hobby, if slightly misguided. However, this "strategy" completely delivered in the Great Résumé Revision of 2007, during which I synthesized months' worth of résumé advice from the internet, found while procrastinating, into a single document printed on ivory cotton paper that makes it look like I have never procrastinated before in my life, ever. That's not just ironic. That's awesome.

Not my résumé! But pretty, right? Courtesy of LifeClever.

Therefore, I am here today to show you the path to awesome. It starts with the most basic, but probably most obscure, aspect: your résumé template. Now, you may be thinking, "Résumé template?! But can't I just type it up in Microsoft Word and add some nice fonts?" That's what I thought too, until I read this mind-blowing article by Chanpory Rith of LifeClever, explaining why everything you thought you knew is wrong. Well, everything about typography in résumés, at least. Apparently, there are all sorts of delicate touches that you can add to make your résumé sparkle—a thin border here, a bullet point there, and suddenly your résumé looks professional. It says "hire me." And it says "hire me" without even using words. (Although you will probably need to use words at some point if you actually do want to get hired.) Now, Rith goes through a long explanation of how to make all these adjustments yourself, but he is also kind enough to include links at the very top of his article to ready-made templates based on his specifications. Simply put, they're magical. Format matters. The easier a résumé is to read, the easier it is to see why you're amazing.

And you are! But what's the classy way to get the message across? Mahalo (the "search engine" that real people write) and Resumagic both have great guides to résumé-writing. I especially like Mahalo's, particularly because it has some links to effective examples online, from places like The Wall Street Journal and Boston College.

But the best advice I got, frankly, was also the simplest. It consists of two parts. First: keep your résumé down to the front side of a single page. It's hard, I know, but that also means it's impressive. Also, less for you to write. And the second?

Don't worry. That's all.