The Online Leland Scantlebury

I’m not generally a fan of big business, and while there are thousands of people marching in NY against corporate control I feel a little strange writing about the former CEO of a Fortune-500 company. But the guy meant something to me.

When I was 12, I was a huge nerd. I mean, sketching computers on the back of my assignments nerd. Any other interests I had became websites I’d create, thus just making them nerdier. So it wasn’t long before I found myself spending mornings, lunch times, and after school hanging out in the computer lab with the other nerds. I’d always been a PC guy but our tech teacher – Mr. Leader – was a Mac guy. I didn’t get it, the thing couldn’t play all the games I loved! But he explained to me that in the creative world, all the video editors, graphic designers, computer illustrators, etc – used Macs. I didn’t see myself as a programmer as much as a creator, so that was the start of that. I wanted an iMac, I wanted iMovie, and I wanted Photoshop.

Fast forward only a year, and I not only had all those things, but several old Macs, and the bible-sized MacWorld Mac Secrets might as well have been on permanent loan from the library to me. (Writing this all now almost makes me cringe, how was this also the year I had my first girlfriend?) We were assigned to become “experts” and heavily research a person, place, or event of our liking and write a paper and present our findings to the class. I saw my opportunity.

I’ll never forget the stack of books I brought home from the library about Steve Jobs and Apple Computer. It was huge, and probably was my first real exploration outside of Young Adult fiction. I read about the start of Apple, Steve and Steve assembling computers in the garage. Jobs’ days at Reed college and the calligraphy course he took. The tour of Xerox and the development of the Macintosh. Stealing Pepsi’s CEO away from “sugar water” to “change the world.” Steve being kicked out of Apple and creating NeXT, investing in Pixar. The fall of Apple Computer in his absence, and his triumphant return as interim CEO accepting only a $1/year salary.

But what really resonated with me was that Steve Jobs was a brilliant hippie nerd. I loved everything about the 1960s, and so had Steve. Here was this powerful, brilliant businessman – but he really was the antithesis of that. The man lived in Portland, homeless, auditing classes and walking to the Hare Krishna Temple to get food. He dated Joan Baez and once proclaimed that anyone who hadn’t done psychedelic drugs wouldn’t be able to understand him. The first Mac commercial referenced 1984. He loved the Beatles and the Whole Earth Catalog. And yet he also loved electronics and computers. That was something I could relate to! Trees and processors! In a world that so often tried to make me feel ashamed for being a nerd, there was a beacon of hope for what I could become.

Now of course, there are plenty of things not to like about Steve Jobs. He was incredibly arrogant, did not keep a very “green” company, nor do anything philanthropic with his enormous wealth, and generally showed a disregard for other people. But brillance and success often comes with traits like these, and that doesn’t mean there wasn’t plenty of reasons to like him.

I always have felt Jobs was the new Edison. He surrounded himself with incredibly talented people, had his name on a plethora of patents, and had a great intuition on what people needed. Despite his rough boss reputation, Jobs knew he was just part of a team:

“My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people.”

It’s going to be weird buying Apple products from this day forward, knowing that the human I saw behind the Apple isn’t with us anymore. I’ll always be an Apple fanboy, I’ll always be a hippie nerd, and I’ll always Think Different. You made technology personal. Thanks for everything, Steve, we’ll miss you.

On Google+ today I saw one of my friends refer to her account on the new social networking site as “a fresh start.” I think that confirms that my last post about Facebook is already on it’s way to becoming true.

That being said, Google+ scares me a little bit because really, it’s more than a social networking site. It’s connected – heck, more than connected, it’s the same company – to the most popular search engine, free e-mail service, hugest video site, and a host of other services that everyone uses. It’s too many of my needs in one place! What is this, AOL?

Also, when you’re signed into Google+ you have a bar at the top to access your documents, your email, etc. It immediately reminded me that Google already has enormous amounts of data on me and I’m just giving them more. They’ve done nothing to betray my trust, but it feels weird. Weird like when I search for a product online and suddenly ads for it appear on every website. I’m not a fan of feeling like the Internet is personalized for me. I do not like being directly advertised too. The comfort I get being online comes from feeling like it’s a meaningless interaction with data put up by other people. When instead it becomes a system of algorithms watching over me it starts making me a little weary. It’s a hard feeling to describe.

Google is going to get in trouble for being a monopoly at some point, right? I can’t even imagine what percentage of my time online is spent on their servers. [He typed into his computer running Google Chrome.]

A monopoly in serving up 1′s and 0′s. What a strange world we have created.

There’s no denying that Facebook is a significant milestone for the Internet. I shouldn’t have to prove that to you, as they already made The Social Network and there’s a “Like” button on every major website. In the strangest twist of things, you can even connect your MySpace with your Facebook.

But I have a funny feeling that Facebook will be going the way of Friendster within a matter of years. I’ve seen groups on campuses dedicated to helping people fully delete their profiles. Students block their computers from the site for entire semesters to aid in getting work done. People post status updates complaining about Facebook, technology bloggers blog about the gaping privacy issues, and site is quickly starting to resemble everything wrong with the Internet. “So what?,” you say, “the Internet is comprised entirely of stupid gripes!” I agree entirely, but I feel like it’s actually reaching a tipping point. Given the right alternative, I think we’d all jump ship.

As I see it, Facebook’s initial success was largely driven by two factors: It was limited to college students, and it was dead simple. MySpace had become a nightmare of homebrewed CSS styles and spam, it was slow and basically just useful enough to take the place of pointless two-sentence emails. It took the joy many of us nerdy folk had found in creating your own homepage added a layer of communication. Not to be overlooked, it became a great way to find and talk to bands. But as people started getting busted for content on their MySpace, whether it be by administrators, employers, or parents, it became obvious that the party was over. Enter Facebook, a closed system for college students that worked perfectly for everything people needed it to do.

But Facebook has gone the way of MySpace. It’s cluttered with advertisements, quizzes, games, people you never wanted to see again, too many ways to communicate, and a millon buttons. The design has gone through numerous revisions, each more cluttered than the last, and countless features have been introduced only to be done away with (or buried in menus!). Keeping your information [relatively] private has become a full time job, both keeping track of where the options are kept and what options you have.

I think what’s really going to kill Facebook, however, is it’s own popularity. It’ll likely keep a firm base of older folks using it to “stay connected” or share photos or whatever, but my generation is going to move on. The Internet keeps giving us more and more reasons to “hang out” with each other online, and just like in “reality”, we want our own places to hang out. I’m talking about it an over (geez, maybe under…) simplified manner, but the American Youth have always valued their privacy and right to be different from their parent generation. Facebook has tried to address this with privacy controls that allow you to hide things from certain groups you specify, but it goes beyond Mom not seeing the picture of you drunk, sitting in a bucket at noon. This is about seeing the picture of your Mom drinking her fourth mimosa at noon, Dad liking it, and Grandpa posting an obscene comment. This is about your Aunt Judy trying to discuss Farmville with you at Thanksgiving and having Uncle Mike post pictures of your cousins putting makeup on you when you were a toddler. Elementary school friends tracking you down and asking for a coffee date. Being unable to resist the temptation of seeing what your ex is up to. Clicking the wrong link and spamming all of your friends. This is but a slice of the issue, along with a host of personal data nightmares and a nightmarish interface.

I think we’re all on the lookout for a medium where we can still be young without worries, without dangers, without girl-from-high-school-we-happily-forgot-about. Everyone loves leaving home because it is a chance to run off and reinvent yourself, to feel as if nobody is watching you. And that’s not really possible on Facebook anymore. It’s like watching the nightmares of globalization on a personal scale. Watch out, Zuckerberg. As the Internet continually proves, nothing lasts forever online.

Alright, I’m in the middle of writing up a microbiology lab report but I figure I’d post something quick while the blog was on my mind.

1. Thanks an engineering computations class, my interest in programming has been reawakened and I’ve been trying to teach myself object oriented programming (with PHP) so I can finally start to get this site together. Once I get the ball rolling it should be fairly smooth. Programming only gets easier, and I just want to get a version of the site up that I can start playing around with. However…

2. Man, what a busy quarter this has been! It’s a straight-up double punch in the face from a harder chemistry class and a microbiology class that I wasn’t prepared to take – each with a lab component. I’ve come to love growing little bacteria on petri dishes, checking them out under the microscope, and learning which ones can kill me and how, but I’ll be glad when this quarter ends and I can retire my pile of notecards. Chemistry is super interesting but sometimes I get lost converting dozens of units. From here on out, it’s just physics, applied physics, and math. That’ll be good, right?

3. My Global Climate Change professor last week gave an inspiring talk about the necessity of helping the planet – and ourselves – adapt to global warming. She said that too much emphasis is put on solely stopping or slowing it down and related solutions. What we’re really going to need is a whole lot of infrastructure to help us handle the changes that our planet is set to undergo, regardless of whether we stop burning fossil fuels or not. She specifically mentioned engineers, and my brain lit up and I got all excited. Sitting in class sometimes I forget why I decided to go down this route, and just how exciting of a job it really will be. You know, for a nerd like me.

4. In that last paragraph I originally accidentally wrote “She specifically mentioned engineerings…” which I thought was funny and I hope to refer to more things as engineerings in the future.

I’ve got a file on my computer full of ideas for blog posts, but over time my passion to write about them fades as well as my associated ideas. Obviously I need to get more impulsive in my blogging.

First off, an update on my attempted time management using the “Pomodoro Technique” as discussed in the last post. It’s alright. Truth is, when I actually get my head into my homework, I work for more than 25 minutes at a time and don’t want any breaks. It’s especially useless when reading since the alarm is bound to go off in the middle of a paragraph. Then you’re using your “break time” to get to a good stopping point. The ticking of the clock had its benefits, but sometimes just made me more anxious. I’ve been listening to classical music while doing my homework instead, it’s just enough to drown out my neighbor’s snoring but not enough to distract me. Most of my life, classical music has been my “work music” so I think the tight mental association helps too.

I got an email from my uncle today and it got me thinking about what it means to be “hard working.” I had a boss a couple years ago, when I was doing small manual-labor jobs like stripping paint, building raised beds, and painting, who told me that even though I wasn’t very knowledgeable (or good, ha) at my job, it was alright because I was willing to work hard. He told me about terrible employees he’d had who would work only when he was watching, or would take extra-long lunch breaks, or needed instructions for every step of every task. I thought about my friends and realized how many of them I wouldn’t actually hire, how many I knew to be terrible workers. In fact, some of the ones I liked the least I decided would be the ones I hire. I’d never really separated intelligence and work ethic before, but suddenly it was pretty evident that work ethic was just as, if not more, important.

My uncle’s email. He was talking about the work ethic of artists, who really have to put themselves into their work, no matter what else is going on around them. It’s like being an actor, you have to keep coming back to this painting (or drawing, or video, or sculpture) day after day and getting your head back in tune with your work. It takes amazing work ethic and dedication. Especially if you’re a real art student and you’ve been slacking and suddenly have to do something in record time! (I’ll admit that slacking off seems like an element of bad work ethic, but I think it’s more a symptom of learning time-management and not having set working hours)

I think most of my work ethic comes the private projects I did in high school, and was fully formed in art school. I will never be more emotionally drained and overworked (hopefully) than when I was studying communication design at PNCA. Late nights staring at my computer screen, pulling ideas from my subconscious, trying approach after approach on the same project, rapidly looking for tutorials on how to accomplish the look I had in my head, and then waiting forever at the lab to get it printed, only to find mistakes and make a few more trimming it. Then having someone point out an obvious fault the next day in a critique, and learning to explain yourself but also to admit defeat and roll with the punches. If you’re smart, you do it for yourself, and nobody else, and that’s what keeps you going.

It’s different from my work now, which is much more learning and applying concepts. Very little creative thought is involved comparatively, but nothing beats that feeling of frustration when you just can’t wrap your head around a concept. I don’t remember that from art school. Sometimes I have to just give up on calculus for a night and watch some mindless TV to clear my mind, so I can wake up in the morning and realize it’s all within my grasp. I see a lot of people struggling with simple concepts in my classes, rationalizing that “it’s just not their thing.” Well, being hard-working means making it your thing. Sometimes we’re our own worst enemy.

I’m approaching rambling and spray cheese territory, so I’ll stop. But I think it’s important to never get too cocky about your skills, your brain, your value – because in the end it’s your work ethic that’s going to make you successful.

In all my years of school, I’ve heard a lot of talks about time management. Everything from teachers telling me the importance of not listening to music while I work, doing my homework away from distractions (i.e. my computer), and doing work right when I get home, instead of relaxing until suddenly I feel rushed to do it. For the most part, it’s always been good advice, but rather hard to adopt. The worst was when they told me to make a calendar and plan out my entire day, including when I’d relax and have fun. I have no doubt this would enable me to get far more done if I actually got in the habit of it, but it’s going to be years before I’m mature and stable enough to handle something like that.

The Pomodoro Technique (see video above) seems pretty accessible, and I think I’ll give it a try. I’ve downloaded a mac app to simulate the kitchen timer. Something about knowing I only have to work 25 minutes (you know, before I take a break and start the timer again) and awaiting the ding of that buzzer sounds very motivating. I don’t know if it’ll actually stop me from suddenly getting the urge to make food and check my Facebook repeatedly, but it certainly won’t encourage such behavior.

Now to just figure out a good motivation to start my work at a reasonable hour. And finish learning PHP OOP so I can get the underbelly of this website coded…

Someday I know I’m going to be considered a square because I actually keep music on my computer rather than just listening to it online.

Recently, whenever a friend wants to show me a song, they go on GrooveShark. One friend referred to it as “cloud napster” because you can instantly hear almost any song you want to. I’m currently listening to Paul Baribeau’s album “25″, which I’ve never found anywhere. Sound quality is great and it’s really easy to create playlists. They survive by having users upload content – much like how people use YouTube – and not identifying the uploader (as far as I can tell).

I have to admit it has an awful lot of smart advantages over keeping music on your computer. The majority of my hard drive space is taken over by my music collection, and growing all the time. With GrooveShark I can just listen to any band , on demand, no matter what computer I’m using and where. Makes my music collection seem like it’s just to ensure I have something to put on my iPod. As much as I like having digital copies of things so I don’t have to rely on the constantly changing world of internet services, I would love free up that space for photos, movies, etc.

The whole cloud computing trend is incredibly strange, it’s just not something I feel many people saw coming. Judging by how many friends I’ve had lose everything when their hard drives crash, the cloud certainly has some appealing potential to keep data safe and accessible. I’m sure we’re not far from a generation of tablet computers that completely run off the cloud.

What industry will the Internet screw up next?

I have to say, I never really cared much for science in high school. It’s embarrassing to look back on, because I always loved my science teachers and had a passion for understanding how things worked. But high school is mostly a social learning ground, and it’s easy to ignore certain subjects to ensure time for others, i.e. the opposite sex. I also feel I grew up believing that science was something for other people, that it was a secret society of white coats and test tubes, meant for the geniuses graduating high school before they break double digits in age. Apparently, this is a common issue among kids. I did enough to get A’s and then moved on.

Of course, it’s taken me until now to realize that I absolutely love science. It combines the problem-solving that always thrilled me in programming, the mind-blowing moments of philosophy, and the concrete conclusions of math. And to be successful, you’ll need the creativity of an artist and the communication skills of a writer. Even in high school I felt that science and math had an unfair rep as being ‘boring’ subjects, but as soon as I got boring teachers my opinions assimilated. Sometimes it’s hard to tell why you dislike a class.

So here I am, Wednesday night, watching chemistry videos on my laptop in a coffee shop. It’s not homework, I don’t need to watch these, but I want to get ahead. I don’t want class to be the first time I’m seeing this material, especially since my attention span leaves something to be desired. You can blame TV, you can blame the Internet, but regardless it’s an issue for modern man. That’s why I supplement my education with videos from Khan Academy. They’re hosted by this MIT/Harvard grad named Sal, who basically just uses a simple drawing problem and a computer tablet to explain incredibly complicated topics, from business to chemistry to calculus. Sal obviously is very passionate about all of his topics, and dedicates a lot of time to thinking about the best way to explain them. I wouldn’t say yet that it’s enough to supplement a real class, but it can be that extra boost you need to ensure you’re comprehending topics. Check the website out, and be sure to watch the videos about Sal. Tell me you wouldn’t like to take some classes from that guy!

This is just the beginning of the Internet being used as an education tool. I don’t want to make terrible assumptions of what the future of education is, or how schools will look in the future, but I don’t think anyone can deny that the Internet will play a larger and larger part in our educational futures. Just think how useful it is to be reading an article on Wikipedia, and if you don’t understand a term used, you just click on the term and get a whole huge page full of information to help you understand.

I’ll never forget in the 8th grade when I started playing guitar. My dad was utterly horrified to find out that you can find ‘tabs’ on how to play nearly every song online. For free. He definitely wished that had been around in his day.

I like to joke with people that I’m “really good at going to college” and that’s why I’ve been in school so long. In reality, of course, I just keep changing my major. But after attending two art schools, a state school, and taking a few classes at community college, I really do feel like I know a lot about colleges. You don’t always know what’s good or bad about something unless you have something to compare and contrast it too. Along with visiting my friends at schools across the country, I feel qualified to say I know college pretty well.

So what am I getting at? I want to write a book about my college experiences! It’ll appear to be a “how to” but will also be full of my stories from college and filled to the brim with questionable advice. When will I do this? Probably once I’ve actually finished a degree. But it’s always on my mind when I’m thinking about college.

Today, I think I figured out a brilliant morning routine system for college students. I can’t speak for everyone, but I get pretty irresponsible in the morning and find myself rolling over and hitting the alarm, taking forever in the shower, staring out the window when I should be chewing my breakfast, and mindlessly checking my email when I should be getting myself out the door.

So what’s the solution? Music! College students love that stuff! My new plan this year is to create a playlist with songs (or sometimes sections of songs) that I’ll listen to while doing certain things. For instance, I’ll have a song I listen to in the shower, about five minutes long, that I’ll know when it’s coming to a close I should be getting out. I feel this is a good solution because usually I have no idea how long it’s taking me to do things. After that, a song or two for making/eating breakfast. I can gradually find shorter songs to make my routine faster so I can sleep more, and if I get bored with a song I can trade it for a new one. I’m not suggesting it’s a perfect system, I’m prone to zoning out in the morning and I imagine I’ll screw up my routine all the time. But at least I’ll know that I’m running behind and better get my ass out of the bathroom. Finally, who doesn’t want a soundtrack to their life?

Well. I wanted to share a video I watched in my Philosophy class and talk about whatever it was about… but I forgot what the video was, where to find it, etc. I’m sure it was super interesting.

So. Instead I’ll talk about website progress. Finally got an acceptable CSS layout going (I haven’t messed around with this stuff in year; i am beyond rusty) and so I can get going on some more serious PHP backend programming. I’m working through an advanced PHP book right now trying to get myself to the point where I don’t write regrettable code.

The eventual goal is to make a really simple, single-user based content management system that I can use to create sites for other people as well. It’ll be good at handling different types of media and displaying them in an attractive fashion. Originally I was thinking I’d let it out as an open source project for other people to contribute too, but I don’t want that burden. I just want something to create quick websites with that is versatile and smart.

Back to coding!