Life & Research Notes

Things are a little rocky right now. Work prospects are great, and the bay area is treating me well with some beautiful weather. But ten days ago I was blindsided by some unexpected personal issues. After three years of what I thought was a solid, special relationship, I’m single once again, by a unilateral decision not my own.

There’s not much to do about it right now, just cope, and look for strategies for moving forward. I didn’t intend this blog to be a repository of emotional baggage. I’d rather keep it outward facing and optimistic. But at the moment it’s difficult to find that voice.

I realized today that I’ve been subscribed to a false belief that great creativity often comes out of intense, painful life experience. With this thick sadness clouding my vision, creativity is on hold, and I’m just concentrating on keeping one foot in front of the other, and navigating all the other parts of life that suddenly seem a lot harder. My most creative moments have happened in my happiest periods, times of intense confidence and feelings of endless possibility. Sadness doesn’t make me create. It numbs.

So for the few people who actually read this thing, thanks for sticking by me, and apologies for the naval gazing introspective stuff here, but my past few weeks have warranted it. This is my material now. This is my life. So I’m going to learn from it, the same way I learned from the lab. These changes are forcing me to go back to basics, making lists of what I need or want to achieve, and trying to make some plans about how to get there. These aren’t ambitious by most standards, but they are a starting point. I’m training at altitude here, where it is harder to breathe and think straight. If I can nail this, if I can keep moving and even grow now, when I come back down to sea level I’m going to be in good shape. That’s when I’ll really make things happen.

I met and had lunch with MIT alum and Atlas Ventures EIR Babak Nivi last week, and he had a very helpful axis of evaluation for blogs that I hope he doesn’t mind me repeating here.

To paraphrase very roughly, we can position any blog as somewhere along a continuum of introspective versus extrospective. Introspective blogs tend to discuss personal issues, life experiences, thoughts and ponderings, and so forth. Extrospective blogs, on the other hand, deal with things, events and ideas out in the world, as witnessed and analyzed by the author. Extrospective blogs, he posited, are more likely to find wider readership. This makes sense, since they create and expand the common ground for dialog.

This blog sort of bounces back and forth, but veering towards introspective. I’d like to gradually shift a little more towards extro. Take one like Anita’s bestthing, which is definitely extrospective in its coverage of things we can all talk about, but nicely personal and introspectively revealing in the selection process. Luis’s blacklog is a really nice example of a hybrid, since it includes so many images, but those images are often of his own creation. For both these guys, the key is their approach to the blog as a curation process as much as a writing process.

Phew, just arrived back in the bay area late last night. I’m in Mill Valley at my parents’ house for the time being, and it is such a gorgeous day. The weather here is a very immediate confirmation that I made a good decision to come back out. I’ll be in the city tomorrow for some meetings, then hopefully some time to wander around a little.

I just handed four heavy boxes containing most of my possessions to two dudes in an aging, unmarked white van. Part of me wishes the stuff would just disappear for good. I don’t really need most of it, and I’ll have mixed feelings when it resurfaces on the west coast. Oh great, my stuff.

When moving I’m always surprised how much I have. Books, clothing, bed stuff, kitchen stuff… all packed up and schlepped or shipped. Furniture and other items stuffed into rental cars, sold or given away. Jenn and I are actually fairly minimal. I know people with much, much more.

There is one particular blob of supposedly important crap that I keep in a shoe box: keys and keychain toys, photos, erasers from japan, tech liner pen, film canister filled with worry people, sea glass, business cards, a flashlight… I rarely look at any of it except when packing. It just sort of sits in there, and slowly grows. I try to throw parts of it out, but it never goes away. And occasionally it multiplies, with one blob going into storage or into an attic, and the other coming with me. It’s a sort of passive scrapbooking.

And of course we are increasingly having to deal with the digital equivalent of this life cruft. I’ve been hauling around some files since I first started typing up papers in 6th grade on school computers. This old work just gets further buried at each stage, lost among the bigger, newer, more seemingly relevant stuff, sitting somewhere within “old” within “school” within “archives” within “backup”. I’m always careful to take it with me even though I don’t ever look at it. Why do I hold on?

And how does this cruft effect apply online? Are my cluttered, disorganized del.icio.us bookmarks anything like the stuff in this shoebox? How about photos or videos? Somehow it feels like less of a burden just because it is removed, sitting on some other server instead of my own hard drive. If eventually all our data is out there in the network, will we always hold onto it? Will we no longer benefit from a good purge?

I just received word that my ftp account on Dreamhost has been hacked. Some of the stuff was copied, some other stuff maybe even modified. It apparently wasn’t just me or something I did wrong. 3500 other FTP accounts were compromised.

I was already becoming frustrated with them for being slow, but this is way beyond that level of badness. I had some sensitive stuff in there. I feel foolish, but even more I feel angry. Time to really start looking for another host.

Excerpt from the email I received:

We have detected what appears to be the exploit of a number of accounts belonging to DreamHost customers, and it appears that your account was one of those affected.

We’re still working to determine how this occurred, but it appears that a 3rd party found a way to obtain the password information associated with approximately 3,500 separate FTP accounts and has used that information to append data to the index files of customer sites using automated scripts (primarily for search engine optimization purposes).

Our records indicate that only roughly 20% of the accounts accessed – less than 0.15% of the total accounts that we host – actually had any changes made to them. Most accounts were untouched.