Mahmoud

The Detroit-based duo plans on appealing the decision.

A still-relevant retro-Joy, as we take some time off to celebrate Canada Day.

If you enjoyed the comic, please retweet, Like, or share the URL!

timheidecker:

http://video.adultswim.com/on-cinema/

(ooops I forget who made this wonderful image. please identify yourself) 

One thing that still amazes me about China is how things are sometimes done on a massive scale, bigger than anything I’ve even heard of anywhere else.

Took this video from a Qingdao taxi as we passed a construction site today. How many construction cranes can you count? I stopped counting after 30.

It’s embedded from YouTube, so you’ll need a VPN if you’re in China. Screenshot below, of only one portion of the entire building site:

10knotes:

_{“A three second exposure meant that subjects had to stand very still to avoid being blurred, and holding a smile for that period was tricky. As a result, we have a tendency to see our Victorian ancestors as even more formal and stern than they might have been.”}

I’ve reblogged this before and I will reblog it again.

This is so great

My parents.

Cupcakes could quite possibly be one of the world's most perfect foods—a tiny cake, just for you!—were it not for those annoying wrappers you have to peel away. But thanks to Dr. Oetker, those are now edible too.

Read more...

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Yikes:

At about 11 o’clock in the morning [June 20], at the grand marketplace in Yulin [China], a dog peddler was haggling with dog lovers over the price of a dog, and because they couldn’t agree on a price, the dog peddler lifted the dog high into the air three times with metal prongs, doing so to force the dog lovers to buy the dog at a high price. In the end, a woman paid 350 yuan to buy the dog. At the scene, quite a few dog peddlers used mistreatment of the dogs to force dog lovers to buy the dogs.

Here is some further background:

Also, according to the official Weibo account of Chengdu Commercial Daily, on the eve of the Dog Meat Festival, a large number of dog lovers gathered in Yulin. On the morning of [June] 20, at 9 o’clock, at the Yulin dog meat market, upon seeing that there were dog lovers present, some dog peddlers began abusing their dogs at the scene, yelling: ”Will you people buy it or not? If not, I’ll strangle it to death [with the prongs]!” Dog lovers bought the dogs with tears in their eyes, and the dog peddlers waved the cash they got before the surrounding onlookers. The onlookers cheered, and some even gave them the thumbs-up.

The story with some rather gruesome photos is here, and for the pointer I thank Ben P.

image courtesy of people’s daily

A Jiangxi government official forced a man to carry him on his back to avoid ruining his expensive shoes while visiting a rescue site, according to People’s Daily.

Rain slammed Guixi City about 12:30 p.m. on June 20, flooding the streets, sidewalks and overflowing streams while children were sent home for lunch. After falling in water on their way home from school, one student drowned and another went missing. Government officials rushed to the scene but, before jumping to the rescue, the deputy director of Guixi City forced a lesser cadre to carry him piggy-back across a stream, so the director’s tan loafers wouldn’t get wet(ter). The official has since been removed from his position.

This isn’t the first time a Chinese government official has thought about his shoes before flood victims. A Zhejiang official was sacked in October after photos revealed that he took a ride on a villager’s shoulders because he didn’t want to get his shoes wet while visiting those affected by the high water.

Based on data compiled from a combination of military records, Defense Department records, and drone manufacturers, Emily Chow, Alberto Cuadra and Craig Whitlock for the Washington Post provide a quick view into drone crashes.

More than 400 large U.S. military drones crashed in major accidents worldwide between Sept. 11, 2001, and December 2013. By reviewing military investigative reports and other records, The Washington Post was able to identify 194 drone crashes that fell into the most severe category: Class A accidents that destroyed the aircraft or caused (under current standards) at least $2 million in damage.

The top row represents where a drone crashed, the second row who owns it, and the third tells the type. Mouse over any of the tick marks, and you get details for the corresponding crash.

From QQ:

Dog Peddlers in Guangxi Yulin Abuse Dogs to Force Dog Lovers to Buy Them at High Prices

Legal Evening News/The Mirror report (reporters Zou Yan, Liu Chang) — At about 11 o’clock in the morning [June 20], at the grand marketplace in Yulin, a dog peddler was haggling with dog lovers over the price of a dog, and because they couldn’t agree on a price, the dog peddler lifted the dog high into the air three times with metal prongs, doing so to force the dog lovers to buy the dog at a high price. In the end, a woman paid 350 yuan to buy the dog. At the scene, quite a few dog peddlers used mistreatment of the dogs to force dog lovers to buy the dogs.

Also, according to the official Weibo account of Chengdu Commercial Daily, on the eve of the “Dog Meat Festival”, a large number of dog lovers gathered in Yulin. On the morning of [June] 20, at 9 o’clock, at the Yulin dog meat market, upon seeing that there were dog lovers present, some dog peddlers began abusing their dogs at the scene, yelling: ”Will you people buy it or not? If not, I’ll strangle it to death [with the prongs]!” Dog lovers bought the dogs with tears in their eyes, and the dog peddlers waved the cash they got before the surrounding onlookers. The onlookers cheered, and some even gave them the thumbs-up.

Comments from QQ:

Qian行:

The dog peddlers’ behavior is indeed immoral, but maybe the root of this is the inappropriate behavior of those people seeking to protect the dogs [inspiring] the dog peddlers’. After all, without buying and selling, there wouldn’t be any dog-clamping [with prongs]. When you touch upon the bottom line of a profession/business, problems of humanity are exposed. After all, loving dogs is a hobby of yours, while they rely on this to make a living.

戈子:

Yulin welcomes you! What you see is not necessarily the truth, to say nothing of some photos taken by so-called reporters! Everybody has the right to choose whether to eat [dog meat] or not, and as long as laws aren’t being broken, don’t let our countrymen curse each other online because of dogs, [because] there are still many things that need our attention, [so] stop using foreigners this or that to make comparisons! I am from Yulin, and I speak for myself!

SS-流星雨:

The person who clamped the dog is despicable, and the people who looked on and applauded are even worse!

Big Brother:

Eating dog meat is okay, but the precondition is that pain and suffering be minimized when the little dog is killed. This abusing of the dogs thoroughly departs from this precondition. I endorse culture/tradition of eating dog meat, but I am against the mistreatment/abuse of dogs.

莪dē佪憶ァ:

Fuck, if some people don’t have the heart to eat doggies because they are cute, it’s understandable, but you can’t curse people who eat dogs beasts. What right do you have to curse people [as such]? You guys don’t eat meat? If we say eating dog meat is very cruel and harming life, and say people who eat dogs are beasts, do you dare stop eating pigs, cows, and lamb? You best stop eating vegetables too, [because] crops are plants, and plants also have life. You can forget about drinking water as well, because there are fucking microorganisms in the water.

与生俱来的倔强ヾ:

Here in Yanbian, there has been a habit of eating dog meat ever since ancient times. Although I also like dogs a lot, we should be a little rational. As long as there are farms, there will be slaughterhouses. If dog lovers could really save all the dogs from all the dog farmers in the world, I would rather not eat dog meat.

淡忘:

“Dog lovers bought the dogs with tears in their eyes, and the dog peddlers waved the cash they got before the surrounding onlookers. The onlookers cheered, and some even gave them the thumbs-up.”

秋雨:

Where do all these dog lovers come from?

小淡妆:

Tomorrow [June 21] is the Summer Solstice Dog Meat Festival, and I’m going to buy dog meat to eat.

葱头:

I’m going to kill three dogs to treat my friends today. The price for each dog is 100,000 RMB [for those who want to save them]. I don’t have to kill the dogs, and can eat only chicken and duck instead. However, aren’t dog lovers all rich? Let’s see just how far your compassion goes.

TODAYS @DREWTOOTHPASTE: Hot Cardinal Shit

WE DID IT! Drewtoothpaste.com has come back to life thanks to our Patreon page. Chip in $1+ there to keep it going!

Celebrity “doctor” Dr. Mehmet Oz was forced to appear before Congress earlier this week, and admitted that the products he’s touted for weight loss, many of which have appeared here on The Worst Things For Sale (Green coffee bean, raspberry ketone, saffron extract, garcinia cambogia, et cetera) do not actually work.

I’m not saying that you should be taking medical advice from me. Just that you definitely shouldn’t be taking medical advice from a person on television who sells pills.

We’ve received a large number of requests to add a bookmarklet feature to The Old Reader.  Today we are excited to be launching this functionality for our premium users.  We will likely roll this functionality out to all users at some point in the future, but do not currently have a timeline in place.

The bookmarklet is quickly and easily added to your browser bookmarks and allows you to send a copy of any web page to your TOR account.  Those pages are saved in the new bookmarklets section and are also searchable and sharable.

We know a lot of our users will be excited to see this new functionality and we look forward to your feedback.  Thanks for using The Old Reader!

image courtesy of South China Morning Post

Two Chinese men allegedly bought and tried to smuggle U.S. Military sensors out of the United States South China Morning Post reported on June 16.

Bo Cai, 28, and Wentong Cai, a 29-year-old graduate student in Iowa, were both arrested after being caught in an undercover sting operation. They are facing charges of smuggling goods and violating the Arms Export Control Act, which requires that certain items being shipped to China, Syria and Sudan have an export license. The two could face up to 20-years in prison, and up to $1 million in fines. Bo has been in the Santa Fe County Jail since his December arrest, and Wentong was booked and released from the same space.

In December 2013, the two men visited Albuquerque to meet with an undercover U.S. Homeland Security Investigations agent about buying the sensors, which were created for military guidance systems. Wentong mentioned he was a fan of the popular TV-series “Breaking Bad”, and the agent gave him a tour of the locations used for the show. The official also took cell phone pictures of the two men.

Wentong, a graduate research assistant in veterinary microbiology and preventative medicine, apparently wanted to buy 20 sensors for Chinese research. The agent said the 29-year-old expressed interest in shipping them to China, although he knew it was illegal without a license.

The agent warned him the sensors had traceable serial numbers.

“(If) They run the numbers and they come back to me, we could all be arrested,” the agent said. “I just want you to understand.”

Wentong was taken into custody in January in Iowa. Bo was arrested at the Los Angeles airport in December, as he was about to board a plane to China. He apparently had an ARS-14 sensor in his possession.

A federal magistrate judge unsealed two search warrants related to the case on June 14. Much of the case remains sealed, however.

“When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me,” once wrote essayist-humorist David Sedaris. “Together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon. ‘It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.’” But Sedaris, one of the last high-profile hold-outs against electronic word processing, wrote those words almost fifteen years ago — even before airport security really cracked down in our post-9/11 reality. Surely he has since picked up and presumably learned to use a computer. We now find ourselves in an age when typewriter usage has transcended the status of an act of nostalgia and attained the status of an act of rebellion; if you insist on using a classic old Underwood Remington, or an Invicta, or a Continental Standard, or Olympia Monika Deluxe, well, you must really have a statement to make.

Yet I daresay that for all their mechanical heft, freedom from internet-borne distraction, and thoroughly analog aesthetic appeal, typewriters bring with them a number of burdens. We have their difficulty in clearing TSA lines, yes, but also their thirst for physical ink and paper (“I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed,” said Sedaris, “at least I took a few trees down with me”), and their noise — oh my, their noise. You can hear the varying sounds of 32 models belonging to many successive typewriter generations in the video at the top of the post. They don’t come as straight recordings, but as sounds reproduced by mouth to perfection by that one-in-a-million mimic Michael Winslow, best known from the Police Academy movies as Sergeant Larvell “Motor Mouth” Jones. “The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow” originated in the mind of Spanish artist Ignacio Uriarte, who, according to Frieze, “has employed standard office supplies such as Biros, highlighters and jotters,” not to mention “the ubiquitous spreadsheet tool Microsoft Excel, perhaps soon facing its own obsolescence.” This production “tellingly culminates with the sounds of a machine from 1983, the year before the arrival of the first home computer with a graphical interface.” Which leads one to wonder: can Winslow do hard drive noises?

We’ll definitely add “The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow” to our collection, 675 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..

via Kottke

Related Content:

The Enduring Analog Underworld of Gramercy Typewriter

Woody Allen’s Typewriter, Scissors and Stapler: The Great Filmmaker Shows Us How He Writes

Discover Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curious Typewriter, the “Malling-Hansen Writing Ball”

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

Disruptive Technology: Student Brings Typewriter to Class

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Sound Effects Genius Michael Winslow Performs the Sounds of 32 Typewriters (1898-1983) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post Sound Effects Genius Michael Winslow Performs the Sounds of 32 Typewriters (1898-1983) appeared first on Open Culture.

image courtesy of chinanews.com

In an incredibly literal lesson regarding personal safety, Henan school children plunged their heads into buckets of icy water to practice “anti-drowning” techniques on June 9, according to chinanews.com.

Approximately 70 students at a primary school in Yanshi Shouyang city lined into meticulous rows about midday that Monday, and dunked their heads into buckets and cooking pots filled with water to practice “anti-drowning.” Yanshi Shouyang is apparently located near a river where children often play during the summer, and the school believes their course is safer than letting students practice “anti-drowning” in the actual river, and is a “novel and practical” way to prepare for summer vacation.

After completing the course, students signed a contract promising not to play in the river alone. Students said the practice made them feel really upset.

So, this weekend's news in the tech world was flooded with a "story" about how a "chatbot" passed the Turing Test for "the first time," with lots of publications buying every point in the story and talking about what a big deal it was. Except, almost everything about the story is bogus and a bunch of gullible reporters ran with it, because that's what they do. First, here's the press release from the University of Reading, which should have set off all sorts of alarm bells for any reporter. Here are some quotes, almost all of which are misleading or bogus:

The 65 year-old iconic Turing Test was passed for the very first time by supercomputer Eugene Goostman during Turing Test 2014 held at the renowned Royal Society in London on Saturday.

'Eugene', a computer programme that simulates a 13 year old boy, was developed in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The development team includes Eugene's creator Vladimir Veselov, who was born in Russia and now lives in the United States, and Ukrainian born Eugene Demchenko who now lives in Russia.

[....] If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. No computer has ever achieved this, until now. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human judges that it was human.

Okay, almost everything about the story is bogus. Let's dig in:

1. It's not a "supercomputer," it's a chatbot. It's a script made to mimic human conversation. There is no intelligence, artificial or not involved. It's just a chatbot.
2. Plenty of other chatbots have similarly claimed to have "passed" the Turing test in the past (often with higher ratings). Here's a story from three years ago about another bot, Cleverbot, "passing" the Turing Test by convincing 59% of judges it was human (much higher than the 33% Eugene Goostman) claims.
3. It "beat" the Turing test here by "gaming" the rules -- by telling people the computer was a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine in order to mentally explain away odd responses.
4. The "rules" of the Turing test always seem to change. Hell, Turing's original test was quite different anyway.
5. As Chris Dixon points out, you don't get to run a single test with judges that you picked and declare you accomplished something. That's just not how it's done. If someone claimed to have created nuclear fusion or cured cancer, you'd wait for some peer review and repeat tests under other circumstances before buying it, right?
6. The whole concept of the Turing Test itself is kind of a joke. While it's fun to think about, creating a chatbot that can fool humans is not really the same thing as creating artificial intelligence. Many in the AI world look on the Turing Test as a needless distraction.

Oh, and the biggest red flag of all. The event was organized by Kevin Warwick at Reading University. If you've spent any time at all in the tech world, you should automatically have red flags raised around that name. Warwick is somewhat infamous for his ridiculous claims to the press, which gullible reporters repeat without question. He's been doing it for decades. All the way back in 2000, we were writing about all the ridiculous press he got for claiming to be the world's first "cyborg" for implanting a chip in his arm. There was even a -- since taken down -- Kevin Warwick Watch website that mocked and categorized all of his media appearances in which gullible reporters simply repeated all of his nutty claims. Warwick had gone quiet for a while, but back in 2010, we wrote about how his lab was getting bogus press for claiming to have "the first human infected with a computer virus." The Register has rightly referred to Warwick as both "Captain Cyborg" and a "media strumpet" and has long been chronicling his escapades in exaggerating bogus stories about the intersection of humans and computers for many, many years.

Basically, any reporter should view extraordinary claims associated with Warwick with extreme caution. But that's not what happened at all. Instead, as is all too typical with Warwick claims, the press went nutty over it, including publications that should know better. Here are just a few sample headlines. The absolute worst are the ones who claim this is a "supercomputer."

• The Verge: Computer passes Turing Test for first time by convincing judges it is a 13-year-old boy
• Venture Beat: Talk to the computer that passed the Turing Test, a historic artificial intelligence milestone
• Yahoo Tech: Turing Test Bested, Robot Overlords Creep Closer
• NBC News: Turing Test: Computer Program Convinces Judges It's Human
• Washington Post: A computer just passed the Turing Test in landmark trial
• The Independent: Turing Test breakthrough as super-computer becomes first to convince us it's human
• PC World: An AI milestone: Chatbot passes Turing Test by posing as 13-year-old boy
• The Wire: For the First Time Ever, a Computer Passed Turing Test for Artificial Intelligence
• Gizmodo: A Computer Program Has Passed the Turing Test For the First Time
• ZDNet: Computer chatbot 'Eugene Goostman' passes the Turing test
• Ars Technica: Eugene—the supercomputer, not 13-year-old—first to beat the Turing Test
• The Guardian: Computer simulating 13-year-old boy becomes first to pass Turing test
• CNET: Computer fools humans, passes Turing Test
• Computerworld: Supercomputer passes Turing Test by posing as a teenager
• Science Alert: Meet the first computer to pass the Turing Test

Anyway, a lot of hubbub over nothing special that everyone seemed to buy into because of the easy headlines (which is exactly what Warwick always counts on). So, since we just spent all this time on a useless nothing, let's end it with the obligatory xkcd:

Original Source

It’s sure is nice living in the First World, where lamenting the battery life on your phone is the same as saying you don’t care about genocide! If something is shitty in the context of your life, that’s fine. It’s a fundamental human right to be miserable!

AND TO COMBAT THAT MISERY (What a segue!) a good friend of ours just released an app called “Happy Hours.” It’s pretty simple, it looks at your location and gives you a list of ongoing happy hour specials sorted by distance. Usually the app is a couple bucks but it’s free to download for the next day or two so CHECK IT OUT.

HEY KIDS!

As you guys may know, I start school for Animation Art & Design really soon.

To make sure the comics don’t fall by the way-side and to help me not starve to death I started a Patreon (with a sweet video I made for it too)!

By donating a few dollars every month you can ensure the comics keep going AND get super sweet rewards!

Please give what you can and tell all your dorky friends that you’ll beat them up if they don’t donate too!

What difference a year makes!

If you enjoyed the comic, please retweet, Like, or share the URL. That goes for you folks at the NSA too! Thanks!

You probably heard about the Facebook executive who complained about the proliferation of “stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them.” It’s almost too easy to be snarky about a Facebook guy who worries the Internet is awash in silly sponsored content. 

Besides, we know that silly sponsored content is not a benign issue. MetaFilter founder Matt Haughhey has written thoughtfully about how Google’s opaque and inscrutable ranking systems have been killing his business. He admits that, “we were doing nothing in terms of SEO, as I find the whole business kind of gross." But because MetaFilter won’t play the ranking game, ad revenue has collapsed. Having thoughtful, high-quality content isn’t enough to get read.

The Internet is still full of great content. The problem is that the big Internet companies don’t do a good job of facilitating it. Well, that and advertisers and shameless self promoters are finding new and annoying ways to get in your face.

Last week, we wrote in defense of publishers’ right to get paid for advertising. But that’s just one part of the equation. The other half is providing a better way for quality content to be found. Or at least found without having to tart it up with stupid SEO tricks. 

I know that content syndication can be used and abused by some people for link building. But RSS is not an algorithm that can be gamed by advertisers and content hucksters. I know that it is still the best mechanism to find the content you want. You’re not going to be tricked into clicking on a link and you’re not having your newsfeed polluted with promoted content. 

And I think it is time to start talking about this. Sometimes I get the feeling RSS developers think of themselves caretakers of an established and respected institution. You know, the kind of institution that can keep catering to a dwindling number of dedicated and sophisticated followers but doesn’t bother attracting new users. RSS is not new technology. But it is outside of the mainstream content delivery that’s increasingly compromised by someone’s desire to sell you something. 

And if a Facebook executive is recognizing the mindlessness, other people are too. It’s time to reintroduce RSS to the world. How about telling people that there is a way to actually ask for content you want to see and actually have it delivered to you. It’s not a miracle or weird trick. Although it will probably seem that way to a few people. 

Today marks the 10th year of the kadavy.net blog. As a natural way to commemorate an event like this, one might make a list of the top blog posts from all 10 years. (I’ve already shared the design evolution of kadavy.net.)

But I think the story that happened in between all of the blog posts is what’s significant about kadavy.net. Sure, the blog has been a great testing bed for web design and thought experimentation, and it’s lead to all of my biggest career wins, but more than anything, it’s been a vehicle for personal transformation.

I took this here #selfie just a few months after I started blogging on kadavy.net. My position in life at this time was one that is probably all-too-familiar for many readers. I was 25 years old, and I was using my college education to get paid $15 an hour to scan photos of my colleagues grandkids, or show them how to change the paper on the printer. (Though, really, I’d just have to do it for them.)

I felt stuck in my hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. I had dreamt of getting out since I was a kid, but – after traveling all over the country searching for a job – I was right back where I had started.

I spent a lot of time staring into the mirror, seeing what you’re seeing in that #selfie. I felt very compelled by my own reflection. Not because I thought I was super duper good-looking, but because I didn’t recognize the person I saw.

I thought I saw someone with talent, and promise, and something to offer the world. But, it didn’t feel like the world agreed with me.

I wanted badly for my life to change, but I had no idea how to make that happen. I could have just picked up and moved, but I was too timid-hearted for that – too risk-averse.

So, I spent the next 10 years making very calculated risks. From that, I’ve built the life that I had dreamt of – one of congruence of desire and action. I’ve written a best-selling book, built a business that allows me to pursue my curiosities, and I’ve done much of it while in various corners of the globe.

Creating the force for a change

I didn’t have the guts to make a drastic change, so I just tried to create enough force that a change would eventually happen. There were two things, it seemed, that would make that more likely.

One was to have enough money saved up that I wouldn’t be scared to make a leap. So, I ate $1 Banquet meals nearly every day. I ate them so often, I couldn’t go into the break room to heat them up without numerous coworkers teasing me for eating Banquet meals every day.

“You should just get married,” was a solution frequently offered for the blandness of my lunchtime ritual. (I’ll just offer that up without comment.)

Sometimes, the Banquet meals were on sale, 10 for $8, making them 80 cents. I socked away as much money as I could into an Ameritrade account, and maxed out my 401k. Ostensibly, I was saving for retirement, but the back of my brain would say “business, business!”

The other thing I could do to create force was work on my skills. I got to do some challenging interactive work amid the picture-scanning and paper-changing duties at my job, but I wanted my own place for experimentation. One where there was no client to meddle with my decisions, and no boss to fire me if I messed something up.

Inspired by the Flash experiments of Erik Natzke, I had previously posted my own Flash experiments, but now I was more interested in CSS. If you didn’t work with the web back in this time, it’s hard to imagine what a pain it was to work with CSS. There were still plenty of advocates for using tables instead of CSS for layout, and the cross-browser compatibility issues were bad enough that those people didn’t sound entirely crazy.

So, I took inspiration from David Shea’s CSS Zen Garden, and bloggers like Jason Santa Maria and Shaun Inman, and started a blog on blogger.com.

If you read my first blog post, you have to shake your head and wonder how I ever managed to write an entire book. It’s all a run-on paragraph, and there’s even a misspelling. I didn’t like writing at the time, and it showed.

I spent my nights and weekends experimenting and redesigning kadavy.net. In fact, I took an entire week’s vacation and sat on my couch from 10am–2am every day of that vacation, just working on my blog.

Getting “discovered,” part I

Little more than a year later, all of that experimentation paid off. Jon Stevenson, co-founder of WorkMetro gave me a call.

He sounded much more formal than usual, like I could hear him standing up straight over the phone to say “we would like to extend you an offer.”

Several months prior, Jon had met one of my colleagues at a Spanish tapas restaurant in Omaha, and Jon became a client through the architecture firm I worked at.

“We’re raising some VC money, and we’ll move you out to California to be our designer,” Jon had said over soup at the Panera Bread on Saddle Creek Road.

I didn’t believe him. “California was for people from movies who are way better designers than I am,” I thought.

“Besides, what’s a VC?”

Silicon Valley: quenching the thirst

When I got to Silicon Valley, I felt like I was drinking from a whole sink-full of water, after trekking across a desert. These people could certainly change the paper on a printer themselves.

“You invented the box-model hack,” I said, dumfounded, when I met Tantek Çelik at my first SuperHappyDevHouse. These internet people I had been reading about existed in the flesh.

The all-night hackathon was full of stacks of Red Bull, and booze, and hackers. It was a microcosm of Silicon Valley: passionate and talented people with the confidence to take action and pursue their ideas.

Being in that environment made me more confident in pursuing my own ideas. Before coming to Silicon Valley, there was “beer talk,” where friends would sit around and talk about all of the ideas that they would like to pursue if it wasn’t for this-that-and-the-other-thing.

Here, ideas were met with a hell-yeah-let’s-do-that. You had to be careful what ideas you shared, not because people would think they were stupid, but because people would make you pursue them!

This environment slowly changed my brain over the next two years. The more I believed in the possibility of pursuing ideas, the more ideas that came to me. It was overwhelming. They’d come flooding out of me into notebooks and text files and mockups, faster than I could do much with them.

The best investment I made

The more ideas I had, the less excited I was to work on other people’s ideas. Add to that the fact that the Ameritrade portfolio I had shoveled Banquet-savings into was now valued at $130,000 (GOOG and AAPL were good picks), and there was a lot of force there, pushing me to make a leap. But I was still too risk-averse to take action!

Then, the best thing that possibly could have happened, happened: I got fired.

Instead of feeling a sense of dread, or wondering what I was going to do, I felt excited. “July 17, 2007. This is going to be a special day in my life,” I said to my boss. “Thanks.”

That was the last day I worked for someone else.

I immediately cashed out a good chunk of my portfolio, which was good timing because the market was at a peak. I thought about things that most people would probably do with that money, like go to business school or buy real estate, but none of those options made sense to me. I wanted to invest that money in myself. (James Altucher would have been proud.)

$40,000 is not-really-that-much-money, but it’s also a lot of money. I figured it could get me through a year of experimentation, where I wouldn’t even take a freelance client, and I’d just pursue my ideas.

It was kind of neat to have that kind of cash. For example, there was a line-item on my Wells Fargo checking statement for “bullshit charges” (or something like that). So I transferred all of the money to the checking account, and went in to dispute the charges.

I figured, surely, they’d see a balance of $40,000 and be like “oh, we want a customer like this,” and stop charging me the bullshit charges.

And you know what? It didn’t matter. They still had to charge for the bullshit every month. I don’t have an account with Wells Fargo anymore.

Filling the vastness

So, for a whole year, I didn’t work for anyone else, not even a client. I just wanted to pursue the ideas in my brain, and take my time, and do work I could be proud of.

I’ve heard lots of people talk about all of the things they’d do if they just had the time, but it’s actually really scary. You just wake up in the morning, and there’s nothing and nobody to tell you what to do with that day. It was just vastness, and a flurry of energy bursting into that vastness. I imagined that parts of the vastness would eventually fill in, and the energy would have to flow around those spots, and fill in more, and eventually, it would be clear how to fill up my days.

But for now, my main metric was a feeling in my brain. I wanted to fill up as much of my day as possible with the soft buzz of the swift passing of time – like being alone in my room as a curious child.

The main project I worked on was called “Through a Friend,” and it was like a Craigslist that used your Facebook social graph to help you find a roommate, sell your car, or put together a Neutral Milk Hotel cover band (actual listing).

Everyone was making Facebook apps at this time, and Through a Friend seemed like it was off to a good start. But, when Facebook made major API changes, it broke the model that really made TaF work, so usage went crashing down.

I could have fought back and rebuilt, but I’m glad that I didn’t, because I don’t think the app would have worked with the way that apps integrate with Facebook today. Additionally, another startup with a similar idea came out a year later, raised $1.2 million, then eventually disappeared.

While working on this, and many other things, I’d just wander around San Francisco, compiling the best “moworking” cafes on a wiki, and meet with developers and other entrepreneurs and just jam and share ideas and help each other out.

I remember many times, the satisfaction of walking home after a 16-hour day, thinking about how I hadn’t made a dime that day, but feeling good for everything I had learned, and for all of the things that I would learn the next day.

Leaving Silicon Valley

Then, I actually did have the guts to make a bold leap. I left Silicon Valley.

It was clear to me by now that I was an entrepreneur (or, maybe an artist, or just a crazy person), but I couldn’t get interested in raising money. I was much more interested in taking my newfound confidence in myself and my ideas, and having a place to explore what was inside my brain. The $1,000 a month I was paying for a tiny bedroom in SF would have had a great ROI for someone raising money, but not for someone trying to explore their mind.

So, I moved to Chicago, and got a two-bedroom apartment (the second bedroom for an office) for about the same price.

By then, I had spent most of the money that I had cashed out, and it was a good time to start taking clients. Just as I was moving to Chicago, someone at oDesk reached out to me after reading a blog post I wrote about Garret IA. They were my main client for the next year.

Having awesome clients was great, but I still wanted to explore. My strategy was to bill as few hours as necessary to get by, and spend the rest of the time trying to set up passive revenue streams.

I had a forum dedicated to people with lumps in their mouths – a spin-off of one of my first SEO hits, that brought in maybe $100 a month. I never could get much more out of it than that, even though each of the of the 20k monthly visitors required expensive surgery. I estimated about $20 million a month was flowing through that blog post. This was a good lesson in finding the right spot in a value chain.

I also had a blog post about transferring your iTunes library, and I started selling affiliate software through that. This time, my position in the value chain was much better. The first time I made a sale, I thought to myself “wow! I might make $500 a month off of this!” At its height, that was bringing in around $2k a month.

I also had an online dating advice blog, written under a pseudonym. I had been doing lots of online dating when I lived in San Francisco, and at SXSW 2007, I had been talking about it with some friends. I “[didn’t] want to be the online dating guy,” I told them, but they practically forced me to start blogging about it. (Remember, you had to be careful what ideas you talked about). I actually really enjoyed writing on that blog, even though I still was making hardly any money from it by the time I moved to Chicago in 2008.

During this time, I was still experimenting with collaborating with others. For one hackathon, some friends and I built a food photo-sharing app. Before you laugh too hard, I was actually talking with Foodspotting founder Alexa Andrzejewski when we were both speaking at a conference a few years later, and it turns out our app predated Foodspotting by about 6 months. So, nom.ms was probably the first food-dedicated photo-sharing community. (Alexa sold Foodspotting to OpenTable for $10 million, but I don’t fret about the missed opportunity, as they clearly executed better.)

Formulating a strategy

Why was I dabbling in affiliates, adsense, and dating blogs, when I could have been making big bucks in a design position in Silicon Valley? Well, the simple answer was that I just liked it. I loved to tinker and learn about the part of the marketing stack that involved finding customers and making money. But, there was a method to this madness.

Just like I had eaten $1 Banquet meals to save up for the day I would escape Nebraska, I was trying to find that passive stream that would free up my brain to explore what had brought it to Chicago.

Here is an illustration of the vision that I planned out on New Year’s Eve, 2008/2009.

Note that “A” is for “active” revenue (consulting), “P” is for “passive” revenue, and “S” is for “speculative” revenue, as in “whatever-I’ll-find-in-my-brain” revenue.

Thankfully, I didn’t write down the timeline for how long I thought this was going to take. That would be kind of depressing, because it was probably much, much faster than it’s actually taken (and is taking).

Getting “discovered,” part II

After 3 years of experimentation, everything came together. I had wanted to do a talk at SXSW for years, and so I dug into my experimental archive and found an old talk I did at a BarCamp conference called “Design for the Coder’s Mind.” I renamed the idea, and wrote a blog post on the concept to try to get votes to talk at SXSW.

The blog post I wrote was so popular on Hacker News, I got this email from an editor at Wiley.

It made perfect sense. My seemingly disparate interests in design, entrepreneurship, and writing were converging on this one challenge. Design for Hackers was born.

The timing was perfect for me to fully dedicate myself to this book. I wound down my freelance contracts, and – just as I was wondering if the advance on the book was going to be enough – that silly online dating blog I had started 4 years previous started bringing in thousands of dollars a month from the coupons it offered.

When Design for Hackers debuted, the same community of people that had made my blog post popular enough to become a book, made my book popular enough to become a best-seller. Design for Hackers reached #18 on all of Amazon on that day.

It’s been nearly 3 years since Design for Hackers debuted, and the way that I set up my business and life has made it so I could pursue this passion, travel the world, and educate without being too concerned with the monetary returns.

More than 40,000 people have taken the D4H email course, and none of them have had to pay a penny for it.

kadavy.net, present & future

The Design for Hackers portion of my business continues to mature into a community of passionate learners, as my upcoming video course launches, it will hopefully fund more exploration and experimentation.

So, what is next? I continue to be fascinated by the very mechanisms that I’ve used to reach this point. How does one drown out noise, find their true calling, and form an existence where passions feed needs?

I’ve done some armchair neuroscience research, and have thought about how a mind best makes use of its precious and scarce time. Those thoughts connected me with the likes of Dan Ariely and Timeful, and I’m excited to see what that team does with those thoughts.

Looking back to 10 years ago, I don’t envy that puzzled young man staring into the mirror. It’s been an exciting journey, but I hope to never be quite that scared, or lonely, or uncertain again. (Maybe a little scared, and lonely, and uncertain, because that’s when you know that something fun is about to happen.)

I shake my own head at the number of seemingly lucky incidents that got me where I am. But, for each of those crazy coincidences and lucky incidents, I know there are dozens more where things didn’t pan out: unreturned emails, dud blog posts, killer start-ups I didn’t go work for, and things where I just plain messed up.

Getting here has been a constant balancing act: trying to find the business in the art and trying to find the art in the business, the whole way trying to operate with faith that if I followed my curiosity, it would lead me somewhere wonderful.

Except to marvel at the speed at which beard hairs turn gray, I don’t stare into the mirror anymore. Instead of “who is that?” I just say “yeah, that’s me.”

I don’t know what I’ll be writing in my 20-year blog post. There’s not much point in speculating what the content of it will be. But, I get excited at the idea that – with any luck – life is not short. Life is long, and with enough patience, great things can grow from it.

Thanks to you for reading this far, whether it’s your first post, or 100th, I hope you’ll read many more.

The post A Bootstrapper’s Story: 10 Years of kadavy.net appeared first on kadavy.net.