I’ve been in a funny spot for the last several weeks as I rock between my previous workflows of being wholly responsible for production work to being in a pseudo-management position and doing more advising, strategy, and writing. I’m still not entirely comfortable with it, mostly because I feel like I’m diluting the amount of the end product that I’ve actually “done”.

This is turning into a dangerous conundrum because every time I slip back to thinking that the only type of “doer” is the one on the production line, I get down on myself and upset about my contributions. Clearly, I know this is irrational. I’m still working. I’m working my ass off. But something felt out of sync.

Lets switch gears for a second.

Ze Frank. Internet performer (genius), educated thinker (genius), master DO-ER (mad respect).

I was introduced to Ze last year at the end of his run of producing “The Show”, his daily take on existence that he distributed over the internet from March 17th 2006-March 17th 2007. Having met Ze briefly before I knew who he was, or more importantly, what he was, seems to be a theme from SXSW Interactive 2007 (where we met at the Yahoo! Bartab). As tends to be the case, I researched him a bit after the fact and realized that I had just brushed shoulders with inspiration and didn’t know it…and that this inspiration would strike again.

And it has.

After taking a 1 year leave of absence from his community, Ze reappeared a few weeks ago on Twitter. Watching Ze emerge was kinda like watching an infant grow up over the course of a couple of days. He didn’t really understand the whys…he didn’t really understand the hows…he just asked questions, tried things, and waited for feedback.

Then he did something that was out of the norm of most developing children. He colored (PUNNY!) outside of the lines, with complete disregard for the ruler aimed intently on slapping his wrists.

Inspiration.

From speaking to my buddy Erik Kastner (internet famous CSS3 Image Hider, FlickrSpell, Befuddler, his contributions to the creation of the acclaimed WineLibraryTV and supporting infrastructure at WineLibrary, and countless other bits of awesome. Clearly a doer.), his contributions to Ze’s latest project have opened his eyes to what makes Ze “tick”.

Ze, I don’t know you and can’t pretend to, but if I had to guess, the one common thread between you and I is our complete and utter disregard for the norm. In fact, I think it goes a bit deeper than that. We strive to break the norm, in experimental, observational activities.

You see, as Ze got his legs for the twitter community, his realization that norms had developed in the first place made him uncomfortable enough to say, “EFF THIS!” and only 4 days after exploding onto the scene, turn several thousand users (including a number of the twitter co-founders and employees) into active participants in a new construct that came completely from his imagination.

Ze colored outside of the lines by starting ColorWar2008.

I’m thinking about my own childhood, and education in general. I’m thinking about the activities that education tries to push on us, and at the same time, I can pinpoint a couple of educators I’ve had in my life that with one hand, imposed rules and regulations. With the other hand, though…certain educators would smile and half-encourage my misbehavior, believing in the fact that I wasn’t being destructive, I simply had a varied perspective. Coloring outside of the lines was my immature way of exhibiting that.

One more Ze-specific anecdote before I come back to my point:

In this video from TED 2006, Ze describes being in a perpetual state of “80%”. I agree and think that most creative people are as well, and really like being there. What Ze does that’s so freaking magnificent is his ability to extend that experience to people who aren’t typically the types to color outside of the lines. Who aren’t the kinds of people who think they can just “try stuff”. The reason I think people idolize Ze isn’t because he’s funny (and he is), and it’s not because he’s smart (and he is). It’s because he’s repeatedly come up with ways to invite people inside his vision, and then at the same time…gives up a good portion of the vision TO the new participant and lets them run with it. That’s inspiring. That’s awesome.

I’ve done my best to conduct myself in the last year to do similar things for my peers surrounding me. As I’ve written about before, by coming up with simple, basic tools to let people share your vision is about as close to a sure-fire way to improve the world around you as I can think of.

I’ve gone on the record before saying IndyHall was a self serving venture in the fact that I wanted it myself. I was able to find others around me, give them their own box of crayons, and tell them that it was OK to color outside of the lines. By doing that, I created the surroundings that I wanted for myself in the first place.

Back on point

Alright. I’ve rambled enough. What’s my point. I was talking about doers, and related, doer-enablers. If it isn’t clear from the lack of structure in this post, I’ve been feeling like I’ve lost a good deal of my focus.

Remember when I mentioned the “80% complete” feeling that most creative people thrive on? Well, once in a while, that feeling sinks and you find yourself stuck in a rut of “always 20% done”. With no light at the end of the tunnel, motivation drops, productivity drops, quality of work drops, and distractions become your biggest enemy.

I’m not longer sure which of my contributions to society are most valuable, both for me and for the people around me. Am I a better doer, or a better doer-enabler? And most importantly…can I make a living (or at least not run myself into debt) being a doer-enabler?

I don’t know the answer. I just needed to get this stream of thought out of my head and out into the world rather than cryptically being frustrated by my own hesitations to execute. I’m not a hesitant person. I don’t know why I’m hesitating now more than ever.

I still haven’t found the focus I’m looking for, but at least this clarity helps me reassure myself that I’m on a path to look for it. This post is an early step to opening myself up to new roads to travel down while searching for that focus.

Here’s to finding my 80% again.

UPDATE:

Another way to look at all of this is finding balance between two sub-types of social capital: bridging and bonding. As if by magic, one of my good friends and mentors, Tara Hunt began twittering about this balance right around the same time I made this initial post. See:
Tara on detecting bridge vs bond
Tara on balance
Tara on the exhaustion from balancing them
Tara on creating mentors

Thanks for accidentally pitching into the mindshare, Tara!

I’ve noticed recent trend in people feeling high and mighty by removing their social network profiles. Like, they are punishing the social networks or something. Yes, without us, they are nothing. We get it.

But…I still get a lot of use out of The Facebook. And I wanted to see for myself if it was true, and if deleting a social network profile was as gratifying to social geeks as shooting a vein full of heroin is to a junkie.

So, I decided to consider this whole B.S. Scoble/Plaxo/Facebook debacle. I’ve already removed Robert from my twitter stream cuz I find his twitter style dilutive ad useless to me, plus, he tends to be an echo chamber for information I’ve already found elsewhere or on my own. Facebook, as I state, still has a tremendous amount of social power for me. So I did the most obvious thing I could.

I deleted my Plaxo account. I never use the thing anyway, except to approve people who’s contact info I already have, or deny people I don’t know (the whole interaction sounds a lot like myspace is these days).

Maybe deleting Plaxo is just equivalent to “the really weak shit”, but I’m not feeling the buzz that you all seem to be getting.

Tags: Facebook, Plaxo, Scoble, shutthehellup

1) OPML as a format is not followed close enough to make it a standard, and that is annoying. while working on a little OPML generation project I discovered that some parsers read text (a required property) while others read title (a not so required property) for the “name” of the feed. Therefore, it is “best practice” to use both. That’s the same string of descriptive text, twice. How inefficient.

2) The Nintendo Wii is insanely fun, potentially distracting (I’m being really good at rationing my time on it), and a heck of a workout. 3rd day and my upper body is still feeling it from boxing + zelda + warioware. OMG the final key to my recent weight loss. I know I won’t work out, but if i can break a sweat playing a game, mix that in with my high stress/low calorie intake diet and I’ll be down to 180 again in no time!

Tags: OPML, standards, Wii, Nintendo, Zelda, Wario Ware, workout

dear verizon:
your cancellation process is already complicated enough. if you MUST put me on hold 3+ times per department, PLEASE to not accompany the experience with a panflute rendition of “my heart will go on”.

thank you,
alex hillman

Tags: verizon sucks, my heart will go on, panflute, kill myself

Jason Santa Maria, whom i recently introduced myself to, posted about a course that is using his website as an example of critiquing site design and usability. His focus is on the types of critiques he was given (and kudos to him for taking them in stride…some of those kids were harsh), but I came away with a more valuable lesson:

some schools actually CAN keep programs up to date and deliver them in an effective manner over the web.

what do i have to do to get a professor who is
a) this knowledgeable about current, relevant course material and
b) innovative enough to use wordpress to drive class participation?

has anyone else seen this kind of format used? Drexel uses blackboard and it is awful…and id KILL for a web development course that focused on standards and usability (instead of tables and frames!)

HEY DREXEL! Get off your ass and take MSU’s program as an example of solid, innovative course material that is relevant and presented in an online format. I’m sick of paying $1500 per class to “learn” from 5 year old slides on 7-10 year old material. I’m tired of being bothered with “busy work” and not being challenged or provoked to actually think on my own.

Ill give Drexel credit, their co-op program has helped me immensely. I’ve changed careers (from IT to web development) because of an opportunity it presented. But outside of that, the only thing I’ve learned is how much red tape comes with a high-ticket University.

The level of frustration that I’m experiencing with Drexel right now is obscene. I can’t get a return phone call unless I wave threats of an alumni’s annual donation going away, it takes weeks to get an intelligent human being on the phone at all. I waste hours upon hours a week staring at garbage slides and waiting until mid-week for a professor to respond as to why no assessments have been assigned for the week. Negligence, poor course material, laggy grading times…the whole thing is a mess, and I’m sick of it.

I’ve written the professor of this class at MSU, to try to get a feel for how he keeps his material fresh and interesting, and thought provoking. Maybe Ill get something to bring back to Drexel and suggest that they use to make their program not suck.

i’m not dropping out because i’ve already blown $50k on this piece of paper and i’ll be damned if i dont get it, and soon. But Drexel needs to quit wasting my time (and money) if they want to keep my business. I’ll take it to MSU, or anywhere else that doesnt suck, if it means a program that I can actually gain something from (or be proud to say I participated in).

YAAAAAARGH!

About a month ago i took a stab at really whipping myspace into shape. Currently, my employer has me riled up to build a crazy-custom myspace page…somewhere between the full overhaul i did for my page and the clean “skinning” style that others have adopted.

So i was talking to a friend of mine about the obscene amount of money some people are charging for corporate myspace pages…you know, the banner-less ones with all kinds of product placement, etc. etc. $10k + monthly maintenance fees + hundreds of thousands (yes, you read that right) in ad spending to get a banner free page for yourself. its a disgusting, commodity-based market that is 100% fabricated. But its working for some really good sales people, so good for them.

My friend got this crazy idea in my head that it might be valuable to create a myspace “IDE” of sorts. I told him it was impossible because there wasn’t an API for myspace. I really need to drop “impossible” from my vocabulary because every time i think there’s no way i can pull something off, someone proves me wrong.

Turns out there is an API…sort of.

1-2-pimp (translated from german for your convenience) runs on the pseudo api created by imagelooop. Effectively it takes whatever code you provide it, and along with a user/pass for myspace authentication, it posts it automagically into your “about me” section (the technique used for myspace customization).

So with that available…all i need to do is document what myspace allows/disallows code wise, build up some neato drag and drop flash components (for rss, music playing, etc), and build up a cute little IDE so that you can, in theory, build the holy grail yourself: a myspace page without the suck.

im VERY against WYSIWYG. It belongs NOWHERE near professional web development. But wouldn’t it be nice to have myspace pages that aren’t so blindingly painful to look at? a nice intermediate step between those $10,000 corporate myspace pages and things like this.

right. like i needed something else to fool around with. ::rolls eyes::

remember how i said my png transparency solution relied on deconcept’s swfobject? We noticed that whenever you clicked a link that left a page, it seemed that every embedded flash object was dumped from the page, collapsing holes and causing everything to look screwy for a second before the page switched.

for the record, this can be fixed by following these directions:
http://lists.deconcept.com/pipermail/swfobject-deconcept.com/2006-August/001407.html

Or, just comment out these lines from the swfobject.swf

if (typeof window.onbeforeunload == 'function') {
var oldBeforeUnload = window.onbeforeunload;
window.onbeforeunload = function() {
deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.cleanupSWFs();
oldBeforeUnload();
}
} else {
window.onbeforeunload = deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.cleanupSWFs;
}


edit: for crying out loud, why dont any of my wordpress plugins for code formatting work???

edit 2:

Geoff at Deconcpet wrote me about this, and it was definitely a known issue. I’m previewing the next release of swfobject, which seems to have the problem locked down, although, i dont have the ability to test the main function of the cause of the bug: the release of swf’s with streaming content. I should have that soon, for testing, and will follow up a report on that.

Thanks, Geoff. You (and swfobject) are awesome.

Drexel University gets a lot of press around here as a “prestigious” school. Do any of you outside of the northeast corridor even know that Drexel exists? Does it mean anything over a degree from any other accreddited university (i’m not talking community college, i’m talking real deal university). Or, is “a degree is a degree is a degree”.

(I’m looking at you, west coasters).

(if you can’t read between the lines, i’m ready to tell Drexel to take their shaft and shove it somewhere else for a change. Just weighing my options, no decisions are being made yet, and no matter what I’m not “dropping out of school”).

maybe it’s just me. maybe it’s just my distaste for world news, and the fact that its never uplifting and always depressing.
it definately isnt my love for interesting uses for technology.

but exercise a little taste. today, 5 years after what we ALL KNOW and remember what happened, CNN is dedicating one of their web news feeds to broadcast the day of live coverage in real time through the course of today. As i type this, I see one tower on the ground and one still standing, smoking. I just heard them get the news of capitol hill experiencing an explosion. I don’t need to relive this, no one does.

here’s to another year of avoiding the news (beyond tech news. the only thing depressing in tech news is windows vista).

it’s been raining for a couple of days, nonstop. as if that wasnt depressing enough, the front windows of my apartment (the ones in my bedroom) are starting to leak from being beaten against by heavy rains.

and for the 2nd time, my apartment is being damaged by water and my landlord is unavailable until monday. but my landlord says to me that I ‘can’t live my life in fear and worry what’s going to happen’, and therefore its inapproprate for me to request an after-hours contact at the realty office.

does anyone have advice on how to deal with a landlord who refuses to provide any contact information for emergency situations off business hours? this is getting a bit ridiculous.