1. 12 August 2006

    881 days ago

    SaySwap

    Here’s a project I spent a lot of time on at work this summer. This kind of site is getting popular, you make lists of the video games you have and want and it will help you trade them with others through the mail. Plus, it has myspace added in on the side (:b). It was a client project, not my idea or anything, but overall it’s neat.

    Kjell Olsen881 days ago

  2. 01 May 2006

    983 days ago

    The abolition of work

    Work is doing something that you’re forced to do. Versus play. Forced play is work. The essay degenerates a bit into ravenous driveling; I’m willing to excuse it. We want a society of play. Helluv’an idea.

    The demeaning system of domination I’ve described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it’s not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or—better still—industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are “free” is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you’ll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias.

    Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at our watches. The only thing “free” about so-called free time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair.

    On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand—and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure—we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn’t make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

    Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That’s why you can’t go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn’t the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?

    If technology has a role in all this it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation.

    Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not—as it is now—a zero/sum game.

    via Kjell Olsen983 days ago

  3. 04 January 2006

    1101 days ago

    Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

    In Praise of Idleness

  4. 13 December 2005

    1122 days ago

    The advantages of being in the weeds (kottke.org)

    Kottke nails what I don’t like about my job.

    via Kjell Olsen1122 days ago

  5. 02 December 2005

    1134 days ago

    Never Underestimate the Power of Fun

    This is exactly what gets me about college. Play is extracted from work, and play inevitably becomes getting drunk and killing someone tearing down a goal post while celebrating a football victory (yes, thats my school).

    ...play=learning, play=practice, and learning/practice=survival. Play – and laughter – sends a signal to the brain that “this is good, and it matters”, which is why we’re often more likely to remember especially funny things than neutral or annoying things.

    I can’t understand how college makes work and play so irreconcilable. I’m all too close to dropping out, college just doesn’t any sense to me.

    via Kjell Olsen1134 days ago

  6. 20 November 2005

    1146 days ago

    Failure is Success.

    Irrational fear of failure is endemic in our society; I think it’s the primary factor keeping most people from doing the great things they’re meant to do. I’ve personally never met anyone who worked hard and fearlessly at a field and did NOT succeed.

    Failure is not just handled gracefully by nature, it is critical.

    via Kjell Olsen1146 days ago

  7. 27 October 2005

    Quit?

    1170 days ago

    So I’ve been working a campus job since school started, and it’s starting to suck. 10 hours a week tethered to a computer in an office. Windows! I’ve been lucky to have previously worked with rails, because so far php is to viciously scratching yourself as rails is to a warm oil massage. It might just be the spaghetti code, maybe it’s the syntax, or maybe specific to the legacy cms that I’m using, I don’t like it.

  8. 07 September 2005

    1220 days ago

    Reduce the risk, hire from open source (Loud Thinking)

    Who cared about his GPA (or if he even went to college)? Or that he lived in Provo, Utah? Or how many years of experience he had programming? We didn’t. It’s simply unnecessary to rely on secondary factors when the work is available to extract values for the five variables listed above.

    via Kjell Olsen1220 days ago

  9. 26 June 2005

    1292 days ago

    Call Me Fishmeal.: Student Talk from WWDC 2005.

    Nice talk on writing (mac) software for a living, from former OmniGroup employee and current CEO of Delicious Monster. I want audio.

    via Kjell Olsen1292 days ago

  10. 19 June 2005

    1300 days ago

    JustinFrench.com: Dear Justin, Part 1

    Justin French, who managed to get a sweet job at textdrive, on how to start your web entrepreneurship.

    In my humble opinion, the key to starting a freelance career or small business boils down to a few very simple ideas:

    via Kjell Olsen1300 days ago

  11. 07 June 2005

    Bummer

    1312 days ago

    I almost got a job at the apple store! Now I’m pissed that I didn’t. Oh well.

  12. 24 May 2005

    1326 days ago

    How to become a firefighter in the national parks

    Now here is a summer job I should look into a few years down the road. How about smoke jumper! I think this would be fun, but thats coming from someone who just shoveled 14 yards3 of dirt from a neighbors drive over a fence into my yard, for $150 (relatively) easy bucks. Hard labor!

    via Kjell Olsen1326 days ago

  13. 22 May 2005

    1327 days ago

    Creative summer & side jobs | Ask MetaFilter

    I really need to get a summer job, and outside of the guy at the hardware store saying he would call me back last week to give me a job (which he didn’t), I really got nothing. C’mon metafilter, lets do this together.

    via Kjell Olsen1327 days ago

  14. 29 April 2005

    Bum

    1350 days ago

    I’m 18. I don’t have a job. Why is that?

  15. 18 April 2005

    1361 days ago

    Park Tool Co. - Repair Help

    Nice looking collection of bike repair tutorials, I’ll have to read this sometime.

    Kjell Olsen1361 days ago

  16. 15 April 2005

    1364 days ago

    Workers of the world... relax! | MetaFilter

    Metafilter post with some nice links. Why do people have jobs anyway?

    via Kjell Olsen1364 days ago

  17. 08 April 2005

    1372 days ago

    Travel jobs | Ask MetaFilter

    A few ways to look into paying your way to a nice long vacation.

    via Kjell Olsen1372 days ago

  18. 10 March 2005

    1400 days ago

    How to Start a Startup

    Another neat essay by Paul Grahm, and I heard that there were only five mentions of lisp this time ;) I only saw one, but who knows?

    If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. You don’t even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.

    When I was trying to think of the things every startup needed to do, I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can. But I decided not to, because that’s implicit in making something customers want. The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.

    In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.

    Stephen Hawking’s editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. When you work on making technology easier to use, you’re riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn’t just increase your sales 10%. It’s more likely to double your sales.

    In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It’s easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the “high-end” products against the ceiling. Sun did this to mainframes, and Intel is doing it to Sun. Microsoft Word did it to desktop publishing software like Interleaf and Framemaker. Mass-market digital cameras are doing it to the expensive models made for professionals. Avid did it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to Avid. Henry Ford did it to the car makers that preceded him. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you’ll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you’ll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.

    Our angels asked for one, and looking back, I’m amazed how much worry it caused me. “Business plan” has that word “business” in it, so I figured it had to be something I’d have to read a book about business plans to write. Well, it doesn’t. At this stage, all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do and how you’re going to make money from it, and the resumes of the founders. If you just sit down and write out what you’ve been saying to one another, that should be fine. It shouldn’t take more than a couple hours, and you’ll probably find that writing it all down gives you more ideas about what to do.

    ...Bill Gates was young and inexperienced and had no business background, and he seems to have done ok. Steve Jobs got booted out of his own company by someone mature and experienced, with a business background, who then proceeded to ruin the company. So I think people who are mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated. We used to call these guys “newscasters,” because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn’t know much more than they read on the teleprompter.

    Unless you’re in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent, spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage. And few if any Web businesses are so undifferentiated. The dating sites are running big ad campaigns right now, which is all the more evidence they’re ripe for the picking.

    More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don’t put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do.

    For most startups the model should be grad student, not law firm. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive. For us the test of whether a startup understood this was whether they had Aeron chairs. [...] We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off. This was slightly embarrassing at the time, but in retrospect the grad-studenty atmosphere of our office was another of those things we did right without knowing it.

    When you’re looking for space for a startup, don’t feel that it has to look professional. Professional means doing good work, not elevators and glass walls. I’d advise most startups to avoid corporate space at first and just rent an apartment. You want to live at the office in a startup, so why not have a place designed to be lived in as your office?

    he key to productivity is for people to come back to work after dinner. Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. Great things happen when a group of employees go out to dinner together, talk over ideas, and then come back to their offices to implement them.

    More people are the right sort of person to start a startup than realize it. That’s the main reason I wrote this. There could be ten times more startups than there are, and that would probably be a good thing.

    So who should start a startup? Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.

    Why I shouldn’t start a company right now:

    The other reason it’s hard to start a company before 23 is that people won’t take you seriously. VCs won’t trust you, and will try to reduce you to a mascot as a condition of funding. Customers will worry you’re going to flake out and leave them stranded. Even you yourself, unless you’re very unusual, will feel your age to some degree; you’ll find it awkward to be the boss of someone much older than you, and if you’re 21, hiring only people younger rather limits your options.

    And why I should…

    ome people could probably start a company at 18 if they wanted to. Bill Gates was 19 when he and Paul Allen started Microsoft. (Paul Allen was 22, though, and that probably made a difference.) So if you’re thinking, I don’t care what he says, I’m going to start a company now, you may be the sort of person who could get away with it.

    My final test may be the most restrictive. Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing—though in that case it probably won’t take four years.

    So mainly what a startup buys you is time. That’s the way to think about it if you’re trying to decide whether to start one. If you’re the sort of person who would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a salary for 40 years, then a startup makes sense.

    Sorry for all the dumps, but there was a lot of stuff here and I found it quite interesting.

    via Kjell Olsen1400 days ago

  19. 09 March 2005

    1401 days ago

    Comments on 3972 | Ask MetaFilter

    Great thread at metafilter as to how you can best achieve things – I particularly like the idea of just budgeting so much time per day on your priorities regardless, it’s something I’ve never been able to do.

    My grades are much higher, but it’s not because I’m trying for the grades. It’s because my goal is to achieve a professional level of functional skill in the areas I’m studying. That means I have to do the work every day. Getting straight A’s is fairly easy compared to having the knowledge to be a good professional. link

    There are some nice ways that people started to do things right here.

    In grad school particularly, I befriended this fellow who was just really bright, with a work ethic to boot. He also happened to be the nicest, least selfish, friendliest guy ever. Everybody sought his opinion and counsel and he gave his wisdom and time generously. I found that when we did projects together, which was frequently, I really wanted to carry my load because he was counting on me to do that. Quarters later when we split up and took electives, I had a bit of a reputation as a guy who this other guy liked to work with because I did my shit. Now other people started looking up to me and wanting to partner with me because they knew I’d come through. While it’s not for everybody, I respond well to that pressure. link

    via Kjell Olsen1401 days ago

  20. Also somewhat recently

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