Clever marketing or a creative con?

I’ve found plenty of conversations recently on Moleskine-based blogs as well as general writing sites such as The Fountain Pen Network who instantly reference Chatwin or Hemingway whenever Moleskine is mentioned. Whilst true that the authors did use a book that resembled the Moleskine, both died a decade before Modo & Modo registered their Moleskine trademark in 1996. The Moleskine Modo & Modo produces is as much Chatwin’s Moleskine as any of the other Moleskine clones by papermakers such as the Spanish Miquelrius or British Paperchase.

In a 2004 IHT article, Modo & Modo marketing director Francesco Franceschi even admitted to the marketing con, saying that “[The Moleskine link to Chatwin and Hemingway is] an exaggeration. It’s marketing, not science. It’s not the absolute truth.” According to Wikipedia’s entry on Moleskine, Chatwin’s last supplier of his Moleskinesque notebooks was a stationer in Tours, France, hardly an Italian company that binds their millions of moleskin oilcloth notebooks in China before finishing them in Italy.

Finding authenticity in notebook-land

Recently disillusioned, I set out to find a superior notebook. I love the Moleskine’s overall form factor and hardcover format; I’m a rather clumsy fellow and softer notepads don’t make it very long being thrown around in my bag or lost in some nook of the office. A few months ago, I bought a set of notepads from French company Bloc Rhodia after having their 80-gsm paper recommended to me by other heavy fountain pen users. For writing, I was hooked: most of Socialuxe’s (awfully few) articles have been written on one of my A4 Rhodia pads before being transcribed to digital form.

Unlike Moleskine, Rhodia actually has a legacy: the stationer was founded in Lyon, France in 1934, giving the French stationer 62 years on Moleskine. Furthermore, all of Rhodia’s paper and pads are still made in France, making the price premium justifiable. If aspirational marketing is your thing, the still-living British fashion designer Paul Smith is a vocal fan of Rhodia’s products, even going so far as to design his own limited edition for the French stationery firm.

While my Rhodia pads served me well at home, the cardstock covers still felt flimsy and more useful for note-taking than anything archival. Writing with a hardcover Moleskine feels more journal-like and less like something to write fast notes in, and I wanted notebooks I could use for this purpose. A few days ago, I stumbled across Rhodia’s new high-end Boutique collection, offering cute imitation leather journals with Rhodia’s paper in classic Rhodia yellow-orange or black vaguely reminiscent of Hèrmes’s Ulysse notebook, which at $325 is most certainly the ultra-luxury of notebooks. After a bit more digging in the Boutique collection, however, I found Rhodia’s A5 Webnotebook, a completely French-made notebook made to the same specification as the Moleskine with far better paper quality and a soft imitation leather cover. For that extra snob appeal, I’d say that the Rhodia Webnotebook is far closer to the Chatwin specification than that of the Moleskine: at least it’s made in France, where Chatwin’s last Moleskinesque notebooks were created. I spent a day tracking one down in San Francisco, finally finding the black A5 Webnotebooks at The Container Store next to Westfield San Francisco Centre for $17.99, a price premium of approximately two dollars over Moleskine’s competing notebook. I was instantly in love. (Note: If anybody finds a place in San Francisco where I can purchase the orange variant, please let me know; I’d love to make an inverse version of my work Webnotebook for personal writing.)

Taking it to the next level

Recently, I’ve found myself unhappy with anything that isn’t modified in some way: I’ve been craving æsthetically unique pieces for my everyday carry, eventually culminating in designing a custom messenger bag that is currently in production and a complete rework of all of the things I carry every day to slightly modified or otherwise custom pieces. Given my Rhodia fandom, I decided it was time to modify the Webnotebook to rival the endless modifications to Moleskines (which, somewhat hypocritically, I’ve contributed to in the past.) With Webnotebook in tow, I headed to Utrecht Art Supplies on New Montgomery to purchase acrylic paint in Cadmium Orange Hue, a couple of Sharpie paint markers and a can of Krylon Matte Finish. Some hours later, I had a fully customised Webnotebook, with a hand-painted Rhodia orange stripe meant to evoke the rougher feeling of the abstract expressionists of the early sixties, an art group that I somehow find perpetually inspires me. As an ode to Smith’s collections, I then doodled a pattern on the inside covers using the paint markers.

In the end, I’ve found peace with my writing supplies. It’s good to know that I’ve found a product superior to the Moleskine from a company that doesn’t lie about its history or origins. I’ve a final note for Moleskine spl: I won’t be coming back. Bloc Rhodia has forever replaced you in my heart.

After I was done working in Photoshop, I started to write the actual markup for hyalineskies 8 (theme named “Nightingale”) when I ended up hitting a bit of an impasse. Aerial, the current hyalineskies theme, was built with semantics in mind (such that I could simply swap out Aerial’s CSS for other ones, minimising design time,) and while Aerial worked to some effect, the underlying document architecture was still in some ways restrictive. Aerial’s development taught me a lot about the semantics of the Web, but a simple CSS facelift wasn’t going to help me build some of the insane functionality I wanted into Nightingale.

What is it, then, that Nightingale needed that Aerial didn’t have? A lot of things, really. Aerial was built back before Valerio Proietti’s awesome mootools was released to the public, and thus uses the older (and deprecated) moo.fx libraries + moo.ajax. Aerial, in a bit of a rush to get out the door, missed its intended livesearch and Mint interfacing functionalities, and building them into the Aerial codebase seemed much like an architectural afterthought. Even so, I wanted to build some interface changes into the way comments are displayed and numbered, support some standard microformats, and, of course, work with the most valid code possible. While it’s certainly possible to build such things into Aerial’s own codebase, the end result would have been pretty hackworthy.

As I explained in Aerial’s own unveiling, Aerial was built upon a strict grid system with a highly modular, class-based grid design pattern. That said, I’ve improved as a developer since the release of Aerial, and its ignorance of multiple class attributes and rather amateur pattern design seem slightly under-par for the professional development that this blog both tries to be an example of and write about. When I began to start rebuilding my design patterns to a more semantic, more universal degree, I realised that Nightingale was essentially a better version of what I had tried to do with Aerial, and what I had inadvertently done with Aerial is start to build a general design framework to work on top of the WordPress engine, some type of primitive K2. What I eventually realised that Nightingale would need, both for its current revision as well as future hyalineskies design versions, was a full-scale, user-friendly framework that offered both the UI easiness of K2 as well as the developer-centric semantics of Sandbox. With that thought process, Nightingale went from a simple redesign to an entire rearchitecture of the WordPress frontend, adding custom presentation options that would allow for fast switching of actual designs, powerful JavaScript effects, and a pretty awesome AJAX engine that would handle the UI complexities of dealing with browser history while degrading nicely all the way down to the handheld.

Introducing Fuselage

With that process, I began my work on Fuselage, a fully-functional WordPress framework, a sort of mootools for WordPress developers. Fuselage is both a developer’s framework as well as a user’s framework, with a backend for options to work with the default markup as well as a full codebase of CSS classes, standardised microformats, and custom template tags to do the things that WordPress doesn’t on its own. While Fuselage won’t be released until hyalineskies 8 (Nightingale) itself is, I thought it might be worthwhile to leak a bit of information on the framework’s current feature set and how it will work in the end.

For a developer to implement the Fuselage framework for their own themes, all they need to do is add the proper Fuselage JavaScript and CSS files to their directories. The Fuselage JavaScript and CSS offer a barebones system to developing WordPress themes with extremely advanced features. Some features Fuselage will include upon release are:

• XHTML 1.1 Semantic Validity Fuselage will be built to the XHTML 1.1 specification, with automatic backward DOCTYPE compatibility to XHTML 1.0 Transitional for older posts (or XHTML 1.0 Transitional can simply be forced from the Fuselage backend.) Fuselage will automatically handle content negotiation to serve XHTML 1.1 pages as application/xhtml+xml to browsers that can handle true XHTML properly.
• A true grid-based design pattern At the core of every site I’ve made over the past year and a half is a strict grid structure. Fuselage offers a full grid-based CSS framework, allowing a developer to specify features for XHTML markup by using a core class framework. Set your column widths to what you’re looking for in fuselage.struct.css, and then all you have to do is define column widths in your markup. Want a structural div that spans four columns? Simply class it structCol4 and Fuselage will automatically format the div properly. This offers extreme amounts of flexibility to grid-based web designers.
• Standard UI controls Fuselage will offer simple, preset styles for common blog UI elements, from comment and search forms to social bookmarking tool widgets. For greater UI support, Fuselage offers a true breadcrumb navigation engine to help a user retrace their steps to a parent page. Fuselage will also maintain a proper browser history in Mozilla and IE when AJAX is in use by using the RSH library.
• Simple UI Effects Fuselage maintains simple UI effects using the mootools library and defined colours. Want to fade in or fade out an element? Simply class it uiFadeIn or uiFadeOut.
• Built-in AJAX Livesearch and Commenting Theme developers using Fuselage can build in AJAX commenting simply by creating one div, classed structAjaxContainer, within the comment list. Livesearch will function much in the way that K2’s livesearch does.
• Support for Common Formats To increase compatibility with standards, Fuselage’s default code will work with WordPress widgets and maintain built-in template tags for generating standardised Microformats such as hCard. Fuselage also maintains formats and template tags for downloads, inline video, and more (including Chris Messina’s figure alignment pattern).
• Built-in sIFR 3 Support sIFR 3 Beta will be worked directly into Fuselage, with standard classes for implementing sIFR (want to turn sIFR on? Simply class an item typoSIFR.) Fuselage’s default sIFR replacement JavaScript can be overridden by user-made stylesheets or sIFR, as well as any other function in this list, can be disabled from an admin panel.
• Quick JavaScript methods Using the rel attribute, Fuselage allows for use of JavaScript tools such as opening in new windows or the use of the Litebox image display system, included with Fuselage (and, of course, an option easily disabled in the backend to save overhead.)
• Drop-in styles Much like K2, a user unfamiliar with code can drop a style package directly on top of Fuselage to make something out of it. Styles in Fuselage allow for both CSS and JavaScript functions. (Of course, you can always take the Fuselage framework and build your own true theme on top of it.)
• Degradeable. Really. Fuselage will function normally without JavaScript or other such fun things, acting entirely as a normal WordPress theme would.

Monocoque: The most awesome thing about Fuselage

My favourite feature of Fuselage is Monocoque, the feature that allows the base Fuselage theme to work entirely in AJAX mode, creating what is essentially a one-page theme in browsers that support the full methods of AJAX and necessary browser UI handling. This effectively deals away with a refresh, while using the best methods available to maintain browser history and proper bookmarking.

To conserve bandwidth, Monocoque’s current design negotiates with its own handler, passing WordPress data back and forth into Monocoque’s sector of the page using JSON instead of a raw HTML block. Monocoque will be able to intelligently decipher external links from internal links so that external links will open properly. Of course, Monocoque is the toughest part of getting Fuselage to work properly, but it will also be rather revolutionary (as well as probably taking the whole AJAX thing one step too far, but hey, somebody’s gotta do it.) In this way, Monocoque will allow a Fuselage-based WordPress theme look and act exactly like a Flash application with true degrade-ability and decreased load times.

The war against bandwidth and processing

Of course, all of this functionality definitely seems like it can make Fuselage turn into a total bandwidth and processing hog. I’m doing my best to optimise the application’s JavaScript, PHP and SQL routines as well as making sure that Fuselage will play nicely with WP-Cache to maintain low database query counts. With absolutely everything enabled, Fuselage will probably be a little heavy on bandwidth and processor usage, but, as with any framework, it is not intended for all of its features to be used at once.

That said, I’ll also note that I’m not the best developer on the planet, and I’m probably not even qualified to write something that’s this huge, so if anyone wants to help optimise Fuselage’s routines before any version is released to the public, I’ll gladly take help by those who are more skilled in JavaScript and PHP optimisation. I’ll definitely be working to learn more optimisation routines myself, as both my site and most likely a few others will run on this framework when it’s complete.

Styles Included

Unlike Sandbox, which really only provides a very simple core (which Fuselage does with styles disabled, I’ve already drawn out a basic design for Airframe, the stock Fuselage template, which will work with every Fuselage feature and offer a starting point for those willing to create new Fuselage styles or develop their own code using the Fuselage framework. Airframe should live up to the same aesthetic traditions as my existing themes, and, with Airframe alone, the Fuselage codebase can be a great theme for those that are neither design- nor development-oriented.

Now that I’ve explained all of this that I’m working on for the next version of this site, I’m definitely getting back to working on it. Maybe I’ll have something to show for it even sooner than expected. (Okay, probably not, but I’ll have the beginning to a new, multi-part First Class post sometime next week.)

I’ve had some time to play around with Virb, and while my profile is currently barren, I’ll vouch for its super-modularity and ability to actually be designed prettily without an obscene amount of HTML/CSS hackery. While Virb is certainly getting a lot of buzz with my fellow 9rulers, I’m going to come in and rain on the parade. Virb is nice, it really is, but it’s definitely got a long, long way to go to beat social network monoliths such as Facebook or MySpace.

Let’s play venture capitalist

Although this question generally carries with it a lot of hedonic calculation, tons of research and probably a few paper-pushing interns, it’s still a very good way to gain insight into a web service’s potential adoption: what’s the value? While this is still a pretty abstract question, a bit of very superficial research into Virb’s own marketing lingo and people’s premature love of the network will show the values that people think (or, in the case of marketing, what Virb thinks people think) are important about the service. From my rather limited evaluation, the biggest lures to Virb are:

• It’s prettier Virb is, for all intents and purposes, the supermodel of the social networking world with a very clean design for equally clean-designing people. The codebase blows MySpace’s hacked-together ColdFusion disaster out of the water and has design-level customisation options that Zuckerberg and Co. have forcefully left out of Facebook.
• It’s got real design-ability As I quickly touched on in the last point, Virb has absolutely awesome customisation properties, allowing any competent standards-based designer full freedom over the design and layout of their profile. They give you structure-level access to your profiles much like a WordPress blog does, leaving the potential for cool design unmatched by anything else I’ve ever used.
• It’s “MySpace for grownups” Fellow 9ruler Blogger and 9rules Reader cristinamarie seems all about Virb, the service she called “MySpace for grownups.”

So it’s prettier. So what?

I won’t deny that Virb — not the user profiles, but the actual system itself — is quite beautiful. The service’s overall UI is solid and definitely has a clean appearance that MySpace obviously does not; however, this is not exactly a means to success. MySpace has taken off and exists in an extremely popular state without any real design much to the grimacing of UI designers and developers worldwide; Facebook, which obviously has a much greater UI than that of MySpace, didn’t gain its success because of its superior design: instead, Facebook owes much of its success to its now-nonexistent college-only functionality and relatively excellent privacy tools. The superficialities of a social network’s interface don’t really seem to matter in the end.

Well the profiles are easier to design.

The capabilities given to a designer on a Virb profile are leaps and bounds above everyone else, and Virb’s beta rounds have brought in a select group of people (such as Kristin Pishdadi) who have the web design know-how to turn out a truly beautiful profile design. There are plenty of users on Virb who have built something beautiful with Virb’s modular capabilities. It’s customisable in the way MySpace isn’t.

That said, as designers we’re extremely shortsighted to believe that Virb’s aesthetic qualities will continue in their superior form as less design-oriented users sign on to the network. MySpace has plenty of so-called “designers” building profiles with entirely invalid code, terrible table-based systems, and CSS that makes the standardista collapse and cry. Those of us using the div overlay method obviously have to hack up MySpace in a fairly nasty way, but even the hack-by-necessity code written by people such as Derek Punsalan and I is nothing compared to the disasters floating around for MySpace users that don’t know a DOCTYPE from their HMO list. As the userbase expands, the code inferiority is bound to skyrocket, and with it so will the annoyances of being able to customise anything at all. The veritable pixel-circus that MySpace has turned into is a primary reason why Facebook is so vigilant in cutting down those who want any bit of style in their profiles: in the end, the site becomes unusable under the control of its own users.

Making things worse, designing a module or two for Virb isn’t anywhere near as challenging as developing something truly awesome on MySpace, thus actually decreasing the learning curve for a vast majority of those building Virb modules. This will most likely lead to more bad news as Dreamweaver-built, WYSIWYG disasters begin to appear across the open Virb network. Sure, you can use the “Remove Customization” button that Virb (thankfully) has, but the majority of users can’t tell good design from bad design, and the population will decrease the overall aesthetic value of the network.

Users: going down in flames

As is true with any beta, the users on the network now — a paltry 5,770 (3,809 male; 1,961 female) at this time of writing — will decrease rapidly in quality. Beta users are the edge of the adoption curve: those currently in Virb are just the tip of an iceberg, the innovators and early adopters of tons of technologies, and the early adopter’s abilities, qualifications and user preferences are a small minority of those that will need to sign on to make Virb a successful social network contender. The users currently on the social network are (for the most part) the grownups that cristinamarie was talking about: they’re all fairly mature, dedicated in some way to better content and able to help Virb’s developers debug the service for public use. This type of user is unfortunately light-years away from the common social network user that fills MySpace or Facebook, and the userbase will be quickly diluted with such lusers (sic) if Virb ever gains traction. The only way to maintain Virb’s current user quality is through restricting invites to the network or to offer applications to join the social network, and both will require more administrative time and restrict the growth of the network dramatically. (One could argue that we’re already seeing user dilution as more and more are invited.)

It ain’t looking good.

Virb is pretty awesome, it really is, but nothing gold can stay, and Virb is a perfect example of that. Virb will eventually have to choose between growth or quality — after a point, both aren’t possible simultaneously — and most likely, to appease venture capitalists and build the social network into something larger, they’ll choose growth. After all, Virb really doesn’t have any features that push the network into something more competitive than MySpace aside from its designer quality, which, without restriction and exclusivity, will quickly be destroyed by its userbase. Sorry guys, but I’m not feeling the whole Virb craze: it’s more Web 2.0 fun that really doesn’t offer any benefit or any advantage in the end.

Invites I’ve got a ton of Virb invites. If you’re a hyalineskies reader and would like one, e-mail me at eston@hyalineskies.com with your favourite hyalineskies post, why it’s your favourite, and why you’d be a good Virb user.

Back when I was a kid, somewhere between third and fourth grade, I thought the coolest thing to have would be a large, intelligent mainframe, some type of overarching computer knowledge base like you see in sci-fi movies and video games. Yeah, I was a geek then, too.

While obviously the idea faded off sometime as I grew up, the odd, nerdy fantasy found its way into my head roughly a week ago. I wondered what a modern interpretation of it would actually be: now, that knowledge base would be a personal information aggregator, some type of tool that would allow me one-look access to nearly all of the information that mattered in my life, from number of e-mails to financial data. I wanted the ultimate PIM. I wanted more than just an e-secretary: I wanted a true e-servant, able to connect to my apartment and automate the lighting, tell me where my car was, and recognise me by biometric authentication. I wanted what was effectively an artificial intelligence server, a modern-day HAL 9000 for my own personal use.

What would I really need to build such a system? What was it that I wanted? After realising that most of my ideas were most certainly feasible with modern-day technology and next-to-nothing costs (less than $50,) I actually began to design such a system. I named it Sarai, for Semi-Automated Residential Artificial Intelligence, which also doubles as the word for “house” in Persian and “palace” in Turkish according to Wikipedia. Sarai would have to be able to:

• Be expandable For Sarai to be expandable, I would need to build it in an object-oriented language and make the codebase modular, that way I could add in new information systems or I/O libraries as was necessary to make the server work with current and future platforms.
• Work with old technology Since Sarai was a limited-budget project, I needed to be able to make it work with really cheap hardware, including computer components I could get for free or close to it.
• Be remotely accessible Since I wanted Sarai to have a remote interface, it would be best to run a web-based application to control most of Sarai’s functionality.
• Be very, very stable and secure Sarai, given its Internet connectivity and responsibility as a be-all, end-all life aggregator, needed to be secure and stable. This ruled out any Windows-based solutions and most off-the-shelf software.
• Be able to control lighting, including dimming I wanted Sarai to be able to control all of my apartment’s lighting. The cheapest solution for automated lighting control is still the X10 protocol; while other, more advanced solutions exist, the shoestring budget for building Sarai would require me to work with the cheapest components.
• Keep tabs on my house and car Thanks to an application I wrote for O’Reilly Media, I had some experience in building GPS tracking systems for automobiles using Mologogo and hacked Nextel phones. The home stuff didn’t need to be that advanced, so using any old webcam would do the trick; I’d just need simple motion detection or the like.
• Maintain data from all over my life Sarai would need connectivity with my stock portfolio, with research systems, with my PIM software on my smartphone, hyalineskies statistics, and message boards that I post on. Thanks to many Web 2.0 services and their software APIs, this type of connectivity has become infinitely easier in recent years, but there are still places where Sarai would have to use a rather-fragile screen scraper.
• Show the data in a kiosk mode on a display Sarai also needed a kiosk mode, some way to dedicate a monitor to the display of the data it aggregates. This rules out a lot of really cheap hardware, as I’d have to run some type of GUI and a web browser
• Look good While this sounds like it’d be the easiest thing to do, it could be tricky: the device needs to be able to support and display anti-aliased TrueType fonts to the user, as well as JavaScript and Flash. This rules out a lot of very minimal web browsers available for UNIX platforms, such as Dillo.

Sarai’s end vision was what Danny O’Brien referred to as “secret software” at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference back in 2004 (Cory Doctorow’s notes on the seminar give an awesome summary of what O’Brien said,) and it is this type of software that ultimately improves the productivity of the person using it. Sarai became more than a simple idea: it became a living example of the ultimate life hack.

Building Sarai: The hardware

I knew that to make Sarai development both quick and easy, I’d have to use a LAMP server solution on a UNIX/Linux box. Thankfully, a single-user server didn’t require that much power or RAM, so I knew a Pentium III box with sufficient memory and a big hard drive would work well enough for the project.

I originally searched eBay for a few computers, but shipping on a full-size computer made it effectively impractical to purchase one from afar. Craigslist turned up nothing but really overpriced Pentium II-class hardware. Eventually, I salvaged an aging IBM Aptiva 2164 from my mother, who had long since moved onto better hardware; I found the Aptiva’s case literally rusting away in the garage, having been placed out there and condemned to die in the elements. I was allowed to take it, but only under the condition that I returned the 25.0GB hard disk. Had I not picked up the machine, it would have headed to the trash heap.

I came back to my apartment with my “new” server: with a 500MHz Pentium III and only 128MB RAM, this once cutting-edge machine was laughably obsolete compared to modern-day technology. After cleaning off the spider webs (including dead spider carcasses) and what I think were mold spores on the top of the black case, a bit of Windex and some Q-tips cleaned the machine up to a state that made it look brand new. Thanks to IBM’s relatively-timeless case design, the black machine sits simply on my desk, meeting the “look good” requirement.

The internal hardware, however, was still a bit of a mess: using an 80-gigabyte Western Digital Caviar I salvaged from a broken external hard disk enclosure and a 15″ Sony Trinitron CRT, I started up the machine. The floppy drive was entirely dead, causing BIOS errors until I disabled it, and the machine had a distinct lack of an Ethernet card. That said, the box contained a Linksys 802.11b PCI card with an aging, huge antenna coming out of the back; there was no guarantee that the wireless would work, either.

With the computer successfully running through BIOS checks otherwise, I decided it was time to start finding software.

Building Sarai: The base software

The machine’s old hardware already confined me to Linux/UNIX systems; no new variant of Windows would meet the security requirement or even work anywhere close to quickly on the PC otherwise. After looking at possibly using OpenBSD for its security, I eventually settled upon Ubuntu’s alternate version, which was made for systems with less than 192MB RAM. (In retrospect, I would’ve used Xubuntu, an even smaller Ubuntu fork, had I paid attention to it when downloading Ubuntu.) I had heard a lot of good things about Ubuntu, and after installing the system in expert mode, I was able to boot into the standard GNOME Desktop Environment with a fully working motherboard (including USB) and got the old Linksys card working using Orinoco drivers after a bit of modprobe.d/blacklist hacking.

With the base installation of Ubuntu down, I began using aptitude to pare away at the packages that I didn’t need, such as The GIMP or OpenOffice.org. I wanted to leave GNOME around in case I wanted a desktop GUI later; instead of deleting gdm and other GNOME-based X tools, I simply disabled them. Thanks to the AutoHide extension for Firefox and a simple .xinitrc file, booting into the X server requires minimal resources, loading Firefox directly in full-screen mode without requiring any window manager. At this point, I had satisfied the kiosk mode constraints to a point that was sufficient. To further increase the aesthetics, I installed the Microsoft Web Safe Fonts using apt-get.

On the backend, I installed a LAMP stack, the type of server I was most used to using. I also included the OpenSSH server for remote login and vsftpd to complete my web server-esque functionality. To make it remotely accessible from my Dynamic IP aDSL, I gave it a domain at the absolutely indispensable DynDNS.org, and then set up a few Python and shell scripts to automatically update DynDNS if the IP address changed. I then set the Web ports of Apache and FTP services to something other than their defaults for more security, installed SSL and was done configuring the LAMP stack.

At this point, I had met most of the basic requirements necessary without writing any serious code of my own; to handle the X10 home lighting control, I found a command-line utility called BottleRocket, which allows X10 control via a tiny serial port hardware device available on eBay for under $5. Since X10 has been around forever and since been obsolesced by more complex systems such as INSTEON, I can replace most light fixtures with modules costing less than $5 on eBay. Using Bottlerocket and the PHP exec command, I could build a library to automate all parts of lighting in my apartment. Surveillance proved easy using tons of existing webcam APIs.

What’s next

While the Sarai vision has certainly found its way closer to geeky reality, a lot more needs to be done before it’s actually useful; the actual application to aggregate things still has to be written. I’ve found ways to handle most of the incoming and outgoing data; it is now simply a matter of coding the proper solutions. Maybe the ideas of elementary schoolers aren’t so crazy after all.

For as much as I dislike the (not-so-) little coupe, I find driving the thing immensely inspiring. With time and money, I can re-develop the car and easily fix most of its flaws with aftermarket parts; and, in doing so, my actions reflect the very personality of not myself, as Toyota wishes to market the Scion brand, but of its original creator somewhere in Tsutsumi, Japan.

Most of my friends know that I find the Toyota Production System, as well as its core kaizen (改善) philosophy, an amazing guideline for nearly all business operations as well as life itself in some way. In fact, most of us practise kaizen in our everyday lives: we periodically stop our processes for introspection when something seems out of place, attempting to change our own life’s direction by taking small steps toward self-improvement, whether in our business or personal lives. After all, making big improvement steps is much like attempting to consistently score home runs: while every so often you’ll hit a grand slam, most of the time you’ll strike out. Mankind isn’t naturally tuned for big improvement, and if one believes otherwise, one simply needs to look at the thousands of failed New Year’s resolutions.

The kaizen philosophy also seems to be a big reason why productivity systems like GTD work: while Allen & Co. attribute its success to freeing your mind to complete, not remember tasks, GTD also has a secondary effect of braking your tasks into smaller pieces to achieve the whole. If somewhere in your daily routine you find that you need to change things up, you can stop the presses and change paths to working on something that would be more productive for you at that time. (That’s why, while right now I should be reading my Economics homework, I’m blogging – I wasn’t being anywhere close to productive reading/falling asleep to Adam Smith.)

It’s the creativity that’s missing in most of our lives. After all, my creativity has been the central reason why some employers at large corporate finance institutions rejected me from their internship positions and instead found me hired at ad agencies. It’s my creativity that’s found me failing at the completion of mundane, repetitive tasks and excelling at anything that required dynamic, dual-brained thought. Toyota’s systems are so wildly successful because of this creativity: they turn assembly lines into thinking positions, giving everyone the ability to create and think even in what could be the most mechanical of jobs. In doing so, company morale jumps dramatically. Extrapolating this to personal kaizen, stopping our own task flow to find creative ways to solve everyday problems can in turn increase our personal well-being.

Do not confuse kaizen with a tortoise-and-hare scenario: kaizen is fix-now-to-solve-later thinking at a hare’s speed. If changing your own operations on something vital in life takes weeks of introspection before action, you’re thinking far too much about what you’re doing. If changing up a task flow in a given day and completing another project instead requires thought over five minutes, you’re thinking too much again. Instead, choose the smallest available problem to eat: kaizen is about small change that leads to the bigger goal. If you’re thinking about whether to move, maybe the task should be examining transportation options in the city you want to move to. If you’re thinking about whether or not to commence development of a client’s project or work on refinancing your home, maybe you should be looking at the difference between creatively designing your project’s specification or researching innovative ways to refinance. Finding the smaller parts of the tasks and appealing to your creative side generally works on most things.

As an example that fits universally, let’s say that you’re looking for some way to do laundry. You’re amassing the equivalent of Kilimanjaro after a while, spending hours on a weekend to do your laundry. You could, as a solution to the problem, swear to do piles every few days in the long term, but the chances of keeping such a drawn-out commitment are slim. Instead, start with a smaller modification to the status quo and improve on the Kilimanjaro method: maybe there’s some way to get the mass done faster. Maybe it’s more valuable to work with multiple washing machines (which is an option if you live in a city / complex with central laundry.) Maybe you can do larger loads. By changing small parts of the process, you’re saving yourself time within each task each time, thus finding a mutual agreement in both the discovery of the creative solution and completing the mundane task more efficiently. As the small changes continue and compound with every iteration, you’ll notice that the task is much more efficient than it was some weeks prior. If you commit yourself to constant small improvement, working on everyday activities, you’ll change your own operations much faster than you could have by making big, leap-of-faith-proportion declarations of self-improvement.

It’s kind of funny how this may appear to be a very backward method at first glance, but, after a few applications of kaizen philosophy, the organic progress inherent in the methodology makes sense. Kaizen, unlike our biggest, most idealistic dreams, is much more synchronous with the evolutionary way in which our world operates: we physically grow in small steps. We accumulate wealth in small steps. Even the biggest milestones in our lives are only noticed in retrospect over lengthy time scales. Maybe that’s why I really seem to fight with my car so much now: when all is said and done, maybe I’ll look back on all of that frustration and figure out that much more has improved in my life than I would’ve expected. At least I won’t have to hike over a cotton mountain in the morning.