a big room, vast

There is one timeless way of building ... But though this method is precise, it cannot be used mechanically. Indeed it turns out, in the end, that what this method does is simply free us from all method ... To purge ourselves of these illusions, to become free of all the artificial images of order which distort the nature that is in us, we must first learn a discipline which teaches us the true relationship between ourselves and our surroundings. Then, once this discipline has done its work, and pricked the bubbles of illusion which we cling to now, we will be ready to give up the discipline, and act as nature does. This is the timeless way of building: learning the discipline—and shedding it.

We have a habit of thinking that the deepest insights, the most mystical, and spiritual insights, are somehow less ordinary than most things—that they are extraordinary. This is only the shallow refuge of the person who does not yet know what he is doing. In fact, the opposite is true: the most mystical, most religious, most wonderful—these are not less ordinary than most things—they are more ordinary than most things. It is because they are so ordinary, indeed, that they strike to the core.

christopher alexander, the timeless way of building

moral fibre

edge.org interviews daniel lieberman. of particular note:

... there's a reversal of class today. Now, it's only the very wealthy who can afford to be physically active and to eat a good diet, and it's the lower classes, the people in the working classes that cannot afford to actually be physically active. People who are well-off, the one-percenters or maybe the five-percenters of our country, can afford to go to health clubs and take yoga classes and buy organic food. But most Americans today, particularly those who are in the working class, have to work all day long, they have to commute long hours. They don't have time to exercise; they can't afford to buy food that's very healthy. The result is that there's now an interesting reversal that never occurred before in human evolution, which is that the wealthier you are, the healthier you are.

and

We love comfort, and people make a lot of money selling us comfort, but I would challenge the notion that comfort is usually good for us.

the meditations and the care of the self are two interesting books to think about here, as is the influence of weather on the development of moral fibre.

costs, benefits

To live well in community, our individual consumption and acquisition will be reined in and held by the bonds of inconvenience. In turn, we will be connected in multiple ways to involuntary responsibilities, and natural seasons, and common cause. Living with a measure of inconvenience and with the energizing and irritating connections it implies keeps us ‘in our places' and ‘in our senses.’ We trap ourselves in a huge contradiction, I believe, when we — farmers and consumers alike — continue to want and cater to convenience on the one hand and mourn the loss of mutuality and collective concern on the other.

laura delind, "place, work, and civic agriculture" [thx jessd]

freedom and constraints

freedom is often misunderstood as the absence of constraints on your action. this is not the case: freedom is your ability to voluntarily choose the constraints on action and then to voluntarily submit to these constraints.

a useful consideration when designing products, services, organizations, careers, lives.

also see: kodawari, the key speech; mindful eating; equilibrium maintenance; the groundwork on the metaphysics of morals; the mad farmer liberation front; a just balance.

co-presence and collaboration

last night, we talked about the difference between services that allow users to be remotely co-present and those that allow users to remotely collaborate.

co-presence is consumption behavior: you are with someone, observing what they are doing. all get, no post, no problems with collision. collaboration is production behavior: you are with someone, working on something together. collaboration is much harder to do well, and gets harder the closer to realtime the collaboration is: at minimum, it requires good collision handling and clear attribution at close to the minimum atomic size of the content being produced. text seems to be the only content being collaboratively produced in any large quantity now and text requires sub-sentence attribution markings. gdocs does neither particularly well, while hackpad does a great job: it is a first-class collaborative document editing tool marked by economy of means. hackpad is nearly feature-complete for my use-cases.

the closer to realtime the collaboration behavior is, the more important it is to have both a way be co-present and a way to collaborate. this is not only good for the user, it is a natural way for the service to reduce collision problems: collaborators tend to avoid bits which they know other collaborators are actively working on. it is smart to build services that tacitly encourage good use. the co-presence information that supports this kind of behavior can be parsimonious and still be useful. this is the only thing that hackpad doesn't yet do which i would love and gdocs does it well: the highlight cursor that shows where someone else in the document's cursor is, to me, a lightweight and effective co-presence indicator. a richer but still lightweight co-presence implementation would be to indicate what other active users are looking at as well as where they are entering new text: viewports and cursor locations.

importantly, though, not all products need this sort of collaboration and co-presence infrastructure built in. some collaboration products need strong norms rather than technical infrastructure to support collaboration. wikis are good for large distributed production and solve the collaboration problem with human gardening; making it possible for lots of people to work on a wiki without wiki interaction norms is probably not a good idea. other products simply don't require collaboration at all. just because you can doesn't mean you should. motivations and objectives are good to think about when making things.

freedom, and how you can achieve it

instructions on how to buy an inexpensive but decently built and swiftly unlockable smartphone and switch to a low-cost pay-as-you-go cellphone service.

you, like me, could soon be free of the iphone's tyranny and AT&T's colossal rip-off cellular service (so bad it would be laughable if it weren't also tear-inducingly frustrating, inconvenient, and expensive).

update: t-mobile unlocked the phone after 60 days of active service.
update: grooveip works fine. it is a bit buggy but i use voice sufficiently infrequently that it doesn't matter to me. (last month, my total talk time was 33 minutes using both the t-mobile network and grooveip). jacob h-a has been fooling around with a combo of sipdroid and pbxes.org that he says is working out well for him. no doubt he'll send an update once he's figured it out completely.

my new t-mobile unlimited 4G data and text plan (with 100 voice minutes a month) costs $30 (prepaid, no contract). i use it with the admittedly absurdly named samsung exhibit ii 4g: a $200 phone (without contract) that isn't perfect but, in the many ways detailed below, is probably the best compromise handset to come onto the US market in the last 12 months. the current setup is an exhibit ii 4g, t-mobile's new $30/month prepaid unlimited data plan (approx $53/month less than my current data plan with AT&T), my previous AT&T number ported to google voice and forwarded to the new t-mobile number, and my previous google voice number retained as a second number.

WHY THIS IS GOOD

1. i will save about $53/month ($1250 over 2 years) in service costs compared to renewing my 2-year AT&T contract. my total startup cost was $252.37, my monthly payments will be no more than $30. 
2. i don't have to tell everyone and their dog what my new number is—they call the old numbers, my new phone rings. all my voicemails and text messages can go to email if i desire it. 
3. i can travel easily with my phone without extortionate roaming fees. 
4. once i unlock the phone, i can discontinue service at any time and resume it with t-mobile or any other provider with almost no disruption in how people call me or send me text messages.

this is better than the iphone on AT&T in every possible way relevant to me.  

HOW TO BE FREE OF YOUR AT&T IPHONE
there is much conflicting information on the interwebs about setting up this brand new wal-mart t-mobile plan. there are hundreds of phones, most of which suck for one or more reasons (on which, see below). consequently, setting up the phone and related services took 4 hours of research instead of 15 minutes. finding the phone took weeks of research.

we stand upon the shoulders of those who go before us (or, more precisely, those who stand underneath us). below, i provide excruciatingly precise detail on what to buy, where to buy it, and how to do everything you need to do to replicate my current situation of cellular bliss—all in the interest of human progress and freedom from digital tyrannies. and because i care about you.

first, the caveats. this scheme is ideal only if you

1. use data intensively and send text messages all the time
2. barely use voice calling
3. are off contract with your current cell service provider
4. have a google voice account
5. don't really need domestic data roaming

if you wish to proceed, do the following in order (full disclosure: some of the links below will send me referral dollars if you buy through them.):

1. a final caveat: you may face a termination fee if you port your phone while your contract is still in force. google voice's porting process may get fubar-ed (horror stories abound). in the grand scheme, these are minor annoyances for which i claim no responsibility.
2. get a phone: purchase an off-contract prepaid-service t-mobile samsung exhibit ii 4g at wal-mart or online (see below for why it is the best compromise phone available today). amazon has the cheapest handsets and fastest fulfilment too. if you want to be nice to me, buy it through this link. important note: you cannot purchase your phone or activate it in a t-mobile physical store location if you want the $30 unlimited data plan described above. while the plan is marketed through wal-mart, it appears to be one of the t-mobile monthly4G plans and is available on any newly activated monthly4G SIM card, as long as activation happens on t-mobile.com.
3. switch the phone on: when your phone arrives, insert the SIM and battery and begin to charge the phone. 
4. activate cell service with t-mobile: have the ugly pink box handy and go to t-mobile's prepaid service activation page. enter the activation code (on a card inside the box) and the IMEI and SIM serial number (both listed on a sticker on the box), choose the $30/month prepaid plan with unlimited data, and complete your activation process but skip step 5 (funding your account). write down the new phone number which t-mobile assigns to you.
5. fund your account: buy your account minutes from callingmart instead, which often has standard discounts on t-mobile prepaid service, in addition to a host of coupons (like these). again, if you want to be nice to me, please use this link to buy your minutes from callingmart.
6. forward google voice to your new t-mobile number: go to this page and click on the link to "add a new phone"
7. port your current cellphone number to google voice: if you are with AT&T, find your AT&T account number and PIN number ready, as well as the exact address and telephone number AT&T has on file for you (you should sign into your account at AT&T to check all this). then, go to this page, click on the link to port or change your number, and follow the quite clear instructions. if, despite entering the exactly correct account number and other details, the google voice workflow tells you to "Please fill out all of the required fields," be persistent and check for extra spaces and that you have the correct case. once you get to google checkout, pay the $20 port fee and confirm the port request. (you will note that there is no field to enter your AT&T PIN.)
8. wait for the porting error message and fix it: eventually, google voice will send you an email titled "Oops! Issue with your Google Voice Number Porting Request." click on the link in the email and enter your AT&T PIN number. 
9. make your current google voice permanent: when the port is completed, you'll get an email titled "Google Voice Number Porting is Complete!" rejoice, then go to google voice again, click on the link to "make permanent," follow instructions and pay another $20.
10. unlock your phone: if you purchased your phone for full price, you can request that it be unlocked immediately. full details here.
11. bask.  

why, you ask, would i go through all this hassle? 

THE STORY

about 6 months ago, i began looking for a new cellphone. my AT&T iphone 3GS was junk after almost two years of use. to be fair, it was a revelatory phone when i first got it and it saved my life once, but five things chafed more and more as time went on:

1. it's locked to AT&T forever. i took a second phone with me whenever i was out of the country, so i would not be subject to AT&T's ludicrous roaming prices.*
2. the silent-mode toggle switch is broken, but works unpredictably. this is always awkward in meetings.
3. there is no way to shut off the shutter sound on the iphone camera without resorting to jailbreaking and doing other silly workarounds.*
4. the battery life seriously blows.
5. dropped calls all the time. all. the. time.
6. i regularly used a small fraction of the hundreds of minutes i paid for on even the least expensive AT&T iphone plan.

every alternative phone i looked at was deficient on at least one of the following dimensions:

1. screen too big = device is enormous (bigger than iphone)
2. screen too crappy
3. looks like a sex aid
4. way too expensive (>$200)
5. CDMA-only 
6. not 4G-compatible in the US
7. not world GSM-compatible
8. processor slower than molasses
9. obnoxious colour
10. no front-facing camera
11. not warrantied in the US
12. battery cannot be replaced by user
13. lousy battery life
14. soon-to-be obsolete operating system
15. locked to one carrier

this samsung handset is the only one i have found that has none of these deficiencies. it has a screen of modest but acceptable size and quality, a decent camera and front-facing camera, a modest but acceptable processor, runs gingerbread. all this is contained in a chassis the size of an iphone. it accepts regular-sized SIM cards and can be used worldwide with prepaid voice/data/text services from other service providers. intended as the mid-market member of the galaxy family, it is not ridiculously expensive. see reviews here and here, and full specifications here.

* yes, i jailbroke it but then that broke voice reception. and i was on a baseband that didn't have an easy unlock strategy. anyway.

** the W, in case you are wondering, stands for Wonder.

a just balance

Fortunate indeed, is the man who takes exactly the right measure of himself, and holds a just balance between what he can acquire and what he can use.

peter mere latham