I'm going to preface this post by saying that I'm sure that wiser heads than I somewhere out there on the Internets have already said everything I'm going to say, and in greater depth than I could hope to say it. If you feel more comfortable doing so, please read this essay as satire.

I want to talk about winning the Dot-Com Lottery. I call it a lottery because there's a strong component of luck, but the reward can be substantial. It's just like having your garage band sign a multimillion dollar contract with a major record label. Lots of people play guitar with a dream in their heart, but not many people get rich doing it. The point in trying to win valuable cash prizes in the Dot-Com Lottery is to be able to spend your time (before and after) pursuing your passions, whatever they are.

I know someone who has a technology business which makes a product that they sell at a modest profit. Someday he might sell the company and retire. That's the time-honored way to build a business, and it's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about all the friends and acquaintances of mine who've cashed in on tech startups built around their passions over the years, and the basic ingredients I see in each of their stories.

The difference between the Dot-Com Lottery and the kind of lottery that supports senior citizens is that not every ticket has the same chance of winning. You can improve your odds. The following points are what I see as the five sine qua non for getting the best chance of buying a winning ticket.

1. You need to be smart. Hell, why hedge this point: You have to be a genius, along with everyone else on your core team. Everyone I've ever known who's launched and sold a tech startup has been among the smartest or, at least, savviest people I know. You already know who I mean.

2. You need to have a product idea that is too simple to fail. You need to be smart enough to focus on a product idea that everyone wants (even if they don't know it yet), and you have to deliver it in such a clear and simple way that people can't not use it.

I think it's hard for smart people to focus on a simple idea without dismissing it as trivial, but the elevator pitch for every big tech startup I can think of isn't even an elevator pitch, it's a noun phrase. Moreover, it's almost always a noun phrase composed of words of two syllables or less. These days the phrase starts with "a place to share _____". Examples:

• Flickr is "a place to share your photos"
• Delicious is "a place to share your bookmarks"
• Dopplr is "a place to share your travel plans"
• Twitter is "a place to share your status"

Other examples are left as an exercise for the reader. ;-)

Also, not only does your product have to be simple, but your delivery has to be as flawless as possible. Every time you add a button or a link to a web page, you increase the chances that people aren't going to use the thing. Witness, for example, the clean original designs of Delicious and Flickr and Dopplr and Twitter.

You'll note that I haven't asserted that an acquireable startup actually needs a viable business model at any point. You don't. You do need what Kellan calls a "revenue story," which is about how your VCs or your prospective corporate overlords *might* make money on your service, if they want to go to all the bother. This is one place where your compellingly MBA-like co-founder will be of substantial service (of which more later).

3. You need to be 100% passionate about your product. You need to be building something you want. Your team not only has to build it, but they must also be its most avid users. In Free Software, we call this "scratching your own itch."

However, you do have to pace yourself. Launching any successful startup is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to work hard and be patient. Expect it to take 2-3 years before it's even worth worrying about why you haven't hit the knee of your uptake curve yet.

The deal is that part of what defines most alpha geeks is that they are early adopters, i.e, intellectual sprinters. It's all too easy to lead oneself up the garden path, or to burn out fast. Kellan pointed out to me that most successful tech companies have at least one really disciplined person who can play the hard-ass. This individual can be either a geek-minded MBA, or an MBA-minded geek. It can be tough for an alpha geek to willingly subject themselves to this kind of stubborn catherding, but somebody has to keep the geeks on track.

Maybe your geeks will get bored anyway. Maybe your product idea will turn out to be crap. You can change tack somewhat before your funding runs out (e.g. Odeo and Twitter, or Dopplr's social atlas feature), but all five of these theses apply doubly at that point.

4. You need to know the right people. Again, this seems tautological, because nearly every startup has to get seed funding from somewhere, but knowing or finding a few good VCs is a condition that a logician might refer to as "necessary but not sufficient."

When a bunch of alpha geeks launch a technology product, by definition, their peers among the tech innovators and early adopters will be the first to try it out. If these folks continue using the site or product long enough for the leading edge of the mainstream to take note, then you're starting to look like acquisition material. (If you don't get or choose not to sell before then, you're going to wind up having to issue an IPO, or resign yourself to finding a real profit model. I'm looking at you, Facebook. You too, Twitter.)

That means you must evangelize (in a respectful and non-irritating way) the hell out of your product to everyone you know, and be really attentive to your first couple thousand users, who will hopefully be all of your friends and colleagues. You want them to feel as enthusiastic as you do for your product. If you're really lucky, your new converts will happen to be way over on the left side of the power-law curve of influential technologists, possibly because they were already the people you knew to begin with.

While you're doing this, you also need to solicit the opinions and advice of said first couple or ten thousand users (in a respectful, non-irritating way) constantly, and, more to the point, you need to act on their feedback as quickly as you possibly can. You may become fortunate enough to create a (dare I say it) feedback loop that will give your users a sense of participation and engagement *and* provide them with an increasingly valuable product. That's what will keep them coming back long enough to draw in the early majority, and, hopefully, behind them the mainstream.

5. You have to be really, really lucky. A lot of the luck comes in being early to market, but not too early to market. Launching a service two years too soon can be as fatal as launching it two years too late. All the same, if you're not first to market, you can still win *if* you do score on all other points.

Remember, this is a lottery we're talking about, but not every ticket has the same chances of winning. As Benjamin Franklin, that patron saint of tech innovators, once observed, "God helps those who help themselves."

A few weeks ago, when this essay started coalescing in my mind, I was planning to review startups past and present, and predict that Dopplr was next in line for a big corporate acquisition, because they seemed to be the closest of any startup I know to having all five of these points down. Today, uttering this prognostication seems slightly less prescient than it did the week before last. But I'll go out on the next limb and bet on Foursquare, probably around late 2011 or early 2012. :)

Hi, folks! Long time no see! For those of you not already in the know, I'm living in Brooklyn, my ancestral homeland, and heading up a small software consultancy with a handful of part-timeengineers and an office out in East Williamsburg. More on that later, perhaps.

In the meantime, however, we're in between contracts, and I'm looking to pick up a bit of short-term work pronto to tide me over. My CV is here, of course. Right now, I'm keen to work on just about anything that doesn't need a user interface, but I don't have to be too picky about that. Have a mad idea that needs implementing or need help with something ongoing? Email me!

Having done almost no practical research ahead of time, I got off the train at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, having been assured by an Irish person on her way to a Pearl Jam concert in town that night (really) that it was right in the center of town, and for certain there would be hostels and the like right nearby. So naturally I find my way out of the train station, smack into... a vast expanse of apparently nothing: huge parking lots on all sides, the river Spree, the lights of buildings twinkling in the distance. Screw this, I thought, and showing a cabbie a list of places recommended to me in Brussels by a very nice lady from the Open Usability Project, politely asked him to take me to the nearest locale that had a hostel nearby, which turned out to be a district called Kreuzberg.

So far so good, except that on the particular weekend I chose to visit Berlin, the city was geared up to play host to both the annual Berlin Marathon (where, according to Wikipedia, the world's record in men's marathon times was established in 2003 on account of the city being so flat) and also Popkomm, Germany's leading annual music industry conference and tradeshow, which had recently moved from Cologne. The upshot of all which was, of course, that the pair of adjacent hostels that the cabbie very solicitously delivered me to, and indeed every hostel or other moderately priced place of lodging within cycling distance of Kreuzberg, was altogether booked up solid for the weekend, a fact which I ascertained only as part of a more elaborate process that ultimately involved throwing down several euro coins in an attempt to learn precisely how German payphones are meant to function, while the bartender in the bar next door, a trustworthy seeming chap, kept an eye on my stuff.

The only other plans I had made for the entire weekend involved an invitation by Jan, a mutual friend of Mako's whom I'd previously met on the media arts circuit in Milan, to attend some dodgy-seeming music performance art thing that evening. By this point it was nearly 2300, and having resolved to find the gaff containing this musical whatnot forthwith and thereby cast my fate to the winds, you may imagine then, the not-insignificant relief I experienced on checking my email to discover that Jan had not only provided a link to the concert event in question, but had also graciously held forth the use of his spare bedroom in the event that I elected not to stay in a hostel, mirabile dictu.

The barkeep proffered a tourist map, and, on offering directions to the club in Alexanderplatz, laconically recommended I cycle up Wilhelmstraße. "It is historic," he opined, a bit of commentary that eluded me and subsequently passed out of mind completely, until after a kilometer or so, I found myself suddenly and without warning at none other than Checkpoint Charlie itself. There is little to see there today, beyond the guardhouse, some heaped sandbags, the notorious "You are leaving the American sector" advisory (a replica; the original is kept in the museum down the block), and a pillar supporting a large lighted sign bearing a photo of a fresh-faced young man in a Red Army dress uniform, the very image of the stalwart defense of Communism itself, staring coolly over the border into imperialist West Berlin. On the reverse of the sign, his brave, freedom-defending American counterpart is depicted gazing confidently towards godless East Berlin. Across the street sits a building with the legend Tschechisches Zentrum, under which it reads, in English, and with tongue firmly planted in cheek -- what else? -- "Czech Point". It was right around here that a couple with with distinctly German accents stopped to me ask me directions to Unter den Linden.

Alexanderplatz wasn't much further, and, asking some disaffected local youth to confirm my understanding of the club's website -- Babelfish's rendition thereof having been actually less comprehensible in English than the original German -- I determined that the club was, in fact, inexplicably above the McDonalds, at which point I became thoroughly perplexed and wasted a couple more euros trying to use a payphone to call Jan, who finally came down and fetched me. The club was tiny and weirdly laid out, but homey in that European media artist dive sort of way, with refrigerators behind the bar that apparently proclaimed their contents with the scrolling LED marquees which I have come to suspect the Germans harbor a secret weakness for, but the beer was cheap and so Jan and I got caught up while the first act set up.

The act, a woman variously known as "marzipan marzipan", "Zelda Pound", or simply "zelda panda", played guitar and sang over tape loops, which had the potential to be terrible but was ultimately so winsome that I approached her afterwards and purchased a CD, one that turned out to have been recorded live at WFMU in, of all places, Newark, New Jersey. By the time she was done, we had gotten progressively drunker, having struck up a conversation with an American expat freelance journalist who bore a shocking resemblance to my old housemate gweeds, and his svelte Danish girlfriend, a marketroid of some description in town from Copenhagen for the weekend, who suggested we switch to vodka shots. I still find it odd to hear American accents on strangers in European cities. The second act opened with a man in reflective gold mylar tutu playing the Imperial March from Star Wars in a slow swing on the trumpet, which was followed by two women in matching gold mylar tutus singing and chanting over, you guessed it, tape loops, while they made with various antics of a theatrical nature, singing odes to glowstick stars and popping latex balloons with their high heels and so on. At one point one of them attached a helium balloon bearing a headshot of Sigmund Freud to the back of her head, and then, turning her back to the audience, proceeded to wrap her arms around herself and writhe about as if making out (with Sigmund Freud?) while the other chanted something into the microphone which Jan could not quite translate for me, but which he assured me was quite humorous. Imagine, if you will, Yoko Ono reincarnated as a pair of German woman in gold mylar tutus, one short and blonde, and the other lanky and brunette, and you have something of the essential gist.

After this, we were pretty sozzled, and opted to abscond chez Jan, which turned out to be right around the corner, on the eleventh floor of a huge apartment building that he hypothesized must have once been intended exclusively for prominent Party apparatchiks, given its size and location right smack in the center of town. The place was enormous, and probably quite inexpensive, and complete with a terrific view of Alexanderplatz and the disco ball tower behind, still prominently showing a bit of World Cup propaganda. I tried to imagine the throngs that gathered in the square immediately below on the days before the Wall fell. Then the vodka asserted itself, and unconsciousness followed.

The following morning was magnificently sunny and clear, and after breakfast I set off to see the city by bicycle, cycling around Friedrichshain, up the hill and through the lovely green Volkspark, across Prenzlauer Berg, and down the hill along tree-lined Kollwitzstraße, past the pubs and cafés. From there I found myself in Hackescher Markt, crammed full of tourists and fashionable restaurants -- and also, on this particular afternoon, throngs of former marathon runners, flushed with accomplishment and gamely limping down the street, sporting small medals on ribbons around the neck. While pushing my bicycle through the market square, I suddenly found myself inexplicably purchasing from an elderly street vendor two Soviet-era enamel pins for a euro each. One pin appears to read "Зенш", or ZENSH in Cyrillic, which, after a bit of Google grepping by Maciej, turns out to be the acronym for a Soviet correspondence school, while the other depicts a castle turret above the word "Rīga". Then I cycled along the Spree for a while, past the Hauptbahnhof (again!), and on into Alt-Moabit, before turning sharply south to catch the western edge of Tiergarten.

My favorite parts of Berlin were the green spaces, and the city is certainly blessed with them. Tiergarten itself is Berlin's crown jewel, her answer to Central Park (which turns out to be a totally absurd thing to say, given that Tiergarten apparently predates the latter by 300 years as a hunting preserve, and by at least 100 years as a public park, although the flora is much newer than that, having been turned to firewood by the end of the war and replanted only subsequently). The Straße de 17 Juni -- so named to commemorate the violent suppression of an x East German workers' uprising on that date in 1953 -- stretches away towards the Siegessäule, a two hundred foot (66m) high pillar, topped with a golden angel, bearing news of the Prussian military victories over the Danish and the Austrians and the French in the 1860s and '70s. One can climb the spiral staircase right up to the base of the statue, but I elected to press on, winding through the park's foot paths, and up John-Foster-Dulles-Allee (no joke) past where the medics and street vendors were still breaking down in the aftermath of the marathon, to the Reichstag itself, catching a glimpse of tiny figures walking up and down the spiral ramp in the dome atop the building. Dem Deutschen Volke, the legend emblazoned above the building's entrance reads, the German People.

I pedalled around the Reichstag, trying to encompass in my head all the fuss that had started in that building, tried to imagine it on fire from arson purportedly started by a purportedly deranged Dutch communist (or so he confessed under state torture), tried to imagine it half in ruins from Soviet bombardment. I couldn't grasp either one, so I continued along, down past Pariser Platz and the majestic Brandenburg Gate, the city's first foray into neoclassical architecture in the early 19th century, whose winged goddess had her olive wreath exchanged for an iron cross in the '30s, the same gate that later became an iconic symbol of the city's division. "While Brandenburg Gate remains closed," then-Mayor Richard Freiherr von Weisäcker once said, "the German question remains open." The Brandenburger Tor, as it happens, also appears on the obverse of the middle denominations of German euro coins, prefiguring the gates and bridges of the superstate's paper currency (as the gate originally appeared on the Deutschemark).

Between Pariser Platz and Potsdamer Platz, I found the city's Holocaust monument, which left me with mixed feelings. On one hand, the rows upon rows of identically mute granite blocks, arrayed like tombstones, echo the anonymity and sheer horrific numbers of the victims of the Nazi regime. The pathways into the memorial descend downwards until the smooth granite blocks loom labrinthine overhead. The effect draws one in; it is somber, reflective. What's more, it's right in the middle of everything, across the street from from the Tiergarten, right down the street from the Brandenburger Tor and the Reichstag. No attempt has been made to hide this memorial, or to place it somewhere where it need not be seen or recalled. Yet, on the other hand, the monument conveys nothing of the actual facts of the Holocaust, of its brutal inhumanity and all-too-real terrors; it is disconnected in every way but conceptually from the suffering it memorializes -- although I suppose that to do otherwise might present very thorny problems for any such public monument. Nor did I see any plaque or other signage informing the visitor of the purpose of the memorial, although I didn't look too hard for such. At least, I suppose, it is there; that is a start.

Berlin seems quite unlike most other European capitals I've been to in that it has quite broad streets throughout its center, and none of the close set buildings and narrow alleyways that one finds in Amsterdam or Brussels or London. The best account for this I heard was that the city was from the cabbie who took me to Kreuzberg, that the Berlin was originally several different cities, which amalgamated over time, leaving it without a distinct center, but given that urban habitation there dates back to the 12th century, I wonder also to what degree Berlin's seeming newness is a function of the destruction wrought by the war and the postwar partition.

Nowhere is this idea of Berlin as a city permanently in transformation more evident than at Potsdamer Platz, the erstwhile crossroads of Berlin, which, in the Golden Twenties, was home to Europe's first ever set of traffic lights, by virtue of how much traffic then passed through its main intersection. At that time, Potsdamer Platz was the throbbing heart of Berlin's famously decadent night life. By 1945, however, Potsdamer Platz was naught but a smoking ruin, and, by 1965, although the rubble had been cleared, only the Berlin Wall had sprung up to replace what had stood there previously -- actually, two walls, one right on the border, and another a couple hundred feet inside East Berlin, with a "death zone" between them -- the space left wide open and empty, to afford a maximum field of view for the East German border guards, who were given orders to shoot to kill. Today's Potsdamer Platz, by contrast, is a cluster of gleaming high rise office buildings, a veritable slice of downtown Manhattan or London's Canary Wharf, a willful eradication of any remaining sign of the locale's on-again-off-again past, excepting solely a twenty foot long section of the Wall left standing near the entrance to the U-Bahn station, with a number of signs detailing the Wall's history. Even this minor concession is curiously inauthentic, as the eastern side of the Wall never had so much as a lick of graffiti on it, clear up to that famous day in 1989.

On the particular sunny afternoon that I cycled up to examine said section of fossilized wall with interest, an obviously informal brass band on the other side of the wall immediately commenced blatting out a rather faithful rendition of the musical theme from Flashdance. What a feeling, indeed.

Thus it seems, however, to be with Berlin's relation to its mixed past: What little is left of the Wall only stands still in a few places, in Potsdamer Platz, and across the Spree over in Friedrichshain, where the East Side Gallery has turned a long section into an international art display. Elsewhere, the wall has been forgotten completely, or is marked only by a double row of paving stones running down and sometimes cutting across the street or sidewalk. In some places, a very small and unobstrusive sign or pair of signs atop a street sign post advertises the path of the Berlin Mauerweg (you guessed it, the Berlin Wall Way) to the seeker of history. The following morning, I went back to Checkpoint Charlie, inspected the outdoor museum exhibit by daylight, and imagined myself standing on the very spot where a company of Soviet tanks squared off against a company of American tanks on a wet October evening in 1961, and almost started World War III. Later on I traced a bit of the path of the Wall between Kreuzberg and Mitte, and found a fascinating abandoned corner of Berlin along Sebastianstraße near Moritzplatz, with a long-disused auditorium building inside what must have been the death zone, the death zone itself now partially squatted by immigrants in modular housing, partially turned back into a sort of involuntary park, with locals walking their dogs in the evening twilight along elephant paths carved into the overgrowth. There is talk in the tourist exhibits of making a green belt that runs the entire historical circuit of the Wall, but it is plain to me that this is the aim of a small minority of Berliners interested in historical conservation. The green belt itself is already an impossibility in places like Potsdamer Platz, where giddy capitalist land development has already proceeded apace.

On one hand, I thoroughly empathize with what I perceive to be the desire of the majority of Berliners for apparently wanting to block out the unpleasant truths of the past, as probably would anyone who has been through a traumatic phase, and wants to get back to the business of normal and even happy life. At the same time, the war and its 45 year aftermath are now an inescapable part of the fabric of the city, and it seems to me that this time deserves to be honored and understood for what it was, if nothing else as a lesson and a sign to civilization about what can happen when compassion and reason are subjugated to dogma and doctrine. Germany's participation in the European experiment -- and the very shape of contemporary Berlin itself -- demonstrate that, if we but heed history, the past can be amended, and the antagonists of old can become the collaborators of tomorrow. But who wants to live in a history lesson?

And, in spite of Berliners' efforts to forget, or at least leave behind the past, the past has not left them behind. Although the city has reintegrated itself to the point where an untutored tourist like me can't tell the difference between East and West Berlin on sight (but for the odd double line of cobblestones), Jan tells me that the distinction between the two is visually apparent to any German. What's more, I'm told that Germans occasionally make reference to the Mauer im Kopf -- the Wall in the Head -- which still psychologically divides East Germans from West Germans, springing up in between a generation through the accident of the two hundred feet of death zone between growing up communist and growing up capitalist. I haven't yet fully figured out what this means, and, maybe, being a foreigner, I never will. And maybe one day soon it will cease to matter -- or as Europe grows and reconfigures in the same way that Berlin has had to, it will come to matter more.

Still, I see a lot of promise for the city's future, perhaps ironically for the fact that a large part of (East) Berlin was totally spared the breakneck redevelopment that has seized a lot of major Western cities over the last twenty five years, cities like New York and London and San Francisco and (so I'm told) Barcelona. In most places in Boston, as Jo once complained of, real estate prices have become fixed so high that there is no room for cultural experimentation left in the margins. This difference came to my attention on my last night in Berlin, when Jan and I first visited c-base (described as "the oldest crashed space-station on earth") too late in the evening to find anyone from Freifunk, and then ambled down to a riverside "beach bar," the likes of which seem to be quite the rage in Berlin, complete with a tiki bar and fire pits and wooden beach chairs and volleyball nets and, of course, sand, which someone must have carted in by the ton at some point. We sat down in the sand there and drank beers and talked about peer-to-peer networking protocols for exchanging geodata and mused on the lack of good Open Source video editors, and at some point I realized, holy crap, there is no longer anywhere in Manhattan or London or Boston that could support a place like this, there isn't room, and the rents would be too high. I said as much to Jan and he lamented the degree to which this is no longer true even in Berlin, and how artists and the like were already starting to move from places like to Friedrichshain to districts slightly farther out, like Wedding. And yet the kaleidescopic cultural possibilities still seem richer there than almost anywhere else I've been in Europe (which may not be saying all that much).

Ah, welthauptstadt Berlin! O axis of Europe, Berlin! Berlin of decadence and division! Berlin, whose reunification points hopefully to the eventual reunification of peoples now separated from one another everywhere and for all time! With grateful benedictions I departed, someday perhaps to gladly return.

At about half past two yesterday, I left Brussels by train, headed for Berlin, via Cologne. Eventually the Belgian farms gave way to gently sloping hills, and then the train crested the slope and descended into the Maas Valley towards Liège, or Luyck, or Lüttich, depending on who you talk to, before crossing the border at Aachen, through pretty wooded country. At some point I fell asleep and woke up just as the train was getting into Köln.

European rail stations seem to be pretty much all of one or two kinds, and Köln's was the most typical, a series of low-ceilinged passageways, with stairs or escalators leading up to the platforms, pretty much rammed with people of every description scurrying in all directions, or else blocking traffic while they peer through travel-worn bloodshot eyes at the departure monitors, with the constant background rush of people chattering over the incomphrehensible overhead announcements made in three or four languages.

I had an hour or so before the next train to Berlin, so I made my way in the direction of the signs indicating "Centre - Dom," thinking to myself, "Dom, is that palace, like the royal palace in Dam Square in Amsterdam, or is it like the Rigas Dom in the heart of Riga, which would mean..."

And then I stepped outside. Holy crap. Apparently, "Dom" in German (and probably Latvian as well) means cathedral. Now, ordinarily, a tourist gets the runaround, because this is profitable. You get out of the train station in some dumpy part of town and have to board some overpriced bus or hire a piratical driver who doesn't apparently speak any language in particular to take you halfway across creation to see the local historical sights, except that instead they first take you to some gift shop owned by a cousin filled with similarly overpriced tat you don't want and don't have room for in your baggage anyway, but, no, this is not the way in Cologne. These Germans are efficient. No doubt when the Deutches Bahn laid the rails into town, they said to themselves, "Now why in his right mind would anyone come here?" and then, with practical and pure Teutonic abruptness, they plunked the crazy Köln Hauptbahnhof right down next to the cathedral.

Oh, yes, the cathedral. You get a peek through the windows of the train station but it might as well be an alien spaceship parked in the square. Then you come through the doors, out into the air, and it takes your breath away. This is a Gothic cathedral to make any Goth proud, a hundred feet high or more, all pointed arches and flying buttresses and rosette windows and saintly statuary guarding every entrance and all kinds of baroque whatnot. This is a cathedral that took 600 years to build. This is a cathedral that gets picked first when the other cathedrals choose up teams. This cathedral is not screwing around. I wonder exactly how it managed to avoid getting destroyed in the war. And you don't get to approach it with from a distance, with appropriate reverence, either; no, you come out of the train station as you are, bloodshot and travel-worn, a child of God, and there it is. Like a proper tourist, I took some photos.

(For those of you who prefer to let God provide in times of need, there is even a kiosk at the ground floor on the outside of the cathedral that sells photographic film.)

The other major attraction of Cologne as far as I could tell from the hour that I spent there is that it was in classical times a outlying Roman city of some importance. Indeed, like that of the English town of Lincoln, the name Cologne or Köln, or whatever you like to call it, is apparently cognate with our modern English word colony. There is in fact a Romanisch-Deutscher Museum out back of the cathedral which I would someday love to come back and visit, but there wasn't time on this trip.

A word about these German trains: The Deutches Bahn is for serious. The trains are ninja quiet, immaculately clean, and they run up to 250 km/h (~150 mph). There are smoking and non-smoking carriages, a cafe car, power in some of the seats for laptops and so on, garbage bins neatly divided into trash and three kinds of recyclables, little LCD readouts over every seat telling you whether the seat is reserved or not, and if so, for which leg of the journey, a totally separate compartment for families with kids (one assumes this is for the sake of the other passengers) and the whole thing, Brussels to Berlin, a crow-flies distance of 650km, cost me €125, and that's only because I bought it on the spot.

When the train pulled into Wuppertal, the conductor got on the overhead and informed us in a deeply contrite voice that they wished to apologize because the train was arriving at the station approximately four minutes late. Four minutes! Take that, Amtrak.

Wuppertal appears at first glance to be a typical sleepy German industrial town, except... wait, what's that thing hanging over the river? At first glance it appears to be some kind of exotic barge loading equipment, a long metal spine supported about ten or so meters above the river by huge metal legs. Except that it goes on kilometers. Is this some gigantic skeletal millipede marching down the river Wupper, eating small water craft and demanding bridge tolls? No, it's the Einschienige Hängebahn System Eugen Langen! What else could it be? The BBC's h2g2 has this to say about the Schwebebahn Wuppertal:

The first thing you should do after arriving in Wuppertal is to go and have a look at the Schwebebahn. This is a kind of tram hanging down from rails which are mounted about ten metres above Wuppertal's river Wupper. Literally translated, Schwebebahn means 'Floating Railway' which is exactly the last thing it actually does. Instead it is a rattling monstrosity that carries some 50,000 people per day from point A to point B while making as much noise as possible.

First thing? Heck, it might be the only thing. Wikipedia has more to say about the Schwebebahn Wuppertal, including that it's been in operation since 1901 (!), that construction involved 19k tons of steel, that it's been modernized since 2004, including rebuilding one of the stations was destroyed in the war, and blah blah blah. It's the strangest looking monorail I've ever seen in my life, and if you've ever ridden the thing, email me and tell me what it's like.

After Wuppertal, I slept through Hagen, Hamm, and Bielefeld, and woke up at dusk in some place that looked for all the world like Fresno, California, or more precisely, like Chico. I say Fresno or Chico, and not perhaps Kansas, only because I could still see some hills to the south. A long straight road intersects with the tracks at grade. In the distance, I can see a line of automobile headlights along a similarly straight road. WTF?

Apparently this is the outskirts of Hannover, and I must say I was disappointed because after years of associations of the name "Hanover" with the British monarchy and Pennsylvania German food like Snyder's (of Hanover) pretzels, I expect Hannover to come across as something more than a strong contender for Dullest Major City in Germany. The only thing of note in the town that I could see from the train is a sinister looking tower not far from the Hbf. with the Volkswagen logo facing in four directions, and the legend "Nutzfahrzeug" underneath. Nutzfahrzeug, indeed.

After Hannover, there is even less to look at apparently, so I didn't mind that it got dark. The train really hit speed and did the last 250km in an hour flat, and by 9pm the train and I slid noiselessly into Berlin Hauptbahnhof...

Around this time last year, like lots of other hackers, I came down with the Getting Things Done virus, probably though not exclusively through Jo, who caught a bad case of it herself. This was in and of itself not such a bad thing. The whole point of GTD is, well, getting things done, with a focus on generating and maintaining a detailed inventory of all the "open loops", or unfinished tasks that tend to occupy one's mind for fear of losing or forgetting them. The end result is supposed to be a comprehensive list of everything you want or need to do in every sphere of your life, and a clear head to do it with.

Of course, there's different ways of approaching the technique. The cult's founder, David Allen, has his suggestions, many of which deal with paper and fixed working places, and didn't really apply well to us. Jo decided to keep her to-do lists on 3"x5" index cards. I kept mine in good old todo.txt, for all the reasons Danny O'Brien posited, plus the fact that it's online, and I don't have to lug a paper reminder with me everywhere. My concession to the GTD regime was a customized folding outline configuration for vim, along with a corresponding entry in my .vimrc. I've been meaning to write an article about how this all works for O'Reilly Net. Needless to say, there's a heading for it in my TODO file, along with 21 corresponding Next Actions.

And this is where I started to get into trouble. Stuff just kind of accumlated in my TODO file, random things, and faster than I could finish the ones that were already there. (It didn't help that Jo and I were working out of the Limehouse Town Hall map room and more or less couchsurfing around London at that time.) Finally, it got to the point where I started to find the list depressing to look at, a persistent reflection of my own feelings of disorganization and lack of discipline, and I started opening my TODO file less and less. By this point, I had more or less failed at Getting Things Done, it had failed at me, and I couldn't find anything specific in Allen's recommendations to help me stick with it.

Fast-forward to last week. I was having a long catch-up phone call with Rich, who has been Getting Things Done again in a furious fashion, after a long hiatus, to the point of reducing his email inbox to zero messages for the first time in, well, as long as I've known him, I think."

"When you put a thing on your to-do list, you are making a committment to do it," he says to me. "Meaning you aren't going to do some other things." He pauses. "So you have to choose between those things. Now, why do you have to choose?"

I think about this for a second. "Because your time is limited?" I venture hopefully.

"BECAUSE YOU ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE," he responds.

At this, the student was enlightened.

Rich went on to observe that one's to-do list, in whatever form, is ultimately a skull on the desk, a memento mori, a reminder that our time here really is limited and we ought to make the most of it, in as much as the list is also meant to be a tool for helping one actually do so.

"Just keep telling yourself 'I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die,'" he later said on IRC.

Operationally, I interpret this as an imperative to keep moving lingering items out of the active to-do list and into the Someday / Maybe file with the ruthless efficiency of an oncology surgeon. Or to not even let them reach the to-do list in the first place.

• "Write a universal wiki transcluder." Not this week, or next. What were we high on thinking again?
• "Make an Ubuntu-based GIS live CD." Great idea, I hope someone does it.
• "Move geotorrents to the freemap server." I ought to do this... but they're fine where they are for now...
• "Add [mumble] check to portsentry." Well. Maybe I'll do that one if I clear my Projects file of the 108 items I promised myself or someone else I'd do during this lifetime.
• "Finish Jehoover." Don't even ask. Sorry, Saul, maybe someday. Maybe I should make an actual action item to post the code somewhere, in case anyone else cares.

You have these items, too, I bet. You don't have to get rid of them, just move them to Someday and forget about them for now. You're going to die, after all.

• "Visit Iceland." Well, I kind of did this one last month, but all I really got to see was the inside of Keflavik Airport. So it's still on the Someday list. I'm not dead yet.

Phil Windley has notes on an interesting lecture by Alan Kay entitled Is the Best Way to Predict the Future to {Invent,Prevent} It?, which I stumbled on via the Torkington Radar:

Hurricane Katrina is Alan's new favorite story. When the city started flooding only four pumps kept pumping until the levee actually broke. The youngest pump that kept going was made in 1929. The newer pumps all stopped well before that. Try to imagine a computing system that will be working 90 years from now?

For some perspective on this, have a look at Sam Ruby's slides from his recent talk on "neurotransmitters", specifically about the technologies and companies that are less than ten years old today. Wifi. Instant messaging. Google. MapQuest. And so on.

Windley's synopsis of Kay continues (emphasis mine):

We live in the 80s extended into the 21st century. The only thing that's changed is the size. Windows XP has 70 million lines of code.... Microsoft engineers don't dare prune it because they don't know what it all does. Cathedrals have 1 millionth the mass of pyramids. The difference was the arch. Architecture demands arches.

The arch, apparently, was a significant innovation in building construction, because it serves to redirect tensile stress, which can be very hard on common building materials, into compressive stress, which is tends to work more with the existing compressive force of gravity. So, if building architecture demand arches, what kinds of analogous structures do other architectures demand? What is the arch in software architecture? What is the arch in architectures of participation?

I'm restarting this blog for the sole purpose of sharing these two lovely bits of email I got recently. Here's the first:

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 21:28:17 -0500
From: "yaffa"
To: 
Subject: no verona, wi data

you have no data for verona, wi?

At first, I thought this particular query about geocoder.us was perhaps from an Eastern European or Central Asian correspondent.

They: You have no data for Verona, wi?

Me (logically): Wi, we have no data there!

Then it occurred to me that "wi" was intended not as some kind of interrogative particle from an Oriental language I don't speak, but rather as a postal abbreviation, namely that of the great state of Wisconsin, famed for its cheese and its mosquitos. Suddenly, the conversation took on a whole new tone.

They: You have no data for Verona, Wisconsin?

Me: Wi, we have no data there!

(Actually, geocoder.us does have data there.)

The other email was pure Zen, in the getting-hit-with-a-stick kind of way:

Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 07:40:54 -0600
From: "Billy"
To: schuyler@tridity.org
Subject: I ask myself the same questions every day.

be catawampous but marchesini see naskapi in jbinng some cpwscb

What a concidence -- I ask myself that same question every day, too!

In 1984, Los Angeles hosted the summer Olympic Games. As a lad of a mere six years watching the television coverage from Philadelphia, I was transfixed, particularly by the feats of Carl Lewis, the American whose four gold medals in track & field that year echoed the four medals won in the same events by the great J. C. "Jesse" Owens in Berlin in 1936: Jesse Owens, the African-American who showed up the Nazi übermenschen ("No Blacks - No Jews - no dogs") on their own home turf. Inspired by the made-for-TV biopic about Owens, and by Lewis himself - who Wikipedia notes as being "considered the greatest athlete of all time by many people" - I, at the tender age of six, started running daily heats around the block in our West Philly neighborhood, in the hopes of training to someday be a great sprinter like Owens and Lewis.

Well, children change future vocations the way their parents change socks, but for the longest time I thought the Olympics were such a fine thing, inspiring youths like me to better themselves through athletic discipline, which I had precious little of as a child otherwise (and not much more to speak of today). It wasn't until I actually spent lots of time in an Olympic candidate city - namely, London 2012, as the advertising puts it - that I witnessed the dark underbelly of the Olympic Games: The manner in which media circus around the Olympics marshals mindless popular support for massive commercial pork-barrel property development projects at the public expense. Bread and circuses, as Heinlein would say.

This morning, that underbelly turned toward the light in a BBC News article about the fate of the Athens Olympic Park. I find I have to restrain myself from excerpting too much of the article here:

Having spent a record sum of at least $12bn (£6.4bn) on the games, Athens is under intense pressure to prove it was all worthwhile for Greek taxpayers.

Most of the venues have remained closed since the games ended six months ago. According to documents given to the BBC, the basic construction work for more than 30 venues cost more than $3bn. And now just maintaining them is costing the state more than $100m a year.

Yet until now the authorities have not had any serious plan for how such a large number of venues can be put to good use, as the Olympics themselves become little more than a distant memory.

....

One Greek property developer told the BBC the government strategy was all wrong, and that it must sell some venues and use the money to subsidise those likely to remain in state hands. Otherwise, taxpayers will continue forking out just to prevent once pristine Olympic venues from crumbling, he says.

Meanwhile, back in London, the propaganda for the 2012 Summer Olympic bid - against Paris, New York, Moscow, and Madrid - runs at a fever pitch, with signs featuring gargantuan athletes performing gargantuan feats over, on, or from depictions of major London landmarks, all under the legend MAKE BRITAIN PROUD - BACK THE BID. These ads festoon tube stations, tube cars (inside and out), buses, street lamps, billboards, banners, newspapers, you name it. Jo says this advertising cost the Greater London Authority alone £30 million, with a probably not disproportionate amount spent by Transport for London, both government agencies.

That's all well and good for London in 2012, but what about London come 2013? The proposed site for the billions of pounds of construction work to be poured is none other than the Lea Valley, a dingy, polluted wetland / canal / garbage pit, sandwiched in the East End between Tower Hamlets, Hackney, and Stratford, filled with the detritus of 250+ years of industrialization in and around greater London. Jo calls this region the 'Olympic Sacrifice Zone', after Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. We went for a hike through there with a few people on my birthday back in December; you can see our photos, and there are links to some other galleries at the bottom of the UO wiki page (linked above).

Now, there's no question that the Lea Valley, and indeed most of the East End, could benefit from an influx of public funds in the form of urban renewal/regeneration projects; the question is what kind of regeneration are we talking about? Projects that will actually give the residents of the East End new places to live, work, and co-exist, or projects that amount to corporate giveaways after the Olympics are over, with only a token nod to the working stiffs that live here? We put up hackthebid.org to offer a forum for the public discourse that isn't happening in the mass media, but, as could be expected, the web site ended up getting spammed by noisome assenters, so the idea has been shelved, since none of us really have time to play nanny. Fortunately, others have taken up this task, particularly NoLondon2012.org, who have a nice set of resources on "London Olympic Myths" (alas in MS Word format), which I won't recount here.

The IOC renders its final decision in July. Of course, if London loses, someone somewhere will still get screwed out of their tax dollars or euros or rubles, a fact which prompted Saul Albert to suggest a Nowhere 2012 campaign instead - MAKE NO ONE PROUD!

Anyway, having read this BBC article, I have just two words for anyone in the UK who might still be deluding themselves that the government will know what to do with a London Olympic Park after it's built, and those two words are: Millenium. Dome. Don't let them waste your money.

Software has played a big part in my life. My first computer program, haltingly trancribed at the age of 6 from a blackboard on to a Commodore VIC-20 one afternoon during my first summer at day camp, read something like this:

    10 PRINT "HELLO! ";
    20 GOTO 10

Since that moment, a lot of things have changed, but the immediate interest I found in writing code hasn't been one of them. My elementary school soon had us writing LOGO on Apple ][es, and at home I spent innumerable hours poking at an Atari 800XL hooked up to an old black and white TV, until Dad brought home a PC AT clone, a 10 MHz 80286 running MS-DOS 3.1 on - wow - a 30 meg hard drive. I wrote dodgy EGA adventure games, saved up for parts, and got my own machine - a second hand Epson PC XT running a mere 4.77 MHz. Not long after I got my own phone line and started a BBS in the 215. Boy, those were the days. If it weren't for those BBSes, I would probably still have no social skills.

In 1996 I started learning Perl to better my earlier attempts at writing CGI apps with an ugly swill of tcsh, sed, and awk, and in 1999 I finally took the plunge and installed Linux on a machine of my own. By then, I had already quit my job at the gas station to write software more or less full-time. In the intervening years, Free Software has put a roof over my head, lead me to travel more and more of the world every year, introduced me to the most amazing people, brought me and my wife together, made us write a book, and someday, Tao not-willing, it might feed our children.

Inspired by Jo's devlog, I recently decided to begin cataloguing my ongoing adventures in code.

So now that the book is done and Jo and I are back from India, we've decided to make robots.

Let me back up. India: It's huge, crowded, messy, exciting, vibrant, colorful, and rich in many ways. I can't hope to do it justice so I'll leave it at that for now. I can't wait to go back.

Now, about the hoverbots. We've been wanting to make physical bots for some time but have been preoccupied with other work. Today, at Rich's direction, I ordered a TI MSP430 development board and programmer cable. We also bought an IR proximity sensor with a range of 80 cm (31") and a pair of IR motion sensors with an arc of about 60°.

The fantasy is to wire the microcontroller into the drive mechanisms of a remote control model vehicle, ideally a (non-US branded) blimp or a black hovercraft. The proximity sensor would be mounted on the front to keep the robot from colliding with things. The motion sensors would be mounted on either side at an angle and allow the robot to sense the motion of humans or (hopefully) other robots. I'm imagining possibly a red or IR signalling light as well. The sensors, as well as the original RC circuit, would be wired into the ADC ports on the microcontroller and programmed with handcrafted C code compiled on mspgcc, an Open Source GCC toolchain for the MSP430 family.

We want to see a bot follow a person around, or follow other bots around, and collectively explore a territory. A small amount of C code could muster some convincing flocking behavior. The MSP430F1121 microcontroller only has 2K of program space and 256 bytes of RAM, so we're not talking about massive intelligence here, but autonomous and collective behavior from cheap consumer robotics. Anything more and we'd want to wire it up to a Gumstix and run Linux.