Modern Nerd

Life is Beautiful

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:02:44 +0100

A cure for apathy: switch off your phone, retreat from your inbox, and tell me you’re not moved by this short video by Everynone. The simplest things in life can be beautiful beyond words.

An Open Letter to Support Ninjas, Web Rock Stars, and Sandwich Artists

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:48:00 +0100

To Whom It May Concern

You are not a ninja. Each time you use the word ‘ninja’ in vain, another one moves into your attic. Ninjas train. Ninjas battle. Ninjas don’t check email.

You are not a rock star. Rock stars paint on silence. Rock stars trash hotels. Rock stars use Internet Explorer 6. Rock stars just don’t give a shit.

An artist? Please. Artists see. Artists reflect. Artists bleed Tyrian purple and lapis lazuli. Artists send light into the darkest heart. Artists don’t get real jobs.

The sign of a life well lived? When your job title becomes the least interesting thing about you. And if it isn’t? Perhaps you need a hobby, a break, or a more humble title.

Sincerely

Nick

"It’s exciting to live in a world where a vibrant blogging scene complements newspapers. But it..."

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:56:11 +0100

“It’s exciting to live in a world where a vibrant blogging scene complements newspapers. But it would be a step back for civilisation if it came to replace them. This is not a debate about “dead tree technology”, but about the future of journalism as a job for which people get paid.”

- David Mitchell on paid content, writing for The Observer

Cat: the dog of tomorrow! An entertaining soap box from David...

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:50:00 +0100

Cat: the dog of tomorrow! An entertaining soap box from David Mitchell, explaining why the giraffe was once called the camelopard, and how marketers have mis-sold animals ever since.

OUT NOW: Zen Kitten Theme for WordPress

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:16:02 +0100

Zen Kitten, the site design that once graced my Put Things Off blog, is now available as a WordPress theme. See the demo site or make my day and buy it now for only $69.

Put your content first

Ever thought that many blogs would be better if they weren’t so… bloggy? Ever felt that web publishers who spend hours creating content only to litter their site designs with crap are missing a trick?

Zen Kitten is a departure from the done-to-death feel that many WordPress themes follow: the cluttered widgets, multiple sidebars, and bunched up text you’ve seen elsewhere have been dumped in the litter tray.

Instead, you’ll find a light, airy design with — shock — simple navigation, minimal distraction, and enough white space to swing a cat.

Bonus features

Zen Kitten features a healthy bunch of theme options, giving you the chance to swap out the plain text header for your own image or logo, as well as tailoring the homepage to list posts from categories you choose.

To make your posts stand out, the theme sets your post titles in a refreshing open source typeface called Titillium Title. In addition, Zen Kitten uses the new WordPress featured image uploader to quickly and easily add thumbnails to your content, which are automatically resized to appear on your homepage, category pages, and below the post titles on your subpages. We think it’s pretty nifty.

Check it out and feel free to get in touch to voice your thoughts or ask for help.

Email Address Formats to Slash and Burn

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:45:00 +0100

Your email address says a lot about you. If, like me, you work remotely away from life’s inconveniences — like traffic and other people — your address makes more of a first impression than your clothes, your car, or your pallid complexion ever will.

I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that, whenever someone new emails me, I take a few seconds to examine their email address, consider their thought process, and judge them as a human being. Here’s what goes through my mind:

tomandjane@smiley-happy-couple.com

I share a house and a business with my partner, but I’d never share an inbox with her. It’s up there with his-and-hers bidets. Some things are best dealt with alone. At least they’re happy, I guess. Or hiding something.

johnsmith1988@i-am-not-a-number.com

Look, John, I know that picking usernames has been a lifelong drag, but don’t just tag a number on the end. Especially not your birth year. You’re better than that.

thewaltonfamily@thewaltons.com

You have a family email address? Who has a family email address? Do you sit around the HappyStation 2000 after dinner composing emails together and updating your family webs-? Wait, you have a family website? Who has a family website?

cuddlebunny@pass-me-a-bucket.com

I have a glowing red button on my desk for cutesy addresses like these. Nothing dramatic. It just deletes them.

info@aaaaaaaaaaataxis.com

That won’t get you to the top of Google, my friend. The internet doesn’t work like the phone book.

mrbigshot@freemail.com

What’s that, my good man? You’re a marketing director with a passion for helping iPhone developers breach new and exciting markets, build strong corporate images, and explore and project consistent brand values? And you’ve got a Hotmail address?

anyone@aol.com

I’ve spent 10 years trying to ditch my asinine prejudice against AOL users, but I still struggle to take aol.com addresses seriously. If you’re an AOL user and you feel hurt by this, I can only apologise and say that I’m trying to grow out of it.

My wariness harks back to AOL’s former role within the People’s Republic of American Internet Providers; an age where AOL subscribers were considered Web simpletons by many, because most of them believed that the aol.com website was the entire internet. A bit like Facebook users today.

jamesathome@definitely-not-in-the-office-or-at-a-bar-or-in-the-park.com

What’s that, James? You’re emailing from home? Thanks for letting me know. Why not get specific next time you’re registering an address and hint at which room you’re in? Or what year you think you’re writing from?

For your consideration

If you’re using a day-to-day email address that contains anything other than your own name or business name, I suggest that you consider updating it. Or don’t. You can always make your first impression next time.

The Curse of the 30-Second News Cycle

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:16:14 +0100

While some delight in having been first to learn of Michael Jackson’s death or hear about the man who married his pillow, I’ve never seen the appeal. For me, news websites often seem optimised to distract the bored, not to inform the healthily curious. A rapid news cycle coupled with perceived demand for breaking stories only encourages reporting of half-truths about live events, or coverage of items that aren’t really news at all, like snow in mid winter, or learning that Sarah Beeny is pregnant.

Since switching from a diet of web-based news to the digital paper format that The Times offers iPad users, a funny thing has happened: I’ve started reading the news again. Not just glancing through titles, skimming the first few paragraphs, scrolling to the comments section to imagine the people who post there in their underwear, then jumping aboard the hyperlink express, but actively reading. For the first time in years, I feel informed again.

I was delighted at developer Marco Arment’s plea that someone launch a news site reporting on last week’s news, where ‘mentioning any event that happened less than seven days ago is strictly prohibited’. Lengthening the news cycle provides a natural filter against the barrage of updates offered by live Web reporting. Following events in a digital newspaper format — where yesterday’s news is presented in a concise format that you can read from beginning to end — has made news reading productive and enjoyable; I now linger over content when it’s delivered each day instead of checking up on it like a virtual babysitter. It’s how it used to be. You know, when news was something you savoured. And paid for.

Why I'm Paying For News Again

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 23:17:00 +0100

Some of you will think me madder than a duck’s udder, but I’m happily paying £9.99 every four weeks for The Times’ new iPad app. I think it’s brilliant. Instead of sifting through a homepage of content that buries old stories as it’s refreshed throughout the day, you download a separate digital edition of the paper every morning then browse at your own pace. The format is fresh, the interface well thought out, and the content thoroughly enjoyable.

How wonderful it is to feel that you’ve finished the news again. How glorious to read the morning paper from cover to cover once more. No more whack-a-moling your way through ever-changing online layouts in the hope of a hit. No more returning an hour later in case Boris Johnson’s invaded Belgium on a giant inflatable goat and displaced the leading story, resetting the game and giving your morning meaning once more. No. Now you can read to the final page and then get on with your day, because there’s not going to be any more news until tomorrow. And I think that’s a good thing.

Get Up Earlier and Do More Work

Mon, 17 May 2010 23:24:00 +0100

“One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that if you drive into London at 6am, half of the cars on the roads are Porsches and Astons. Whereas if you go in at ten to nine, they’re all Renaults. Simple solution, then. You want a nice car? Get up earlier and do more work.”

— Jeremy Clarkson reviews the Porsche 911 GT3

On Personal Sub-Branding

Wed, 05 May 2010 12:18:00 +0100

The unstoppable Mark McGuinness has a piece over at The 99 Percent called ‘Build a Business, Not Just a Client List’ that’s well worth a read for all freelancers and entrepreneurs.

He mentions me because I tend to build new projects around brand names instead of my own name. Mark is right — I do this because it creates a degree of separation from my paid client work and it becomes easier to sell projects because they’re not bound to my name. But there are two other reasons:

I don’t want to be ‘that cheesecake guy’

There’s been a boom in self-promotion chatter, spurred by ‘that wine guy’ Gary Vaynerchuk declaring a ‘Personal Brand Gold Rush’ and stressing the importance of picking a tiny niche and attaching your name to it. I think that can be a mistake.

Attaching your name to a small field might give you clarity of execution and a degree of personal fame, but these benefits come at a price: by broadcasting your identity in too narrow an arc, others will begin to attach labels to you that may prove hard to remove should you wish to reinvent yourself later on.

More critically still, I think there’s a danger that labelling yourself makes you feel obliged to deliver on a single subject alone, to the point where you’re more likely to burn out and get bored. Passion is exciting because it’s fleeting; few can sustain it on a given subject over time — just ask anyone who’s abandoned a niche blog after a year, or answered 50,000 emails about which wine goes best with salmon. Don’t force yourself down that path unless you’re pretty confident you’d be happy doing it for the rest of your life.

It’s simple: I don’t have a personal brand because I don’t want to label myself. Labels determine not just how others view you, but how you start to view yourself. I’d rather be ‘Nick Cernis’ than ‘Nick Cernis, that guy who blogs about cheesecake’. Some folks would say that I’m ‘diluting my brand’ or ‘scattering my tribe’. And that’s fine. At least I’m not the cheesecake guy.

I’d rather the stuff I made got famous

The other reason I use personal sub-brands and multiple mini sites instead of one personal brand and domain is less obvious: I’d rather people talked about the stuff I make than about me.

Getting people to talk about your products will usually do more for your bottom line than a piece pandering to your ego, however flattering it might be to see your name in pixels or print. But it goes further than that.

For me, the greatest sign of success is when the things you create are more famous than you are: it says that you’ve contributed something bigger and better than yourself to the world; that you’ve had a positive net effect on the planet; that you’ve spent your time building something that’s wonderful, beautiful, or useful; something that will outlive you and continue to improve the lives of others for years to come.

Why YouTube Recommends Heroin

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:34:00 +0100

Ever since companies started recommending similar crap to stuff I’ve bought online at three in the morning on a drunken whim, I’ve become a whole lot poorer. But I’ve also laughed louder. Last year Amazon recommended I buy a nose hair trimmer because I’d purchased a book by Stephen Fry. Earlier this week, YouTube suggested I try Heroin.

Its rationale? I’d watched a video about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. No doubt YouTube found time to read Lewis Carroll’s work, to note the brazen references to experimental drugs and zoological hallucinations, and to suggest to all those viewing Wonderland-related miscellany that they might also enjoy hard drug how-tos, croquet flicks, and clips about missing cats.

It must take a lot of guts for big companies with fidgety legal departments to create a recommendation algorithm, feed it some visitor data, and sit back and hope for the best. Giving people the gift of discovery is a noble pursuit, but who could predict how disastrous the results can be?

You may also enjoy these illicit substances

To Amazon’s credit, they explain why they’ve picked items for you and allow you to forbid them from using certain past purchases to make future suggestions. By combining other users’ input, product ratings, and metadata about how items relate to each other, they’re building a collaborative filter that will improve matches for everyone over time; a sort of virtual collective consciousness for people with too much free time and disposable income, if you like.

If only YouTube offered the same Borg-like recommendation engine. I would like it to know that I don’t do hard drugs, and tell it that the Heroin video was a cheap stunt; a fun but harmless monologue only vaguely related to its title. (Of course I clicked it.) Devoid of any feedback system, the next time I visit YouTube it will surely upsell me to something harder and more expensive, unaware that it takes more than an ‘Eat Me’ tag to get me hooked.

Turns out that many of the companies who use recommendation engines know that there’s room for improvement, and that those leading the pack will pay handsomely for small performance gains. In 2006, Netflix offered a million dollars to anyone who could improve the accuracy — by just 10% — of computer-predicted ratings that users would give movies they hadn’t watched yet, which are based partly on how they rated other films.

The million dollar Netflix prize

The prize was awarded in 2009 to a team at AT&T Labs, one of whose paper entitled ‘The BellKor Solution to the Netflix Grand Prize’ [PDF] will give you a headache, which is probably why they published an article for laymen called The Million Dollar Programming Prize that’s well worth a read.

You’ll discover that the science of learning what people like is a complex and fascinating field. At its heart, a good recommendation engine is an artificially intelligent system; a moving model of irrational human tastes, built by a series of collaborative filters like ‘nearest-neighbours’, which intelligently discern related films and actors, and ‘latent factor models’, which help match users with films by classifying both into genres.

What fascinates me most is that the system not only works out, say, that you’ll probably like martial arts films or anything containing Keira Knightley; it also learns how critical you are as a human being. It then gives you a kind of secret ‘Scrooge rating’ so that it knows how to adjust other people’s scores to meet your overly high standards, and so that your unjust and frankly rude reviews are weighted appropriately when it makes suggestions to other users.

In the same way that you’ve accumulated enough information to know which of your friends and family would be delighted to watch Johnny Depp in the 2-hour drug-fuelled mindfuck that is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and which of them would fail to see the funny side, so too is Netflix evolving to learn its users’ tastes. The only difference is that it doesn’t have to watch the films itself; it doesn’t need to — it forms its opinions by proxy based on what other people think, a surprisingly human trait.

All of which brings us loosely back to why YouTube recommends Heroin. Perhaps it’s not a true recommendation engine at all, but a random list of popular videos. Maybe it’s become so heavily gamed by its users that it’s now useless in determining our tastes. More likely, I suspect, that it gives crap suggestions because it’s never asked us what we like; it hasn’t gotten to know us like Netflix and Amazon have. When it comes to offering recommendations, YouTube is the sort of friend who defaults to chocs, socks, and smellies at Christmas every year because it’s given up figuring us out.

I think I know how it feels.

Solved: Gmail, iPad, iPhone, and multiple from addresses

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 09:33:00 +0100

For a long time I’ve forwarded many email addresses to a single Gmail account, a setup I call Inbox Heaven. It’s great because you get a unified inbox to collect mail from multiple email addresses that you can check on any device.

One caveat has been that Mail on the iPhone and iPad won’t let you send email from multiple addresses living under one Gmail account. This means, for example, that even though you can receive messages from secondary accounts like superman@krypton.com, you can only reply from your main address of clarkkent@gmail.com.

After much Googling, dribbling, and head bangering, I’ve managed to get around this in a way that works great on the iPad and iPhone. I thought I’d combine the various hints and tips I’ve discovered to put them in one place, then add some screenshots to make it more useful to others who’ve been driven nuts by the same issue.

The steps assume you’re setting up Gmail for the first time, so if you’ve already got a Gmail account on your mobile device, it’s best to disable it or delete it altogether to avoid confusion. You’ll also need to check that IMAP is enabled in your Gmail account by logging into Gmail in your Web browser and following Google’s IMAP instructions, and you need to be running iPhone OS 3 or higher on all of your devices.

The short version is that you just list your email addresses separated by a comma in the Address field of the mail settings on your iPhone/iPad. Sounds simple, but it turns out to be important that you follow certain steps in order, and that you set your Gmail address up as an IMAP account, not a Gmail account. If you’re already utterly confused, read on as I attempt to deconfuddle you:

iPhone and iPod Touch instructions (iPad steps lower down)

Open the Settings app:
Tap ‘Mail, Contacts, Calendars’:
Tap ‘Add Account…’:
Tap ‘Other’ (NOT Gmail or Google Mail):
Tap ‘Add Mail Account’:
Enter your full name in the Name field (this is what people will see in the “From” field when you send email), your Gmail address in the Address field, your password in the Password field, and the word ‘Gmail’ in the Description. Then tap Save.
You should be presented with the ‘New Account’ screen:
Scroll down to ‘Incoming Mail Server’, and use ‘imap.gmail.com’ for the Host Name, your full Gmail address for the User Name, and your Gmail password for the Password.
Under ‘Outgoing Mail Server’, use ‘smtp.gmail.com’ for the Host Name, your full Gmail address for the User Name, and your Gmail password for the Password.
Tap ‘Save’. (It’s really important that you save here before you start editing the Address field as described below, otherwise you’ll get an error message.)
If you entered your details correctly you’ll be returned to the Accounts screen:
We’re going to modify the account you’ve just created in a minute. First, though, we need to copy a comma into the clipboard. Sounds weird, but bear with me.
Press the Home button, then swipe right to get to the search screen. Type a single comma in the search field, double tap the search field itself, tap ‘Select All’, and then tap ‘Copy’ so that you copy the comma to the iPhone’s clipboard:
Open the Settings app again, then tap ‘Mail, Contacts, Calendars’.
Tap the Gmail account you created in the previous steps:
Tap the ‘Address’ field once to place the cursor at the end of your Gmail address.
Double tap the same Address field to bring up the Select/Paste options:
Then, being sure that the cursor is at the end of the line and that no part of your address is selected, tap Paste to add a comma to the field. (We do this because there’s no way to access the comma from the keyboard once the cursor’s in the Address field.)
Now, start typing one of your secondary email addresses that you’d like to be able to send email from.
Repeat steps 18 and 19 for as many email addresses as you like. You should end up with a list of email addresses, separated by commas. The field should end with a ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’ or some other domain, not with a comma.
When you’re done, tap your iPhone’s Home button to get back to your Springboard. (The Settings app saves the changes you’ve just made automatically.)
To check it’s worked, open Mail, browse to your Gmail account, and create a new message:
Tap the “Cc/Bcc, From:” field to open it up, then tap the “From:” field. You should see a scroll wheel containing all of the email addresses you just entered. If not, don’t panic — just shut down your phone by pressing and holding the power button, and it should work the next time you power up and use Mail.

iPad instructions

It’s even easier on the iPad. No faffing around with commas, and no need to create the account first and go back and edit it. Instead, it works like this:

Open the Settings app:
Tap ‘Mail, Contacts, Calendars’:
Tap ‘Add Account…’:
Tap ‘Other’ (NOT Gmail or Google Mail):
Tap ‘Add Mail Account’:
Enter your full name in the Name field (this is what people will see in the “From” field when you send email), your Gmail address in the Address field, your password in the Password field, and the word ‘Gmail’ in the Description. Then tap Save.
You should be presented with the ‘Enter Your Account Information’ screen.
Scroll down to ‘Incoming Mail Server’, and use ‘imap.gmail.com’ for the Host Name, your full Gmail address for the User Name, and your Gmail password for the Password.
Under ‘Outgoing Mail Server’, use ‘smtp.gmail.com’ for the Host Name, your full Gmail address for the User Name, and your Gmail password for the Password.
Tap the ‘Address’ field once to place the cursor at the end of your Gmail address:
Now, start typing one of your secondary email addresses that you’d like to be able to send email from, each separated by a comma. To type a comma on the iPad when you’re in an email field like this, first tap the ‘.?123’ key followed by the ‘#+=’ key. The comma will appear in the top right of the keyboard, to the left of the backspace key.
Repeat iPad steps 10 and 11 for as many email addresses as you like. You should end up with a list of email addresses, separated by commas. The field should end with a ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’ or some other domain, not with a comma.
Tap ‘Save’.
Tap your iPad’s Home button to get back to your Springboard.
To check it’s worked, open Mail, browse to your Gmail account, and create a new message.
Tap the “Cc/Bcc, From:” field to open it up, then tap the “From:” field. You should see a picker overlay containing all of the email addresses you just entered. If not, don’t panic — just power down your iPad by pressing and holding the power button, and it should be there when you next power up and use Mail.

Final notes

Note that recipients will still be able to see your original Gmail address when you send from your secondary addresses by looking at their email header information (just like Gmail in your web browser). This shouldn’t be a concern for most, but if it is, you need to set up completely separate mailboxes instead of forwarding all of your addresses to one account.

Also note that, in step 13 of the iPhone instructions above, I suggest using the Search field to copy and paste a comma. You can actually use any field that brings up a full keyboard, including those in the Settings app itself. I just felt it was slightly clearer this way.

Finally, I prefer not to answer email about Gmail settings and configuration, if only because it’s nice to pretend that I’ve got more important things to do. If you need help with this stuff, try the Apple discussion board or Gmail support forums. Thanks.

Alice for iPad

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:07:45 +0100

If proof were needed that eBooks are worthy of mainstream attention at last, Alice for iPad by the charmingly named Atomic Antelope delivers in spades.

Watching their demo video [YouTube] instills in me the same sense of wonder I experienced upon playing with my first pop-up book as a child, minus the guilty feeling that anything this fun surely doesn’t count as proper reading, and devoid of the horrible notion that all the bits are about to fall off.

I once wrote that I’d only adopt electronic books wholeheartedly when they read like paper, smelt like paper, and cut my fingers like paper. Looks like it’s only a matter of time.

"Each day I live in mortal fear that I’ve used up the last idea that will ever come to me."

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:05:00 +0000

“Each day I live in mortal fear that I’ve used up the last idea that will ever come to me.”

- zefrank, in a delightful clip from yesteryear on the subject of brain crack

That Syncing Feeling

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:53:00 +0000

That syncing feeling will be familiar to many of you; it is both the bane of the technorati and the cyclic five-step rite of passage for the mobile computing age:

Step 1. Set up your phone’s calendar and address book to sync over-the-air with your desktop computer, laptop, web service, or all three.

Step 2. Watch in dismay as this year’s upcoming appointments disappear, along with the contact information for everyone you’ve ever met.

Step 3. Add the single calendar and address book entries your tech-dependent excuse for a mind can recall, and apologise for missing meetings for the next few weeks.

Step 4. Spend three months replying to text messages from lifelong friends with the words, “Who is this?”

Step 5. Go to step 1.

For me, syncing data across devices ranks on the ball ache scale alongside falling the wrong way off a tightrope and watching a Shaolin Monk being kicked repeatedly in the groin. Is it any wonder, then, that it feels like a small miracle when it works flawlessly? I think it’s worth exploring that feeling to see how we can bottle it.

Earlier in the week I set out the Five Laws of Syncing as I see them. Here’s how they break down:

1. Thou should not have to press a button labelled ‘sync, damn it!’

For end users, syncing should be automatic. I know first-hand that it’s one of the most difficult features to get right as a developer, but that doesn’t mean your users need to bleed for it too.

2. Thou should not have to plug a thing into another thing.

USB syncing is both a chore and a trip hazard. I suspect that Apple insist upon cable-based syncing because they haven’t yet found a way to sell the air between your Mac and your iPhone.

3. Thou should not have to be connected to your mother’s wifi network.

Wifi syncing (when your phone and computer must be on the same wifi network and running the same app) is the perfect solution only for those who never leave the cave.

No-one who’s done it for more than a week actively enjoys syncing over their wifi network, so it probably shouldn’t be part of your app. New world computing’s supposed to be fun.

4. Thou should whisper softly when things are syncing and again when they have sunk.

Mercifully, evidence of disco syncing — where apps block access to the interface while displaying a disco ball and neon ‘SYNCING!’ sign — is now scarce.

Giving a subtle indication that syncing is in progress is a great thing. Blocking the user’s access to the app while it’s happening isn’t.

5. Thou shalt make it feel just a little bit like magic.

This is the golden one. If you can merrily switch between desktop, webtop, and iPhone applications all day without realising that a thousand tiny gremlins are secretly ferrying data back and forth, you’ve achieved the improbable.

Make it feel too much like magic, though — as Apple has done with Mobile Me — and users won’t know whether their stuff has sunk, is syncing, or is en route to join Gandalf on a three-month bender in the Maldives.

It’s a delicate balance.

The Five Laws of Syncing

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:45:16 +0000

Thou should not have to press a button labelled ‘sync, damn it!’
Thou should not have to plug a thing into another thing.
Thou should not have to be connected to your mother’s wifi network.
Thou should whisper softly when things are syncing and again when they have sunk.
Thou shalt make it feel just a little bit like magic.

The Curse of the iPhone Developer

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:07:16 +0000

As an iPhone developer, few mistakes are more costly than telling people what you do. Gone are the days when hopeless romantics thought they had a book in them; today they’re full of app ideas:

“I’d like to think I’ve got an app in me,” said one guy I met at a New Year’s Eve party.

What can you do but smile and brace yourself? A game with ninja badgers, an app for detecting cheating spouses, and a tool for measuring the size of your penis and uploading the results to Facebook. I’ve heard them all and wish I’d picked a profession with fewer talking points. Like taxidermy.

Worse is when you’re introduced by your line of work: “Here’s the iPhone developer I was telling you about,” they’ll say. “His name’s Nick,” almost in afterthought. You’ll soon be the sounding board for a thousand drunken app concepts. They should have just hired a clown.

“How about one that finds the nearest [bar/strip club/hooker]?” some idiot will offer. “I’d buy it,” he’ll add, as if to seal its position in the top 100.

When I’m feeling antisocial I tell people I’m a web developer. Nobody bothers a web developer. The longest conversation you can hold with one lasts three minutes. The title exists to blend boredom with confusion — suggesting, perhaps, that you build housing estates for spiders.

If nothing else, it’s taught me that people value great software over great websites; as a web developer, I’m rarely offered exciting website ideas or encouraged to talk at length about upcoming launches. As an iPhone developer, I can’t escape it: within three minutes the theme has turned from the crisis in Haiti to samurai raccoons and dick-measuring apps.

The real Curse of the iPhone developer is not the App Store approval process, having to talk to people at parties, or worrying that you’ll never be invited back; it’s wrestling with a million ideas and deciding which not to build next.

"Do it now. If you bankrupt a company before you’re 25, that’s like a badge of honor! Get out there."

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:13:05 +0000

“Do it now. If you bankrupt a company before you’re 25, that’s like a badge of honor! Get out there.”

- Jim Coudal in an interview with Coudal Partners

Put Things Off is now Modern Nerd

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:53:00 +0000

Following a laid-back stay at Put Things Off, I’ve rebranded, donned a black suit, sold the cat on eBay, and moved to a new home at Modern Nerd, where you’ll find my essays, updates, and meandering prose from now on.

Your subscription should redirect automatically if you followed the old RSS feed, but you might like to visit Modern Nerd and resubscribe anyway, especially if you’re the type who worries needlessly about things.

Q: Why Modern Nerd?

I felt it was time for a change, largely because the work I do has shifted from telling people to shut up and make things to shutting up and making them myself. It’s harder than it looks. Also, nerds are cool now.

Q: What about Put Things Off dot com?

The site will house the Web version of Put Things Off 2, the laid-back to-do list that I’m relaunching this year. Progress is good, thanks, and you should follow @spiffingapps on twitter for sneak peaks and updates.

Q: I really liked your old Put Things Off site design. Are you going to sell it as a WordPress theme, move to an Alpine ski chalet, descend into madness, and spend your nights quoting Sartre at passing mountain goats?

Yes. You’ll soon be able to buy the Put Things Off design as a WordPress theme from Wordprezzie. To find out when it’s available, follow @nickcernis on twitter or subscribe to the Wordprezzie feed.

Q: Did you really sell the cat on eBay?

Of course not! eBay is dead to me. I used Craigslist.

Q: What do you think of tumblr?

I’m pretty excited about it. It took me a day to learn their template system, design, code, and launch this site. Imagine what you could do if you were clever.

The writing workflow is great — you can queue posts and drip feed them to your audience automatically, without having to wrestle with publish dates or keep anything as laughable as a ‘blogging diary’.

Overall, I’ve fallen in love. Tumblr is a laid-back, low-pressure approach to publishing: there’s no software to maintain or update, no plugins to fiddle with, no hosting bills to pay, no security issues to worry about, and no guilty feeling when you post 10 words instead of 1,000. Plus, their logo has a full stop in it. That could catch on.

Talk nerdy to me

In Michael Okuda’s text commentary on the DVD edition of Star Trek, The Wrath of Khan, he claims the computer on Kirk’s apartment desk is a Commodore 64. It’s actually a Commodore PET.

Easy mistake to make.

The Importance of Abandoning Crap

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:06:00 +0000

There’s a flimsy line between wimping out and moving on. I should know; in recent years I’ve left a comfy full time job, launched six websites, abandoned two, ditched archery, and turned my back on origami. I remember the sad words of my Cello teacher when I announced I was quitting that:

“Don’t tell me you’re starting a bloody rock band.”

I told her I’d defected to the guitar because it doesn’t have a nine-inch steel spike in one end, a missing fret board, or a sad role in a Bond movie where Timothy Dalton uses a £1.4m Stradivarius to steer a makeshift toboggan. The truth is this: the Cello got tough at around grade six, so I switched to an instrument that any talentless shitbag can play.

I have always been fickle: flitting between phases for more than 20 years; purchasing the most expensive thingamijig to pursue each new craft; being careful not to startle those close to me by using it more than once. Imagine my delight, then, to hear Ira Glass attest to the importance of giving things up:

“Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.”

In a must-see clip [YouTube] produced by current.tv, Glass sheds light on the process of creating remarkable things. Turns out it’s a tip of the iceberg equation: his greatest work — the stuff that airs — only exists because he abandons over half of everything he starts. How refreshing it is to hear a long-time hero admit that their successes are little more than lucky ducks bobbing in a sea of abandoned crap. How I wish that part-time action hero Seth Godin had written The Book about quitting 20 years ago.

In the Dip — a short book about ‘the extraordinary benefits of knowing when to quit (and when to stick)’ — Godin puts it this way:

“Quitting is difficult. Quitting requires you to acknowledge that you’re never going to be #1 in the world. At least not at this. So it’s easier just to put it off, not admit it, settle for mediocre. What a waste.”

Abandoning your dwindling hobby, business, relationship, blog, or other pursuit is tricky. Sometimes, though, giving up can be exactly the right thing to do. The thing to take-away from Glass and Godin is this: killing a failing project isn’t an act of destruction — it’s a powerful creative force:

“It’s time to kill and it’s time to enjoy the killing because, by killing, you will make something else even better live.” –Ira Glass

And that, for me, is the key. Anyone can make something. But to make something great, you have to find the courage to ditch the things dribbling along at half-past average. I’ve spent the last few years juggling projects and hobbies, abandoning a few to let others shine. It hurts to give up, but I know that my small successes wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to move on and not hang on.

Abandon your crap. You’ll be amazed at what thrives in its place.