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Missing Los Angeles

2010-12-04T13:28:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles is a city of passion. Art goes up in the middle of the night, unlooked for and often uncelebrated, usually there for the passion of the artist alone... but many of us enjoy that art, and I find that the creativity of these pieces is something I have missed horribly since heading to SF.

I've been looking through some of the photos I took of some of my favorite pieces in LA, and thought I'd share them here. If you know how to attribute some of the uncredited pieces, let me know!

Mural by El Mac + Retna @ Wilton and Hollywood (work in progress while photographed)

Art @ the 4th Street Bridge, Downtown Los Angeles (artist unknown)

σωματική τέχνες

2010-10-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

I'm stepping back up on the self-hacking game, which will mean a lot more technê of the mind and body. It will also mean a lot more self-awareness, discipline and adaptation. I'm going to try to write more about my process and progress as I go, which should give me another fun record of what I'm doing, and possibly also elicit some feedback.

Today was a big, full-body plyometrics and neuromuscular engagement kind of day. I had been about a week off of training, due to work, illness and life's fun scheduling complexities. It felt good to get everything moving, and to really burn some of the week off. This wasn't the kind of set that you'll see muscle heads doing - it's geared more toward sustained, high-capacity generation of peak force with the entire body, usually in ways that will end up being useful in actual movement through the world.

Today's session:

1mi run @ 7:30 pace - just to warm up and get the blood flowing
stretch - no long static holds, as I don't want to attenuate muscles right before lifting hard, but some good dynamic movement to loosen things up
abdominal work - crunches, twist-crunches, roman chair extensions and oblique crunches
press + plyometric chest combo - incline dumbbell press @ 80% current max for 3 sets, followed immediately by 3 sets of plyometric pushups (this forces the engagement of both Type I and Type II muscle fibers, and will train toward more capacity in the fast-twitch system)
isolateral dumbbells thrusters w/ balance - stand on one leg, raise a dumbbell through a curl, up into an overhead press, and back down into neutral in one smooth motion; do this with each arm for each leg, so you have oppositional and complimentary balance loads to work with (this will work not only your biceps, triceps, deltoids and stabilizers in the shoulder, but also core and leg stabilizers - lots of fun!)
pull-ups in pike position - fun for your arms, back and abs, all at once
suitcase step-ups - hold a moderately heavy dumbbell in each hand, roll your shoulders back and down, and lock out your arms with some tension in your tricep; from here, step up with one leg onto a bench or step, driving upward with your quad, hip-flexors and glute; return to the ground with a controlled motion; mix up sets of one leg and sets that alternate both legs (this will sound like a lower-body workout, but I assure you that it is full body, and that it works your stabilizers, arms and shoulders far more than you will expect)
reverse forearm curls - the suitcase step-ups tend to put a lot of load on your inner forearm, as you support the acceleration of the weights, so I like to balance it out with some reverse forearm curls; take a relatively light dumbbell, and, with your palm-facing down, curl your wrist back and up, to work the oppositional muscle chain
weighted jump squats - take a weight plate or ball (I'm working with a 35lb plate for the moment, but hope to get back up to my old weight again soon), and hold it in front of you with slightly bent arms; descend into a deep squat, with the back as upright as possible; explode out of the squat, driving with the hip-flexors, glutes, quads and calves in a chained motion - this should propel you into a jump, at the height of which, you tuck your legs up as high as possible; extend your legs and carry the landing of the jump into the controlled reset motion of your squat; repeat this as quickly and explosively as possible for the duration of the set, being careful to maintain good form (it's easy to hurt your lower back doing this if you aren't mindful of form, so be careful)
corkscrews - take a weight plate or ball (usually the same that was just used for the jump squats), and set yourself with feet slightly more than shoulder width apart; holding the weight in front of you, rotate on the balls of your feet down to one side, crouching with the back relatively erect; from this position, rotate and extend in the opposite direction, raising the weight and using a "throwing" motion as you guide it across your opposite shoulder; drive this movement with the extension of your legs and your core rotator muscles, again being careful of form to avoid injury; repeat 10 as quickly as possible from one side, then switch sides immediate to do 10 in the other direction - this is 1 set; get 2-3 sets in, as fast as you can without losing form
shoulder raises - take kettlebells or dumbbells and raise them laterally and medially to work the various muscle bands of your deltoids and linked back muscles; I chained this on at the end of this workout primarily to give an easy loaded stretch to the delts, which just took an ugly beating

I'll probably follow this up with a body-weight and mobility exercise set this evening before bed, and another similar body-weight set in the morning, just to keep the blood flowing and the nervous system engaged.

These posts will probably evolve as I work on them, including more journal references, more specific weights, more technique, and probably some food logging as well.

Just hacking on my favorite bit of design - the human body. It's truly my favorite technology, temple and toy.

Signal All the Way Down

2010-10-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

Face Of God (Feat. Nadine Risha) by R/D

Fever Ray - I'm Not Done (R/D's Just Beginning REMIX) by R/D

Eskmo - 12 minute dj mix for Ninja Tune (free download) by Eskmo

Driving Across the Horizon, One Beat at Time

2010-10-01T11:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you need a proper bassline to keep you moving in time. This is today's line-up for high velocity design. Re-working my life, one hard note at a time. And loving it.

Two Fingers - Fools Rhythm by One O'Clock

Akira Kiteshi - Machine by Akira Kiteshi

The Glitch Mob - Starve The Ego, Feed The Soul (R/D's Soul Full Remix) by R/D

Kether-DROID(unreleased) by Ruff Hauser

Sofi Needs A Ladder - DeadMau5 (Brion.Charles REMIX) by Brion Charles

Project | Product Management

2008-02-25T11:13:00.000-08:00

I have come to acknowledge a few core principles that are important to guiding projects and products through conception, development and release. I just want to get them down here for now. I'll come back to add to them and expand upon them further in the near future.

You can't know how effective you're being if you don't know what your goals are.
It is critical to understand how to define requirements in the domain of the client, and to be able map those requirements to the technical execution process.

Change is the only constant. Knowing how to adapt is the key to successful projects.
It is important to understand the likely sources of change, to build variability into the scope of a project, and to control the outcome.

Multidisciplinary excellence is the road to true happiness.
Being able to communicate effectively and with native competence in the creative, technical and business realms is central to managing a modern project.

Focused design is incredibly effective.
Attention is finite, for both developers and users. Keeping an application focused on its most salient elements will deliver a more effective and compelling product.

Yes We Can

2008-02-12T20:01:00.001-08:00

Heroku | Rails done Right

2008-02-07T11:49:00.000-08:00

Heroku has finally launched into a more public beta. TechCrunch picked it up this morning, and they've been getting the kind of traffic and praise they deserve ever since.

Orion, Adam, James... congrats, guys.

2008-01-20T14:33:00.000-08:00

A|C|E

2007-12-04T21:56:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about this for some time now, and it seems that others have been having related thoughts as well. I'll get into the factors that are driving the consideration of these things in another post, and focus on the 'what' in this post.

In my opinion, any given person has two things that are of value to exchange with most other people: Attention and Creativity.

Attention | Perception by an aware mind has value. It is how ideas spread, markets form and shift, opinions develop, and how people know the world and each other. The focused attention of a person is therefor worth much more than passive and incidental awareness. By choosing what we pay attention to, we determine which ideas can affect us most profoundly. (Whicken has some amusing fiction that's germane to this idea on his blog)

Creativity | The generation of new ideas, or the synthesis of novel constructs out of existing concepts is the other half of the equation. Creativity drives change, changes the rules and rules the markets of attention. Creative content will often draw a disproportionate share of attention in the world, and thus the market speaks.

The interplay of Attention and Creativity (and indeed, many other aspects of life) can be seen to be modulated by Effectiveness.

Effectiveness | Effectiveness is the measure of impact, relative to the desired outcome, that any given action has. Effectiveness is of far greater importance than Efficiency (as so eloquently put by Tim Ferriss), and should always guide our efforts.

How does one become more effective? By maintaining awareness of (and Attention to) the process of action and the results thereof. By constantly tuning and refining (and experimenting, ie being Creative), it is possible to constantly improve the quality of action taken. This concept is core to the paradigm of Agility that I so often tangle with in the world of software development, but it is of far broader reach and importance than just that industry, as some simple exercises can confirm (again, in posts to come).

Attention | Creativity | Effectiveness

The choice of how to use each of these is up to each individual, and the outcome of adjustments to our decisions relating to them can be realized as profound changes in our lives.

For the next day, watch yourself: what are you paying attention to? what are you creating? how effective are your actions?

How can you improve?

AWS Tools Aplenty

2007-11-21T09:16:00.001-08:00

With the AWS tools/stacks being built by the likes of WeoCEO and Heroku, it is becoming increasingly clear that leveraging the flexibility and scalability of EC2, S3 and SQS is going to be a key component for a lot of up and coming web services. Why? Because these services offer a lot of flexibility and some massive savings on overhead.

I'm predicting that either Amazon or one of the players dealing with their services regularly is going to roll out a full tool suite for public consumption sometime soon. Sure, WeoCEO is pretty solid looking, but if they combine some of the other ideas out there (not sure which I can enumerate here, so I'll update more later), and make it a flexible toolkit for anyone to use in deploying an app, the whole hosting/deployment game will change radically (and with it, the costs).

Open Brain Function Analysis

2007-11-21T08:55:00.001-08:00

Brainscape, one of the finalists for Amazon's AWS Challenge, is an interesting way to store, analyze and share fMRI BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) signal data. Privacy/access control and evaluation/analysis tools make this a great resource.

Can't wait to see how it progresses.

Very cool that they're building the app on top of Amazon's amazingly flexible services. AWS is really a platform/tool set to watch closely in the near future.