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The proprietor of iWonder Designs — programmer extraordinaire, accomplished artist, and my brother — just redid his site, and it’s drop-dead gorgeous. Not standard Web 2.0 gorgeous, with the giant buttons and the rounded corners and the pastel palettes — no. Idiosyncratically, oddly gorgeous, a lovely-strange melange of wanted poster and tea-stained tablecloth and ancient parchment and samurai sunrise, and it just works.

Anyway. Check it out.

Here’s a picture of Beauregard carrying around his comfort cowhide, the remains of an old Halloween costume.

Beau has a love hate relationship with toys like this. Whenever he’s stressed about something he likes to put large fluffly things in his mouth and run around the house with them, mewling pitiably. The first thing he did when we brought him home was find and lay claim to a giant draftdodger, which stayed in his mouth for a couple of hours.

But when he gets over whatever’s bothering him, he sits down and slowly, methodically tears his stuff to pieces. This cowhide has another week of life, maybe.

Beagles are weird.

When Lapsed Cannibal was five years old, he was kidnapped by a band of gypsies and raised as a wolf cub. At age ten, he escaped and joined a traveling flea circus, where he remains to this day. He enjoys needlework, phrenology, and conquering small island nations.

Philip K Dick sez:

But I think you show know this — specifically, in case you are, say, in your twenties and rather poor and perhaps becoming filled with despair, whether you are an SF writer or not, whatever you want to make of your life. There can be a lot of fear, and often it is justified fear. People do starve in America. I have seen uneducated street girls survive horrors that beggar description. I have seen the faces of men whose brains have been burned-out by drugs, men who could still think enough to be able to realize what had happened to them; I watched their clumsy attempt to weather that which cannot be weathered … Kabir, the sixteenth century Sufi poet, wrote, “If you have not lived through it, it is not true.” So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.

This is what he’s saying, I think: when you decide to shrug off the shackles of a conventional life, when you step off the cliff to become whatever you are meant to be, you will not fly. Nothing in your capitulation to destiny will give you wings. You will fall, and fall, and fall, and it will be terrifying, and all that’ll be waiting for you at the bottom is the impact. No fairy-tale ending here. If life is pain, then a fully-realized life is agony.

But on the other side of agony: transcendence.

Maybe.

So … transcendence is nice and all, but it’s not that nice. Here’s the deal, Destiny: call me when I can order transcendence on Amazon.com. In the meantime, I think I’ll settle for a Nintendo Wii.

Not that you can get Wii’s on Amazon, either.

Or anywhere else, for that matter.

Stupid Nintendo Wii’s.

Bjarne Stroustrup, progenitor of C++, has lots of smart things to say about the current state of the software industry (recently upgraded from “screwed” to “fucked” by the watchdog group Concerned Geeks for Endangered Software):

I think the real problem is that “we” (that is, we software developers) are in a permanent state of emergency, grasping at straws to get our work done. We perform many minor miracles through trial and error, excessive use of brute force, and lots and lots of testing, but–so often–it’s not enough.

Software developers have become adept at the difficult art of building reasonably reliable systems out of unreliable parts. The snag is that often we do not know exactly how we did it: a system just “sort of evolved” into something minimally acceptable. Personally, I prefer to know when a system will work, and why it will.

The basic problem is that there isn’t a good enough reason not to write crappy code. The market punishes shoddy products, somewhat, but it rewards fast products more. Sure, capitalism is a meritocracy, but it’s a meritocracy based on expediency rather than quality, short-term gain rather than long-term success. It works because the world is full of smart hard-working people who make it work, but we’re strip-mining the landscape of our potential, and it’s going to come back to bite us in the ass.

Scratch that: it bites us in the ass all the time. The Y2K bug is probably the best example of this, but there are hundreds of others: the failed FAA upgrade project, the Denver Airport debacle , and, of course, Windows ME, may it rot in the colon of a flatulent camel for all of eternity. And those are just the high profile ones. The battleground is littered with the corpses of failed software projects, which we blithely tramp over in our headlong charge toward the set spears of the next challenge.

You can’t stop, because you’ll be overrun. You can’t slow down, for the same reason. You certainly can’t turn around and go a different way, choose a new battlefield, because any victory you achieve on your own terms will likely be overshadowed by the blood-soaked Gettysburgs of all the shops who impaled themselves on the enemy’s bayonets and yet had the wherewithal/luck/brute strength to survive.

It’s not all gloom and doom. We beat on, and stuff gets done, and smart people make impossible things happen — but it’s incredibly inefficient, and it feels like we could achieve so much more if we change the terms of this war. Sit back, think about what we’re doing. Our enemies, for the most part, aren’t going anywhere. They’re holed up in their fortresses, staring at us with dull implacable eyes. This is a siege. We can take our time. We can figure out the best way to win, rather than dashing ourselves against their walls, climbing over the bodies of our vanguard to reach the ramparts.

And that’s all the mixed battlefield metaphors we have time for today. Next week: Hello Kitty allegories! Don’t miss it!

Lead Designer: [Holding up an iPod] Ok, so we want to make one of these.

Associate Designer: Embrace and extend one of these, you mean.

LD: Right, right. [Nods] Right. So are we done?

AD: Well, no. We have to design it.

LD: I thought we were embracing their design.

AD: No, Jobs has good lawyers. We need to do lots of extending.

LD: Right. Right. [Turns iPod around in his hands] VistaPod?

AD: More than the name.

LD: Right. Well, how about we make this scroll wheel thingy textured. With little bumps and shit. The TexturePod!

AD: No. We can’t use a scrollwheel. Apple has that patented. And we want to stay away from pod, if possible.

LD: [sighs] Tell me again why we don’t just buy the fuckers?

AD: Jobs won’t sell.

LD: Oh, good. I thought it was principles, or something.

AD: No. We haven’t embraced principles. How about we make the screen bigger?

LD: I like that! We’ll have a VistaPod Enterprise Edition with a big screen, a VistaPod Home Edition with a really small screen, a VistaPod Business Edition with a big screen, but only half of it works, a VistaPod Student Edition …

AD: We’re going to try to embrace simplicity for this one. Only one edition.

LD: [pauses] I don’t understand.

AD: Only one kind of VistaPod.

LD: Huh.

AD: And we can’t call it a VistaPod.

LD: Right.

AD: Right.

[uncomfortable silence]

LD: So how much did we offer Jobs?

AD: Lots. Ok, so a bigger screen. And let’s use buttons instead of the wheel.

LD: Right. Wheels are dumb anyway. You don’t type with wheels!

AD: Yeah. [pauses] You know that there’s not going to be any typing on this thing, right?

LD: [frowns] So how are they going to pick songs?

AD: Well, not by typing their names.

LD: So are all the songs going to be in the Start menu?

AD: [pauses] There’s not going to be a Start menu either.

LD: Oh.

AD: Have you even looked at an iPod before?

LD: Well … no. I was just going to hand one off to our Embrace and Extendgineers and tell them to make one.

AD: Well we can’t do that.

LD: Right. [pauses] So bigger screen, buttons. No Start Menu. No keyboard. No mouse?

AD: No mouse.

LD: No mouse. Ok. [thinks] I’ve got it.

AD: Alright.

LD: iPods come in a bunch of colors, right? White and black and blue and whatever, right?

AD: Right.

LD: Let’s come up with a color that no one’s ever used before.

AD: [sighs] That’s a start, I guess.

LD: Brown.

AD: Brown?

LD: Brown.

AD: Like a UPS truck?

LD: I was thinking more a carmel shit brown.

AD: A shit-colored MP3 player.

LD: Yeah. [smiles] Oh yeah.

AD: So you’re proposing a ShitPod.

LD: [frowns] I thought we couldn’t use pod.

AD: Why would anybody buy that?

LD: It’s reverse psychology. Everyone always says our stuff looks like shit, right? So what happens if we make something that actually does?

AD: [rubs temples] I don’t know.

LD: Then we get to say yeah it looks like shit! That’s the point!

AD:

LD: It’s countercultural! It’s bold!

AD:

LD: I feel like we’re having a moment here.

AD: Have you ever designed anything before?

LD: Also, let’s make it look like a brick. A sort of clunky brown brick with a big screen and buttons.

AD: A ShitBrickPod.

LD: Something like that. [claps hands] I think we’ve got it. We’ll get marketing to take pictures of teenagers laughing and partying and being cool while they’re listening to their ShitBrickPods. And we’ll call the campaign “Bringing the Ugly”.

AD: I don’t think that’s a great idea.

LD: Apple’s already done pretty, ok? They’ve already done elegant and well-designed. We need to go in a different direction.

AD: So you’re saying we need to boldly sell something ugly and poorly designed.

LD: Look, we’ve been doing it for the past fifteen years. Why stop now? What’s so special about the ShitBrickPod?

AD: I really don’t think …

LD: Ok, lunchtime! [stands up] That was fun. Let’s design something else tomorrow!

The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, is one of those epiphany books. It advertises itself as a guide to getting past the blocks that keep you from expressing yourself creatively, but it’s much, much more than that: it’s a manifesto on the importance of overcoming your fear and letting your soul speak through your art.

That sounds a little mushy and groan-inducing, and if I were someone else reading this I’d probably have stopped reading by now. But trust me: this book isn’t a new-agey treatise on discovering your inner light through the medium of magic crystals, or hug therapy, or kitten worship. It’s an absolutely no-bullshit kick in the ass, a shout from the ramparts. It tells you why you need to get your act together, and then it tells you how.

Here’s a passage:

When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens. A crack appears in the membrane. Like the first craze when a chick pecks at the inside of a shell. Angel midwives congregate around us; they assist as we give birth to ourselves, to that person we were born to be, to the one whose destiny was encoded in our soul, our daimon, our genius.

When we make a beginning, we get out of our own way and allow the angels to come in and do their job. They can speak to us now and it makes them happy. It makes God happy. Eternity, as Blake might have told us, has opened a portal into time.

And we’re it.

I’d admit to shedding a tear on reading that last line, but that would be a clear violation of several Articles of Guyhood, so I’ll just say this: I might have misted up, a little bit, in an intensely masculine way. And this book is littered with gems like that.

But it isn’t a panacea, or a therapy, or a ten-step program on how to defeat your blocks. It doesn’t prescribe medication, or offer canned solutions. It won’t give you any answers. But it will give something a lot better: the wherewithal to identify the real problems, and the weapons to combat them.

So read this book, if you want to be a writer or a painter or a dancer or a bottle drummer or a trampoline expressionist or anything at all that requires you to draw stuff out from the core of yourself and show it to the world. We all have lifelong ambitions that we simultaneously define ourselves by and dismiss as silly or impractical or unattainable. The War of Art tells us how to dispel those doubts, and do the things we want to do, and become the people we want to be.

Many people hate giving presentations at work, and for good reason. I personally would rather eat a plate of broken glass soaked in cyanide than get up in front of people and talk for an hour. But that’s what I had to do, yesterday. And, in order to get through the process without fainting or puking or sinking to my knees and cursing the gods I’d apparently angered, I used several techniques I’ve learned over the years to make the whole ordeal less excruciating. I will now share these techniques with you.

1. Talk really, really fast. Think about the guy who reads the fine print at the end of commercials, the one who sounds like he’s been forcefed vast quantities of speed and then drilled until he’s able to squeeze thirty syllables into 300 microseconds — think about that dude, and then go twice as fast. This has many advantages. One, it significantly reduces the amount of time you’re up there. Second, it makes it difficult for people to criticize any part of your presentation, since they can’t understand a single word you’re saying. But you’ve said the words, and that’s what’s important.

2. Become a mass of annoying tics. Fidget with your slide clicky thing. Wipe constantly at your nose, as if to dam an incipient flood of snot. Gesture aimlessly with your hands. Nod at odd times. Pace backwards and forwards, as if you’re a novice line dancer. If you can manage a full epileptic seizure, by all means do it. This stuff may make your presentation go a little longer than it absolutely has to, but it will definitely make people avert their eyes, and tune you out, so that they’ll have less cause to mock your crappy presentation skills afterwards. They’ll mock you for being a crazy person, of course, but that’s the price you pay. In life, one has to make choices.

3. Talk constantly about what you’re about to talk about, and then don’t talk about it. This is a subtle but effective trick. As you go through the bullet points in your slides, say something useless and vague about each, and then say “But we’ll get to that later”. Do this at least ten times in the first two slides. And then — and this is the key — do it ten more times in the next two slides. You have no intention of talking about any of this stuff, of course. At some point your audience’s short-term memories will fill up with the muck of all of these broken promises, until eventually they’ll just dump the whole mess and fall asleep. Or they’ll stay awake. It doesn’t matter. This technique allows you to get through the whole hour without actually saying anything, but you’re saying nothing in a way that involves the speaking of many words.

4. Freeze like a deer in headlights whenever anyone asks you a question. Stand up very straight (you should be slouching throughout the whole presentation, incidentally, until this point) and then stare at your questioner like he’s a giant viking marauder with a huge battleaxe poised quivering over your head. Open your mouth. Make noises. Stutter. Eventually, say something inconsequential but vaguely related to the question — an old politician’s trick. This will get you past that question, and dissuade any future questions. Win-win.

5. Sabotage your presentation equipment. If thing are going very, very badly, then you can always go nuclear. Plant tiny explosives in your projector, for example, or loosen the moorings on the projection screen, or maybe even install some nasty, viral software on your laptop — Microsoft Windows, for example. Then, if you absolutely can’t stand it anymore, trip every one of these mechanisms. When the projector blows up, and the screen falls down at your feet, and the laptop crashes … well, what can you do? Here’s what you can do. You can rush through an abridged version of your presentation, make your apologies, and end early. Hey, you did the best you could. You’re a trooper.

If you learn all of these techniques, and practice them well, presentations will soon become effortless, and possibly even fun. Try it. You’ll thank me.

Here are some tips on how to dress up as your favorite programming language for halloween.

C

Not much to this costume, basically just a thong and a bunch of pointer references that you malloc() houses into. You move from house to house on a very thin tightrope with no supports and no net. You do so very very quickly. If you fall off, you explode.

C++

Find some other costume you like and extend it. Redefine the “>=”, “>”, and “=” operators to act like “<”, to thwart all those stingy spinsters who refuse to give you more than one piece of candy. Walk the tightrope from house to house, almost as quickly as you would in a C costume, but explode just as loudly if you fall.

Perl

The Perl costume is pretty easy. Just tear apart of bunch of other costumes and sew their pieces into a new one, a sort of motley bastard costume that’s so chaotic and complicated and butt-ugly that only a very select few will be able to look at it for any length of time. Those select few will absolutely love you, though, and will give you twenty times more candy than they do the others, so it works out.

Java

The great thing about the Java costume is that it works at pretty much every household you visit. The bad thing is that you have to move about 100 times slower than the kids in the C costume, and pause often to garbage collect. Also, you can’t just accept() candy, you have to build a CandyAcceptor(), using the factory pattern, and then build a hierarchy of acceptors using the Command pattern, each of which is uniquely suited to the particular brand of candy you’re given.

Lisp

Get a bunch of friends to dress up as parentheses, and have them bracket you constantly as you move from house to house. Collect candy recursively, depth-first, by traversing all the way down to the last house then unwinding back up the stack to the first. Make sure the house with the best candy is the last branch node of your domicile tree.

Javascript

Everybody will hate you when you put this costume on, but they’ll give you candy because they think you’re their only option. However — you will be incapable of accepting this candy using the normal means (open bag, wait, close bag) because of some early design mistakes, but there will be literally thousands of ways to hack around this. For example, you could set fire to a house, and then lay a tripwire so that when its residents coming screaming out they’ll fall and the candy in their arms will go sailing through the air into a field of mousetraps you set a little bit down the road, which will go off and in the process hurl the candy into another high rainbow arc which will fall into a giant funnel that leads into a complicated series of roller coaster tunnels that propel that candy through the neighborhood and empty out into your bedroom window. This mechanism will seem very natural to you.

But it will only work with one house. You’ll need to find a different way to do it for each of the others.