The last few weeks have been incredibly intense. My schedule has flipped back and forth from vacation time to programmer’s time to manager’s time [1]. Because we are working on so many things at the same time, I never feel like any one thing gets done.  I really like to complete things and then move on.

The craziness has manifested itself in odd ways. For instance I will sleep from 10:30 to 7:30 but wake up more tired than I went to bed the night before. I get this way sometimes and usually take naps in the afternoon to compensate, but the schedule has been so crazy that there has literally been no down time to do that.

I’ve found that one thing in particular helps: having an hour or two to just sit and read in the evenings. I usually read my RSS feed and the day’s news from other sources. For whatever reason that time helps calm me down and let my brain unwind from the day’s events. Lately, since the resting problems started, I haven’t gotten that either.

Hopefully things are calming down again. I will clear out some of the email this week, have gotten a handle on the Equals communications, and next week have big holes to get back to programming. While the personal stuff is only ramping up (both girls are playing soccer this fall), I will complete a big project this weekend — I’m building a dog kennel — that has been taking up evening time for me.

I woke up this morning feeling better. Hopefully it will last.

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[1] Programmer’s time is scheduled in four hour blocks while manager time is one hour blocks. For more, see Paul Graham’s classic post on the topic.

This little nugget buried in a footnote to Paul Graham’s latest masterpiece on convincing investors:

Most people emerge from the tube of their upbringing in their early twenties compressed into the shape of the tube. Some find they have wings and start to spread them. But this takes a few years. In the beginning even they don’t know yet what they’re capable of.

I thought I had found my wings in my mid-twenties. I really didn’t find my wings until my mid-thirties. And I was raised in a house where I was constantly pressured to find my own wings, as it were. I can’t imagine how long it takes people who grow up in repressive households, abusive households, households riddled with drug abuse. No wonder we as humans are generally so screwed up.

I linked to this last week but wanted to highlight this specific passage from Mark Suster’s post entitled Why You Need To Ring The Freaking Cash Register:

Some businesses take time to find their magic. And I only know one reason companies go out of business – they run out of money. Delaying going out of business gives you way more chances at product / market fit than any other strategy I know of.

I’m a freaking master at not going out of business! I’ve been not going out of business for longer than most companies have been in business. Hell, my kids haven’t been around as long as I’ve been not going out of business.

In 2006 it became apparent that powerOne was going to struggle to make us a living, let alone change the world. The problem was I didn’t have anything better.

I could have changed my thesis — that the tools we use for working with numbers hadn’t changed since the advent of the personal computer even though the personal computer had — but felt that changing the world of numbers was an audacious goal that impacted all segments of life: how we work, how we live and how we learn. I didn’t want to start a new thesis from scratch.

So we bided our time. We tried other products, a web education platform called MathPoint that almost got us acquired then a powerOne-like platform called FastFigures focused on the data. We also experimented with two or three other ideas that didn’t make it off the ground.

We kept moving forward. We worked hard on versions of powerOne for iOS, Android and Tizen. We learned Rails and did contract work to fill the financial gaps. We rebuilt our skill set around modern languages for the day when we had the right idea. We kept our tiny little team, reduced from 13 in 2003 to 2 in 2006, together.

Many people thought I was mad. I saw the steps as ends to a means, a long planned out path that most people couldn’t see. I knew, if I just didn’t go out of business, that all the learning, all the experiences and all the observations would coalesce into an unmistakably earth-shaking product.

More on that tomorrow.

Bret Victor, presenting in the present as if he was speaking from the past at the DBX conference, said this:

The message of this talk is if you want to be open and receptive, to invent new ways of thinking, I think the first step is you have to say to yourself, “I don’t know what I’m doing. We as a field don’t know what we are doing.” I think we have to say, “we don’t know what programming is, we don’t know what computing is, we don’t even know what a computer is.” And once you truly understand that and once you truly believe that then you are free and you can think anything.

If you don’t follow Bret’s work, he is one of the most fascinating thinkers, programmers and designers in computer science today. Substitute other terms for ‘programming,’ ‘computing’ and ‘computer’ and we have a simple recipe for every disruptive innovation in the history of the world.

The path to invention is the willful ignorance of everything we knew before.

John Gruber linked to this article from the New York Time on our perception of time as we age:

Here’s a possible answer: think about what it’s like when you learn something for the first time — for example how, when you are young, you learn to ride a bike or navigate your way home from school. It takes time to learn new tasks and to encode them in your memory. And when you are learning about the world for the first time, you are forming a fairly steady stream of new memories of events, places and people.

My grandfather, who died two years ago at age 93, used to say that things moved faster when you are older because it is, in fact, actually less of your life. When we are 2 going on 3, that’s 33% of our lives but when we are 49 going on 50, that’s only 2%. This came from a man who decided to learn the computer at age 85. So I think it is reasonable to assume that the article’s author is more accurate than my grandfather on this one.