I went to a school that required uniforms (private school in England). We were forced to be uniform.

This afternoon driving by the high school near my house I was amused to see uniforms everywhere – here a patch of girls all wearing the same types of shorts, with hair pulled back, there a group of emo kids all wearing shades of near identical clothes.

It’s lovely. We all need to be different in our uniform ways.

AndBot, recently featured in Mashable, is about the best source for Android news and reviews out there. If you do anything Android you definitely need to check it out.

To boot, its creator Courtney is a good buddy of mine, a fantastically smart and good guy.

I had a good laugh when I saw Mashable describe it as “one of the best-looking sites when it comes to researching Android apps” though, as I was recently giving Courtney a hard time about the design. Turns out it’s plenty good I guess

Excuse the bullshit title, I’m just a little bit sad right now that my RSS feed is filled with “19 ways to do this” and “7 tricks of the other”. Are we ever going to move beyond this tripe or is this the confirmed future of the web?

Anyway, the point of this post, if there is any, is to reveal to you the secret of getting traffic to your blog and of adding twitter followers. Ready? Here it is:

There is no further secret that I’ve been able to figure out.

Take, for example, my recent post on How To Be A Good Participant On A Panel. It’s brilliant. Go read it. I’ll wait.

That post got tweeted a number of times, including by Dave McClure, one of the most interesting guys in the startup world, and it got a link from Simon Willison, whose link blog is the single best resource for finding all things of interest in the web/tech world.

I am pleased.

Now let me tell you about that blog post. It took about 45 seconds to write, and I came very close to not publishing it. It is, after all, just a little puff of air.

I have at other times written important, interesting, thought provoking masterpieces and even made some effort to get them noticed. Yet, as often as not, they fail to garner any interest.

My Become an Assassin post, however, still gets quite a bit of traffic (from people who actually want to become assassins).

Go figure.

Which is to say, there is no figuring it. When it comes to blogging or tweeting, the best policy is to not worry about it and just write whatever interests you, no matter how earth shattering or inconsequential it is. Resist the urge to censor yourself; just push publish.

Mark Suster and Fred Wilson have both posted on the topic of being a good panelist. I’ll throw in the best advice I ever got on the topic (from Alex, who got it from someone else):

Disagree with other panelists.

A panel of people agreeing with each other is generally tremendously boring, and any topic that’s interesting enough to be brought up as a question to panel must have at least two sides that can be argued.

So argue the other side. Find someone else on the panel willing to go toe to toe with you, and disagree with what they say. The point is not to start a fight, but to create an engaging discussion. It’ll force you to think on your feet and it’ll entertain the audience.

I was doing some log analysis this morning and was struck by the variety of user agents accessing Xpenser. Quite a bit of mobile access with quite a variety of different browsers, as well as some more exotic items (various tablet PCs I don’t recognize, etc).

Then there’s the API access that’s been picking up quite significantly – in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it overtakes regular web access in a little while.

For quite a while the web we had a fairly uniform set of entry points – IE and FireFox for the most part, with a smattering of others thrown in. There is so much more variety now, and the variety is significant – for example, the difference between a mobile device and a desktop browser is much more significant than between IE and FF.

I’m hoping other modes of access become commonplace as well – boxee, tablet PCs, etc.

It feels like we’re at a transition point from uniformity to diversity again. This will mean pain the short term as we adjust, but a richer and more encompassing experience once we make it to the other side.

I’m looking forward to it.

Impressive Ted Talk by Chimamanda Adichie on how stories, and in particular “single stories”, shape our views of cultures. Many parallels with how people typically see Iran.

A great quote from the talk: “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue – it is that they are incomplete“.

I used to read the local newspaper. It was a fairly poor quality view of world events.

As news sources moved to the web I started to read a wider variety of sources – BBC, Le Monde, Haaretz, NY Times, Google News, various Iranian publications, and so forth. I had a better view.

As RSS took over I started to spend more time in Google Reader, with a larger number of sources. The sources, however, were hand-picked by me and the topics they covered were much more niche.

Sure, I had the feed from the NY Times, BBC, etc, but they just couldn’t compete with the blogs. I would only read them occasionally, and finally I gave up and removed them from my feed.

Nowadays I hang out on Twitter, to the detriment of Google Reader.

My sources of news are even more niche, even more hand-picked, and the news itself is headline-only.

It strikes me that I’ve lost something valuable here. I went from being exposed to a world view, much of which I didn’t agree with, to a series of very short, niche, hand-picked news sources.

I have unwittingly self-applied blinders.

An odd and disturbing trend. Nothing is stopping me from regaining the world view, other than my own choices. Yet I remain mostly blind.

I asked my brother Pooya, a former resident of Manhattan, what bridge-and-tunnel (off-island) adventures he’d recommend and where we should eat. Here’s his response, for your benefit:

For directions to all these places, use hotstop, gives you subway and walking directions, very nice, there’s an iphone version too.

First of all, why would you ever want to get off the island?

But if you do, definitely go to Brooklyn instead of Queens, the only interesting thing in Queens is little india.  In Brooklyn, you can go to Prospect park, the whole neighborhood there is pretty cool in a hipsterish kinda way. You could also go all the way out to Coney Island, kinda neat to see once, they have the nathans hot dogs and the old rollercoasters.
F train towards Coney Island, get off at Prospect park (for Prospect park) or go all the way and get to Coney Island.

BROOKLYN:

My recommendation, take the F train to Prospect park, look around the park and then walk around the corner to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, makes a nice day.

You can also head to the Bronx to see the zoo (though living in San Diego, it’s probably not worth it).  If you want to get away from the city feel, you can hop over to Governor’s island, go down to battery park, head a little north and there’s a free ferry that takes you out to this almost deserted island, used to be a navy base or something, take some picnic food and lounge out looking back at the manhattan skyline.  But given your limited time, I would recommend sticking to Manhattan.

Places to Eat:

Check out all the menus and phone numbers: menupages .

Village:

John’s Pizza – good pizza in the village, whole pies only, no slices, another branch in times sq and lots more to eat in the village, so up to you [Me: I wasn't crazy about John's Pizza, but plenty of people like it]

Mamouns (you know about) [Me: we always end up eating here a ridiculous number of times. Really excellent falafels. I recommend the falafel sandwich with baba ganouj. In fact my mouth is watering as I write this. The MacDougal location is nice; you can walk over to Rocco's for desert from there: 119 MacDougal St, New York, NY 10012 212-674-8685]

Rocco’s – dessert, definitely get the canolis
243 Bleecker Street (past 6th Ave) [Me: I ended up over dosing on canolis. The mini eclairs, the napoleans, and just about everything else is good too, so experiment]

Brunos – dessert, especially the chocolate mousse
506 Laguardia Pl & Bleecker St (near wash sq park, NYU)

Thai: Spice – cool looking place and good food, great value (on your way from the village to union sq)
39 E 13th St (at University Pl) [Me: Spice is not high end, but it's actually really good. Another place we ended up eating at multiple times. Several locations in the city so it's easy to get to.]

Sushi – Tomoe Sushi is a nice place, but surprisingly the prepared sushi from Morton Williams supermarket (Bleecker and LaGuardia) is also fresh and excellent.

Times Sq Area:

John’s Pizza – best thing if you have to be in Times Sq for a play or something
260 W 44th St (Btwn 7th & 8th Ave)

Margon – Cuban sandwich place, deli style – get a cuban sandwich or the special (oh crap, forgot the ham thing, still get an oxtail soup)
136 W 46th St  (Btwn 6th & 7th Ave)

Lupa – if you’re going to do a an up-scale meal but dont want to spend too much, this italian place is great, modern (mario battali place)
170 Thompson St (Btwn Houston & Bleecker St)

Soho:

Lombardis pizza – crowded, but worth it, you can call ahead and pick up
32 Spring St  (At Mott St)

Sullivan St Bakery- great soho snack as you’re shopping, fresh bread, the olive is great
533 W 47th St (Btwn 10th & 11th Ave)

Kees Chocolates – you have to try the passion fruit chocolates, take some home too
80 Thompson Street (Spring St)

Katz Deli – really for pastrami so not sure if it’s worth it for you guys
205 E Houston St | At Ludlow St

Central Park area:

Burger Joint – great burgers, simple menu, buy and take to the park for a picnic
118 W 57th St (Btwn 6th & 7th Ave) – hard to find, in the lobby of the Le Meridien hotel, look for a small neon burger sign or just ask in the lobby

Other random places:

Sahara’s – Turkish place on the east side mid 20’s , fresh bread, appetizers
513 2nd Ave (Btwn 28th & 29th St)

Shake shack – Burgers in Madison Sq Park
11 Madison Ave | At 23rd St

Pomme Frites – Belgian fries, lots of topping choices, east village snack if you’re near st. marks
123 2nd Ave | Btwn 7th St & St Marks Pl [Me: these are really excellent, give them a try]
Hopefully that’s enough to get you started.  Keep in mind I haven’t lived there in 3 years so things may have changed, but I’ve been going to my favorites (Katz, Lomardis, Brunos, Roccos) regularly on my visits and can still vouch for them,

Enjoy and bon appetit.

Taking out a row boat in central park is surprisingly fun. I recommend it.

The trip back to JFK, should you decide to take the metro and AirTrain, is extremely long. Coupled with the fact that most airlines don’t offer food anymore on the flight, you’ll want to bring some food with you. A couple of slices of pizza and some pad thai from Spice will do you well.

Turns out Delta charges for checking in even a single bag. That annoys me, so I don’t think I’ll be flying them again.

I was reading Mark Chu-Carroll’s why I won’t be at my high school reunion with considerable sadness and got to thinking about my own experience.

I went to school in ~10 different schools in 3 different continents. I only went to high school in the US for ~ 1 1/2 years, so my experience is limited. I was, however, a very socially inept 15 year old as a senior in high school, so I can claim some geek-in-high-school credit.

My first exposure to U.S. high school violence was in the second week of school. I was walking back from class when a typewriter shattered a window and flew across the walkway. Inside the classroom I saw several large boys attacking each other in a way I’d never seen before: they appeared to be trying to kill each other.

I’m no stranger to school fights. In Iran, even for a studious little boy like myself, fights are common place. I have no idea how many fights I had, but I’d guess maybe once a month. I probably saw at least one fight a day.

In England I had fewer fist fights. Maybe 4 or 5 in ~2 1/2 years.

I’ve seen far fewer fights in the U.S. The fights I have seen, however, have a sickening quality to them. The violent intent is incredible. Elsewhere the goal of the fight is to assert your superiority over the other person. Here it seems to be inflict terrible violence.

Back to Mark’s story: picturing a normal neighbourhood Iran, I can’t imagine a kid needlessly getting his fingers broken while others watched. I left when I was 12 so I may be mistaken, but I just can’t picture it. I don’t think it would fit the culture – someone would step in to stop it.

I can’t really see it happening in England either. I was there till I was 14 so I’m slightly better informed. I’m picturing my school. It just would not happen.

Let me clarify: in Iran I’ve seen grown men get into a fist fight over a taxi, and I’ve seen a crowd gather to egg them on.

I just can’t see the part, however, where one of the fighters, having clearly dominated the other, would start breaking fingers for fun while others watched. The watchers would stop watching – they’d step in.

…

My impression is that physical violence in school in the U.S. is less frequent but more serious than elsewhere. I can’t figure out why.

More than likely I’m mistaken. Let me know your impressions, particularly if you’ve gone to school in multiple countries / states.

Well that was impressive. Somehow I clicked through to a site called totalvirusscanc3 dot com that displayed a web page that mimicked the windows interface of a virus scanner very well, showed a ficticious but real looking virus scan proceeding, and attempted to save an executable on my computer.

Not only were the graphics and the animations dead on, but the site also somehow managed to prevent me from closing the browser tab in Chrome. Even clicking on the tab’s x button didn’t work. I killed the tab via Chrome’s Task Manager, but that killed the whole browser. Not sure how they did that, but I’m impressed.

There’s been a bit of discussion regarding the use of GPL vs. BSD style licenses triggered by Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s Twenty Questions About GPL and Zed Shaw’s Why I GPL. Interesting stuff, even made it to Slashdot. James Bennett has some intelligent things to say about it.

My 2 cents on this, mostly on Zed’s post. The gist of his argument seems to be that he wrote a very popular piece of software, but was denied recognition and financial benefit due to a conspiracy between the triumvirate of VCs, startup founders, and Al Qaeda, all enabled by an over-permissive license.

I absolutely agree with Zed that the choice of license is the author’s alone, and whoever doesn’t like it can take their ball and go home. Ripping on a project because of choice of license is indeed jerkish, although I don’t know if there was any such ripping in this case. Anyway, license choice belongs to the author, agreed.

Zed’s point on VC’s, however, starts to get murky: “I have no reason to give them unrestricted use of my software since they are only interested in turning my software into a hot IPO 2-5 years from now.” That’s … misguided. Infrastructure software has so very little to do with a company reaching IPO – it’s just not very connected. I’m not saying infrastructure software has no value – in fact it’s quite valuable – it’s just not what’s “turned into an IPO.”

Skipping to Zed’s fifth point: “I’ll always be an open source developer, but quite frankly, we’re dying off because the companies who use our software do not give back.” Huh. That’s another one that misses the mark for me. Open source software is more vibrant than ever, and most of the most interesting stuff seems to be coming from startups. Possibly the same ones Zed’s berating for using his software without giving back.

Anyway, open source is definitely not dying off.

So to Zed’s main point, about recognition and financial benefit from open sores software. It’s reasonable to expect to get consulting offers when your software becomes popular. Everybody I know who wrote reasonably popular open source software has gotten plenty of consulting offers. Hell, I even got a fair amount of offers related to my silly tcl-sql interface that had maybe 500 users back in the day.

So why didn’t Zed? He’s clearly a very smart and capable developer, and his software clearly is popular. So what’s the deal?

Well, it might be related to his reputation. Not related to his ability as a developer, not related to his choice of a BSD license.

His blog used to be called “Zed’s So Fucking Awesome”, and he was world renowned for his rants.

When you’re known more for your rants than for your software (perhaps unfairly), it should come as little surprise if you don’t have consulting offers lined up around the block. Rants scare people. “Fucking Awesome” and talk of how you can kick my scrawny ass because of your martial arts training scares people. Don’t get me wrong – it was very entertaining, and I certainly enjoyed reading his blog, but my very next thought was not to go recommend him for a consulting job. Hell, he might kick my ass if I looked at him wrong!

Now everyone seems to agree the Zed is in fact a wonderful human being when you meet him in person, and my email exchanges with him have been nothing short of extraordinary – he’s been ludicrously helpful. I’m saying, he’s probably a great guy to work with.

But that’s not the image he projected.

So, my point, after all these wasted words, is that Zed’s financial prospects are helped far more by his new blog and demeanor than by his choice of license. I’m not saying he shouldn’t be free to say what he wants – I actually really enjoyed his old blog – but I am saying he shouldn’t be surprised if it impacts his financial prospects.

Thinking through my performance as coach (of my son’s under-8 soccer team):

We had a tough season, winning only a single game. Clearly not very good.

On the other hand, each and every player showed improvement, some quite significant. One parent even took the time to thank me for helping his son find a passion for the sport.

The season ended on a very high note: we came in first in the tournament (based on points). We won two games, tied one, and lost one (in the final minutes). We played very well, showed a real understanding of the game, and played as a team. I was very proud of every one of the players.

On the other hand, a big part of the reason we did so well was our super-sub. This kid was incredible. We were short on players so he played for our team.

Hmm. So we have a clearly improved set of players, playing as a team, playing their hearts out. Fantastic. I’d like to take some credit for that.

The biggest impact on winning, however, was having an excellent player on our side.

I can’t help but think there’s a management lesson in here somewhere. Something about hiring the best you can…

We subscribed to the local paper, mainly to support a cause that was raising money by selling subscriptions.

Thursday through Sunday we get the paper physically delivered to our house. And I get to experience the value first-hand.

The value of the printed paper is less than zero. I’d prefer they stop delivering it immediately.

I end up with newspaper all over the house, I feel bad about the wasted paper, and I have to make room in my already overflowing recycling bin.

This is not a comment on the contents of the paper; it could be great stuff for all I know (I’m not really reading the local papers so much anymore). It is a comment on printed newspaper as a medium.

A few years ago I used to argue that paper is so much more convenient that electronic media that I’ll never switch. In those few years, unbeknownst to me, I did switch. Paper is now less convenient for me than carrying my little netbook around.

Simon Willison asks whether people are using Twitter as a replacement for RSS aggregators, and finds anecdotally that a sizable number are.

I can buy that. I still prefer RSS for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the velocity of Twitter is too high – I don’t have time to keep up with a lot of the conversations, and by the time I get around to reading (if I do), it’s often too late to participate. It’s also annoying to see partial nonsensical conversations between people you’re otherwise interested in. A lot of the old timers are using Twitter as the new IRC, and I’m not quite used to that yet.

Anyway, as a still-interested-in-RSS fellow I’m concerned not about people using Twitter as an RSS aggregator replacement, but about authors tweeting instead of blogging. I enjoy reading longer, more thoughtful pieces, and I feel like people are decreasing their blogging output in favor of increased tweeting. Looking at my RSS feeds it feels like a good number of the non-commercial authors are publishing less than they used to. I suppose if I wasn’t lazy I could actually calculate this instead of guessing, but, alas, I’m lazy.

So, Simon, perhaps you could ask the complement of the authors as well: are they using Twitter in place of writing blog posts?

My older son is a very gentle human being – he doesn’t want to hurt anyone or anything. When he was 4 he realized that meat comes from killing cows and declared he was a vegeterian. 

Yesterday we were out at mission bay and he was getting thrown around by a 5 year old. He’s almost 7, quite strong, and takes wrestling, so I was perturbed. I pulled him aside and asked him about it – how come you’re getting beaten up by a little kid?

His answer really struck me. He said

What are you worried about? I have all this power. But I don’t want to use it against him – he’s just a little kid.

I was dumbstruck and impressed. Sounds like something superman would say.

I had the opportunity to introduce one friend, Alex Shah, to another, Andrew Warner, leading to this fun interview on how to approach and launch iPhone apps. Stop by and take a quick listen.

Alex is a lot of fun to talk to, even more fun to argue with, and he’s never afraid of telling you what’s on his mind. In fact I remember years ago I asked him how a panel he was on went, and he said “disaster – I couldn’t get anyone to disagree with me!”

If you run into Alex ask him about iPhone apps, or better yet, ask him how he feels about the high-speed train initiative.

I’m starting to make use of Twitter more, in the sense that I’m starting to actually follow random people and read their updates once in a while. 

My twitter stream breaks down into people I know well and would like to keep close contact with, and the general *find nice way to say twitter loud mouths here*. I’d like to see every update from the former group and I’d like to pay attention to the latter group whenever I have the time and interest.

This is pretty easy in RSS – I have different folders for my different feeds and read them as I want.

I haven’t found an effective equivalent for Twitter. Is there one? Or am I holding on to an antiquated concept?

Maybe I should whip up a quick Twitter to RSS feed converter and stay blissfully stuck in my yesteryear habits.

Btw, I’m Parand on Twitter, follow me if you want to know what the most recent flavor of cheese I’m trying is.

The topic of public transportation and the proposed high-speed train comes up often whenever Alex is around. I voted against it, but I actually would take a 3 hour train from San Diego to the Bay area that cost the same or less than the plane because practically speaking with security and such the plane ends up taking 3 hours anyway, and train time is actually productive while plane time is wasted.

What do you think? Would you realistically ever take the train, or always opt for the plane?

I was thinking about what book to read next and it occurred to me to ask you nice people. I’m in the mood for something factual but interesting – something like The Prize, if you’re familiar with that. I was intrigued by Fiasco but I haven’t looked into it.

So what do you say, what should I read next?

Wikihow’s How To Stop Accumulating Books has been making the rounds in blogs and delicious popular. Reminds me of the ultimate book non-accumulator, a good friend of my dad’s.

This particular friend of my dad’s would always bring me books when he came to visit. I was a voracious reader, to the point where people made fun of me for it, so I always loved his visits. And he brought interesting books – not children’s books, but histories, etc. I think he brought me Animal Farm when I was 8 or 9.

As I got older I started to notice something odd about the books – they didn’t belong to him.

Eventually I found out he didn’t own any books. He’d take a book from you, read it, and give it to someone else. Usually without permission.

I was fascinated. I remember asking him about it, and he told me: books cannot be owned. Ideas are the ultimate expression of freedom, and to cage them is unnatural. Books are for reading and for passing on.

That made a big impression on me. I’ve always thought sharing books with friends is the most amazing gift.

Anyway, that’s why I’ve never returned that book you lent me