For You Mamasita
Corpo de Mujer
Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos,
te pareces al mundo en tu actitud de entrega.
Mi cuerpo de labriego salvaje te socava
y hace saltar el hijo del fondo de la tierra.
Fui solo como un túnel. De mí huían los pájaros
y en mí la noche entraba su invasión poderosa.
Para sobrevivirme te forjé como un arma,
como una flecha en mi arco, como una piedra en mi honda.
Pero cae la hora de la venganza, y te amo.
Cuerpo de piel, de musgo, de leche ávida y firme.
Ah los vasos del pecho! Ah los ojos de ausencia!
Ah las rosas del pubis! Ah tu voz lenta y triste!
Cuerpo de mujer mía, persistiré en tu gracia.
Mi sed, mi ansia sin límite, mi camino indeciso!
Oscuros cauces donde la sed eterna sigue,
y la fatiga sigue, y el dolor infinito.
Vente poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada - Pablo Neruda, 1924
Body of a Woman
Body of woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look yourself like a world in your attitude of surrender.
My rough peasant’s body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depths of the earth.
I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me
and the night enveloped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged to you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, like a stone in my sling.
But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Ah those goblets of the chest! Ah those eyes of absence!
Ah the roses of the pubis! Ah your voice slow and sad!
Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my unbounded desire, my uncertain road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst follows,
and tiredness follows, and the infinite ache.
Twenty Love poems and a song of despair - Pablo Neruda, 1924
Christopher Hitchens Lived
I always knew there was a risk in the bohemian lifestyle… I decided to take it because it helped my concentration, it stopped me being bored — it stopped other people being boring. It would make me want to prolong the conversation and enhance the moment. If you ask: would I do it again? I would probably say yes. But I would have quit earlier hoping to get away with the whole thing. I decided all of life is a wager and I’m going to wager on this bit… In a strange way I don’t regret it. It’s just impossible for me to picture life without wine, and other things, fueling the company, keeping me reading, energising me. It worked for me. It really did.
– Christopher Hitchens 1949 – 2011
Scale and Perspective
“It takes these very simple-minded instructions—’Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’––but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.”
PHP Gravatar Class
I was recently working on a small side project when I ran across a need for a php implementation of a class that would produce Gravatar urls.
Generating Gravatar urls is not a complicated affair. In fact, it’s not out of the question to write a one-off gravatar function as needed. I wanted something slightly more robust and reuseable. I was surprised as I surveyed the php gravatar classes in github to find a morass of over engineered solutions that were often tightly coupled to a particular framework.
It’s understandable that the framework specific examples would be popular on github. More often than not a php coder will be working inside a standard framework and is more likely to seek code designed to plug-in directly to their framework of choice. Parsing the program flow and logic of these modules is difficult if you’re not familiar with the conventions and peculiarities of the framework for which they are designed. I was looking for a more barebones implementation that I can drop in a variety of contexts or use as a skeleton when implementing a gravatar class in a specific context.
After a page or two of browsing I decided it would be faster to just write one myself. It is a very simple and straightforward gravatar class. It uses sensible defaults and all parameters except the email address are optional.
Usage is as a simple as:
1 | $gravatar_url = gravatar::url('bob@bitcap.com'); |
If you are feeling more specific, pass parameters like so:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | $email = filter_input(INPUT_GET,'e',FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL); $params = array( 'secure' => false, 'default' => 'monsterid', 'rating' => 'x', 'size' => 256 ); $url = gravatar::url($email,$params); echo '<h1>'. $url . '</h1> <img src="'. $url .'" alt="" / >'; |
To clone or copy my simple php gravatar class:
Occupy The Future
We need a course correction. The world is changing and technology is introducing new ways of distributing power and ideas. In some ways a correction is inevitable. Then only question is what direction we’re going to pick.
In times of great technological change options become available that simply weren’t possible before. Fortunes are made and lost, businesses pivot and react, politicians opine, preachers stir up anxiety and the clever take advantage of the shifting situation.
It is unlikely that extant systems of power are going to facilitate an orderly transfer from the old networks of family and corporate control. You can see that in action in the lawsuits vomited out of the RIAA and MPAA and other bastions of rapidly disintegrating leverage. You can see it in the consolidation of broadcast media. You can see it in the rigidity of polarized politics solidified by data driven gerrymandering and campaigning. The old power structures know a fire sale when they see it and they are stocking up.
The correction is unlikely to come from tea party rallies or professional agitators. They are tools of traditional power and were a useful distraction that gave the media something to talk about other than what was really going on.
Our society is a tangle of legacy systems, spaghetti code and undocumented APIs that far too many people rely on to ever expect a major rewrite. We will see the same sort of patches that we’re applied in Teddy Roosevelt’s emergency scripts. Those later formed the base of FDRs major framework upgrade. If we’re lucky, we’ll get something like LBJ’s Great Society expansion pack. Republicans want to fork the whole thing for a stripped down system where everything is static and private. Nobody is going to sign off on any of that, so we’re just going to creak by with occasional emergency patches and more committees sent off to draw up a spec that will never get implemented.
So how are things going to get corrected this time? This time it’s up to the users. Users are pragmatists. Users aren’t interested in reading manuals or getting nagged about upgrading all the time. If they have to, they’ll patch together excel documents and screenshots and MS Paint drawings, but they’ll get it done.
One example of this is the Occupy Wall Street movement. The goals of this movement have been endlessly debated. The powers that be are exasperated because they can’t figure out how to make these people just go away. Lately they’ve tried police raids and talk radio mockery. The occupiers remain infuriatingly inscrutable. If they won’t offer solutions, why should we pay attention?
The point is paying attention. The point of the movement is to get in the way. For years dissent has been marginalized as the sphere of acceptable opinion has lurched further and further to the right. Media personalities are incentivized to confuse and distract. Even now the bobbing heads on cable news are spreading rumors that the Occupiers are having sex in public and defecating on the sidewalks. They hope to dehumanize the occupiers and keep the hoi polloi from identifying with their fellow citizens.
The movement has remained peaceful and undistracted. They remain encamped in the shadow of power. A power that betrays its nervousness in sporadic outbursts of state violence.
Will the occupy movement change anything? I doubt it will directly. It has changed the discussion and radicalized a lot of pepper sprayed citizens. I think most importantly it has given us an object lesson in power.
Who is defended, who is beaten, who is heard, who is silenced… by speaking up and demanding an answer in the public sphere the occupy movement has laid bare the priorities of the 1% and their government.
What we do with that information is anyones guess. The only thing we know is that the future will be a lot different than now. That’s not prophecy, just recognizing the turbulent transitions that are shuddering through every human institution.
We’ll be living in that future. It’s up to us to decide what life will look like and what organizations will survive. We have the tools and the information to build a sustainable and human centered future. Of course, we also have the tools to oppress and exploit each other. What we decide to do with these tools will be a matter of loud and contentious discussion in our streets, government halls and media. The most important thing you can do is be part of that discussion.
falling back
I like daylight savings time because it reminds me that my perception of time is a completely arbitrary abstraction based on the base 60 / 12 number system of a dead civilization which I have to translate into base 10 numerals in my head because my ancestors never thought to use their closed hand as one and six, but that’s ok because they are both, in turn, just arbitrary abstractions.
Why Start Up In Saint Louis?
Traditionally, St. Louis has made its fortune on the rivers. It’s easy to see why. Sitting at the confluence of the two largest rivers in North America, during the height of the river trade, St. Louis attracted immigrants from all over, new businesses and even a shady scheme or two.
However, as America has moved to over the road trucking and air cargo, the leverage that St. Louis’ location afforded the city began to wane. Since then, the city has used a more diversified basket of features to entice investors and businesses to grow our local economy.
The fate of every city is intricately wrapped up in its geography. The unique geographic features of cities like the shipping ports of New York and New Orléans, the prairie isolation of Omaha and the central location of Chicago have always been the major driver of the regional economies.
One unique example is the San Francisco bay area — particularly the J shaped strip of towns we collectively call ‘Silicon Valley.’ The area is interesting because their geographic advantages seem more social than geologic.
It is a beautiful place. That much at least is unambiguously attributed to its location. However, the major economic draw is the result of a series of fortunate accidents including government military spending, well-financed and widely available higher education, openness to immigration and cultural diversity and other features that have entangled into a feedback loop that results in the Valley being where America goes to invent stuff.
It is a real advantage. The silicon valley is where the money is. The money is there because the entrepreneurs are there. They are there because of the great schools, weather and, of course, the money. There’s also The Network. Though Steve Jobs’ famous license plate-less Mercedes is no longer parking in their handicap spots, the cafés, bars and noodle shops up and down the valley are full of people chatting, dreaming, lying and scheming. Everywhere you look another young entrepreneur is hustling his way down the block while another emails her lawyer another stack of impenetrable documents.
Things are happening in the valley because people have come there to make things happen.
Are things happening in St. Louis?
Have you been down to Cherokee street? If not, you owe yourself a taco so go down and take a walk around. You will see little businesses growing up between the Taquerias and check cashing joints. There are startups bootstrapping their way up above art galleries and at tables in communist bakeries.
There aren’t any big VC offices. You won’t find investment bankers or opportunistic MBAs. There’s a few Rockstar Programmers, but they’re actually programmers in rock bands. You’ll find new sites like StartLouis.com and hacker spaces like the Arch Reactor. There are creative people tooling around in their custom and inexplicably illegal food trucks.
Music, community, cheap rent, World Series winning baseball teams, smart people, cool hangouts – Saint Louis has a lot to offer. It’s also, for a lot of innovators and creators, home.
It used to be, when a young man needed to find his fortune, that he would pack up his belongings and hit the road. Opportunity was limited and hard to find. As we entered the industrial age, cities exploded into sprawling, soot covered opportunity engines. Economic opportunities increase in tight correlation with individual’s opportunity to interact with each other. As the number of nodes in the network increase, the value of the network to each node grows exponentially. On the flip side, the value of each node is correlated with how many connections it has to other nodes, either through many weak direct connections or a few strong connections to other highly connected nodes. It really is all about who you know and, by extension, who they know.
The tightly connected cities stretched out and connected with each other in stages including trains, telegraphs, telephones and highways. Finally, in an unprecedented whirlwind of copper cables, fiber optics and finally persistent personal wireless strands that connect us to each other in pools of actionable market data.
That tightly wound network of investors, institutions and entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley is likely to experience something like what St. Louis went through when the man-made networks of first the Railroad and then the highway system suddenly devalued the river network.
Those were networks with more nodes and edges than the relatively sparse river ports. That added value is clear when you see how quickly rail and road replaced the riverboat.
The ad hoc networks that are springing up across the internet are challenging the old gatekeepers. Instead of supplicating on Sand Hill road, you can run a Kickstarter campaign or use lean methods to bootstrap your idea into an MVP on South Grand or Delmar or Cherokee Street. Being funded is still a big advantage. You can bully and buy your way into viability if you’re funded and the right combination of ruthless and lucky. But in a pinch you can be scrappy and clever make up for whole choirs of Angel investors.
I don’t want to downplay the significant advantages the Silicon Valley can confer on a hot startup. You can build companies in the Valley in a time-frame and scale that would be hard to replicate elsewhere. However, you can build a company in St. Louis on a scale and time-frame that would be unthinkable out west.
Everyone is preaching the gospel of metrics, experimentation and optimizing your way to profitability. Have you noticed that all the big funded companies are experimenting on the same things? Some of the experiments are about validating the hobby-horse of a particular investor and others are CYA experiments in doing whatever is on the home page of TechCrunch today.
When you’re operating at an outlandish scale with other people’s money you have a limited range of experimentation you can get away with. Everyone will get behind seeing if you can pretend to be Groupon for a while and moving the needle a couple of points one way or the other with a different colored button is a productive use of your time when your visitor logs look like pro football attendance records.
What you can’t do is experiment with the premise of capitalism itself. You can’t just paste together a pastiche of open source software without a marketing plan. You can’t trade beer for code. Well, you can… we just have better beer.
We’re living in a world where is often takes a disaster like a tornado, earthquake or hurricane to remind us of how much where we are affects who we are. When I was a kid we heard rumors that kids in California wore fashions we wouldn’t be aware of for a couple of years. We dreamed of growing up and running off to New York to be in the center of it all.
Now there isn’t a center. We’ve agreed to search not sort. The traditional way of making a fortune was to secure exclusive control of a node or two of a large system. Industrialization and electronic communications allowed for control of more and more nodes, and even entire systems. The early trusts were the natural end of that progression.
We’re reaching what, optimistically, is the peak of our current cycle. The computer’s ability to exploit information for monetary gain has reached a point where winners and losers are decided by CPU cycles and, literally, the speed of light.
Having value created virtually on a network that doesn’t respond to scarcity like its real world proxies has been an interesting experiment and it has led to some outlandish results like credit default swaps being sold for more than the GDP of the planet.
On a happier note, one of the things created in the wake of our sudden and ubiquitous interconnection is the opportunity to use information in novel ways from anywhere. When the internet first left the academic and military cloisters it was born in, we experienced a sudden burst of innovation that almost outran itself. As the network’s physical infrastructure has caught up to demand, we’ve seen a more rationed growth in innovation. Somewhere in the last few years we reached a tipping point. Mobile networks have expanded to reach of the network to a saturation level unimaginable just a decade ago.
Do you remember Jott? As I barely remember it, it was a service that allowed you to store notes and ideas and todo lists in a personal space on their website. It was attractive then because it allowed you to connect to the world wide network in that “last mile” when you weren’t physically in front of a connected computer. The smart phone rendered Jott irrelevant instantly. Instead of running a custom line that last mile, the mobile networks brought the internet itself to your pocket.
That network saturation level is a seismic event in human history. The network is expanding at a rate closely approximating the growth of information itself. According to some interpretations of network theory, the value of the network is growing exponentially to that rate. That’s a pretentious undergraduate way of saying that it is getting easier and easier to capture the value created on that network.
As that happens, it becomes easier to take advantage of the resources available in St. Louis. A couple of decades ago, creating a tech startup in Saint Louis was so arduous as to be nearly impossible. As evidence I present a list of notable tech startups from St. Louis in that time period. (I don’t have a list, I’m sure there are some. But that’s my point.)
Back then you didn’t have access to the information, equipment and money that a silicon valley company had. You also didn’t have a deep network of fellow entrepreneurs. Even if there were a sufficient number of peers, finding each other and coordinating meetings was a challenge unto itself.
Now, we can connect with each other instantly by location and interest. We can read streams of each others thoughts before ever meeting! Now we can download open source software that does all the stuff you needed money and employees for in the past. Now we have free information and tutorials that will teach you skills that the best universities could not teach you at any price. You can ask questions of experts and receive instant answers. You can build something cool and people can share it with a twitch. Before you know it people from all over the world are cloning your repo, or signing up for your MVP or reading your rambling blog posts.
The value of any one of those things is incalculable. The best way to estimate their value is to use them.
- Start connecting with people who know how to make things
- Develop a habit of sharing what’s on your mind online
- Make plans and schemes at Cartel or Mokabe‘s or Kaldi‘s.
- Celebrate a release with some Ted Drewes.
- If someone whines about moving to the valley, ask them how the Giants did this year. Cough cough.
St. Louis is a great place to start a business because it’s our home. We live in a unique time in which, for better or worse, we’ve been asked to release the alpha version of the Human Network Operating System. For some reason, most of it is being written in Javascript and PHP.
St. Louis is a great place to start a business because it’s full of people who think it’s ok to be creative. We let our children play on a rusted out airplane attached to the side of an old shoe factory. In a city famous for its brick buildings and centered on the regal architecture of the courthouse we installed a 630 foot stainless steel arch. Have you had a pork steak? I’m just saying we’re willing to try new things.
Our state sobriquet is the “Show Me State.” It’s essentially an ode to data driven innovation. It’s not hard to convince a Missourian of the value of market validation.
At the same time, there is another essential character trait that helps drive innovators in this region. It’s a default openness to just rolling with it. Think about our regional specialties. Gooey Butter cake was invented, the legend goes, when a baker reversed the proportions of sugar and flour in a standard yellow cake recipe. Instead of throwing out the gooey and gloppy failure, she just rolled with it. Gooey is now a feature not a bug. Problem solved.
Not convinced? What other weird stuff do we eat here? Toasted Ravioli? A chef accidentally dropped an order of ravioli in a deep fryer and just rolled with it. It’s fine, just dip it in the sauce.
Monsanto was trying to make a serum to create an army of super soldiers but spilled the secret formula on some weeds that shriveled up. The army of super soldiers drowned during a float trip on the Meramec river but Roundup makes billions. Rolled with it.
The economy is in transition. It will be a bumpy ride in many places. Having a tendency to tenacity and curiosity is a great combo now. St. Louis was largely insulated from the fallout of the housing crisis. Driving around the city now you will see new businesses growing in the rugged remains of old industries. You’ll see big buildings that don’t seem to be used for anything but inside are humming thousands and thousands of servers taking advantage of our location and Washington University’s historic role near the backbone of the internet. You will see creative businesses like the Cherokee Photobooth and Upcycle Exchange are exploring entire new business models.
Sucking the marrow out of dying power structures is a perfectly rational strategy as the perfectly rational sociopaths on Wall Street are all too eager to prove. Creating the future is a much riskier strategy but never has it been more accessible and more rewarding. St. Louis is a great place to try to build the future.
Also, we have frozen custard.
Photo Credits: CC licensed photos from http://www.flickr.com/photos/paparutzi/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/dherholz and http://www.flickr.com/photos/janet/
How to setup a new Magento Store
This post is a step by step walk-through to setting up a new online store using Magento. It is not just a technical guide, but a comprehensive guide to:
- Setting up your Magento server environment
- Downloading and installing Magento
- Setting up a Magento development environment
- Selecting and applying Magento themes
- Selecting and Installing Magento Plugins
- 10 Must Have Magento Plugins
- Magento Optimization Tips and Techniques
- Configuring your Magento store
- Security and Performance Best Practices for Magento
- Content Management and SEO Optimization for Magento
- Configuring Product Types in Magento
- Bulk Upload of Products into Magento
- Customizing Magento with PHP
- Common Gotchas and Problems with Magento
- Using Google Products, Shopzilla and Aggregators with Magento
- Magento specific Google Analytics settings
- Creating Conversion Funnels in Google Analytics for a Magento Store
- Conversion optimization with Magento
- A/B Testing with Magento
- Writing your Privacy, Shipping and Returns Policy for Magento
- Trustmarks in your Magento Checkout Process
- Effective Email Management for Magento Stores
- Integrating third-party CMS systems and WordPress into Magento
- Acquiring high converting traffic to your Magento store
- Customer Retention strategies for Magento
Introduction to Magento
Magento is a popular PHP based e-commerce web application. A company called Varien developed the Magento platform and released it in 2008. The company that owns the application is now called Magento, inc. and is now 100% owned by eBay.
Magento is available as a free and open source application. It is also sold in other editions by Magento, Inc. I am focusing this guide on the Community Edition of Magento. Some parts, especially the marketing chapters, are applicable to any Magento store, and generally to any online store.
Magento is very powerful and very configurable. This means, of course, that Magento has a steep learning curve. However, the application is carefully and logically organized, so by learning the basics you will find the concepts increasingly clear and may find yourself a Magento expert in no time!
Check back soon for the first in my Magento Series, Setting Up Your Magento Server Environment.
Débrouillard
Débrouillard is what every plongeur wants to be called. A débrouillard is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se débrouiller — get it done somehow.
— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
How To Stand Out
Adam Lisagor as Photographed by Noe Montes
“At each creative decision, ask whether you’re doing it a certain way because that’s the way you’ve seen it done before. If the answer is yes, then figure out if there’s a better way. You’ll stand apart from the rest, and we’ll love you for it.”
From a profile of Adam Lisagor in Fast Company
As a designer or developer, it’s easy to get intimidated by the work of your peers. In this age of dribbble and github, we can see each others works and inspect it in close detail. Sometimes I’ll stumble on someones repo on github and just be blown away by the quality and quantity of their work.
What sets some people’s work above the rest? It’s almost never how difficult the problems they solve are. Most problems are either simple or just haven’t been broken down into small enough pieces. From what I’ve seen it’s more likely their attention to detail and their taste.
Differences in taste are easy to see among designers but I think it applies just as much to developers. We just call it elegance.
When you have high standards and either the talent or persistence to meet those standards, you can make something great.
