An Annoucement

For reasons that revolve around my own inner personal fear of failure, I have kept this announcement to myself for way too long. This is my demon, and I am coping.

But the long overdue news is that I have written a novel. I've added a link on this page that points to My Writings and that will point you to an overview, more information, and the actual content of the book (for your reading pleasure).

Meanwhile, I'm want to talk about writing and my process.

First and foremost, I write in mixed-tenses while I am drafting anything. This is quite annoying and has been the grating source of more revision than anything else. Secondly, a major reason I disliked grad-school was because it took away from time that I would have rather spent writing. Thirdly, slow and steady wins the race. While writing 2076, I set goals of writing one page per night and did fairly well to meet this goal. After six months, I had something substantial. The thing that kept me on track was typing on a non-networked laptop. There are too many distractions while connected. Maybe someday I will find a networked groove and re-commit myself to writing a page per day, but it is an uphill battle. Fourthly, I write to capture a small piece of my school's motto. 'Nuf said. Last, I am a guy and while writing female characters I sometimes will frequently portray them poorly. For example, I write women who are sympathetic to others and unselfish. "Rob, no woman would do such-and-such," my (female) critics will say. I take no offense to this type of criticism. I actually find it enlightening, and willing seek to tweak the situations to make them more believable.

So, what's next? My next writing project is a novel that deals with relationships and growing up in the 21st Century with trials and tribulations the accompany it. The working title for this is Youthful Exuberance, and I accomplished the grand task of finishing the first draft of the first chapter about a week ago. Hooray!

The journey continues...

-Rob

A Change of Perspective

Up until about an hour ago I felt very negatively about continuing my education. I'm reconsidering now because I may have had an epiphany that it would be a wonderful experience. The saying is, "Why not change the world", and more education would open opportunities in front of me to do this.

This is the program which I would be enrolled in.

http://www.draper.com/fellow/fellow.html

I would go for a Ph.D is a Science or Technology field with a focus on Industrial Robotic Automation including but not limited to either (a) autonomous vehicles, or (b) space exploration. And I would be studying at one of the best schools for this type of thing in the world, under the best people. Take a look at their mission statement, because it impresses me with their ambition.

http://web.mit.edu/facts/graduate.html

For more than a century, MIT graduate programs have provided ideal environments for advanced study by students and faculty working together to extend the boundaries of knowledge.

To be fair, I might start thinking about applying in late 2008 for enrollment in Fall 2009, but that timeline is more promising than my past claims that I would never-ever go back for more school (and this is more just more proof that people and ideas change, and there is no such thing as "never-ever").

Killing Ticketmaster

Here's an idea for an Open Source project that I think would be successful: An online ticket sales engine.

I think with a small amount of effort and some ingenuity, it would be possible to code up a system that accomplishes the same basic goals of the online ticket behemoth. Furthermore, there is room for improvement over what is available. Ticketmaster is slow and has a bad customer User-Interface.

They manage to have a great bot-interface, though. I don't know how they can't manage to prevent ticket re-sellers from using automatic tools to buy tickets the instant they go on sale, but it is similarly troubling that Microsoft can't manage to write proprietary software which can't be hacked. As an Open Source project, I think it would be pretty easy to develop the algorithms needed to keep bots from buying tickets by relying on a good fundamental design rather than "Security through Obscurity".

Of course, a goal of this project would be twofold:

(a) Let small venues book bands and sell advanced tickets in a progressive way without dealing with the overhead of working with Ticketmaster.

(b) Let big venues sell tickets to real fans, and do away with the "after-market" for buying tickets which favors the wealthy.

The advantage of being Open Source instead of just proprietary and competing against Ticketmaster might be hard to see. The general advantage of this project is to offer a competing product against one that nobody really likes. Fundamentally, Ticketmaster is as strong as they are because of deals with venues. They are basically a monopoly for getting tickets without going to a stadium Box Office (which are limited by operating hours and accessibility). As a monopoly, they could underbid practically any venture that attempts to dethrone them to maintain their power. However, it is much harder to underbid a service operating with trivial costs of doing business (like Open Source does). A decentralized development system is essential because it would be easier for decentralized developers to establish their own local contacts to offer the service to, whereas a centralized group would be geographically limited. The obvious bonus is the charity of free development. It would be easy to get people to work on this problem because it is awesome and there are a ton of people who would benefit (venues, performers, and fans of events). So, the reason that an Open Source Online Ticket Sales Engine would be successful is (a) competitive benefits, (b) decentralization, (c) cost-effectiveness, and (d) all-around awesomeness.

There is another additional bonus of running an Open Source web-platform. For the good of the community, the service will be run from a centralized website named after whatever the service is to be called. Since there is obvious overhead with hosting an internet presence, there is the possibility for individual artists and venues to deploy their own installation of it. Because of the proprietary nature of their business, Ticketmaster.com is forced to use 400 servers which cost $2,500 each to support their business (see the chart 2/3 of the way down this semi-ironic article where the VP of Technology tauts Open Source). The centralized website can get away with running 2 servers, initially. As time goes by and small amounts of revenues are generated, then more can be added. But with an Open project, there would be nothing stopping anybody from deploying there own remote system - which would be great.

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After some research, In Ticketing is already trying to do this. I need to look into them more.