If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
—Jack Handey

A friend forwarded me a provocatively-titled article by Natalie Angier in the science section of The New York Times: Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too. The premise is that plants are sophisticated organisms with complex defense mechanisms, and therefore have as much of a right to life as any other organism.

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze.

There’s some really interesting information about the defense mechanisms of some plants in the article, but they should have left the editorializing to the op-ed page. Angier may say that she does not mean to offer “a trite argument or a chuckled aside,” but that’s exactly how it comes off to vegans. This question has been posed many times online, usually facetiously and antagonistically, and most of us have heard it in person by at least a few people who think they’re being clever. Lots of reasonable responses have been written, too, but since it still comes up, I’ll add my own summary.

I don’t think most vegans think of plants as static or passive. It’s pretty obvious that they react to their environment, and if they didn’t have defense mechanisms, they wouldn’t have survived as species. That’s not the point. The concern is whether the plants perceive suffering. I’m not speaking for all vegans here, but in my opinion the only relevant question is whether eating a plant-based diet results in more or less overall suffering than one that contains animals.

The part that really bugs me, though, is the unstated conclusion that this line of argument usually implies: assuming that plants do suffer, that means that we can’t eat without causing suffering, so we might as well not worry about it. If vegans are still making plants suffer, then making animals suffer isn’t really any worse. Or, to put it another way, if you can’t be perfectly “good” by some ethical standard (don’t cause suffering) then you can arbitrarily redefine your ethical standards to validate whatever it is you’re already doing.

The key phrase is “whatever it is you’re already doing,” because most people who make this argument don’t really want to accept the logical conclusion of the idea that one form of suffering is just as significant as another, which would be complete nihilism. Why not eat humans, then? There’s another unstated assumption that humans get some untouchable moral status, but usually there’s no real rationale given for this. I think nihilism is a legitimate interpretation of the world, or at least a logically consistent one, but that’s not what most of the animal suffering apologists are promoting. They’re saying it’s OK to eat animals because eating either plants or animals might cause suffering, but it’s not OK to eat humans or intentionally cause other human suffering because… well, just because. It’s a lazy form of morality that amounts to “do what you’re taught” or even “do whatever serves you, if you can get away with conveniently.” To justify this against the case for veganism, you need to convince yourself that there is a fundamental flaw in vegan reasoning, so you argue a position that you don’t actually believe yourself: that vegans are committing an injustice by killing plants.

It’s a pretty easy argument to counter. The goal of veganism, at least in its utilitarian form, is not to be a perfect being that never does anything that causes suffering (which not even all plants can claim to be) but to make choices that try to minimize the amount of suffering caused. Even if plants are capable of suffering, a plant-based diet would result in less suffering for the simple reason that raising animals for food requires the consumption of far more plant food than feeding it to humans directly.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it.

He goes on to highlight how unusual this is when compared with the previous generation, who rarely had the need or opportunity to write outside of school assignments.

What intrigued me, though, wasn’t the amount of extracurricular writing, but how students’ perception of writing has changed in a culture where most of their work is widely shared.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

This struck a chord with me. I left my university after two years. Originally, I intended to go back after a year or two, but I never did. There were a lot of reasons why I left, but a big one was that, like these students, I had a lack of enthusiasm about my course work. School assignments seemed pointless to me. Most of them didn’t really benefit anyone, maybe not even myself. Sure, sometimes the process of completing an assignment helped me learn the material, but a lot of the time the purpose felt more like I was just proving that I had already learned it. Not putting my knowledge into practice, not creating something, just going through a literally academic exercise.

This was especially true because by the time I was halfway through my freshman year, I scored a part-time job as a Java developer, thanks to some good luck and the help of my roommate. I had the freedom to work remotely from my dorm room for as many or as few hours as I could manage each week. This made it hard to feel motivated to spend a lot of time writing trivial programs that demonstrated some principle or data structure without actually accomplishing anything useful, when I could spend the same time writing software meant to be used by real people, while learning skills I knew were applicable to real-world work, and get paid for it.

(As an aside, none of that software I worked on in my college job actually was used by real people, as far as I know. Frankly, it was pretty pointless too, and I quickly realized that I would never want to actually use the software myself, and wouldn’t wish it on anyone else, either. Despite that, I learned more skills while working there that I still find useful now than I ever did writing map coloring programs and merge sorts in my CS courses.)

So I find it really interesting to learn that a whole generation of students shares my disdain for purely academic exercises. OK, maybe that’s an overstatement, but I think the article does point out a need for change in the way school work is assigned. Students who are used to creating and sharing their creations as a part of their daily life won’t be motivated to work on projects that they’re expressly forbidden to collaborate with their peers on, and which effectively die on the day they’re handed in for grading.

Maybe schools need to learn how to engage students in work that is essentially open and collaborative, not just with their classmates, but with the world at large. Work that helps build their reputations, and provides real value to a broader community. Work that feels meaningful to both the students themselves and the people they involve as their audience and co-participants.

Maybe schools need to learn how to recognize the creative work that students are already doing, on their own initiative, and nurture it into something that also has academic value.

Maybe schools need to realize that it is increasingly important for people in all sorts of careers to take an active role in shaping the world, and that working through scripted assignments for evaluation by an academic authority is teaching students skills for twentieth-century jobs, instead of helping them master the creativity and boldness that they will need for the future that they’ve already started building.

It’s a restaurant and travel guide for vegetarians and vegans. It’s not the first one, but it has some interesting innovations.

Many existing vegetarian restaurant guides are limited to a single geographical area. They may provide a lot of information for one city, but can be hard to discover if you’re not a local, and often go for comprehensive coverage of all of the veggie options available, rather than highlighting the best ones. Veg Table was launched as a global site from day one, with a focus on travelers that may only be in town for a few days, as well as long-term residents.

Existing sites also tend to focus exclusively on major cities. Of course, as most vegetarians are well aware, getting food in a big city isn’t usually that tough — it’s the smaller towns and less-cosmopolitan places that you need to worry about. While Veg Table does cover big cities, it also tries to recognize the spaces in between that we often find ourselves in.

My favorite feature is its set of “Airport Survival Guides”, a great idea that I’m surprised nobody’s thought of before. Airports can be one of the worst places to be stuck as a vegan — you can’t really leave, you’re completely unfamiliar with your options, the facility is usually too big to fully explore, and you often only have a short amount of time between flights. Being able to rely on the knowledge of people who have been through the airport before will be a big help.

Finally, many previous attempts at restaurant and travel guides, both for vegetarians and in general, suffer from out-of-date and incomplete information. Often the people in charge of the site simply can’t cover enough area to make it worthwhile. Veg Table, however, is based on a wiki, so any member of the site can contribute information, perhaps about a city that they live in or recently visited, an update to a restaurant listing, or just a brief comment on one of the pages about their experience at a particular place. This removes the bottleneck of having all of the updates have to come from a single person or organization, and will help fill in a lot of areas that have gone neglected on other sites.

So, if you’re vegan, vegetarian, a fan of herbivorous cooking, or just curious, please sign up and feel free to start contributing.

I found an AppleScript on GitHub for centering the frontmost window. It didn’t do quite what I wanted, so here’s my slightly-modified version, which will center the window in your screen horizontally without changing the vertical position or size.

tell application "Finder"
	set screenSize to bounds of window of desktop
	set screenWidth to item 3 of screenSize
end tell

tell application "System Events"
	set myFrontMost to name of first item of ¬
		(processes whose frontmost is true)
end tell

try
	tell application myFrontMost
		set windowSize to bounds of window 1
		set windowXl to item 1 of windowSize
		set windowYt to item 2 of windowSize
		set windowXr to item 3 of windowSize
		set windowYb to item 4 of windowSize

		set windowWidth to windowXr - windowXl

		set bounds of window 1 to {¬
			(screenWidth - windowWidth) / 2.0, ¬
			windowYt, ¬
			(screenWidth + windowWidth) / 2.0, ¬
			windowYb}
	end tell
end try

Paste this into Script Editor or download the script file. Put the file in ~/Library/Scripts. Make sure you’ve got the Script menu turned on in the AppleScript Utility application. It will show up in there, and should work in most Mac applications.

I have found a couple of limitations. It doesn’t seem to work at all with Firefox, which doesn’t have very complete AppleScript support. It’s likely that there are other applications out there with missing or incomplete AppleScript support that this won’t work for either. The second problem is that there’s a bug in the Terminal application that moves the window upwards, even though the script is written in a way that’s supposed to preserve the vertical position. It would be possible to work around this, but I decided that it didn’t bother me enough to clutter up the code. If you want a workaround, post a comment and I’ll give it a shot.

The original script doesn’t specify a license, so I hope it’s OK to modify and share it. I figure that, since it’s published on GitHub, and the author releases a lot of open source code under very liberal licenses, that he’s probably not intending to keep very tight control over it. My changes are offered to the public domain.

I’m just as obsessive with making sure objects are lined up straight on my (real life) desk top. Sadly, AppleScript can’t help me there.

To make the situation worse, I was traveling for work at the time, 2,812 miles from home and my extra pair of specs. Luckily, I was in the second-least-horrible place in the world this could have happened: Washington DC. I grew up just outside the city, worked in it for six years, and spent most of my free time between June 1998, when I left school in Pittsburgh, and April 2005, when I moved to San Francisco, in the neighborhood where my hotel happened to be. I still know the city well enough that I was able to stumble my way around and find food for two more days without being able to read any of the street signs or storefronts until I was just about right on top of them. But it was not fun, especially when it came time to try to navigate the airports on my way home.

This is just the latest example of my notorious absent-mindedness. Just as with my eyesight, I have immense trouble keeping my attention focused without artificial aid. This plagues me in all sorts of different ways, from losing possessions, to chronic tardiness, to hobbies and projects that never really get off the ground. I’ve always been better at dreaming up ambitious plans than following through with them. I started writing this blog post over a month ago!

So, it was with complete earnestness and good intention that I published my personal objectives for 2009, and I made a good start on all of them, early in the year. As is often the case for New Year’s resolutions, I fell off quickly. I haven’t given up, though, I’ve just changed my approach.

I think it was a mistake to try to do all of them at once. Embarking on five projects at once is a great way to avoid focusing on any of them. I have to force myself to tackle one at a time.

The natural place to start is by getting myself organized. Without a good system for keeping track of all of the things that I want to do (or have to do), I tend to fall back on doing whatever occurs to me in the moment… and later stressing out about the things that I’ve forgotten during moments that I can’t do anything about them. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve tried using systems based on paper or index cards for this before, but they never felt right. I really need the ability to sort, filter, and edit without having to spread things out across a table and keep a pile of blank cards on my person all the time.

I briefly tried some web-based applications, but they didn’t feel right either. I think it’s important to be able to capture ideas very quickly, at any time, with minimal interruption of my concentration. Requiring an internet connection—absent on the train and unreliable at other times—makes this impractical at times, and even when a fast connection is available, needing to go to my web browser, open a new tab, and load a site before being able to enter a new task is just enough of a context switch to make me lose my focus on what I’m doing.

So I quickly carved my choices down to the two most popular OS X tools: OmniFocus and Things. On their face, they are similar in more ways than they’re different. Both have a Mac application and and an iPhone companion that can sync with it. Both allow you to organize tasks around multiple dimensions (for example, the project it belongs to and the context you need to be in to do it). Both support repeating tasks, on-hold projects, deferred tasks and notes. Both have a quick entry window that can be called up with a keyboard shortcut to capture tasks without switching contexts. Both were built to support the GTD system, but also to be flexible enough to adapt to individual users. They each have devoted fans and a lot to recommend.

Things is a little newer, and has some great visual design. The user interface is simple and appealing, and it’s been promoted by its fans as the less complicated alternative. It supports flexible tagging of items, and has a very intuitive filter bar to limit your view to the items with the tags that apply right now. It’s also less expensive than OmniFocus.

OmniFocus, on the other hand, is a little more heavyweight, but also felt a little more stable and polished. It’s not quite as pretty as Things, but the UI feels more natural to me. It is a lot easier to use by keyboard, and it’s heritage as a descendant of outlining software makes it a really great way to organize thoughts that might start out as unstructured notes, jotted down in the middle of doing something else, and are later organized into multi-stage projects with smaller projects inside them. It may be more complex than Things, but the complexity mirrors the projects you’re using it to organize. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than you want it to be, but it doesn’t impose artificial simplicity on you either.

OmniFocus also has much better support for syncing across multiple computers than Things does. I switch between three different computers and an iPhone on a regular basis. OmniFocus handles syncing across the internet very well… maybe a little more slowly than I’d like, but with very few conflict problems and little effort required. For the most part, it “just works.” Things requires syncing to your phone over wi-fi, rather than syncing both the phone and the computer to an internet file server. This means you need to remember to sync your phone any time you make changes to your computer, or else you might find yourself at the grocery store with only half of your shopping list. The situation for syncing multiple computers is even worse: it requires use of a third-party syncing service such as Dropbox, and reports from users indicate that forgetting to close Things on one computer before opening it on another can result in a corrupt database. Ouch. Put those two problems together, and it makes it seem like syncing Things would require constant diligence and attention… in other words, I’d have to work around the software’s deficiencies rather than the other way around. That’s pretty much the opposite of the reason I’m interested in the software in the first place. Cultured Code, the company that makes Things, has said that better multi-computer syncing is their top priority for the next release, but I’ve learned in technology not to count your chickens before they hatch.

What’s more, during my trial of Things, I ran into a number of UI glitches and other bugs. It may look nicer in the pictures and screencasts, but OmniFocus felt more robust. This is not to disparage Things. It’s a new product and a few glitches are inevitable. But OmniFocus has the benefit of more maturity (though it’s only a couple of years old itself) and it’s still progressing pretty quickly. I had pretty much decided to buy a copy of Things when a 15% discount rolled into my RSS reader, courtesy of Daring Fireball. Sold!

A month later, I already feel like it’s helping, although I’m really only just getting started. One of the key insights in David Allen’s methodology is that the separation of capturing, processing, and acting on information helps to reduce overload. OmniFocus is really ideal for putting that into practice, and I realize now that the main problem with everything I’ve tried in the past is that they’ve only really covered capturing. Processing the information is too tedious with pencil and paper or basic to-do list applications, and it’s difficult to focus on the items that are currently relevant from one moment to the next.

Which isn’t to say that I feel totally in control yet. I still have much more that I want to do than I have the time and energy for, but what I’m hoping is that I can get better about juggling those things with the things that I need to do but don’t particular enjoy, and especially the things that I may think I need to do, but turn out not to be so important in the end.

That said, I have a handful of long-standing intentions that never seem to turn into action. Or, really, they’ll turn into a short spurt of action whenever I’m feeling particularly guilty or inspired about them, that quickly fizzles out as soon as something else comes up.

I think part of my problem is that I rarely set concrete goals for these things, only vague notions such as “exercise more” or “work on music” that do nothing to help me gauge whether I’m succeeding or failing. Another problem is that when I keep my personal plans private, I’m accountable to nobody but myself, and it’s all too easy to make excuses about why I did other things instead. So, I think I can beat both of these hang-ups by deciding on a handful of specific metrics and declaring them here in the open. Maybe I can shame myself into keeping on track.

It just so happens that now is one of the more ideal times for me to be refocusing my life. The entire second half of 2008 was impossibly busy for me, punctuated by frequent travel… at least, much more frequent than I’m used to. It looks like this summer may turn out the same way for me, and I’ve got another long trip planned for February, so if I want to establish some new habits, now is the time.

I don’t want to be unrealistic — the whole idea is to make these goals achievable — so I’m limiting it to five reasonable objectives. At the same time, I do want to stretch myself a little, so in addition to five modest goals each one will have a more challenging pair. If I hit the first target, I can feel pretty good about myself, but if I hit the second, even better.

Music

I have a life-long love of music… and a life-long habit of collecting musical instruments and projects, only to let them fall by the wayside. For ten years now (wow, has it really been that long?) I’ve dabbled in electronic music production, but have yet to really finish even one track. I’ve started plenty, but tend to lose interest or become otherwise distracted before any of them are finalized. OK, so it’s a hobby, and maybe I should be happy to just play around, but it would be nice to see something through. I’m going to try to put together a short album of techno and electro tracks, and if that goes well, a second collection of a few more free-form tracks.

Good: A five-track EP
Better: An additional three-track EP in a more adventurous style

Writing

It seems like I write a blog post every couple of months about how I need to write more blog posts. In November I said, “surely I can think of something interesting to post at least once a week.” It turns out, thinking of things to write about isn’t as hard as actually taking the time to write them. So I’m going to dial down the ambition a little bit and shoot for somewhere between one and two posts each month.

Good: At least fifteen posts this year
Better: At least twenty posts this year

Exercise

I’m not getting much of a workout sitting behind a desk for eight-plus hours a day. This is nothing new, but I think it’s starting to catch up with me. When I first moved to San Francisco, I lived at the top of a steep hill, which helped me get my heart rate up every day, but now I live in the flattest part of the city. I walk to work most days, but it hasn’t been enough to keep me from gaining weight in the past year. I’m still far from overweight, but if trends continue I may not be for long. Beyond that, it can’t be great for my health in other respects to be so out of shape.

I’ve never liked gyms, but several months ago Sharon & I got a stationary bike. In true San Francisco style, we found it on the curb outside our apartment. It’s pretty common here for people to leave unwanted items outside on the sidewalk for other people to claim. Usually, there’s a pretty good reason these things are unwanted, but this thing looked pretty clean and in good working condition, and it appeared out there in the time it took us to go out for brunch and come back, so we figured, hey, why not?

Since then, I have been mostly using it as an elaborate towel rack. It’s kind of ridiculous… as a form of exercise, it couldn’t really get any easier or more convenient. I can use it from the convenience of my home, and listen to music or a podcast while I cycle. I don’t need any gear other than what I already lucked upon, and there’s no need to coordinate with anyone else. Surely 25 to 45 minutes per day can’t be that hard.

Good: Average three hours per week on the stationary bike
Better: Average five hours per week on the stationary bike

Finance

Considering the times, we’re in pretty good shape. We’re not carrying any debt, we’re renting so there’s no mortgage to worry about, we’ve got relatively healthy long-term retirement accounts and a decent amount in savings. Still, I don’t feel like I’ve got a handle on where our spending is going, and we would eventually like to buy a house or a condo, so I feel like we could be saving more.

There are plenty of tools out there to help people get more of a grasp on their finances. There’s Quicken and the like, and in the past two or three years a number of web-based solutions have appeared. Each of these has tradeoffs, but I haven’t really taken the time to evaluate them fully. I think the first step in any long-term plan is to figure out where you are now, so I’ll take a look at all of the options to help me do that and try to get one set up. Once that’s done, I can try to develop a plan with Sharon for the next few years that will help us reach our goals, even in uncertain times.

Good: Set up and maintain a tool for tracking finances
Better: Create and stick to a monthly budget, including allocations for investment and philanthropy

Organization

Part of the reason I think I have such a hard time working on long-term goals — things that I think are personally important but that are not really essential in day-to-day living — is that I have a hard time juggling all of the things that I want to do with all of the things that I feel like I need to do. A few years ago I was introduced to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology the same way many geeks were, through Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders weblog. The approach appeals to me, and I’ve read the book a couple of times, but I still haven’t found a “trusted system” for capturing projects and actions that appeals to me. I tried the all-paper route for a while, but it felt cumbersome. I really need something that I can use from a computer and from my phone. Echoing what I said about financial planning software, there are a number of web-based and local software-based approaches to task tracking now, and with an iPhone I wouldn’t need to be at a computer to use either. It’s again just a matter of trying them out and choosing one that doesn’t feel like a burden. If I can get that sorted out, I’d like to get the apartment organized better, and the first step in that will be to get rid of the piles of crap that I don’t want, need, or use anymore.

Good: Choose a tool for GTD-style task and project tracking
Better: Sell, donate, or trash everything in the house that we don’t want

Keeping Tabs on My Progress

I know that setting goals is pretty meaningless if I’m not tracking metrics on a regular basis, so as an experiment I’ve set up an account on Daytum to try to record my progress. I’m not sure yet if the site will really fit well, but it’s a start, and since it’s public, it helps to keep me honest. I’ll also plan to check in here a few times this year to note how I’m doing. If it works well, maybe I’ll start to make a habit of doing this every year. And if it doesn’t… I suppose I’ll have to publicly shame myself here so that may be all the motivation I need.

Hey, well at least I can add a tick to the blog post count!

What my name has going for it in simplicity, however, it lacks in uniqueness. Although my Googleability has risen quickly in the last year and a half or so, if you search for “Tim Moore” you’ll tend to come across Amos ’n’ Andy actor Tim Moore, ’70s AM radio soft pop singer Tim Moore, Michigan Republican Representative Tim Moore, or British travel writer Tim Moore before you find any mention of yours truly. The Wikipedia disambiguation page for my name doesn’t even mention me among the nine “people called Tim Moore.”

Besides the pseudo-famous Tim Moores of the world, I run into other like-named individuals pretty regularly. On two separate occasions during childhood I went to schools with other students named Tim Moore. Once I met a Tim Moore in a bar in DC. It’s gotten worse in the internet era. I’ve been mistaken on IRC for Common Lisp luminary Tim Moore. Even working at Atlassian, I was surprised to discover some posts on our forums that I didn’t remember writing, only to realize that I have a customer namesake there as well.

This is the reason, I suppose, that most people with common names — especially if they’re as geeky as I am — invent some kind of internet handle early on in their online lives. I’ve never been able to commit to one; it always seems too cheesy to me. My one past attempt feels regrettable now, and it looks like it’s been hijacked now by some other guy in Brisbane anyway.

So when I decided to buy my first personal domain name in 2002, I couldn’t think of anything to register other than my own name. Most variations of tmoore.com, timmoore.com, timothymoore.com, etc. were unavailable, but a new .name top-level domain had recently become available, and it seemed like exactly what I wanted. The way .name domains worked at the time, you couldn’t buy a second-level domain. Instead, second-level domains were reserved for surnames, and were shared between all registrants that have that name. Your first name was registered to you as a third-level domain, and an email alias was set up so firstname@lastname.name forwards to another address of your choosing. Unfortunately, tim.moore.name was already taken, so I registered timothy.moore.name and began to use timothy at moore.name as my preferred email address.

It’s been a great convenience using a forwarding alias for my primary email address. I’ve moved between several email providers in the last six years, and most of the people who send me email have been none the wiser. I haven’t had to update the dozens of web site accounts and mailing list subscriptions that are sending to my .name address, and for the most part, it’s pretty easy for people to remember.

I say “for the most part” because it hasn’t been without the occasional headache. For one thing, most people aren’t aware of .name domains; they haven’t exactly been a raging success. And for people who think all domain names have to end in .com, .net or .org — trust me, there are more than you’d think — sometimes it can be hard to convince them that, yes, that’s actually my email address. Even worse are the poorly implemented form validation schemes used by an unfortunate number of websites. In that case, no amount of convincing will help, and I’m forced to give out another, more conventional address.

Mostly I could live with these drawbacks, directing my frustrations towards the ignorant people that failed to understand how domain names work, rather than my own choice of an unusual email address. In any case, it was easier to work around the occasional misunderstanding than to change the address I had been using for so long. But a few months ago I decided to finally transfer all of my domains off of the tacky godaddy.com registrar and discovered that things were worse than I realized.

The .name top-level domain experiment has mostly been a failure for the Global Name Registry — the company that administers these domains. There are few registrars that support them at all, and even fewer that support inbound transfers. The scheme was so unpopular that they decided years ago to abandon the restriction on registering second-level names — the “moore” in “timothy.moore.name” — and allow unused ones to be bought and sold freely. In fact, most of the .name domains that have been sold since 2004 are of the second-level type, and of the small number of registrars that accept incoming .name transfers, an even smaller portion of them can handle the third-level domain transfer that I needed.

I found one, Gandi.net, that looked nice enough, so I started the transfer from Go Daddy. Once the transfer completed, I decided to change my email alias — it pointed to a Gmail account that I’m trying to move off of, and I figured that while I was in the middle of making changes, I might as well go through with that one too. The only problem was that I couldn’t find the place in the Gandi admin UI where the forwarding address is set. To my dismay, their tech support confirmed that there isn’t one. It turns out that the registration and transfer of the third-level .name domain email aliases is a completely separate process from the domain itself, supported by an even tinier fraction of .name registrars, not including Gandi. Even worse, the Global Name Registry’s confusing table of registrar capabilities incorrectly listed Gandi as supporting the email aliases, an error that has since been corrected after I alerted Gandi to the problem.

So I found one of the few registrars that does support the email aliases and once again transfered the domain. The only problem is that somewhere in the switch from Go Daddy to Gandi to 123 Registration, the email registration got lost. None of the sites seems to be aware that I own it; Go Daddy no longer shows me the option to transfer it out, and 123 doesn’t seem to have received it during the inbound transfer. The mail is still being forwarded to my Gmail address correctly for the time being, but I have no way to change the address that it forwards to.

It’s possible that I could get this sorted out if I go through negotiations between Go Daddy, 123 Registration and the Global Name Registry, but at this point, I give up. Dot Name is a failure and a giant hassle. I’m still registered until 2010, but I’m phasing the address out. Luckily, I’ve got this incrementalism.net domain running here at DreamHost. It’s been working out pretty well for me, so I’m officially changing all of my personal email over to tmoore at this domain. If you ever send me email, update your address books now, because timothy at moore.name will be going away once the domain expires. I’ve been slowly switching over all of my online accounts to use the new address, and it really is a big headache, so I hope I don’t ever have to do this again.

You may be wondering, “why incrementalism?” Well, I’ve had a long interest in incremental processes, in software development, project planning, public policy, self-improvement, music, biology, economics, cosmology… the list goes on. In many ways, it seems that it’s the key to reliable improvement in the world, and on a personal level I find that incremental thinking is the only way I can ever get anything accomplished. Which is not to say that it’s the most natural way for me to think. On the contrary, I all too easily get wrapped up in ambitious, overreaching ideas and endless preparation for projects that I rarely start, much less finish. So I chose the name not to describe myself, but to remind myself of what I want to become, and that it’s OK to make only small, slow progress towards my goals for now, as long as I can start again later and keep going.

Quoting artist Chuck Close, via Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders:

What I found that one of the nice things [about] working incrementally is that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single day. Today I did what I did. You can pick it up and put it down. I don’t have to wait for inspiration. There are no good days or bad days. Every day essentially builds positively on what I did the day before

Over the summer I finally got around to updating WordPress to 2.5, and later to 2.6.3, as well as updating to the latest release candidate of K2, the theme I use for this site. These changes should result in a few subtle improvments — my corners are much rounder now, and things like commenting and searching are all ajazzy. More importantly, it should keep me safe from any known security exploits in the wild.

I dressed up the site a bit further with a little favicon I made using the handy pixel editor at favicon.cc. I made a custom style for K2 with a few tweaks to the default look, and patched a couple of bugs in the theme that were preventing the markup from validating properly. I started promoting the site in a few more places, and notably added it to Planet Atlassian, which I imagine is how most of you are seeing this now.

Stats

I also got a couple of statistics tracking services up and running on the site. On the one hand, DreamHost (my hosting provider) offers analog out of the box. It’s not too pretty, but it gives me some interesting information about low-level requests, browser usage, detailed referrer information, and other nerdery. On the other hand, I’ve installed the WordPress.com Stats plugin (should I be admitting that? I hope there aren’t any known security holes…) to give me a higher-level view on popular posts and some pretty graphs of hits over time.

Unsurprisingly, my most popular post recently has been the one where I voice my support for Obama. It turns out that he’s got quite the following. What is unexpected, though, is the close second. “10 Reasons Why Being 30 is Better Than Being 20” has gotten a lot more traffic than I could ever imagine, mostly from people searching on Google for things such as “being 30″ or “good things about being thirty” or even “reasons to be 30″. It seems that I was not the only one suffering from a little bit of age-related anxiety this year. None of my other posts were even within the same order of magnitude of traffic as those two.

But, as analog revealed, most of the traffic hasn’t even been coming to blog posts at all. I first noticed something strange when I saw that my top referrers listed in analog are all myspace profiles of random teenage strangers. Then I discovered what they were all linking to:

It turns out that dozens of Obama supporters across the internet have been hot-linking to my copy of Shepard Fairey’s famous image of Obama — the one that I considerately copied from the site where I originally found it instead of stealing bandwidth.

My first reaction, “I’ll show those little brats,” had me searching for instructions on how to block hot-links, or maybe even substitute a replacement image to help teach them a lesson in manners. I quickly reconsidered. I’m only using a tiny fraction of the bandwidth allowed by my hosting plan, and, besides, why should I punish a bunch of young people — who probably don’t know any better — for displaying their enthusiasm for a presidential candidate that I strongly support? So, for now, I’ve left it as is, though I’ll be keeping an eye on it, since I’m practically begging for abuse by announcing it here.

Speed

Despite the relative lack of popularity of the actual writing on the site, I did make a few performance improvements, so I should be able to handle the surge of traffic from Digg or Slashdot that is surely just around the corner.

First, I installed the wp-cache plugin. For those who haven’t heard of it, wp-cache saves WordPress the trouble of recreating pages from scratch every time someone visits one, and therefore speeds up load times significantly. It’s not the most sophisticated caching plugin available, but it is super simple and seems to work pretty well.

Next, I stripped out the Amazon Associates widget JavaScript. When I wrote an article about Nine Inch Nails late last year, I made a cheap attempt to defray my hosting costs a little bit by adding links to Amazon.com whenever I mentioned an album. As you may know, website owners can get a small kickback on purchases made by their readers by including a special identifying tag in links from their site back to items on Amazon. There are a couple of ways to generate those links. One is to go through a tedious search form on their affiliate program website. The other is to use one of a variety of JavaScript widgets, which can do everything from recommending products based on keywords in your page to displaying a gaudy spinning 3-D carousel with pictures of popular products. I didn’t want anything that intrusive, so I just used a simple widget that automatically generated the correct links for text labelled with the ASIN of an item on Amazon.com. All I had to do is include a special script tag somewhere in the post.

For this I got a result that had all of the functionality of an unadorned text link, but was much, much slower. The site that serves Amazon’s affiliate widget JavaScript files performs pathetically poorly, and it drags down any site that uses widgets with it. Even worse, the post in question was included on the front page of the site, as well as several other index pages, so it was causing nearly the whole site to load slowly. So I bucked up and went through the process of converting all of the links in that post so that I could remove the widget script. It turns out that exactly zero people have bought anything through those links anyway.

After these two changes, the load time for the home page went from six or seven seconds down to under two seconds with a completely empty cache on both the client and server, and less than half a second with a warm cache (usually around 300–400 milliseconds in my unscientific tests).

I also added “more” tags to all of my old posts, so that it only displays an excerpt on the home page and index pages, with a link to continue to the rest of the article. This was less for performance — it probably doesn’t change load times significantly — and more to make the site easier to scan. I hope this will make it more readable for people, but if not please let me know and I can change things back. One thing I worry about especially is that I think WordPress will also truncate items in the RSS feed. I generally prefer full-text feeds myself, so I’ll understand if this irks people, but then again maybe nobody will care. Let me know in the comments and if it bugs enough people I’ll try to find a workaround.

OpenID

Another change is completely invisible to most readers, but helpful for me, so I’ll share in the hope that someone else finds it useful. I set up incrementalism.net as an OpenID delegator. This means that I can log in to sites that accept OpenID using my own URL instead of my actual identity provider URL, which I always seem to forget for some reason (am I “tmoore” or “timmoore” or “timothy.moore” on that site?) I did find a WordPress plugin to do this automatically, but I found it to be clunky, a little outdated (no OpenID 2.0 support) and apparently no longer maintained. The K2 WordPress theme supports custom user functions to allow you to easily add in plugin-like functionality, so I wrote one that looks like this:

<?php
/*
    Add OpenID Delegation
    Inspired by WP-Yadis http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yadis/
 */
add_action('wp_head', 'insert_delegation_tags');

define('MYOPENID_USERNAME', 'tmoore');

function insert_delegation_tags() {
    if (is_home()) {
?>

    <!-- OpenID Delegation -->
    <link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
    <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://<?=MYOPENID_USERNAME?>.myopenid.com/" />
    <link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://<?=MYOPENID_USERNAME?>.myopenid.com" />
    <link rel="openid2.provider" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
    <meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=<?=MYOPENID_USERNAME?>.myopenid.com" />

<?php
    }
}
?>

If you use myOpenID or another OpenID provider, feel free to adapt that for your own site. It looks like there’s now a new, more flexible plugin that has replaced WP-Yadis, but for now this does exactly what I need with no fuss.

So, What’s Missing?

One thing I haven’t been doing a lot of is writing. After my insistence that starting was the hard part, it turns out that I all too easily fell into that nerdy cliché of fiddling with the technology on the site instead of producing useful or interesting content. While I hope that this post has something of interest to readers who run their own weblogs, I’m writing it more to get back in the habit of posting. I intend to keep up a more regular schedule going forward — I won’t try to post every day, but surely I can think of something interesting to post at least once a week. Not everything will always be relevant to everyone that reads the site, since I don’t think there’s that much overlap between what my co-workers, my old DJ friends and my Mom are into, but I hope that everything will be interesting to someone, or at least fun to write.

In the past, I’ve sometimes shied away from writing personal things about my own life, but I think I’ll loosen up on that, since I think most of my readers know me personally, and it could help my writing voice sound a little less stilted. On the other hand, I’ll continue to write about technical things here, especially now that I’m becoming more visible as an Atlassian employee. So I apologize in advance if you’re bored out of your skull by half of what I write — you can use the category links on the right to focus in on the parts that you are interested in, and you can tack “/feed” onto the end of a category index URL to get a customized RSS feed.

This came out longer than I planned, but if you’re still reading, thanks and welcome to the relaunched incrementalism.net. I hope you’ll stick around!

So, things are looking pretty good these days, and I feel that over the next ten years they will only get better. Thanks to everyone who helped make this my best birthday ever.