The story of the tv show Babylon 5 really begins when Mr. Morden starts asking the question, “What do you want?” In a station populated with ambassadors for various alien races, he asks every ambassador this question, until Ambassador Londo Mollari of the Centauri Republic finally satisfies him…

“I want my people to reclaim their rightful place in the galaxy. I want to see the Centauri stretch forth their hand again and command the stars. I want a rebirth of glory, a renaissance of power. I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment, afraid to look back or to look forward. I want us to be what we used to be. I want it all back the way that it was.”

Despite all the negative connotations of this scene in the bigger picture of Babylon 5 (interstellar war, genocide, etc), Mr. Morden’s question is one of my favorite ideas, and I ask it of people all the time. Really, most people don’t have the guts to give an honest answer. They shoo it away, like all the other ambassadors did before Londo. They make excuses, or pleasantries. They don’t say what they really want. They don’t KNOW what they really want.

If you want to accomplish anything that really matters to you, first you need to know what matters. You need to look closely at what’s important. Everyone should answer this question. Few really do.

Of course, answering the question doesn’t necessarily mean putting your fate in the hands of those who will use you for their own ends. Londo’s assistant, Vir, had a very different answer for Mr. Morden…

And sometimes, when you want something enough, you get rewarded.

What do you want?

Tickets purchased for a dream concert… Bob Dylan with Wilco, the Richard Thompson Electric Trio, and My Morning Jacket.

Wilco is my favorite contemporary American band. Richard Thompson is my favorite contemporary British musician (never mind he’s been around since the 1960s, he’s STILL the best!). I’ve seen both many times over the years, and they’re phenomenal live performers.

As a musician (particularly a guitarist) who loves folk, rock, punk, Americana, and experimentalism equally, Wilco is a nearly perfect band for me. “The Art of Almost”, with its Krautrock mashup, brings together so many of the elements that make me love Wilco.

And Richard Thompson… when I see most great guitarists play, I’m inspired to work harder and play better (that would include seeing Nels Cline and Jeff Tweedy in Wilco). But every time I see Richard Thompson, I just want to take all my guitars and set them on fire in the backyard. Here’s what he can do with just an acoustic guitar… “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, one of the greatest songs ever written by anyone.

And this, with a full electric band. This was 30 years ago, so he’s had 30 years to get better!

Oh yeah, and Bob Dylan is playing too.

There’s an illusion to recorded music. It might sound natural, but it’s often highly artificial. This is one of my favorite tracks I’ve recorded – “The Golden Age”, from the Apocalypse Blues album by Beth Kinderman & the Player Characters. Sounds like a slowly building folk tune, right? That’s actually seven different recording sessions in two locations! Moreover, the original guide track is deleted. Beth wrote it in several different keys, and to play it, I would actually have to stop the recording and move a capo around. The mob/choir vocal at the end? That’s about two dozen of our friends, summoned together in a room, singing along to a prerecorded guide track.

The song itself is an illusion, too. Beth wrote it for an online songwriting challenge to write a Top 40 song from the year 2055. Instead of futuristic, she got a folk song. It’s inspired by the old slave spirituals that had coded escape messages in them. The song is actually instructions on how to escape the evil alien overlords, disguised as a folk song.

For the past week or two, I’ve focused my Baqbeat work on words and text – web site makeover, marketing, preparation for eventually presenting to investors. It’s been interesting and challenging. I’ve always prided myself on being a good writer, but I do tend to get wordy. Carving away to the bare bones of an idea is a real challenge for me.

One thing I’m currently struggling with is trying to hone my concept of why. What is the hard core of the problem I’m solving? It is, in essence, the product of my own experience working in configuration management. I’m trying to automate myself. I’ve spent much of my career being the go-to guy who speaks both programmer and ops. Time to let a computer do it for a change.

As much as I may grumble about all the brokenness of enterprise software, debugging production problems is a lot of fun. I like the pressure, and the technical challenges, and the do-or-die nature of it. I like seeing the best minds of an organization hunkered down together, fitting the pieces of the puzzle together, the scars the worst problems leave on us, and the stories those scars tell. What I don’t like is scrounging around for data because I don’t have access to it or don’t know what I’m looking for or how to look for it. I don’t like twiddling my thumbs for hours on end, waiting for some tech in another department to get out of whatever meetings she’s in to look up some little detail for me. I don’t like the finger-pointing and ass-covering exercises, or the cross-dysfunctional team politics.

That’s what Baqbeat is for – to solve the data-lookup issues so we can focus on the problem-solving issues. It’s about minimizing the parts that suck so we can better enjoy the parts that rule. I like the people who do that sort of intense, high pressure debugging. I want to make it more fun and less frustrating for them.

My latest guitar is a Bambu, a vintage Japanese work of art from the late 1970s, strongly inspired by Alembic guitars. The neck-through construction is made of alternating strips of bamboo(!) and walnut, with sen (Japanese ash) wings. Electronics are active, with a bridge humbucker, a neck single-coil in a humbucker housing, and active bass and treble controls.

I named it Brown Gargantua, after the classic Japanese monster movie The War of the Gargantuas. It’s the nice one, but looks exactly like the raging beast.

I’m coming to the conclusion that Microsoft Excel is the most toxic piece of software in the IT industry. Here’s a few reasons why…

1. It is used as a faux-database to store data that will be consumed by computers, but generally not in a computer-consumable way. This leads to duplication and inconsistency. 
2. It is a two-dimensional representation only, but gets used to represent relational data, usually in a very awkward manner.
3. Spreadsheets get emailed around and updated by different people, resulting in out-of-sync versions and confusion.

Sure, csv export blah blah, SharePoint woof woof. Anyone sophisticated enough to handle spreadsheets as data stores responsibly is sophisticated enough to use a real database.

If you’re a smart, creative person, ideas probably come at a tremendous rate for you. It’s very helpful to have a notebook or some other means of capturing them with you at all times. I always have a pen with me, even if I don’t have any paper. I’ll write on my hand if I must.

Writing down ideas helps stick them in your mind by making a slower, more physical act of expression. It can also help you focus something too ambitious to put into words, by forcing it into the smaller word-shaped box. And finally, writing ideas leaves them for later review.

And if you’re smart and creative, you probably have FAR more ideas than you have time to work on them all. The next step is to filter all the ideas you capture, and figure out which ones are worth action. This is usually done by actually acting on them. If you’re not motivated to act on it, it’s not good enough. If you can’t help but act on it, it’s probably really good.

The other day, I had a basically terrible day at the DayJob. There was stress, and drama, and frustration, and an afternoon of productivity lost with the anticipation of more failure to work in the future.

All I could think of was the relief of going home to work on Baqbeat. I could write code in a drama-free environment, focused on delivering something meaningful and valuable to me.

Common sense is just a first order approximation of reality. This means that it is more often than not right, but there’s still a substantial chance that it is wrong. So if being right is actually important in any given situation, don’t rely on common sense. Use a more precise analysis.

Since starting on Baqbeat, I’ve spent a lot of time examining various technologies in order to decide how to actually implement it – in particular, my choice of primary programming language, and my choice of database. I started from some negative space. First, I knew I did not want to work in Java. I find it overly ceremonial most of the time. Second, I knew the problems I want to solve don’t map very well to relational databases.

For databases, I started looking at various NoSQL options, and two styles struck me right away – document databases like CouchDB and MongoDB, and graph databases like Neo4J. I knew I needed extensive searchability, which suggests documents, but I also need complex relationships, which suggest graphs. Ultimately, the decision came to me in a dream. I’m not sure of the details of the dream, just that I woke up at 4am knowing how to put the data together. So Neo4J it is.

With the database settled, the next question was language. I’d mostly been torn between Ruby on Rails and Groovy on Grails. Ruby felt better to me, but Groovy offered Java infrastructure compatibility that was very appealing. But ultimately, I need to write code, and compatibility can be worked around. By worrying about compatibility without being able to put my finger directly on a compatibility issue, I was prematurely optimizing. On the other hand, I’m building a product primarily for customers working in Java. Shouldn’t I be eating my own cooking here?

I stumbled on my answer by accident, while reading through Paul Graham’s excellent essays. I read Java’s Cover, his now thoroughly dated 2001 critique of Java. This particular quote stood out for me:

No one loves it. C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers love their languages. I’ve never heard anyone say that they loved Java.

This became my guide – googling for “I love Ruby”, as opposed to “I love Groovy” or various other languages I’ve considered. And one thing became clear to me – Ruby programmers tend to love their language much more than programmers in other languages with mature web application frameworks. So Ruby it is.

Forging ahead now on a JRuby/Rails/Neo4J stack. If it fails me, I’ll worry about it then. But making this decision will help keep me from wasting time on analysis paralysis.