procrastination diagram

I spent the weekend helping to move and put up a set for The MIT Gilbert & Sullivan Players production of The Yeomen of the Guard (or The Merryman and His Maid). Actually, an extended weekend; I took Monday off to continue putting up the set, and yesterday off to recover. I still didn't get as much done with the rest of my life as I really intended to. I think I did more of what I would call "actual work" this weekend than I have in the past four years of professional behavior. Anyway, If you happen to be in town this weekend or next weekend, you should catch a show; it's shaping up to being a well executed production of one of Gilbert and Sullivan's more highly regarded works. Also the set is kind of cool.

Now, if only I didn't have to go back to work today...

Actually, I think the change did me good; walking to dinner last night, I had a couple of interesting thoughts.

One, which I will share, is the perhaps obvious in retrospect observation that carrying a decent camera is probably a license to talk to attractive women that you see walking down the street (if you're, well, more outgoing than I am, anyway). I was walking down Massachusetts Avenue when a woman stepped between some parked cars and the evening sunlight caught her long dark hair so perfectly I actually forgot that I had my camera on me for a few seconds ("If only I had my camera... wait, I do"). I only realized after thinking for a bit that there was a reasonable chance that I could have gotten her to stand still, let me take the picture, strike up a conversation, and give me her email address (so I could send her the picture, of course). (I freely admit that I am assuming that an email address is equivalent to a phone number these days, especially in the umbra of MIT. Also, I am probably unfairly assuming that people in general are vain enough to be flattered when a random person asks if they can take their picture.)

So what would have stopped me? Well, I don't have enough practice with this camera at portraiture, and I just don't strike up conversations with people on the street. Actually, I suspect that if I were the kind of person to talk to people on the street, the inexperience with the camera wouldn't have stopped me. (What really stopped this time me was that I was thirty feet down the street before I even articulated the scenario.)

I'm pretty sure I have at least one reader that will read the above two paragraphs and say "Well, Duh".

To mostly change the topic, I have a question: If you come up with an idea (yes, the other one) for something that people didn't realize that they needed, and you could potentially build a free software business out of it (it's the sort of thing that would actually be somewhat harder to sell closed-source, but has a lot of integration and enhancement consulting opportunities as free software), does it make sense to blog about it before actually writing the software? What if you're lame enough that you're never going to write the software or start the company? What if you're just not sure?

In other news, googling for "Does this starship make me look fat?" (with the quotes) reassuringly finds no hits... yet.

"In other news, googling for "Does this starship make me look fat?" (with the quotes) reassuringly finds no hits... yet."

Would you mind if I metaquoted that?

Some comments on the idea:

(1) I consider BP/Mekinok a success because of the openafs/kerberos deployment infrastructure we left behind (and the idea that yes, IT *doesn't* have to hurt, and no, you don't have to do stupid arcane stuff yourself every time.) While it would have been nice to go farther with it -- it would also have been good if someone else picked it up and ran with it. If the latter is also true of your idea, write it up.

(2) Writing in detail about the idea can make you enough of an "I've already thought this through" guru/expert that there are greater odds of someone who does want to take a shot at it asking you about it.

(3) I can't find the source of the quote, but "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas - if they're any good, you'll have to beat people with them."

(4) Another way to put it is that "an idea you can *use* is worth a lot more than just an idea" - making something effective always takes work.

"does it make sense to blog about it before actually writing the software?" Well, blog about whatever you like, but my personal experience is that yakking about a creative enterprise does not improve the likelihood the enterprise will proceed. So start working, already. ;)

The quote is supposedly from Howard Aiken, who worked at IBM at the time:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

I also like "a good idea and $4.50 will get you a cup of coffee."

With respect to the other idea, I've had half a dozen or so random conversations with people on the street in the last few months, usually using something related to photography as a conversation starter. I give them my card or leave them some other form of contact information, but none of them ever contact me. I guess the only way to get anything to happen is to get their information and contact them, instead, but to me that feels disturbingly like *work*.