Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled

Set this TypePad free or I will kill it.

I'm CEO of a startup so I don't have much free time and I'm always cognizant of how much things cost.

I have been a paying for TypePad for five years and everyone I care about thinks I'm stupid for doing so. Over two TypePad accounts I have paid nearly $1000 to Six Apart. Enough. My paying for TypePad begins to end today.

Today I destroyed the TypePad for my company Renkoo. With the touch of a button, renkoo.typepad.com just plain disappeared from the webiverse. It's just a matter of time before it's gone from the Google cache, too.

I killed the Renkoo TypePad for three reasons. First, Renkoo TypePad was costing me an annual fee despite the fact that I haven't posted here in over a year. Second, two years ago I moved all Renkoo TypePad content over to renkoo.wordpress.com which is hosted for free. And third, Renkoo TypePad was costing me an annual fee.

In other words: Money, Money, Money.

It's 2008. Information wants to be free. Blogs should be free. Blogger is free. Flickr is free. Vox is free. Twitter is free. LiveJournal is free. Facebook is free. WordPress is free.

I won't go into why Wordpress is more fun to use than TypePad. If Six Apart decides to make TypePad free by September 1, 2009, I will keep this blog housed here. If not, I will move this blog. I already have ifindkarma.wordpress.com and I'm not afraid to use it.

How will Six Apart survive if they don't charge for TypePad? I'm sure they can figure something out. Chris Alden, Mena Trott, and Ben Trott, plus a deep bench, are so smart that August Capital put a lot of money in them to figure it out. So figure it out.

Because charging me for TypePad makes me want to leave so badly that I went all Keyser Söze on my TypePad tonight, and it felt gooooood.

Rather than give in to their demands he murders his loved ones and all but one of the Hungarians, whom he spares knowing that the survivor would tell the mafia what has transpired.

I killed one TypePad today. I'm ready and willing to do it again if I need to. Six Apart, set this TypePad free.

Twitter Notifications Off; Google Reader On

It was just a matter of time.

With more than 200 friends on Twitter, my text message notifications got out of control.

I got more than 1500 notifications by SMS in the last week. Too many to keep up with (and still less than Jason Calcanis before he turned off his SMS notifications).

To deal with the inundation of text messages, at first I turned off phone buzzing for SMS. There was no way to turn off phone buzzing just for Twitter, so I turned off phone alerts for everything.

As a result, Joyce said that she could no longer text me with important stuff, because there was no indication I would look at the text message in a timely manner (since my phone was no longer buzzing when it received a message).

So that solution didn't work. I needed to escalate.

So I've turned off Twitter.

And now that I've turned off Twitter, I can turn my phone buzz notifications-when-I-get-SMS back on.

But I still want to keep track of my Twitterfriends. What to do, what to do.

Enter Google reader. I can now read my Twitter friends feed in an RSS reader. And Google reader is so much more usable than I remember when I first tried it. As Zwoddy said, b'bye Bloglines. (Doubleplus good: I can add Renkoo feeds, too.)

Bloglines is to Google Reader, as Typepad is to Wordpress.

I now go to Google Reader and Wordpress everyday. Bloglines and Typepad, once a month.

Slipping Away From Typepad

Forgive me, Typepad, for I have sinned. It has been over nine months since my last confession. In fact, except for deleting comment spam and trackback spam, I've spent almost no time here in the past year. Of course you don't mind as long as I pay my annual fee, but the less time I spend here, the less connected I feel to this place that houses some content from when my fingers danced over their keyboard many moons ago.

Where has my time been spent lately?

1. Renkoo. Startups are all-consuming. Renkoo is a startup. Therefore,  Renkoo is all-consuming.


2. Wordpress. The Renkoo Blog is there now. And the more time I spend with Wordpress, the more I love it. Now when I visit Typepad it feels like visiting four years ago. (Much as I try, I can't get into Vox, either.)


3. Offline. One of Allen Stern's predictions for 2007 predictions is that people will decrease their overall online time by 10%. Allen writes, Renkoo is a tool that helps you plan offline events with your friends and family. Adam Rifkin (yours truly) spends a lot of time on Renkoo. Therefore, Adam Rifkin is offline regularly.

So I'm not likely to write a lot more here for a while. Maybe I would write more if I moved this blog to Wordpress, since I spend so much time there now. It's an experiment worth doing at somepoint. I'll let you know when/if that happens.

Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world.

After the final no there comes a yes.
And on that yes the future world depends.
        -- Wallace Stevens, "The Well Dressed Man With A Beard"

Guess who's back? Back again...

Wow, this website has been sitting here collecting dust for nine months because I couldn't complete my monstrosity of a JavaScript post. I started that post way back in January -- back when people thought Ajax was a product by Colgate Palmolive used to clean toilets.

Well, maybe I'll finish that post one day, and maybe I won't. I'm tired of having this typepad constipated. It's been nine months. I've been busy, and my blogging efforts have split a dozen ways, but it's time to get this party started again. And maybe this time I'll remember to say less.

LinkRank Egoboo

A random, completely egocentric sampling of PubSub LinkRanks:

• troutgirl.com, timconverse.com, and blog.commerce.net -- all tied for 1,105,026
• mod-pubsub.org -- 1,056,072
• bobwyman.pubsub.com -- 1,049,981
• adambosworth.net -- 8246
• ysearchblog.com -- 8057
• ifindkarma.typepad.com -- 2364
• battellemedia.com -- 2047
• jeremy.zawodny.com -- 2009
• napsterization.org -- 1921

Hmmm. Out of over 8 million blogs. Interesting.

I'm reminded of Susan Mernit quoting Dave Pollard:

If you're a blogger, how do you anticipate what your audience might look like? Pollard's essay on blog traffic and stats offers some ways to think about blog metrics, traffic and unique users. Dave estimates that only about 20,000 blogs (a mere 0.4% of all active blogs) have a sizeable audience (more than 10 regular visitors and more than 150 hits per average day). He projects that based on the latest Pew numbers, traffic to blogs might look like this:
 

                                                                                            

	Total Hits/Day	Average Hits/Day per Blog	Minimum Hits/Day per Blog	Average Aggregate     Reader Attention/Day per Blog
100 A-list bloggers	15 million	150,000	15,000	1700 hrs
2,000 B-list bloggers	5 million	2,500	1,000	62 hrs
18,000 C-list bloggers	9 million	500	150	13 hrs
80,000 up-and-coming bloggers	8 million	100	50	2.5 hrs
5 million remaining active bloggers	15 million	3	0	-

Dave sez: "If you're an average A-list blogger (those getting at least 15,000 hits per day), your 150,000 40-second visitors in aggregate are spending 1700 hours per day reading and commenting on your blog. The average B-list blogger (those getting at least 1,000 hits per day) is getting 62 hours per day of 90-second-per-visit aggregate reader attention, the average C-list (150-1,000 hits-per-day) blogger 13 hours per day of aggregate reader attention, and the average up-and-coming (50-150 hits-per-day) blogger 2.5 hours per day. "

More here.

Nonetheless, Google Blog continues to resemble "your not-so-cool uncle unbuttoning his shirt, listening to The Postal Service (but only the single of Such Great Heights)".

Life in a TEXTAREA

Eric Anderson said to me, "Relax, Adam, Everything is Deeply Intertwingled."  Good advice, I know I've heard that somewhere before.

It's hard to relax when you're living in a box. I'd estimate that I spend between 10% and 20% of my life in a browser, and half of that time is spent in a <TEXTAREA> like the one I'm typing in right at this moment to flesh out this post. The reason I cannot relax is that Web forms have not evolved in fifteen years -- there's still so few text editting features that I find myself manually searching and replacing sometimes. There aren't many activities more useless than eyeballing a <TEXTAREA> looking for text sequences when I know this is what computers were friggin' invented to do.

Worse, I find that sometimes I hit the wrong key and move off the browser page and all the typing I've done gets completely wiped out. <TEXTAREA>s have no automatic save feature -- even iTunes has that! Every time I get burned by this I tell myself to relax and to use a real text editor and then cut-and-paste into the Gmail form or the Typepad form or the Flickr form or the comment form on someone's blog or community or any of the next generation of weblications. But when you spend so much time living in a <TEXTAREA> like I do, that becomes tedious and inevitably I fall back to typing without a net and without editting and saving features in a <TEXTAREA>. Browsers need to improve, not just me. And I won't relax till that happens.

Are you listening Internet Explorer 7? Opera? Firefox? The Google calendar/browser/blogger/picasa (calbroblopic? :) team with one Adam to unite them all? Make it so life in a <TEXTAREA> isn't the sucky experience we've grown to expect. I guess Konqueror/Safari scores best so far, with Undo, Redo, Find, Replace, and Spell-Check, and when I hit the back button it (usually) saves the content of the forms -- but it still isn't a full-blown editor. HTML forms are some of the least friendly UI in applications today.

Geeks need a reality check, and we need it soon. Joel on Software says, "[Things you can't really do well in a web application] are not all big issues. Some of them will be solved very soon by witty JavaScript developers." The world's greatest witty JavaScript developers are like a beer: "They look good, they smell good and you'd step over your own mother just to get one."

Firefox (finally) gave me undo in my <TEXTAREA>, which is tremendously useful. Please don't stop there. Let me save. Actually, save automatically for me. Let me search. Actually, let me search-and-replace. Let me spellcheck. But only when *I* want to spellcheck. Let me define shortcuts. Actually, let me define shortcuts and macros. And don't force WYSIWYG on me like Typepad seems to think I want. I don't want it, and it often creates more trouble than it's worth. (While I'm dinging Typepad, let me deduct 100 shares from their place in heaven for not escaping the title of a typepad post -- I practically crashed the application because I tried to put aerodynamic angle brackets around TEXTAREA in the title of this post.)

I'm not the first person to ask for this, and I won't be the last. The best articulation that comes to mind is Clay Shirky's rant, Why are browsers such terrible writing instruments?, and his top three feature requests are:

1. Autosave on quit or crash. My browser, to a first approximation, is my workspace. Let me say "Restore all windows and contents to where they were before the quit." (ed.: Session saver saves tabs but not content.)


2. Multiple undo for reload and tab closes. Oops, I didn’t mean to remove the window I had that post in — bring it back. (My memory of Windows, especially, was that this happened often, partly because the left hand hovers over the CTL key, and CTL-R re-loads.)


3. Let me re-size or tear off the form field itself, and give me undo in it as well.
   
   There’s tons more stuff here, of course — some WebDAV+RSS combo so I can make any folder a drafts or publish folder (blosxom style), or tie existing word processors to form fields, so that SubEthaEdit would auto-open when I wanted to post, but really, the browser has been around for a long time now; why should anyone even have to make an argument that autosave, undo, and re-sizing are good functions for an app to support?
   
   But even more than this list, I want the people who write browsers to care that they are seriously and increasingly important writing environments, and that the current display bias leaves the average browser someplace between sucktastic and actually unusable on the sub-optimality-o-meter.

Cory Doctorow spends more time writing than I do, and he says, "I do *all* my composition in BBEdit -- it really saves my ass on numerous occassions. I want a local proxy that captures all my submitted forms and drops their content into lightly structured ASCII files." Amen, brother.

JP tells me to shut up and listen to Zwoddy's mantra, "Perhaps an ice cream sandwich would bolster my self-esteem." Well, I don't want an ice cream sandwich. I want a decent text editor in a web browser. And I won't relax till I get it.

Eternal Vigilance

Consider what would happen right now if the hard drive on the primary machine you use in your life were to crash irreparably. Is your data backed up and easily restorable? How much time and money would it take for you to get a new machine back into a condition conducive to productivity? Often we don't realize how  much our data and tools mean to us until we lose them, suddenly, without warning.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and only with our tools in order and our data regularly backed up can we truly be free to innovate.

30 Hypothesis

Tomorrow Rohit turns the tender young age of 30. As articulated by Rohit to me a dozen years ago, the 30 Hypothesis is something that has never been proven but remains at the core of his life's philosophy:

This is the belief that one's useful life ends at the age 30. This rule was first proposed by Rohit as the "Mathematician's rule of 25," which states that anything that was ever useful in mathematics was discovered and/or proved by a person by the time s/he was 25. (As an example, Galileo was already Chair of Mathematics at Pisa at 25.) We extend this rule to 30 for all fields besides mathematics; in fact, the number 30 also corresponds to the average person's life expectancy back when the institution of marriage was invented. Let's face it: you make your reputation by 30, and then it's all downhill from there. This comes from an ISI study of citations charting scientists' initial most-cited paper vs age, where the media ranged from very early twenties for mathematicians to early 30s for engineers. If you haven't broken through by the end of your PhD, it's not going to happen. On a Rohit level, Rohit lives his life as if it is literally going to end when he turns 30.

Reading this passage as an almost-35-year-old I am struck by how there are seeds of truth and nontruth contained within the hypothesis. Now, it's certainly true that mathematics is rigged. Heck, they won't give the Fields Medal to anyone over 40. But for other disciplines there's a wisdom, embodying emotional maturity and intellectual insight, that I believe only comes with age. A person can do great things after 30, and the examples are too numerous to count; however, by 30, most people have chosen their life's path and their specialty, and that perspective peppers everything they think and do after 30.

For some more insight, I looked into the Book of Ages: 30 by Joshua Albertson, Lockhart Steele and Jonathan Van Gieson:

This year about four million people in the United States will turn 30. If you’re one of them, the bad news is that you’re older than 42 percent of Americans. You’ve already lost 10 percent of your muscle mass. And, on average, you’re almost $20,000 in debt. But don’t despair. At 30, Harrison Ford was working as a carpenter, and neither Oprah nor Jane Austen had found fame. Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream? Created at 30. And, most heartening, you’re still gettin’ it on—2.24 times a week.

So I bought the book for Rohit; I figure he'll get a kick out of it. Here are some more insights from the book:

1. 15% of Americans are in their 30s.


2. The average age of students graduating from Harvard Divinity School in 2000 was 30.


3. 30-39 is the second most likely age group to use Linux.


4. 3% of people in their 30s prefer to have telemarketers call them by their first name.


5. Median income for a 30-year-old U.S. man: $30,510. For a 30-year-old U.S. woman: $21,473.


6. Average height for U.S. man in his 30s: 5 feet, 10 inches. Average weight: 174 pounds.


7. Average height for U.S. woman in her 30s: 5 feet, 4.6 inches. Average weight: 130 pounds.


8. 43% of 30-year-olds have held their job for 2 years or less. 12% report 10 or more years at their current job. The average 30-year-old has had 7.5 jobs. 19% have had 3 jobs or less. 25% have had more than 10 jobs.


9. 62% of thirtysomethings think they are overweight. 10% of men in their 30s weigh over 226 pounds; 10% of women in their 30s weigh over 212 pounds. Isn't it true that fat people are lazy, stupid, weak-willed, lacking in ambition, selfish, greedy, gluttonous, sedentary, and ugly? No, none of these characterizations have any basis in fact. (Council on Size and Weight Discrimination FAQ)


10. 59% of people in their early 30s drank alcohol in the past month. 27% binged (5 or more drinks on one occasion). 8% are heavy drinkers (binged on 5 separate days). 26% smoke cigarettes. 7% used illicit drugs in the past month.


11. "Psychological health steadily increases from 30 years of age to 40, 50, and 62 years of age." (Psychology and Aging, Volume 15, Number 2)


12. 17% of people in their early 30s say they are extremely happy; 41% very happy; 30% generally satisfied; 9% fairly unhappy; and 3% unhappy most of the time.


13. 45% of thirtysomethings own a firearm. Of those 34% own a rifle; 37% own a shotgun; 31% own a pistol; 23% own all three. More people in their 30s own firearms than those in any other decade of their lives.


14. 47% of people in their 30s watched a NASCAR race in the last year. (vs. 53% in their 20s)


15. "It is well for the world that for most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster and will never soften again." (William James, psychologist and philosopher)


16. 82% of people who visit Yosemite have done so by 30.


17. 26% are less likely to make a New Year's resolution than those in their 20s, but are 26% more likely to keep it.


18. 78% of families headed by people under 35 own a vehicle. It's worth, on average, $8900.


19. 55% of people in their early 30s own a home, including 71% of married couples.


20. "The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty... The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits." (Hervey Allen)


21. At age 30, Harriet Tubman made her first trip to the South as a free woman to help bring other slaves to freedom.


22. The most common age of identity-theft victims is 30.


23. George Clooney starred in 15 failed series or pilots before hitting it big as a star of ER; he was 33 when the show premiered.
 

24. Harrison Ford at 30 was discouraged by his $500 weekly salary for American Graffiti and returned to carpentry; four years later, George Lucas convinced him to play Han Solo.


25. On the day of his 30th birthday, Samuel Langhorne Clemens found himself unemployed in San Francisco. A few months earlier, he had left his job at a local newspaper. Unknown to Clemens, 12 days previously the Saturday Press in New York City had published a short story of his (under the pen name Mark Twain) that would later come to be called "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Response to the story won Twain nationwide acclaim and launched his fiction-writing career.
 

26. One method to allocate a retirement portfolio: the Rule of 100. It suggests that you subtract your age from 100. The resulting number is how much of your portfolio should be invested in stocks. For example, at 30 years old, 100 minus 30 is 70, so 70% of your portfolio should be allocated to stocks, with the rest in bonds and cash.
 

27. "I have always looked to about thirty as the barrier of any real or fierce delight in the passions." (Lord Byron)


28. 20% of women in their early 30s are single.


29. "I'm sorry, if a man is over 30 and single, there's something wrong with him. It's Darwinian -- they're being weeded out from propagating the species." (Miranda, Sex in the City)


30. 1 in 33 30-year-old men is a virgin. 1 in 25 30-year-old women is a virgin.
 

31. 81% of women in their early 30s have been married. 71% of men in their early 30s have people married.


32. 28 days after turning 30, Marilyn Monroe tied the knot with playwright Arthur Miller, a man ten years her senior. It was Monroe's third, and weirdest, marriage, but it did not halt her increasing dependence on drugs and alcohol. Less than five years later, the couple divorced, and Monroe died the following year at 36.


33. On his 30th birthday, Franz Kafka revealed to his mother that he was engaged. He'd proposed to Felice Bauer, a secretarial assistant, a few months earlier. Some say Kafka wanted to marry to prove to his father that he was "normal". The relationship lasted five yeas and resulted in two broken engagements, but the despair spurred Kafka on. Between 29 and 33, he wrote most of his major works.


34. "Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall." (Frank Lloyd Wright)


35. Bill Gates was 30 years, four months, and 16 days old on the day of Microsoft's IPO (March 13, 1986). On that day, he was worth $233,982,000.


36. "At 30 years of age it is not good for anyone, no matter how well balanced, to have things come his way too fast and too consistently." (Edward William Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok)


37. People at 30 on average expect to retire by age 61.


38. 25% of college students think that they'll be millionaires by 30. The mean net worth for families headed by people under 35 is $65,900. 81% of families headed by people under 35 carry debt.


39. 30-year-olds should expect only a 2.4% annual raise over their next five years.


40. At 30, Martha Stewart was a Wall Street stockbroker. Two years later, she purchased an old farmhouse in Connecticut with her husband. She supervised its restoration and launched a custom catering business, starting her on the path to becoming a home-life media mogul.


41. At 30, Oprah Winfrey left her television job in Baltimore and moved to Chicago to take over the ailing half-hour TV talk show AM Chicago. Within a month, the show became the highest-rated talk show in Chicago. The following year, AM Chicago was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. When she was 32, Oprah's show went national. 17 years later, she was a billionaire.


42. At 30, Steve Case was running Quantum Computer Services, a company he co-founded at 27. At 31, he renamed Quantum's online services, and America Online was born. Ten years later, he signaled the end of the Internet era by buying Time Warner and running it into the ground.


43. "No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty years." (U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 3)


44. "Never trust anyone over 30." (Mario Savio, 1960s U.C. Berkeley activist)


45. George W. Bush was busted for drunk driving. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of driving under the influence, was fined $150, and had his driving privileges suspended. Bush acknowledges that when he was 30 he was "drinking and carousing and fumbling around".


46. "Nothing else is new except my cold." (Pablo Picasso, age 30)


47. "If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a capitalist then you have no brains." (attributed to George Bernard Shaw)


48. By 30, David Goldhaber-Gordon of Stanford University had won the inaugural George E. Valley Prize "for the discovery and elucidation of the physics of the Kondo Effect in Single Electron Transistors." In addition to studying quantum phenomena in mesoscopic semiconductor structures, David also enjoys nanoelectronics.


49. At 30, Thomas Edison changed the world -- for the first time. Working to perfect the telephone transmitter, he was tinkering around with tinfoil when it occurred to him that sound could be recorded on a rapidly moving surface. He assembled a crude instrument and spoke "Mary had a little lamb" into a mouthpiece. The device played the verse back to him -- the world's first recorded sound. At age 31, Edison upped the ante, inventing the electric lightbulb.


50. His father struck candy-bar gold with the creation of Milky Way and Snickers in the 1920s, but Forrest Mars Sr. wanted more. By 30, he had distanced himself from his family firm and decamped to Britain, where he was manufacturing chocolate for European tastes. Soon after, Mars visited Spain and saw soldiers in the Spanish Civil War eating chocolates encased in a hard coating to stop them from melting. That inspired his creation of M & M chocolate candies, which debuted in 1941 to wide acclaim -- and no sticky fingers.


51. Three weeks after his 30th birthday, Eminem's first movie 8 Mile opened. The film grossed $54.5 million its opening weekend, doubling studio expectations and establishing the controversial rapper as a box-office draw. Two months later, his album The Eminem Show was named the top-selling album of the year, with self-analytic lyrics like "Full of controversy, until I retire my jersey, 'til the fire inside dies and expires at thirty" and "So let me just revel and bask, in the fact that I got everyone kissing my ass."


52. At 30, Jane Fonda played the titular hero in the 1968 film Barbarella. In the movie, it's the year 40,000 A.D. and an evil scientist named Duran Duran is bent on wreaking havoc. Barbarella must save the day. Two years later, Fonda ditched the catsuit and received her first of six Best Actress Oscar nominations.


53. At 30, Henry David Thoreau left his hand-hewn home after more than two years of living life on the shores of Walden Pond. He moved into the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson in downtown Concord, Massachusetts, and then later back to his parents' pad. "I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything, to the purpose," wrote Thoreau in Walden.


54. At 30, Jack Kerouac was in the middle of the greatest creative push of his life. He wrote Doctor Sax and spent most of the next few years writing more than half of his major works. Unfortunately, he spent the rest of his time opening rejection letters from editors who didn't understand his "spontaneous prose." Though he wrote his most famous work, On the Road, before he was 30, it sat in his rucksack unpublished until he was 35. Kerouac wrote in a letter written on his 30th birthday, "I have completely reached my peak maturity now and am blowing such mad poetry and literature that I'll look back years later with amazement and chagrin that I can't do it anymore."


55. At 30, Elvis Presley was in a rut, John Lennon recorded Imagine, Paul Simon went solo, Pat Benatar wrote "Love is a Battlefield", Bruce Springsteen recorded "Hungry Heart", and Bono wrote the lyrics to U2's Achtung Baby.


56. Having left the theater world for several years to work on his poetry, William Shakespeare returned to to theater as a founding member of the theater troupe Lord Chamberlain's Men. By that time, he had written eleven plays, including Richard III and The Comedy of Errors, and had gained a valuable sponsor in the Earl of Southampton. At 30 he would write Titus Andronicus; at 36, he would write Hamlet.


57. On a long train ride in her mid-20s, J.K. Rowling came up with the idea for a story about a boy wizard who lives a normal life, unaware of his own powers. A single mother at 30, she was forging ahead with that character now named Harry Potter, stealing seconds of writing time in coffee shops while her daughter slept in a carriage nearby. The book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, would be published just before Rowling turned 32.


58. "At 20 years of age the will reigns, at 30 the wit, and at 40 the judgement." (Benjamin Franklin)


59. "There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything." (Gertrude Stein)


60. At 30 your body begins a slow fade to the grave. Bone density thins up to 10% per decade. Stamina decreases by one minute from your 20s. Muscle mass is down 10% per decade, starting now. Lung capacity peaked at 25. Oxygen intake goes down 1% per year, starting now. Flexibility fades.


61. "Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshness of a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty." (Honore de Balzac, A Woman of Thirty)


62. "Thirty -- the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, published when he was 28)


63. Most common ways to die at 30: 29% accidents, 12% suicide, 10% homicide, 10% cancer, 7% heart disease. Patsy Cline, Andy Gibb, and Jim Croce died at 30. Then again, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain died at 27.


64. On her 30th birthday, Sylvia Plath was in the middle of a two-month period of productivity during which she wrote the forty poems "of rage, despair, love, and vengeance" for which she is best remembered. On that same birthday, she and her husband Ted Hughes had been separated for a few weeks. She moved to London where she saw her novel The Bell Jar published, and gassed herself to death. Lines from her final poem written a week before her death said, "Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment."


65. Orson Welles debuted on Broadway at 19, was a radio star with War of the Worlds at 23, and made Citizen Kane at 25. Kane was lambasted by critics, tanked at the box office, and was booed at the Oscars. His next movies fared no better, so at 33 he exiled himself to Europe. He never lived up to the promise of his youth.


66. "The only thing you can't have in this perfect world of total pleasure is your 30th birthday. Logan is 29." (Logan's Run, 1976... though the original book and the remake reduce the age to 21...)


67. At 30, Michael Jordan signed a contract to play for the Birmingham Barrons, a minor league baseball team. Earlier that year he'd led the Chicago Bulls to their third straight NBA championship -- and then walked away from the game. But in his baseball rookie season, he struck out 114 times. After a season and a half, he returned to the court; by 35, he had won another three NBA titles.


68. At 30, Steve Jobs resigned in a huff from Apple Computer after a dispute with the CEO he'd hired. He immediately formed NeXT and bought a majority stake in Pixar. Ten years later Pixar released Toy Story and a year after that Apple bought NeXT to bring Jobs back.


69. The odds a 30-year-old will live to see his or her late 30s: 99.003%. (From "Five Year Survival Rates", U.S. Census, 1996; stat is middle mortality assumption in 2000-2005 for people ages 30-34 living to ages 35-39.)

Before I close, I'd like to cite a survey by Perseus about recent statistics about the Blogosphere, I see that only 241,000 blogs (5.8%) are by people 30-39. (Almost 93% of blogs are maintained by people under 30.) But no worries.

A lot can happen in 30 years; human life itself seems to like to flow 0, 30, 60, 90. So Rohit, here's to your NeXT 30 and 60 years... en route to 90...

w00t!

Adam Messinger dives into w00t:

Wikipedia has a hilarious entry attempting to trace the origins of “w00t.”

See also: The Straight Dope [on l33t5p33k] ...

There's also a web proxy that will convert any web page into l33t5p33k -- for example, R3l4x, 3v3ry7h1n9 15 D33ply 1n73r7w1n9l3d... w00t!