work

This is my “good” presentation. I’m looking a little haggard here — this is after two more days of being on a boat in Stockholm, and two more nights out with the king of Denmark, then flying back to spend Friday/Saturday nights in Austin, Texas — but this is the best Video I’ve got of my “inspired by Lessig” deal.

Someday I’m going to get my own projector, a foot-pedal clicker, and a few weeks of time, and make some king-hell presentation-art. Lots of potential.

One of the things I did while on my world-tour last fall was give a talk about Drupal and academia in the belly of a ship in Stockholm. And the cameras we’re rolling.

How Berkeley and Stanford University Use Drupal (Joshua Koenig) from NodeOne.se on Vimeo.

It’s not my best presentation due to jetlag/sickness and a funky mic (I also never really had my breath working right, a big no-no from Theater World), but I did a decent job of regulating my pace and I think it’s a more or less accurate talk.

Huge thanks to my hosts who cut together this video really well, and gave me some lovely liquor that I didn’t quite get to drink. Looking forward to showing them a really good time when they come out to San Francisco in April!

Returning to the romance.

It’s been a dark fall so far, hard-pressed and shut in. I’m looking forward to getting healthy so I can go back to getting drunk like a sailor, heaving to and fro, freewheeling and going where I will. Getting out on the road was good, but work-travel is more draining.

High time now to ride another wave, to get up on it and roll. It’s unlikely that I’ll have any less work to do anytime soon, but like every self-help manual teaches (and my own philosophy preaches) the X factor you’ve got real control over is your mind, not your circumstances. Big changes begin as shifts in perception. Mad lib it. Fill in the blank with confidence and everything will be fine, or as fine as it can be.

So there’s an inflection. My situation can be seen as being overwhelmed by an unreasonable and untenable tumult of todos, or a raging whitewater sluice of opportunities to be rafted. We’re in the deep fast water now, the difference between going under and riding it for all its worth really comes down to attitude. If we head into this thing with joy, it should work out. If not, well, there’s a reason the skaters say fear is the mind-killer.

But what’s really missing from all this is the romance, and really it’s nobody’s fault but my own. I’m pretty much impossible to please, my desires in love taking on the same grandiose scale as the rest of my outsized ambitions, even as my ability to invest time, energy, effort ever dwindles. What exactly can you expect?

Of late I’m all wrung out and hung up, exhausted, scheduled, and sick. No room for special lady friends. No time to be genuinely interested even — so long since I’ve been smitten — just the dull sense that I’m missing out and a flickering hunger.

I’m reminded of an old girlfriend I had back in the day who related some advice from her mother upon hearing that she was feeling stressed and overwhelmed at college. “I think you should be having sex,” was the gist of it, pointing out that getting laid can be quite the boon to ones self-confidence in addition to providing a bit of an endorphin rush and being a way to get unstuck from a situation. Pretty logical family; Russians.

So it occurs to me now that in the same way that going and running on a treadmill would be a good thing for me, so might participating in some uncomplicated physical congress.

But how long has it been since that’s happened? Quite a while, I think. Years even. Somewhere in the mid-decade I lost the whimsy jaunt one really needs to, as the kids say, “hook up.” Not that it hasn’t happened, but it’s been different. More laden with expectations and baggage, even if only my own. I miss that old swashbuckling sexual goodness, that simple faith in fun.

It takes a certain kind of purity of the heart, an essential self-trust and self-love that I seem to be lacking. Is this something that can be recaptured? I’m not sure. Maybe this is why people go to therapy.

Actually, scratch that: I’m pretty sure it can be recaptured. When I was down in Uruguay, on my last night in Montevideo I met a fabulous girl and had just that sort of time, carrying on in the streets and making a bit of a scene in the hostel hallway. It was another of my “king of second base” experiences (no sex, even by Clintonian standards), so perhaps this doesn’t quite prove the point, and it’s probably getting a bit of memory gloss, but I think that essential feeling of freedom and rightness was there.

It’s a bit cliche, but the traveling connection creates a situation where you have no choice but to embrace the moment, move with what’s happening. There’s also a lot less in the form of accountability; no reason not to say, do, feel, act. No day but today.

Finding the equivalent moral and emotional latitude in the day to day is somewhat harder. And to be honest that whole thing probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t spent 10 days decompressing on a remote beach with no cellphone or laptop.

So there’s a lesson there. All work and no play makes Josh a dull boy. Blindingly obvious as this sounds, it won’t be until I can regain more of my schedule to myself that the romance returns. “Now You Labor Every Day / Love Life Drifts Away.”

Anyway, good to be back in California. Stockholm was a great old european city where all the pretty girls ride bikes in freezing cold weather. Austin is a mecca, the Portland of Texas, and full of fabulous friends and collaborators and (apparently) cheap rents and wild wide-open american scenes. Tempe/Phoenix is a desert dream city, full of neon and fresh asphalt and the wide open blue skies that only the Southwest can deliver. But I’m happy to be back home.

(Note: updated with some next-day polish and exposition)

It's 4am+ in Paris, and I'm reading some Krugman. Week full of Drupal, head full of business, this jumps out at me:

Keynes considered it a very bad idea to let such markets, in which speculators spent their time chasing one another’s tails, dictate important business decisions: “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

This is why I currently lean against Chapter Three pursuing investors, venture capital or the like, even though we could probably do so successfully and there are some cool (Y-combinator) options out there. In my opinion too much of that is about angling towards a big payday from selling out, "an exit" or "liquidity event." This isn't a bad thing per se, and I'm certainly not knocking anyone's choices along these lines, but this question of "capital development" is a large one for me.

Even in the face of the Great Recession, the market my business operates in is growing. Not everyone's a winner and some people are having problems meeting their nut — something we think about a lot as we staff up — but there's tons of work out there and lots of enticing larger-scale growth on the horizon. Pretty decent prospects out on this here internet, honestly.

However, that in and of itself is boring to me. I like money, but beyond a relatively minimal point it's not really motivating or interesting. The personal threshold at which it becomes merely a way of keeping score for me is somewhere just north of paying all my bills and having enough left over to stay well-stocked on goat cheese and olives. That'll change if/as I end up taking on bigger financial responsibilities, family and the like, but for know that's where it is.

What's of enormous interest though is the growth and development of a whole new way of doing business, and one that addresses the principle task of empowering people to take ownership and agency over their personal (and of course organizational) destiny with regards to this information-driven world we all now inhabit. The "infrastructure play" as they say, helping this post-capitalist open source economy really take root and flourish.

At the same time, I'm increasingly disenchanted with the state of national politics. While I don't want to abandon things to be run into the ground (President Cheney???!?), it just doesn't feel like there's a lot that can really be done at that level given the constraints of the system.

Yet I'm ambitious and power-acquisitive as ever. Much as I wax nostalgic about the good old days of bohemian simplicity, I don't see myself abandoning my current career arc in any wholesale manner. I'd like to regulate my work-life a bit better, do more for the community, and spend more time on really interesting things, but overall "building the internets" is the best ticket I have to ride, and I'll be sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

So basically the plan is to continue to build my skills, capacities and resources, and start planning bigger and bigger projects/maneuvers. Towards that end, the best opportunities for me appear to be an lateral and local organization.

As The Girth is fond of positing, we could likely return home and probably beat out Jordan Papé/whoever for eventual control of the State of Oregon. Likewise, there's a lot of interesting work going on around citizen-level international solidarity, and my participation in the Drupal community gives me trusted contacts on five continents, spanning the gamut from government employees to avowed trotskyites.

So maybe there's a future in sustainable business ownership success which leaves me with enough free capital, latitude and connections to work these angles. My job title, after all, is "CTO", and if I do right I should be able to keep the business rockin' without having to spend so much time in the trenches on individual projects. Higher-level visibility. Put that together with a little long-term planning, and something pretty interesting could emerge.

If nothing else, I love these conferences because they get me thinking BIG again.

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Credit where it's due, that photo is from a wonderful art installation put on by the EMU Marketing department that I helped assemble (throwing 60,000 lines of printed code around is fun).

Man, when it’s like this, it’s not really that fun.

I have an office. The office has a door. The door has words on it.

Oh man.

Hey, whaddya know. This weekend, we’re opening a bike store.

It’s been a long time coming, and I have to congratulate my partners Matt and Zack (as well as the other zach) and the host of comrades who’ve done the real work here to get this thing off the ground. I’ve been a silent partner for the most part, but I’m proud and excited to be a part of this.

Come on by if you’re in SF. It’s going to be so hip you might bleed from your eyes.

I just can’t stop starting new businesses. Here’s the latest.

Want to see me piss off some sign language interpreters?

Oh yeah.

It really makes me feel bad as an actor. Look at my shitty posture and gesticulation. Listen to my non-warmed-up voice. Still, got good reviews because, in the words of the Professor Brothers, I talked about some real shit.

Exhausted and brain-swolen. Got some more things to do and some travel to figure out. Flying out tomorrow night.

New website design, courtesy new Creative Director Nica Lorber (and some work from the team on the nice touches). Let me know what you think:

http://www.chapterthree.com/

Off to pack, etc.