I wrote this back in June 2010 when Season Of Sneakers first launched. It still is one of my favourite content ideas of 2010 and holds true today. More like this please.

Ford “Fucking” Davis Media Conglomerate Group (FFDMCG) – whose custom web assets include the highly controversial “Pull Out Bros” alongside daily musings “blog” Ford Davis – have just launched their latest title, a joint venture with JTL LLC.

The question and answer/fashion hybrid “blog”, “JTL’S Season of Sneakers“, is seen as a grab at the burgeoning Q&A market, pitting themselves against titles such as About.com, Answers.com, and newcomer Quora. But their possible point of difference could be taking the unusual step of selecting a single spokesperson, JTL chief Johnny The Ladd, as the site’s one and only voice/ambassador.

“We’ve spent a six dollar figure in R&D and Johnny was an unlikely choice” says FFDMCG chief Ford Davis. “But in the end the data and research rang true: the world is finally ready for the meme that is JTL”. When questioned on likely revenue streams Ford was tight-lipped, only to imply that a private webcam pay-on-demand service is in the works. That and “we’ll sell the front windscreen for the right price”.

Early reports are bullish with the site doing over 60 million unique browsers in the first few days, only second in traffic, in Australia, to Facebook. “The combination sinkhole party and South American “blogger outreach” was a great strategy in getting it [JTL'S Season of Sneakers] in front of the target eyeballs”, said Ford Davis from his condo in Guatemala City, “now comes the tough task of ensuring we keep the content fresh and JTL relevant”.

The writer was flown 1st class into Guatemala for this interview and stayed in the presidential suite at the Westin Camino Real Guatemala City courtesy of FFDMC and JTL LLC.

I was adding a new site to MAMP PRO the other night. A tiny little one-page HTML job that I look after for a friend. I added the new host, it told me it needed to reboot for the new site to take effect, then it flatlined like Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Bacon and Julia Roberts in that movie from 1990. Quit and restarted. Nothing. Rebooted the computer. Nada. I did the usual: asked Google, got a hit on Stack Overflow, tried and tried again. I killed processes and renamed configuration files but from what I can tell MAMP PRO runs encapsulated in its own instance: you can’t kill the individual MySQL process. (Please email me and tell me I’m wrong). I had recently upgraded my machine to Lion and found that MAMP didn’t play well with virtual hosts so I decided to go PRO.

And you know what? I was using a hacked version. Yep – I didn’t pay the lousy $50 AUD for a license. A developer or team of developers probably put a lot of work into that piece of software. It’s simple, intuitive, and does what it’s supposed to do (most of the time): serve database driven websites. And I had the nerve to buck the system. $50 has now cost me ten times that in billable hours rebuilding my local development environment.

For the record I purchased a license straight away. In fact I wrote this as my order was being processed “within the next 4 hours, but in no case will it take more than 24 hours.” I’ll reinstall, rebuild, and get going again. I’m prepared for it going all seppuku on me again as I understand these things happen. I might complain. Nothing will probably come of it. I might restore from backup. But at least this time round I’ll know that I paid for somebody else’s mistakes.

Fuck you, karma police.

Pigs die in hot cars – Pigs Don’t Fly

Maybe it’s time to fire your creative technologist – Wieden+Kennedy

America’s gone and got its gun, again – Bloomberg

Dan Frommer drops some writing knowledge – SplatF

Possibly the best way to introduce yourself to Captain Beefheart – The New Yorker

I asked @alexvitlin for some good writing on all things NBA and he delivered, in buckets – Grantland

If you’re having trouble conentrating just blame Google – The Atlantic

Greg Egan’s “Dark Integers” – Asimov’s Science Fiction

How did this happen again? The same way it usually does: invariably surfing Daring Fireball. I come upon a link to a post by Zach Holman where he talks about Shit Work. This is exactly the reason why I have a photo album on Facebook titled “Don’t Make Me Categorise Things”. Search was supposed to fix all of this. No more compartmentalising things. No more lists. No more folders, eight deep, that make sense only to its creator. As I dig around a little further I find a post on a product that he’d produced, named Facelette, with a quote that lends well to my current thinking in that with all the curation going on at the moment, where the hell are the creators? That and the reason, perhaps a little justification, as to why I am writing again.

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create.

The original tweet is long gone and yes I did correct the punctuation and case. A quick search leads me to a Smashing Magazine article that seems thorough and drills pretty deep into the enigma that was why the lucky stiff aka Why aka _why. And I do remember coming across his Ruby programming book, Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, when I ever so briefly dabbled in Ruby (of the Rails flavour. If you want to for whatever reason learn how to program, in a heartbeat I’d tell you to start on Ruby). He was as much of an artist as he was a writer and a coder. The best coders I know are great writers. If you’re a good writer I suggest you look into coding as it seems the tasks go hand in hand.

Why’s output was fairly intense, a lot of code libraries, art, music, and words. Then he just goes up and “disappears” on or around 19 August 2009. He pulls his websites, kills his code repositories, and deletes his Twitter account. I get a sense from the article and bits and pieces that he was hounded out: kids were resolving IP addresses and deciphering mailing list headers. This is a coder we’re talking about here, not a TMZ b-grade celebrity. Why did everyone want to, need to, know more? That’s some really sad shit right there.

It seems on the Internet – this place where no one knows you’re a dog – it needs to be proven you are a dog, lest we all get caught out and made to look like proper fools.

The title is a work in progress. I had Shit On My Kindle but it may offend, is probably bad for SEO, and who knows what we’ll be reading off in the next couple of years? Taking cues from Daring Fireball and the excellent Counterparties, it’s a list of things that I’ve read and worth sharing. The first few editions will probably include a lot of older reads as I’m currently cleaning out my Instapaper list, but the idea is to keep it fresh.

Man writes awesome code book with sweet pictures, gets hounded on the internet, deletes everything – Smashing Magazine

Randy Reimann writes about his hardcore band from Farfield called Massappeal – Deaf Sparrow

Punctuation just got a whole lot more logical – Slate

Remember when zombies were just something that you killed with a shovel? – The New Yorker

On Douglas Coupland on Marshall McLuhan – The New York Times

Sean Parker can’t help himself; maybe that’s why he’s so good – Vanity Fair

Here comes JavaScript – Richard Rodger

Notice how a comma changes everything? I bought a punctuation book a little way back and it’s completely changed my life. Well not really but it has got me thinking about punctuation. Again not really as I think about punctuation every time I write – I just never thought that I was ever good at punctuation. This is really going downhill fast. I know that my punctuation is okay I just never had benchmarked it against anything. Until now. The book is called Type It Write. You should go get it as it just might change your life.

But this was never about punctuation.

This was about This American Life. And fucking it. Although I don’t really want to go into how I’ve been sucked into this amazing radio program and how it’s changed my life much like my punctuation book has. I’ll save radio for another time.

A quote from an episode just gone by, So Crazy It Just Might Work, kind of blew my mind.

“Pancreatic cancer is his specialty and it’s practicly invincible; harder to kill than any other cancers and it’s so tough that chemo, which is poison, often barely works at all. Over the last 25 years the biggest treatment breakthrough only added about four months to a paitent’s life.”

I shouldn’t need to tell you why.

I stopped writing. Well, creative writing. I write emails every day. Good emails. Thorough emails. Emails with thought and big words, possibly meaning, but that’s about it. And it’s been driving me insane. I used to produce a weekly email and managed to churn out hundreds of words a week and edit that many again. It was hard work but it made me laugh. My friends read my words. My friends helped me write those words. My parents read my words. It got a little serious from time to time, as events of the world asked us to take a stand. And I miss all of that. I’ve stopped reading too, perhaps because of the same reason. Actually that’s crap: I’ve been reading a heap but only words of others. Worst thing of all I’ve been fretting as to how I’m going to get back into words, back into writing. It seems to start something these days you need to buy into how you’re going to be relevant, how you’re going to be different, and how you’re going to succeed. And from that starting point you’re locked into some sort of contract with the Word Wizards and The Content Fairies and they’ll take your blood if you don’t return on your investment which really turns out to be their investment: their return on your engagement. So I’ve made a pact with myself to write about nothing. Well not nothing but it isn’t anything. I like that. It’s nice and simple. There’s no theme. I’m not hiding anything from you. It’s going to be whatever it wants to be. That’s why it’s beautiful and I’m sticking to it.

I have to go shave my beard now because it’s really starting to piss me off.