I arrived in San Francisco yesterday and made the trip to Silicon Valley (turns out it is an actual, semi-well-defined place; ie I bought a Map of It) during rush hour. That clearly was an iffy choice, as the traffic was the equivalent of I-93 in Boston (on a good day) the entire time.

I'm in Mountain View now, it's almost tomorrow (midnight). Of course, to my body, it's already tomorrow; it's 2 AM EST. I can't deny that I'm jet lagged, yet the concierge at my hotel (the fabulous Hotel Avante; the room has a Rubik's cube!) just informed me that bars/clubs in San Francisco stay open until 6 AM....and some until 3PM the next day!! Now, quite frankly, I don't really like clubbing. Which is why I'm sitting here blogging about this information instead of driving up Route 101N right this moment. But as a hacker, I love freedom. And the freedom to stay up till 6 AM, if I so choose, is momentously refreshing.

Also, the weather today was fantastic. Sunny, 70.

When you go to Craigslist, the default view is SF. When you hit Google Earth, they suggest SF as a place to search. To anyone but a hacker-nerd-geek, these would seem contrivances. But to me, it's philosophically refreshing to be in the default namespace for once...

...It's also not a pipe.....(sorry)

There are very few areas of human endeavor in which achievement is based more on talent than hard work. Child acting, I would say, is one of them. So is Gymnastics. In those fields, you really have to be 'born with it'. For child acting, you're a kid: you don't have time to study, work hard, gain experience, etc. You just have to have a knack for acting, and be lucky enough to have that knack manifest itself before you start growing hair in awkward places. With gymnastics, you need to realize that it's what you want to do early, while your body is still nimble and flexible and you can then train it to grow in a certain way. One also needs to have enough talent to sustain one's focus, so that the craft is fun and rewarding and never full of drudgeries.

By contrast, with almost everything else in the world that human beings aspire to be good at success is more dependent on hard work than 'raw talent' or 'intrinsic ability' or whatever. The main areas that I want to highlight that fall into this category are: Computer Programming; Music; (which are my two main passions) and.....Professional Baseball.

Of course there are tools out there that can....ahem....'enhance' your 'performance' in certain areas. Like a good text editor, or a debugger. Or a guitar pick or amplifier.

Is using these devices 'cheating'? Or to put it more broadly, is it unfair competition? It depends on how the competition is set up; what it's rules (both explicit and implicit) are. If one believes debuggers to be immoral then using them would definitely be cheating: at the least, cheating yourself. If there is a code of ethics in your field and you use a tool that violates that code, then you are undoubtedly a cheater.

There's an upside and a downside to believing the premise of this post (which, by the way, is this: hard work is more important than talent in achieving your goals). The upside? You can achieve anything you want if you're willing to put in enough hard work. The downside? To achieve something you want, you have to put in enough hard work.

Here's a video of me playing a song I wrote with the title of the same name as this post.

Enjoy!

Brightcove:

YouTube:

I honestly can't believe it was that easy to make a podcast! Not that I couldn't have (ahem) done it myself using Ruby on Rails...(To get to it, click the 'Get Podcast' button in the widget directly below the song module on the main page)

I fricken' love storymaker. How much does it cost? Would a regular shmoe like me be able to afford his own account (and not have to use the demo account that Brightcove gave me since I work there)? Even if I have no way of monetizing my content but just want to share with friends and family?

Looking at the storymaker website, my instinctive answer to my questions is no (since you have to talk to customer engagement to get a free trial, that screams $$$$ to me). I spend ~100 dollars a year on my shared hosting, so I would only be willing to pay maybe another 25-50/year for the mp3 player project in storymaker. But don't quote me on that.

Speaking of my costs to run this website, I might be adding AdWords soon...not because I need the money (or even expect them to make money) but more to get a feel for how the integration works.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I work for Brightcove, who bought Storymaker (which up until then was its own company) maybe a year and a half ago

I'm in this week's Weekly Dig, a local free magazine. If I were to quote the article, it would look something like this:

Thompson, Barry. "exit polls". Weekly Dig. p50.

    Volume 9, Issue 30; July 25-August 1 2007.

It's interesting, because Barry didn't tell me that he was a reporter for the dig. He just said "Can I interview you and take your picture".