The 20th century was largely about realizing the vision of the Industrial Revolution: a world of plenty, where goods could be cheaply manufactured and efficiently distributed to consumers. We’re entering an era where those problems are largely solved thanks to the magic of Capitalism and global trade – the world is not lacking for Stuff. Even the poorest in the US don’t lack for T-shirts or underpants. We don’t need cheaper goods.

So the 21st century consumer isn’t just looking for Stuff, they’re looking to express themselves. Consequently we’ve seen an evolution of Brands from “Our Stuff Is Good,” implying you shouldn’t buy the possibly-shoddy stuff sold by other vendors, to “You Should Identify With Our Values.” People don’t buy Nike because they think non-Nike shoes are bad shoes – Nike marketing doesn’t even try to touch that – people buy Nike because they want to be and be seen as the sort of go-getters who Just Do It. Modern brands are about expression more than quality.

But expressing yourself as a brand’s identity is an abstraction – how much do you really understand me just because I am wearing Nike shoes? When the brands have small constituencies, identification is more meaningful, but without broad recognition, identification is much more challenging. Namely, it’s cool that you wear True Religion jeans, but until they become well-known I don’t know what that means — and by the time True Religion jeans become popular, it by definition means less to associate yourselves with them. This is part of the reason why we see “hipsters” always seeking to identify with a brand before it’s popular and move on once a brand “sells out” or becomes mainstream. While many people just dismiss hipsters, it’s legitimate that they’re looking to express themselves and their “brand churn” demonstrates that brand expression is inherently ineffective because it’s a generic intermediate, a poor proxy for values. Which is to say that no brand can actually represent you.

Consequently, the natural conclusion is that your only brand is yourself and your direct expressions. Online platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and WordPress allow the individual to push their unique thoughts and tastes to a wider audience, but they still don’t cover the world outside of the computer. As people hunger to legitimately express themselves in person, they will want goods they identify with and that uniquely and directly express their values, without intermediaries. An increase in the sophistication of just-in-time custom manufacturing and the need for rapid turnaround and shipping will mean that “synthesis factories” in the US will be able to turn out large quantities of custom goods for consumers. Waiting for things to ship from China will just take too long, and lower labor costs will be obviated by automated machinery. Combined with readily available crowdsourced pools of designers who can help individuals create an maintain a personal aesthetic, by the end of the 21st century, most Americans’ clothes will be bespoke and manufactured here.

The same goes for custom skins for electronics, photographs, and other touches that help personalize a body or space. While bulk manufacture of electronics and other long-turnaround goods will remain overseas for some time, much of what is produced – like flash memory or displays – will be commoditized, much like importing raw materials. The actual synthesis and creation of value to pair a product with a consumer and put it in their hands will be done near the consumer.

Many thanks to @agentfin for a #brainbreakfast where we fleshed out some of these ideas.

As the percentage of time you’re spending coding drifts from to 50%, you’re surprised to note that you’re now only a quarter as effective; the context switches just kill you and the team is evolving new best practices and tools and building out the system’s complexity fast enough that it takes at least ~20% of full-time just to keep up.

Consequently, you hit the point where, even though it’s your company, your team gently asks you to stop checking code into production. There’s just no way you can make helpful contributions when only 5% of your time is spent coding – you’re using last year’s syntax, you forgot to create unit tests, you didn’t hook into the new functional test framework appropriately, and you totally horked the new Javascript minifier. You lose your commit privileges.

This has happened to nearly every technical founder I know – the only recourse I’ve seen is when, at some point, they give up managerial control and go hole up in a dark corner again to come back up to speed for a few months.

So I’ve found myself delighted to be back coding again, figuring out the state of the art for 2012, wrapping my head around jQuery, GitHub, node.js, SASS, Compass, HTML5 Boilerplate, MongoDB, and all these other things the cool kids have been playing with for the last five years while I was busy doing businessy things.

Got some pointers on what technologies I should be playing with?

• Rule 0: Write Tests.
• Rule 1: Test at the highest level that makes sense.
• Rule 2: Tests should be fast.

I grew up nearsighted pretty badly in my left eye (20/200, or -3.0) – my right eye too, but to a much lesser degree (20/35 or -1.0). I hated the idea of sticking stuff in my eye every morning and glasses didn’t appeal to me much as a kid, so I just went around with everything kind of in 2D. Sports like shotput and wrestling were obviously not too badly affected, and soccer even was not that bad (the ball is big and slow enough that parallax and ball size can give you enough cues with one eye to know where the ball is), but tennis didn’t work out so well for me. Around college I started wearing glasses as an experiment, mainly encouraged by girls who thought they framed my face nicely. And so it went for years – which mainly worked. But sometimes it’d be challenging – like when scuba diving, skydiving, snowboarding, or going to 3D movies and having to wear two sets of glasses at once. Sometimes I like to just let my nose rest and take my glasses off my face. So I started thinking about getting laser eye surgery.

A lot of my friends have gotten laser eye surgery over the years and I’ve been surprised by how uniformly they’ve been fans of it. Most described their surgery as “life changing” and “the best purchase of their life”. My company, PBworks, has a Health Savings Account and contributes $175/mo to it. If you’re not in the know, HSA’s are great because you can stash away pre-tax income and spend it with a special credit card on any medical-related expenses. Even Tylenol at Target! Acupuncture, teeth whitening, whatever. So I’ve been saving up in my HSA for a few years and finally built it up to the point where I had enough money for Lasik and to have some extra buffer left in there still.

Picking a Doctor & Procedure

After a lot of research, I found Dr. Craig Bindi of Laser Eye Center of Silicon Valley – he has a perfect 5-star rating on Yelp and heck, the center did Linus Torvalds’s eyes, so I figure it’s good enough for me. I first went in for measurements in July of 2009 and mulled my options for some time.

You have two options, one for each step of the procedure: whether you want conventional microkeratome or IntraLase and whether you want Traditional LASIK or Wavefront. The first choice is what technology the surgeon will use to cut a hinged flap of your cornea (to give them access to where you are going to have the correction performed) and the second is what technology will be used to actually perform the correction. A microkeratome is a small, vibrating knife that allows the surgeon to manually “saw” through your cornea. This is the more traditional way of performing LASIK, so most surgeons have a lot of experience doing these. That said, most post-op complications occur because of issues with the corneal flap (such as skin cells accidentally lodging under your flap and starting to grow!). IntraLase uses a computer-controlled laser to cut the flap instead, which makes for many fewer long-term issues. Your cornea heals much more strongly long-term, which is why both NASA and the US Air Force have approved laser surgery only where IntraLase is used (under high-G forces, a traditional LASIK patient’s corneal flap might dislodge, but not someone who’s had IntraLase). IntraLase is a chunk more expensive (+$500), but given that this is a once-ever kind of a thing and you want it done right, it seemed pretty obviously worth it to me. What I wasn’t told up front was that the eye is a little more beat up in the short term with IntraLase – people who have a microkeratome surgery often wake up the next day with near-perfect eyesight, but it can take a little longer for those with IntraLase to heal and the redness in the eye persists for some time.

The other option is Traditional or Wavefront LASIK. This covers what technology is going to be used to actually perform the correction. My understanding of Traditional LASIK is that the eye surgeon manually operates the laser during the procedure. It’s very important that the patient keep their eyes precisely still during the procedure, since a quick dart of the eye could cause a mis-correction. Small, unavoidable errors often happen, causing “night halos”. With Wavefront LASIK, a computerized map of the exact shape of your eye is made and a computer-controlled laser that continuously tracks your eye’s movement makes the corrections. This enables a much more precise surgery that is customized to your eye. There are a lot fewer reports of night halos with Wavefront and generally speaking it seems as though people’s vision (and astigmatism) could be more precisely corrected with Wavefront. So I opted to add that as well (+$700).

Timeline

3/17/2010 Wednesday AM - I decide to go ahead with the surgery and schedule a Friday afternoon appointment.

3/19/2010 Friday AM - I’m feeling well-rested, calm, and confident going into the surgery. After doing some work, Anna drives me down to San Jose.

1pm – I arrive at the Laser Eye Center. They do some extra measurements, and offer people Valium. I decline since I’m feeling calm and don’t want to be drugged up. It turns out they’re running a 20% off “March Madness” special and the whole thing is going to cost substantially less than I thought. After a bunch of waiting, I’m guided to the IntraLase room and left to hang out for about fifteen minutes. I lay back on the operating table, alone, staring at the ceiling and meditating on health care that goes beyond just getting people back to a baseline of “not sick” but that focuses on helping people be as excellent as possible.

3pm – Dr. Bindi comes in with an assistant and provides extra-strength numbing drops. These ones tingle more than the earlier ones – it’s clear that these are the hardcore drops. A few seconds later, my left eye can’t feel a thing. The speculum (which keeps my eye open) is placed on my eye but I can’t feel it. Dr. Bindi walks me through what he’s doing and what I’m going to feel at all times, which is very helpful. The procedure is most uncomfortable because my eye is being pressed upon pretty hard for about ten seconds. (Or at least my eye felt pressed upon – turns out it was suction and not pressure!) I had originally thought that the corrective step would happen immediately thereafter – turns out, that was wrong! They give me a pair of sunglasses to wear and guide me to the Wavefront room. I’m really a little wigged out, knowing that my cornea is currently sliced in half as I’m walking around. I can’t see anything at all out of my left eye other than a vague sensation of light, which is pretty scary. I sit in the Wavefront room by myself as they wait for the swelling to subside.

3:10pm – A technician comes in to calibrate the Wavefront machine. This part is pretty fascinating as they put a sheet of metal under the machine and a pair of lasers click as they zap perfectly round holes into the metal. My eyes are about to be zapped by a machine that just drilled holes into sheet metal. I was mildly intimidated/amused.

3:15pm – Dr. Bindi and his assistant come into the room and check on my eye; it apparently looks good, so I lay down on the bed, which rotates underneath the laser. A blinking red laser comes into view above and a green laser below. The speculum is put in again and I’m told to keep my whole body completely still and stare just above the red dot. After a short while, the laser starts tracking my eye movements and stays in a fixed position in my sight. The laser “sparkles” are providing me with a pretty incredible – and awesomely personal – laser show. When the lasers start blasting, I don’t see a big flash of light or anything like that – the sparkles just freeze in place for a second or two and then resume, well, sparkling. It does smell just a little bit like burned hair. After about 30 seconds or so, Dr. Bindi washes off my eyes and removes the speculum. I’m pivoted out from under the machine and get up. I walk out of the room and into the lobby – “You’re all set!”. Given all the setup, it’s kind of funny to be released into the wild less than a minute after surgery. Some people told me their vision was better right off the table, but that definitely wasn’t my experience: the world looked as if I was seeing it through ten sheets of saran wrap. I’m given three kinds of drops: fake tears, Omnipred (anti-inflammatory), and Vigamox (antibiotic). I’ll need to drop the Omnipred and Vigamox four times daily for a week.

5pm – Dinner with Anna. My eye has begun healing noticeably. We’re down to “three or four sheets of saran wrap”. My eye is very red around the edges and there’s a bright red blob in the corner of my eye.

8pm – A work-emergency puts me in front of my home computer working on a customer issue for a few hours. It feels a little awkward.

10pm – I go to the Groove Armada show with Anna. It’s amazing. We meet up with her friend afterwards at around 1am. He seems surprised that I’ve had surgery that day.

3/20/2010 Saturday 7:30am – My bright-and-early followup appointment. I didn’t wake up with clear vision, which was a mild disappointment. I’m down to two sheets of saran wrap. The world is hazy but not blurry. It’s more like there’s Vaseline on my eyes than it is that my eyes are defocused. Anna (bless her heart, on some four hours of sleep) drives me to San Jose. The doctor (not Bindi) checks on my eye and concludes I have a corneal edema (swelling with fluids) due to my eye’s reaction to the Intralase and my cornea is dry/irritated. The edema explains the haziness; as it heals up, my visual acuity will improve. He measures my eye at 20/60, which is already a lot better than it started at.

3/21/2010 Sunday AM – One sheet of saran wrap. I look at the fire escape of the building across the way and can make out more fine detail with my left eye than my right for the first time in my life. I wonder if my eye dominance is going to switch at some point.

Sunday PM – just for fun, I try on my old glasses. My eyes kind of wig out and the world rapidly goes in and out of very crisp focus. I take them off quickly. My eye is looking better – the dark red patch has become a light pink blotch.

3/22 Monday AM – Still at “one sheet of saran wrap”.

3/23-24 Tuesday & Wednesday - I go up to Tahoe for some snowboarding. Since I’ve never had prescription goggles, this is the first time I’ve ever really seen the mountain in 3D. It’s pretty crisp, though I definitely need to keep my goggles on outside to keep my eyes from hurting in the bright light. My snowboarding improves somewhat, notwithstanding an epic 100+ foot slide down a double-black vertical that was basically just a solid ice sheet. I should have known better when a row of expert snowboarders were lined up at the edge looking down nervously and waiting.

3/26 Friday – It’s time for my one-week post-operative checkup. My eye doesn’t hurt at all and the “saran wrap” is now more like a thin layer of Vaseline spread over my eyeball. My left eye’s vision is measured at about 20/15, though there are still mild halos around bright objects. My right eye’s vision is definitely better – I can make out the text on the 20/20 line – weird. I’m told by Dr. Bindi that the halos will completely go away in about the next week and I no longer need to take my anti-inflammatory and antibiotic eyedrops. My cornea is apparently healing very well with no wrinkles, abrasions, or infections and the flap is beginning to firmly reseal. My eye is self-lubricating well, so I’ve apparently dodged the common dry-eye syndrome. I get a copy of all my records from the office and am pleased to see I rated 5/5 on “patient cooperation”. There’s a huge amount of data on my eyes they’ve processed!

3/27 Saturday – Driving is pretty comfortable now day or night. Still very mild “glow” around bright objects. I’m pretty happy with how the surgery has turned out and would probably recommend it. If the halos do finish disappearing over the next week and I have totally clear vision  I’ll be pretty pumped!

4/1 Thursday – My left eye is still much more sensitive to small bumps / being pushed than my right eye.  My eye is lubricating well but still feels a little “different” than my right. There’s still a very slight halo around things. Sunlight doesn’t bug me so much anymore, but I do like wearing these cool shades. I’m thinking about going into the DMV and getting my glasses restriction removed…

Disclaimers: I am not a licensed attorney and cannot provide you with legal counsel or advice. Consequently, there may be very serious errors in this writeup. You are strongly advised to consult with proper legal counsel before taking any action in filing or not filing a trademark. I am not responsible for you screwing up your trademark registration!

A “trade mark” is a unique piece of text or graphic that uniquely identifies your brand. Think of the Apple logo or the Nike swoosh, the blue stripes of the IBM logo or the bland text of “Microsoft”. All of these are trademarks. I’m not allowed to sell a piece of software and call it “Microsoft” or even “Micro Sawft” or anything that’s confusingly similar. Having it be clear to consumers what companies are making what products they buy is helpful to both consumers and the owners of trade marks.

Most marks are registered around certain “classes” of product or service. This allows two companies both named “Kara’s” to co-exist, where one is a gourmet cupcake outlet and the other is a home cleaning service. The point of having “classes” of products or services is that the purchaser of Kara’s cupcakes isn’t likely to believe that it’s affiliated with the home cleaning service. There’s a low risk of confusion so they could both own the trademark “Kara’s” in their respective classes.

In many countries, like the US, you get a trademark by default, just by virtue of using a particular name in commerce. Just registering a website and operating it is good enough. If you want to let the world know that you think you own a particular trademark, you can put “(TM)” next to the mark. This doesn’t require or grant you any particular legal rights, but does make an implicit statement that you are planned to sue people who infringe your mark. The burden of proof will fall on you, however, that you were the one to first use the mark. But in other countries, like Mexico and South Korea, there are “first to file” regimes — so even if you’ve been using a mark in commerce for years, if you haven’t filed with their patent office a brand new competitor could beat you to the punch and legally register your trademark. If you’re planning on doing business in one of these countries, it would be wise to file sooner rather than later.

If you’d like stronger protection for your mark, you can choose to register it with the US Patent & Trademark Office. This will cost you $350 per class. If you have a website, you probably want both the Product Class 9 and Service Class 39, for a total cost of $700. Not bad for lifetime rights to a mark. It will take about six months for your case to get assigned an examiner at the USPTO (it used to take over a year!) – the examiner might call, mail, or email you if they have questions about your mark. For instance, when I registered PBwiki, I had to explain to the examiner that I was not claiming ownership over “wiki”. Once you’ve cleared the examiner, the notice that you’d like to register the mark will be published in the Federal Register in order to let people who object to your registration see your intent and respond to it — for example, if you tried to register “Zeerocks” as a mark for a photocopier company, Xerox could object to the registration after your mark was published for opposition. If there has been no opposition, you should recieve your registration about three months after your mark has been published for opposition. At this point you can use the ® symbol next to your mark to indicate it’s a registered trademark. If someone violates your registered trademark, the burden of proof is now on them that they are not in violation — and if they’re found guilty, they are responsible for treble (3x) damages due to “wilful infringement” (namely: they should have known better since the could have seen the mark was already taken!).

If you’d like a template for how to do this, check out the PBworks trademark registration and note how the class 9 description focuses on the software as a thing and the class 39 description focuses on what it is doing to provide a service. You’ll need to phrase your filing in this way.

If you’d like to register your mark in other countries as your brand starts going global, there are two main ways. You can either do it yourself directly with each country’s government offices or you can use The Madrid Protocol – this mechanism allows you to submit one registration to several countries at the same time through the United Nations. Be warned, costs can add up in a real hurry – if you want to register your mark in two classes in all 42 jurisdictional areas, it’ll run you around $20,000. On the plus side, you’ve got a single entity to deal with (WIPO – the World Intellectual Property Organization, an arm of the U.N.) and don’t have to scurry around making lots of different filings with lots of different patent offices. On the downside, unless you’re a giant multinational corporation, you probably don’t have to worry about registering your mark in Lesotho. And you still can’t use this system to register marks in countries not under the protocol, like Brazil or New Zealand.

WIPO charges a pretty hefty overhead for the service – $653 + about double the rate that you’d pay to any single country’s trademark office. For instance, if you want to register an EU trademark directly, that’ll set you back 900 Euros (~$1200) but if you file through WIPO via the Madrid Protocol, it’s 2229 CHF (~$2000) to get coverage in the EU. So you’re definitely paying for the convenience of filing in one place.

Here’s a quick guide I’ve just assembled for the costs of registering trademarks in different countries and links to the online (English) applications:

• USA $350/class
• European Union 900€
• Canada CAN$250
• Australia AU$120/class filing + AU$250/class registration
• New Zealand
• Mexico

I found websites for the following Patent Offices, but there wasn’t a clear link to online registrations – I’ll update this post at the point that I find those links!

• Japan
• South Korea
• Brazil
• China
• India
• Russia

Anger resolves little. we get angry because it suits us to do so; it allows us to express our feelings and we temporarily feel better about having a candid exchange. but angry speech does not concern itself with being understood or with conveying ideas other than pain and guilt. angry speech concerns itself only with inflicting pain. regardless of motivation or provocation then, the presence of angry speech should always be relected as a weakness of the speaker, a lack of ability to seek an appropriate resolution. anger means you’ve lost.

Assume the other is willing to listen, can be convinced, and is willing to change. Assume the other means well and wants to be a positive influence on the world. Assume everything’s going to be okay. Assume you can understand things well enough to make a difference.

Speech for speech’s sake is intellectual masturbation. Do not talk for the pleasure of talking; speak to be understood and have your ideas acted upon.

Seek to have your hypotheses invalidated – ask in all things “how am I looking at this wrong?” and quest for your foolishness as eagerly as hunting for gold. If you look for confirming evidence, you will find it, even if it is weak. If you seek to have your ideas overthrown, however, you will quickly grow in wisdom. If you aren’t regularly seeing what a fool you are, you are probably just not looking hard enough.