The 36 best stories, pictures and opinions of August 2012

Every link I shared in August 2012 that earned at least 50 clicks on Twitter:

1. Wikipedia Redefined (1001)
2. An independent rating system for online Terms of Service (545)
3. Your startup is not a startup, it’s just a website. (536) 
4. Public humiliation done right. (479)
5. The best place on the web to learn anything, free. (410) 
6. Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger (356)
7. Advice I Wish I Could Have Given Myself 5 Years Ago (324)
8. Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 App Analogy (255)
9. Friend just posted a pic of Atlanta Marriott mega-lobby, AKA Dragon*Con ground zero. I remember that feeling (247)
10. Programmer Time Translation Cheatsheet -or- Why Programmers Are Bad at Estimating Times (241)
11. A rookie goes to Dragon*Con: Here's what he learned (240) 
12. The best interface is no interface (218)
13. How The Poor, The Middle Class And The Rich Spend Their Money (157)
14. You can't make this stuff up… (153) 
15. "Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies" - Fox News (142)
16. Productivity vs. Guilt and Self-Loathing (142)
17. Fear of Money (138)
18. The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win (136)
19. The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy (131)
20. Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa (129)
21. When Freemium Fails (129)
22. 13 ways of looking at Medium, the new blogging/sharing/discovery platform from @ev and Obvious (114)
23. An Unexpected Ass Kicking (105)
24. If Content Is King, Multiscreen Is The Queen, Says New Google Study (90)
25. 25 Ways To Survive As A Creative Person (89)
26. 30 Indispensable Writing Tips From Famous Authors (87)
27. Move your feet (86)
28. The poison pill hidden in Twitter's social graph (85)
29. Why You Can’t Be Anything You Want to Be (81)
30. Wolfram|Alpha's Personal Analytics for Facebook (80)
31. Peter Thiel's College Dropouts: One-Year Checkup (73)
32. ‘The riskiest thing you can do now is be safe’ – The Top 10 TED talks for startups (66)
33. The top ten differences between white terrorists and others (61)
34. What My Son's Disabilities Taught Me About 'Having It All' (58)
35. The coming civil war over general purpose computing (57)
36. How to Be a Better Procrastinator (55)

Stats compiled with Buffer.

So you want to hire little old me?

Image by TW Collins

Because many have asked, yes, I am for hire.

I have served as a professional writer, editor, speaker, community administrator, and software product manager for over 20 years. I had a regular radio show spot, my name on a provisional patent, and citations as a source in the Wikipedia to show for it. Google "Jay Garmon" and you'll get plenty of details. (Or just check out my lengthy bio page.)

I'm a reasonably smart guy who understands technology, and I'm offering my talents in exchange for your coin. Specifically, you can hire me as a...

• Writer of blogs, proposals, ads, scripts, or pithy commentary. If you need words strung together in interesting ways, I can get that done.
• Speaker on a variety of subjects, including how to use social media, emerging technology and the like. I also wrote a trivia column for ten years, which means I have a knack for making even the most obscure topics interesting, and I can probably do the same for you on most any subject. Particularly as it relates to tech.
• Strategist for software and interactive applications. I've overseen the development of features and functions for Web sites, including revamping a multimillion-dollar e-mail marketing system. I've launched HIPAA and PCI-compliant SaaS solutions for industry-leading healthcare software companies. If you're trying to make smarter, more effective customer-facing technology, I have a few bits of hard-earned wisdom I can bring to bear.  

But before you contact me with a job inquiry, there are some things to know.

• I don't work for free. If your inquiry includes any version of the phrase "we can't pay you," spare both of us the effort, as this will only end in an awkward e-mail where I explain I actually get paid for this stuff. Reasonably well, reasonably often. I occasionally amend my speaking fees for non-profits and charities, but those are handled on a case-by-case basis and I agree to them rarely. You've been warned.
• I have a day job. This is not to say I am unavailable during normal business hours, but my undivided attention is not on the table (unless you're offering a great full-time gig at great full-time pay). 
• I am a very public geek. Look over this blog, and you'll note a pervasive interest in science, science fiction, and online media. In the current online world, you need to have a certain measure of imagination to understand how all these new tools and trends work and evolve. Moreover, as everything is now public, pervasive, and persistent, communications skills have become more important than ever. There's no better thought-leader for the current economy than a sci-fi writer. But if having a loud and proud Star Trek fan associated with your brand is a problem, it is best we stop now, because that's who you're hiring, and your customers will figure that out pretty quickly.

If I haven't scared you off with all the above caveats, we can now discuss price. My consulting rate is $250 per hour, and my per-word rate ranges from $0.25 to $0.75 based on required research for the piece. 

I typically bid jobs based on how many hours I estimate they will require, and for speaking engagements this includes preparation, especially if you want a PowerPoint presentation in addition to my words and voice. 

For recurring jobs -- such as an open-ended blogging assignment -- I discount my rate based on how much recurring work is required. 

Finally, I am available on retainer, with the regular fee negotiated based on the expected level of time investment.

Questions, comments, or proposals should all be addressed to jay [at] jaygarmon [dot] net.

Nerd Word of the Week: Spoiler alert

Image via Wikipedia 

Spoiler alert (n.) - A warning given to an audience that the following content or discussion will divulge plot details of a particular work of fiction. The term originated in online forums devoted to discussing movies, television shows, and books; if you have not seen or read the works under discussion, the spoiler alert warns you to proceed no further in the discussion thread lest you "spoil" the surprises inherent in any future reading or viewing experience. Tossing out spoilers without a spoiler alert is considered a serious breach of netiquette and geek civility -- to the point that Wikipedia articles describing many fictional works are required to exclude spoilers or to clearly segregate such content and mark it with spoiler alerts.

I bring it up because: The long-running plot-complex TV show Lost aired its finale last Sunday, and the web has been overridden with dissections of the series resolution. For those of us that have never seen Lost but may wish to view it on DVD or Hulu someday, the appropriate use of spoiler alerts is much appreciated, as was the case with reimagined Battlestar Galactica, The Shield, The Wire, and Sopranos finales before it. Basically, any cult-favorite show that has ended since the advent of Twitter in 2006 has been subject to a delicate balance of fan commiseration and judicious spoiler-alerting, as divulging too much via a social networking post can earn you ire and scorn from the masses, and divulging too little will miss the point. Such is the online geek paradox.

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Nerd Word of the Week: Light cone

Light cone (n.) - A simplified diagram for explaining causality, brought to us from relativistic physics. The diagram on the left (blatantly stolen from Wikipedia) is a light cone based on Minkowski spacetime, which is a fancy term for a uber-simplified diagram of the universe as a flat, two-dimensional plane; no Einsteinian curving to confuse us. Time is the vertical axis, so everything below the center is the past and everything above it is the future. At the very center is an event--typically, a flash of light, which gives us the term light cone. The lower cone represents all the possible events that could have caused the flash of light to happen at the exact time and place it actually occurred. The upper cone is all the events that could be influenced by the flash of light after it happened.

As you get closer to the event in time, fewer and fewer other events could have caused it, as the particular circumstances surrounding the event get more specific. For example, if the flash of light is caused by an LED in my office, any LED that existed in the world a year ago could go on to create the flash of light, so long as in the intervening year any of those LEDs found their way to my office. As we approach the time of the event, the vast majority of those LEDs are ruled out, as they are destroyed or simply stationed too far away to reach my office in time to emit the flash, even if they move there at the fastest possible speed. Finally, only one LED is in the exact right place at the exact right time to emit the flash--the one at the center of the light cone.

At the moment of the flash, I may be the only person in my office, so for simplicty's sake, I am the only observer of the flash (though in reality the exact electrons used to generate the flash, the heat produced, the bacteria incinerated or mutated, and so on all are influenced by the flash in some fashion). I note the flash, and remember it. For every subsequent moment of my life, I could potentially mention the flash of light to someone else, thus passing on the flash's influence. Each person I mention it to could mention it to someone else, and every one they tell could mention the flash to someone else, and so on exponentially until the end of time. Thus, the flash's light cone--its potential realm of influence--expands as we move forward in time.

That said, there were innumerable objects in the past that could never have emitted the flash of light no matter how their circumstances progress, and there are incalculable persons, places, things and events in the future that can never be influenced by the flash of light, if only because all the non-causers and the un-effectables exist so distantly in the universe that they could neither reach my office at any point in the universe's past, nor could lightspeed information from my office reach them before the heat death of the universe. All of these events and objects outside the flash of light's realm of influence exist outside its light cone. Sci-fi writers occasionally invoke the light cone when discussing time-travel and its myriad consequences.

I bring it up because: Because, quoth Wikipedia, 90 years ago tomorrow (May 29, 1919), "Einstein's theory of general relativity is tested (later confirmed) by Arthur Eddington's observation of a total solar eclipse in Principe and by Andrew Crommelin in Sobral, Ceará, Brazil." Any excuse to discuss spacetime relativity and its sci-fi applications is a good one.

Further reading: Author Charles Stross makes light cones somewhat central to the plot in his Timelike Diplomacy series, Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise. In the series, there is a godlike artificial intelligence called the Eschaton that forbids any time travel that intersects with its own light cone because it doesn't want humans erasing it from history. This leads to a great deal of political and technical intrigue when humans tried to use time travel to conduct interstellar war. Fun stuff.

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Giving up that which defines me

Image via Wikipedia

For seven and a half years, I've written a column called Geek Trivia. On Wednesday, April 29, 2009, the last issue of that column I'll likely ever write will be publicized in its e-mail newsletter. I'm taking a full-time job with a competitor of CBS Interactive, the publisher of Geek Trivia and its host blog, The Geekend, for which I also write several times per week. I built The Geekend from the ground up, and I have come to regard my Geek Trivia readers (of which there were about 60,000) as not just fans, but in some measure friends. Saying goodbye to them is more difficult than I imagined it could be.

Google my name--Jay Garmon--and you'll find my work for the Geekend in the top two or three results. Google Geek Trivia, and you'll find my work for that column first and foremost. In some ways, Geek Trivia and The Geekend have defined me, professionally. They've opened doors for me that I never thought possible.

My role as a guest on TechTalk radio, I garnered through Geek Trivia. My connections to the wonderful bloggers at SFSignal, I made through the Geekend. John Scalzi noticed--and reacted to--my work there. (And then recalled the incident enough to sign books to that effect.) Writers and artists like Rich Lovatt, Mike Sterling, Valerie D'Orazio, David Gallaher, Lar DeSouza, Steve Ellis, Rich Ginter, Hannibal Tabu, Andrew Hackard, John Klima, Dwight MacPherson, Rich Barrett, Chris Meeks, John F. Merz and Mary Robinette Kowal follow me on Twitter because of my networking done in part through the Geekend. I've been cited as a source in Wikipedia articles because of Geek Trivia, which is a very strange notion indeed.

Ironically, I've "ended" Geek Trivia before, only to have my fans demand its return. Twice. I cannot begin to tell you how gratifying those responses were. The only compliment that comes close is that TechRepublic won't continue Geek Trivia without me, which is equally sad and humbling all at once.

For over eight years, my career and my online identity have been tied in some measure to TechRepublic in general and Geek Trivia specifically. That's a quarter of my life.

And now I'm giving all that up.

It is a strange new world I enter now, one where I have to reinvent myself online. My wife is actually glad of this, as she's looking forward to my having just one set of deadlines (that of the new day job) and me spending the rest of time either away from the keyboard, or writing what I want to write, not what I'm obligated to write. Hopefully, that means my long-neglected personal blog (this one) will get some attention and, more importantly, my long-forestalled fiction writing career will finally get underway.

It's time to move on to the next chapter, but no matter how promising or exciting my prospects may be, I cannot help but be momentarily saddened by what what I'm leaving behind. It has been good to me, and I'm the better for it. Those of you who knew me as the Trivia Geek, please look for me here. I'm not gone, I'm just different. And I look forward to seeing what is to come.

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