I wasn't a huge X-Files fan, but I saw a fair number of episodes back in the day. I remember the most random episode about a guy who was the target of a secret military test using sound waves as weapons; the guy got a sound wave "stuck" in his head, and the waves amplified inside his skull. The only way he could relieve the pressure was to drive west - Mulder and Scully devised a plan to puncture his ear drum (leaving him deaf in one ear) to "release" the sound waves, but the guy's head exploded when Mulder ran out of highway to drive west.

Anyways, the only respite I seem to have from my insomnia is to write the random thoughts which are bouncing around in my head on this journal. So, in no real order:

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I'm fascinated by the perception of power and its impact on people. If you give off the perception of power, then you have it. So basically if you trick yourself into thinking you have power, then people believe you have power, and then you have power.

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The tragedy of being an adult is you work so hard for a task, and nobody really cares. For example, we just launched Mozilla's Developer Center on Deki (only four months over schedule!), which was a seriously monumental task. But trying to find people (outside of work) to share my joy of releasing this project was ... hard. No one cares. If I wrote a long entry about the work that went into it (which I may), it'd seem like a huge deal ... but nobody understands that without being explained (if they even care about reading it). This leads me to wonder: how many of my (few) friends out there are working their asses off and not getting enough props outside of work? I'm guessing a lot of them.

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I got a letter from my loft managment company saying that the local police think that it's possible they accidentally disclosed all my personal information, and I should be aware of potential identity theft. This just leads me to wonder: who actually wants to steal my identity? To anybody considering being stealing my life: be prepared to have zero game (and hence never get laid). Sadmuffins.

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I find it interesting that my nonsensical posts draw the most comments. Chances of this post receiving more than five comments? Zip. I guess it has something to do something with "digestible" posts (who has time to read novellas, anyways?!)

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One thing that totally sucks about my job is that I oftentimes don't get to give the amount of detailed oversight to some aspect that falls under my auspices. This happens more and more nowadays, but I'm simply overwhelmed with the number of decisions I have to make per day (maybe one of these days, I'll keep a tally). I simply cannot deal with things and simply have to say: "Later." I never thought that'd be possible. Today's:

For example, this morning, I was being flooded with a few problems at once:

• Triaging bugs from our overnight QA team in Russia
  
• Then I got a heads-up that the Moz guys were running into three issues prior to launch, so I was processing all those issues mentally (trying to figure out the soln, or figuring out who would know)
• My IRC client stopped connecting (wtf)

Then I got an implementation question about exception handling in the control panel. I remember just thinking, "I cannot deal with this" - fortunately, we have very capable devs who are capable of interpreting when I'm overwhelmed, so it was taken off my plate.

I honestly never thought I would be that guy who would coldly have to cut people off - but it really comes down to a matter of not being able to process everything. What's important to other people may be so incredibly unimportant to me (at that moment), that I have to be cold.

As an engineer, I'm used to completely controlilng my little world - the code I write works exactly as I have defined it. The product/engineering decisions I have to make are a lot less concrete and rely on a lot of other factor, and when they screw up (as they ultimately do), I feel incredibly bad. 

For example, I ultimately made the decision to shift our MindTouch store processing to PayPal, due to issues with Authorize.net (and Amazon FPS wasn't active then). We needed to fulfill a bunch of requirements, so I chose what I thought was the best solution. Fast forward a couple of months, and PayPal's API is broken (Direct Payments Pro). And I feel completely responsible for the failures of the store, even though most of the variables were completely out of my control.

And this isn't the only case - almost every single engineering failure, I feel directly responsible for. Every defect I see regarding the product, every other competitor who has "done it better," every customer who has run into problems with any software related to MindTouch - I feel personally responsible.

So I guess it's easier to understand the root of all my stress given that I feel personally responsible anytime any of the other ten+ engineers at MT have bugs in their software.

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Man, there are seriously no shortage of ideas at work lately. Every day, new ideas all over the place. What I've realized is that ideas are worthless. I really used to think that ideas were the real value, but that's so not the case. All that matters is execution. I was mulling over the most "successful" web companies lately (Twitter, Facebook, Yelp) and sometimes they're so simple that everybody's thought of them at some point (sometimes they've even existed before!). Successful execution acts as a multiplier for ideas.

This realization is probably why I'm so frustrated at work lately with some of the ideas being tossed around - great ideas are fine, but unless there's even a inkling of a plan for execution, the idea is worthless. I know that MT has a special engineering team - we are all pretty f'ing smart, and it took us a year full-speed to figure out how to ship an open-source wiki effectively. Even now, we're stretched on resources (I tried to move above the day-to-day fray a bit early, and it bit us in the ass), and I'm honestly not sure how we expect to ship some of the ideas over the next year. Anyhoos..

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My feeling about ideas with a lack of execution also explains my recently-found disdain for "demos." As much as I dislike Apple for their closed mentality, they have had an effective track record for shipping complete end-to-end solutions (iPod, iPhone) without shipping demos. I'm tired of seeing Android demos. I'm sick of seeing things like the Microsoft Surface demo. Please, ship products. I don't care about what I could do ... I want to know what I can do.

To me, companies that build demos can't decide what they want, so they're throw a bunch of things against the wall and see what sticks. Have the balls to have a vision, guys.

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Is it ever possible to build the perfect product the first time? This is an interesting question if you consider my stance on demos above. Steve mentioned that he thought it'd be impossible to build something as great as the iPod or iPhone on the first try - they must have built an internal one, then scrapped the whole thing to find out what they did wrong. Nobody has the foresight to know exactly what needs to be done on the first pass.

If this is true, the true test of a product guy is the ability to say "this sucks" and to throw everything out and start again. This has an impact on project management - how can we ever set definitive schedules if projects are subject to being scrapped at any time?

I certainly don't have that killer instinct in me yet (although I have been known to cull out about half the code before), but it's an idea that's been bouncing around in my head for a while.

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There are a lot of decisions coming up for Deki's product line in terms of procedural - do we move away from the Agile mentality into more of a traditional waterfall methodology? Wish there was a "right" answer, but I know better than that: the right answer can only be found after experimenting with all the different methods...