I’m now full-time at Resilient Communities, helping John Robb take the business and the research to the next level. It’s my first time as COO. Finding that it requires a degree of discipline that I am now grown-up enough to enjoy. Defining processes defeats the ambiguity I was altogether too familiar with in the past. Lots to learn, but we’ve accomplished quite a bit so far. So much more on the way.

We’re going to save as much of the world as we can.

I’m living in Austin. Not the suburbs where I grew up, but in the core of the city. It’s a new take on a place that shaped me. Great for the soul.

I’m writing a lot now. Resiliency. Sequels to The Rise of Siri. Scripts. Screenplays. I’ve come to terms with the fact that, at my core, I’m a writer. That’s one of those big-for-me, perhaps-obvious-for-you, observations. It’s the skill that has enabled everything I’ve been able to accomplish. Mastering that workflow is my current meta-pursuit.

Which brings me to this blog. You’ll notice the new look. It’s an instantiation of what I want this to be. Meaningful and intentional. Not spur of the moment quick thought-fires. Those burn out quickly. You forget them as easily as I do. Writing that will stay with you. Showcase my brain rather than stream it.

Going to try for the considered musings of an about-to-be-26-year-old executive with interesting experience in warfare, technology, and a penchant for fiction.

Still, it’s my realtime story about getting paid while carving my name into the bloodied face of history.

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Airman Ridgeway’s element was conducting a routine patrolling mission through the financial system near FINRA’s primary servers when they discovered shellcode decrypting itself and probing a backdoor to the securities trading authentication subsystem. Upon finding indications of a botnet brewing, Airman Ridgeway led his anti-penetration specialists towards the nearby IP block. Upon arriving, he discovered a senior executive had been phished and was allowing infiltration of the system. The black hats quickly shifted their attention to Airman Ridgeway’s team. Remaining calm under attack, he ordered his element to reinforce the shielding on their own servers while he captured logs to transmit to command.

Undeterred by the black hats exploiting previously unknown zero day security vulnerabilities, but finding his position almost overrun Airman Ridgeway ordered his element to log out. With complete disregard for his own safety, Airman Ridgeway remained, ordering low orbiting ion cannon attacks on the botnet’s vulnerabilities, first danger close, and then finally upon his own position, destroying the botnet’s command and control in the process.

In an ultimate and selfless act of bravery in which his machine was forcibly reset, he saved at least three servers, a network attached storage device, and several firewalls.

By his undaunted courage, intrepid fighting spirit, and unwavering devotion to duty, Senior Airman Ridgeway gallanty gave his 37 open Chrome tabs for his country, thereby reflecting great credit upon himself and upholding the highest traditions of the United States Air Force.

Rank and Organization: Senior Airman, United States Air Force

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“And it is awful here, there is no other way to say it. But I believe that Detroit is America’s city. IT was the vanguard of our way up, just as it is the vanguard of our way down. And one hopes, the vanguard of our way up again. Detroit is Pax Americana. The birthplace of mass production, the automobile, the cement road, the refrigerator, frozen peas, high-paid blue-collar jobs, home ownership and credit on a mass scale. America’s way of life was built here.”

I’ve read and written a lot about how America is dying. Regulatory capture, Wall Street, global arbitrage and deviant entrepreneurs collaborated to massacre the middle class.

But I always came at it from the perspective that the country is mid-collapse. That we still have time. That we can still swing the wheel and, for the most part, make it through. Sure, we’ll pay $8 for a gallon of gas, we’ll overpay for armies of contractors we don’t need, but we will make it through. We’re America after all.

Charlie LeDuff convinced me we may be too late. The book is aptly titled, Detroit: An American Autopsy. What if the land of the free, of prosperity, of two cars and a picket fence succumbed to the corrupt, the incompetent, the immoral?

He describes the imbeciles that run Detroit – not just its corrupt, race-baiting politicians, but also the evil puppet masters, the CEOs, that pulled their strings. He takes us on a journey through those we abandoned on the front line, one he describes as a “landscape of fire and human failing.” We watch them live, fight, and die. He talks to the workers in factories, once producing subprime mortgages, now reduced to relabeling screws. He speaks with the mothers of the dead. We walk with him as he tries to make change, failing more often than not. His own life is inexorably tied into that of his failed city, so we feel his guilt, his family’s mourning, the pain of finding work, the toll it takes.

He writes like Naipaul. Blisteringly honest. Solid, real flow.

And it presents the viewpoint that we’re not careening into failure. We’re already there. Ours is a state soon to be hollowed out by failed cities. America was murdered. What we live in is fundamentally different from what we had. We’re in the middle of launching what is new. Its time to approach it that way.

Regardless of whether you believe in American decline or not, this book presents a compelling, unflinching perspective that is worth reading. This should be required reading for anyone who thinks D.C. and its ilk still matter.

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A nonprofit called Common Crawl is now using its own Web crawler and making a giant copy of the Web that it makes accessible to anyone. The organization offers up over five billion Web pages, available for free so that researchers and entrepreneurs can try things otherwise possible only for those with access to resources on the scale of Google’s.

This is the absolute right approach. You can’t trust these behemoth corporations to give us a level playing field. You have to make it. And we’re at a point where it needs to be done in an intentional and aggressive way. Otherwise we stand to lose control of the decentralized global platform that underpins life today.

Common Crawl is a good start. The legal process for this is something that needs to be formalized, streamlined, and copy/pasted across all domain areas.

Do this for drones, 3d printing, food systems, everything where patent-garbage can get in the way of innovation. Capture as much intellectual property as you can, shovel it into a nonprofit,  and repeat. Set the rules. Wield their systems against them.

Note: For anyone unfortunate enough to go to law school in recent times, this is a BIG opportunity.

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• Didn’t look like variants of a 1980′s vision of a future wallet.
• Spoofed RFID identities.
• Better yet, skimmer-detecting.

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For a single family home, this is kind of overkill. For a family compound, it’s much better than the Kennedy or Corleone abodes.

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NEVER, EVER, pay to pitch.

That’s of ‘consultants,’ ‘investors,’ and ‘incubators’ taking advantage of unsuspecting startups and first time entrepreneurs. They’ll couch it in language like ‘mentorship,’ ‘access,’ ‘experience.’

It’s actually predatory and evil.

With a viable path and hustle, you can get money. And money is important. But the people you take money from are on your team, for better or worse, so you don’t want just money. You want a motivated teammate.

And some asshole who charges you a month of runway ($250-$750) to show up for a 7 minute pitch isn’t that. Angel groups in particular are notorious for this.

Some angel groups are awesome. Comprised of motivated entrepreneurs and the likeminded who got together to enhance their opportunities and yours. That’s cool.

Others not so much. Here’s how those look:

Some prick, usually a finance type with maybe an MBA and no entrepreneurial experience (or worse, owns 7/11′s), corrals people who want to invest but feel like they need assistance/experience/companionship. People with $200k+ income earned with minimal risk. Corporate executives, doctors, etc.

He charged them (predatory) and then turns around and charges the startups who want access to those investors (predatory). He makes a tidy sum, gets plugged into the middle of a hot/sexy community, and doesn’t care that 90% of the companies he raped die.

Dealflow is what keeps the lights on, not success.

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Works fine as a personal tool. Nice to have stuff sync across the Mini, iPad, and iPhone. It’s missing a dedicated todo function though. Would be nice to have folks on the team assign stuff directly in there. (Mailbox and Orchestra are owning that.)

Anyway, it’s pretty cool, but Evernote is a total pain in the ass when it comes to shared workflows.

First problem. I create a notebook and want another user to have access. I’m expressing a degree of trust that is the basis for our shared work. The software should reflect that.

Evernote lets her add, change, delete the notes within the folder. Great.

It does not let her ‘tag’ the contents therein. I have to define the tag taxonomy, and then he can use it, but he can’t add tags to it. So now I have to spend time processing what he puts in rather than letting him do that for me. Or no one – in which case we all use the search function, a dirty solution.

I mean, fair enough. There’s a workflow where that makes sense. One notebook/product owner. Fine.

But there’s a dozen cases where it doesn’t. Why force a notebook owner to manage a taxonomy/notebook if they don’t want to?

That kind of friction is how pretty software with baked in flows turns into a stupid infodump.

More annoying is the stubbornness of this. There’s little hope of adding an option that corrects this massive flaw (their forum has had this requested, repeatedly, since 2011 with the CTO just repeatedly brushing it off).

Second problem: That manager-dictated-taxonomy only applies to a specific notebook. I have to recreate/create a new one for each additional notebook. And there’s no sub-notebooks on shared notebooks. So I’m either forced to use one notebook for the entire business and just fill it with thousands of documents that I have to manage the tags for, or a few dozen notebooks where I have to manage tags for each, share specifically.

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The art in this graphic novel by is absolutely stunning – moreso because the creator did every aspect of this book. The writing is over the top at times – “The dawn of my childhood was nestled in a cradle of dreams” – though the story does not suffer for these indulgences.

That said, I wish there was more: when Krishna gives the two sides the option of either him or his army; Balarama leaving the battlefield; the lifting of Govardhan. These are major moments in the Krishna story that are inexplicably missing. I mean, edits have to be made somewhere, I get that. But I really, really, would have liked to see those scenes.

Major props to Image for putting this out. Indian mythology needs more reimaginations, more variants. It’s ossifying and dying, which sucks, because this stuff is rich and amazing and can be formative. (It was for me anyway.)

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