Justin Dunham

's journal about making things

The Startup As A Game

Filed under: Everything Else — Tags: , , , , , — Justin Dunham on February 24, 2013

Instead of "Washington", think "Light Bulb", "Classic Coke" or "Windows"

I recently read Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order. Here is the barest inkling of what Fukuyama says in the book:

  • The best-functioning states in the world today generally combine (a) a strong central government with (b) rule of law and (c) accountability to citizens.
  • States like China and Russia have a strong central government, but weak rule of law and no accountability to citizens; states like India have good rule of law and accountability but are centrally weak. Only in a few parts of Europe (Northern Europe, mostly) did all 3 come together.
  • Each piece of every modern political system came about through an extraordinarily complex interaction between biology, climate, geography, philosophy, many other things, occasionally luck, the timely actions of certain historical figures, and interactions with other civilizations. (Fukuyama is able to give only the briefest of overviews of some of these specific factors, mostly by way of defending his central thesis).
Because it was so heavy on interesting ideas and light on detail, finishing this book got me excited about all the machinations involved in the modern societal order.
And specifically, it made me want to play a game I had heard about for a long time but never picked up: Civilization. It seemed like a great way to think more about the incredibly complex mechanisms behind political order: resource allocation, social policies, ideas and culture and their spread, the influence of technology, war, etc. I bought Civilization 5, which has its detractors but for me was a great exploration of the subject.

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The Manhattan Bridge

Filed under: Everything Else — Tags: — Justin Dunham on February 12, 2013

Entry to the Manhattan Bridge pedestrian walkway. Photo by Jim Henderson.

Yesterday, I decided to run home from work, a distance of about 4 miles from my office in Soho to my apartment in Brooklyn. The obvious crossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn is the Brooklyn Bridge, a beautiful span built in the 19th century that is easy to walk along. However, you can also cross the river via the far less popular Manhattan Bridge, which opened in 1909 and puts you pretty much in the same spot in Brooklyn as the Brooklyn Bridge does. I had actually never been on the Manhattan Bridge so this seemed like a good opportunity to try it out.

Unfortunately, since I’d never been on the bridge before, I did not have a good sense of where to get on it, on the Manhattan side. And, I didn’t realize this. I’ve always perceived my ability to navigate as being far better than it actually proves to be.

An accidental detour to Point B.

So, I took off running from my office. It was dark and cold last night, and my glasses kept fogging up, making it impossible to see. I also, as it turned out, had no idea where I was going so ended up overshooting the entrance to the bridge by about half a mile (point B on the map). In the process of getting lost, I had also been running along unlit, deserted paths, many of which had deep puddles full of icy slush.

Eventually, I made it to the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. There is a reason why it is so unpopular. You aren’t running along charming, wooden footpaths, elevated above traffic. Instead, you run along concrete paths, enclosed by chain-link fencing, just a few feet away from an active subway line. And the Manhattan Bridge is lonely. Along its mile-plus span, I saw a total of maybe 5 or 6 people. I don’t know what the Brooklyn Bridge looks like at 7PM on a weekday in particular, but usually it’s filled with strolling tourists.

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Leapfrogging, or why I’m getting rid of my to-do lists

Filed under: Everything Else — Tags: , — Justin Dunham on January 25, 2013

London Souvenirs by Vera Kratochvil; link goes to original picture page

Many cities in Africa have excellent mobile infrastructure – beating some places in the United States, that’s for sure. It really helps that African telecom companies have concentrated their resources on building the technology of today, i.e. mobile infrastructure. Imagine if they felt compelled to build a landline network out first, because that may have been a goal fifty years ago?

But we do the same thing to ourselves a lot. We let our past selves run things, and we don’t make the most appropriate energy and time investments for our current lives because our past selves are still setting our priorities.

For example, I keep a lot of lists in my notebook, but the two longest-lived were Books to Read and Posts to Write. I’d hear about some book that sounded interesting, or come up with inspiration for a post, and then I’d put it on the list, and maybe get around to that item later. Sometimes months later.

By this point, I had usually lost interest in whatever it was I had put down on the list. In the meantime I had earned lots of guilt by seeing the same entries, undone, every time I thought of something new. My interests, desired effort level, and ideas had also changed. Often, I’m a different person at the end of a month than I was at the beginning, so why would a to-read or to-write item from six months ago still be worth doing?

I found that this applies to projects, too, and increasingly I find this applies to work projects as well as stuff I do in my free time. So, I’m trying to give up all to-do list items that are more than a week or two out. The two lists I mentioned earlier were the first to go. Once I got rid of these lists, I realized that reading and writing is much more fun if you (not your past self) is calling the shots. And you’re much more productive, too.

What do you get when you buy through a third party?

Filed under: Everything Else — Tags: , — Justin Dunham on January 12, 2013

Last year, I ran the Philadelphia marathon – my first one, hooray! I’d like to run more in the future, though that’s not what this post is about.

I had a bad experience the night before the marathon that has made me wonder about third-party sales. To tell the story quickly, the marathon started at 7AM, and I don’t live in Philadelphia anymore, so I needed to come down the night before. Through Kayak, I found and booked a room at the Philadelphia Embassy Suites hotel, which is just a few blocks away from the starting line. Great deal, too!

But when I arrived at the hotel, they said they had never received my reservation. I was pretty mad; I had my confirmation with me from Kayak and my card had been charged. The hotel was full by then, so I ended up finding a room at another hotel out by the airport, woke up at 5AM, much earlier than I had wanted to, made the start on time and ran the race.

But I really wondered whose fault this was. Here’s how third-party hotel reservations work: you find a room through an aggregator such as Kayak or Expedia. You make a reservation, and they fax that reservation on to the hotel. And that’s pretty much what you pay them to do. Amazingly, Kayak doesn’t actively check to see whether the reservation was received, e.g. through a phone call. If the hotel’s fax machine isn’t working you’re out of luck when you arrive. And if your room isn’t available, Kayak isn’t guaranteeing you a room at all, they just refund your card or find you another room.

So, what’s the point of hotel aggregators? They provide:

  • Reviews, which you can find pretty much anywhere else on the web these days, and which can be supported through advertising
  • A search engine, but then why am I not calling the hotel directly once I find out which one has the lowest price?

They don’t provide:

  • A guarantee of a good night’s stay and an available room

So, it seems to me as if third-party booking sites are doomed over the long run. Am I wrong about this? Search engines seem valuable, and customer service guarantees / insurance seem valuable, but not the middle ground of search and booking aggregators.

How to write marketing copy quickly

Filed under: Everything Else — Tags: , , — Justin Dunham on January 10, 2013

I’ve recently been working on some marketing copy for the website I manage; I’d estimate I’ve written about ten pages of pretty solid, reasonably-well-thought out stuff that’ll go up fairly soon. It’s not perfect but it took me, overall, less than a day to get it all written.

I use a method which is just as exhausting as real writing from scratch, but much faster and highly suitable for marketing copy which usually does not need to be groundbreaking or a particularly religious experience. But really, a disturbingly high percentage of the copy you write doesn’t need to be incredibly high-quality so this method may come in handy more than you’d expect.

The first step is to grab some content that isn’t yours. When I was in high school and college, this meant dropping in quotations from the fiction or non-fiction I was writing an essay about. Just going through, grabbing quotations, and putting them in a document. Today, this means Googling whatever I’m writing about, and doing basically the same thing. Drop in a quote from a book here, or a forum post there, verbatim. Starting with content that isn’t yours makes it much easier to get something on a page.

After I’ve written down everything that’s interesting once, I start organizing it into themes. For example, if I were writing a short piece about the history of Brooklyn, I’d start grabbing all the stuff I copied about important events in Brooklyn history and organizing them chronologically. Perhaps there’d be a separate section with interesting observations or notes related to geography. For marketing copy, I start organizing it around the talking points I need to cover. Our product is a great floor polish (move points related to floor polish here) and a wonderful dessert topping (move points related to dessert toppings here).

The next thing I do is write garbage to connect all the quotations. That’s right, garbage. I give myself permission to write really bad prose. I actually try for bad prose because that’s usually faster to write and the key in this step is speed. I try to talk about whatever I already have in my head but I don’t worry at all about how it sounds. (Although actually, I do often find that things sound much better when I read them later than I thought they did when I first wrote them.) Writing garbage is good because:

  • You don’t worry about the quality of what you’re writing (you know it’s garbage),
  • So you get much more content onto the page,
  • Which is important because the more you have, the higher the chance that you have written things worth preserving during the edit phase, and because in keeping your keyboard moving you’ll remember lots of interesting points as you go along.

Once that’s done, I edit. I’ve always found editing the easy part, and actually kind of fun, because I like to organize and criticize and I pretend that I’m fixing someone else’s work. When you’re writing marketing copy, one of the things you obviously have to make sure you do is delete all the verbatim quotations you used as scaffolding. But that should be pretty easy because you  replaced it with lots of original content in step 2.

Maybe this is all really obvious, but it’s a method that’s worked well for me.

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