I’m not proud of this. Oh wait, I sort-of am. Here’s a story I’ve only shared over the past twenty years with close friends, and maybe only after a few drinks. It’s the one they can’t believe happened, except for the fact that it did. Although it briefly made me a hero to some Philadelphians, it was still an unfortunate series of events that could have become the main thing I was known for before I even established myself. So I swept it under the carpet for the better part of two decades.

Flash forward twenty years, and I’m now a Marketing Technologist in New York City with one of the top 1% of viewed profiles on LinkedIn. I carry my career and reputation with me now wherever I go. And since I’m finally getting my stories out there, I guess it’s time I wrote about the time I shot a guy.

It was in Philly back in the ’90s… the early ’90s. And that’s all the explanation my wife ever gives—letting the mystery hang there in the air, to which I add a confirming nod. She shits you not. Still, to this day, that’s as much explanation as a few of our close friends actually ever got. If you like the mysterious version of the story that my wife prefers, stop now. Oh, and also this story has a bit of cursing, so if that offends you, also stop now.

When it does come up, I’m now comfortable with the strange vibe it creates, though it does warrant a deeper dive into the circumstances that brought me a heartbeat away from ending a life.

As with the Final Days of Lung Cancer story, this is another one that revolves around the loss of a parent—but this time, my dad, straight out of graduating college. It’s another one of unwanted responsibility suddenly dumped on me. And as all my stories seem to be, it’s another about dealing with bullies—albeit of a more common criminal-variety and of a less personal nature than NYC co-op bullying ordeal I’m now dealing with.

My father died the week I graduated college, and I had to take over—of all things—a check cashing business. A check cashing business?!?! I had no problem just walking away. But because I had a sibling, I had an obligation to the estate to preserve my dad’s assets for eventual sale and disbursement per the will. I’d have much rather run off to California to join the tech explosion. This was 1992. I was already a multimedia programmer and tied in with the Commodore crowd.

However, my dad detoured me by explicitly naming me the executor of his estate. What’s worse, my sister and her friend happened to be in town for my graduation, staying with Dad and me. When my dad died, they just sort of moved in on me. If I walked away, the business dissolves and she gets nothing, and I legally expose myself. As executor, I had to look after the estate, whose money was all tied up in the check cashing business—but not enough to hire a manager to keeping it running while I made the preparations to sell it. But I couldn’t sell it too fast. Why?

Check cashing is the kind of business whose entire value is in the “good will”—meaning if the doors closed for even just a day, the customers start going through the trust-building registration process with nearby competitors and the value of the business starts to erode. Being on file with a check casher means you can walk in the door and easily cash checks from known companies—which is a pretty big deal. First-timers get confirming phone-calls, sometimes both to the bank and the company it’s drawn on. So few people go through the hassle of going on file with more than one check casher. Therefore, it’s the file cabinet full of verified customers where the value of the business resides. All the physical assets are chump change in comparison to that $100K file cabinet.

What’s worse about my situation was when the owner of such a company dies and a family member takes over, you’re only going to get low-ball offers from trying to sell too soon. The way it was put to me: “The sharks smell blood.” So I figured, I’d wrap this up as maybe a 1-year detour in life. In hindsight, I should have been like: “Fuck it. Let the sharks have a feast.” But I was a 22 year old who was actually more worried by the prospect of legal entanglement by my sister than running what amounts to a bank for a year or so. What a fool I was.

Oh, the lessons of life—even just knowing what advice to take in life. At 22 years-old, I didn’t have the experience yet to know that my peace-of-mind and freedom to apply my youthful passion as I saw fit was worth more than any money, duty, or even potential legal entanglement. I lacked the confidence to just walk away. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, that’s why I had to run that place. After those 8-months were over, I was through a sort of bootcamp that prepped me for coping with the really big, bad stuff which, believe it or not, was still to come.

So, I took over my dad’s check cashing business hours after he died, which I affectionately nicknamed “that fucking place”. I was going to be a check casher for awhile. Forget the fact I found Dad collapsed that very morning, and I tried to resuscitate him until the ambulance arrived—a futile effort as the paramedics informed me. He’s been dead for a couple of hours.

There was a notebook he prepared for emergencies, and I broke it out. To call my father organized is an understatement. Growing up, he had every tool he ever owned neatly hung on peg-board and organized by frequency-of-use for rapid retrieval and return. Organization equals preparedness. I got that from him. This notebook was a masterpiece of preparedness—his technical manual of what to do if he were to die, be killed, or what have you.

Within the next four hours, per his instructions, I was off at the business making sure it was running as usual. It ended up only ever opening a few hours late that morning. In the years leading up, Dad had tried to rope me into the business several times, only to have me balk, saying I didn’t want to be a check casher.

Looking back, I maybe should have just to spend more time with him. He didn’t much want to be a check casher either, but his textile industry dried up beneath him. For that matter, he didn’t much want to be in textiles either—he wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. But his father died when he was 12, and his uncles who were in textiles shepherded him along through Philadelphia College of Textiles and Engineering and into a “good business” where a Jew could hold a good job.

By the time of my story, the last of the Philly mills had closed—Somerset Knitting Mills. He would have needed to move to Asia—or at least, New York. But instead, in his typical meticulous fashion, he made a study of how to still have an income at his age so he could continue housing me and finish putting me through college in Philly, where I was going to Drexel University.

But what could an old man do with not too much money to invest who is risk adverse and had to guarantee enough income to put me through college? A Dunkin Donuts? A wicker store in the mall? A chain of laundromats? I accompanied him on a few of these visits. Sucks to be in your 50′s and un-hirable. You’ll find obsolescence-proofing a regular theme of my writing.

Well anyway, he discovered this beautiful business where people GAVE YOU MONEY as they bought money orders every Monday to pay their bills, then you give it back to them on Fridays when they cash their paychecks. See the beauty? The cash ebbs and flows, and you take a little each direction. No inventory. No food. No stock. Just charging a modest 30-cents per money order, and 1% plus $1.10 per check (in those days). All you need is a bank account and about a $10K float to kickstart the process.

A lot of people object to check cashing fees, but the customers are hand-to-mouth blue collar workers who can’t necessarily keep a checking account. One bounced check with a traditional bank, and what do they charge you? About $25 (in those days). How many bounced checks in the course of a year does it take before its just worth paying 1% plus $1.10 per check?

This is the world I walked into unprepared after 4 years mastering graphic design. Knowing then what I know now, I maybe should have sold the place at bargain basement prices, said “fuck you” to my sister, and walked away. But then, I probably wouldn’t be living today in New York with my beautiful amazing wife and delightful daughter. And I wouldn’t have stories like that time a shot a guy. I’m not superstitious or very religious, but this always leads me to “it needed to happen” thinking.

And so, heavily burdened and probably still in shock, I donned Dad’s bullet-proof vest, drove to my new job, greeted my employees, and familiarized myself with what was to be my new one-man-bank lifestyle for the next eight months.

And then, there was the guns. My dad had a Mossberg shotgun mounted to the wall behind inch-thick bulletproof windows so all the customers could see. He was fond of saying that with the bullet proof glass and double air-lock style entrance, if the bad guys break in, you casually take the Mossberg off the wall and make that lovely shotgun-cocking sound, and casually wait for them to break through. It’s an effective deterrent. You’d basically have to drive a truck through the wall to defeat it.

But for coming and going, he had a body-harnessed .38. When he wasn’t carrying it, he had a tiny Secamp .32. This was the smallest 32-caliber gun made, and when it slipped into a pair of pants pockets, it all but disappeared. In order to have stopping-power, this tiny gun exclusively used Winchester hollow-point ammo, which spread to like a quarter-sized hole as it passed through the body. One bullet in the barrel, six more in the magazine for a total of seven rounds. No safety. Tight trigger. Call it a point-and-click. Really easy. My dad studied things thoroughly.

The Secamp was what you slipped into your pocket when you didn’t want to look like you were carrying. It’s what I started carrying when I realized my application for a license to carry a firearm, which I put in for that very week, wasn’t going to come through for six months or so, and figured I might be dead by then. I was learning about using the buddy systems to open and close the store, and keeping your driving route to and from home and the bank unpredictable. About the only thing wrong with this business that looks nearly ideal on paper is the always-a-target lifestyle.

Ah, the paranoia of running essentially what was a bank, and what it does to your head. Talk about being aware of your surroundings! I started mentally noting the things in case I had to describe it later, like if a group of strangers walked past the store. Normally, who cares. But someone running a check cashing business notices such things. I think I became two notches smarter that day. There is really something connected between deliberately exercising your language skills for observation, and intelligence. If you didn’t verbally describe it, life is just whizzing by you in a blur.

And that sort of blurry existence is okay for most folks, as it serves as a filter for what’s really important. But not so for a 22 year old kid that just took over his just-deceased father’s check cashing operation. I imagine the mindset I was in those days must not be terribly dissimilar from a soldier or cop. Tons of people asked me where the old man was. I told them I was giving him some time off. No need for any locals to know the old man was dead just yet.

So, I took up the Secamp 32 as my personal defense while I was waiting for my license to carry to arrive. No blue jeans for me! Just slightly baggy khakis. And one of the main deterrents of carrying was lost—the telltale bulge that a .38 in a body harness produces. You look a little badass and intimidating to the bad guys with that bulge. Me? I looked like an unarmed kid. But what good was being armed if you couldn’t use it? I wasn’t really a gun guy… yet.

Enter one of my new pastimes, and the Spring Garden Street shooting range. So, I got my membership, learned the rules, and took one tutorial lesson with each gun I inherited. Using firing ranges—especially ones in the middle of big cities—is a fascinating experience. You can feel your personal capabilities expand a thousand-fold, with all the other patrons around you kinda sorta minding their own business.

I practiced the .38 a few times for when the time came I could carry it. Meh. But making the Secamp into effective protection… now that was interesting. Could you reliably grab an un-holstered gun from your pocket? Yes. How fast? Very fast.

But is there any intimidation in this? No, it’s a very tiny gun. But it does have six rounds plus one in the chamber, and a tight trigger with no safety—making the purpose of such a gun to use it without hesitation—to pop off as many rounds into the bad guy as you can and see who comes out alive on the other side. Its only stopping-power comes from the spreading hollow points of multiple accurately placed rounds.

Can I commit the process of using such a tiny gun to defend my life to muscle memory? I got my chance to find out in the parking lot of then-Mellon Bank at 2nd & Pine near Penn’s Landing in Philly on one of my bank runs. A huge mistake I made in this whole check cashing affair was to carry on my father’s practice of not using an armored car to deliver cash. Typically you made your own runs at strange times when no one would imagine you were on business. And the $50,000 to $100,000 cash that it takes to cover Friday’s checks takes surprisingly little room. I looked like a student with a backpack. Oh, but then there was the coins.

If you’re ever running a check cashing operation, don’t run out of change on a Friday, or you have to make a special trip to the bank to pick up something that really can’t be done in a discrete low-profile way. Your bag comes in empty and goes out heavily dime, nickel and quarter-laden. People see this. You hope they’re not dumb enough to try to rob you over quarters. You can transport big bucks no problem, but try quarters, and you’re marked. Stupid, stupid!

To this day, I don’t know if my assailant staked me out, or was a pure opportunist in the crowd at the bank, though I tend to think the later. All I do know is that on my way out, I heard footsteps running up behind me. I was nearly to my car. I had no doubt what was occurring. I ducked, swiveled, and shot right as the hammer came down on my head—thankfully, with much less impact than Mr. Bad Guy intended. Still, blood splattered blurring my vision as my glasses flew off as I landed the first round in his belly.

Two more pops. Three total so far. Just as advertised, the Winchester hollow point rounds brought to a dead-stop a man three times my size. Pop number four! Why won’t he drop that hammer? Pop! Number five. On that fifth shot, the hammer drops out of his hand. He falls to his knees with one hand on the ground to hold himself up, and the other hand coming up towards me. I level my gun at his head to see what he’s going to do next.

He shouts “No!”—not a bad thing for him to say, since the main rule of armed self-defense was resonating through my head, as if struck like a bell: If you draw a gun, it’s to use it. If you use a gun, it’s to kill. That’s the mantra of armed self defense that was taught to me. Not sure if that was from Boy Scouts or my dad. But that was one of the longest frozen moments of my life. Bad guy barely down. Gun leveled at his face. Two rounds left.

Just then, another person in the parking lot—an older woman—pulls a gun from her bag and shouts: “I’ve got him covered!” Danger over. Thank God. God bless this woman. I have no idea what I would have done without this excuse to shake off the slow-motion fugue that gripped me. I had Mr. Bad Guy frozen in some sort of force-field emanating from the gun’s nozzle, holding his head in place and keeping his linebacker sized body pinned down. I had no doubt he was ready to rush me. Only the gun to the face held him still.

How life changes on the tiny moments. One life could have ended if I pulled that trigger. Another life which I hold in much higher esteem could have ended if I didn’t. The difference between five or six shots fired. No way I’m pulling off that sixth round. Not me. Fuck the gun-rule. I’m safe. Thank you armed woman whoever you were. By covering him, you saved me from having to make that final terrible decision.

So, bloodied and blind, I slip the gun back in my pocket and I run my bag of money back into the bank, shoving it in through a teller window, yelling: “Here, hold this!” and setting off every alarm in the place. I’m lucky I myself wasn’t shot by the security guards, but I’ll be damned if that bag of money was to go into some evidence locker. Luckily, everybody knew me at the bank. Then, I ran back out, and the guy was gone.

The police cars zoomed up in seconds. I forget the officer’s name, but I remember him well. Nice guy, but I couldn’t get my glasses back because they were now evidence. After a few seconds of chitchat about what just happened, I asked him how much more blood he thought I’d have to lose before I passed out.

The nice officer snapped into action and rushed me in the back of his car and to the nearest emergency room, staying with me the whole time. After consulting his radio, he told me, they couldn’t find the gun at the scene. I told him, “Oh, it’s in my pocket.” Surprised, he asked if it was still loaded. I said, “Yeah, two rounds.” He said “Can I have it?” I said “Sure, are you okay with me pulling it out of my pocket?” He said, “Yeah”, and I gave it to him.

“You know,” he said, “you really ought to join the force when this is over. I don’t think most cops would have had that kind of composure.” I thanked him for the compliment and said I’d think about it, but I knew that that particular path in life was never going to be. I ran the check cashing store a few more months then put it up for sale after enough time for the sharks to see that a little thing like a hammer to the head wasn’t going to phase me. Yes, I got a good price for the business.

The DA had to charge me for carrying without a license and discharging a gun in city limits for consistency. I became friends with the detective who had to make the arrest. He took two months to get around to it, but then called and said it’s time. “I’m happy to turn myself in,” I told him. He came and picked me up and apologized that he had to handcuff me. Policy. No problem, I said, and took a ride in the back of the paddy-wagon.

I spent that night in the Philly roundhouse. One large gentleman there asked what I was in for, and I told him with everyone listening. He asked me what color the guy I shot was. I told him, and and asked “So what?” All the other guys who were listening blurted out: “The guy hit him on the head with a hammer!” I was okay with them, I guess. I ate a cheese sandwich. The cops processed me in the morning and released me, telling me to expect the court date to be set.

The court thing was just preliminary hearings for the judge to decide if it was to actually go to trial. Even just to this, I brought an army of character witnesses. The judge asked if my license to carry ever arrived. I said yes. He asked whether I had it with me. I said yes. He asked if he could see it. I said yes. I never got it back, but the judge was of the “I should be a hero” persuasion, and threw out the case as a waste of the courts time. He actually pointed out that I did everything exactly as I should have done, having shouldered a heavy burden, and had the unfortunate experience of having to defend my life while waiting for the license to arrive, which it did. He even suggested we’d be better off in this city if more cases were like mine.

The perp? He was found at a local hospital with a weak cover story. He spent six weeks in the hospital recovering, but then was released on his own recognizance—because attacks with a hammer doesn’t count as a deadly weapon in Philly. It seems that Philly just had too many people in jail already, and they had to draw the line somewhere. In addition, crimes with guns get extra time on their sentences. So as you might guess, there’s a lot of crimes committed in Philly with hammers and baseball bats. Mr. Bad Guy didn’t make his court date.

Although this was a terrible experience that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, there is still something nice thinking back to the simplicity of the incident—and how it was just not personal. I knew the dangers of the business, took precautions, and was prepared for the eventuality. Although I should have never allowed myself to get into that situation in the first place, it’s nice to know that when I take time to prepare, I can be more of a danger to the bad guys than they are to me.

Note: Reach me or my wife @jewyorican at ParkTerraceGardens.org, and enjoy her famous humor at @elbloombito.

This post is about being bullied by a pair of neighbors, and testing the limits I can endure trying to adhere to my own self-image as a good person. I’ve held back on publishing this article after the harassment intensified as I tweeted about my mother’s passing. I’ve held back on publishing it after the lies were exposed and the real motivations revealed. I held back as management ignored our repeated requests to address security issues.

And so, I was forced to install a security system that has captured just a couple of incidents in the pattern of threats and harassment we have endured over the past year here at the Park Terrace Gardens in the Inwood neighborhood of New York City. I can no longer hold back as the threats against my family have become blatant and menacing. And with the belief that there is no better way to cope with a bully than to shine the bright light of accountability on their actions, here it goes.

This was mostly written as I was awaiting the news of my mother’s passing from Hospice right as the pattern of persistent and baseless complaints lodged against us by my neighbors to the building’s management began to intensify anew. It turns out, their strategy was for one neighbor to make an initial fabricated—or at best, egregiously exaggerated—complaint against us, and then for the other to follow-up in such a way as to validate each other.

Soon after, when we were actually threatened with eviction by the board president Mary Fran (loudly, in front of our sick child—after denying us a delay to the meeting to care for her) over offensive odors that did not exist. This “verification” from multiple neighbors was the only reason cited for elevating it to the level of an eviction threat by the board. But after now six surprise walk-in inspections of the “odor-police” (supers, and the building’s manager) that have subsequently invalidated the complaints, we have not yet had acknowledgement of this fact from the board or management, or a retraction of the eviction threat.

The way the two of these neighbors reinforced each other’s lies to the board during my first year at Park Terrace Gardens for the purpose of causing needless grief and hardship was a dark mark on a time period that was otherwise the most wonderful experience of my life as a new daddy getting to know my baby.

How could I sit and write about being bullied by neighbors as my mother was passing away? Well, that’s just how profoundly this affair has affected our family. When you’re bullied and harassed, even if the culprits are clever enough to use a co-op board as their arms and legs, it can color every aspect of your day—every time you take out the garbage and might see them in the hallway—every time you leave for work in the morning, and come home at night and run an errand. And I can only imagine how bad it is for my dear wife who most often had our 1 year old child (at the time) in tow.

Almost always, the phone-calls of complaints are at 11:30 PM (when one of the neighbors returned home from work) when they know no one from management will want to come out and do the sniff-test for verification. They are on Fridays, after management has gone home for the weekend. They are timed for the maximum impact of hearsay, and the minimization of objective truth.

And so, here is the documentation and accounting of the facts and events as they happened. Odor complaints about my family started almost immediately upon moving into the building. The culprit? Pinesol! We learned that a neighbor had been complaining to management about the smell of cleaning supplies without having the courtesy to bring it up with us first. Upon learning of the issue, we immediately switched floor cleaning products, but were taken aback by complaints being lodged against us as fast as we moved in, and so we tweeted something along the lines of one of our neighbors (without naming him or providing any identifying information) of being a pansy—which, I actually stick by to this day.

Someone without the guts or respect to knock on a door and say, hey could you switch cleaning supplies, but instead lodges complaints behind your back with management is… well, a pansy. No names were named, but this triggered off a campaign against us the likes of which is now manifesting as something quite menacing. If he just knocked on our door, none of this would have happened. But he didn’t, and we tweeted, and have been feeling what at first was the ridiculous wrath of passive aggressive vendetta, but which now is escalating into the early signs of violence.

Yep, a single tweet of an unnamed neighbor has triggered off what has evolved from mere harassment and bullying into a very serious safety concern. But I’m jumping ahead. Let’s roll back the story for a moment to about a year and a half ago.

After half a lifetime of renting, I decided with the encouragement of my wife and with a new baby, to join the ranks of the tax-sheltered and equity-building owners. We decided to buy into a wonderful little co-op up on a hill at the top of Manhattan. Inwood’s got the reputation of being a quiet little escape while still on the island, and we had already lived here three years in rentals before making our decision. The building we bought into is the part of a five building community connected by gates to form a beautiful common garden in the center. We are near two wonderful parks, and at the end of the line of the A-Train and near the One Train. It’s just a great place to commute-from and raise a kid while still being in Manhattan.

Given the challenges of a one-year-old, we are blessed to be able to afford the help provided by a weekly cleaning service. That cleaning service used Pinesol—and in a few weeks of moving in, it got back to me via management that a neighbor was complaining about it. I immediately changed cleaning supplies, confirmed which neighbor it was, and when running into the neighbor in the hallway, apologized and told him he was always welcome to bring up such issues directly with us. I went so far as to tell him I was determined to be a good neighbor.

It turns out that this neighbor’s form of taking it directly up with us that I encouraged him to do took the form of knocking on our door and then literally proceeding to yell at my wife right in front of my baby daughter—for just the dog barking for maybe ten-minutes on a Saturday evening at ~7:00 PM. This was an ominous precursor of things to come. A few weeks later, we got a knock at our door waking the baby. It was once again this neighbor, seemingly intoxicated, stumbling and giggling with with a female friend, and knocking on our door because they said they thought it was the elevator.

And that’s when things really started to get strange. It came to our attention that a rash of odor complaints started being lodged against us. I rolled my eyes thinking could anyone really be this petty? I thought that was settled. We switched cleaners. But we were told it was from multiple sources about different odors—which really shook me, until I found out to be one other neighbor, a friend and professional associate of his. Unfortunately for us, this “bully buddy” turned out to be friends with several members of the board.

Okay, so full disclosure. We were making handmade soap—the vegetable glycerin type—not the fight club type. It’s really not bad, and every smell is pleasant. And we also have some small caged animals like gerbils aside from the dog and cats that were on the co-op board application—effectively all but odorless in their little frequently changed cages.

However, these little facts added credence to the odor complaints, making them sound legitimate. Neither of these are criminal offenses, nor are they terribly out of the ordinary, nor even a source of offensive odors. However, all together with the board’s willingness to take this neighbor seriously, you might say it was the perfect storm of us looking guilty, and my colluding neighbors knew it, and seems to have gone in for the kill—reportedly going for an eviction!

We received letters from management demanding to know what we were going to do about the odors, giving deadlines and such. Remedies were demanded. We provided remedies the best we could, not even knowing what odors they could be talking about. Complaints continued, and remedies demanded, right as we were repeatedly being denied walk-in inspections to verify whether there truly was an offensive odor of any kind.

We didn’t smell it any of the vaguely described odors. Our numerous friends who we have over didn’t smell it. Our pregnant friend with a hypersensitive mommy nose didn’t smell it. But there was something allegedly in the hallway which we did in fact catch an occasional whiff of, and it was being logged in management’s odor log and counted as a strike against us every time. It was a brilliant strategy by terrible people.

Given the letter and the fact that a special session of the board that was called to lay it into us where one board member told us our problem was that we couldn’t smell our own filth, we launched into on a Holy mission to live an odor-free lifestyle—even given our pets—the unreported ones now reported and approved. We gave up making soap at home per the board’s instructions. I put a high-end IQAir air-cleaner into service—rated so highly that it’s reportedly even capable of removing odors and the SARS virus from the air. We did several rounds of deep cleaning, started taking trash out multiple times per day, changing the cat-litter daily (and we were already using a litter-robot). I started my two robot vacuum cleaners—the Neato VX-21 and the Mint Plus—running daily. Basically, in our weak position looking guilty and feeling terrorized, we turned our lives upside down for the board and the bullies.

These were some of the worst episodes of my life during what were otherwise the best as a new daddy and “home-owner”. It haunted my every day. It kept me from being able to concentrate at work. I was receiving phone-calls daily from my wife with updates on the latest. We were scared to open cans of soup for fear of the odor they would emit, and cooking was absolutely out of the question.

But the odor complaints continued unabated. In fact, they were even getting worse, and I got my first inkling that what we were actually dealing with here was vendetta. We were once again called in again for a hand-slapping by the board. During the second special session, we were told by the president that if there was even just one more complaint, that we would be getting a letter from a lawyer and that we shouldn’t plan on being able to live there for the next 20-years like I had just stated—implying that the letter would be the beginning of eviction proceedings. Later in that meeting, we received a more explicit eviction threat. We were told that eviction proceedings were to begin on one more indiscretion.

I only just gave the vaguest suggestion that what we may be encountering here was foul play at work, as my position still felt weak over the few tiny animals we didn’t disclose (at the encouragement of our real estate agent), and the board was clearly much more interested in assuming that the unverified complaints were true and sincere. Our ongoing requests for walk-in verification of the source of the odors were being consistently ignored.

Really? Just one more complaint and we’re evicted? It was obviously inevitable that complaint would occur, and THAT was the conditions we we living under for months. Can you imagine? A one-year-old child going on two. Getting your first mortgage, and being told that you would be kicked out without any trial, and on top of that prevented from selling your home. So you would be responsible for continuing to pay the mortgage plus maintenance, but not allowed to live there. We were being threatened with nothing less than financial ruin—all over something for which there was not yet one solid bit of evidence that we were at fault.

We also learned by this point that it wasn’t widespread complaints. It was really just the one bully and one bully-buddy—and you know how in the movies the bully has a buddy? That was consistently the other complainant. As far as we’ve been told, no one else ever registered a complaint. Just these two on their tweet-vendetta.

Now, under threat of eviction—reportedly a hair’s breadth away— we started demanding the knock-on-the-door walk-in odor inspections that we had been asking for from the beginning. That would definitively determine whether or not we were the source of the odors—if, which I was doubting by this time were even genuine complaints.

And guess what? Every walk-in inspection, which eventually got up to six occasions—consistently cleared us. Get it? For this entire harrowing ordeal that caused emotional hardship and grief during these critical formative years of our child could have been totally avoided if management just took the time to verify! And verification is not the silly “sniff-at-the-door” test that could create false positives due to odors from another door, ventilation problems, things tracked in on shoes from the elevator, and a whole host of other possibilities. Instead, all they had was a recording of whatever they happened to smell in the hallway, categorized as offensive even if it wasn’t, and automatically attributed to us.

If you ever want to get someone in trouble at a co-op, that’s the formula. Smell is subjective, and management is obliged to create a smell-log, which the supers and porters have to make an entry whenever they’re in the area. So here’s the insidious part. The smell-log is tied to the person being complained about. So anything that goes into that log amounts to automatic guilt-by-association. Supers and porters think they have to record something to be doing their job, little knowing they’re playing into an eviction-scam. There’s always some little odor or another in apartment living. That’s just apartment living.

But now, these are getting logged, and in the minds of everyone looking at the log gets attributed to the person who the log was created about, and amplified into an offense—even if the odor was inoffensive and just part of everyday apartment living. See? It’s a formula for transforming the subjective sniff-tests of employees just trying to do a good job into seemingly objective damnation of your mark. Subsequently, we have learned from supers and porters talking to us in confidence that the neighbor hid in waiting for the hallway sniff-tests to ambush them to intimidate them into reporting non-present smells.

Okay, so what about an objective fresh nose? What about a disinterested third party? Well, our neighbor gave us that chance when he went on what sounded like a mad rage in the hallway one midnight, yelling at a super (who came to our hallway to investigate a complaint and told our neighbor that he didn’t smell anything) at our door, waking us up and the baby and giving another whole dimension to our neighbor troubles—safety! We were being raged-at (indirectly, as we have since learned) from the hallway at midnight! I called the co-op emergency number to seek advice. They told us that if we felt unsafe, we had better not risk it, and should call 911. The police arrived, and couldn’t even detect the odor that warranted a mad, threatening rage in front of our door at midnight. The police who we had to now call over this ordeal couldn’t smell any of these odors, which were at best frivolous, and at worst fabricated and malicious.

Now on top of a developing harassment case, this had also been elevated to a safety issue. Clearly, my way to handle things now was to demand the walk-in inspections upon EVERY SINGLE complaint (that we are fortunate enough to become aware-of—another whole tragic comedy there), which consistently come up empty, vindicate us, and strengthen our legal case. I wrote a letter saying as much, and we got the first and so-far only lawyer letter back, demanding that WE stay vigilant in our measures against OUR odors (more harassment) and failed to even acknowledge our now-safety concerns with our neighbor that were management’s to deal with—so says the police. And that’s the status we’re at today.

Whenever I run into either of these neighbors now in the hallway, I can feel their gaze on my back like daggers. After a few such encounters, I become aware that complaints were being registered again. Making matters worse, I can occasionally smell an unidentifiable odor in the hallway that immediately goes away upon entering our apartment. Now it’s not really offensive except by virtue of its very unidentifiable-ness, and it’s almost beneath notice, but given our harassed, beleaguered and heightened sensitivity now to such issues, I was taken aback to see that one of these neighbors consistently left his wet umbrella in the hallway to drain fresh rainwater into the carpet. I took photos on two occasions and reported it to management. After all this time, the very neighbor complaining of odors in the hallways was a documented mold offender!

And then my mother passed. On the day she passed we received an email from management stating that there were complaints of “fumes” coming from our apartment. About a week later when I was still sitting Shiva (part of the traditional Jewish funeral and mourning process), I was approached by one of the board members on the street to discuss matters—us, now apparently worth talking to now that the walk-in inspections were consistently coming up empty. And astoundingly this board member told us that as a lesbian, she took offense to our use of the word “pansy” in the tweet about the unnamed neighbor who complained about us behind our back to management. And so, the reason a personal vendetta was so amplified was suddenly clear! Our ordeal has taken on a new light ever since.

More than anything, my mother’s passing snapped into focus the pettiness with which two neighbors, enabled by co-op board members, have taken up as their mission against my family regarding a thing so minor which is beneath the notice of most any Manhattanite. I was soon after cornered on a crowded subway car by that board member who said we couldn’t smell our own stink in order to tell me we brought this on ourselves. The implication was clear. We ran afoul of a powerful clique within the board.

And so the the everyday odors in the hallway from people cooking, unidentifiable at times, and yes—even sometimes animal odors (there are a few other people on our floor with animals) was turned into a very powerful weapon against us. My mother dying just about emboldened me to tell the story, but I held back. We have accommodated every request of the board up until an unofficial call from a sympathetic board member told us their lawyer advised they do three more surprise walk-in inspections before they would start to ignore the neighbor’s complaints. I told her that was unacceptable and should have been done three inspections ago and reminded her the real issues here—the security of my family—had yet to be addressed, though we were promised a response.

And so, after management repeatedly refused to address our repeated security concerns, I took matters into my own hands and installed a security system, which immediately began capturing one of their dogs consistently off-leash in the hallway in front of our door, despite co-op rules. In fact, a notice was posted in the elevator over this specific issue, and we ourselves were baselessly accused of this violation by the co-op board’s lawyers (by quoting that rule to us). And so, we decided to register a complaint with management over the persistently off-leash dog—a very real safety threat, given the door could open with our child caught between two dogs.

After a week of being ignored, we started to demand the courtesy of a reply, and started making known some small parts of this larger ordeal on Facebook and in social media. Before you know it, one of the neighbors posted an actual threat in Facebook and our security system captured menacing gestures and tampering with the Mezuzah on our door.

When you combine the year-and-a-half ordeal of unsubstantiated odor complaints resulting in an eviction threat with hallway rages of anger that make us call the police for our safety with intimidation of supers to comply with falsifying management records with blatant disregard of the very co-op rules that we were being accused of violating and finally a violent response to us even just asserting ourselves once, you have the picture of why I must act now to secure the safety of my family.

UPDATE: Since writing this article, the thug shown in the video above was sent to quietly enter the hallway from the stairwell and stand outside the door of our apartment, with my wife and 2 year old baby right on the other side of the door, and for nearly a minute stand still enough to make our security system’s motion detector stop recording. It then popped back on recording when he started making threatening “I’m watching you” gestures. Yes, we reported it to the police (who reported it as harassment) and yes, we reported it to management.

Everything’s in flux! To me, this is the most interesting sort of time in my career. I’ve made several successful transition leaps—print to webmaster. Webmaster to SEO. And now SEO to some yet-unnamed but more important evolution of my career—a culmination of everything. What is it called? I’m not precisely sure. I’m drawn towards some sort of soup-to-nuts tour de force marketing technologist. “MT”-alone sounds—I don’t know—empty. I need something to say I’m the architect and the programmer—the doer! But for lack of anything better, I’ll probably stick with MT.

I’ll tell you one thing. It’s not going to be social media. Being popular on line should be a side effect of the other hopefully brilliant things you’re doing—and not an end-in-itself. Everyone and their mother is jumping on the social media bandwagon. Literally! Is your mother a social media guru yet? And what is social media, anyway? Blah, blah, blah echo chamber. Not interested. Like public relations before it, the rules are fuzzy, very personality-driven, and has a low barrier-to-entry. But ask one of them to set up their own web service—and silence.

In other words, social media is a great place to plant a flag in a new career where a lot of credentials aren’t really required. It’s heavy overtones of the endless parade of marketing gurus and self-help books. With the rise of Google+ I myself am tempted to become an authority on becoming an authority. It’d be a great way to breath a few more years of relevancy into my SEO-career. But I must resist! I feel vaguely contemptuous at the mere thought—maybe the aftertaste of SEO.

Instead, I’ve got a pretty good idea where I’m going—if not what it’ll be called. Right now at my place of employ, we’re labeling it “internal projects”. It’s work that’s not quite ready to be billed against clients, and not in the critical path of productivity enough to go to the IT department or even the normal often necessary but sometimes time-consuming scoping process. Instead, the benefit of these types of things are only realized if you act fast and hit that window of opportunity. But you have to be at the peek-of-your-game to deliver quality and speed in marketing endeavors that require using technology in new ways.

The biggest challenge right now repositioning myself for this is forcing myself to regularly get into “the zone” and actually be at my peek. I need to ensure that what I’m working on is more interesting than anything else I could be doing. In have to care. Ideas have to rapidly become proof-of-concepts, rapidly become prototypes, and perhaps the prototypes be ready as completely viable production instances.

So, what’s this type work look like? Well, I can put it in terms of what it USED to look like. Take web state-fulness, for example, by which web apps have memory between page-loads. So simple, but the http protocol was designed to be fire-and-forget, so we’ve been suffering ever since. I’ve used maybe every hack to get around statelessness, from cookies to passing parameters on the URL to hiding them with JavaScript in iframes, to the kooky Microsoft ViewState postback method. Modern equivalents might be giving Google Docs OAuth login to Facebook and such. I have a talent at connecting dots such as this that no one else even realizes the benefits of connecting.

This dot-connecting ability has made me rather effective at realizing successful internal company projects that are almost impossibly ambitious by most reasonable standards—but which still never amounted to much industry-wide. That’s because internal projects most often fade into obscurity and do not even become a footnote due to the closed doors of internal company workings. On rare occasion, something pops out into the industry, such as happened with HitTail and 360iTiger.

For example, in my first professional job out of college at Scala, I programmed a whole Ruby-on-Rails-like framework in VBScript just in order to be a sort of über-web-salesmen. I controlled the website and generated about 10 sales-leads per day on a product with maybe a $50K total customer value—but couldn’t get a single sale-lead followed up! This struck me as egregiously offensive since I worked on commission, so I created a system that took away the salespeople’s option of not responding. I proceeded to drag the company kicking and screaming to success, transforming its culture in the process. But it left me greatly empty handed since my solution was uniquely tailored for Scala, and VBScript ultimately went away. This all played out on and off between 1997 and 2003.

And as another example, in 2004 I hopped over to NYC to become a VP of a PR firm and eventually created HitTail—a keyword suggestion tool been in continuous use as a secret weapon of the SEO community ever since. I squeezed every ounce of performance out of SQL Server, interacting with billion-row tables with performance like if they only had a few dozen rows—bringing ISAM-like efficiency to SQL. Whatever the situation, I find technical solutions to often tedious and seemingly and intractable problems. But I never quite hit it big with them.

So you see, an unpleasant repeating pattern here is that I regularly do the impossible behind closed doors and working towards the wrong goals. I heard somewhere that repeating behavior that harms you without learning and changing your ways is the very definition of insanity. When things go belly-up or I leave a job or a software stack goes out if style, I’m left empty-handed. That seems to happen to me a lot. So in the interest of not allowing myself to REALLY believe I’m insane, I slammed the brakes on my next maneuver and made a study if it, and determined to know better.

With Microsoft retiring Active Server Pages (ASP), the Active Data Object (ADO) and all that good VBScript stuff was making me go more obsolete by the day. I didn’t move to .NET―but I’m ashamed to say, not for lack of trying. You gotta be a “real” (read: PROFESSIONAL) programmer to make that move. Whether a deliberate decision or providence, the cycle was finally broken. That was maybe 5 years ago I started the research and probing attempts at making the switch.

Well, now I’m over forty, I have a kid, I have a Manhattan mortgage, and I can’t afford such meanderings. I can’t get wrapped up in fads or dead-end career paths. And I have to do things thoughtfully and correctly—and in a semi-public fashion, so I can build up whatever notoriety it’s worth. In simply blogging the revolution and trying to employ good practices while doing it—instead of getting into social media. That’s my plan—but doing it with exactly the right hardware and software stack that it’ll be the last time I ever have to do it.

So in other words, the revolution I’ll be blogging is avoiding yet another trendy vendor-ridden tall software stack—and instead, going old-school. I have this almost visceral need to simplify and go after the disruption-proof timeless bits these days. What is this “old-school” of which I speak that is still so important?

It took me until darn near forty years old to piece it all together—though the clues were there my entire life. I’ve got to productize it now, because I still have nothing to sell. As usual in life, I AM THE PRODUCT. However, I myself am not scalable. But what I have to teach may be. I’ve got a great message now, and it’s time to dust off my communication skills and make MY ding in the universe—in the total opposite way as Steve Jobs. Oh yeah, that old-school stuff. A little more explanation, by way of contrast with Uncle Steve…

Jobs built an empire. I’ll build none. He tied awesomeness to particular hardware. I’ll tie awesomeness to generic anything-hardware (or even virtual). He invented a very particular tall software stack that you have to use. I’ll strip away as much software as possible to the generic lowest common denominator and teach the user to build it up according to his/her needs. He spurned type-in user interfaces and championed graphics. I’ll champion the type-in interface and spurn graphics. He tried to retire the “old-school” way of doing things. I’ll make it cool again.

But to do that, I need the formula, and to communicate it super-effectively. And I think it all comes down to stories. You can take the contrarian approach—so long as it’s also correct—so long as your stories are good enough and win people over.

It’s been quite an awakening that I never really knew the important stories for the old-school way until recently. Some of the most exciting stories in human history were actually playing out when I was just born (the rise of Unix), and on through my teens at which time—before the Web—those innovations only reached me as video games and home computers. And at 12 years old, I got the Coleco Adam instead of the Commodore 64, which really set the tone for my inauspicious path.

The irony of this horribly wrong computing platform choice only compounds in the fact that I actually then interned with Commodore which was right in my back yard right as THEY themselves were becoming the losing-horse.

What’s worse, I totally fell in love with “their” Amiga technology (more like Atari’s) and invested much of my youthful passion into it—to the point of attending shareholder meetings and trying to save Commodore. I made an interactive multimedia demo as my College senior-thesis as to how it would be done. I went to work for a Commodore spin-off company called Scala after college. I held out hope entirely too long that the best technology would also be the one that won—making all my invested time worth it.

The Amiga was so inherently and obviously better than anything else I’d seen. And I had good friends who swore up and down it compared favorably to the coveted Symbolics, Apollo and CGI workstations of the day—which were just starting to be used to make computer graphics for the movies. The impossibly sophisticated NewTek Video Toaster peripheral came along and seemed to vindicate all these beliefs. I mastered AREXX for inter-process communication, DeluxePaint for graphics, and Scala for multimedia.

Fortunately with the Amiga, I was triangulating in on what what was really important—because the Amiga wasn’t terribly dissimilar from Unix. It had a similar command-line interface, command-set, and even command-piping. All the inter-process communication stuff I learned for AREXX is the same as today’s API-everything-mania. I just wasn’t learning Unix (or Linux) precisely, and was massively distracted by the sexy multimedia bits.

I actually liked the graphics bits so much, I went to school for graphic design. My first choice was mechanical engineering, but physics did me in. Computer science didn’t even seriously occur to me—probably because of some sort of inferiority complex. I thought “those people” were somehow smarter than me.

I hated my Pascal classes, and felt that everything cool had to be written in C or C++, and required mastery over heaps, stacks, and pointers. Even in the halls of Commodore, I put those software engineers that lived on the other side of locked doors way too high on a pedestal.

Well no more. I realize now, I simply got the wrong stories. My dad was not qualified to guide me. The Web hasn’t happened yet. My public school education barely had computer classes. My one summer of science camp didn’t hook me. These are the things I want to help fix for another generation.

And so my stories begin. And so, I’ll start tapping into my 40+ years of life experience to make a power-packed formula for producing powerful people. And I’ll do it as I once again reposition myself in a career soon to be more in-demand than even SEO was—the discipline of doing things rapidly, making them ready to scale, and not hoarding the love, but rather packaging the process I myself went through to get there.

Ah, welcome again to my daily work diary. Things got rough again recently with the loss of my wife’s grandmother. I’m deep in my first project in my new role where I work. I’m going to be out of the office for two days next week for a big company management off-site. And I have to “show” my work at the office tomorrow, which is usually a work-from-home focus Friday day. Sunday will be the memorial service, and Monday will be Sitting Shvia. My dog needs to go to the vet, and I need to get my co-op management to do repairs to a wall at home where a mirror fell off the wall because it got wet from repairs in the apartment above us. There are many plates that need spinning, and I have to work smart, work hard, and not starve anything for attention that needs attention. Yeah, I know. First world problems. But this is my daily work journal and you’re reading it, so there.

Get this day underway, and make a wonderful story to tell for today that isn’t bogged down or derailed by other things going on in your life. It’s time for a little compartmentalization and mental concentration and focus tricks. Get into the zone in a timely fashion (early enough today to make a big difference), and STAY there come hell or high water. Of course, before you start doing this zone-getting-into, spin a few plates. You can’t work in isolation with headphones on with no interaction with your Internet audience or your bosses audience for too long, or people start thinking: what is Mike up to? I have to report into the bosses—at work, and you. You a boss? Yeah, Google Robert Cialdini’s principles of persuasion, and commitment and consistency in particular, which is the self-behavior hack I’m employing to keep myself on-track, maintain clarity, and work on the right things for the right reasons.

Every day, see if there isn’t an article-in-progress you can’t push out. Also, see if there isn’t a “website suggestion box question” that came in from HitTail that you can’t answer. The data type within WordPress that’s really easy to push out and work into different areas of the site are FAQ entries, which are what controls my Roadmap page, the FAQ page, and little accordion expansion box questions scattered all throughout the site. This is the best place to quickly hittail from and expand my site’s topical footprint. Every FAQ entry gets its own page, and a proper home somewhere within the site.

One of the things that improves my life pretty dramatically day-to-day is taking those few extra moments to learn something new about vim to solve something that’s been bugging me. On a similar note, is just practicing new things I recently learned, in order to commit them to memory. Two things come to mind recently. The first is how I want to keep spell-checking on all the time by editing “:set spell” into my .vimrc. Problem is that this creates a bright red obnoxious distracting background color on all suspected misspellings, and I want it to be more subtle and more aesthetically appealing, so that if I don’t fix a spelling, it still looks good. The answer is to add “:hi SpellBad ctermbg=52″ to get a nice burgundy color. The next, is to make sure I remember to use the square bracket+s combo to step through spelling mistakes: ]s and [s. And finally, remember that “zg” will add a word to a word list so it won’t get highlighted, and if you make a mistake, and “zug” will undo adding a word to the word list if I made a mistake.

That’s enough vim items to practice today. I added my .vimrc to my vim article on MikeLev.in under the “Become More Technical” dropdown menu. This is the one system customization that I always want with me. I think I will move it, or something very close to it, into Levinux once I start building it into a real dev platform with vim. One of the annoying things about vim in the Tiny Core Linux repository is if you want to get a text-only vim that has color coded syntax highlighting supported, you also have to get the graphical version of vim that has all these graphics library dependencies, making it many tens of megabytes larger than it needs to be, which really is an issue for the recipe inflation process, which I’m trying to keep as fast and small as possible. That may be a first instance where I make my own Tiny Core Linux extension and submit it to the repository specifically for Levinux.

Pshwew, okay! That’s plenty for setting the tone for the day. I really have to pick up the pace, get into the zone, and crank out the latest round of demonstrate-able work for a meeting later today. It all ties back to Levinux however, fortunately, and is my trick for making what I’m working on as interesting to myself as anything else I could possibly be doing (except for spending time with my family). By using Levinux as the “test bed” for everything I’m doing in my new job, I will care passionately about my work, and be inching closer to my Linux Server education for everyone who would like to make the move to that old-school way of working, and needs a well-worn path to follow. Well, the well-worn path doesn’t really exist yet, but I’m forging through the forest with a machete.

I need to get myself more productive on a daily basis at work. This is my daily work journal, and I should do better to keep that continuous, if not rather unpolished, story rolling out every day. A nice strong narrative keeps your work and your live moving along forward—the correct direction. Life’s little knocks and trials can so easily make you backslide.

There are a certain amount of projects in one’s life that feel worthwhile during the normal workday, and certainly are distracting. But they must be treated like plates that need spinning, and you have to avoid chasing the rabbit down the rabbit hole. Yep, my life is filled with metaphors. On any given day, I first ask: What’s MOST broken? Then I ask: where do I get the biggest bang for the buck? And finally, I ask: what plates need spinning?

Many of the projects that threaten to consume me for the day if I pursue them are actually just plates that need to be spun, and then forgotten for the rest of the day. I have to always remind myself of that, and that’s one of the functions of this daily journal—to keep me on track. And by doing it in the very distributed version control system repository of my most important project at work, I make everything sort-of part of the record, even if I don’t end up publishing it on my blog. It’s a line-of-defense.

And so, my daily routine. It’s got to be fairly tightly controlled and turned into strong habits. It consists of forcing myself to start a daily journal entry, and to not immediately get consumed by the Web: Twitter, Google News Reader, HitTail, Facebook, and the like. The things I’m doing now for my career—isolating and packaging the things about my recent switch to Linux for the whole world to follow—is so tempting to turn into a social media personal campaign of my own. But I have to suppress that urge, and just focus on my daily work.

Satisfying that urge is really just spinning plates. Until I take that time to “shoot that video” or update Levinux, I can just make quick FAQ entries on my site (takes MUCH less time), or write scripts for my videos on the subway on my way to or from work. Being a daddy of a 2 year-old, and wanting to dedicate as much of my time after work to her and my wife, I have to seize whatever time does not belong to my employer, and does not belong to my family for deeper, time-consuming thought-work.

I switched out of the SEO department at work, because of my belief that it’s losing value as a career if you’re not directly servicing the small-and-medium businesses (SMBs) that can still greatly benefit from SEO. Large Fortune 500 type companies like giving SEO lip service, but don’t really want to do all those things that SMBs are so motivated to do to pick up the scraps of search, gathering them together into something that’s worth it, and represents a toe-hold for free automatic exposure.

In fact, I would say SEO is stratifying in two directions: the long-tail that I just described, and the increasingly less spam-able hyper-competitive terms that require either a large marketing campaign behind it, or absolutely brilliant content, of the type that we used to call viral. All that stuff in the middle USED to be fertile ground for SEO, but is forever less-so, because after all your on-page optimizations are done, and all the link-manipulation withing your own site architecture is done, all that’s left is garnering more links from outside sources—and Google is on a war against any paid form of that.

And so, you put the social king-maker links on the pages: Tweet, Like and +1. This is what linking has become. Once in a blue moon, you will get a blogger to link to a deep page because it happens to intersect with their current interests. And even less frequently, a link will appear in one of the super-rare forums that haven’t nofollowed everything. But more commonly, your deep pages will never get old fashioned “a href” links. That era of the Web is winding down.

Things just change too fast where people’s mind-sets actually are. That’s one type of web content—the stuff that aligns with the public zeitgeist. And that’s always shifting and changing with culture, news, and the times. So, you have to speculatively outguess the news and have the content there before the story breaks, so you get picked up by the twitter-storm when it finally happens. Alternatively, your topic may be in a place so fortified with old-time competitors, you have no chance of knocking them loose. Is either one a place to base a career servicing Fortune 500′s?

Things are not so bleak in the long-tail. You can still publish content, and have it in the first position in Google for those keywords literally in minutes. You can even start getting hits right away from people interested in those topics around the world. But it’s only a few a day—or even a few a week. How does that equate to money? How does that equate to career? Well, in two ways: if you have an enormous long-tail-ish product catalog (i.e. Amazon) where you can collect up enough of these prospects to make it worth it.

And on the other extreme is obscure high-end, heavily researched products with long sales-cycles and a painful sales pipeline process with dozens of touches required before winning the sale. That could be a fine career, but I’m living in New York City now, with a 2 year old kid and a mortgage. I simply have to be where the high-paying careers are, and that’s no longer SEO for Fortune 500′s. Than what is it? Being yet another social media guru who talks the talk, but can’t really “do anything”?

A lot of people thing so, but not me. I’m betting on the pendulum swinging back into the direction of people who really know how to do things—in the best technical sense of the word—become valuable again, because they are required for the multitude of ad hoc real-time projects that are going to permeate marketing in a few more years. The only truisms are that everything is getting fragmented: hardware platforms, media channels, content revenue models—everything. So many of the rules are being suspended, and a great cloud of uncertainty hangs over the battle for eyeballs.

And against that backdrop, champions will arise. Some will be false—those who talk a great talk, but as soon as their novelty wears off, they have nothing more to offer. When the significance of Google+ and those head-shot author icons that run next to search results FINALLY dawns on marketing pro’s, the marketing world is going to be inundated with “Authority Authorities”. Being one of those was my first thought. And then my second thought was contempt. One of the only guys who gets a “get out of jail free” card as being one of those types is Seth Godin, because he articulated Permission Marketing, and then created Squidoo. He is an individual who talks the talk and walks the walk.

And therefore, you see my vision. It is much more important to walk the walk to me than talk the talk. This is not always so great when working in a New York marketing agency, where talking the talk is what people mostly want from you. But by doing that for too many years without full immersion, your… well, your blade gets dull, in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habit’s terms, and the time soon comes to have to “sharpen the saw”. When that time comes, you generally job-switch, and that was my first inclination.

But I LOVE where I work. It’s the best place to work I’ve ever been. They’re literally stellar. You’d have to be nuts to abandon ship when your company is repeatedly getting named as the best of its type by the industry trades. Imagine a company recently being acquired by the Japanese, but maintaining its autonomy, because that’s the value they felt they are getting—because the new owners have the long-view in mind, and are willing to invest a little.

Now imagine an employee who has lots to still offer, but sees his current line of business having run its course (in the context of Fortune 500′s), and the heavy responsibility of doing right by his new family, and still wanting to be positioned brilliantly professionally 5 or 10 years down the line, without having gone obsolete by total soil-liquefaction having just occurred underneath him? I have lots of choices, and it turns out one of them is staying with the company and re-immersing myself and sharpening the saw again!

And now we finally get to the point of this post/daily journal entry, and why I justify putting a good solid hour or more into it at work—just by way of getting started for the day on a Monday morning. I am now an internal projects guy. But I feel a lot like the Obi Wan Kenobi quote: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” in regards to SEO.

SEO isn’t going away. It’s just being transformed, and I have been unsuccessful in divining the precise nature of that transformation. I’m not even 100% convinced it remains a Google game, or that there can be one-big-trick after all the platform, media, and search method fragmentation plays out. If you’ve read the asteroid strike scifi or seen the movies, you know the one thing you don’t do is blast an incoming asteroid, or the countless spread fragments that are still going to hit you will do more collective damage than the one big blast. That’s what’s happening with SEO.

None-the-less, there is some brass ring is out there to be grabbed that has something to do with next-generation SEO—even in context of servicing the big Fortune 500′s. In many ways, its already happened with social, community management, and the like. Because all we’re really doing is aggregating eyeballs and human attention to open channels for message delivery. Ad-driven media is ad-driven media, no matter how tech reshapes it. And premium subscription-content is premium subscription content, mo matter how tech reshapes it. It’s kinda always the same. So what career skills could possibly remain the same and maintain their value—or perhaps even appreciate over time?

Well, in my mind, it’s crystal clear now. It’s the ability to rapidly carry out ad hoc projects without the long product-build that’s normally associated with them. It’s the field of agile or extreme programming converging with real-time marketing in a way that can keep pace with the zeitgeist of the world. The problem is that to do each project well, you need to be a domain expert on the material, and you quickly get into a circular dependency problem that keeps you from being fast, and high quality.

THAT is where my career needs to reside. In those impossible projects. The ones that everyone wants to spec out and put into the queue according to the old processes, but if you do, the window of opportunity has closed on you. You need to drop a project like that into the hands of someone who’s been there and done that enough times, in enough different ways, and has sufficiently mastered all the tools, API’s, subject-matter and such involved, that they can appear to work miracles. I have to be one of those miracle workers.

This makes a lot of my actions difficult to understand, even by my employers who I occasionally have to explain things to. It was unworkable in my old position as an SEO director, because the things I simply had to do to adapt to the new ways of the world were not 100% consistent with what was desired of me to make my people and our clients happy. But that puts me in the choice of doing right by myself, or doing right by others. Either choice has a win scenario and either choice has a lose scenario, depending on the details of how things play out. It has a lot in common with the classical prisoner’s dilemma (google it).

And when choosing the doing right by myself option, which one must ultimately do to do right by our families and the ones who truly depend on us, and because we are managing our own careers that we must be able to take with us anywhere, I must ensure my success by means that are not always 100% understandable to everyone. I say that I do not want to merely become another one of the gold-rush marketers trying to become an authority on being an authority, per Google+ author rank and the replacement to the PageRank algorithm. What then? Well, the Sun Tzu quote comes to mind: Victory over multitudes by means of formation is unknowable to the multitudes. Everyone knows the form by which I am victorious, but no one knows the form by which I ensure victory.

And so, it will play out in my daily journal. Stay tuned.

Bear with me a moment. I’ll get to the squishy wizard stuff. Well, a new day has started. I’m going to keep on track with my daily journal in the Tiger code in vim. This is part of my old-school is cool agenda, and practicing what I preach. It is also to keep me on-track and focused—and I suppose OUT of the web browser while I’m writing, really. As much as I love Google Docs, this may be a case where being in the browser as a writing environment may be more distracting than its worth. And I need to master vim!

I have a lot on my mind to write about, and a lot of work to do. I have a flurry of meetings starting at 10:30 AM, and then most of the day free. So today is a day to take a few very well placed chisel-strikes to tease out the shape of the beautiful masterpiece that I’m gradually revealing. Okay, so first… my subway writing from this morning, and what THIS journal entry is really going to be named for. I’m tempted to actually get rid of this daily journal opening paragraph, and just make it a post about the subject-matter I wrote about on the train, but I want to keep this raw. I can always go back later and clean up journal entries into stronger stand-alone articles. Anyway…

There is a multi-player game designer way of looking at the world. It rose from probably the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, then migrated to arcade games and battle-cards like Magic The Gathering. Powerful hitters are made slow. Speedsters are given a glass jaw. And so on, so no one is made too powerful and ruins all the fun.

Lots of rules regarding strategy, life and success can be found in those rules of game-balance. But in real-life, you’re actually trying to throw the game out-of-balance. Things don’t have to be fair in real life, and a strategy of building yourself up to have excess capacity all over the place, but then holding it all in reserve to “decloak” with surprising, smashing force is a perfectly acceptable strategy in life. Speak soft, but carry a big stick.

As a battle character type, I am either a mighty glacier or a jack of all trades. The one thing I am not (yet) is a lightning bruiser—due to lack of speed, and lack of the total mastery required to cast mighty spells or throw earth-shattering punches. Some who casually know me might think I’m a squishy wizard, but my spells aren’t sufficiently powerful (yet), and I can take a pretty hard punch.

Conversely, I actually can throw a pretty hard and well-placed punch. People don’t see that about me much, because I like to just do my work and not throw my hat into corporate political arenas, where most punches of the type I’m discussing are thrown and received. I prefer to make my arena purely technical in nature, and the quality results of my work. Those are the punches in my world, and when the time comes, I can dish it out pretty well. Plus, I have fairly good command of a lot if disciplines—but not the total command I need to fulfill my mission.

My weakness is the lack of speed and profound mastery of a very few very important skills. Everything now has to be geared towards being FAST and stunningly expert in a few important areas. So everything I do has to combine the pursuit of mastery in the correct disciplines, and to wield that mastery to produce impressive results. Hit hard. Hit fast. But do that WHILE LEARNING. And in such a way, I will turn myself from whatever I happen to be, into the game-upsetting lightning bruiser.

I’m going to try to move my daily journal entry once again back into the Tiger code-base. This has a few advantages. It helps ensure that I actually go into the Tiger code-base every day, which is where much of my capabilities and productive momentum comes from lately professionally. But it also keeps me immersed in the vim text editor, sharpening my skills and forever reaching that elusive infinite limit, which is total vim mastery—one of the ultimate achievements for anyone considering themselves a heavyweight tech.

Okay, it’s Monday morning, and a perfect time to think through my overarching habits and workflow that I’m trying to get into place for my new job responsibility. It goes into effect full-time on March 11th, but I’m being allowed to put up to 50 percent of my time against it starting right away. And the projects are there. The projects are interesting and right up my alley. And the projects are truly valuable to the company and in some unexplored territory. All I have to do is get myself a bit more immersed into it. It has to be as interesting to me as anything else going on.

The other thing going on right now that is just as interesting is my release of my own respun Linux. I’m calling it a distro, but really it’s just a respin. But with time, I think I may actually be able to turn it into my own true distribution. That’s a longer term thing. The Tiny Core Linux people have already done a miraculous job getting a minimalistic Linux kernel that gets the average I’ve seen of around 50MB down to a much more reasonable 2.5MB. They also got the command-set, thanks BusyBox, down to about 6MB. I’ve finally got it up on my website in a decent form with a download tracker. And I think it’s going to be the center around which I refine my evolving online identity.

I don’t want to talk about that TOO MUCH before I dive into my real work today, but it is important to say that this is going to tie into EVERYTHING I do. I am going to try to make the Recipe system I have for inflating an unlimited variety of JeOS-box servers as close to what I’m using on Rackspace, and potentially Amazon EC2 as possible. And as much as I like Tiny Core Linux on the desktop, switching over to something based on the Debian Package Manager (dpkg) or possibly the Redhat Package Manager (RPM) to make reproducing Levinux work in the cloud much easier. Okay noted and put in my roadmap.

Okay, my workflow goes like this.

First and foremost, I set my Chrome start-page to my new mikelev.in/roadmap/ page. My one-page-plan page is also good, but its basically too high-level to be my constant reminder about what to do next. The roadmap is my daily evaluation list of what to do next, in which I ask: what’s most broken, where do I get the biggest bang for the buck, and what plates need spinning? The roadmap page lets me think out-loud, and remember what was important to me just days prior. Continuity!

Next most important is going over my recent writings, no matter where I typed them in. Chances are that it’s on iPhone Notes from my commute on the subway, and the worst crime is when these good thoughts get buried in the notes without having impact on my daily work-flow, and without ever getting refined further and published into an article, or otherwise leveraged. All the little things that make a big difference are buried in my captured notes—sometimes Notes. Sometimes Google Docs. Sometimes right here in this journal. So, take inventory and quickly scan the important stuff.

These two steps help immensely with immersion. One of my fundamental rules is that what you’re working on has to be at least as interesting as anything else you could be doing in life right now, and to get into that state of mind, you have to remind yourself about what you loved about that subject-matter just recently, and the things you’ve been meaning to do regarding it, and the benefits you expected to gain by getting that work done. Which leads to the next workflow item, which is wrapping up those latest thoughts into the beginning entry of a new daily journal—a lot like this, and now according to my renewed determination—in vim, so it keeps me centered, focused, and in pursuit of mastery in at least one parallel simultaneously exercised skill.

Okay, so we have reviewing my roadmap, reviewing my recent writing, and starting to gather my latest thoughts into a new daily journal entry, based in vim and intended for publishing on MikeLev.in. We have to actually get to starting the work itself, because the nature of contemplating one’s own navel could too-easily become an all-day affair, and tip the scales of excellent planning for brilliant execution to excellent planning for the sake of excellent planning, pontification, and public posting for glory’s sake. And that’s no better than drilling down plan-less and rudder-less on the work.

So, this next step in my work-flow is… call it, putting the fear of failure into myself. Visualize the penalty of NOT carrying out the most important work at-hand. I’m a doer, and without doing, I become less valuable. I always need very recent examples of what I’ve done. You always need to be able to answer: what CAN you do, and what have you done LATELY. This piece of the workflow keeps me driving forward and getting over some of that strange stand-still inertial momentum that the act of writing itself can create.

Okay, in the spirit of moving onto actually DOING the work that’s important for today, and to keep my publishing level up on my website for public commitment and consistency, and keeping the process of publishing from my vim Mercurial hg code repository to WordPress, I’m going to push this out as a new public post right now. Hmmmmm… I shall call it planning my daily workflow.

I have to test my Levinux tiny virtual Linux server distribution on a lot of different operating systems. It’s designed to run with a double-click whether you’re on a Windows, Mac or Linux desktop—and a wide variety of Linux at that. So, I need to try it out on a lot. This article is about one of the tools I’m using to accomplish that.

While I do have various different computers to test on, I don’t have as many computers as the OSes I need to test. So, it’s time to play around with virtualization products again. But I have a love/hate relationship with virtualization, and I’m always dubious—especially of a kind called Type 2 hypervisor virtualization that runs after a main OS boots. Well, I’ve used VirtualPC and Parallels on the Mac. This time up, it’s VMWare Fusion 5.

It’s turning out that VMWare Fusion and the Mac OS X are a match made in heaven. I’m finally starting to have some faith in type 2 hypervisors—something l’ll explain in this article. This is a surprising development for me, as I usually advocate using the one intended OS per piece of hardware, to keep things running smoothly. Life’s too short to try living inside houses of cards (what virtualization tends to be). So, generally adding another whole OS on top of the one you e got is bad news and something I avoid.

Now, I’m a big fan of virtualization in the right circumstances—and my very own virtual Linux distribution is based on it. However, I’m more an advocate of low-level access to your actual hardware for severely optimized code—code that does something so perfectly that it hasn’t lost a cycle doing anything its not supposed to be doing. In other words: making more of less. Economy in computing is a rare topic due to Moore’s Law, but there are rising instances it’s important—like for low power consumption in mobile.

Virtualization and optimization are two opposite sides of the how-to-be-most-productive with your equipment argument. Virtualization is a high-level abstract code lifeboat for ultimate code survival, at the expense of CPU cycles—and consequently heat cost, performance, and stability. Fast optimized code is low-level precise one-off never to be reused, because you’ll never encounter precisely the same challenge on precisely the same hardware. Low-level near-the-metal hardware optimization of software is faster, cooler, cheaper, and generally more stable.

Why? Because virtualization requires all these overlording tasks from an outside, like the hypervisor that—while (in type 1 bare metal hypervisors) seemingly not interacting with the hardware it supervises, still has the right to kill it. But otherwise, there should in theory be no performance burden or stability sacrifice on the regulated and virtualized OS. It doesn’t (shouldn’t) know it’s being monitored. It doesn’t know it’s virtualized. And hardly anything is being stolen for it to notice. CPU cycles don’t have log files, so it’s hard to know. But from the things that go wrong with virtualization, I’ll tell you the ideal theory does not always hold true.

The truth is that when you virtualize a computer on another computer, something’s got to be in control—and that control costs something, or else things would bog down with overhead forever until all resources darken out and can’t be fixed without a full hardware reboot. Kinda like how old 486 and Pentium PCs would bog down and crap out under Windows after awhile until their hard drives needed to be wiped and reinstalled. Security-wise on these systems, they were extraordinarily easily owned machines. Something has to me the taskmaster. So what’s in control at the very top of privileged tasks?

Enter the hypervisor—wasted overhead cycles because you’ve bought into virtualization. Everything has a cost, and don’t let anyone fool you—those resources are being used in housekeeping. It’s just that the average user is so non-demanding on their very powerful hardware, that they don’t notice in the least the extra overhead. HOWEVER, VMWare fusion, because it runs AFTER OS X is started, can’t use a type 1 hypervisor. It has to be type 2 with many more moving parts, so expectations were low. House of cards, and all that.

So, the type 2 hypervisor in VMWare Fusion for Mac OS X is kinda like the heavyweight overlording task of a virus checker. I mean—how do you write a virus checker? Something’s got to interrupt every potentially at-risk operation with elevated sufficient rights to investigate and scan it, and then let it continue if benign, or kill it if malevolent. Think how much overhead that must be. On tasks running with privileged access in memory—and with every read or write of a file.

Well, it’s not quite as bad with virtualization as it is with virus checkers, but I always fear it could be. Type 2 VMWare Workstation (the PC equivalent to Fusion) was even once used as a trick on me by a rotten sysadmin who never delivered hardware that I had ordered, but instead just gave me a login to a virtualized session that turned out to be a VMWare Workstation session running—maybe—on the hardware that I ordered, but which he intercepted and kept for himself.

That stupid procurement abuse—which was severely corrected—made me forever suspicious of the ways of lording sysadmins, and particularly the performance of type-2 hypervised sessions—which tended to pop like soap bubbles in those days if you didn’t shell out $10K for the type-1 ESX product (which he didn’t). This all resulted in the soap-bubble hosted website nosediving in availability, until ultimately it hurt sales. So, I now equate type 2 virtualization as cheap, fragile soap bubble-like sessions and trickery.

But I’m finding that VMWare Fusion pulls off type 2 virtualization miraculously well for single-user desktop work. I’ve used VMWare and VirtualBox pretty extensively over the years on a variety of host operating systems. And although I tend to shy away from VMWare because VirtualBox can be had in a free and open source forms—I have to say my latest experience with VMWare Fusion is knocking my socks off. A few nuances come together to make OS X the ideal host OS for Type 2 hypervised virtualization.

First is the way OS X now brilliantly handles full-screen mode. It’s the best implementation I’ve seen since the Amiga computer, which made cycling through full-screen apps as easy and fast as switching TV channels—BEFORE digital. Amiga+N to zap, zap, zap, app, app, app. I have missed this for the twenty years since—until now. Mac OS X seamlessly blended together the concept of virtual screens, full-screen mode, and swiping gestures with your fingers on a trackpad to move between them for something even better that the Amiga’s model.

Ever fumble around losing time or your productive flow by trying to switch between full-screen apps under Windows? Tired of their their jolting half-assed response to Mac Expose that zooms an annoying 3D stacked effect just to switch full-screen apps? Well not on the Mac. It’s just swoosh-left with a three-finger gesture. Swoosh-right. The whole screen slides naturally horizontally butter-smooth like all your virtual full-screen programs are lined up next to each other on a wheel on a highly greased rail, waiting to be spun into focus—with none of the distracting “chrome” from the OS.

Well, this is a combination of three features: how Macs handle full-screen “windows”, how they handle virtual workspaces, and how they handle multi-touch gestures on trackpads for natural hand-motions. One might also argue it is the result of Mac’s now also having plenty of the type of video memory so often needed for first-person 3D shooter games.

The end result is a workable full-system-feeling Ubuntu. The result is a full-system-feeling Windows whatever. The result is a full-system-feeling Fedora, OpenSUSE, or whatever’s your poison. And you navigate between them swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. And one is the Mac OS. But it’s really there in control of everything—as a tap of the pointer against the top or bottom of the screen within any of the full-screen virtual sessions will remind you.

The end-result is almost unreal. It has been my most elegant and least painful use of type 2 virtualization yet. And I’ve used VirtualPC in Mac in it’s pre-aquistion state and post. On both Mac and Windows. And I’ve used Parallels on Mac. Now, in all fairness, maybe all emulation products on the Mac seem magical, thanks to the full-screen mode, virtual screen and multi gesture swooshing gifts of the host OS. But VMWare is the one I got up to testing while the Mac OS is in such an awesome state.

Also, in fairness, I haven’t tried the a KVM-based solution on Linux. My Levinux virtualized Linux server distro actually avoids the kernel virtual machine for maximum compatibility with different host systems. And my current primary Ubuntu system has a weak Atom netbook motherboard. So, my MacBook Air is my best VM platform right now.

Plus, UIs to the KVM under Linux is yet another place different UIs are doing battle. No such uncertainty under Mac OS X. Almost complete rightness, seamless blending with host OS features for a nearly transparent experience—leaning on a multi-touch trackpad to accomplish this—something not universally supported in Linux yet. There’s just no added UI contrivances or any extra UI chrome to mess with. It’s just natural native feeling. I almost respect Type 2 virtualization now as much as Type 1.

Plus, you get an OS X system—something which is possible, but whose legality is questionable on other systems. Apple’s terms of service are not very supportive of running OSX virtualized or on other hardware. For, I go back to A-Max for the Amiga—late ’80′s—88, I think. You needed actual Mac ROMs. Suffice to say, Apple has never been crazy about OS X being virtualized. So if you want Windows, Linux and OS X at your disposal, it’s most legally tidy to make OS X the host OS anyway—aside from it being seemingly most suited for it.

I’ve started teaching a friend to become technical—someone who for years now has demonstrated the aptitude and interest, but for whatever reasons has not yet taken the plunge. Or shall we say—has never stayed on the water and committed to a swim after taking the plunge. With my mission to turn my personal Linux distribution into my secret weapon at work and into a groundswell movement in education, I’m taking the opportunity to turn him into a tech and take some notes.

After the first couple of lessons, my observation—at least with this particular learner—let’s call him Boris—is context, context, context! This was an unexpected learning for me. Even though the computer history context of what I do is always fascinating to me, I always thought it would make others tune out. For me, these rich histories have eclipsed sports, music, politics, and a ton of other areas in which people revel in knowing the players, following the careers, reciting the stats. If you talk to me about programming syntax, I’m as likely as the next guy to zone-out. But talk to me about the stranger-than-fiction tales of Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, and I’m engaged. I’m glad to learn it’s not only me.

Who knows if its the same way with all learners. But it is with Boris. He’s a lover of stories. In fact, I give Boris credit for turning me back onto SciFi after a very long hiatus, insisting that Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age was written almost specifically for me—given the issues of raising my daughter in a technologically accelerating world that he and I sometimes discussed over our “SEO Babble Lunches”. Boris was right regarding Diamond Age. Now, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is a cornerstone of recent thinking. Truth be told, Boris had conquered the obtuse and heady Stephenson tome called The Cryptonomicon that I have yet to get through, which tells me that he is as able to be a “tech” as anyone. While merely reading doesn’t make you a tech, actually understanding Neal’s perpetually challenging concepts qualifies to you make the attempt.

Perhaps it’s Boris’ predilection for stories that made the context of what I was trying to teach him as interesting (more?) than the subject matter itself. Specifically, I’m trying to teach him very old-school, yet amazingly still relevant, information tech that underlies most other tech. Some call it the “short stack”. But basically, you strip away all graphical windows managers (Windows, OS X) and monolithic frameworks (Objective C, .NET), and work with nothing more than what you need to make your program (a short stack). Then you carefully add things on top of this base of the stack (which is usually Unix or Linux) to get your job done—and no more!

I fully disclosed to Boris that this was the utterly opposite to the HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript and sometimes PHP approach, which is where the jobs are—and different from the Mobile Apps Instagram / Angry Birds approach, which is also where the jobs are AND could let you hit the billionaire jackpot.

My way is different. Those who read my articles know that I advocate the fundamentals, and stripping out every reasonable unnecessary dependency, until all you have left is a very small version of Unix/Linux. Then you build-up just on that until you have precisely what you need to accomplish the job at hand. This is not the “client software” approach of Mobile Apps, and it is not really the Web development approach. Writing the actual client-facing user interface is a different, and admittedly sexier world. Instead, my way is more of a API-publishing, API-consuming approach by machines and for machines. It lets you build Internet and Web services that other things use—which is occasionally useful for automating some tasks that you are called upon to perform. My way makes you a citizen who can automate tasks on a broad variety of machinery that is around you today.

You might describe my way as old-school—or lowest-common denominator. I like to think of it as timeless, and obsolescence-proof. Some have even called it bad-ass. It involves logging into remote servers, and using only a text-based interface and the most cryptic—and yet worth mastering—text editors known to man: vi(m). Discovering this approach was born of a “got screwed by Microsoft / fool me twice” mentality (I was an Active Server Page guy). Any way you slice it, my way is highly effective in the modern world and elevates you to being a sort of super-citizen. Yet, it won’t necessarily get you hired into the best, most in-demand jobs. It’s not trendy. But it is undeniably useful, and underlies all other more complicated information technology. I basically tried to scare Boris away.

But Boris asks why. I start to tell him why I take such an approach. I tell him about the Multics consortium from the ’60s and Ken Thompson of AT&T, and his frustration with Multics and his rebel-streak—and how he just went and made Unix, and the tradition of play-on-words deeply ingrained in the Unix culture that was born that moment. I tell him about Berkeley Unix that tried to free Unix from commercialism (BSD), and it’s legal quagmire that kept it in a prison—and the serendipitous work by a young Fin named Linus Torvalds and how Linux’s work came together with Richard Matthew Stallman’s (rms) GNU to form the worlds first FOSS operating system—and why rms hates the concept “Open Software” and hates Steve Jobs and was happy he was dead.

I showed Boris Google Knowledge Graph pics of Richard—instant understanding when you just LOOK at him in contrast to Steve. And I showed him Ken who lands somewhere in between. Boris noticed Ken was still alive, and I explained how he is working for Google on the Go language. Boris doesn’t understand the need for new languages, so I explain Go and compiled languages versus interpreted ones, and the wasted time during C compiles, and how you take that times 20K to see why long compile-times plague Google.

Compiled versus interpreted languages is a difficult discussion these days. You have to skip over a lot of confusing details about hybrid interpreters, pseudo-code, JIT compilers, virtual runtime engines, and the like. You have to focus on the fact that if you know everything ahead of time, you can make the fastest, most optimized code reasonably possible without working in machine code.

So, Boris asks: So, compiled languages are best? I say: well, if you’re programming an operating system and drivers, sure. But if you’re programming robotic cars to autonomously cross the desert, you want something entirely different, because your problem is so unique, and your problem domain is so particular. You probably want to write your own language in a language for writing languages. In other words, you want LISP.

And Boris is like: so LISP is not compiled? I’m like: No. Not until you write a compiler in LISP to compile your own code. BAM! Head explodes. Back up! Simplify! If you want to write solid, fast code, use C. If you’re solving a very difficult problem that no one else has addressed before and you hit a lot of obstacles that you feel may be due to the limitations of the tools you’re using, try LISP.

There is always a better way of looking at a problem, and LISP could get you there. But both C and LISP require quite a large commitment, and I wouldn’t recommend going that route unless you plan on becoming a career programmer. You don’t need a career programmer’s pulsing alien brain just to be a tech. There are better language choices for a tech. The only thing in common is sitting on top of the heritage of Unix. In other words, no matter how you slice it, Unix or Linux should be at the base of the technologies you “stack” on top of each other to arrive at your solutions.

So, what about non-compiled languages? What are they, and why would you use them? Well, there’s a bunch, and they’re popular because they’re usually easier to get started and be productive fast. There’s a lot that you may have heard of here: PHP, which Facebook and WordPress are based on. There’s Ruby, Python and PERL—all of which play a very big role on the Web. Oh, and there’s JavaScript. Each of these has its own fairly rich story behind it, why you would use it, and how it can approach similar performance in many cases to a compiled language like C.

There’s literally a whole Neal Stephenson-like book here, based on REAL history. And the real history is still playing out. Wait, the guy at Google helping to get rid of C compile-time is the guy who invented Unix? Yes. What about the guy who invented C? Oh, Dennis Ritchie invented C—sadly, he just passed away. By the way, Dennis co-invented Unix with Ken Thompson, and actually made C as an update to a similar prior language named BCPL, so that Unix could be ported to different hardware more easily. As a result of the ease of porting Unix to different hardware that C brought about, C is just as important an ingredient to Unix’s success as Unix itself. And Ken’s making a replacement for C? Yes. For Google? Yes. And Google really needs this? And they’re tapping the inventor of Unix? Yes. Wow.

Context, context, context! What about the language we’re focusing on now, Python? How does that fit in? Well, a young dutchman named Guido van Rossum decided to do a summer project taking the best of the Unix and C worlds and make a language with the strengths of a prior academic language called ABC, and make it as pragmatic and human-understandable and real-world problem-solving as possible. Guido asked: Can one language be equally loved by newbies and compsci-freaks? His answer was: Yes! It’s all lovable stuff about C and Unix with none of the crazy syntax and overhead—plus Python can be spot-optimized with C for maximum punch.

Oh, and the Google empire was built on Python. Yep, PageRank was originally written as a Python program. Tons of Google systems were written in Python—at one point, rumored to be as much as 25%. They’re phasing Python-for-systems out now, because Google really needs to use a compiled system-language like C (Go), but Google’s Python-love runs deep. Many of their API client libraries are still made available in Python, despite the groundswell popularity of JavaScript as the one language to rule-them-all. Oh, and MIT even dumped a now legendary 20-year tradition of teaching LISP to incoming students as an introduction to computer science (6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs), in favor of Python. So, what’s Guido van Rossum doing now? Oh, he works for Google.

Well, this is a whole lot of talking, and I’m all about doing. Seth Godin reminds me today that too much talk doesn’t do anyone any good—and points to a historic Jeffrey Pfeffer piece on why we can’t get anything done. And so, it’s time to move onto the new problem at hand: tutorials to get over the unexpected and interesting hurdles I encountered with Boris, trying to introduce him to Python from a Windows laptop—and why even just getting an SSH program to log into a remote server is a challenge, because Windows is not part of the Unix lineage, so everything is subtly harder. It was so hard in fact (copying and pasting with PuTTY from a Windows laptop with no mouse), that I switched to just showing him a native install of Python under Windows. I’ll switch back the remote server login approach when I have a reasonable way (WinSCP?). And when I really get around to the first “course” for my Linux distribution, Levinux, it’s going to be a doozie.

I finally bit the bullet and read Nate Silver’s Bayesian prediction book that’s made so much press from predicting election outcomes and such. Nate’s that guy who uncannily predicted the outcome of EVERY electoral college vote in the 2012 presidential election. Okay, I’m now on the Nate bandwagon in regards to my field of SEO… well, sort of. But as usual, with all great books and great ideas, it just reinforces something we already intuitively know—or at least suspect…

The world is way more complex than can be pigeon-holed down into a simple computer model. On a lot of unpredictable subject-matter, the model can only be directional in nature and must be open to constant new input, which has been “pre-filtered” or “pre-considered” by a well-informed, mostly emotionless HUMAN! That’s a big part of Nate’s message: a bunch of stuff is extremely predictable, and a bunch is not… and those pontificating assholes should be a little more honest about it.

However, in those cases where things ARE predictable, you have to zero-in on the real story with a rinse-and-repeat process that uses new input as it becomes available, understanding the fact that even this new input is in fact subjective—yet, it’s striving to be impartially and emotionlessly objective as possible. Get it? If you do, you’re in some tiny but influential company.

Stated another way, under Nate’s model, there are TWO SIDES of Bayesian probability… especially when it comes to SEO: precise content recommendations that can probably and pretty accurately be done in analytics—versus the much more fuzzy-stuff regarding what direction the field of SEO is headed as a whole. Can you use Bayesian probably to answer the question: “Is SEO dead?” In this article, I address the second type: what does probability say about what’s happening with the field of SEO as a whole? Is it dead? Should I switch fields?

If this sounds a bit wacky to you, then you’re right along there with everyone else who had been ignoring the Bayesian method of probability prediction, due to its abandoning of absolute measurable factors, replaced by an “eyeballed” percentage provided by a keen observer. When this happens, predictions improve over time, as updated data (truer scenarios) are fed into the system. Wacky indeed! In fact, Bayesian logic was lost to history for over 200 years since articulated by mathematician and theologian Thomas Bayes in the 1700′s. Frankly, it sounds a bit like fufu math that no one should buy into… oh, except that it works. Why?

Things that are as subjective in nature and subject-to-human-error as the Bayesian process just doesn’t sit well with pure math and statistician-type folks. And it is true that accuracy of predictions even with Bayesian methods DROPS if the human involved is excessively ruled by emotions, or excessively vested in certain outcomes. Biases amplify. But another type of person feeding the data in for predictive models can get uncannily accurate results, as Nate himself proved with baseball stats and elections.

The best users of Bayesian logic make continual observations and input probability adjustments that are dispassionate, multi-disciplinary, well-informed. In short, they couldn’t give a shit about the actual outcome. They are ideal dispassionate observers—which rules-out just about every TV pundit, or career-minded “expert” peddling their particular view. Folks who can achieve that oddly accurate predictive behavior are strange beasts indeed—neither fish nor fowl—and probably not IN the industry they’re making predictions about.

Such successful predictive models CAN NOT be applied with confidence to just any situation. The subject-matter for predictions have to follow a fairly consistent set of rules. Hence, why it worked so well with baseball and electoral college elections—the places where Nate made his reputation. His new book, The Signal and the Noise, is throwing the world into a tizzy looking for where such uncannily accurate, if not subjectively derived, predictive models can be applied. The weather? Stock markets? Personal growth and career paths?

Of course, I look at the world of search engine optimization (SEO) as my current career, in dire need of some predictive science. Will Google+ take off or quietly ascend to dominance, swapping out the infinitely corruptible Link Graph with the easier to quality-check Authority Graph? When will the pendulum swing in that direction? Will Google hold the keys to the Authority Kingdom, or are there openings for other players to transform the popular concept of “search”? What role does a Googlebot web-crawl based search still play in light of the purely crowd-sourced Facebook Graph Search? How many people still like the anonymous but massive and massively-corruptible long-tail versus the the cleaned-up, curated, and much more mainstream content that populates Facebook as shared stories in the prattle-stream?

Precisely how this “great game” of search and online habits is going to play out is… simply… unpredictable. There are too many variables. The success or failure of these endeavors is determined by implementation details that we are not yet privy too. It’s much more like the stock-market, a much more unpredictable system, than like baseball statistics or electoral vote outcomes. The input parameters are unknowable—and even if known, with insufficient details to make an accurate percentage outcome prediction. Will Amazon start giving Kindles for free to Prime customers to predispose their online experience? Will it be Android-based versus Tizen or Ubuntu? What’s the formula for dark horses, long-shots, and unknown territory?

Oh, I project a voice and an opinion that sounds a great deal like accurate predictive capabilities, but I would argue that they’ve been delivered to me by captain obvious. I just articulate what’s going on better than some folks. Obviously, the Internet was a mistake as far as big publicly traded companies are concerned. Its existence goes AGAINST the bottom-line of profits and revenue, because with better information in peoples’ hands comes more informed purchasing decisions and more opportunity for newcomer competitors to upset the apple cart. Actually superior products and services get an edge over the fatcat incumbents. Fatcat incumbents want to correct that… correct the Internet.

To that end, they desire to predispose your very online experience through the device. He or she who equips you with your primary preferred device to access online services has EXTREME ability to predispose what that experience is, and what products and services to which you are ultimately exposed. Think cheap tablets. There is already a battle over the pricing of the 7-inch form-factor. Kindles set it at $200. Google Nexus 7 upped the ante of what you get for $200. India’s Akash gives you SOMETHING for $50. Acer’s TRYING to make Nexus 7-quality available for $99. And that’s all just THIS YEAR.

The Internet was originally designed to survive nuclear blasts, enabling “packets” of communication to “route” themselves around the disruption. On a big network, there are infinite paths for the packages to dynamically adapt themselves to follow to get you the info you requested. It’s quite a robust system, great for freedom, democracy, and the informed consumer—but not so great to the incumbents being knocked off their high horses. Entire empires fell from this new dynamic, and new sexier ones sprung up to fill their space.

Ah yes, the four horsemen… or is it five? Or six? Is Samsung going to become a diverse products and services company? Can Microsoft regain its footing now that the world has collectively knocked it wobbling for delivering too little too late in the shadow of Apple? Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook… and maybe Samsung. And maybe Microsoft. Oh, and does IBM still factor in at all? They’re doing some nifty stuff with search and big data, as many of us saw Watson crushing humans on Jeopardy. And is Facebook really that savvy, with no likely plans for hardware?

It all started with Apple turning worldwide assumptions upside down by proving hardware is indeed important. Hardware is where the personal relationship comes into play—and personal relationships are everything. People LOVE their iPhones. Perfectly milled cases that feel more like jewels in your hands and pockets matter. But not only that, Apple’s odd draconian rule over its iTunes ecosystem, operating system, hardware, and even right down to the programming language for apps (Objective C) and adherence to rules regarding API-usage for performance… well, they pulled off a piece of social engineering artwork the likes of which… well… perhaps probably the world has NEVER seen before. Except maybe Commodore.

As many of my long-time readers know, my heart belongs to this long-dead loser—a loser who mastered the total vertical integration game to deliver superior hardware at a cheaper price to a broader audience—long before anyone even understood that was the game. They got control of the world’s $25 processors when everyone else had to use $300 processors, making Commodore able to deliver a complete $500 box when everyone else’s were $3000. But Commodore screwed up a lot of the little implementation details that Apple mastered.

And so now we live in a different, much more educated world. Hardware matters. Superior performing hardware at ever-cheaper prices matter. There used to be this eternal “Price, Quality, Speed – pick any two” game that is no longer true. As much as people like to bust on Apple, the iPad for example delivered price, quality and speed at about a $500 price point when the equivalent netbooks on the market, the Asus Eee 700 model from the prior year for example, delivered only price and… Hmmm. What was the second thing? Yep, I owned it.

And so obviously, the world is now scrambling on how to compete with Apple on all three fronts: price, quality and speed. Now speed doesn’t refer to computer-speed like MHz and GHz CPU processor speed measurements. In this context, speed refers to the manufacturer’s ability to innovate and keep bringing newer and better products to market at forever lower prices, with forever better specs and battery-life. But who? Amazon with Kindle Fire? Close. Google with Nexus 7? Yep, but it wasn’t Google. It was the same good ol’ Asus who brought us netbooks. Oh, and NVidia who had to reinvent themselves or die.

Not to digress too much in this article that’s ultimately about SEO and the science of prediction. But, NVidia seeing as how Intel just made them more-or-less obsolete by including “good enough” [for gaming] graphics co-processors directly into the current Ivy Bridge generation of Intel chips designed to power the Macbook-air competitive line of Ultrabooks (the design-specification provided by Intel as a gift to the industry), NVidia responded with the high-tech version of a bitch-slap. They made their own gift to the industry: how to design high quality cheap TABLET computers around the ARM processor—a technology competitive to Intel, which powers all our Android and iPhone phones. It’s called the NVidia Kai platform, based on the NVidia designed Tegra 3 soc (system on a chip). And no one’s heard of it… except as the Nexus 7, of course… built by Asus… marketed by Google.

Oh, what a tangled web! The unholy alliance of NVidia, Asus and Google is EXACTLY analogous to the unholy alliance of the 80′s between Acorn, VLSI and Apple that gave rise to the ARM processor technology. ARM was originally designed by a desperate UK-based competitor of Commodore’s, built by one of the best chip fabricators of the day, and funded at least in part by a US-side interested third party that ended up using the thing in the Newton. Here we are thirty years later, and one of the dark-horse unholy alliances of tech passes the baton to another new unholy alliance of tech… this time, the ferocious competitor not Commodore… but Apple!

What the hell does any of this have to do with SEO and the Internet, anyway? Well… the game is fairly static so long as the Internet as we know it is accessed through devices that cost a lot, and get infrequently revised and replaced. There is little opportunity for major seismic shifts. The network is generically the network, which is generally the Internet. Access to it is generically hardware, which is generally your desktop Windows PC running Internet Explorer.

Get it? The game isn’t static anymore. Because of ever-cheaper hardware with ever-faster release cycles, the network is NOT NECESSARILY the generic Internet, and your device to access it is ALMOST CERTAINLY no longer your desktop PC. This creates an opening for seismic game-changing shifts. This is where the four, five, six horesmen play. But it’s a checklist of items that must be wholly owned—or at least, mastered in order for one to rise to dominance. It’s why Apple owns hardware and digital goods. It’s why Amazon owns datacenters and hardgoods fulfillment houses. It’s why Google owns information and bought Android and Motorola.

The checklist is: you need the hardware portal to access services. It’s gotta be cheap enough to frequently improve and drop new models into your hands every 2 years or so. There’s gotta be a digital economy where everything that CAN be bought or sold in digital form (music, movies, books, etc.) is sold. You need the massive cloud-like datacenter infrastructure to support this—servers on top of servers on top of servers. The server infrastructure needs to be seamlessly upgradable to benefit from Moore’s Law.

The cheap high-quality tablet-like device that keeps getting dropped into your hands needs to have as many pieces as possible provided by YOUR OWN company or COMPLETELY free and open source (FOSS) software (if there is such a thing), so that other companies do not have choke-hold on you. That means Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, and obviously Apple, must get Android off their product—much more realistic than you may think, since Android is a ziggurat of shortcuts—Java on top of Linux with a bunch of custom drivers—that makes Android apps uniquely portable to Tizen and Ubuntu Mobile. Remember, all Ubuntu needs of Android is those delicious hardware-specific drivers for cameras, graphics optimization and such.

Ahhhhh, so if you want to own everything about the tablet that accesses online services, it’s clear that Tizen and Ubuntu are paths off of Android. But can you EVER wean the world off the Internet, or somehow limit its access or exposure, so you can always peddle your own products (or your advertiser’s products) first, before the experience provided by some other company who weaseled their way onto your hardware via impossible-to-stop HTML5 Web apps? Amazon just did this to Apple with an Amazon web app “site” iTunes store competitor. It violates Apple’s terms of service, but what’s Apple going to do when music you bought over the Web can stream over the Web? The Internet itself is a difficult-to-control factor that must be mitigated. WTF did I just say? Jeff Bezos has some kung fu that rivals the late great Steve Jobs. We just haven’t seen Jeff do his thing yet… and I think he might get a hand from another kung fu master, Mark Shuttleworth.

Apple uncloaked its brilliant ecosystem maneuver with the iTunes economy. It’s a play that’s equally as brilliant as what it did to break its dependence on PowerPC processors, and is once again doing to break its dependence on Intel CPUs. The dependency on the Internet is broken simply by having a superior, curated experience in the iTunes and App Store environment that gives you everything you feel you might miss about the Net: search, crowdsourced reviews, cool software, your news and other stuff VIA those apps… oh and what the Net CAN’T provide you: a sense of security and a seal-of-approval by the ghost of Uncle Steve.

Ahh, iTunes. This is where we mention one of the checklist items the N-horsemen must also provide: a friction-free payment method. Apple tied it to your phone-bill and credit card, but they DID pull it off. You can make a $1 purchase at a time without hardly thinking about it. At worst, you have to provide your Apple .mac .me .icloud .whatever login credentials, and BAM! $1 billed against your credit card. Amazon did something similar, and took it to a new level with Prime and subscription services that just keeps you buying. Google struggled with Checkout… Google Wallet… Google Play… whatever they’re calling it. What will Facebook do? Is Samsung even in this game? It’s another place Microsoft did too little too late. Apple’s brilliant move was to drive the process with music, and then later through curated apps.

Hopefully, I’m drawing a picture for you of giants each trying to drop different hardware into your hands and get you addicted to their particular mix of services and experience. Not all of the horsemen can easily reproduce the killer-app checklist item of their competitors. For extremely large-scale cloud services Apple had to source it from the Amazon and Microsoft clouds (Microsoft Azure). Google is struggling to outsource all the Amazon-like hardgoods fulfillment to the world, because reproducing a $10-billion Hoover Dam-scale pick-and-pack operation ain’t easy. Maybe Wal-Mart could do it. But Google? It seems antithetical to their information-centric existence. But Google has to do SOMETHING like it to compete with Amazon. A horseman’s ability to outsource these checklist items is uncertain. Just ask Apple in regards to maps.

Are maps a checklist item? Nope, but the integration of local product or service offerings WITH maps is. Or in other words, replacing the function of the old-fashioned Yellow Pages and White Pages phone-book IS a checklist item of this new breed of megalifestyle-provider companies. Huh? Okay, a definition: megalifestyle-provider company IS a horseman. It’s something akin to what GE was when it owned NBC, both forming all the products of life, and then programming the public to use those products. The Net put the kibosh on GE/NBC because it needed efficient mass media to work—but that only left a vacuum that the horsemen are trying to fill.

So far on the checklist, we’ve got cheap slick hardware, an autonomous OS, a friction-less payment system, a digital goods marketplace, hard goods fulfillment capability, a massive cloud infrastructure, and local data to fuel maps and local search. We had better throw in cloud-synced Office software suite. But is that all of the checklist items?

I hinted at making the Internet-proper unnecessary, but only an AT&T, Verizon, Comcast or major telecom could do that, and government anti-monopoly laws would clamp down on it—so, as awesome as those products would be, it’s unlikely. Remember how early Kindles connected to Sprint with users hardly thinking about it? Could someone really pull off an alternative to the Internet proper? Telecom independence is the elusive unattainable checklist item. As his biography reveals, it’s a holy grail that even Steve Jobs chased in his early vision for the iPhone. A universal truth that even the reality distortion field can’t change: highly reliable and available bandwidth takes towers and a whole bunch of satellite launching and tearing up the ground to lay fiber that… well, not even Apple can just bully their way into. Telecoms are special, and are kinda immune to getting rolled into a horseman ’cause of consumer and government anti-trust watchdogs. Content is a bit easier to wrap-into the checklist, and that’ll be the subject of another article.

How about an advertising network? Ad revenue to offset hardware cost? A way for people outside the new ecosystems to buy their way in? Certainly! Who would leave such vast quantities of money on the table? Display ads on web pages and in apps, and ad-insertion on search. Just imagine if Amazon put out an Ubuntu-powered Kindle whose search hit Amazon first. Far-fetched? The current released version of Ubuntu 12.04 DOES PRECISELY THAT on the desktop in the desktop’s easily-accessed built-in search feature called Dash. And now Canonical announced Ubuntu Mobile that can be installed on any Android-compatible phone. Let that sink in for a moment.

So, who can predict? Everything I’ve done is mere observations, and guess-work based on all the facts around us. Dots are popping up all the time that need connecting. But even the picture drawn by the connected dots may never come to be. Could Amazon REALLY EVER put out a non-Android Kindle Tablet? And if they did, could they give it to all Prime customers for free? And if they could do that, could it be a good enough experience to make you NOT MISS Android, or your iPhone or Google or the Internet in general? And that’s JUST ONE scenario that could play out in parallel with a half-dozen other game-changing seismic shifting plays by the megalifestyle-providers that some call the four horsemen.

This is perfect ground for prediction. So, using Nate Silver’s prediction methods here are very appealing. But what variables would you fill into the now famous Bayesian equation? It is unclear to me. There are too many variables of unknowable values. It is much different than baseball statistics or electoral votes. Yet, there is something vaguely predictable through a certain type of obviousness that arises from being a student of history and fan of technology.

Human nature and the free market being what they are, and certain things having no other possible outcome (better, cheaper, faster)—certain patterns WILL rise again. And those patterns are the re-assertion of corporate influence over today’s free-for-all Internet via the embrace-and-displace strategy—often used by Microsoft during its rise. Specifically, embrace-and-displace will take the form of building neat little devices that Free Software advocate Richard Matthew Stallman (rms) would describe as “beautiful prisons”.

As an iPhone customer, literally from day-1, I LOVE my beautiful prison. I appreciate Apple protecting the sanctity of my phone against malware criminals phishing for me through corrupt apps and even more corruptible operating systems. Sandboxing apps, granular permissions, and accessing phone features through strictly controlled API-calls are concepts I endorse—ON MY PHONE! My thinking changes dramatically when it comes to how I program and write server apps of my own.

When you are a programmer, there should be absolutely no limits imposed on you by the platform that are not limits that you chose in exchange for other advantages the platform provides. Fully explaining that statement will be the subject-matter for another article. But in-short, there are places for beautiful prisons. Mikey likey his beautiful prisons. AND there are places for totally free and open source environments where you can transcend the abilities of the normal public.

And THAT is precisely what I do in inventing SEO systems like HitTail.com, which is enjoying a sort of renaissance, given its motivated new owner Rob Walling and the strange SEO days brought about by the Google Panda and Penguin algorithm tweaks and war against spammers. The long tail really does work well, and I know this through my continued hittailing, using the very product I invented to help predict the future. I did something similar with 360iTiger.com, but that has not reached maturation yet. Stay tuned on that front, but it’s ANOTHER great source of the as-objective-as-possible, but still-quite-subjective data that feeds the Bayesian theorem.

I can’t really predict the future in terms of what’s going to happen to the field of SEO, and natural search itself—but I’m going to try. I haven’t even talked about Siri, Google Now, and the attempt to turn old-fashioned crawl-based Web search into a sort of backfill or overflow of search—but a brilliant coworker of mine, Boris Zilberman, has done precisely this in this article just published over on Search Engine Journal—so go read that also.

Bayesian probability likely indicates cheap awesome hardware and its frequent upgrade cycle as the likeliest driver of change. What are the odds that Android can be knocked off these platforms? What’s the percentage probability? That would reduce the impact of Google AdWords revenue on the future of mobile, and make yet another decision-branch. What would that be? Can an adequate experience be provided on such a theoretical mobile platform WITHOUT Google? Yes/No? Percentage likelihood? Is the ecosystem sufficiently complete and satisfying to isolate the tribe on that platform from the broader Internet-accessing world? Yes/No? Percentage likelihood? And so on. I will keep zero’ing in on the truth.

And how important is the Google that’s left standing? If successful with Android, Motorola Mobile, Google+ and being the owner of worldwide Author Authority, then Google remains very important for SEO, and the field of helping Authors and Agents with their Authority Rank becomes the new sweet spot in the field of SEO. If not, then it’s jockeying to provide the best data feeds into this strange heterogeneous mix of best-of-breed search experiences each horseman is going to try to knit together. Influence Wikipedia, get in Yelp!, etc.

Given all the search engine landscape stuff that I fleshed-out above, my decision is to act on what I know for sure so far to in order to assure the best future for myself, my family, and education for my 2 year-old daughter. I’m betting on BOTH being an Authority Authority (Google+ is not what you think), and on being a general API-using wizard—whatever you want to call that—look at 360iTiger.com and Levinux for a clue.