I’m no longer an employee at Standout Jobs; They will be my first freelance client.

Going freelance will let me work fewer hours, spend most of my time learning about the ‘next big thing’ and contribute to open source in the process. Here are a few things that are on my radar:

• IM as command line: Jabber + twitter
• Semantic web: micro-formats and freebase
• Collaborative filtering
• API design
• Authentication

These are interesting times for net heads, with many simultaneous inflection points, lots of freely usable data and ridiculously cheap on-demand computing.

Rails was that ‘next big thing’ about two years ago. I fell in love. After traveling across Canada and South to California, I spent months learning and prototyping. My parents thought I was crazy, spending months without a job. Maybe they’re right, and going freelance certainly won’t dispel that notion.

I fell in love a few times this past year. I’m willing to bet heavily that one of those muses is going to be the ‘next big thing’. Going freelance will afford me the time to pursue them that I just couldn’t have in a startup. It’s exciting, even if I’ll miss working as closely with the world-class team back at Standout Jobs headquarters.

“A man, working in a laundromat?” It wasn’t really a question, nor a rhetorical device. She was just floored I’d ask why the help wanted sign on the window explicitly said “Woman wanted for 3 evening shifts per week”.

When I indicated the laundromat on Duluth St. had 2 men working there, she told me that when they hired a man at their previous location, they lost a lot of customers.

See also a blog entry from a year ago: Women can’t lift heavy weights.

What should I do? Report, boycott, ignore or try and cajole?

On Earth Day, I announced I’d be be spending some time thinking about a ’sexy’ vision of the (bright green) future. When Jamais Cascio blooged about Feedback, Tipping Points, and Hard Choices I asked him about a better vision than the one offered by Monbiot. He pointed me to Joseph Romm’s Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 2: The Solution.

Romm builds upon Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies. I don’t particularly like Romm’s proposal, and since he asks dissenters to read the Stabilization wedges paper before critiquing him, I gave it another read.

Now, the first time I read about stabilization wedges, the idea was very exciting. By breaking down the problem of carbon emissions into smaller, tractable problem, the authors gave us a credible, positive vision. While no single element or ‘wedge’ could solve even half the problem, any 7 of the many they proposed could do so.

The 15 proposed wedges are summarized on the Carbon Mitigation Initiative’s website, broken down into the four categories of Efficiency, Decarbonization of power, Decarbonization of fuel and Forests and agricultural soils

David Weinberger’s excellent book Everything is Miscellaneous has made me suspicious of such neat classification systems. It is one of those deceptively profound books that will permanently warp the way you see the world. Now I read about climate policy and think about the Dewey decimal classification system, or Linnaean taxonomy.

These classification systems not only fail at classifying important things (the inevitable ‘miscellaneous’), they also imply a certain worldview, which has political consequences.

Here’s a miscellaneous: sometimes planting a tree is not simply a mechanism for CO2 sequestration, but also a way to cut air conditioning costs. Does that fit under “Forests and agricultural soils” or “Efficiency”?

Another unclassifiable wedge is population. Yes, it’s a politically sensitive issue, yet right now there are governments encouraging higher birth rates, and others not giving women access to contraceptives.

There are other problems with the wedges. As the authors put it, wedges can not be combined willy-nilly:

Because the same BAU [business as usual] carbon emissions cannot be displaced twice, achieving one wedge often interacts with achieving another. The more the electricity system becomes decarbonized, for example, the less the available savings from greater efficiency of electricity use, and vice versa.

The wedge concept assumes linearity:

A wedge represents an activity that reduces emissions to the atmosphere that starts at zero today and increases linearly until it accounts for 1 GtC/year of reduced carbon emissions in 50 years. It thus represents a cumulative total of 25 GtC of reduced emissions over 50 years.

Of course, wind and solar have been growing at rates above 30%: not exactly linear.

Along with linearity, the very classification and sheer size of wedges, as well as the examples given favour bureaucratic solutions and state intervention. In fact, bureaucracies often can’t handle solutions like planting trees which have multiple benefits for health, environment, water management and energy use.

There’s a lot to like in Pacala and Socolow’s original paper: breaking down the problem into manageable chunks, insisting on stabilization with existing, ready technologies and a framework with which we can more sanely compare the cost of strategies.

What would be useful now is a way to think about solutions from the bottom-up. Maybe there’s a way to account for strategies with non-linear and multiple benefits.

I love the luxury of it all. Every Wednesday, fresh veggies and fruits, in my fridge. Jardin des Anges has a key to my place and debits my account automatically twice a month.

The lettuce tastes like what my dad gets from his garden: not your anemic grocery store variety. At $34, it’s pricey (click the image for details of the contents, or check their site), but if it motivates me to cook more and eat out less, I will save money.

The ethical thing to do (organic, and either local or fair-trade) should always be this easy.

Google has a post up about Helping others go green, including news that Google Transit is continuing its expansion.

If any Googlers are reading this, I’d like three green additions to Google Maps:

1. Lines connecting Metro stations.
2. Bike lanes. In Montreal, they’re faster than the metro.
3. Travel-time maps.

In the last couple weeks, I’ve finished reading Monbiot’s Heat and subscribed to organic food delivery by Le Jardin Des Anges. Today I asked Natasha for help with a vermicomposter, since I know I’ll have plenty of organic food scraps.

Still, it all feels inadequate given the enormity of the challenge. While scientists and the environmental movement have finally made us realize climate change is real and deadly, we have not yet seen a very compelling vision that could galvanize political change.

Talks of restraint, rationing and cuts aren’t sexy. And changing light bulbs to compact fluorescents or LEDs, eating less meat and offsetting air travel emissions - while necessary and good - just won’t cut it. In the coming months, I’ll be spending some time thinking about a ’sexy’ vision of the (bright green) future. If you have ideas to share, you can do so in comments. If you live in my neighbourhood, let’s meet up face to face.

1- The forgotten password

We all forget passwords. So you click on that link on the login form, and you’re greeted with a blank text field for your email address.

And it’s usually blank, even if you already entered an email on the login page. How stupid is that?

2 - Is that VISA or MasterCard?

It happens every time I have to give my card information over the phone. On nearly every website with a checkout form, you usually have a drop-down.

That’s stupid, because if you have a credit card number, you already know who issued it. Wikipedia has a list of credit card prefixes. Mastercard starts with 51-55, VISA with 4.

3 - 90210, that’s in New York, right?

A simple search will tell you that’s Beverly Hills, CA. This one’s not nearly as trivial as my first two points to implement. Still, asking someone someone to input city, postal code and state is annoying, pointless and adds the possibility of error.

4 - English or Français on splash pages

Our browsers already tell servers what language they want pages served in. We have cookies to track these types of preferences. Yet the Canadian government still insists that every time I go to a department web site, I’m asked: Français / English?

Taking their cue from government, businesses do the same thing, which leads me to my last pet peeve.

5 - ATMs suck

Besides their outrageous fees, every time I visit another bank’s ATM, they ask me the language question. And then they ask me what operation I want to do, with only ONE choice: Withdrawal.

Pretty stupid, no? But my bank tops that. No language choice - but it asks me which account I want to withdraw money from. Even though I only have one chequing account with them.

There are a lot of small details that can add up to a pleasant, friction-less experience. Most of them don’t take that much effort. I believe it’s a responsibility on our part to create interfaces that are as simple as possible, so that people feel empowered.

Anyone have other examples they can share?

Wednesday I attended Rick Segal’s VC Roundtable in Montreal. Rick is a partner at JLA Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in technology and software. Their last fund was one of North America’s top performers (top 5%), and they should shortly open their next fund.

Over the course of 2 hours, he went over venture capital basics and a brief overview of their working process.

JLA’s differentiators:

• Coders. They have techies on staff, and will try your beta software.
• They want to take you out for lunch when you’re still writing a prototype, before you even get angel money.
• Due diligence happens *before* signing a term sheet.
• Deals are made by partners, as long as their other partners don’t have strong objections. This is different from consensus, multi-layered approvals or vote-systems common with some VCs

Because there are a few mistakes companies can make early on that will torpedo their chances of ever making it, I’d recommend talking to them early on. One other point worth mentioning here is that JLA has made a few smaller investments - that is, small by VC standards - in businesses like B5 Media and Tungle. Rick lovingly referred to these as ’science experiments’: smaller bets in an emerging market that are very uncertain but should help them understand that space.

I bet those two experiments will be incredibly successful.

Some of my take-aways probably apply to all VC businesses:

• “Lifestyle businesses” need not apply. While making $5 million in annual revenue might be fantastic for an entrepreneur, they want companies that will sell for 25-100 million. Companies usually sell for 1.5 to 2 times revenues.
• Target investments have to have a ‘liquidity event’ within 5 to 7 years. VC’s have to repay their investors too, so you have to be prepared to see your baby bought, merged or sold on the public market.
• “pre-money valuation” is usually 3-5 million.
• Keep track of who owns the company - including your mom, and that designer or coder in Hungary.
• Ask angels for convertible debt, not equity.
• Don’t call yourself the CEO: those get replaced. A founder gets to stick around on the board.

If memory serves, they met over 850 entrepreneurs last year, and have funded 4. Some of those 850 are still being considered, but most were told ‘no’. Those odds appear quite similar to those of getting funded by most VC’s.

When AngesQuebec announced $750k of funding from the Québec government, I asked what the justification was for giving money to already wealthy investors.

Austin Hill is one of the network’s members, as well as one of Standout Jobs’ 3 founders. I pinged him, teasing him about getting government financing. He argued that while he’s generally opposed to the idea of subsidies, it makes sense in this specific case. In our discussion, a few facts came out that changed my mind about the project:

-$750,000 is over 3 years, after which the network should be self-sustaining
-AngesQuebec aims to have a network of 200 angels
-Over the next 5 years, $50 million should be invested in 120 companies, creating 800 jobs
-Other angel networks have gone bankrupt trying to bootstrap from member fees.

AngesQuebec is a non-profit, trying to build a public infrastructure good - something markets tend to fail dismally on. They are currently all volunteer run, and seeking their first paid staff. Hopefully this hire can improve communications and start the process of recruiting angels in order to grow to a sustainable size.

Our workplace uses Campfire for its group chat. We get everything in there from water cooler discussions to build messages.

It was awesome at first, and quickly started to get very annoying once our numbers grew from 4 to 8. The constant interruptions became quite distracting, with Growl continually notifying me of every bit of banter that might need attention.

Upgrading to Leopard meant I could apply a hack to get better growl notifications.

Since we had started to refer to each other by initial in the chatroom, I modified the script to only pop up a notification when I was concerned.

It’s only been an hour so far, but I don’t feel the need to compulsively check the room anymore - what a relief.

I had dismissed Heroku as a toy after getting my first invite, a glorified web-based Texmate to let you code rails applications.

After Ruby Inside mentioned their new API, I gave it another look and had to change my mind. It looks like they’re set to really nail the issue of rails deployment and scaling. A git mirror, with deployment and scaling - for free!

Should OpenId support in Rails ever get really worked out (see #10604), it will become trivially easy to code and deploy small applications. Ideally, a programmer’s time is spent on modeling the business domain and creating a simple UI - not on incidental complexity of project management overhead.

On a recent project to track my wine tastings, I have been using git along with a plain text file to keep track of bugs and to-dos. bugs.txt file got checked in to the git repo; it’s simple and It Just Works (TM).

If dealing with capistrano and server configuration was getting you down on your week-end projects, check out Heroku. For your next week-end app, it might just be the thing - and they promise to keep growing capacity so if your baby grows up you may be able to stay with them.

Aaah, never having to worry about deployment again.