I agree with the suggestions from the original article. Yet, I would like to change the order a little bit; DVCS and then agile (with lowercase a) and then the rest. None of my points below are cool trends, in fact I can guarantee most of you will find them boring. But I think they are all important. OK, I hope you are all psyched now. Here we go:

1. Be Careful With The Buzz

Trends are cool. What could be wrong about following cutting edge stuff? We all want to be up to date, no? I think it’s good to follow the trends if you have the experience and the ability to filter the BS. I know a young developer who was constantly going back and forth between Rails/Ruby and Django/Python. I haven’t heard from him for a while, but he is probably still doing that same dance. Why? Because his considerations were solely based on buzz, not on simple requirements analysis or technical comparisons or personal experience.

2. Learn And Use An Old-Fashioned Modern Low-Level Scripting Language

To all the scripting people, like me, out there: you need to have an understanding of what’s happening under the hood. At the least to appreciate our high-level environments, at the most to become genuinely good programmers. Being a Python person myself, I think the best low-level language to be proficient for me is C. Many other high-level languages have C interfaces. So investing the time to learn C should pay off one way or the other.

3. Do Less Web Programming

Aren’t we doing a lot of web programming these days? Actually I think doing X development exclusively is bad for your programming muscles. Web programming, enterprise work or system scripting, it doesn’t matter. But web programming happens more than anything else. Maybe some of you have only been playing with it, but there are a huge number of us doing nothing but web programming. This is so sad; both in an individual level and for the community at large.

4. Learn How To Educate Yourself

What is a noob? Here is a definition and disambiguation (from newbie):

Newbs are those who are new to some task and are very beginner at it, possibly a little overconfident about it, but they are willing to learn and fix their errors to move out of that stage. n00bs, on the other hand, know little and have no will to learn any more. They expect people to do the work for them and then expect to get praised about it, and make up a unique species of their own.

Make an active effort not to be a noob. Learn how to ask smart questions, how to communicate others and seek help. Being polite is good but actually improving and being a valuable member of the community is much, much better.

5. Open Source Properly

It’s great to open source your project. But please do it properly. There are already too many unmaintained, undocumented projects out there that noone seem to care. Do you really have to add to that? As is argument doesn’t make much sense today. But if you really have to make an open source dead drop, please at least document the status of your project and your intentions clearly.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some you think they all are obvious. But if they are so obvious then why are they widely being ignored? Is it because they are under-retweeted, under-reddited and therefore not trendy.

Related posts:

1. django-formfieldset
2. What’s New in django-formfieldset 1.1
3. Why Not To Localize Community Support

I have sent XING two messages to cancel my account, I don’t want to be a member.

I would like to take advantage of XING’s unique potential to bring people together, until they cancel my account, to help homeless children and elders.

WTF! This was supposed to be a business related group. If anybody and their aunt will spam all 15k members; thank you, but no, thank you. So I did what any responsible user would do and used the report spam thingy.

Here is what I had hoped to happen; my report is stored somewhere. Other people flags this as well. When a critical number is reached a moderator reviews if the message is really spam and takes the appropriate action.

Here is what happened; an hour later or so I got an e-mail. It said “if you don’t want to receive messages from this person do yak yak yak”. King-size WTF.

1. First of all I had already done that. He should have checked if I did before writing an e-mail.
2. More importantly, he should have checked my profile for a second. It says programmer. So, if I’m a programmer I am supposed to know a thing or two about these computer thingies, right? Clicking, double-clicking, expertise on check boxes and stuff. Telling me how to block a user is the same thing as saying “hey muhuk, you’re an idiot”. Even if we suppose there are such morons¹, you still don’t have to tell it to their face. If you don’t have anything useful to say, don’t say nothing.

As a result, I got pissed of and sent this tweet:

XING Türkiye Support is clueless. Make sure you know who you’re e-mailing + take a moment to check if your advice has already been applied.

This is not the end of the story though. I received an e-mail from XING Community Manager yesterday. It was a very polite message containing the acknowledgement of both issues². Nothing out of the ordinary at first sight. But wait, the message mentioned my tweet. In the very beginning. Actually the first word was “Twitter”. And it was concluded with something along the lines of “keep sharing your comments”.

Well, of course my comments and ideas are worthless. Especially since I’m not a very active XING user. But don’t miss the important point here: XING basically, via it’s community representative, says “you tweeted a negative tweet about us, but we are cool with that”. Why is it so important?

1. They seem to be really cool about that. That means they understand social web. Conventional thinking is “I’d prefer you told this to me directly”, “we could have solved it between you and me”, “why do you shout, you make me look bad”. I have seen supposedly social media aware brands do this. It doesn’t look good. Trying to silence people is a horrible idea.
2. You can win people easily. Beautiful thing about Internet (and online services in particular) is that no party has too much power over the other. You can’t intimidate someone because she doesn’t like your services and writes about it. On the other hand she can’t do much damage³. So instead of freaking out, try to be nice and convert naysayers to evangelists.

Most of the time complaining customers want to know there is someone who can see things from the right perspective. Someone reasonable, agreeable, fair. Most of the time that’s all that is needed to turn “<your brand> sucks” to “sh*t happens, no big deal”. My perception changed from “clueless” to “hmm, I guess that was a misstep of an individual” to “wow, appereantly XING Türkiye knows social web very well”. And all it took was a simple e-mail⁴. It’s not that difficult.

Kudos to XING for being a good web2.0 citizen.⁵

1: I mean programmers who couldn’t figure out how to use a web GUI. People from other professions might not know these and that’s not necessarily their problem.

2: What more could a user/customer hope other than acknowledgement? The message also contained an apology. But, I personally don’t think brands should apologize to their customers. Especially regarding to freemium services.

3: This is true even for big players like TechCrunch.

4: I bet it’s instantiated from a draft, everybody gets more or less the same message. This makes it even cooler though.

5: And special thanks for making me feel like a jerk. Just kidding, feelings are for losers.

Related posts:

1. Sad State of Web Development Industry in Türkiye
2. CVyolla.com: It’s Not OK To SPAM!
3. Top 5 Untrends According To Me

An Internet startup however is a completely different story. If you are doing business online you are supposed to know what you can and can not do. You can’t SPAM for instance. You just can’t. There’s no excuse for such an act from Internet companies. Correcting such mistakes is marginally harder than correcting technical mistakes. Once people mark you evil, it is painful to fix.

Here’s a summary what happened between a Turkish startup CVyolla.com and me last week. They are service that send your CV’s to companies.

1. I Receive A CV From CVyolla.com

This may not sound extraordinary, since that’s what they do. But I don’t have a corporate account with them, or any other kind of membership. I might have visited their homepage a couple of times, that doesn’t count as a sign up, does it? So CVyolla.com is SPAMming people.

I noticed a username (my email address) and a login address at the bottom of this message. So I thought I should check it out¹.

2. CVyolla.com Might Be Stealing Your Identity Too

Before I could log in, I had to request my password via forgot my password link. I couldn’t possibly remember a password that I have never created, could I? It became clear once I logged in (see image below). Company name Muhuk, WTF? CVyolla.com is creating accounts on your behalf to inflate their company portfolio. This is not just uncool, this is immoral. Shame on you CVyolla.com.

CVyolla.com Stealing My Identity

I have never signed up in your service, I have never accepted your terms of service. How impudent of you to think you can just create a mock account on my behalf and start sending stuff to my personal e-mail!

3. When Will Companies Learn Not To Reply With Stupid Anonymous E-mails

Despite things being clear enough, I wanted to hear the story from their side. Maybe there has been a mistake of some sort. Or maybe they would understand what they have been doing is wrong. I would be writing a completely different post today if they had just accepted both SPAMming and identity theft were wrong and assured me that they’d stop doing it. But, no. Instead they have sent me some nonsense reply. Before I get into the contents of this reply, there’s one very important issue with this reply.

Just as many other Internet companies, CVyolla.com was lacking the decency to reply my message with a real name and a real e-mail address. See, I am sending you with my real name, as a person, naturally I expect to communicate with a person. It is simply rude to reply your visitors/customers with a faceless nameless e-mail. If you are having difficulty to figure out how to configure your e-mails, drop me a line and I’ll try to help, seriously. Show some respect to your correspondents.

OK, back to the contents of CVyolla.com’s reply to my inquiry, faceless representative says:

1. They have taken my e-mail address from my webpage² or from a job listing³ or a public source such as an union or trade chamber⁴.
2. They have sent me an e-mail telling me that I can opt-out before they started sending me SPAM.. erm, notifications.
3. Since I haven’t opt out, they have decided that they can send their SPAM. But now upon my request they have frozen my account.

Let’s see;

1. You probably found my e-mail address in an illegally collected list that you have bought. I seriously doubt you’d ever come read my blog and collect my e-mail address then. Anyway, regardless of how you found my e-mail address, you have no right to SPAM me.
2. “Oh, we have given you an opt-out option” is just such a miserable, lame excuse it makes me throw up. Hell with your opt-out, where have you been the last eight years? It’s probably marked as SPAM instantly, and you would find that convenient, wouldn’t you?
3. What account? I never signed up! It’s you deceiving yourself and those who entrusted their CV’s to you.

I wish CVyolla.com handled this a little better. If you don’t manage your online conversations professionally, or if you try the same management strategy with offline customer relations, you fail. If you SPAM, you fail. If you tell people crap like opt-out, you fail. If you make up accounts on other people/entities without their consent, you fail big time. I hope they correct these wrongs soon.

PS: Just as I was preparing to submit this post, I got another CV from CVyolla.com. So much from freezing my account upon my request, eh! Mega-fail, if you ask me.

1: Having a terrible memory, I though for a second, maybe I had signed up once and then I forgot about it. But that’s not the case, read on.

2: I don’t display this e-mail in my work site, it is only displayed in my personal site. Where there is no mention to work related stuff.

3: This e-mail is not mentioned in any job listing.

4: Again, it’s not listed in such places.

Related posts:

1. Sad State of Web Development Industry in Türkiye
2. XING Türkiye Social Media Win
3. Top 5 Untrends According To Me

I have edited and edited and edited… Finally, last section; proficiencies. Huh, which proficiencies could a new graduate possibly have? Let’s make it the last part.¹ I scrolled through the dropdown of options to find Python and Django. No Python! Unsurprisingly no Django. But wait, the list doesn’t have Ruby, RoR, LISP either. But they included some programming languages I have never heard of; like HTML. What is this HTML programming language?

Basically I was left with the choices of Java and C. I couldn’t select them because neither is my main programming language. I can only select them after I select Python. So I left that section blank and sent them a contact form thing. It’s not cool not having an e-mail in your contact us section guys. If you are concerned about SPAM there are ways to evade e-mail harvesting bots. Please don’t be afraid of people who prefer using e-mail. I got a timely reply. From a nobody. Again, not cool. I am person and I’d like to communicate with another person. It’s OK to publish a generic e-mail on the site. But the reply should come from a employee e-mail and contain the employees name. I give you my name and e-mail when I contact you, right? You should have the decency to do the same when you reply.

Anyway, the reply I got was brief. In short it said “OK, we’ll do it.” Nice. Except they didn’t. I checked yesterday and they still had HTML programming language and not Python. Oh, well. So much for the orange ties. I deleted my account for the reason of being totally useless. It could be useful feedback if you asked why, when your users delete their accounts, you know?

In fact kariyerGENÇ is not doing it wrong. They’re just taking a picture of The Industry. The picture is correct, The Industry is doing it wrong. But that’s another topic for discussion². What was disappointing for me was the lack of agile in kariyerGENÇ. I don’t mean agile methodology here, I mean agile technology. Technology and infrastructure that changes and adopts fast. For instance; how long would it take to make the change in a Django project? Yes, Django. The framework most people ignore or haven’t even heard of. You would just log-in the admin, add a new proficiency, save, optionally run a custom management command. 10 minutes at most.

It doesn’t matter much even if they add new proficiencies now. First of all a fixed list of options doesn’t work well where there are virtually unlimited possibilities. Second of all that dropdown is hideous, and increasing the number of options will only make it worse. Instead they should just let people tag themselves, WordPress style. Django-tagging does that automagically. You know, Django, the framework you don’t list in your proficiencies.

What Most People Agree On Is Not Necessarily The Best

The language for web development in Türkiye is PHP. Java is on the rise, in a couple of years it will be as popular as PHP. I am not kidding myself; these two and that horrible propriety thing that I don’t even want to name are industry standart in the world. But they also use other technologies. At least they experiment. At least they know that other alternatives exist. Here those minorities doesn’t even exist.

I frequently hear people saying “Python is a toy language“. Because for them there are serious, proper programming languages for grown-ups and serious, proper frameworks for grown-ups as Cal Henderson said …and everything else is a toy. You can’t use Python/Django for anything professional. Well, Markafoni did, with much success.

Think about it for a second; if what the majority have generally chosen the best, wouldn’t we live in a better society & environment than this? Just think about it.

Meanwhile I’ll be playing with my toys.

1: Actually kariyerGENÇ got it right here; in reality most of the new graduates have no proficiency. So, they’ll pick I know Word and Excel here even though they aren’t really proficient.

2: …and flame wars.

Related posts:

1. Web Site Performance Optimizations
2. XING Türkiye Social Media Win
3. Serving Static Media In Django Development Server

gençlerin türkçe bilgiye ihtiyacı var. türkçe yazsanıza!

Translation: Young people need Turkish articles. Why don’t you write in Turkish!

Let’s ask this as a question, or a more relevant question of why I am writing my blog in English, at the end of this post.

People Who Just Can’t Admit They’re Wrong

I am always shopping for new blogs for my RSS reader. Especially blogs written in Turkish. Not only because of Turkish is my mother tongue. But mainly because there are so few, you have to keep searching all the time. So far I’ve followed many blogs only to find out they’re by far and large not for me. Except for FZ Blogs of course, FZ rocks.

Then I’ve found this other blog, with FZ’s suggestion. It is in Turkish, check! tech/internet/programming related, check! Then I subscribed it happily. An article published today led to that e-mail in the beginning. It looked like an innocent article about Google Ventures until the final part.

Bir takım ahmakların dayattıkları genel fikir, halihazırda yurtdışında mevcut bir sistemi ne kadar çabuk kopyalayarak bir “.com” şirketi açarsanız o kadar başarılı olabileceğiniz yönünde. Bu senaryoda ileri teknoloji kullanımı, yaratıcılık, tasarım, özgünlük gibi unsurlar geri plana atılmış durumda.

Translation: Some fools are spreading the idea that the quicker you can duplicate an existing dotcom business the more successful you become. Advanced technologies, creativity, design and originality are neglected in this scenario.

Belli başlı, az sayıda ve sistemin çarpıklığından palazlanmış büyük oyuncu, etraflarına bazı çığırtkan ve spekülatif insanları toplayarak, kendi aralarında bir birlik oluşturmuşlar ve kendi aralarındaki rekabete rağmen, dışardan oyuna katılmak isteyenlere karşı düşmanca ve dışlayıcı bir tavır içindeler. Aslında bu primitif bir oyun, sektör var, oyuncular ve oyuncu olmayanlar var, oyuncular oyuna yeni oyuncu girmesini engellemek için işbirliği yaparken kendi aralarında da rekabet ediyorlar. Durum kabaca bundan ibaret.

Translation: Some big players, who had grown rich out of deformities of the system, gathering speculators and barkers around, formed an alliance, despite competition amongst themselves, to cast newcomers out. This is actually a simple game, there is the industry, players and non players, players are competing with each other while they cooperate to obstruct new players. This is roughly the situation

Naturally I asked if they could back that claim up. Are big players really trying to crush new startups? How exactly are they doing that?

I got no response to that comment, no big surprise. Instead I received the e-mail I mentioned in the beginning. Why? Because we love throwing mud at successful and not-so-successful¹. Of course there’s no such secret allience between big players of Internet industry in Türkiye. At the very most they are (naturaly) protecting their investment. This is neither illegal nor immoral. If you actually have anything to support you claim Mr Consultant I’d be happy to read. Otherwise you should just admit you were wrong and fix that post.

Guilty Conscience

Just trying to move the conversation into private, shows that you have nothing meaningful to say about the evil secret cult of Internet companies. That’s not even an e-mail you have sent me. It is more like an IM message pasted in an e-mail composer.

gençlerin türkçe bilgiye ihtiyacı var. türkçe yazsanıza!

Why don’t we pay the minimum attention to aviod being a situation where we end up being wrong. And more importantly why do we still insist even after we realize we are wrong. Say, if you give crack/warez links in your blog and then claim the software/media in question is public domain. And then when presentented with link to its official site where it is being sold (ie. not abandonware) you are supposed to try to make fun of people who did the warning? This is why I don’t, I can’t follow any Turkish bloggers.

Justification of stealing is bad for the person and bad for the community. Same is true with needless feces throwing and flaming corporate hatred.

Mr Consultant, I liked your blog. I want to follow it, I want to refer it to my friends, I want to learn something from it. So, please put some effort in when writing. I also like your web application yazboz.com a lot. It may be another duplicate of a well known class of applications you were bashing in your post². But I like it. And I hope it becomes a big success.

Why Am I Torturing You With My Broken English?

The young needs Turkish information sources, eh? No! The young need to drag his sorry ass and learn English first. And then he should go read something of substance. And then if he has some time to kill he can read my blog. I am not an expert or guru or anything like that. I don’t have a mission or inclination to educate the young.

Trying to translate all the knowledge (written in English) on the Internet is absurdly, disproportionally more work than individually learning English, that it is plain stupid to even think about suggesting it.

I am writing in English for the following reasons:

• It is a nice filter. If you are too lazy to learn enough English, I have nothing to say to you³.
• Internet language is English⁴, insist on ignoring this fact and you will stay under-developed. On the contrary the more nationalistic you behave the more marginalized you get. If you are truly for technological advancement you can do nothing but to be pragmatic. Also I love and respect my languge. That is why I don’t butcher it trying to write technical stuff half English half Turkish.
• In support of the first point; writing in English allows me to connect to a larger and better equipped community. So yes, instead of script kiddes who’ll never get past LAMP, I prefer a pythonista visiting my blog to at least get an idea of what kind of person I am.

If, for some odd reason, a young person were to listen to my advice, I’d like to repeat; learn decent English. Especially if you are a programmer. Get a book, a real book not one of those educational materials, and read it. It’s simple as that. Or all you’ll will be have to read is Mr. Consultant’s blog.

EDIT:
Author of mentioned post removed the second quote, about Internet investors, along with my comment there.

1: …and we love pissing contests. Just reply a question with another question, try to find the weak spot. look, I can piss further!

2: See the first quote.

3: This is of course in context of this Blog; mainly programming and programmers.

4: Arc supports only ASCII

Related posts:

1. Freedays’09 Recap
2. Freedays’09 Videos
3. Sad State of Web Development Industry in Türkiye

The Womb Method

Before we get into the details of the box method, I should mention about the womb method. It was implemented quite successfully in the gym before the previous one. The gym was run by a group of young Sports Academy graduates. The manager was the oldest of them. He converted a not much used space into an office for himself (this is the womb). The door of the office was towards the main entrance, and the back and side walls were (frosted) glass bricks seperating from the main studio. So he sat in his office his face to the door and his back to the gym. When I say he sat there, I mean he sat in that office all the time. He was spatially in the gym, but actually he was never there (hence the womb). The music would stop and he wouldn’t notice (or care?) until I walk over there and tell him to turn it on again. I don’t know what he was doing there, but I guess he was doing something (on his laptop) more important than finding out what was happening in his gym.

I witnessed the conditions degrading over a period of time. There were less and less people working out. At one point only regulars were (me and) a bunch of students living there. Then the so-called instructors’ mocking those young members became more disturbing for me. And did I mention about the music. The music was horrible. I guess they had made a management decision on building new offices instead of investing on an MP3 player. Load a CD with grandmother music, endure tracks sequentially, go remind the manager the CD is finished. This is the womb method for you.

One day I was in his office, we used to get along well actually, chatting about how my business goes and then the ever shrinking member count. I asked him “are you really doing all you can to prevent it?”¹, he said “yes, of course”. Two days later I had a new gym membership.²

Is The Box Method Applicable For You?

If you have an hierarchical organization, you can let the information flow from the bottom up to you. This way you get the aggregated information from every branch under your management. Like a birds eye view. This doesn’t necessarily imply lack of detail. But it definitely implies lack of objectivity. If you have the means to measure the performance of a branch accurately, this upwards flow of information in the hierarchy is not a bad thing. For example, a sales branch can’t safely lie about the inventory. Or an advertisement team’s performance can be determined with the help of an expert advisor.

If you are running a gym. The single quantitative indicator is the number of members. More new members doesn’t necessarily mean you are doing good, but not renewed memberships is conclusive that you suck. Therefore it is stupid to try the information flow described above; it will simply be too late when you find out something is wrong. This is where the box method comes to rescue.

The box method in a nutshell is delegating management to a box³. A good manager should know how to delegate, right? But forget about good management. The most powerful selling point of the box method is that it not only doesn’t require good managers, it encourages bad management.

My current gym implements the box method successfully. Whenever something goes wrong, or you have a question you are told to write it down and put it in the box. How well does it work? I haven’t tried it yet. But I am convinced that the results are quite consistent. Pretty much everybody, members and employees alike, tells me they have tried without any results and I should also give it a try. Now, isn’t this a mighty example of how efficiently the box’s capabilites are utilized.

Advantages Of The Box Method Is Numerous

I would like to share a little incident, which happened before I learned about the box method at all. There is this huge machine, one of those total body workout promising complete fitness systems. I think it is called Kinesis or something. Anyway, the point is this thing has a huge wooden frame. So they decided to put it right in the middle of the weight room. In front of the mirrors in the middle, where it will block most the daylight. And it did create a really depressing environment successfully. So, one day so stressed up that I couldn’t contain myself, I stormed upstairs to the customer represantative lady who has taken my registration. I am neither polite nor subtle, especially when I’m pissed of. So I directly said:

"Whoever decied to put that thing in the middle of the weight room, can
not be possibly working out here. Otherwise he would have realized that is
a horrible placement."

She gave me a quick horrified look and then turned to the table at the opposite side. Apparently, that moron, who made the decision was sitting there. I’ll keep what happened afterwards short. I basically took both of them, no I actually only wanted her to see the situation but the instructor come along anyway, and explained why that was a very very bad idea to put a huge wooden frame in front of the main mirrors⁴ in a room without tall windows. And what happened? The customer represantative lady kept looking at me like a lobotomized monkey and let the instructor defend (well, at least that’s what he would have called it) his decision and find solid arguments (like “oh, there are mats there”, MATS?! Can’t you just MOVE them somewhere else!) against the alternative position I offered for the machine. And the most pathetic thing was he kept on assuring me once the thing is assembled completely, they’ll push it all the way to the mirror so it won’t take that much space. Putting aside the question not being the space but being the concealment of the mirror, it was obvious that it would never ever fit between those two columns. I have seen this with my eyes in a second. How can they possibly fail to realize that it won’t fit with tools and days to work it out. And it didn’t fit of course. Anyway that is not the point. The point is I have learned that my so-called customer representative was just too incompetent and inexperienced to even lie to me saying “OK, I have listened your complaint, I will relay it to management.” The machine is still there. And they turn the lights on even midday, because it is dark. If you have a problem with that, write a letter to the box.

Yes, the box takes care of it all. You can get away with anything! Customer representatives who only know how to say hi very enthusiastically, so-called instructors who can’t even crank out a solid set with proper form themselves, even with tinyier weights, cleaning people who call the person 50 m away (and there is a whole changing room in between with doors closed) yelling and swearing… It all works harmoniously. I hear some people complain. They complain about reception people giving them adjacent lockers where most of them are empty. Fixing all these little problems and keeping track of what is going on in the gym is quite some work. It probably means increased expenses (hiring competent people?) at the same time. The box method alleviates all this burden acting like a filter for customer complaints. Have a complaint? Write a letter and throw it in the box. Very effective.

Does It Really Work

Enough satire for one post I think. Yes, it does work. My current gym is really using the box method. The non-existance of a proper management is so obvious that you, as a member, can’t help notice it. It sucks, period.

What do I do when I have a suggestion or a complaint? I can’t go to the customer representative who is not equipped to carry on an intelligent discussion. Telling the instructors doesn’t produce much better results. In the best case they tell me “we have been trying tell this and that for long time to the management, but nothing happened yet” and encourage me to write to the box. Some of the resons I can come up with for not writing to the box:

• There is no guarantee the letters are read. I make a consious effort in my life to make sure what I say is heard every time.
• If they are read; I have no idea who reads them. It might as well be the janitor. Believe me I wouldn’t be surprised at all in that case. If I am going to write a letter seriously, I’d like to know someone who can make decisions read them.
• Let’s assume someone with the authority to fix things is reading these letters. And she is reading them because she wants to improve conditions of her facility. Then, why can’t she simply show up, see things with her own eyes and maybe talk to people? Why the hell do I have to sit down and write a stupid letter to put in a stupid box? Why do I have to do her job?

This narrows my options to; do nothing or blog about it. I prefer the latter. Writing always helps seeing things in a different point of view. And I would like to hear what you think about this as well.

Both the earlier (womb) gym and this one are still in the business. They are probably getting less memberships than they would if they operated well. But they don’t close up shop. People keep coming. This is one half of the real problem. Because there is no real community, you don’t get to learn, before you sign-up, that this place is not a good choice.

The other half is more dramatic; people don’t know what to expect. This is so sad. Everybody can complain when they blow cold air from outside in (this is called the air conditioning here, it blows instead of sucking). But you should actually complain when they tell you to do side bends with weights, if you are trying to reduce your waist. We don’t know what to expect, therefore we get what we deserve. Maybe this is the perfect management for us. After all a box can’t tell that you will never be able to achieve your goals⁵ with your current level of determination. But this is a subject for another entry.

1: No, it didn’t tip him up. Yes, they are still in business.

2: Which was a short, but great experience for me. Actually I just went there did my workout. After all that torture at that previous gym, just doing you thing feels great though.

3: Yes, box. As in tip box.

4: What I mean is that almost 70% of the light contributing the room reflects from that single mirror.

5: That you so ambiguously define, yet fail to hide.

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I could have just told him to get lost. That is usually what I do, because these so-called instructors think of themselves as gurus and all you can be is a newbie to be guided and advised and… Yes, instructed . They are usually stupid people with a crappy education. But this was a nice person, so I didn’t gave him the usual. Instead I tried to explain him. I thought that if I explained things calmly and simply, he would at least understand part of it. But I was wrong.

I decided that it was enough when he told me “perhaps you have the prejudice that you know better than us (instructors)“. Prejudice? Prejudice! I asked a single question “Have you ever done bodybuilding?“. The answer was of course no. “Then how the hell can you tell me that you know about this stuff?“. Really, it is not something you can learn from books. For training other people, or even for your own training. So I don’t have a prejudice, you moron. I have seen you show people incline bench press on a 45 degrees bench. Forget bodybuilding, you simply don’t know the first thing about weight training.

Guru Happens In Three Months

I see this happening in gyms all the time. A newbie trains for three months, and then decides that he has mastered it all. He compassionately comes to you, the pathetic loser who obviously know nothing, to share his infinite wisdom. And you tell him to go bother someone else, directly and probably in the presence of others. Not a pleasant scene. I believe he acts with good intentions, but that doesn’t make it less insulting.

Well, fools are fools. I can never imagine to surmount the limitless power of foolishness. But there is a pattern, and I think it is worth drawing some attention to it. What happens is not significantly important. Neither your reaction. But it is important to realize and observe it.

I have worked as a cashier for a brief period of time. If you are working at a busy place it is not at all easy to get used to. But once you do, you start experiencing something (IMO) unique. Time slows down for you, relative to the person paying of course. While she is hurrying to get it over with and (hopefully) get it right, you do your part efforlessly. Simply because you have done that for too many times before. The customer has no way of seeing this, she is just too busy with finding her purse, counting the money or whatever. On the other hand it has become a reflex for you, so you can observe the person in front of you shutting down everything but the task at hand. My point here is; who has a better understanding of the subject inevitably can see things in a much larger field of view, but the other is oblivious to this fact.

What happened this morning made me think; I must be doing the same thing (being a fool) on some other subjects. Of course I am not aware of it. I am oblivious to my own ignorance. Isn’t that convenient?

What Is Missing In This Picture

Human eye has about 200 degrees viewing angle. It is a pretty wide angle. But still it is just a little more than half of panoramic view. Half of the truth. Actually it is much less than the half, considering a 3 dimensional space. Our vision is just a projection of our surroundings, very limited information in this sense. And how many of us now feel like visually inadequate?

Not likely. Because our brain compensates for the holes in our knowledge. It puts the pieces together and infers for what is missing. We think we know what is around us, but in reality we just make things. up.

This is not a necessarily a bad thing. We can work with limited information and create art. An artist might reach exactly the same result as she imagined it to be. But most of the time there is no instantiated idea that makes it to the final creation. Another example is martial arts. There is no way to stop and observe your surroundings and your opponent. And these change constantly with time. Unless of course you are already knocked out. Yet your mind can fill the gaps in this very limited 2 dimensional information to create a 4 dimensional model and makes predictions based on that. These activities (artistic creation, martial arts) have significantly different time scales. But a lot more than we are counciously aware of is happening in both. Autonomous nature of this guessing shouldn’t mean becoming aware of and having some control over it is worthless.

This counciousness can sometimes save you from being fooled (or being a fool). As crude example; people with high self-confidence speak loud and clear, right? Yes. And people with low self-confidence do that as well, they are possibly even louder. If you buy into this stereotype you will probably end up misjudging people. Or worse, you might speak too loud when you feel unconfident.

Actually relying on this mechanism too much might lead to a kind of lazyness. Adults are much less explorative than children. I don’t think this is because they have learned so much, or opinionated themselves after rigorous thinking. It is simply easier to be lazy and after a while it becomes a routine. Growing up, after a certain age, is replaced by getting old. Sure, we all get old. But we don’t have to stop growing up. And then we don’t have to reverse the process, to the point live life on auto-pilot.

A Meta-Solution

How do we protect against this exporative lazyness? I don’t even know what it is and how it works exactly. But I will try to apply two principles that works well with regular lazyness;

• Setting expectations the right way. Getting rid of habits and building skills are two different things. You are not trying to free yourself of the non-existance of the skill, and the habit is already working on you from t=0. You can not expect incremental gains. You will win some, and then lose some. Think about the process as many iterations instead, many being a strictly unknown number. Expect to get back to where you have started, hopefully with positive changes.
• Taking advantage of external forces. We are affected from both internal and external stimuli. But external stimuli has much power than internal. This is great of course, because our lazyness is internal. The tricky part is to find out that external thing we can use. We need to get out of our comfort zone, for two reasons. Outside our comfort zone is a world stranger to us, this should supply material to observe. Getting out of our comfort zone is naturally forcing ourselves out, this should supply enough irritation. Think of it as a slap in the face. “Hey! Wake up!“

You Are Too Naive Too Fool Me

I never claim to be an expert on bodybuilding or something like that. But when people around are really clueless, as in thinking sit-ups will give them a six pack, and I point it out, it appears to be I am making such a claim.

It is sad actually. I see people everyday, thinking they are working out. But it is not working out. Can you imagine a perfectly healthy 30 year old and a pyhsically inactive 50 year old following exactly the same program. Oh, sorry; not exactly the same. Younger one is additionally doing sit-upa. To get a six pack of course. Good luck.

1: I’m on a diet now, so I do my cardio in the mornings and my weight training in the evenings.

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