flowerhack

The other day I was chatting with a non-technical guy who was curious about web development, and he asked me: "Say I make a website, and it has everything I want, and I just want it to stay on the internet. What all do I have to do to keep that website up? Is it a daily maintenance thing? weekly? yearly?"

I actually thought this was an interesting question, because there's so many variables at play here, and most of them aren't particularly obvious when you're just starting out. For fun, here's a rundown of some of the perils you'll face if you're "just" trying to keep things running.

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I guess the big lesson here is that, lots of folks imagine a web site is something like a painting. Someone paints it, you buy it, and then you invite all your friends over to admire how pretty it looks in your living room, and that's that. But it's more like building a house. Or rather, it's like building a house in some alternate universe where time is going by ten times as fast. All these people keep coming in and scuffing up the floor! There's too much junk in the attic! There was a huge flood and now some of the wood's starting to rot away! The kitchen sink is broken!

You can avoid worrying about a lot of these problems, by paying other people to take care of your house, but at the end of the day, someone is doing a lot of work to just keep your site running.

Ordinarily I'm a little shy about writing up book reviews, but I was surprised at how difficult it was to google for a comparative review of the four books Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy.  I would've very much liked to have seen more folks' thoughts on how each of the books compared to each other before I set out to read this series.  So, for the sake of Making the Internet a Better Place™, I now offer my thoughts.

(There are spoilers—none so major as to spoil enjoyment of the books, I think, but I tend to not mind spoilers as much as the average person, so take that for what you will.)

( Spring Snow )

( Runaway Horses )

( The Temple of Dawn )

( The Decay of the Angel )

Ultimately, I feel that perhaps Mishima is at his best when writing about younger people. His work is romantic in character, full of bombastic, colorful prose that feels well-suited for his younger characters but a bit strange when they begin to age. And the subject matter simply fits his favorite themes better—young men acting rashly and nobly is inspiring; seeing aging men behaving the same way often seems more like erraticness and stupidity, and Mishima does not always handle the distinction elegantly.

Overall, I'd recommend Spring Snow to anyone, and recommend Runaway Horses if you really enjoyed Spring Snow. The Temple of Dawn is skippable, and The Decay of the Angel has its moments if you wish to see the series's conclusion.

A guy asked me on the airplane what I think of Facebook's future prospects. I told him that, while I think Facebook will still be around, it will lose a lot of viability and relevance in the future—possibly within five years, definitely within ten years.

I've held that opinion for a while, but as I was talking with this guy, I managed to get a sharper insight as to why I think this. But for me to properly explain that insight, first I need to provide a short explanation of something that (initially) seems totally unrelated:

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See also "The Social Graph is Neither", a very interesting blog entry from the creator of Pinboard that makes some similar points, but also some very different ones, in a much more eloquent fashion than me.