I worked two days solid on the issue page. It’s not too hard, but JavaScript sucks.

I spent several hours trying to figure out why one thing didn’t work. Finally I found it. I was adding two numbers, but JavaScript thought they were strings so it concatenated them. The code was doing this just before filing the object away using the result. Code elsewhere was failing because the objects couldn’t be found.

This code is all in the browser. If it was in the server, there’s probably some way I could have created a test for it. But writing tests isn’t something the developers did, so I don’t have an example…

I spent a few hours trying to get a Vertx.io system running, with Java. It looks like it’ll take an extra week, and it won’t help me with the front-end, where most of the challenges are, so I gave it up.

I finally got most of the issue page working today. Mucking with Angular was unpleasant, too. Angular is the UI technology. Angular is overbuilt, poorly documented and not very fast. It’s also very complex to code unless one gets its cryptic patterns just right. Luckily, the developers weren’t very experienced with it, so they wrote things out simply, all in the web page. This means things aren’t very reusable, but they’re simpler. Still, it took me a while to make the checkboxes and radio buttons work.

I can now answer questions and the answers are saved and tallied. When I bring up the page again, the answers are set.

I still have to store the main issue checkbox result that says whether the user wants to receive reports on an issue. After debating with myself, I decided to store it as a regular answer, so it’ll use the same tallying mechanism. But it means not tripping over the answer elsewhere, and I had to update my database-filling software.

And I discovered another piece of the page that the developers had implemented as “vaporware.”  Maybe I’ll just leave it out… We’re already leaving out the “More Information” links…

They wanted to give me a demo, but I refused. A demo shows the things that works. I wanted to see tests, and after looking at the code, it was pretty easy to create tests that failed. And this would have been all on their schema with its slow queries…

They wanted the second half of the week’s payment. But that was for completing the milestone. What they did was far from complete. And I’m struggling to finish the basic functions.

I found a bunch of other problems, too. The security is non-existent. Any hacker could ruin everything. Hopefully, with some help we can get it ready in a week or two. Another week or two…

I’m not going to finish the page tonight. I need to spend at least 6 hours reviewing a draft of the novel. That’s also late. Maybe it can be published by the end of the month, but more probably mid-June… It was supposed to be done in March…

Finances are running low. Time is money. Meanwhile, many more millions are being raised for politics as usual…

I hate working alone. I shouldn’t be doing this project alone. I have emotional issues from childhood that are tweaked by working alone. They’re uncomfortable and distracting. Okay, painful and distracting.

But they’re just emotional issues, rattling around in my brain. The work needs to be done and I have no one beside me at the moment. The solution is to pretend that I’m an adult and do what needs to be done. In two months I’ll turn 59. It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

Yes, I have a partner. But he’s working on the marketing. I need help with the code.

I am strung out from lack of sleep. Historically, I’ve “needed” my sleep. My responsibilities are hugely cerebral. Lack of sleep is debilitating. But these people in India I’ve tried to work with work midnight to 8am my time. So I’ve tried to stay up. It’s not working very well…

My arms hurt from typing. I have old RSI’s from computer use. I have to be careful. They can be debilitating. I hate the feeling of wanting to rip my skin off. I’m exhausted, but I’ll try working at my standing desk today, and using an ergonomic keyboard. Using the laptop while reclining isn’t too bad, but it’s not good…

I learned one new (to me) technology last week (PL/SQL), when I couldn’t find a cheap consultant to help (can’t afford an expensive one.)  Luckily, it was a small project. And I’ll use it for two more things.

The people that I hired did what they knew to do, instead of what I asked, so their code is too slow. It won’t scale. It’ll start slowing down with 1000 users. We need to build for at least 100k, more like 10m. They gave me a bogus, high estimate for fixing it. There’s no integrity in that, no partnership.

Their communication sucks. Mine’s much better, but not great. I explain at length, written. Somehow, we need to talk… I needed to work with them, and didn’t realize it…

I am starting to work with a new guy, in India, at a different company. His name is Rags (the ‘a’ is pronounced like the ‘o’ in bogs.) He has a manager named Jay. But he can’t start for another 36 hours…

Today I will try to dive into angularJS + nodeJS. Just for two hours. You have no idea how much I hate JS. It’s bad and wrong. There are tons of convoluted interfaces. JS defines them sloppily. It’s easy to make mistakes, and very difficult to figure out what’s wrong and how things should be. The debugging is primitive. There are tools for it, but to me they seem to take an endless amount of setup, also convoluted and poorly documented. So I’m going to try to change some code without a debugger…

Yesterday I added a new method to a module. Node barfed. I tried to load the project into Eclipse for help. It hung. I downloaded a newer version, but haven’t tried it yet…  I should probably try the other IDE. I can’t even remember its name…  The team uses netbeans. I know nothing about that, but have heard weird things…

I started to create a Vertx.io project- it’s a nodeJS-like system, but for Java. Maybe I should redo the backend in Java. Vertx looks pretty decent. I started reading about their MySql support. They don’t support stored procedures, sigh… I suppose I could make a small table and insert the procedure parameters into it, and make a trigger that runs the procedure. I don’t know anything about triggers, but it might work…

My mood is very black at times. I don’t take it seriously, but it’s unpleasant and unhelpful. I hate working alone. Hopefully I can end this complaining and start concentrating.

The plan for today. Set my timer for 90 minutes and launch into NodeJS. When it rings, I have to decide whether to try to finish or back it out. Then I’ll make a plan for what needs to be done to get to beta. Maybe it’ll help to tell you, now.

• Switch over to my schema, fix up 3-4 queries.
• Change the mysql library to mysql2 and use their prepared statements.
• Add some monitoring/measuring technology.
• Add an admin page and some status info.
• Thoroughly test the join/signin stuff and get it working smoothly.
• Thoroughly test the pages for small screens (aka “responsive”)
• Assess and probably tweak the feel of the UI.

Oh, and pay the bills. There’s not much savings left. But I can’t worry about that. Though I have to…

Thanks for listening.

Happy Passover.

About 3500 years ago, according to the story, plagues descended on Egypt. And at the same time, Moses said they were punishment for not freeing the Jews. And he proposed a solution: Walk away. En masse.

The strange part of the story, to me, is that most did. They lived there for something like 5 generations. Do you know your ancestry? I was born and bred in the US. My parents were not. My identity, while a bit Jewish, is 100% American. In fact, 200 years is almost the age of America. If your ancestors were in America in the 1816, you’d feel as American as the Jews felt Egyptian. Yes, they were Egyptian slaves. But they were Egyptian.

Moses told the people, too, not just Pharaoh. And over eight days some weird things happened. Rumors and stories were flying. But no one prepared!  When the Pharaoh capitulated, there was not even time to bake bread! If they had listened, they would have had eight days to prepare.

Today’s Plagues are Upon Us

Today, raining on us are the plagues of global warming, Greenland melting at record temperatures, the bleaching (dying) of coral reefs, plus wars based on religious stupidity, as well as the usual stupidity of tyranny, plus new diseases! It’s once again time to be thankful that the worst of it has passed over us. (At least, for those that have escaped the worst of it.)

And the plagues of the candidates are upon us. We’ve had the debacle of the debates, the pathos of the primaries and looming ahead are the cataclysms of the conventions. Heed the message.

Passover’s message: End slavery!

Passover comes with a message. End slavery. We can free ourselves from all these plagues and more, if we heed the words to escape.

Will you recognize those words when they come? Probably not. They’re already circulating, but you haven’t been listening.

Most Jews didn’t. Moses was delivering the message for eight days. But people didn’t believe him. Not until Pharaoh announced they should leave! By then there was no time to prepare. Today, we still have to eat chalky matzoh for eight days every year as a result. To remind us to heed prophecy early.

The plagues are upon us. Within the next month, you’ll have the opportunity to end slavery. Worldwide. This time it won’t be so easy. You’ll have to take responsibility for it. The plagues are upon us, but there’ll be no decree from Pharaoh.

Do the right thing. Listen up. Get ready. Put your name on our mailing list.

Last week an argument was made, supposedly against empathy, by a psychologist and Yale professor, Paul Bloom. He argued that the emotional reward of helping others a little bit can blind a person to truly effective help, such as to the long-term consequences of your actions.

I disagree. Why would you care about the long-term consequences of your actions to others, if not due to empathy?

It seems to me that he’s really complaining about people feeling and not thinking. One example he gives is that some people care a lot more for a baby who has fallen down a well than they care about climate change, even though climate change is causing much more harm.

This is not a problem of empathy. Without empathy, one might think it’s good for the planet to warm and the human population to shrink. True, without empathy, one might only be concerned for having reasonable weather for oneself, but without empathy, one might not care at all about future generations.

The real problem is in marketing. Taking pictures of people visibly upset about a baby at the bottom of a well is easy. But a story about a climate change disaster requires travel and research. People are getting malaria in places that used to be high enough that it was too cold for mosquitoes. Drought is killing off crops in far-off parts of the world.

News agencies focus on reporting, not spinning the news. Yet when a baby falls down a well, they don’t take the temperature of the community, they focus on the people who care the most and are loudest, most expressive.

Even if they travel to places impacted severely by climate change, they find mostly quiet desperation, not the extreme emotional outbursts of a sudden calamity.

We don’t need less empathy. We need a way for people to engage responsibly with political issues. And that’s what we’re building, here at PeopleCount.org. Please add your name to our announcement list.

March 20, 2016:
A guy I talked to a bit ago read about the issues we had with our first website developer. Instead of giving him an update, I thought I’d share it with posterity and send him the link.

We have a new developer! I think they’re working out. They’re not quite as aggressive as I was hoping for, and I’d like more project management out of them, but I think they’re working out. My fingers are crossed.

A woman was going to be my CTO and manage them. But she had a few things that were occupying her and she didn’t jump in and take over, as I wanted her to. Then something else happened and she hasn’t been in communication for 8 days. So it’s not working out. I spent at least 40 hours last week reviewing things, designing the product and the schema and working on a software tool. I got almost nothing else done.

So far, the developers and I spent a week going over the functionality and fleshing out a spec. Then they redid most of the mockups (the previous developer gave me jpg’s, but no photoshop files, plus they needed lots of editing.) And they have some sample HTML of a few of the pages. Next week begins setting up the site and the code, plus finishing more of the sample HTML pages (before they create the software that will then generate the HTML.)

So I’ve been managing the developers near full-time, reviewing the mockups, designing the product and the database. The product has to be absolutely minimal, yet still deliver a good experience for the user and do everything we need it to. Plus I’ve been working on some software for a tool.

Last week I reviewed one of the books being written for me. I didn’t get to the other one this weekend. I also put together some lists of about 1400 politicians and am working on getting their contact info, with some help from people on Fiverr.com.

I start working from the moment I wake till late at night. I take a lot of deep breaths to let go of the stress. The stress is from needing another 20 or so hours each day.

I wish I had someone beside me. It’s don’t understand why that didn’t work out. But that’s okay. I don’t have to understand everything…

I do have a marketing VP so there’s another 40 hours of work a week I’m NOT doing. Yay!  It’ll probably be like this for the next few months, till we launch.

And then a whole new drama will begin. It’s just what there is to do.

That’s the update. If you haven’t, please add yourself to our announcement list.

What are our chances of transforming democracy? What are our chances of success?

This is the kind of thing people ask. The truth is that it’s an inappropriate question.

I’m trained as a mathematician. “Chance” is something you can measure in a repeatable event. You can flip a coin a thousand times and count how many times it’ll come up heads 5 times in a row. And you can calculate that.

PeopleCount is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. And there are thousands of variables. 92% of startups fail. But most of them didn’t do the work I’ve done. Most of them didn’t lay the foundation I’ve created. Many of them were by young people who didn’t have the training I’ve had. Plus I found a great person to head up marketing.

And already I’ve failed hundreds of times. How many times did Gandhi fail?  Mandela was locked up. Jesus was killed. MLK failed a bunch.

This is a creation. It can’t be measured. The current year’s election results were not predicted by people well versed in the election prediction business. PeopleCount is much more of a wild card. While we’ve done good work so far, we’re aiming to perform far beyond any level I’ve performed at. With a team and funding, we’d have a good chance. With two people, late nights and a tiny budget? All I can say is that we’re going for it.

I took a half-hour break yesterday and walked with a friend. He expressed dismay that I am probably going to fail. He said, “I can’t believe you’re trying this with only a budget of $200,000.” I said, “Then you’ll be even more skeptical when you find out it’s more like $100,000. That’s all I had left.”

Then a thought occurred to me. I asked him, “So do you think our chances would be good if I had, say, a million dollars?” He said, “Hell, yeah!”

The U.S. spends several billion dollars on elections, and I can’t get a single wealthy person to pony up a million. I’ve even communicated with three billionaires who say they want this. It’s weird..

You’re welcome to send us a few bucks. And please add your name to our announcement list.

What are our chances of transforming democracy? I say they’re 100%. Or bust.

PS: If you’re new to what we’re doing, please also check out our “How it Works” page.

It seems like the quality of life is based on what I’m accountable for.

I’m accountable for:

• running a development team
• trying to cultivate someone else to run it
• reviewing two books for publication
• building a new web facade (till the site’s up)
• contacting groups and politicians
• writing some key algorithms
• writing some software tools and managing one helper
• blogging
• being the committed listener to my marketing VP
• helping plan the sequence of our launching and funding efforts
• managing my own work, priorities and calendar
• reporting to my business advisor

And now I “should” try out some project management software… Oh yeah, and finish taxes and take a shower…

Politicians are busy without accountability in a dysfunctional system.

I’ve written a ton of letters and contacted a ton of people. Few respond. Especially, politicians don’t respond.

If someone DID have a great solution- they’re not listening. They’re fighting to win. They’re working hard in Congress. They’re trying to figure out what people want. Daily they spend several hours on fundraising.

This is one way the system helps keep itself the way it is. It’s completely arranged to stay dysfunctional.

If there were a devil, he’d have invented it this way. He’d make a dysfunctional system where people work very, very hard to succeed, so they’re too busy to really consider fixing it.

Since it’s dysfunctional, people would have to try all sorts of weird schemes to make it even partially work. So they’d put their effort into working this dysfunctional system instead trying to fix it.

And it would be so dysfunctional that people would by resigned and cynical. Present a real solution and they’d say “Yeah, right,” and roll their eyes.

This is the system we have. Your cynicism keeps it in place. Your ideas that someone needs to succeed before you’ll give a new solution a try keeps new projects from succeeding.

Christianity is based on faith. But it’s not faith that Jesus was God’s son. It’s not faith that you’ll be saved after you die. It’s faith that you should do the right thing, even when the system says not to.

When Jesus was alive, the Hebrew leaders were corrupt. They were in league with Rome. They honored the political order more than they honored morality. Jesus said, “No!” He tried to bring people back to their foundational morality.

That’s what you need to have faith in- not the Bible, but in morality. We all sell out to the system. We all adjust to our corporate-greed driven world. That’s okay if at least you realize that you’re selling out and look for something better, listen for something better.

We do that a little. I’ve talked to many hundreds of people. Mostly I get arguments about “how the system is” and “how people are.” People have sold out to cultural truths. We can do better. Listen for a new way. Listen for a miracle.

People say that the technology we have today would appear to be magic in the days of King Arthur. Similarly, a world where government is accountable to people would me magic to you. Neither is magic. Both are possible.

You needn’t believe in PeopleCount. But I guarantee, support PeopleCount and it’ll at least have enough success to break through our belief that there’s no possibility for a breakthrough in politics. PeopleCount will probably succeed, but at least it’ll cause enough disruption of the current cynicism to lead to real change.

Believe it. You have nothing to lose but today’s political dysfunction. Please add your email address to our announcement list.

I find that accountability aids productivity.

Accountability aids Productivity

I’ve had very full days, the last few days. I’ve been putting together schedules and specs, going through the details.

I can’t do it alone. There’s nothing that I know today about it that I didn’t know a few days ago or a month ago. Yet I couldn’t do it then. Other things seemed more important.

But now someone needs it. So now I can focus on it.

I’m more productive on a team

Why is it so much easier for me to produce something when it’s for someone else?

A minute ago, I hadn’t a clue about the answer. And now it’s obvious. I didn’t feel like I needed it. I knew a spec would be needed, but that didn’t make me need it. Another way of looking at it was that it wasn’t urgent.

It’s much easier for me to create urgency if someone else needs it. I guess I’m naturally prone to being accountable.

This is the first big project I’ve run. I have a long way to go to be reliable. But I’m willing to be accountable. Ask me about something I promised, or even something I mentioned, and I’ll tell you what I’ve done so far and what’s left. I’ll tell you why it’s not done.

I’ve worked on PeopleCount almost four and a half years. I’ve had some team-mates just in the last two months. It’s great, but we’re still learning to work together. We’re still learning how to be accountable to each other.

But it’s good. I have people who are depending on me, and that helps me focus. I better get back to it.

Please, be my partner. Add your name to our mailing list so I can send you updates. Be an early adopter in the coming revolution in politics.