Tao Effect

As this is a company blog it might not be the best of places for me to post some of my more politically-charged-unrelated-to-Tao-Effect-thoughts.

Therefore I’ve started a Posterous account to which I’ll be posting that sort of goodness.

Yesterday the President made the extraordinary step of asking citizens to submit questions to him. He promised to answer the most popular ones, and he did.

This isn’t the first time this administration has invited questions. They’ve done this before, and each time one of the most pressing questions has been the issue of legalization.

About the only respectable thing I can say today about this man is that he finally gave the public a direct answer:

I have to say that there was one question that ranked fairly high, and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy [pause], and uh… [laughs], ah.. I don’t know what this says about the online audience [crowd laughs], but.. haha… but I just want uh.. I don’t want people to think uh.. this was a fairly popular question we wanted to make sure that it was answered, the answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy. [crowd claps]

Perhaps I’m naive, but I was shocked when I saw this.

Whether or not you agree with it, how can you laugh at an issue like that?

You were not put there by the people to laugh at their serious concerns. This particular issue has been the source of decades of fighting, murders, imprisonments, and millions of lives ruined. And this… politician, behaves exactly as so many cynics have said he would. This is not the change that we were told about, this is idiocy-as-usual.

I thought hard about posting this, as this post has nothing to do with Tao Effect or Espionage, or anything tech-related. But then I realized that in my position this is the most I could do, that this is what “being patriotic” is about, and on an issue like this I would be embarrassed and ashamed of myself if I didn’t speak out.

You’re laughing at peoples lives and their freedom Mister President. Wipe that smirk off your face.

Further Reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Criticism
The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States
Bullshit: The War on Drugs part 1 of 3

I think most people have encountered this strange phenomenon. That is, quite often, whenever one creates a complex artwork, one often finds themselves in the position least likely to directly benefit from it.

Consider, for example, a musician. My good friend Ryan Brown (developer of CocoaCollider) has created many electronic songs, but more often than not he’ll begin a project only to drop it a few days later.

Or a choreographer, like the voice behind the screencasts for Espionage, Lizzy Snow. While working on a dance for a while she becomes disenchanted with it—the movements that were so brilliant a second ago become dull and uninteresting.

The same applies to programmers. Those humans who have taken up this method of self-expression, can work enthusiastically for hours on end, completely motionless aside from a flurry of hand-movement and the occasional outburst, only to discover that, oddly enough, the more code they write for a project, the uglier and more unwieldy it becomes¹.

But many artists today don’t have the luxury of dilly-dallying about until they can achieve, what in their minds is called, perfection. There’s often some sort of a dead-line associated with their work, and more importantly, it’s how they make their living. So they persist, and eventually reveal to the world the fruits of their labor.

Herein lies the artist’s dilemma², for while everyone else can enjoy their work, they themselves cannot. The magician knows how it’s done, the choreographer has performed it countless times, the musician has listened to the same 3-second loop for over an hour, and they can all see with unmatched clarity, the various flaws in each of their respective performances.

I created Espionage because I wanted to encrypt my email without encrypting everything in my home directory. Yet to this day, it remains unencrypted. Why? Because I’m constantly working on Espionage, constantly testing it, installing it, uninstalling it, improving it in various ways, and I work on the same machine that I use for everything else³ (wouldn’t have it any other way).

Thus, I suffer.

¹That’s not to say that Espionage is full of ugly code (I wouldn’t be able to work on it if it was), or that I’m indifferent to the issue. Complexity naturally arises in large projects, especially those written in C.
²I make no claims of originality in using this term, which has been used by many different people to refer to various things.
³Espionage is always tested on multiple machines before it’s released, not just mine. ^_^
⁴Apparently I like footnotes.

“I didn’t know you were down in the first place,” I hear you say.

Indeed! Those of you who sent emails to our support address today were probably pleasantly surprised to find a blazingly fast reply from us in your inbox today, but to your dismay it was not, after all, a reply to your inquiry, but the following description of an unfortunate event that befell Tao Effect yesterday morning:

Hi there!

This is an automatic reply. Today (Mon. 17th of November), my main development machine died, it appears to be a problem with the logic board. Right now I’m scrambling to the nearest Apple Store to get it fixed as soon as possible. Because of this, my ability to reply to your email will probably be delayed a bit, and I apologize for that. I will still do my best to try and send you a reply within 48 hours though.

Hopefully this situation will be fixed soon. I will try my best to keep you posted via updates to the blog.

Best regards,

Greg Slepak
CEO, Tao Effect LLC

I drove down to the nearest Apple Store from Gainesville yesterday, which (timewise) is Orlando. The genius there (Jon) was quite helpful and the laptop is on its way to receive repairs. My guess is that the logic board decided that it would rather leave this realm than live under the stresses that I put it through.

In the meantime, our test machine (a PowerMac) has been setup as the temporary center of operations, so I should be able to reply to support email (and continue development) while waiting for my beloved laptop to find its way back home.

Tao Effect is born on October 26, 2008.

Nice ta’ mee’cha!