I went to Silicon Valley in 1979 the same way a country singer goes to Nashville or an actor goes to Hollywood. Really. I absolutely felt that way. I was broke after a couple of months, and did the equivalent of waiting tables in NY, contract programming for National Semiconductor. I met people in coffee shops and diners, and worked the big tech companies as if they were accounts. Made a deal. Lived from hand to mouth until I struck it big, and when I left, I had lots of money in the bank.

Today, Silicon Valley has a more formal system welcoming young folk. And that's smart, and other places should do it too, but here's the twist. In addition to giving a warm welcome to hotshot programmers and marketers, have city-based "in residence" programs, the way universities and venture firms do. Make it easy for people who are accomplished in tech to set up house in your city for a few months at a time.

In other words people can be coral reefs too.

I had this thought recently relating to my longtime friend Marc Canter. I would love to have him around in NYC for a few months, maybe every year. But he's too big to sleep on my couch, both in spirit and physical size. We need to put him up somewhere in the city, and let's set up little parties for young startups with Marc, there are so many of them. I want Marc to advise me on user interfaces I'm working on. But I could never use all of his time. He would be a tremendous asset to a place like New York. But why should have to pay $400 a night to stay in one of our hotels? That's a big barrier, because the costs are so much higher today than they were 30 years ago.

This is an idea any of our mayoral candidates are welcome to, or a borough president for that matter. Does Queens want to be the next Silicon Valley? Maybe it could happen.

8/18/2013; 1:04:31 PM

It's not just news that's been disrupted by the Internet, we've also seen dramatic changes in the way entertainment and now security information flows.

On one side, you have an institution that was formed in the 20th century, and developed huge power and wealth based on controlling a flow of information.

On the other side, the mass of people who were, in the past, given very limited information, but now have access to much more, and are in the process of evolving new flows around this ability.

On one side you have the RIAA, MPAA and now the NSA. And on the other is Napster, BitTorrent, and Manning/Snowden (and the web, Twitter, Facebook, RSS).

People on either side view the situation very differently.

On the left side, they're trying to put the genie back in the bottle. And on the right side, the genie no longer fits. True, Napster was killed, and BitTorrent plays a game of whack-a-mole. Bradley Manning is in jail, and Snowden in exile. But the effects are with us permanently, even if the individual distruptors have been stopped by the old institutions.

It's amazing to see this play out over and over, there's obviously some kind of fundamental law of nature at work here.

BTW, there's a third dynamic -- the 20th-century institution also adopts the new technology, learns from the practices of the open development community and its users, and grows stronger as a result. The NSA is doing this, and to a lesser extent the MPAA and RIAA (with their counter-measures against piracy).

However they are still largely unable to deal with the new flow of information to the users. They're still getting all the music they want, and new episodes of Game of Thrones, and specifics on how the government is capturing our online activities.

8/18/2013; 9:47:09 AM

One of the smallpicture.com servers is down.

It's not responding to low-level network pings, so the problem seems to be at the service-provider level.

We've tried to reboot the machine, that didn't bring it back.

Tried stopping the instance, hoping to restart it in a different AWS zone, but it's been trying to stop for about 1/2 hour. Usually it takes less than a minute.

Interestingly, we got an email this morning from Amazon saying that the server is going to be retired in September, and we'd have to stop and restart it in September. Is this a coincidence?

This is not one of our main servers. It handles tasks like allocating names for outlines, and acting as a proxy for WordPress. Fargo, because so much of it runs on the user's machine, is still working fine. I'm writing this post in Fargo.

I'm posting a link to this on our user support mail lists. If you have questions or suggestions, please post a comment here. Thanks!

At least the outage happened on a Sunday.

8/18/2013; 9:27:03 AM