• Sriracha, but a little bit spicier.
• Accessibility for software, but as a continuum instead of a few "accessibility features".
• Me, but with the benefit of having observed a few more cycles of my habitual reactions to things and how those are oftimes unhelpful.
• Now, but maybe paying attention to the meeting I'm in?

Flagging for Android

1. Build an app for an obscure message board
2. ???
3. Beer!

A thing I did with friends. Metal by Daniel, fabric by Calli. Special thanks to Mary.

Since I've done this twice in the past 24 hours ... roughly in order:

• SizeUp
• Dropbox / Google Drive
• Notational Velocity
• Freemind
• 1Password
• Spotify
• Adium
• MS Office (meh)
• Omnigraffle
• VLC
• change Terminal font to Consolas 13
• .vimrc
• .bashrc
• log in to all the websites
• defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Screenshots; killall SystemUIServer
• defaults write http://com.apple.finder NSWindowSupportsAutomaticInlineTitle -bool false

not sure about f.lux any more

Worked late on a project at work that requires integrating with a lot of other products. Spent time reading requirements docs, trying to understand how it might fit together. It's possible this isn't going to work out - people might decide the risks aren't worth the reward. That's actually ... fine. Take feedback, iterate, make sure we're headed in the right direction. But figuring out the direction sooner is better, so I missed the Wire concert.

Trying to sleep, one of my roommates was up late singing along with her laptop in another part of the house. Not sure how you can hate on that, so I went with it. Still got up early and met up with the Mission Cycling guys for the pre-dawn Headlands raid. Haven't been climbing a lot so I was one of the last ones to the top of Hawk Hill. View still spectacular, bombing back down still an adrenaline rush. Water started coming down, just a few drops at a time, enough to have me rushing home, acting antisocially through the Wiggle (which I really gotta stop.)

Dinner tonight, a walk tomorrow, signing a lease Thursday, happy hour and a birthday party on Friday, no clue on Saturday.

Just wanted to get a picture down of what it looks like when it's working out.

I don't really have a good comeback to this. I had my reasons, but yeah, certain dreams have suffered as a result. It's really a shame that we only get one life, isn't it?

I was going to write a report about riding in the LA marathon crash race, luckily Alex already did.

Update your bookmarks: after over ten years of a URL I hated, we're moving to one slightly less bad.

Henceforth find me at theporouscity.com instead of inevitablebacklash.com

They point to the same place, links to the old URL won't break, but I'll be happier if we just move on.

What 6:30am looks like in the Presidio, January 17th 2013 courtesy Dave Mongan

A graph of all 5,025 miles I rode in 2012, excluding rides in street clothes. Weight of the lines based on how often I rode that stretch of road.

Full view:


Northern California only:

Posted on the CrowdFlower blog on Apple Maps data quality compared to Google Maps and Bing. Thinking about doing a followup with OpenStreetMaps.

And hey look, it got picked up by an LA Times blog. Haha: Apple hasn't responded to requests for comment.

If this works, we've moved.

We were sitting in the Botanical Garden in some kind of faux-classical bit of architecture, looking at a gray sky.

"I wonder if it's sunny in the Mission ... "

isitsunnyinthemission.com

1. Break 9:00 on Hawk Hill
2. **********
3. ********
4. Write a track

The line for the open bar wasn't as long as you'd expect, but the bartenders were mixing complicated drinks designed to impress, so there was a wait. Eventually a circle formed to make space for the belly dancer, pushing the bar line away and moving people closer to the bouncy castle, the fire engine red Tesla and the indoor waffle truck. The music went from hip-hop to something vaguely Middle Eastern. I didn't stay for the fire dancing, but it must have been a trick to thread the poi balls through all the hanging paper lanterns.

Joseph and I goggled.
"Do you have any idea what this company does?"
"None."

Next night, Sichuan food.

"Hey Kasima, know any engineers looking for work?" And we laughed and laughed and laughed.

And ... yes, I'm at a startup, again, in a converted industrial space in one of the highest-crime areas in San Francisco. Venture funding inside, 10% unemployment outside. Let's not fuck up.

I am in the office at 6:52 after an all-nighter, the kind where you're playing catch-up and scrambling to meet a deadline. Embarrassing. And I'm listening to UB-40, so doubly embarrassing. But that's not why I decided to write. I decided to write because I just remembered my first and only visit to Parrotfish Records in St. Thomas, USVI. My mom took me because she knew I was a music geek. The color scheme, the decor, the stuff on display, all Jamaican. Not the proprietor, clearly a mainlander, middle-aged and sour-looking. I didn't know much about reggae or dancehall, so I asked for some dub. For my trouble I got a five minute lecture about how nobody in Jamaica listens to that "drug music" any more. And after lecturing me on "drug music" he tries to sell me some dancehall! The record sleeve was probably covered with five-pointed leaves! The fucking nerve!

I started a new job. I will reassert my right to post random stuff to my blog .... now.

On March 11th I leave One Acre Fund and fly from Nairobi to Frankfurt, on my way back to the USA.

It feels a little like leaving Microsoft in 1982 might have if you had an inkling of the future trajectory of the company. The core model in Kenya is much more mature than it was eighteen months ago: we now have three districts with 3,000 to 4,000 clients each, all generating performance numbers that in aggregate are steady and predictable. We have very promising trials underway to achieve better economies of scale and more impact for our clients. When I first got here it felt like building a car - suspension, frame, engine, speedometer and steering wheel - while the car was already on the road. Now it feels like we have the platform and we're tuning for performance. We have incredibly ambitious growth targets (seriously. ambitious.) and I believe we'll reach them.

So it's obvious I have mixed feelings about this. But when I brought up the subject of leaving with our executive director in October, I mentioned that I've been overseas for two years, and working in operations management for, now, eighteen months. I've got a better idea of what I want in life, and it involves building a life closer to family and friends, and going back to a career with a heavier analytical component. One Acre Fund's strength is a laser focus on field results, which means living here and staying devoted to implementation. There are a lot of people that are happiest doing exactly that (did I mention how rewarding it is to see a good harvest?) so I'm not worried about One Acre.

It's not the end of my work on behalf of One Acre Fund, either. I'll be fundraising, blogging about their progress and in general not shutting up about it whenever the conversation turns to development. I'll also be doing some volunteer country scouting if the timing works out.

The next set of opportunities is looking exciting too, though. More later.

Driving the RAV4 on the road near my house, a small Kenyan girl stands in the middle of the road, arms out from the her sides, chest puffed out. I just keep repeating to myself "I am not the guy driving the truck in Avatar, I am not the guy driving the truck in Avatar..."

In the interests of total uninhibited geeking out, I'm going to start doing all music-related Twittering from @lukasmusic. Don't get used to all the substantive news so far, it's mostly going to be me raving about new beats.

Yesterday, as my plane taxiied to the gate, I saw a man bent over sweeping a red carpet. "Interesting, I bet that's where ..." the plane continued and my gaze passed over a rigid line of about 150 red-suited members of a Kenyan army honor guard. Kibaki landed right behind me, and his motorcade fouled traffic the rest of the night.

Today, in a developed-world bubble at Art Caffé, sipping wine and enjoying near-broadband. Art Caffé is frequented by expats and wealthier locals. The expats are mostly Westerners, with some Chinese people thrown in. My guess is that most of the Westerners are NGO workers and most of the Chinese people are working at for-profits. I wonder who will have the greatest impact on Kenya in the long term?

On taxi drivers: once you know the fair price for a trip, it's fun to hassle the taxi drivers hanging outside of tourist hotspots (Soi Rambutri in Bangkok, Westgate mall in Nairobi.) Really pointless though - the drivers know that if they wait two minutes, a bigger sucker will come along.

I was "interviewed" about One Acre Fund by members of the Global Swadeshi development forum. Very bright people with great questions, check it out.

Field directors


Field managers


Field officers


We're working on it.

We're in the middle of repayment. Wait, let me back up. One Acre Fund gives loans to small farmers, in the form of seed (maize, in Kenya) and fertilizer. We give them training on how to use it, they plant, harvest, and pay us back in cash or maize.

So we're accepting cash repayment. We have about $200 in our budget to give incentives for the groups that finish repayment first. Patrick (Kenyan field director) and I are sitting around brainstorming ideas. It's hard, because you want to give them something of substance, that'll generate income over the long run, that a group of six to twelve farmers can practically share.

Pigs? Too expensive. Chickens? Tough to share, and how do you decide who gets the chicks, or income from eggs?

We land on trees. Tree seedlings are super cheap and can be harvested for firewood or sold as lumber. We figure out how we can pay to transport the tree seedlings to farmers, and still have enough in the budget to give each group 200 tree seedlings. We choose a tree that benefits soil fertility, isn't so thirsty that it's going to starve other crops for water, and can be harvested in 2-3 years.

We're pretty pleased with ourselves, and settle in for the Friday field managers meeting. We mention the incentive to them. They nod politely. We ask what they think. They look at each other, then look at us.

"It would be good if we could provide t-shirts," Vincent says.
"Sorry - farmers would rather have One Acre Fund t-shirts than 200 trees?"

The field managers nod vigorously.

Jake is brewing espresso in the kitchen. I'm wrapping up some projects - our motorcycle taxi program, and sourcing 15 tons of bean seed for our short rains planting - to hand off to other people. Tomorrow: up at 5, drive to Kisumu, fly to Nairobi. Two days in Nairobi, hopefully including an on-site inspection of a potential bean supplier.

Monday: fly to Dubai. Get on a plane to New York. Get on a plane to San Francisco. Take the BART to Millbrae and then get a cab to Paul's. Pick up a car. Drive to San Francisco. Crash at Ruth's (we're at early Wednesday morning by now.)

Next few days: what to wear to Stephen and Mary's wedding? Where to eat brunch?

Intermittent updates to my Twitter feed are sucking up the energy that would go to blog posts. And energy reserves are not generally high, as I'm going through an exhausting learning process.

My management experience prior to joining One Acre was as a case team leader at Monitor Group. It was a little like playing traffic cop: everything was moving along fine on its own, I just had to make sure it was pointed in the right direction. A lot of young associates came in with some consulting experience already, and (although we never thought about this) everyone came from the same cultural background, making communication a cinch.

Our staff here are also bright and hard-working, but they have much less in common with me. So I've learned things like:

• Avoiding abbreviated, idiomatic English
• Delivering tools, training and feedback that are crystal clear
• Ensuring timely data collection to get a birds-eye view of our progress
• Getting plenty of time in the field, before and after rollout, to make sure I actually understand what's going on. Rolling out a new field initiative without testing it with a field officer first and getting their feedback is just asking for trouble.

Given the opportunities for miscommunication and the impressive things our staff are capable of, it's tempting to think that execution problems can just be put down to poor communication - but sometimes it just takes energy and drive to get staff to assign the proper importance to tasks. Either way, whether communication or motivation is the problem, it seems like the name of the game is management by persistence.

The part that relates to the title, if not the rest of the post
Oh, right. Scylla and Charbydis. Being dumb, it was only recently that I thought about that image as a narrative version of the Greek ideal of moderation. Clever chaps, the Greeks. Way to work that pattern into our thought. But also: where is this myth misleading? where does moderation fail, as an ideal?

• Tomorrow: my second consecutive 8am meeting about motorcycle repairs. (Don't worry, mom, I'm running a mototaxi program for our field managers, not driving one myself.) These things are either prone to breakage, heavily used/abused, or our drivers are trying to skim off the top. So I'm going to start checking out bikes they're bringing in for repair myself.
• Next week: I give a talk on a year-long income and expenditure survey we're conducting with over thirty of our farmers. We're having them record what they eat every day, and once a week a survey agent records what they earned and spent in different categories. Jake designed the survey before I took over the project, so I can't take credit for it. Or maybe I can try. Anyway, I'll post some of the summary results here.
• Yesterday: an Ultimate game that no one was really satisfied with. The season of long rains (hopefully) started today, so future Ultimate games will probably be even sloppier.

Sitting at a cafe in the Dubai airport right now, waiting to board a flight to Nairobi. The eerie feeling of occupying a 3D rendering, from the ribbed arch overhead to the identical rows of red chairs.

• People are anxious about the downturn, but some, I think, are a little gleeful. It's like having school called off for the day. People used to work 60 hours a week just to keep up, to chase this huge and ever-growing carrot. Now things have slowed down and expectations are lower, and no one has to feel bad for not getting rich quick. They can direct their energies to everything they've neglected. The underground life is seeping through the concrete.

• Just spent three weeks in the US reconnecting with a bunch of people. It was good to remind myself of how much I'm linked in to. Now the opposite - it'll be another six months or so before I leave Africa again. I'm looking to narrow my field of vision.

• New Year's, for once, wasn't disappointing. Lesson: get a good group, start small, leave plenty of options. Come to think of it, not a bad strategy for 2009.

• Irrigation kit sales have been so-so. 25% of the farmers that bought seed and fertilizer kits have gone on to buy irrigation kits (which cost four times as much, but then, what else were they planning to do with the seeds during the dry season?*) We'll continue sales for the next couple of weeks, we'll see how many of the farmers who have been saying "I'll have the money next week" will come through.
• We had a party. Did you know that steel wool+fire+oxygen = decent fireworks?
• Added some new projects to my list. So far I've been working on special projects - limited trials of possible changes to the core model. I'll still be working on them next year, but I'll also get some experience just running the core model.
• A cat is being spayed outside my window. Erp, apparently it is (was?) pregnant.

*This is just me being frustrated. Our farmers have pretty chaotic lives, it can be hard for them to stick to plans - and we (originally) gave them a short time window in which to purchase kits.

Took a boda-boda (bicycle taxi) from the office to my house. It's 10 shillings (about 13 cents), 15 if they go down the dirt track to my door. Almost all the boda-boda guys have the same kind of bike: imagine a depressing Soviet-era steel bicycle with a cushion over the back wheel, festooned with paint, streamers and slogans painted on the mudflaps. Everyone pedals at the same plodding pace, since they have one gear at some ridiculous gear ratio, suitable only for Olympic sprinters.

This boda-boda driver spoke English, which is unusual.

"Hey, brother. Hey."
"Yes?"
"How can I have an easy life?"
"Sorry?"
"How can I have an easy life? I have been given a hard life."

He laughed, grinned, and kept at his sad, slow pedalling. I don't think his smile was faked. It's amazing how happy people are here, despite everything.

Talked to one of our survey agents today about a baseline survey we do when we enroll farmers - a sort of census and inventory of assets. Apparently it's pretty quick and easy to go through with a farmer.

"They don't have problems with any of the questions?"
"No ... well, sometimes they can't remember the names of all their children."

Obama's family is from a town a few hours away. Today: Obama t-shirts, Obama songs, cheers and handshakes from passers-by. I visited one of our farmers and he and another farmer discussed the election results. A radio was on nearby, playing Obama's acceptance speech interspersed with commentary in Kibukusu (the local tribal language.)

They admired the smooth handover of power in American democracy. They complained that no one in Africa gives up power without a fight. They agreed that it's not good enough to have good projects, they must be implemented well, and worried about Obama's inexperience. However they agreed that Joe Biden, with his 35 years of experience, would be a good advisor for him.

The best story comes from Sid and Melissa, who back in September talked to their cab driver in Nairobi about the election. The normal stuff: he asked who they were going to vote for, they said Obama, he went off on a five minute speech about how great Obama is. Then he paused.

"But McCain is strong too!"

So I came up with what I thought was a clever solution to one problem. No amount of cleverness will save me on the irrigation project, however, if any of the following things go wrong:

• Field officers do a poor job of delivering sales or training messages
• Kit pre-work doesn't happen on time: delivering components, preparing 400 seed kits, cutting 800 irrigation hoses, punching holes in them exactly 45cm apart, and cutting 70,000 emitter tubes
• Farmers can't come up with the money on time
• Farmers prepare their seedbeds incorrectly, and their seeds fail to germinate
• Repeatedly attaching and detaching the irrigation hoses from the jerry can causes the connection to weaken and leak water
• The cloth filter fails and dirt clogs the emitter tubes
• Farmers do a poor job of lofting the jerry can, and water doesn't travel all the way to the end of the hose

I'm trying to prepare training and plans to prevent this stuff, and backup plans to deal with it if it occurs. As you can tell I'm not comfortable with my progress. In the meantime I'm having weird food dreams. Last night I dreamt I was eating a hamburger and some people threatened to take it away from me. I pulled a gun on them.

I had a good idea today. I'm responsible for our motorcycles program: we bought some motorcycles, and we're going to let some independent drivers rent them from us. They're also required to provide one free return trip to a One Acre Fund field manager each day.

Somebody else had the idea and did the profitability analysis. I'm not in love with it, but since it's mine now, I have to figure out whether the original rationale holds: is it reducing transportation costs for field managers?

Problem: how to get good data on usage? Drivers don't want to give free rides, but will probably say "of course I gave a field manager a ride today" anyway.

And for field managers ... frankly it's not that convenient. Each location only has a couple motorcycles, and drivers might be busy or have already given their free ride that day. But the field managers know they're supposed to use them, so they might just say "of course I used the One Acre motorcycle."

Solution: give vouchers, with random serial numbers, to the field managers. They give them to the drivers, and the drivers write their names on them and give them to One Acre when they're submitting fees. Barring a motodriver-field manager conspiracy, we'll know exactly how much field managers are using the bikes.

Sorry about the lack of updates. Have been recuperating from some tropical flu (I'm fine, Mom, it wasn't anything serious.) Frustrating to have just gotten here and suddenly get sidelined; now I know how Greg Oden felt last season. Coffee'd up and sorting through the wreckage of my work plan.

While I was laid up, the boundary of my world was the One Acre place here in Bungoma. The other expats are friendly, thoughtful and fun to be around. However, the risks of the all-expat diet are becoming clear. If you spend all your free time with people, books and movies from home, you're inevitably going to get a pale imitation of a previous life. I'm still hoping for better than that.

Picked up one of our $5 irrigation kits yesterday - basically a plastic hose that connects to a jerry can, with little tubes to guide water to the plants. Hoping to sell a few hundred of these in time for farmers to plant during the dry season. Lots of little implementation questions remain - will farmers have an extra 20L jerry can around to actually get the water with? (the one provided with the kit will have a hole in it) Will farmers have a way to loft the jerry can enough to get water flowing? (probably - most will have a chair or something similar)

I don't have the field intuition yet to feel my way through these questions, but I'm glad to be enjoying the details. This week we roll out with a pilot location, so more to come.

Check out my sister's paintings! Here's the one that I had above my bed (she's holding onto it for me until I get back to the States.)

My first field visit was last Tuesday, to the Chola site. Jake (expat staff), Andrew, Moses (Kenyan staff) and I visited five farmers and handed out logbooks for them to record some of what they eat and buy. Limited trial to test the logbook format before we roll it out for real. We left the house before 9 and got back a little after 12.

The first surprise for me about Bungoma wasn't the size, it was the density. The main roads are a constant stream of bikes, trucks, and matatus (overstuffed minibuses.) Shops, markets and restaurants are crowded full. I figured boredom would be a problem, peace and quiet wouldn't. Guess again.

The second surprise came when Jake and I were walking between houses and he mentioned that a lot of our farmers don't do much during the day. I'd have expected people experiencing chronic hunger and the resulting health problems and infant mortality to be working themselves to the bone.

Then I remembered a line from the One Acre reference materials; paraphrased, "our farmers are not used to being rewarded for their effort." They lack capital for quality inputs (seed, fertilizer.) They lack the expertise to plant and harvest most effectively. And it's difficult for them to get their outputs to an interested buyer.

Those three basic things are what we offer to farmers, and are the reason One Acre Fund exists. And here's the third surprise: One Acre is close to sustainability. In fact, at current maize prices - which are, however, unusually high - farmers are paying back enough to cover our operational costs and then some.

Alright, there was a fourth surprise: field work is fun. Visiting farmers is better than frowning at a laptop. Speaking of ...

Landed in Nairobi the night of the 13th. Up early the next morning for a bumpy eight-hour ride west to Eldoret; two hours by taxi later and I'm getting picked up in Bungoma by another expat staffer. Hellos, a trip to the grocery store, some unpacking, and by 6pm I'm crashing in my bed under a mosquito net.

We live in a little compound with three houses near the center of town; One Acre's been growing, so there's now another house just down the street. Don't let "compound" confuse you: it's nothing elaborate, there's barbed wire on one side but this is not your typical expat bunker. There is a dual-tank reserve water system that I spent some time learning about today. Playing house ...

Looking forward to later this afternoon when I find out what kinds of projects Andrew (founder) and Veronica (current Director of Program Innovation) have in mind for my first three months.

View Larger Map

The blue marker is a town called Bungoma.

Just got back from the desert, am now spending a week in Minnesota with family. On September 12th I take a plane to Nairobi, followed by a bus to a town called Bungoma, to start a new job with One Acre Fund. A little busy until then.

Last week Kristy and I headed into Gerlach to make a water run, in a big Budget truck loaded with empty 55-gallon drums in back. We stopped at Sylvia's place, which has a potable water hose right next to the tent where she sells sunscreen, beef jerky and blinky lights. Sylvia also has a ranch further out, where she keeps livestock and has a license to hunt mountain lions.

Kristy, innocently: "and what do you do with the mountain lions? Catch them and release them?"

Sylvia enunciated her reply clearly: "I shoot 'em and kill 'em dead."

This discussion in praise of idleness prompted me to think about how the Greeks (according to Hannah Arendt) separated their activities into two parts, labor and work. Labor is those activities required to support life: getting food, shelter, etc. Work is basically political activity: arguing, voting, taking part in the life of the city.

I've struggled myself with how to achieve deep alignment between my values and my work, with the assumption that it's best to do one thing that is simultaneously my job, my passion and my push toward a better world. Having a corporate job that pays, and doing non-profits on the side, looks like a lesser alternative.

But the Greeks had an entirely different starting point. For them, taking money for political activity would cheapen and degrade the experience, and put your motives under suspicion. The basis of a political life is the freedom to reason and act apart from pure self-interest. So they serenely and proudly built on the very separation that I've been wondering how to eliminate.

Burning Man was awesome, and you should go.

The sun is out.

There's a rock paper scissors tournament downtown this weekend.

The beat just dropped in the track I'm listening to.

75% of my MySpace Top 8 Friends are beer.

I'm now spending a few days a week working for a company in the Flynt Building. On my floor is a mysterious room.

There is nothing good about this month. It's too cold. There's no sun. The holidays are over. If January was a gift you'd return it. Shit, all the smart animals skip this part of the year completely while still burning fat.

(Yeah so I have problems with February too. I'll keep beating on this topic until we get some changes around here. Like, pool party weather. Or some sort of yearly government-subsidised migration to the southern hemisphere. No justice, no peace.)

Six days, motherfuckers!

Even the crucial Lego analogy!

So I'm in DC for a while. I forgot one very important thing in my car, on the roof of a parking structure near LAX, inside a glass-steel bubble, under a 24-hour heat-cool cycle. God, I am bereft.

• b&w unloading cargo ship
• barrel wall
• a million starlings
• not a photo but great
• ground zero

• amazon wishlist
• hm, should i read the Dark Is Rising series again, or will it disappoint me?
• the art of looking sideways
• book on the underground railroad
• Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles
• the unconsoled, ishiguro
• a dream of wessex, priest

This is Lukas Bergstrom's personal site and weblog. Read more about me here. New posts on an irregular schedule. Mostly, it's my personal bookmarks and annotations, with some consideration afforded to visitors. I also use it to post dj sets. You can email me at lukasb@gmail.com.

see also:
me on twitter
what i've been listening to
pictures i've taken


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