Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I’m not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: While PG’s essays on startups are his most influential works, his more abstract writings are actually more incisive. They deserve a much wider readership.

• TrevorBurnham.com / @TrevorBurnham for personal and business matters
• Iterative.ly / @Iteratively for software development
• Pointed.ly / @Pointedly for deeper thoughts

Now you need only follow the aspect(s) of me that interest you most. I’ve posted one essay to Pointed.ly, The Human Trace, which should give you the flavor of it. I’d like to think of the new site as the first draft of a book I might write one day, after I’ve become less excited about making great software.

(P.S. The notion of referring to my three blogs as “The Trilogy” is taken from Jeff Atwood, who wisely split up Stack Overflow.)

Now, I’m not much of a gamer these days. But Portal may well be the greatest game of all time, a pure pleasure and a challenge. Its only flaw is that it’s too short, taking a mere four hours to play through. It’s to Valve’s credit that they didn’t add any filler just to extend the playing time, as is de rigueur in the game industry. The bar for Portal 2 has been set very, very high.

I had an unpleasant experience with Comcast today. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that Comcast offers its customers a world in which every precious thread in the fabric of reality is as indeterminate as Schrödinger’s Cat. My phone number is and isn’t the number my account is under. My credit card number is and isn’t valid. The Russell set exists.

But here’s the thing that really irks me: Before connecting me to a human being (after 15 minutes of menu navigation), the system asked if I’d be willing to give my feedback on my support experience. God yes, I thought, let me tell you how to fix this! 30 minutes later, an automated system called me and asked exactly three questions:

1. Was your issue resolved today? (Yes or no.)
2. How pleasant was your experience with the customer support representative? (1–5 scale)
3. How much effort did this support call take? (1–5 scale)

And then: Thank you! *click* But… but… Comcast, you have so much you could learn from me. I volunteered to talk to you! I tweeted @ComcastCares, but receive no response. Do you really care so little? I realize that your monopoly seems cozy now, but once I have a 4G Verizon wi-fi box, will I really need to buy cable from a company that evidently relishes my suffering? And one final question: In that e-mail you sent me, asking me to call you about an unspecified account issue, was it really necessary to precede your number with So that we may provide you with exceptional customer service…? The statement is technically accurate (exceptional in the sense of “unusual; not typical,” or—also from the New Oxford American Dictionary—“mentally or physically disabled so as to require special schooling”), but you need to learn to manage expectations.

I’m not a cynical or anti-corporate person. Actually, I had a very pleasant experience with American Express yesterday. (Some fiend had gotten my card number and used it to buy a bunch of songs on iTunes; a friendly customer support person called me to report the fraud.) It’s a cliché to say that Comcast is an evil corporation, and I don’t even like the phrase “evil corporation.” But Comcast is the Dark Prince of Corporations.

Now my focus is moving back to the web, but I’ve moved on. Social bookmarking is not on the agenda. Which means it’s time to salvage what I can from Quocial. Therefore, I’m auctioning the Quocial.com domain, as well as some related domains and the @Quocial handle on Twitter. They’re all available as a bundle on Flippa. Here’s the link.

By bidding, you’re not just getting your hands on a great domain (one of only a handful of pronounceable 2-syllable .coms left). You’re also supporting my next endeavor, a webapp that promises to make science more collaborative, more democratic, and more fun. Please spread the word.

I got my iPad in the mail today. Like so many other hapless nerds, I ordered it without any clear conception of what I’m going to use it for. I already have an iPhone and a MacBook; where does this thing fit in? At the same time, I get the sense that I’ll be inevitably developing software (or at least webapps) for the thing in the not-too-distant future, so I might as well get used to it now.

My first reaction was: Wow, this thing’s fast. Application switching is nearly instantaneous, and web browsing is as smooth as on any computer. I’m crossing my fingers that the next iPhone will offer a similar level of zippiness.

Second reaction: Typing is a bitch. Worse than on the iPhone, even. Slow and uncomfortable. Your thumbs can’t reach the center of the screen; this is a weird design flaw, since it makes it virtually impossible to type on the tablet unless it’s on some kind of surface. What the iPad really needs is a split keyboard. That goes for both landscape and portrait mode.

But those things aren’t so important. The really important thing is: Can I read comfortably on it? The answer is, thankfully, yes. In my highly scientific tests (reading a couple of chapters of Wolf Hall in bed), the 1024x768 screen has just enough DPI for smooth reading. (I found that the Cochin font worked best in iBooks, though the default Palatino is nice as well.) Text is way sharper on my laptop screen, but my laptop screen can’t be detached from the rest of the device and held still over my head, now can it? I’d always assumed, like many folks, that extended reading on a computer is uncomfortable because the screen is backlit. Let me tell you, I’ve used a Kindle and I’ve used an iPad, and the two seem to bejust about equally easy on the eyes. Print still reigns supreme—high DPI, low weight (hardcovers excluded)—but the iPad comes in a close second, and the experience is only going to get better in the next few years. E-ink is doomed.

The iPad has other uses that have gotten a lot of press: You can challenge your iPhone-wielding friends to Scrabble! Fight zombies with the kids! Enrage your cat! But reading is its killer app. And while iBooks, the Kindle app, and the various PDF readers are slick, the bulk of that reading is going to take place on the web.

Remember how cool it was when the iPhone brought the web to your pocket? Well, the iPad is bringing the web to your bed, sofa, or wherever else you like to settle in cozily. I’ve been reading the web version of Pro Git, and it’s fantastic. Reading a long, technical book on a computer is a pain, even with a crisp PDF on a top-of-the-line display. The hype is right: The iPad will change the way we consume content on the web. My prediction is that long-form content on the web is going to take off. The iPad might just be the rare piece of sexy technology that actually lengthens our collective attention spans.

[P.S. I feel some obligation to weigh in on the Flash debate: I really wish the iPad supported Flash. It’s an idle wish at this point—Apple’s made up its mind—but it’s not the right choice for their customers.]

From now on, this blog’s focus is going to be more personal. More abstract thoughts unrelated to programming will be piped to a third blog, set to debut next week.

I love Sass, the stylesheet-generating cousin of Haml. It’s so much syntactically sweeter than CSS, it lets you define variables and mixins like this handy border-radius shortcut, and it works seamlessly in Rails. And Sass 3 is the best version yet, for a number of reasons. Meanwhile, if you’re creating a new Rails project, the Creator Himself has proclaimed that you should be doing it with Rails 3.

But right now, the installation instructions for this lethal combination don’t exactly parse. So here’s what you need to do:

1. Install the latest Rails (instructions here)
2. Install the latest Haml/Sass distribution: gem install haml --pre. (If you get an error, try updating RubyGems: gem update --system.)
3. Run haml -v and note the version number. Mine is 3.0.0.beta.3 (delightfully code-named “Classy Cassidy.”)
4. Create a Rails project, e.g. with rails ~/MyProject
5. Open up Gemfile in the project root and add the line gem 'haml', '3.0.0.beta.3', substituting whatever the version number was in step 3.

And that’s it! Running haml --rails ~/MyProject appears to be harmless but unnecessary. If I’m wrong about that, someone please let me know.

Related: If you want to get Ruby 1.9 installed on your Mac, I strongly urge you to use Homebrew. If you’re curious about how to set Rubygems so that you don’t have to sudo it, follow the instructions at this page under the heading “Fixing Rubygems.

Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

From “Keep Your Identity Small.” Paul Graham deserves a broader audience than the startup tribe that frequents his site. It’s a pity that no one reads “essays” anymore.

The danger with grad school is that you don’t see the scary part upfront. PhD programs start out as college part 2, with several years of classes. So by the time you face the horror of writing a dissertation, you’re already several years in. If you quit now, you’ll be a grad-school dropout, and you probably won’t like that idea. When Robert got kicked out of grad school for writing the Internet worm of 1988, I envied him enormously for finding a way out without the stigma of failure.

On the whole, grad school is probably better than most alternatives. You meet a lot of smart people, and your glum procrastination will at least be a powerful common bond. And of course you have a PhD at the end. I forgot about that. I suppose that’s worth something.

From Paul Graham’s essay “Undergraduation.” The whole thing is worth reading.