Matthew Burton

I’m almost at my 1-year anniversary of working for myself. I think everyone who wants to do such a thing should be able to. So I’ve put together some thoughts on how I came to this point, and the challenges I’m facing.

First, I want to explain why I think self-employment is so crucial to happiness. I’ve learned that it’s not just about waking up when you want to and having as many vacation days as you like. It’s about spending your life—or at least, a third of it—pursuing your own curiosities instead of someone else’s. It means no office culture. It means you can pursue multiple tracks and avoid the ups and downs of any one industry, staying safe while your friends get laid off. It means you can navigate into other fields when you become bored with others. And when you wake up in the middle of the night with the stomach flu, there’s nothing more comforting than knowing that your boss will have no problem with you taking the day off.

How did this happen?

I wanted all of these things. I did it through work and luck: hard work put me in the position to get lucky.…

Scroll down for an update to this post, February 20

The Clinton campaign’s new strategy is to cast Obama as an orator, and nothing else. From today’s Times:

“Speeches don’t put food on the table,” Mrs. Clinton said at a General Motors plant in Warren, Ohio, on Thursday morning. “Speeches don’t fill up your tank, or fill your prescription, or do anything about that stack of bills that keeps you up at night.”

“My opponent gives speeches. I offer solutions.”

“It’s about whether you choose the power of solutions over the power of speeches.”

(That last quote is from Bill.)

Hogwash. I’ve been hearing this more and more lately: Obama is all talk, everything he says is vague, he never talks details, we don’t know what he offers…and on and on. Not only is it crap. The opposite is true: there is much more meat to Obama’s platform than Clinton’s, and I’ll prove it.

Now, before I begin, I want to say that I’m neither a Clinton fan nor an Obama fan (nor McCain, for that matter). My candidate dropped out long ago. Like that candidate, I worship facts and I despise catchy slogans that belie the truth. Vote for whomever you want.…

I love presenting, and I love critiquing other people’s presentations. I’m not Kawasaki or Conway, but I think I’m decent at it. Most of what I know is thanks to a two-week training course early in my government career, about four years ago. For 13 straight days, I watched a series of presenters stand up and make God-awful briefings. I kept myself awake by taking notes on their presentation styles. (Eventually, I ran out of criticisms, so I wrote down lyrics to Springsteen, The Who, Cream…) Therefore, most of the notes are on how NOT to give presentations. I’ve kept the notes in my desk since then. Here they are:

1. Only use PowerPoint if absolutely necessary. Never use slides as cue cards. People don’t want to see your own notes. It distracts the audience and draws attention from what you’re saying. If you talk and show me word-filled slides at the same time, I try to read the slides and listen to you simultaneously. I end up doing neither.
2. A slide deck full of bullet points is the hallmark of poor preparation and ignorance of the subject. If you really had a command of your subject, you wouldn’t need to read directly from your notes/slides.

…

I just hacked out my first piece of custom MediaWiki interface: adding custom tabs next to the standard “Article,” “Edit,” “Discussion,” etc. tabs. I was surprised that there was no existing documentation on how to do this. So I decided to write my own for the benefit of other amatuers like me. Here’s how you can do it:

1) Before starting, you have to be working from a skin that is built on SkinTemplate.php. If you aren’t sure, then you probably are. (I’m sure there are ways to add custom tabs to other skins, but I don’t know how.)

2) Create a new custom namespace. This is what will come before the colon in the new page’s address, eg “yourdomain.com/wiki/NewNamespace:Pagename”. (NOTE, 5/15/2008: The instructions for this step are based on an old version of MediaWiki (1.7). Rich points out in Comments that for versions back to at least 1.12, you should follow the official instructions here.)

To do this, open the LocalSettings.php file in your wiki’s directory. Around Line 150 or so, you’ll see some code like this:

$wgNamespacesWithSubpages = array(
NS_TALK           => true,
NS_USER           => true,

Right above that, add the line

$wgExtraNamespaces = array(100 => "New_namespace");

replacing New_namespace with your own custom name.…