Various geek ideas, maybe startup ideas. Some are ones I’m thinking about, and some are ones I wish you would think about. Solve the Sybil Attack problem. An online game bans a player for being a jerk, but the person creates new “sockpuppet” accounts and keeps being a jerk. It’s a hard problem to solve because it pits decentralization, privacy, and scalability against each other. Most solutions I’ve seen favor scalability over decentralization and privacy.

I’d like to start long-form writing more often. My motivation is to become a clear thinker. I believe that clear writing requires clear thinking, and that practicing writing is the same as practicing thinking. I used to be a good writer and a reasonably clear thinker, but today I wouldn’t describe myself that way. What changed? One difference is that my day-to-day writing doesn’t require as much deep thought as it used to.

While throwing out old storage boxes this weekend, I discovered my old Power Macintosh 6100, packed up in 1997. To use eBay terminology, it was in vintage condition. It had the mouse, keyboard, VGA monitor adapter, power cord, and a few floppy disks. There was no excuse not to plug it in and see what happened. So that’s what I did. The chimes played and the smiling Mac appeared on the screen.

Anyone who’s worked with me for more than four hours knows that when it comes to efficient use of time at the office, I have the soul of an 80-year-old curmudgeon. I take time to write up documentation with executive summaries, working hyperlinks, sample code, and FAQs, and in exchange I expect people to read it. But all too often the pattern goes like this: Imminent Target Of Rage: Hey Mike, so I saw we have a new schema for brillig, and the slithy toves need to gyre and gimble in the wabe, and anyway, I saw you sent out something about how to do this…

[originally posted in 2007] Last night, we were reminiscing about “go-getters,” or more accurately, people we’d known in the past who weren’t go-getters. By this I mean people who seemed to be waiting for good things to happen to them, rather than picking goals and working to achieve them. Before descending too far into self-congratulation, I made a mental list of what I considered to be the important good decisions in my life.

My name is Mike Tsao. I live in California. This is me on LinkedIn.

[Editor’s note from the future: the correct date on this post is September 21, 2005. There is a bug or design flaw in the Hugo blogging utility, or the theme I’m using, that doesn’t handle old dates.] California natives need a leap of faith to survive as pedestrians in New York. The first challenge we face is distance. People in Manhattan – normal people just like you and me – might walk a full mile to get from Point A to Point B, where neither Point A nor Point B is on a nature trail, or on a treadmill at the gym, or the spot in the mall where we forgot our car was parked.