Read that headline carefully. Note that I didn’t say everyone should start calling themselves artists and try to sell their paintings for thousands of dollars. I do, however, think the exercise of making a painting is a good one for all human beings.

Painting has been around almost as long as hunting and gathering, and there are very few activities that are so innate to our species. Resolving a painting is a puzzle, a maze, a riddle, a quest, all that. It is a process requiring a billion decisions. Want to try a great game? Put down that electronic device and pick up a brush. Get in touch with your human part. Even Michael Jackson’s former pet chimp, Bubbles, is doing it. Elephants do it. It’s a genus thing.

Getting started, the gathering part

You are going to need some paint, some instruments to paint with, and an object to paint on. Got a $100 bucks? That should be enough to get you started.
First off, don’t use really crappy paint. It is not impossible, but it is significantly harder to make a good painting with student grade paint. Get a set with eight to ten colors. This will cost you 35-50 bucks. Here’s one.
(Note: I’m spreading the links around between Blick, Utrecht, Amazon, and Cheap Joes. All are good options, as is Mom and Pop’s down the street. Look for sales.)
Next, get some brushes. Brushes can be crazy expensive. You don’t need fancy sable brushes to get started, but you shouldn’t get kid stuff either. Get a decent synthetic set with a variety of shapes: 20 – 30 bucks. I like long handles because they can also be used to kill vampires.
Get something to paint on. Canvas works. Do you have your own woodshop and like to make things ten times more complicated than they need to be? No, then don’t stretch your own canvas. There are some great options at the store. Get a few canvasses so you can make mistakes. One of my former instructors told me that you always make your best paintings on shitty canvasses, and I have found that to be true wisdom.
Rig up an easel. You can paint on a tabletop or on the floor, but I think it is really important to learn how to paint from a vertical position. If you have the option, hanging a canvas on the wall and working from there is preferable to working horizontally on a table. There are Easels that cost as much as a ‘04 Lexus ES300. You don’t need that one. Start out with a $20 tabletop easel. If you have more room and this pursuit is going to be lasting, get a real easel. Later on you can store it with the treadmill.
One more thing. You will also need a palette and a cup. Paper towels and newspaper may also be useful. For a palette I recommend a sturdy, disposable, plastic plate. Anything non-porous and solid will do. Glass, marble, old electronics, sealed cardboard, or even another painting will work as a palette. For a cup use something substantial enough in size and stable enough in shape to hold brushes. Old soup cans work. So do plastic beer cups. I have even sawed off the top of a Gatorade bottle and used that. This cup will hold dirty paint water. Choose a cup that you will never want to drink out of again. You don’t want to drink dirty paint water.

Getting started, the hunting part

Let’s paint. If you are painting on the counter with a tabletop easel, put some newspaper or something else down so you don’t ruin the counter, you idiot. Also, take off that expensive suit. Next, put the blank canvas on the easel, raise it to a comfortable height, and take in the intimidating blankness of it all.
Now what? Well you haven’t finished setting up yet. You are going to have to find a place to set some stuff down. Find a little side table, or a stool, if you aren’t already working from a table, and put it on the right or left side of the canvas, depending on your dominant hand. Now, go fill the cup 72% of the way with water and set it on your table. Also find some space for your palette and some tubes of paint. Take out those brushes and drop two of them, bristles first, into the water.
You are ready to paint.

A few things…

Today I made intermission public. As I mentioned in my post about mysql_role_swap we’ve been working hard to limit / eliminate the impact our operations maintenance tasks have on our customer’s experience.

A few people noticed the /tmp/hold “leftover” in mysql_role_swap script. intermission is a product of that early exploration with coordinating database maintenance with request pausing in the web application tier. I’ve done a good bit of non production testing with intermission, but only limited production testing.

Last Friday we used intermission with mysql_role_swap to move Writeboard’s database to a new server. We had a single user facing exception, and we think it was likely caused by something other than the maintenance. For Friday’s maintenance we enabled request pausing via intermission, ran mysql_role_swap, restarted the unicorn (rails) processes, and then unpaused the requests. Total maintenance time was just a few seconds!

When visitors come to our office, one of the first things they notice is how quiet it is. Naturally, one of the first questions they ask is “how do you keep it so quiet?”

My answer is “library rules.”

Everyone knows how to behave in a library. You keep quiet or whisper. You respect people’s personal space. You don’t interrupt people who are reading or working, learning or studying. And if you need to have a full-volume conversation, you hit a private room.

So if you want to keep things quiet at the office, treat it like a library. It works surprisingly well.

I was on In Beta a while ago, and we talked about the “guilt” that comes with maintaining open source projects. I feel both intensely passionate and exceptionally guilty with how I contribute to open source. I love getting patches into new projects, and the needs of existing projects are demanding.

An open source contributor doesn’t feel guilt as in a crime, but guilt as in time: What is best to spend your yours on? Steve Klabnik has a strategy for dealing with a limited amount of time:

The basic idea is this: you try to minimize the things that are bad, and maximize those that are good.

My strategy has built on Steve’s: minimize the guilt of open source, maximize the passion from open source. I’ve been thinking a lot about what creates passion, and what builds up guilt. It’s also worth considering what destroys passion, and what can tear down guilt.

Earlier this summer I spent an hour or so wandering through a gallery specializing in Navajo rugs. Actually, it was even more specialized that that. The collector, a curious guy named Jamie Ross, liked to collect Navajo rugs with English words, letters, or language woven into the designs.

I was intrigued by some of the designs so I asked him about the history of some of the pieces. Jamie is the kind of guy who turns a quick ten second question into a slow ten minute answer. That was fine by me, I had nowhere else to be.

He explained a lot of things. He talked about his fascination with letters and words and why he especially liked them when they showed up on Navajo rugs. He also talked a bit about crazy quilts, another one of his obsessions.

But there was one thing he said that really stuck with me. I asked him why a lot of the rugs seemed to have mistakes woven into the patterns. Obvious distortions in the patterns, stray lines, or a shape that was just a bit off compared to the other shapes in the piece.

He said there are many explanations. One popular one is that the Navajo intentionally weave mistakes into their rugs to remind them that man isn’t perfect. That sensibility can also be found in the Wabi-sabi art of Japan.

But he preferred another explanation. He said the mistakes weren’t intentional. What was intentional was the desire not to go back and fix them.

He said the Navajo saw mistakes as moments in time. And since you can’t change time, why try to change a mistake that already happened? The mistake is already woven into the fabric of time. It’s good to be reminded of it when you look back.

Further, he compared it to climbing a mountain. If you climb a mountain you are sure to have a few missteps along the way. But you keep going. You don’t stop and start over if you trip here or take the wrong path there. You keep going. You can’t remove that step. It happened, it’s part of the climb. And when the climb is done, you’ve finished. As long as you made it to the top, you don’t call the climb a mistake. Likewise, the Navajo don’t call a rug with some off stiches a mistake. If the rug is finished, it’s a successful rug. More importantly, a rug with a few off stitches is an honest rug.

Now, I don’t know if this is Jamie’s own personal intrepretation, or something other’s Navajo scholars (or Navajo themselves) can back up, but it doesn’t matter to me. I love the idea regardless.

Here are a few rugs from his collection: