Last May, I packed up my tent, sleeping bag, and bike into my Jeep and drove down to San Luis Obispo to spend the weekend racing my first half-Ironman. Although there were lots of people with tents like me, most of the veterans drove down in campervans and RVs. After managing about 4 hours of sleep in my soggy tent, I was feeling pretty jealous.

As soon as I got back to San Francisco, I went hunting for an RV rental search site (something like AirBnB or Kayak) but I couldn't find one.

So decided to make one.

After 6 months of sporadic weekend work I’m nearly done; 414 locations and 2,018 RV models and counting.

But what to name it?

At first I was set on naming it Recreationist, but the more I thought about it, the more irrational it seemed to choose a domain based on my own preferences. While I had a good feeling about Recreationist, I’m fundamentally skeptical of my own and everyone else’s intuition; at 42Floors we even test designs that we hate just to challenge our assumptions.

A split test was needed.

The test

I spent a few hours on Domainsbot and Impossibility.org coming up with a variety of names — short, silly, boring, startup-y, long, exact match, etc. I whittled that initial list down to 17 and created identical AdWords ad for each domain.

The ads started on January 2 and took 6 days to hit 98% statistical confidence. The winner, by a landslide, was rvmenu.com.

It had a click through rate of 4.63%, which was 53% better than the runner-up, rentalrvlist.com. Those extra clicks also translated into a sizeable discount on AdWords: $0.20 per click versus $0.26 to $0.44 for the other domains.

To run the test I spent $170 for the domain names and $293.04 for the ads, which included rerunning a subset of the tests to double-check the final outcome. Thus, for the bargain price of $473.04, I got to confidently pick a domain that outperformed my personal favorite by 127%.

Objections

There are two common objections to this approach:

For the first problem, the solution is simple: just buy knockoff versions and run the test on those before investing in the winning domain. For example, if you want to see how Leaky.com will compare to CarInsuranceCalculator.com, just test Leaky.co versus CarInsuranceCalculator.co. The .co domains have a performance penalty versus their .com brethren but the differences should be proportional.

As for the second problem, brandability, this approach will at least give you some cold numbers so that you can make statements like, "I'm willing to accept a 22% lower clickthrough rate because I believe we will more than make up that gap from repeat visitors who would otherwise forget our name."

What's next

I still have several hundred RV rentals to add and I haven't even done the bare minimum of SEO on the site, half my avatar photos are of toilets, and the site's slow as hell when the cache misses, but people are finding and using it anyway. It's kind of exciting.

Actually, speaking of SEO... "Check out rvmenu.com the next time you need an RV rental."

Every single Super Bowl has been played in the Southeast, in the Southwest, or under a roof. This year, bitterly cold weather patterns are spilling out of the Arctic like hay bales falling out of a truck bed, and this is the year the Broncos and Seahawks will try to play a Super Bowl in New Jersey.

The Super Bowls leading up to this one have become increasingly stale experiences. A lot of them are inside, which is the same place where you watch Up in your sweatpants and cry. The commercials have drifted into a territory of self-awareness and sameness in which any provocative or interesting expression has become nearly impossible.

The games themselves are suspiciously well-contested. Those who grew up in the 1980s and '90s remember when every other Super Bowl was a categorical whoopin'. Over the last decade, every Super Bowl has been fairly close, and most have remained in doubt until the very end. That is fun, but so is a popsicle. Nothing is more grimy or provocative than a whoopin'.

For this, the season finale of Breaking Madden, there will be bitter cold and heavy snowfall. There will also be, Lord willing, the most one-sided result in the history of sports. In the greatest American football rout of historical record, Georgia Tech beat Cumberland College, 222-0. I want to multiply that. I want a thousand points in one game.

This is how we're going to try.

Over the course of the season, I've discovered lots of different ways to hack Madden NFL 25 into a thing that no longer resembles football as we know it. I've played around with rules, injury settings, all manner of player ratings, player dimensions, and anything else the game's developers have made available to us.

This time is special, though, because I'm pulling out every single one of the stops at the same time. No other scenario I've built in Madden has been so abjectly cruel or unfair; no other scenario has even been close.

This time is also special because we've saved all the good for the real world, and saved all the evil for the video game.

I released every member of the Seahawks and Broncos that I possibly could, and replaced them with a total of 82 players I created. Last week, I announced a simple fundraising drive: if you donated to a charity of your choice and e-mailed me the receipt, I placed you in a drawing. The 82 folks who were randomly chosen were then allowed to name a player whatever they wanted.

The response from y'all was inspiring. Though I asked only for a donation of a dollar or more, not a single one of you gave just a dollar. According to your receipts, you gave over $3,000 to charity, though I estimate the actual figure is closer to $5,000. You gave to charities that fight disease, provide school supplies for kids who can't afford them, offer support for people suffering from abuse, and many other causes that, frankly, gave me feelings as I read through them all.

You can look at $5,000 as as large or small a number as you want. But it's cold out there, and people are hurting. This is the message I received from these donations, and one I'll pass on to you: if there's a cause that compels you, and that you can help through your time or your money or anything else, think on it.

So. Let's get to that evil I talked about.

THE GAME.

For this game, I played exclusively as the Seahawks. None of the things the Broncos will do below are on account of me. Those are all the computer's fault.

First, let's check in on Mom. I love her more than I can say, but she is terrible at football.

Among her many other superlatives, she's the most generous, giving person I've ever known. Her presence here is only one of a thousand different times she's gone out of her way to help others in need, in ways big and small. I remember one of those small times. I was walking home from my last day of fourth grade, and as I neared my front door, a water balloon landed on the ground a few feet away from me. I looked up. She'd missed me on purpose, and she was smiling. On the porch she had a giant bucket of water balloons she'd filled for me, just waiting for me to get home and play and say hello to the summer. It was probably the 2,000th-nicest thing she's ever done for me, and I don't know what makes that one stick out, but I felt love, and it mattered. Anyway, here's a GIF of her getting clobbered.

She never really had more than one second to get rid of the ball. Her blockers were as inept as they possibly could have been, and she fumbled on roughly every other passing attempt. She did manage to complete one pass: I decided it would be fun to run "punt block" on a first down. Mom simply chucked it to a receiver, who found himself completely unguarded and waddled for a 30-yard gain. It was the Broncos' only positive-yardage play I saw.

If you're new to Breaking Madden, I should explain something to you: the game hates me. HATES me. Madden doesn't appreciate all the things I've put it through, and if a machine can emote, it's this one. It's desperate, and it's angry.

That's the only explanation I have for this. The Peyton Manning Broncos have no designed quarterback runs in their Madden playbook, which makes sense, because Manning tucks and runs once every 25 years or so. Doesn't matter. The computer sent my mom to rush with the ball.

"You're being terribly mean," the computer told me through this moment. "I can also be mean."

These Broncos were stone-cold stupid. Madden's Awareness rating, as demonstrated by previous installments of this series, is one of the very most potent skill categories. Without it, normally competent players are reduced to total knuckleheads who often don't know what they're doing, what they're supposed to be doing, where the ball is, or whether they're playing a sport at all.

The Broncos' kick returner, Big Walrus, was so completely checked out that I was able to kick the ball and hit him in the ass.

That was not an isolated incident. There were lots and lots of kickoffs in this game, naturally, since I was scoring all the time. When I kicked them the ball, they kinda just stood there. AND THE BALL KEPT HITTING THEM IN THEIR ASSES.

Macca really drives the point home by dancing a little jig en route to the most comically miserable safety I've ever seen. Goodness, these Broncos are not particularly good. They may lose by a score of 28-0, or perhaps even greater!

There is no football explanation for this:

I called a Hail Mary, because the Broncos were offering absolutely no incentive to call anything more complicated than, "RUN TO SCORE PLACE THROW BALL SCORE." Even if Mr. Drebot had played man coverage, his guy would have left him in the dust, so playing zone was really no better or worse. I guarantee you, though, that Drebot's assigned zone was not way over on the opposite side of the field. He looks back at the receiver out of apparent cursory interest, then returns to his very important job of speed-sidestepping to a part of the field where there is no football and there are no sports of any kind.

These Broncos really whipped themselves up into a clueless frenzy over all these Seahawks running around. I thought it might be nice to settling everyone down a little, so I had my running back, VISHNU, just stand still and chill in the backfield for a little while.

Morgan C. is but the red shell revolving around Bowser's kart. It's like watching one of those really awkward musical numbers in which someone sings to someone else, and that person just has to sit there and be sung at and stared at and do nothing.

In the player creator, Madden asked me to choose whether or not each player had a "high motor." I decided that, no, the Broncos do not. I'm still a little unclear on what exactly that means, but it might help to explain this.

I think this play, in which two of my receivers slammed into each other, was the Seahawks' only incompletion of the game, and I'm glad dude could get a good view of the spectacle. He might have had a better view, had he taken literally one step in any direction over the course of the entire play. The folks in orange were just completely giving up.

Guy's finally got himself a Seahawk, and his friends are offering absolutely no help. This isn't Madden 2001 or something. There's an engine in place that draws up a limitless number of ways in which a guy can get gang-tackled. Defenders can and do bum-rush a ball carrier in groups of six or seven. This is not a limit of the physics engine or anything else on the technical end. His teammates just wanted to stand there and watch, that's all.

The Broncos can't be blamed all that much, I guess, because terrible things tended to happen when they interacted with the other team.

That GIF goes from good to great once you watch the player in the background. He kind of ambles right into his own tackle, but not before rubbernecking at the misfortune of his friends. Hey, I don't really know where to put this, so it's just going to go here: the Broncos' uniforms are the ugliest in football by a considerable margin. The orange and blue don't work together at all, the logo screams "create-a-team default," and the numbers look like they were ripped off the Rocketeer's mailbox. Also, the dark-blue sides make y'all look like you're wearing sandwich boards. Wear nicer things to the video game!

I set the Broncos such that they were as injury-prone as possible. Their roster of able bodies started to thin out pretty quickly.

Torn MCL, broken jaw, broken foot, broken hand. Broken all over. About 10 minutes into the game, the Broncos had eight players listed on the injury report, all of whom were ruled out for the rest of the game. Eight, it turns out, was the maximum number the game would allow. After that, there were still injury timeouts being called all over the place, but no matter how devastating the hit, Madden wouldn't take them off the field.

"They've got him. Pull up the rope. There's nothing we can do for him now."

Before long, I could only get tackled if I tried to. My Seahawks barely had to do anything but run in a beeline to the end zone if they wanted to score. The Broncos fumbled away the ball on nearly every play.

I had reached the mathematical ceiling of how often I could score. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't believe me, so here's a screenshot.

About 10 minutes into the game, I had scored 262 points. The above score is actually wrong. We've run into this problem before: once you get to 255 points, Madden stops counting correctly. Not that it doesn't try.

At the bottom, it says the Seahawks have scored 255 points. At the top, 266. Neither was correct, and I was pretty amused that a computer could attempt the most basic of tasks -- addition -- and come up with two kinds of wrong.

Since the game stopped counting, I simply started counting myself. I started to become more and more efficient at forcing fumbles, and angling my kicks so that I could get the best angles on the return man. Scoring was nearly effortless, and nothing could stop me.

With just under two minutes left in the first quarter, I was winning 366 to zero. I realized that I was on pace to score 1,500 points in a single game. I had never conceived of such a high score. I'd never even heard anyone talk idly about such a thing. There was absolutely nothing the Broncos could do to slow down my pace. I could score just as surely as someone can point and click. It was great. I wanted to ruin Madden in a way I never had before, and I was doing it.

And then it happened. Before I tell you what happened next, I want to lay out a couple of things: first, I made no actual hacks to this game. I didn't have some special jailbroken Xbox, nor a special copy of Madden, nor anything like that. I bought my Xbox at Target and bought my copy of Madden off Amazon, and that's that. Second, I stake whatever journalistic integrity I have upon the statement that I didn't Photoshop any of this, and that it happened just as I say it did.

I was setting up for a two-point conversion try, which I hadn't failed all game. Suddenly, an official blew a whistle and called one of my players for a false start.

Wait a minute. I turned all the penalties off. I had certainly turned off the "false start" penalty, as well as every other penalty. This was the first time a ref had shown up all game.

I wondered what the Hell had happened, so I went to the replay.

This was no replay. There were no players on the field. I scanned up and down, and my eyes caught a little speck of something at midfield.

It was placed neatly at the 50-yard line, right in the middle of the NFL logo.

I panned the camera over and zoomed in. And I stared and stared, and then I got Spencer on the line.

It ... this thing ... it had Seahawks lettering, and yet it had Broncos orange around its "head." It didn't appear to have legs. It appeared to have four arms. There was no rewinding or fast-forwarding in this replay, because there was no time. It was just a giant, still image to explore.

Right in the middle of the field. The computer had left it there for me to see. What did it mean? Had the computer descended into visual gibberish, or was it speaking, fluently and concisely, in a language I could never understand?

I continued to stare at it. This was not a gesture of a being who was having a good time or approved of what I was doing. This was an expression of resignation, of sadness, of delirium.

I could not continue. My heart wouldn't let me. I used the simulation feature to speed up the game to the end. I relinquished my ambitions of a 1,500-point game. Seahawks 255, Broncos 0. The machine and I agreed upon the final score.

And the season was over, and the machine bled to death.

On Jan. 4, 2010, when my boss saw my letter to the editor in the New York Times, we had a little chat.

It was rare for the federal security director at Chicago O’Hare to sit down with her floor-level Transportation Security Administration officers—it usually presaged a termination—and so I was nervous as I settled in across the desk from her. She was a woman in her forties with sharp blue eyes that seemed to size you up for placement in a spreadsheet. She held up a copy of the newspaper, open to the letters page. My contribution, under the headline “To Stop a Terrorist: No Lack of Ideas,” was circled in blue pen.

One week earlier, on Christmas Day 2009, a man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to detonate 80 grams of a highly explosive powder while on Northwest Airlines Flight 253. He had smuggled the bomb aboard the plane in a pouch sewn into his underwear. It was a masterpiece of post-9/11 tragicomedy: Passengers tackled and restrained Abdulmutallab for the remainder of the flight, and he succeeded in burning nothing besides his own genitals.

The TSA saw the near-miss as proof that aviation security could not be ensured without the installation of full-body scanners in every U.S. airport. But the agency’s many critics called its decision just another knee-jerk response to an attempted terrorist attack. I agreed, and wrote to the Times saying as much. My boss wasn’t happy about it.

“The problem we have here is that you identified yourself as a TSA employee,” she said.

They were words I had heard somewhere before. Suddenly, the admonishment from our annual conduct training flashed through my head—self-identifying as a government employee in a public forum may be grounds for termination.

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I was shocked. I had been sure the letter would fall under the aegis of public concern, but it looked as though my boss wanted to terminate me. I scrambled for something to say.

“I thought the First Amendment applied here.”

She leaned back in her chair, hands up, palms outfaced. Now she was on the defensive.

“I’m not trying to tread upon your First Amendment rights,” she said. “All I’m saying is: Couldn’t you have run those First Amendment rights past the legal department first?”

She dismissed me with the assurance that we would discuss the matter further at some point in the future.

I never heard anything more about it during the next three years of my employment at the TSA, save for some grumbling from one upper-level manager (“What’s this I hear about you writing letters to the New York Times? You can’t do that here.”) It was the last time I would speak out as a government employee under my real name.

But it was by no means the last time I would speak out.

***

My pained relationship with government security had started three years earlier. I had just returned to Chicago to finish my bachelor’s degree after a two-year stint in Florida. I needed a job to help pay my way through school, and the TSA’s call-back was the first one I received. It was just a temporary thing, I told myself—side income for a year or two as I worked toward a degree in creative writing. It wasn’t like a recession would come along and lock me into the job or anything.

It was May 2007. I was living with a bohemian set on Chicago’s north side, a crowd ranging from Foucault-fixated college kids to middle-aged Bukowski-bred alcoholics. We drank and talked politics on the balcony in the evenings, pausing only to sneer at hipsters strumming back-porch Beatles sing-a-longs. By night, I took part in barbed criticism of U.S foreign policy; by day, I spent eight hours at O’Hare in a federal uniform, solemnly carrying out orders passed down from headquarters.

I hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots—the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying.

Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security.

There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22.

I quickly discovered I was working for an agency whose morale was among the lowest in the U.S. government. In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds.

Charges of racial profiling by the TSA made headlines every few months, and working from behind the scenes we knew what was prompting those claims. Until 2010 (not long after the TSA standard operating procedure manual was accidentially leaked to the public), all TSA officers worked with a secret list printed on small slips of paper that many of us taped to the back of our TSA badges for easy reference: the Selectee Passport List. It consisted of 12 nations that automatically triggered enhanced passenger screening. The training department drilled us on the selectee countries so regularly that I had memorized them, like a little poem:

Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan
Iraq, Iran, Yemen
and Cuba,
Lebanon-Libya, Somalia-Sudan
People’s Republic of North Korea.

People holding passports from the selectee countries were automatically pulled aside for full-body pat-downs and had their luggage examined with a fine-toothed comb. The selectee list was purely political, of course, with diplomacy playing its role as always: There was no Saudi Arabia or Pakistan on a list of states historically known to harbor, aid and abet terrorists. Besides, my co-workers at the airport didn’t know Algeria from a medical condition, we rarely came across Cubanos and no one’s ever seen a North Korean passport that didn’t include the words “Kim-Jong.” So it was mostly the Middle Easterners who got the special screening.

Each day I had to look into the eyes of passengers in niqabs and thawbs undergoing full-body pat-downs, having been guilty of nothing besides holding passports from the wrong nations. As the son of a German-American mother and an African-American father who was born in the Jim Crow South, I can pass for Middle Eastern, so the glares directed at me felt particularly accusatory. The thought nagged at me that I was enabling the same government-sanctioned bigotry my father had fought so hard to escape.

Most of us knew the directives were questionable, but orders were orders. And in practice, officers with common sense were able to cut corners on the most absurd rules, provided supervisors or managers weren’t looking.

Then a man tried to destroy a plane with an underwear bomb, and everything changed.

***

We knew the full-body scanners didn’t work before they were even installed. Not long after the Underwear Bomber incident, all TSA officers at O’Hare were informed that training for the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners would soon begin. The machines cost about $150,000 a pop.

Our instructor was a balding middle-aged man who shrugged his shoulders after everything he said, as though in apology. At the conclusion of our crash course, one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines.

“They’re shit,” he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket.

We quickly found out the trainer was not kidding: Officers discovered that the machines were good at detecting just about everything besides cleverly hidden explosives and guns. The only thing more absurd than how poorly the full-body scanners performed was the incredible amount of time the machines wasted for everyone.

It worked like this: The passengers stood between two enormous radiation sensors—each of the machines twice the size of a refrigerator—and assumed the position for seven seconds, feet spread shoulder-width apart, hands above the head, making Mickey Mouse ears. The policy was to have three officers on the checkpoint floor to coach passengers into position for the machine and administer pat-downs when necessary. The images were analyzed for threats in what was called the I.O. room, short for Image Operator, which locked from the inside.

I.O. room duty quickly devolved into an unofficial break. It was the one place in the airport free of surveillance cameras, since the TSA had assured the public that no nude images of passengers would be stored on any recording device, closed circuit cameras included.

The I.O. room at O’Hare had a bank of monitors, each with a disabled keyboard—which perfectly summed up my relationship with the TSA. I spent several hours each day looking at nude images of airline passengers with a keyboard that didn’t work, wishing I could be doing what I loved: writing. To pass the time, I phantom-typed passages on the dumb keys: Shakespeare and Nabokov and Baudelaire.

The scans were grotesque, ghostly looking black-and-white images parading across our screens. I found comedy even in the I.O. room’s name. I had been brushing up on my Greek mythology for a writing project at the time, and couldn’t help but relate the I.O. room to the myth of Io and Zeus: Zeus shrouded the world with cloud cover to hide his relations with the beautiful Io from his jealous wife, Hera. But Hera suspected something was going on, and brought the affair to an end.

***

Most of my co-workers found humor in the I.O. room on a cruder level. Just as the long-suffering American public waiting on those security lines suspected, jokes about the passengers ran rampant among my TSA colleagues: Many of the images we gawked at were of overweight people, their every fold and dimple on full awful display. Piercings of every kind were visible. Women who’d had mastectomies were easy to discern—their chests showed up on our screens as dull, pixelated regions. Hernias appeared as bulging, blistery growths in the crotch area. Passengers were often caught off-guard by the X-Ray scan and so materialized on-screen in ridiculous, blurred poses—mouths agape, à la Edvard Munch. One of us in the I.O. room would occasionally identify a passenger as female, only to have the officers out on the checkpoint floor radio back that it was actually a man. All the old, crass stereotypes about race and genitalia size thrived on our secure government radio channels.

There were other types of bad behavior in the I.O. room—I personally witnessed quite a bit of fooling around, in every sense of the phrase. Officers who were dating often conspired to get assigned to the I.O. room at the same time, where they analyzed the nude images with one eye apiece, at best. Every now and then, a passenger would throw up two middle fingers during his or her scan, as though somehow aware of the transgressions going on.

But the only people who hated the body-scanners more than the public were TSA employees themselves. Many of my co-workers felt uncomfortable even standing next to the radiation-emitting machines we were forcing members of the public to stand inside. Several told me they submitted formal requests for dosimeters, to measure their exposure to radiation. The agency’s stance was that dosimeters were not necessary—the radiation doses from the machines were perfectly acceptable, they told us. We would just have to take their word for it. When concerned passengers—usually pregnant women—asked how much radiation the machines emitted and whether they were safe, we were instructed by our superiors to assure them everything was fine.

We were also ordered to tell the public that the machines were 100 percent effective, security-wise, in the event that any citizens caught wind of rumors to the contrary.

Then, in March 2012, a blogger named Jonathan Corbett published a video on YouTube, titled “How to Get Anything Past the Full Body Scanners.” In it, Corbett revealed one of the greatest weaknesses of the scanners, known to everyone I talked to within the agency: A metal object hidden on the side of the body was invisible to an image operator. Corbett showed how a passenger could bring a pistol to the airport and get it past the full-body scanners and onto a plane.

More than a million people saw the video within a few days of its being posted. Finally, the public had a hint of what my colleagues and I already knew. The scanners were useless. The TSA was compelling toddlers, pregnant women, cancer survivors—everyone—to stand inside radiation-emitting machines that didn’t work.

Officially, the agency downplayed the Corbett video: “For obvious security reasons, we can’t discuss our technology’s detection capability in detail, however TSA conducts extensive testing of all screening technologies in the laboratory and at airports prior to rolling them out to the entire field,” an agency representative wrote on the TSA’s official blog. Behind closed doors, supervisors instructed us to begin patting down the sides of every fifth passenger as a clumsy workaround to the scanners’ embarrassing vulnerability.

I remember one passenger coming through the checkpoint just after the video’s release. He declined to pass through the full-body scanner, choosing instead to receive a full-body pat-down. I asked him why he was opting out.

“Because those things don’t work,” he said, “And I don’t want to be dosed with radiation by a thing that doesn’t work. Didn’t you see the video that just came out the other day?”

“Yes, I did,” I said.

“Well, what did you think about it?”

I told him I wasn’t allowed to express that opinion while on duty as a federal officer, and he smiled.

***

By 2012, I’d had some experience with blogging—the run-of-the-mill personal blog that only mothers and best friends actually read—as well as contributing humor and memoir pieces to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

The thought occurred to me: Why not publish a website by a TSA employee, for TSA employees, which would also serve as a platform to tell the public the truth about what was going on at the agency? And so early that year I created a blog on WordPress. I titled it “Taking Sense Away.” It was to be my forum for telling the public all that I had experienced in my five years of employment with the TSA. Across the top of the site, I used an illustration of body-scan images, front and back views, like we saw in the I.O. room.

I registered the blog on a public computer at a FedEx office in Chicago, anticipating the possibility that someone might eventually be interested in the I.P. address from which the site was launched. At first, I told no one about the project and quietly sketched out articles; by mid-summer, I had enough material to fill out a year’s worth of blog posts. To be safe, I described myself as a “former” TSA employee, though I was still reporting for duty at O’Hare each day. But still I got cold feet when it was time to actually hit publish. For three months, I thought about it every time I walked past a quote painted on one of the walls at O’Hare: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.”

They were the words of the urban architect Daniel Burnham. I knew I could continue down the Path of the Little Plan—cling to my stable job with the TSA, carrying out absurd orders with my head bowed. And I knew that by publishing the blog I could very likely lose my government job and, at worst, even land myself on some sort of government watch list. But I felt an obligation to speak out, consequences be damned.

One night in late October, on a computer at a UPS store, I published the first post, “All the Airport’s a Security Stage.” It went straight to the heart of what had prompted me to speak out in the first place: the inefficacy of the full-body scanners, the theatrical quality of nearly all airport security and the government’s shameful attempt to hide the scanners’ flaws from the public. “Working for the TSA,” I wrote, “has the feel of riding atop the back of a large, dopey dog fanatically chasing its tail clockwise for a while, then counterclockwise, and back again, ad infinitum.”

I followed that post with several others detailing the day-to-day experiences of a TSA employee. I wrote about my awkward encounters on the job, like having to ask androgynous passengers whether they were male or female, and the absurd rules I had to follow, like having to confiscate snow globes during the holiday season even though we had taxpayer-funded equipment that could test the water inside. I saw the blog as a whistleblowing site with a sense of humor. From the moment I clicked publish, I was nervous about the blowback that was sure would follow.

Altogether, a total of nine people saw the site in its first six weeks.

I began to worry that no one at all would read what I had written. I didn’t know which was worse: gaining an audience and losing my job for speaking out, or speaking out to a nonexistent audience and working at TSA for the rest of my life.

Then one day—Dec. 18, 2012—I got home and discovered that a blog devoted to TSA-related news had linked to me, sending several dozen people my way. I was thrilled. One woman wrote in, asking what it was like in the room where we analyzed nude images of the public. I posted her question, along with an answer: Many TSA officers clowned around in the I.O. room, I wrote. I didn’t think much of it at the time.

A couple days later another niche blog picked up my site, delivering a few dozen more visitors.

Two days later, I logged in and saw that the graph for my blog’s web traffic had come to resemble the Burj Khalifa: 60,000 people had viewed it in the eight hours that I had been at work. I sat in front of my laptop until 5 a.m., transfixed, clicking refresh over and over, watching the visitors arrive in real time.

I had gone viral.

I barely ate. It was the feeling of being in love and being scared for one’s life, all at the same time. I spent each day wondering if my co-workers or bosses had seen the site. I came home one day to an e-mail from an ABC News reporter, requesting an interview and my real name, a request I ignored. Hours later, Jezebel linked to me. Then Fox News.

Within a week, an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times with a TSA spokesperson issuing an official government response, denying the claims of the anonymous blogger:

ARE TSA OFFICERS LAUGHING AT YOU? AGENCY SAYS NO

January 06, 2013 | By Hugo Martin

The TSA made the statement in response to a blog post purportedly written by a former TSA screener on the blog Taking Sense Away … the author of the post said he had witnessed “a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard to some of your nude images, dear passenger.”

At work soon afterward, one of my colleagues told me: “Whoever it is, they’ll find him.”

***

At first I only used public computers—a FedEx office here, a public library there. Then, I began posting at home but masked my IP address via TOR, the same network that WikiLeaks uses to ensure its informants’ anonymity. Programs such as TOR make it difficult for investigators to track online activity back to a name—by no means impossible, but difficult. I quickly came to understand why people make mistakes and leave behind digital fingerprints, though: Shielding one’s identity is a cumbersome enterprise. I eventually surrendered all hope of total anonymity and began posting from home, unmasked.

Paranoia gnawed at me. One of my jobs at O’Hare was to guard the airport exit lanes to make sure no one snuck into the secure side. I was also responsible for allowing credentialed law enforcement officers in. Several times a day, CIA and FBI agents would approach me at the exit lane, shiny shoes and all. After my site took off, I couldn’t shake the fear that they were approaching not to show me their badges and be waved through, but to confront me about my blog.

My roommates were the only ones who knew. I came home from work each day to two scruffy, thirty-something guys. The three of us sat around the living room, our laptops open in front of us. They played online poker and “World of Warcraft;” I tracked my site’s web traffic. They read aloud the news sites that linked to my blog, while I watched the hits coming in from the very same outlets.

We joked that it all looked like a scene from the movie Hackers. “Did you hack into the mainframe?” one of my roommates once asked, glancing over at my screen.

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One day, I received an e-mail from a man offering to loan me his apartment in Paris if I would give WikiLeaks every piece of insider information I had. At the time, I thought he was kidding.

Looking back now, I believe the offer was no joke.

***

On Jan. 17, 2013, three weeks after my site went viral, the TSA announced it was canceling its contract with Rapiscan, the manufacturer of the full-body scanners, in favor of a new type of scanner that produced a generic outline of the body instead of graphic nudes.

People wrote in to the blog suggesting that the announcement might have been prompted by the embarrassment my site brought upon the organization. If ever someone wanted to de-anonymize me, it was then. I felt it was in my interest to get out—soon.

The only question was where to go.

I didn’t know how I would ever make a decent living as a writer, but I also knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a mindless cog in a vast bureaucratic machine. On the advice of an editor friend, I had begun applying to graduate school creative writing programs in the weeks before I clicked publish on my site.

I feared I wouldn’t be accepted into any of the seven programs to which I’d applied—and dreaded being stranded in airport purgatory. But I was lucky: The first acceptance came in January, with an offer of a full scholarship. Several more followed.

In flying to visit universities, I found myself checking my airline ticket as soon as it was printed, praying I hadn’t been branded with the SSSS stamp that I knew all too well—the mark of a passenger who has been singled out as a potential threat to national security and designated for special screening. But the selectee mark never did appear.

As a writer, the only thing of value that I could glean from my time at the TSA was the story of it all—the sheer absurdity of working for one of America’s most despised federal agencies. In the six months that I secretly blogged as a TSA employee, I did my best to record every notable piece of stupidity TSA and O’Hare had to offer.

There was “The Things They Ran Through the X-Ray,” a post that detailed the craziest items I had seen put through the X-Ray belt at O’Hare: dildos, puppies, kittens. Even a real live TSA officer: In 2009, one of my friends had run her male colleague through a carry-on X-Ray machine. (It was a slow night.) When management happened upon video footage of the episode, they were both fired.

There was also “No, You Don’t Know What It Is,” a post revealing that the enhanced screening you receive is often just as mystifying to the TSA officer administering it as it is to the traveler. “Random” security “plays” were passed down from headquarters every day, or ordered by our supervisors. The enhanced screening was also triggered by SSSS stamps, which could show up on passengers’ boarding passes for any number of reasons, often reasons we would never know. But we would also sometimes pull a passenger’s bag or give a pat down because he or she was rude. We always deployed the same explanation: “It’s just a random search.”

Then there was the infamous “guyspeak” in my “Insider’s TSA Dictionary.” One of the first terms I learned from fellow male TSA officers at O’Hare was “Hotel Papa,” code language for an attractive female passenger—“Hotel” standing for “hot,” and “Papa” for, well, use your imagination.

I hinted several times on the blog that a determined terrorist’s best bet for defeating airport security would be to apply for a job with the TSA and simply become part of the security system itself. That assertion stemmed from personal experience. A fellow officer once returned to O’Hare from a trip to TSA headquarters and confessed that he had run into some complications: Someone realized that his background check had never been processed in the four years he had been an employee. He could have been anyone, for all TSA knew—a murderer, terrorist, rapist. The agency had to rush to get his background investigated. Who knows how many similar cases there were, and are, at airports around the nation.

***

As much as I wished I could maintain my behind-the-scenes view of the security circus, my heart was not heavy on the May afternoon when I went to turn in my uniform and tell the TSA I wouldn’t be coming back.

“You’ll have to sign all these papers,” the woman in HR told me, barely glancing my way as she handed me a clipboard with a packet of documents. She was accustomed to people coming in and resigning unexpectedly; it seemed as though everyone wanted out of the TSA.

“But as for your uniforms,” she said, “You’ll be giving those to your exit interviewer.”

I was conflicted about whether to go to the interview. I could simply refuse, claiming some sort of emergency—drop my uniforms off in a cardboard box out in front of headquarters, like an unwanted baby. My roommates told me I would be stupid to go. After all, if some government official was going to sit me down for questioning about my involvement with an anonymous whistleblower site, the exit interview would be the place it would happen.

I decided to show. I had committed no crime in daring to speak out; I had only provided information the public had a right to know. As I saw it, $40 million in taxpayer dollars had been wasted on ineffective anti-terrorism security measures at the expense of the public’s health, privacy and dignity. If asked during my exit interview whether I knew anything about a website called “Taking Sense Away,” I decided I would tell the truth.

But the exit interview turned out to be nothing more than a pleasant conversation with a woman in admin. There was no last-minute grilling by a grim-faced government suit. It was just “Jane,” the exit interview girl who had moved from Georgia to Chicago, Southern hospitality intact. The interview consisted of Jane reading from a checklist of TSA uniform pieces I was on record as owning, and me, for the most part, apologizing for having lost many of them years ago.

Jane smiled, assuring me it was fine. She shook my hand, wished me luck in my new role as a grad student, and that was it. I left headquarters, officially relieved of my federal post.

The simple answer is because that is what the convention was.

The more complex answer deals with PCI compliance1. PCI compliance is a big deal and a lot of companies don't like to deal with it so they use 3rd party companies that are PCI compliant. Many of which would require the use of iframes that pointed to the 3rd party company's credit card form. At that point, you were at the mercy of their form and what fields they required. Typically, card type was one of those fields.

References:

1 - For more information on the importance of PCI compliance, read my answer to another question.

The good news is that the convention is changing to more of a user experience convention.

Designmodo has a great article on this subject:

Here are some quotes from the article:

This has nothing to do with the question, but for those who are curious about or don't know the breakdown of the credit card:

The 1st digit is the Major Industry Identifier.

It designates the category of the entity which issued the card:

• 1 and 2 are Airlines
• 3 is Travel and Entertainment
• 4 and 5 are Banking and Financial
• 6 is Merchandising and Banking
• 7 is Petroleum
• 8 is Telecommunications
• 9 is National Assignment

The first 6 digits are the Issuer Identification Number.

It will identify the institution that issued the card:

• Visa: 4xxxxx
• Mastercard: 51xxxx - 55xxxx
• Discover: 6011xx, 644xxx, 65xxxx
• Amex: 34xxxx, 37xxxx

Cards can be looked up by their IIN. A card that starts wtih 376211 is a Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer American Express Gold Card. 529962 designates a pre-paid Much-Music MasterCard.

The 7th and following digits, excluding the final digit, are the person's Account Number. This leaves a trillion possible combinations if the maximum of 12 digits is used. Many cards only use 9 digits.

The final digit is the check digit or checksum. It is used to validate the credit card number using the Luhn algorithm.

Take the following number:

4417 1234 5678 9113

From the rightmost digit, which is the check digit, moving left, double the value of every second digit

 4 4 1 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 1 3
x2 x2 x2 x2 x2 x2 x2 x2
------------------------------------
 8 2 2 6 10 14 18 2

Add the new digits to the digits that weren't doubled (even indices).

 4 7 2 4 6 8 1 3

Add them all together. (Double digit numbers are added as a sum of their digits, e.g. 14 becomes 1+4)

8+4+2+7 + 2+2+6+4 + 1+0+6+1+4+8 + 1+8+1+2+3 = 70

If the final sum is divisible by 10, then you know that the credit card number is a valid number. However, the credit card would still need to be verified via a credit card processing system.

As of this batch we're introducing a new policy for investments by YC partners in the companies we fund.

YC partners have invested in the startups we fund since the first batch. In the beginning it was harmless, and occasionally even necessary. And other investors couldn't treat investments by YC partners as much of a signal when I was the only one doing it, because I was so haphazard about it. But over the years this gradually changed, as there came to be more YC partners and they paid more attention to picking likely winners, till by the last couple batches, other investors could treat investment by YC partners as an accurate sign of how promising we thought a startup was. Which meant we were now making it harder for the startups that partners didn't invest in to raise money.

Our new policy is designed to prevent this by depriving other investors of this signal till it's too late. The new rule is that YC partners can't be in the first $500k a company raises, unless it's 3 weeks past Demo Day. And since a startup's fundraising trajectory is almost always established, one way or another, by 3 weeks after Demo Day, this should mean that we can't affect anyone's fundraising unless they've raised $500k, at which point their fundraising is already successful.

This should fix the problem.  If it doesn't we'll try something else.

Legislation introduced in the Kansas state legislature by a lobby for cable companies would make it almost impossible for cities and towns to offer broadband services to residents and would perhaps even outlaw public-private partnerships like the one that brought Google Fiber to Kansas City.The Senate bill doesn't list any lawmaker as its sponsor, and there's a reason—a Senate employee told us it was submitted by John Federico on behalf of the Kansas Cable Telecommunications Association, of which he is president.

That's a lobby group with members such as Comcast, Cox, Eagle Communications, and Time Warner Cable. The bill was introduced this week, referred to the Committee on Commerce, and scheduled for discussion for Tuesday of next week.

The telco-written bill starts out pleasantly enough, saying its goal is to "Ensure that video, telecommunications, and broadband services are provided through fair competition consistent with the federal telecommunications act of 1996" to "encourage the development and widespread use of technological advances in providing video, telecommunications and broadband services at competitive rates; and ensure that video, telecommunications and broadband services are each provided within a consistent, comprehensive, and nondiscriminatory federal, state, and local government framework."

But instead of promoting development in broadband networks, the bill actually limits the possibility of them being built. Here's the key passage:

A municipality would not be able to offer broadband "through a partnership, joint venture, or other entity in which the municipality participates," the bill says. The city or town also would not be able to use its powers of eminent domain to condemn any facility "for the purpose of enabling a private business or entity to offer, provide, carry, or deliver video, telecommunications, or broadband service to one or more subscribers."

While the bill lets cities and towns offer service in "unserved areas," it defines such areas as those where at least 90 percent of households lack access to any broadband service, whether it be "fixed or mobile, or satellite broadband service" at the minimum broadband speed defined by the Federal Communications Commission, which is 4Mbps down and 1Mbps up.

Since satellite can be used pretty much anywhere at broadband speeds (but with annoying latency), it would be hard to identify any "unserved areas" as defined by this legislation. The bill does allow networks "for internal government purposes," but not for any users outside the government.

The bill has unsurprisingly drawn outrage. "The language in this bill prohibits not only networks that directly offer services but even public-private partnerships and open access approaches," wrote Christopher Mitchell of Community Broadband Networks. "This is the kind of language one would expect to see if the goal is to protect politically powerful cable and telephone company monopolies rather than just limiting local authority to deliver services."

The city of Chanute, which "has established its own fiber optic network for government use and as a service to local businesses," condemned the legislation, according to the Chanute Tribune. 

A man named Joshua Montgomery set up a website and Facebook group to urge Kansans to submit written opposition to the bill. Calling the bill the "Incumbent Telecommunications Company Protection Act," Montgomery wrote, "Even joint partnerships like the one between Google and Kansas City would be illegal under this bill." Google Fiber, he pointed out, came to Kansas City after Google received what the Competitive Enterprise Institute called "stunning regulatory concessions and incentives from local governments, including free access to virtually everything the city owns or controls: rights of way, central office space, power, interconnections with anchor institutions, marketing and direct mail, and office space for Google employees."

Montgomery is co-owner of Wicked Broadband, which is trying to install gigabit broadband in Lawrence, Kansas.

Mitchell, who is also director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said the Kansas bill is not even the most restrictive one he has seen. That honor goes to one proposed in Minnesota two years ago which didn't even have an exception allowing networks for government use. That bill was not passed.

We called Federico but he wasn't available this morning. When asked if it had any input in writing the bill, Comcast told us that it "has less than 5 percent of the subscribers in the state," and that Cox and Eagle are the dominant players in Kansas. We've contacted Cox, Eagle, and Time Warner but haven't gotten answers to our questions yet.

I feel like I’m practically the poster child for the “passionate programmer”. I code for fun, always have. I’m like the stereotype of the guy who’d be programming even if it didn’t pay. I play with new programming languages for the sheer hell of it. I write and speak about the joy of coding, and try my best to pass that joy along to others as best I can.

And yet… I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the rhetoric of passion in programming.

Searching for “passionate” on the 37signals job board currently returns 11 out of 46 total listings for programmers. “Passionate about technology”. “Passionate about product development”. “Passionate developer”. “Passionate team”.

Looking up “passion” in the dictionary, the first definition I see is:

And a large segment of the population associates the term “passion” with a man going to his death for the sake of something he believed in.

I love code. I dream of code. I enjoy code. I find writing high quality code deeply satisfying. I feel the same way about helping others write code they can feel proud of.

But do I feel “strong and barely controllable emotion” about code? Honestly? No.

I feel that way about my kids, certainly. I feel it about many of the tragedies and grave injustices that happen in the world, too. But code? I can’t truthfully compare the way I feel about software to the way I feel about my 1 year old daughter. They aren’t even in the same category.

I think some of the people writing these job ads are well-meaning. Maybe most of them. I think when they write “passionate” they mean “motivated”. No slackers. No one who is a drag on the team.

But sometimes I worry that it’s code for we want to exploit your lack of boundaries. Maybe it’s fanciful on my part, but there’s a faintly Orwellian whiff to the language of these job ads: excuse me comrade, I couldn’t noticing that man over there is not writing his joining-the-team blog post with sincere revolutionary conviction.

In some ways this is just a microcosm of the job market as a whole. We’ve all read the advice for job seekers. A custom cover letter for every application! “I feel I would be perfect for the job of ________, despite having never heard of such a thing until this moment…”

But still, I feel like there is a peculiar emphasis on passion when it comes to software jobs.

I have the great fortune of not needing a job right now. But when I look at job adverts demanding “passion” I get a little involuntary shiver. I remember needing a job. These are the kinds of job ads I’d be looking at, if I needed one again. And that makes me feel threatened, because they are looking for something I’m not sure I can give them. And if I were looking for a job right now, I’d feel pressured to fake it. Either I’d feel like an impostor, or I’d feel resentment for trying to boost my emotional commitment to a coding project to an unrealistic fever-pitch.

“Sounds like you’re just getting old, Avdi!” Except I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way about code. There’s programming—my vocation, my hobby, my ongoing obsession. And then there are the really important things in life. I’ve always felt that way.

Can I honestly call myself a “passionate programmer”? I don’t think so. “Enthusiast” seems more appropriate.

Am I just quibbling over words? Maybe. But programmers know that what we call things matters.

I worry about what the expectations these demands of “passion” are setting up. If I don’t treat the code like a lover, if I fail to put it ahead of friends and family, if I don’t hurl myself into the task like a soldier charging a machine-gun nest, am I failing to give the team my “100%”? Am I letting them down?

Even more problematic to me is the idea of being passionate about a product. I care about doing good work, certainly. I take great personal and professional pride in it. But am I really expected to be passionate about something I’ve been hired to help build? Do we fire members of construction crews if they don’t show a strong enough emotional attachment to the office complex they are building? Do we even fire architects for that offense?

I’m tremendously lucky to get to share the joy of writing code for a living. But nothing lasts forever. Maybe the programming screencast market will dry up someday. Maybe I’ll just get tired of it after a few thousand more episodes.

There is a part of me that is genuinely fearful of the effect on my future hire-ability, when I admit the following: no, I will not be passionate about your product. I will be professional about it. I may even be excited about it, if it happens to be something that I think is neat-o cool. I may have a ton of fun building it. But that doesn’t really matter. You’re not hiring a Juliet to your project’s Romeo. In the final analysis, you’re exchanging goods for services.

I’m an enthusiastic and conscientious programmer. I really hope that’s enough.

(P.S. to head off the inevitable question: no, this is not a swipe at Chad Fowler’s book The Passionate Programmer. If anything, Chad is a vocal proponent of a balanced approach to software projects)

UPDATE: This video sums it up pretty well:

I’d gone through a few droughts as a freelancer, but this one was bad.

Each day, the stress mounted.

The magnitude of every new client meeting ballooned greater than ever before. Before each meeting, I went in knowing one thing; “I need this job.”

It’s the nature of being a freelancer. By definition, the work ends.

However, this stretch was particularly dry. Each time I thought I had a client, they would slip out of my grasp, like sand through an hour-glass.

Their reasons for backing out at the last minute were always different. Some would have a change in plans or strategy, others balked at my rate, but most just stopped replying altogether. I knew it was something I was doing wrong.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had a hole in my sales funnel.

Freelancers have a lot on their shoulders.

Their portfolio, clients, accounting, marketing, contracts, etc. the list goes on and on.

A lot of us don’t have time to think about proactively improving our business, much less looking for the holes in it’s sails. We’re consumed by responding to client issues, technical stuff, and everything else that comes packaged with the aforementioned list.

But this article isn’t about those things, it’s about fixing one big problem those things cause. The single phrase (and every variation of it) that time and time again repels clients away from us and hurts our credibility in more ways than one:

“Let me know how I can help.”

When I said this I honestly thought I was being helpful.

I would close almost every email with some variation of “Just let me know…”. It felt like the right way to end an email. Heck, it seemed professional.

Inevitably conversations with new clients would reach a point where we needed to discuss solutions, and I thought by letting the client dictate what they wanted from me, I was allowing them to get exactly what they were looking for.

But the reality was this was a load of shit. By ending my emails like this, I was dropping a wheel-barrel full of work on my client’s desk, and saying “here, you deal with it.”

It reeked of incompetence.

After all, these were the very problems I was (not) being paid to solve.

So I began to do the complete opposite and prescribe solutions at the end of every email.

At first, I felt like I was encroaching onto the client’s domain, and barking orders.

Could I really boss the client around and tell them what they needed to do? It was definitely intimidating… at first.

Slowly, though, I noticed a change. Clients were increasingly respondent to my emails. Even prospects were beginning to chirp back to me more times than not.

Just by suggesting a next step at the end of my email, I was able to double the amount of people who responded to me.

This next step was different for every email, but it always followed the same 2-step structure. I would include: 1) My suggested next step 2) What we could do in the event they don’t want to do that.

Sometimes every line in my email would lead up to this two-step solution. Sometimes the solution was the entire email.

If someone wanted a meeting, I’d suggest a time and instead of saying, “Let me know if this works for you.” I’d switch that out for, “If not, than X time/day also works or I’m free at X time/day.”

Think about that. You’re not just saving yourself the extra time of writing two separate emails, you’re saving you (and your client) the time in between these emails.

That set the tone that my time was money.

Beyond just setting the tone though, it actually proved I was a professional capable of making the right decisions by exhibiting these qualities instead of just claiming them. In a way, it showed my hands wouldn’t have to be held throughout the entire project. At the very least, it signaled my clients would just have to muster a “sounds good” in order to reply to my emails (I made sure that was the case throughout the project too).

Most of all though, it meant I was shoveling work away from my client and taking the burden on myself. This is the entire point of freelancing, to take work away from our clients. That’s how I look at every interaction now.

You’re probably ending a lot of emails with “let me know.”

That’s okay. Most people end emails like that. In fact, when put at the end of an email, our brains automatically transform the phrase “let me know” to “I just got to the end of this email, and I don’t know what to write next so there.”

But don’t worry, you just have to be a tiny bit better to melt clients’ freakin’ faces off with your awesomeness. Here’s how you stop writing emails in this way:

1.) Before writing an email, start by knowing what next-step you’re going to propose, then write down that part first. Do this for every email.

2.) When you write your email, don’t begin by wandering aimlessly from topic to topic. Make every sentence re-enforce the next-step you’re suggesting.

3.) By the time you get to the bottom of your email and it’s time to propose the next step, you’re done. You’ve already written that.

4.) A good rule of thumb is: if a client can just reply “sounds good” to your email, you’re right on.

Want to try out this technique on more prospects? I send a daily list of hand-qualified leads to freelance designers, developers, and studios. It’s called Workshop.

Ukraine's language divide. Data source: 2001 national census. (Laris Karklis/Washington Post)

Ukrainians have been protesting since Nov. 21, when President Viktor Yanukovych rejected a deal for closer integration with the European Union, instead drawing the country closer to Russia. They are still in the streets in huge numbers and have seized regional government buildings in several parts of the country. In Kiev, the capital, clashes between protesters and security forces have become violent, killing several people. On Tuesday, the prime minister resigned. No one is quite sure what will happen next.

What's happening in Ukraine is really important, but it can also be confusing and difficult to follow for outsiders who don't know the history that led up to – and, in some crucial ways, explains – this crisis. Here, then, are the most basic answers to your most basic questions. First, a disclaimer: this is not an exhaustive or definitive account of Ukraine's story, just some background, written so that anyone can understand it.

1. What is Ukraine?

Ukraine – not "the Ukraine"– is a country in Eastern Europe, between Russia and Central Europe. It's big: about the area of Texas, with a little less than twice the population. Its history goes back thousands of years – the first domesticated horses were here – and has long been characterized by intersections between "east" and "west." That's continued right up to today's crisis.

Ukraine has a long history of being subjugated by foreign powers. This is even reflected in its name, which many scholars believe means "borderland" and is part of why it used to be called "the Ukraine." (Other scholars, though, believe it means "homeland.") It's only been independent since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and it broke away. The last time it was independent (for a few short years right after World War I; before that, briefly in the 1600s), it had different borders and very different demographics. That turns out to be really important.

2. Why are so many Ukrainians protesting?

The protests started, mostly in the capital of Kiev, when President Yanukovych rejected an expected deal for greater economic integration with the European Union. The deal was popular with Ukrainians, particularly in Kiev and that part of the country (although not as popular as you may have heard: about 42 or 43 percent support it).

But this is about much more than just a trade deal. Symbolically, Yanukovych's decision was seen as a turn away from Europe and toward Moscow, which rewarded Ukraine with a "stimulus" worth billions of dollars and a promise of cheaper gas exports. Moscow had subjugated or outright ruled Ukraine for generations, so you can see why this could hit a nerve.

But this is about more than just geopolitics. Yanukovych and his government, since taking power in 2010, have mismanaged the economy and have been increasingly seen as corrupt. In 2004, there had been mass protests against Yanukovych when he won the presidential election under widespread suspicions of fraud; those protests, which succeeded in blocking him from office, were called the "Orange Revolution" and considered a big deal at the time. But now he's back.

The protests had actually been dying down until Jan. 16, when Yanukovych signed an "anti-protest law" that also deeply restricts free speech, the media (especially from criticizing the government), driving in a group of more than five cars, even wearing a helmet. Protests kicked back up with a vengeance, not just in Kiev but in a number of regional capitals, outright seizing government administration buildings in some.

3. I heard this was about Ukrainians wanting ties with Europe and their government selling out to Moscow. Is it?

That's sort of true – lots of Ukrainians want their country to be "European" rather than linked with Russia, and Yanukovych is sure buddying up to Moscow – but it's also sort of wrong. Yes, about half of Ukrainians say they want the European Union deal. But another third say they'd prefer integrating with the Russian-dominated Eurasian Customs Union. So it's more split than you'd think.

Here's the thing you have to understand: Ukraine is divided. Deeply, deeply divided by language, by history and by politics. One-third of the country speaks Russian as its native language, and in practice even more use it day-to-day. The Russian-speakers mostly live in one half of the country; the Ukrainian-speakers live in another. You can see that clear-as-day divide in the map at the top of this page.

It's not just that Ukraine has two halves that predominantly speak different languages. They have different politics – and different visions for their country. Check out this composite of four maps: the top two show the language and ethnic divide, the bottom two show the election results for the 2004 and 2010 presidential elections. The lines are identical!

Top left: Ukraine's Russian-speakers in blue. Top right: Major ethnic and linguistic groups. Bottom left: 2004 presidential election results. Bottom right: 2010 presidential results. The western half of the country voted overwhelmingly against Yanukovcyh; that's also where, until very recently, most of the protests have been.

The Russian-speaking, eastern half of Ukraine tends to be, big surprise, more pro-Russian. Yanukovych is from that part of the country, has most of his support there, and did not even speak Ukrainian until he was in his 50s.

The pro-E.U.-deal protests have mostly been in the Ukrainian-speaking, western half. That's also the half that voted overwhelmingly against Yanukovych in 2010. (That has been changing since the anti-protest law, which inflamed nationwide anger with Yanukovych.)

This divide has been a challenge for Ukraine since it won independence in 1991. Elections have been near-evenly split between the two halves, pulling the country in opposite directions. As the Ukraine-focused political scientist Leonid Peisakhin put it, Ukraine "has never been and is not yet a coherent national unit with a common narrative or a set of more or less commonly shared political aspirations."

In some ways, this crisis is about popular anger against a president who mishandled the economy and whose attempts to quash protests have edged into authoritarianism. But it's also about Ukraine's long-unresolved national identity crisis. This story is often framed as Ukraine being pulled by Moscow on one end and Europe on the other. But Ukrainians themselves are doing a lot of the pulling: a 22-year tug-of-war between two halves and two identities.

4. Wow. How did Ukraine get so divided?

Ukraine was conquered and divided for centuries by neighboring powers: the Polish, the Austrians and most of all the Russians. But Russian rulers didn't just want to rule Ukraine, they wanted to make it Russian.

The Russification of Ukraine began 250 years ago with Catherine the Great, who oversaw Russia's "golden age" in the late 1700s. At first, she controlled only eastern Ukraine, where she developed vast coal and iron industries to feed Russia's expansion. Though she later took the west as well, she and subsequent Russian rulers focused overwhelmingly on the east, which also happens to be some of the most productive farmland in the world.

The director of Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, Serhii Plokhii, recently told National Geographic that the country is divided between a super-fertile steppe in the east and forestland in the west – an ecological split that lines up almost perfectly with the linguistic-political line in our maps above.

So many Russians swept in to Ukraine's southeast – a number of them troops, to fight the neighboring Ottoman Empire – that it became known as "Novorossiya," or "New Russia." Russian leaders, hoping to make the territory permanently Russian, banned the Ukrainian language.

Then came Joseph Stalin. In the 1930s, the Soviet leader "collectivized" peasants into state-run farms, which caused several million Ukrainians to die of starvation. The governments of Ukraine and the United States consider it a deliberate act of genocide, though historians are more divided. In either case, after the famine, Stalin repopulated the devastated eastern farmlands by shipping in ethnic Russians.

Today, Ukraine is only about one-sixth ethnic Russian. But the cultural imprint goes much deeper, and not just because so many Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language. When the Western-oriented, Ukrainian-nationalist politician Viktor Yushchenko became president, in 2005, "about 60 percent of TV programming was in Russian and 40 percent in Ukrainian," according to the Christian Science Monitor. By the time he left office in 2010, "that ratio [had] been roughly reversed." Most magazines and newspapers were still in Russian. This came after five years of "Ukrainianization" so aggressive that, even though he spoke fluent Russian, he would only converse with Russian President Vladimir Putin through an interpreter.

5. This is getting complicated. Can we take a music break?

Great idea. Ukraine has a rich tradition of folk and popular music, but let's listen to one of their many classical greats, Mykola Lysenko. A Ukrainian nationalist, and by his death in 1912 a major star, Lysenko loved to incorporate Ukrainian folk melodies into his compositions. Here's his simple but beautiful Second Ukrainian Rhapsody for piano, performed by his now-deceased granddaughter Rada Lysenko:

Lysenko's life, more than a century ago, charted many of the same issues driving today's crisis. Ukraine was then a part of Imperial Russia, which pushed composers and musicians to use only the Russian language. Lysenko refused, composing two operas in Ukrainian (here's one), which he refused to translate into Russian, even though this meant they could never be performed in Moscow. Because an 1876 czarist decree banned the use of Ukrainian in print, Lysenko had to have his scores printed in secret abroad. He died a hero to Ukrainians, his music cherished by contemporaries such as Pyotr Tchaikovsky, but recordings are criminally difficult to find today.

6. So I get that Russia used to rule Ukraine but doesn't anymore. Why do I hear so much about its role in all this?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been highly aggressive in pushing Ukraine to reject the European Union and, he hopes, instead join the Moscow-led Eurasian Customs Union, which consists of a few other former Soviet states. That included threatening to impose economic sanctions on Ukraine. In 2004 and 2006, when the pro-Western Yushchenko was in power, Russia shut off natural gas exports to Ukraine over political disputes, doing serious damage to the economy.

But if Putin taketh away, he also giveth. A few weeks after Yanukovych rejected the E.U. deal, Putin offered Ukraine a stimulus package worth $15 billion and a 33 percent price cut for Russian natural gas. That will make it much tougher for Yanukovych to walk away from Putin's embrace, particularly given how much of the popular discontent is driven by the poor economy.

7. Why does Russia care so much about Ukraine?

There are the surface reasons. The cultural connections are indeed deep, and Putin can't not want to remain close to a country with so much shared history and so many Russians. The country, a source of food and a transit hub for Russian energy exports, is economically and strategically important to Russia. Putin is thought to personally care a great deal about the Eurasian Trade Union and sees it as his legacy.

And then there are the deeper reasons. Ukraine makes or breaks Russia's self-image as a great power, which has fared poorly since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As Tufts political scientist Dan Drezner put it in Foreign Policy, "For all of Putin's Middle East diplomacy, Ukraine is far more important to his great power ambitions. One of the very first sentences you're taught to say in Foreign Policy Community College is, 'Russia without Ukraine is a country; Russia with Ukraine is an empire.' "

Even if Putin can't bring Ukraine in, he'd like to keep it out of the European Union, which he sees as an extension of a century-old Western conspiracy against Russia. There is a certain lingering suspicion in Moscow that the West wouldn't mind Russia's destruction, which is part of why it so opposes any Western intervention into another country, which it fears could be precedent for a similar attack on Russia some day. This is why, silly though it may sound, some security experts tend to emphasize Ukraine's importance to Russia as a defensive buffer.

8. Why haven't the U.S. or Europe fixed this?

Western countries could pressure Yanukovych to halt his authoritarian-tinged actions since the crisis began (the Ukrainian parliament rolled back most of the anti-protest law on Tuesday). But most of the power seems to be with Putin and with actual Ukrainians, so it's not clear what the West could do. A New York Times op-ed by four (four!) former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine mostly just called for the United States to issue statements, adding that it could follow those up with economic sanctions.

The danger, though, is that any Western action strong enough to make a difference risks triggering a backlash that would make things worse. If the West gets too aggressive about pushing Yanukovych, then the country's eastern, Russian-facing half might see it as foreign meddling not so different from Russia's involvement.

Ultimately, the deeper issues here are Ukraine's troubled economy and its unresolved national identity. Outside countries (including Russia) can certainly help with the former, but the latter can be solved by only Ukrainians.

9. I skipped to the bottom. What's going to happen next?

The parliament rolled back most of the anti-protest law that had so angered people; it also passed a blanket amnesty for protesters, provided they leave government buildings they've occupied.

Putin has put the $15 billion financial aid on hold, which could actually make it easier for Yanukovych to walk away from Putin and go back to the European Union deal.

Still, protests are spreading rapidly– including into the country's Russian-speaking eastern regions. Right now, the immediate crisis is about more than the E.U. deal or the cultural divide or even the anti-protest law, even if all those things brought Ukraine's crisis to this point. Yanukovych's not-terribly-adept handling of the two-month crisis has forced him into a very tight little corner.

There is chatter among analysts, in Moscow as well as Washington, that if Yanukovych panics and calls in the military to disperse protesters it could lead to a civil war. That looks like an extremely remote possibility at this point; probably more likely that the government and opposition leaders strike a deal, the government muddles through and Yanukovych is voted out overwhelmingly in the February 2015 election. But the fact that civil war is being discussed at all shows the degree of international concern and uncertainty about what comes next for Ukraine.

New video footage has been released for the first time of the moment Guardian editors destroyed computers used to store top-secret documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Under the watchful gaze of two technicians from the British government spy agency GCHQ, the journalists took angle-grinders and drills to the internal components, rendering them useless and the information on them obliterated.

The bizarre episode in the basement of the Guardian's London HQ was the climax of Downing Street's fraught interactions with the Guardian in the wake of Snowden's leak – the biggest in the history of western intelligence. The details are revealed in a new book – The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man– by the Guardian correspondent Luke Harding. The book, published next week, describes how the Guardian took the decision to destroy its own Macbooks after the government explicitly threatened the paper with an injunction.

In two tense meetings last June and July the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents.

Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American's National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: "We can do this nicely or we can go to law". He added: "A lot of people in government think you should be closed down."

Downing Street insiders admit they struggled to come to terms with Snowden's mega-leak, and the fact that the 29-year-old American was able to upload top secret British material while working at an NSA facility in faraway Hawaii. Snowden wasn't even a full-time NSA employee, but a private contractor, one of 850,000 Americans with access to top secret UK information. "We just sat up and thought: 'Oh my God!'" one Downing Street insider said.

Some five weeks after Snowden first leaked classified NSA and GCHQ material, the British government still had no clue of the scale of the security breach. It was working on the assumption that a small amount of material had been lost.

A small team of trusted senior reporters examined Snowden's files in a secure fourth-floor room in the Guardian's King's Cross office. The material was kept on four laptops. None had ever been connected to the internet or any other network. There were numerous other security measures, including round-the-clock guards, multiple passwords, and a ban on electronics.

The government's response to the leak was initially slow – then increasingly strident. Rusbridger told government officials that destruction of the Snowden files would not stop the flow of intelligence-related stories since the documents existed in several jurisdictions. He explained that Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian US columnist who met Snowden in Hong Kong, had leaked material in Rio de Janeiro. There were further copies in America, he said.

Days later Oliver Robbins, the prime minister's deputy national security adviser, renewed the threat of legal action. "If you won't return it [the Snowden material] we will have to talk to 'other people' this evening." Asked if Downing Street really intended to close down the Guardian if it did not comply, Robbins confirmed: "I'm saying this." He told the deputy editor, Paul Johnson, the government wanted the material in order to conduct "forensics". This would establish how Snowden had carried out his leak, strengthening the legal case against the Guardian's source. It would also reveal which reporters had examined which files.

With the threat of punitive legal action ever present, the only way of protecting the Guardian's team – and of carrying on reporting from another jurisdiction – was for the paper to destroy its own computers. GCHQ officials wanted to inspect the material before destruction, carry out the operation themselves and take the remnants away. The Guardian refused.

After the destruction on Saturday 20 July, reporting switched entirely to the US. Despite these tensions, the paper continued to consult with the government before publishing national security stories. There were more than 100 interactions with No 10, the White House and US and UK intelligence agencies.

The hard drives used to store documents leaked by Edward Snowden are destroyed in the basement of the Guardian's London offices. Photograph: Guardian

Three Guardian staff members – Johnson, executive director Sheila Fitzsimons and computer expert David Blishen – carried out the demolition of the Guardian's hard drives. It was hot, sweaty work. On the instructions of GCHQ, the trio bought angle-grinders, dremels – a drill with a revolving bit – and masks. The spy agency provided one piece of hi-tech equipment, a "degausser", which destroys magnetic fields, and erases data. It took three hours to smash up the computers. The journalists then fed the pieces into the degausser.

Two GCHQ technical experts – "Ian" and "Chris" – recorded the process on their iPhones. Afterwards they headed back to GCHQ's doughnut-shaped HQ in Cheltenham carrying presents for family members, bought on their rare visit to the capital.

"It was purely a symbolic act," Johnson said. "We knew that. GCHQ knew that. And the government knew that," He added: "It was the most surreal event I have witnessed in British journalism."

The Snowden Files includes fresh details of Snowden's early life, his time in the CIA, and the libertarian ideas and political views which shaped his philosophy and his life-changing decision to spill government secrets. Snowden visited the UK several times during his intelligence career, including when he worked for the CIA at the US embassy in Geneva.

On one occasion he visited RAF Croughton, the CIA communications base 30 miles north of Oxford in Northamptonshire. Posting on the technology forum Ars Technica, Snowden said he was struck by the large number of sheep grazing in green fields – a classic English scene. On another occasion he flew to City airport in London. He said he was unimpressed by east London's multiracial neighbourhoods, telling one British user of the forum: "It's where all of your Muslims live. I didn't want to get out of the car."

The book also reveals that the British security service MI5 was behind the controversial detention of David Miranda, Greenwald's partner, at Heathrow airport last August. Miranda was detained under schedule 7 of the UK's Terrorism Act 2000, despite having no connection to terrorism. He was carrying heavily encrypted Snowden material at the time. MI5 tried to conceal its role in the affair, telling the police at Heathrow in a briefing: "Please do not make any reference to espionage activity. It is vital that MIRANDA is not aware of the reason for this ports stop."

• Read an exclusive extract from Luke Harding's The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man in Weekend magazine and online on Saturday.

Dr. Michael C. Labossiere, the author of a Macintosh tutorial named Fallacy Tutorial Pro 3.0, has kindly agreed to allow the text of his work to appear on the Nizkor site, as a Nizkor Feature. It remains © Copyright 1995 Michael C. Labossiere, with distribution restrictions -- please see our copyright notice. If you have questions or comments about this work, please direct them both to the Nizkor webmasters (webmaster@nizkor.org) and to Dr. Labossiere (ontologist@aol.com).

Other sites that list and explain fallacies include:

In order to understand what a fallacy is, one must understand what an argument is. Very briefly, an argument consists of one or more premises and one conclusion. A premise is a statement (a sentence that is either true or false) that is offered in support of the claim being made, which is the conclusion (which is also a sentence that is either true or false).

There are two main types of arguments: deductive and inductive. A deductive argument is an argument such that the premises provide (or appear to provide) complete support for the conclusion. An inductive argument is an argument such that the premises provide (or appear to provide) some degree of support (but less than complete support) for the conclusion. If the premises actually provide the required degree of support for the conclusion, then the argument is a good one. A good deductive argument is known as a valid argument and is such that if all its premises are true, then its conclusion must be true. If all the argument is valid and actually has all true premises, then it is known as a sound argument. If it is invalid or has one or more false premises, it will be unsound. A good inductive argument is known as a strong (or "cogent") inductive argument. It is such that if the premises are true, the conclusion is likely to be true.

A fallacy is, very generally, an error in reasoning. This differs from a factual error, which is simply being wrong about the facts. To be more specific, a fallacy is an "argument" in which the premises given for the conclusion do not provide the needed degree of support. A deductive fallacy is a deductive argument that is invalid (it is such that it could have all true premises and still have a false conclusion). An inductive fallacy is less formal than a deductive fallacy. They are simply "arguments" which appear to be inductive arguments, but the premises do not provided enough support for the conclusion. In such cases, even if the premises were true, the conclusion would not be more likely to be true.

We can appreciate the irony of a customer service startup running into less than stellar customer service.

A little over a week ago we discovered that our domains could not be accessed from T-Mobile USA network. We probably wouldn’t find out until much later had we not picked up a T-Mobile SIM while in the US.

Although we are B2B is is still a problem when 40+ million people do not have access to your website, campaigns, services or when you can’t demo your product at an event. The founder almost had a coronary when he first encountered the 504 at an investor meeting and thought that the entire service was down.

Naively, we posted an issue on T-Mobile’s support forums only to be given a run around by T-Mobile staff.

Its funny how members of the community are often more helpful than actual customer support agents even when issue was clearly identified.

A quick Google search for “T-Mobile 504” shows that this is a pretty common error that is affecting a lot of people.

http://support.t-mobile.com/message/208262
http://support.t-mobile.com/message/213445
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111118201827AAqUxY7
http://support.t-mobile.com/message/203605
http://t-mobilesupportalcommunity2.hosted.jivesoftware.com/thread/34299
http://support.memsource.com/topic/getting-a-504-gateway-timeout-on-cloud1memsourcecom

T-Mobile please fix your gateways. Thank you!

Related posts

During the years of Nokia's decline, culminating in the sale of its mobile phone division to Microsoft in September, thousands of workers were made redundant. But the ex-Nokians have now created hundreds of new companies - thanks partly to a very Finnish level of support from the employer to its departing staff.

Like many university graduates in Finland, Kimmo Koivisto only wanted to work for Nokia - the country's biggest and most successful company. He fondly recalls the four years he spent working in its research strategy team in Helsinki.

"Working for Nokia was my dream job. It was good fun, having the geek inside me enjoying all the geeky stuff that was happening," he says.

Nokia once dominated the worldwide mobile phone market. It also dominated Finnish life.

Up until 2012 it was Finland's biggest employer, with more than 24,000 workers at its peak in 2000 (and another 36,000 overseas). It had an operating profit of 8bn euros and accounted for 4% of the country's GDP.

But in 2007 Nokia found itself losing ground rapidly against Apple and Samsung, and their hugely successful smartphones.

By the end of 2013 the number of employees in Finland had fallen by over half to 10,600. Its operating profit in 2012 was minus 2.3bn euros.

Kimmo left Nokia of his own accord, but he says it has been hard for him to watch the company's change in fortunes.

"Nokia gave us so much. You really grew there, learning so much and taking the opportunities it provided," he says.

"Then, in a few years everything is disappearing. It's very sad and difficult to see that happening."

In February 2011 Nokia announced that it was replacing its operating system with Microsoft Windows. The company restructured, shedding staff.

But about the same time, the company launched the Bridge programme, a scheme offering financial help and training to the workers who were about to leave.

"The company decided - all the way from the board to the senior management - that we wanted to do career responsibility as well as we can, beyond what the legal minimum is," says Matti Vanska, the head of the Bridge programme.

The scheme - available to 18,000 employees across 13 countries - helped people to find a new job, offered training for a completely new profession, or helped entrepreneurs set up their own companies.

In Finland 5,000 people received help and 400 new companies have now been created by around 500 entrepreneurs.

Kimmo was not eligible for Bridge funding because he left Nokia voluntarily. But he launched Tellyo - an app which allows people to instantly record and share TV clips with friends - with two other ex-Nokians who were.

Jakub Majkowski and Justyna Kowalska each received the maximum grant amount of 25,000 euros (£20,770) which was immediately invested in Tellyo.

Since it started up in January 2012, it has signed deals with broadcasters in Finland, Spain and Poland.

"The company would never have started without the Bridge programme," says Kimmo.

"We couldn't believe that you could get so much support. It was an unbelievably good opportunity."

Nokia is not prepared to reveal how much the Bridge programme has cost but says it is "in the tens of millions of euros".

Some new companies have - with permission - taken licensed technologies from Nokia. Others - like Jolla Mobile - have given new life to ideas which were no longer considered part of Nokia's strategy, such as the MeeGo operating system.

"We saw this perfect opportunity to take the people, the asset and the know-how to create something new," says Jolla's co-founder Marc Dillon.

Dillon had intended to work at Nokia for the rest of his life but was made redundant after 10 years working for the company in San Diego and Helsinki. The majority of Jolla's 90 employees also worked at Nokia.

Based in a former Nokia research centre in Helsinki, Jolla used elements of Nokia's MeeGo system to create a new operating system called Sailfish, and launched its first mobile phone in November.

Dillon says "agreements and things" don't allow him to say if his company received money from Nokia. But he says that Nokia is not an investor in Jolla.

"The most important thing was that they encouraged and they did not block. They could have said No, citing anti-competition or something like that.

"Instead we were open with them and they were open with us and we were able to take MeeGo and do something with it."

Another company that was allowed to take technology out of Nokia and develop it is PulseOn, which claims to have created the world's most accurate and easy-to-use sport heart-rate monitor.

PulseOn describes itself as being a Nokia spin-off company. Four out of its five shareholders are ex-Nokians, including Tero Mennander who spent five years heading a business development team.

"We saw a fantastic opportunity to commercialise a technology where the foundations were developed within Nokia," says Tero.

Nokia gave the company a grant of tens of thousands of euros, and helped arranged a credit guarantee from a bank.

The grant enabled PulseOn to fund itself for 10 months, allowing it to further develop the technology before getting venture capital investment. The company now has 13 employees and will launch its first commercial product this year.

"It would have been very challenging to start it from scratch," says Tero.

"We're extremely grateful that this opportunity was given to us."

Some may argue that Nokia has done all this for its ex-staff to generate good publicity. This is denied by Matti Vanska.

"We said the individual priority is first, the community priority is second and the Nokia interest is third. I believe that when you do the right thing, Nokia will also benefit - but that was not the primary driver."

Ari Tulla is another one who benefited. He was Nokia's Head of App studios, working in Helsinki and San Francisco, but opted to leave when Nokia decided to switch to the Windows phone in February 2011.

He and Tapio Tolvanen - who also took redundancy - set up a company called BetterDoctor in San Francisco. Its app allows users to quickly find a suitable local doctor based on their insurance plan and the type of care they need.

Ari says the Bridge programme gave BetterDoctor "a few tens of thousands of dollars" but believes the gesture was about far more than money.

"Nokia has been - and is still today - a Finnish company and if you think about the Finnish psyche, it's a very fair culture," says Ari.

"When we do something we always want to see it through. You don't see Finns bailing out, that's not part of the culture so I think you would expect that from Nokia.

"For workers in America, if you worked at a company like General Electric it's more like you get the package - a month's salary - and go. They lock the doors on the day you are fired.

"At Nokia there were people who knew they were going to be laid off in six months and they were able to stay at Nokia with a Nokia email address with the Nokia laptop and spend time applying for new things and Nokia helped them. That's pretty fair."

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Fort William, United Kingdom - The tiny isle of Eigg, off Scotland's north-west coast, can feel like a land outside time. Buzzards, ravens, and even golden eagles swoop over heather-filled fields. The occasional car moves ponderously along the island's few kilometres of road. A sporadic ferry service provides the only connection with the outside world.

The 31-square-kilometre island's hundred or so inhabitants call this languid pace of life "Eigg Time". But the island, part of the Hebrides archipelago, is proving that a relaxed approach is no barrier to making big changes.

Eigg is firmly on course to become the first island entirely self-sufficient in renewable power. Dotted around the picturesque island are solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric schemes that provide almost all of the residents' energy needs.

"It varies from year to year depending on weather conditions, but we are getting between 85 and 90 percent of our energy from renewables," explains Maggie Fyffe over coffee in her pleasingly chaotic bungalow that doubles as the financial office for "Eigg Electric". Outside her window the sun shines on the Atlantic Ocean, bathing the hills of nearby Rum island in light. 

"There are miles and miles of underground cable connecting every house to the grid."

More electricity

The electricity scheme, which cost around £1.6m ($2.64m) and was funded by the European Union and national bodies, was switched on in 2008. Before then, most islanders relied on noisy, polluting generators that ran on diesel that had to be shipped from the mainland at great cost.

"It's hard to imagine what it is like to live with no electricity or limited electricity," says Fyffe, who moved to the island in the 1970s. "If you had a generator you would only have it on for a few hours a day, so that meant you only had electricity for certain hours of the day. Now life is so much easier. I've got a washing machine - which I never had before."

Eigg Electric is independent of the UK's national grid, which means that the island is unable to sign lucrative renewables contracts with big energy companies as other rural communities in Scotland have done. Instead, electricity prices on Eigg are set slightly higher than the cost on the mainland. But at 21 pence (35 cents) per kilowatt-hour, few on the island are complaining. 

"It was a condition of our funding that the price was higher," says Fyffe. "We might have to put up the price next year by another penny. We just have to keep an eye on how the books are balancing and decide. But it is still a lot less than we were paying before."

To ensure there is enough energy for everyone, islanders cannot use more than 5 kilowatts at a time - equivalent to running a washing machine and a kettle simultaneously. For businesses, the limit is 10 kilowatts. Islanders are used to rationing their power: So far, no one has been disconnected.

Extreme weather

Perched on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, Eigg gets more than its fair share of extreme weather - good news for renewable energy.

"It gives you a completely different attitude to rain," says Eddie Scott, part of Eigg Electric's maintenance team, as he shows off the state-of-the-art energy storage facility in the middle of the island. Rainfall helps power hydroelectric generators set up along streams or rivers.

"That arrow there shows you that there is more power coming in than the island is consuming," Scott explains, pointing to a bank of batteries and flashing lights.

On days that are really sunny - or, more likely, really wet or windy - Eigg Electric has a useful way for dealing with excess energy. "We have heaters in all the public spaces on the island, the two churches, the community centre, [the shop and café] down at the pier. So we put free heating into these buildings to keep the island's costs down and to keep the infrastructure of the buildings dry," says Scott.

Scott is not an energy specialist or a technician by profession - his background is in horticulture - but, like the rest of the six-man, part-time maintenance team, he learned how the system works by shadowing the construction company as they built the Eigg Electric scheme. "Part of their contract was that they had to teach people about installation and how it worked," he says. "Now we can solve a lot of the problems ourselves. We have learned a lot as the years have gone by."

One of the reasons the electricity scheme has worked so well, says Scott, is Eigg's unique ownership structure, which gave everyone on the island a say in the decision to install the wind turbines, solar panels and hydroelectric generators.

This was not always the case. For centuries, Eigg was owned by a succession of landlords, many of whom had little or nothing to do with the island. As recently as the 1990s most residents had no legal tenure on their land, making development on the island almost impossible.

Owning the island

In 1997, after a campaign that made international headlines, the residents of Eigg raised £1.5m ($2.48m) to buy the island from its erstwhile owner, an eccentric German fire artist who went by the name of Maruma. And so Eigg became the first island in Scottish history to be bought by its inhabitants.

"Owning the island has empowered the people of Eigg," says Fyffe, who spearheaded the community buyout of the island. "Eigg has improved enormously over the last 15 years. A lot of employment has been created. We have a lot of young people coming back to live here."

An impressive broadband scheme has helped, as has the island's vibrant cultural scheme - musician Johnny Lynch - better known as the Pictish Trail - is among the island's residents.

Anyone who lives on Eigg for more than six months of the year automatically becomes a member of the residents' committee. It was at this monthly committee that the idea for a renewable energy scheme first emerged.

"Electricity was brought up at every meeting. Where folk would want to see wind turbines, how much they would pay for a unit of electricity, we talked about all of that," says Fyffe.

'A great luxury'

Now the biggest problem for Eigg Electric is not renewables, but ensuring a supply of clean fuel for the diesel generators that still account for around 15 percent of the island's energy consumption. Last year, contaminated diesel entered the supply chain, causing £12,000 ($19,800) worth of damage - a significant outlay for a small community.

For its inhabitants, continuous electricity has changed island life forever. "Electric light is a great luxury. Now I have a television, a sound system, a refrigerator, all the stuff that people take for granted," says local postman John Cormack.

Cormack built his own hydroelectric scheme, near his wooden house overlooking a sandy beach at the Bay of Laig more than 15 years ago, but he has come to rely on Eigg Electric when bad weather knocks out his private generator. 

"Before I'd have to try to stagger out there in the dark," he says. "Now I have the luxury of flicking over to Eigg Electric and sorting it out when the weather is nicer and it is daylight. It's great."

Follow Peter Geoghegan on Twitter: @PeterKGeoghegan