I usually stay far away from the Craigslist jobs section, but I couldn’t help getting sucked in today when a friend sent me an unusually wacky ad.

Craigslist is sort of like the bus depot of the Internet. Like a bus depot in a major metropolitan area, it’s a congregating place for all sorts of strange people who hang out there simply because it’s free. In no other section is this more apparent than the jobs section. “Real” companies hire a recruiter or put a listing on one of the major job sites when they look for candidates. Conversely, Craigslist, because it’s free, attracts all sorts of folks who want you to work for them in exchange for a share of revenue, barter for goods or services, on credit, or simply for no compensation at all because they believe their project is an important social issue. Of course there are legitimate companies hiring on Craigslist, but they tend to be drowned out by all the crap.

The ad my friend pointed me to was from the Twin Cities “Computer Gigs” section. The title was Looking for “SMART” unemployed IT person. Here it is in all its unedited glory:

Looking for a:

Highly intelligent
Very confident
IT professional

WHO currently finds themselves:
Unemployed
Ready to change the world
Willing to take a chance on a brighter future

What we offer:
An algorithm that has not been though of
A chance to better the world
Profit sharing
A non-discriminatory work place
Pool, lake, kayaking, biking, fishing….

We recently found a “MAJOR” loop_hole in the internet which needs to be exploited as soon as humanly possible. This is the push that the American Economy needs at the moment and, if you are reading this; You could be the one to make it happen.

Experiences of our in home staff include:
DNR (Forestry)
Retail Management
Insurance Negotiations
Mortgage Processing and generation
Construction Management

The Boss:
Fought forest fires
Headed a local Alternative band
Worked with Audio/Visual production
Invented a “smoking demonstrator” at age 10
Awards in science at state levels
Passed militaries ASVAP with flying colors
Rated in the “superior” range

The GOAL:
To launch this site as soon as possible and start the road to recovery. Potentially save a life or several along the way. Be part of something new and exciting.

Anyone who has had skepticism about this idea, and still been allowed to view the principal, agrees that this “WILL change the WORLD!”

Location: Lake Minnetonka
it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Compensation: “As profited” Pay should be no issue once we’re up and running ;) Generous compensation.

Now, I’m not a troll. I’m normally content with laughing at people inside my own head and moving on to more productive things. But this was just too good to resist. Not only was this an opportunity to exploit a “MAJOR” loophole in the Internet, I would also have a chance to be instrumental in the recovery of the American economy. Plus, “The Boss” was a forest-fire-fighting, mortgage-processing band leader. I didn’t know what a “smoking demonstrator” was, but it sure was impressive that he invented one at age 10. Finally, it wasn’t clear if he was rated as “superior” in the ASVAP (sic) specifically or if he was just superior at life in general, but I didn’t care. Clearly this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

So I sent him an email.

To: [anonymous Craigslist email address]
Subject: IT Position

Hello,

I saw your ad on Craigslist and I’m interested in this opportunity. I’m a software developer with a wide range of experience, including designing and building websites. I’m also really into forestry. I can build your site and have it up and running very soon. I’m not unemployed, but I’m willing to work in my free time to get the American economy back in gear.

I understand that you can’t pay me for building the site, so I’m curious to know what sort of profit sharing you’re offering. Kayaking and fishing on Lake Minnetonka sounds nice, but I need to put food on my table too.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to learning more about this project. I’m inspired to help make it a reality, so please respond at your earliest convenience.

Thanks,
Hans

Within a few minutes I got a reply. (Name and email address removed, of course).

From: [REDACTED]
Subject: Re: IT Position

Hans :)

I posted this 15 mins ago and you are my most eligible of the 3 so far.

“Profit sharing” The site will make money and it will force large corporations to fight for positions within the advertising sectors.

My goal is 20/20/20/40 (CEO, main programmer, profits for future growth, facility and staff)

The idea is that this site should be “insanely popular” before it even launches ;)

Okay, “insanely popular” sounded pretty cool. I sent him another email.

To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Re: IT Position

Awesome! So what kind of site do you need built?

Also, a fair word of warning: If there really is an exploitable loophole in the Internet, we’ll need to make sure the site is built to be impervious against it. A site that exploits a loophole that can also be exploited itself could result in some really gnarly situations: what if the site exploits itself? Total meltdown, or worse. I don’t want to be anywhere near the web server when that happens.

Again, I received a reply within a few minutes.

From: [REDACTED]
Subject: Re: IT Position

LoL! Good point! :)

[Something about a user-generated opinion website]

I personally know very little about coding but have thought this through from every angle and have a very detailed sketch of the layouts and functions ready to go.

It is the bottled water of internet, economy boosting a-duh’s!

When would you be available to come to [REDACTED] to discuss the matter further? I am available days and nights as I work out of my home office currently. I would prefer to meet in seclusion to keep the general idea away from public interest.

[REDACTED]

And another reply shortly after that.

From: [REDACTED]
Subject: Re: IT Position

Is goalfinch your own personal design?

Pretty cool concept. Bet against yourself to succeed and therefore force yourself to try harder. Ingenious.

[Something about contacting Mark Zuckerberg and becoming a subsidiary of Facebook]

When I cross compared it against the other internet giants…. Craigslist topped the chart at 44 followed by facebook at 43 and this rated at 73. I had my closest friends compare with me for best results.

I have had a number of responses but so far you and another lady seem to have the sense of humor I like to work with and high confidence :) Hopefully speak with you soon.

[REDACTED]

I have no idea what he meant about comparing to Craigslist and Facebook. But at this point I took a step back and reconsidered what I was doing. He was seeming less like a cook and more like just a regular guy who had an interesting idea (if incomprehensible to me) but didn’t know anything about building a website. I did a search for his email address and found his Facebook page, Myspace pages for a couple bands he’s in, and more. So while the Craigslist ad made him sound like he was a bit strange, the rest of his online presence revealed that he’s (probably) a totally normal dude. He also had my real name and had found one of my projects, so if I had found all that information on him, he could find just as much about me. I didn’t want to lead him on anymore, so I sent him one more email.

To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Re: IT Position

Hi [REDACTED],

I have to be honest; I initially replied to your Cragslist ad only because it was pretty off the wall and I was curious to find out more. I’m a pretty busy guy, so I don’t think I’ll have time to help you build the site. I apologize for leading you on, I was simply very intrigued about a loophole in the Internet and a chance to jump-start the economy. I really hope you find someone to implement your idea and I wish you the best of luck.

Hans

I haven’t heard back from him since.

So what did I learn?

1. I should continue staying far away from the Craigslist jobs section.
2. People who have a wild idea and just need somebody to build it for them for no or little money may not be crazy, but they do need to be educated about the value of someone’s time.
3. If you’re an engineer, developer, or designer and someone asks you to build something for them without directly paying you for your work, tread carefully. There’s a small possibility you’ve stumbled on something as lucrative as “the bottled water of the internet”, but chances are you’ll wind up with nothing to show for it except a funny chain of emails.

I’ve been getting some great reactions on my series of posts over on the Goalfinch blog explaining how I built this interactive map of Twitter weight loss goals. If you’re interested in creating rich maps (without Flash!) on the web, you should check it out: Building Interactive Maps With PolyMaps, TileStache, and MongoDB.

I had the idea for Goalfinch while reading an article about economic incentives and how effective they are. It got me thinking: What if there were an easy way to set up economic incentives for goals I have in my own life?

A few months later, after working on it off and on in my spare hours, it’s ready for prime time.

With Goalfinch, you define a goal and make a contribution of cash that acts as an incentive for you to complete the goal. Your Facebook friends confirm whether or not you’ve accomplished it. If you succeed before your deadline, you get the cash back. If you fail, it gets donated to the charity of your choice. The combination of money on the line and your friends breathing down your neck makes for a very powerful motivator.

It’s a pretty simple idea that could go in many different directions. I’m still fine tuning the details, but it’s ready to use for tracking goals and creating incentives to accomplish them.

Tiction was always meant to run on a multi-touch screen. It started as a prototype interface for a home-brewed multitouch display that I never completed. But since Apple was kind enough to build and distribute a fantastic multitouch pad for me, the decision to move Tiction to the iPad was a no-brainer.

And now Tiction AV is available on the App Store. As much as I love Tiction for the desktop, the iPad is where it really shines. Grabbing multiple nodes at a time with your fingers and flinging them around the screen is a lot of fun. In addition to the multitouch support that Tiction was originally designed for, I’ve made Tiction even more immediately accessible by adding a set of high-quality audio samples that play when nodes are triggered. OSC is still supported, of course.

I’ll be adding a video tutorial in the next couple days that will introduce Tiction to those who aren’t familiar with it.

So check it out here or on the App Store, and let me know what you think!

OSCHub (http://oschub.com) is a fun little tool I’ve built to help everyone share the awesome power of OpenSoundControl.

What is OSCHub? Let’s say Alice and Bob each have some way of generating OpenSoundControl – with TouchOSC, OSCulator, a Lemur, or whatever. They can send their OSC messages to OSCHub, and those messages will become part of the global OSCHub stream.

If Chris is looking for some inspiration for a track he’s working on or just wants to inject a little randomness or uncertainty into his music-making process, he can fire up the OSCHub application on his computer and get a real-time feed of the global OSCHub stream, which will include both Alice and Bob’s messages as well as the messages of anybody else sending to OSCHub at that moment.

Send any OpenSoundControl message to oschub.com:9000 and it will be inserted into the global OSCHub stream. You can subscribe to the OSCHub stream by downloading and running a small program for Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux.

Go play with it at http://oschub.com.

Apologies to everybody who came here looking for Tiction over the past few months and found a page full of dead links. In addition to moving this site to a different host, I’ve been occupied with a host of other projects, most notably GainStudio, a brand new way to manage your recording studio. More on that in a separate post.

The upshot is, all of the links to Tiction are back in place and working. Some people have been experiencing problems with Tiction and OS X 10.6, and I’ve started looking into that. Stay tuned.

GetHappy is live on the iPhone App Store!

GetHappy searches for happy hours, drink specials, and food specials near you. Get access to our huge, always growing database of happy hours across the US. Save money and socialize by finding great drink and food deals.

See the GetHappy page here.

Check it out in the App Store here.

I just made Tiction v0.4.0 available for download.

Changes:

• MIDI Sync
• Full screen support
• Improved controller widgets (for number boxes, mostly)
• FIxed bugs where NOTE OFF messages weren’t being properly sent

Tiction v0.3.0 is now released!

Tiction v0.3.0 adds support for OpenSoundControl (OSC). Now you can trigger and move nodes, start and stop the sequencer, and sync to an external source, all over a network with OSC. This lets you control Tiction with practically anything, including the iPhone/iPod Touch (using TouchOSC, Mrmr, or OSCemote, for example), Pd, Max/MSP, or pretty much anything else you can dream of. The ability to send OSC messages from Tiction is coming soon

The ability to save files and open them later means you can hang on to that amazing patch you set up.

You can now globally disable the physical actions. This prevents nodes from moving around when triggered.

The background now subtly pulses to indicate which pitch was triggered. You can turn this off by setting the “bar brightness” slider to 0.

The Tiction window is no longer inverted, meaning the top of the window corresponds to higher pitch/velocity/CC values.

A number of other bugs were fixed, including one that didn’t preserve the source of a node’s note velocity.

You can get it here.

I’ve updated Tiction to use the excellent RWMidi library. This fixes problems some people were having with Tiction not starting up correctly.

I also added the ability to copy a node’s MIDI channel to all other connected nodes.

Get it here!