For years I’ve been saying this:

Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.

This week, the second one worked over Detroit. Security succeeded.

EDITED TO ADD (12/26): Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.

Bruce is referring, of course, to the new, rumored security procedures said to be rumbling their way out of the TSA’s nightmare bureaucracy and onto your next airline flight.

In a nutshell: planes must disable their seat-back in-flight entertainment, passengers can’t use electronics, get up or access their bags during the last part of a flight. Oh, and you can’t have anything in your lap.

Keep in mind, this is in response to a dim-witted “terrorist” who snuck a weak explosive onto a plane… inside of his pants.

Remember when shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to blow up his Reeboks? That resulted in a limit of one carry on bag per passenger, despite the fact that Reid’s plan had nothing to do with carry on bags. Then there’s the whole liquid limit for carry on bags, which also makes no sense given the simple reality that liquid re-combines very easily, even if you do happen to carry it aboard in small containers instead of big ones.

So the recent rumors of new policy, while wildly stupid, are just stupid enough. They carry enough non sequitur authenticity to be utterly believable. I was ready to believe them. Then a source contacted me. He’s inside the TSA and was desperate to leak the internal memo that brought the new rules into existence. Now it all makes sense: the non sequiturs, the absurdity, the utterly incomprehensible creation, amendment and abandonment of these policies.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that in a few places, it would seem the TSA exercised forbearance when it seemed like, even by their standards, they’d crossed the line. Here’s the document, reproduced without further comment:

Let’s start with this: I’m an idiot. I’m 24 years old and I don’t know anywhere near as much as I need to. I convince myself otherwise because without the strength of thinking I know at least something, I could never get much done.

That said, I do know this: there are only a few people who you should take advice from. I mean life advice: advice on how to be who you are, how to manage your world, how to grow as a person.

1. People who have demonstrated an interest in your success and years of loyalty. You’ll be lucky if you get one of these. I hit the lottery, and I have two. You’ll know them with this test: If they asked you to drop everything and save their ass (business, product, family, life) for a month, you’d do it without hesitation.
2. Your significant other. This is someone who spends a lot of time with you and sees all that you struggle with, all that makes you happy. You’ve been through good and bad and get wistful recalling both. My luck continues: my girlfriend is the wisest counselor I could ever ask for.
3. Yourself: If you cut the crap and take a long walk alone, you can ask yourself anything and usually get the right answer. Make the time to know your own thoughts: you might be surprised how much is waiting in your own brain.

That’s all. Here are people who should not be trusted for advice:

1. Some dick with a blog (even me). If you’ve ever read a top-ten post on a blog, you know the content is cranked out to drive pageviews. The author probably slapped the content together in the space of two hours to benefit an audience of thousands. Like with drive-by legal or medical advice, you’re a fool to assume you can get something directly applicable to your case from a one-size-fits-all post.
2. Parents. Your mileage may vary but parents are often too invested in your safety and security to be able to weigh the benefits of those risky life decisions with huge payoffs and incredible experiences. If your parents are batshit insane (thankfully not my case, but I have seen this) that investment may yield terrifyingly bad advice. Even if the advice you get is reasonable, there’s plenty we don’t need to tell our own parents.
3. Your social circle. Excluding a choice best friend or two, your social circle can’t tell you anything useful about how to run your life. Groups breed conformity and breaking from that might be consciously or even subconsciously discouraged.
4. Penelope Trunk. (cf. #1)

Penelope Trunk wants to tell you how to run your career. She presumes to be an expert on this subject. She’s not.

Once upon a time, as a young man desperate for growth and success, a blog specifically like hers, geared toward shameless career ambition, seemed like crack. Loyal readership taught me otherwise. Penelope Trunk is someone barely in control of her own life. That she is honest and open about her flaws is endearing but doesn’t change the fact that she cannot provide viable career advice based on personal experience. She’s proudly a trainwreck and while that may be great for her blog’s readership, would you trust a fitness trainer who doesn’t exercise and can’t stick to a healthy diet? Mental health counseling from a patient in a psychiatric ward? Computer advice from someone who uses Windows 98? Come on. I may be an idiot but at least my bullshit detector works.

Only when Penelope Trunk is viewed as a cautionary tale will you find viable lessons for your own career. I would never claim to be qualified to advise you on how to run your life. Nonetheless, if you take the things Trunk has done with her life and imagine the opposite, you may find valuable guidance.

Read on for these lessons.

Bullying is Okay

Earlier this year, Trunk was complaining about her kids. I don’t blame her — parenting doesn’t seem like a lot of fun at times and blowing off steam via Twitter is cheap, easy relief. Things got complicated when our thin-skinned heroine was sassed by some jackass in flyover country. What did Trunk do? For most people who aspire to the public eye, ignoring this would be right move. Maybe using Twitter’s block feature, if you’re an especially petty kind of douche, would have been called for. In any case, it’s hardly worth more than a few seconds of thought. I guess Trunk wasn’t busy enough with her family and leading her startup because instead of doing the grownup thing, she called his place of employment and saved their number with the intent of “ruin[ing] his life there if [she] ever felt like he needed to be taught a lesson.”

(I’m not sure crazy internet lady calling out of the blue and whining about 140 characters of abuse is something technically capable of ruining anyone’s life. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what her true plan really was.)

Next, she called his wife. From the blog: “There was no answer. Maybe by then he had alerted his wife that he is being pursued by a psycho who maybe will kill her kids or maybe will kill him. Maybe they will never answer their phone again.“

(My emphasis.)

This is professional? This is what we do with our careers? There’s a word for this: unhinged. Self-revelatory stuff, right there.

Finally, Trunk penned a seething, rage-soaked blog post naming names and even the guy’s home town. She was impressed with herself, though, for having the maturity to not post his home phone number. Trunk was happy enough to ruin his Google mojo forever. She is, in fact, proud of that post to this day. (Notwithstanding the flurry of posts that came next, lasting just long enough to push the hatefest off her front page.)

Anti-Lesson: When you build a blog readership and a meager Twitter following, you should use these tools to bully the hell out of those who dare disagree with you. Anyone who tells you your behavior is unacceptable just doesn’t get it. It’s worthwhile to spend a significant amount of time and effort persecuting a grudge. You can use bad behavior to impress other people by appealing to the worst within them.

The real lesson: Self-control is important. In your life, especially as you become more successful, more and more jackasses will come out of the woodwork. How you respond to the least courteous of those around you speaks volumes about your true character. You can spend a lot of time getting vengeance against those who piss you off but the payoff is rarely worth it. If you want to make yourself seem smaller than you are, the best way to do it is to give attention to someone who doesn’t deserve it.

“Online Stars” Are Important

We’ve all been in this predicament before:

“So, D, who is really attentive and normal—two traits I have never had in a boyfriend, ever—is scary to me because I’m giving up the chance to enhance my brand by dating an online star.“

Yeah, I guess maybe not so much. Trunk is still in high school — approval of the internet cool kids is so important to her that not dating one who can improve her standing is a quandary worth blogging about. She has since resolved the quandary by electing to marry a farmer. He must be the retired co-founder of Skype or something.

Speaking of quandaries and farmers, the internet cool kids caused a conflict there, too. After accepting a reconciliation date from this then-estranged farmer fellow, Trunk realized she was double booked!

When I came out of my giddy stupor from his email, I realized that [the date] was the same weekend as maybe the biggest schmoozing event of my life: Guy Kawasaki invited me to spend a weekend on the USS Nimitz with Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and others.

I said yes to the weekend, of course. Because how can hanging out with these guys not be great for me? It’s probably what I’ve been working up to my whole career: a weekend like that.

Guy Kawasaki is apparently a friend of hers, so we’ll skip him, but wow, Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble! Connected guys? Sure. But you know what? They’re also douchebags. 40-something Scoble, for example, sees no problem getting touchy-feely with 17-year-old female entrepreneurs. Arrington is just a pompous weiner who can’t handle other people’s low opinions of his douchery. Trunk ultimately did what anyone with healthy priorities would do: she spent the weekend with someone who loves her instead of with a self-important group of perpetual children whose only interest in Trunk is how she’s able to further their own interests.

Invitation to dine with the Obamas? With Steve Jobs? With the late Norman Borlaug? Yeah, the farmer could take a hike. But these guys on the Nimitz? No one will know who they are in 20 years. There is no conflict. These guys were a group of assclowns who have never made any meaningful contributions to humanity. They’re worth skipping for someone who cares about you. If you’ve spent your whole career working toward a weekend with them, you need a new career.

Anti-lesson: People who have convinced the internet they are cool deserve our time, reverence and attention. If you’re going to waste your time with people who aren’t internet cool kids, there had better be a good reason. You should spend your whole career getting to the point where you can possibly one day hang out with these cool kids.

The real lesson: Often with little meaningful or useful accomplishment, people can convince the internet they are cool. Maybe they truly are. Just as often, these flavors of the minute will be forgotten within a decade. Either way, they’re just people. You have your own people. You should measure the value of your people by what they contribute to your life rather than their Twitter follow count. If your career is itself focused on convincing other people you’re cooler than you are, you should switch to a career where you’re actually doing meaningful work.

You Kind of Suck and Can’t Be Incredible

Penelope Trunk wants you to know: “[Dooce] is a marvel. And you are not.”

Dooce is, in fact, a marvel: a blog that pays her bills, millions of Twitter followers and a self-directed life right from the comfort of her home. Without even meeting you, though, Trunk dispenses the above defeatist advice: you’ll never be that, even if you want to be. Dooce is not an overnight success by any stretch: she has been writing her blog for eight years. While she is certainly talented in relating her thoughts, one of the greatest contributors to her success is her simple willingness to keep showing up, year after year. Woody Allen will tell us: 90% of success is just showing up. He should know — a large swath of the population finds his self-indulgent New Yorgies unwatchable. (I am on the fence.)

Anyone with a modicum of interest in an activity and a willingness to keep showing up over and over again will become a marvel. Malcolm Gladwell calls this the 10,000 hour rule.

Imagine if Penelope Trunk had given Dooce that advice, before she became a marvel? Imagine if she had told a young Heather Armstrong she’s not much of anything and should stick to doing jobs she doesn’t much like. Imagine if Dooce had believed it. (Not that it seems she would — by all accounts, Dooce is someone who does whatever it is she wants.)

Dooce is exceptional because she chose to be, not because a supernatural event anointed her with that status.

While the overall advice of Trunk’s post is so blindingly obvious as not to need saying (blogs won’t immediately make you money), the evidence used is part of an overall theme of her blog: Penelope Trunk thinks you kind of suck and you should just quit trying to build your career if the path you’ve chosen isn’t immediately marketable. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anti-Lesson: Things that are hard aren’t worth doing. Other people are better than you. You shouldn’t even bother trying. You kind of suck.

The real lesson: You’re in control of how great you are (or aren’t). You decide how quickly you reach 10,000 hours of anything. You’ll become incredible only if you choose to be: by doing the near-impossibly difficult work necessary to get there. Just like everyone else who ever chose to be incredible.

Unethical Behavior is Just Fine

If a company pays you to say something about them, Trunk says, there’s no real reason to disclose that. That’s for newspapers. You should just trust that she’s making money from smart companies, and that makes it all okay.

The trust of her readership is for sale to highest, smartest bidder.

The FTC, unfortunately, doesn’t agree that this is acceptable behavior. They’ll be going after companies who pay bloggers to endorse their products without disclosure.

Is it unethical? Of course it is. There’s a big difference between caring about a product or company for its own sake and caring about it because you’ve been paid to. Penelope may dance around this by saying she only picks good companies but that doesn’t change the fact that she failed to disclose a paid relationship. Her estimation of a post’s value after the fact doesn’t excuse the lapse, either. This kind of ends-justify-the-means rationalization is the hallmark of a crook.

It doesn’t matter if the conversation is between a newspaper and its readers, a blog and its subscribers or a friend and a friend. When one party is giving advice that could be influenced by an outside force, it is essential that the influence be announced openly. Anything less is simple dishonesty.

Anti-lesson: It’s fine to build a loyal readership and then sell their attention without disclosure. The rules of ethical behavior only apply to old media. You make your own rules — honesty is less important than cash money.

The real lesson: Don’t build trust and then quietly sell it for money.

Don’t Do What You Love — Do What is Easy Based on Your Existing Resume

“One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to ‘do what you love.’”

Yeah, she said that. Supporting evidence: “I am a writer, but I love sex more than I love writing. And I am not getting paid for sex.”

Trunk even had a talent for combining these things, writing “the best sex scenes” her writing professor had ever read. She gave up on her erotic literature career, though, because she believed it wasn’t important enough work.

“So if you are overwhelmed with the task of ‘doing what you love’ you should recognize that you are totally normal, and maybe you should just forget it. Just do something that caters to your strengths. Do anything.”

Hmm. So because Penelope can’t do it, there must not be any way at all to find a way to build a life and career around what you love, huh? Because you can’t immediately find a way to make your work impressive to other people, it must be impossible to find greatness in it?

Bye, Adam Savage. You love scifi, building things and using your imagination. Can’t think of any way you can parlay that into an enormous, satisfying career. Be a bricklayer.

Bye, John Gruber. You love details, design, Apple, and writing. There’s no way those things can possibly come together as a lucrative blog that lets you be your own boss. Go scrub toilets.

Bye, Phil Tan. You love music? What do you think you’re going to do with that? Go buy some CDs or something.

Bye, even, to my mother. Someone who didn’t even have the benefit of a complete high school education somehow found a way to turn her love of animals into a career that let her be her own boss while keeping me fed, clothed and housed my whole childhood. Seriously: there is not a thing this woman loves more than animals, as her past ownership even of ostriches will clearly demonstrate. The result of that and years of hard work is that she’s the best pet groomer in whatever city she’s in, bar none. She can do that because she cares about her clients’ animals in ways that other groomers, just paying the bills, never could.

I guess she should have just gotten a retail job and stuck with that, right, Penelope? Hey, you said do anything.

Anti-Lesson: Don’t do what you love. It’s hard! Since Penelope Trunk never figured out how, you shouldn’t bother, either. Instead of dedicating yourself to something you’re great at doing, absolutely love doing, become the founder of an also-ran social network for young people that provides none of the value of its competitors while alienating the sort of older, more accomplished professionals those young people need to meet.

The real lesson: Your passions give you deep, generous, unique insight into specific problems. With some luck, a little imagination and a ton of hard work, you can focus your career around the things you care about. There’s a significant chance that career will matter a whole lot more to you than just “doing anything.” You’ve got a better chance at finding happiness in work you find meaningful rather than trying to fit into roles that other, faceless people will deem great.

Does Penelope have a strong writing style and a compelling blog? Absolutely. Does she have a gripping sense of honesty and transparency? Sure. But let’s be clear: as a vendor of career advice, she is a charlatan. If a career of settling for second-best, letting other people decide the value of your passions and giving up on your dreams is what you seek, then you seek Penelope. If you want your self-worth to be short-changed, then get yourself over to Trunk. If you want to improve your brand image by writing psychotic screeds against nobodies in Ohio, then boy, do I have the role model for you!

In the final equation, the case of Penelope Trunk is a sad one. By letting other people decide what matters, what’s important, she took her passions out of the driver’s seat of her career too many times. By worrying constantly about other people’s estimation of her potential greatness, she condemned herself to a life of mediocrity. Her blog and its continual churn of the latest misery, the most recent stress, is a chronicle of the results of those decisions. I don’t want that to be me.

Trunk needs to do everyone a favor, herself included, and cut the career advice crap. She is at her best when she writes about herself. The drama queen schtick all on its own is more than enough to build content around. Her sycophantic hoards of hysterically, irrationally loyal commenter fans are evidence enough of that. While her bad choices make for poisonous, self-defeating career advice and a needlessly stressful life, they nonetheless make for entertaining, instructive, even inspiring reading. That’s a great focus and the best part is that it doesn’t presume to be qualified to tell other people how to manage their lives.

I have met men and women who have done incredible things. I have found role models in people who came from nothing, who had nothing but passion on their side, and who now spend their days being paid to do incredible things they absolutely love. It’s real. It’s possible. But I, for one, will never find that place by listening to someone who says I can’t. Who comforts herself by telling you that you’re not good enough. That’s poison. That’s quitting before you start. That’s being someone else’s person, fitting into someone else’s expectations, living someone else’s shortcomings, instead of being who you yearn to be.

My advice? Don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you things online. Make your own decisions based on your own values, your own passions, your own drives, your own strengths. If you must, get advice for managing your life’s direction from people who know you, who care about you, who you can trust. Most of all, get it from people whose lives and careers approach a level of sanity and stability you’d like to emulate. If you must get advice on running your career from the internet, this is the only source I’ve seen with viable information:

Merlin Mann and John Gruber at SxSW ’09. They’re talking about blogs but their advice is broadly applicable to any career where you choose to do what you want to do.

Final advice, which you also should not take just because I’m saying it: Instead of writing comments on someone else’s blog when they piss you off, write your own post. Your content is yours — don’t fuel someone else’s blog with it. That’s their job. Also, don’t wait years to write that post. You’ll be stuck writing a long-ass screed like me.

But they called me. I had a job.

And I loved it. I’d never had more fun in my life. Thanks to a handful of adult mentors, I went from being shy and insecure in front of strangers to being outgoing, helpful and outrageously courteous, as befitted Publix’s customer service mission.  I got to meet people, learn about their lives and help make their day better, all in the time it took to bag up an order and pack in a car. Publix has a firm “no tipping!” policy and this was spelled out on a button affixed to my apron at all times. Despite this, not a week went by where a kindly retiree or harried but grateful parent didn’t stuff a couple bucks into my hand or pocket, buying me a sandwich or drink to end my shift. With a home life that was terrifyingly unpredictable and school that was tedious and unsatisfying, Publix, the people and the tangible benefits of my work there, became an escape that I craved.

There was plenty of reward in the fun of the job, but I found that throwing myself into my work with such gusto had other perks. When all of the front service clerks got reviews, there was much kvetching in the break room. Nickels and dimes, my teenaged colleagues moaned. They barely gave them anything for a raise. When my turn came, my boss, Mr. Starkey, called me into his office. After rattling through his estimate of my performance, I was given a fifty cent raise. It was the largest, Starkey confided, that anyone in my group had gotten. In retrospect, too, I realize that I was rarely tapped to do cleaning chores, since my management seemed to prefer me in front of customers as much as possible.

It was all so perfectly Randian, in a way that satisfied my then-Randroid brain. I gave honest effort in exchange for honest reward and recognition. Love your work, I thought as I pushed a pile of carts back into the store, and nothing feels like work.

Of course, it wouldn’t last. Home, as was its wont, took another lolloping, staggering jolt. For the second time in less than a year, we were moving away. Mr. Starkey was crestfallen. He’d been eager to groom me into cashiering and beyond. These were remarks that were and remain deeply flattering – it didn’t seem like he especially enjoyed terribly many of the other kids who had my title. At my request, he eagerly typed up a letter of recommendation. My favorite line, then and now:

“I would rehire him immediately if he were to return to Sarasota.”

I enjoyed it both for the heartfelt endorsement and for the tiny, whimsical implication that I was somehow in control of my existence.

I went on to be a salesman, an intern, a marketing manager and a project manager. With each job, I hoped to find the feeling I knew at Publix. The feeling of throwing myself into my work, enjoying every minute, and always hungry for more.

To be sure, I had some amazing jobs in the years since. Tremendous opportunities that provoked growth and change. But none of it could ever recapture the lost innocence of that first, magical time I worked at the supermarket. This realization, each time I started a new gig, was always a tiny disappointment.

For almost a decade, I’ve drawn a paycheck from someone. Until now. Not having been to the office, or any office, feels vaguely like retirement. Except there’s a ton of work to do.

And it’s back: that magic Publix feeling.

I love my new job. I’ve spent the last week building a new iPhone app from scratch. My new boss, me, really likes how it turned out. This is the most incredibly rewarding productive activity I have ever chosen for myself. The app is about done; I’ll have more to say about it soon. The most tremendous and powerful discovery came through its creation: I love developing applications for the iPhone. I can do it all day and night until my fingers hurt and still want more. It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever invested my working time doing. All I want is to get better and keep building.

Like Publix ten years ago, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s fun. It’s… wonderful.

Time will tell if this feeling and the products it creates will be sufficient to feed and house me. For now, I’ve got enough to hold out for awhile and give it everything I’ve got.

It’s a scary prospect to abandon security and regular cashflow, move across the country, and go into business for yourself, all the while hoping to hell everything will work out okay. Like many projects, it’s one of those things where if you truly took the time to consider all the attendant difficulty, complication and risk, you’d never bother to do it all.

It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.

There are no words to convey my excitement.

For as long as I’ve existed, there has always been an obligation to someone else’s rules lurking just beyond the horizon. Even on vacations, where time is theoretically mine, there was the lingering, ever-present knowledge that before I knew it, I would go back to a world of obliging someone else’s whims. For the first time, I’ll escape those bonds. It’s a feeling of freedom I’ve never known.

It must be stressed that while Full Sail has been a great place to work and I’m grateful for the experience, I had a job there and I have a handful of problems with working any “job,” no matter who supplies it. When I say job in this context, I mean any paid activity wherein you provide 40+ weekly hours in exchange for a regular paycheck, benefits and perhaps a reasonable approximation of social interaction. I’m a difficult, demanding, even impossible person, so these problems loom larger for me than perhaps they do you.

Ownership

When you arrive at your job and get down to the business of working, you are addressing problems that are not yours. These are the problems of whatever organization has hired you for your job. Depending on your level of career advancement and achievement, the problems you solve may range from the tedious (data entry) to the complicated (project or team management). No matter the complexity of your daily tasks, though, you can be assured that none of the problems they address are actually your own. While it is true that, through initiative, hard work and persistence, your handling of the organization’s problems can enrich your knowledge, experience and career prospects, this doesn’t change the fact that you’re doing someone else’s work.

Time

Unless you’re working at some sort of hippy, ultra-progressive company, you give 96% of your weeks to your job. That is a shitload of time. When I write it out like that, the egregious criminality of giving away that much of your life to someone who isn’t you seems so obvious, I can’t even come up with anything else to say.

Direction

I’ve spent a lifetime resenting any condition where someone else had authority to direct the discharge of my energies. The trade you make while collecting a paycheck is that in exchange for the money, someone gets to tell you what to do with 96% of your weeks. Even with the best boss, this deal is crap: Who wants to spend this much of their lives following orders?

Wealth

In the typical job arrangement, I would  show up each day and give a significant amount of time, energy, imagination and passion to the tasks of the organization. If I worked exceptionally hard while not being a douche and doing my best to help others be successful, I could earn promotions and more money. I would not become wealthy. Meanwhile, assuming successful management of the company, those who own the organization would increase their wealth. For many people, maintaining the wealth of others in exchange for a job’s security is a fine trade. That doesn’t work for me. If there’s anyone who should be wealthy off the sweat of my brow, I’m the first person on that list.

This is also including the assumption that whomever it is who owns the company is making the right decisions, which is absolutely not a given. There’s an illusion of security in a paycheck that comes crashing down as soon as layoffs or bankruptcy are announced (hello, domestic auto manufacturers). I’d rather have control of my fate than leave it in the hands of someone else.

Alignment of Interests

If your company did not need you, you would not exist there. This is a simple, business-driven reality and under no circumstances would I ever begrudge any organization this simple fact. Business is not and should not be charity. Still, think about it. The interest of the business is always and will always be the business. Never you, as an individual. This is an important fact to remember as you commit 96% of your weeks to the job that has hired you. You are the only person you can trust to have your own best interests as a top priority. Rest assured, if the business felt as though it could get more of your time while paying you less, it would surely take that arrangement. It’s just business.

The Game

You show up early, stay late. You take on extra projects and complete them in your spare time. You’re good to your coworkers and can always be relied upon in a pinch. Congratulations, you’re on your way to promotions and potential raises.

The trouble is, if you gave this level of effort for clients instead of your boss, you’d make a whole lot more money.

If you’re following the thread of my argument, you might be thinking “hey, wow, having a job is slavery and my company is screwing me over!”

Two things to note: Having a job gives you incredible opportunities to learn, grow and network while giving you the stability to develop yourself over the long term.

Secondly, unless you signed some sort of contract, you can leave any time you like. If you’re prepared.

So prepare yourself. Maybe I’m young and idealistic, but I firmly believe that the pursuit of things I genuinely love will bring me infinitely more reward than being paid to worry about someone else’s problems. I believe that dedicating the bulk of my time to my own growth, wealth and self-selected challenges, rather than to the development of someone else’s business, is the only conscionable use of my time. I believe that investing myself in an organization whose best interest is something that isn’t me would be to ignore one simple fact: I’m going to die one day. I need to make the most of my life and working for someone else isn’t going to cut it.

You may be following this, finding none of my assessments about having a job objectionable and thinking to yourself that I am, in fact, absurdly difficult and demanding. If that is so I salute you: your expectations for your life are much more easily satisfied.

I’m stuck wanting something else for myself. Thankfully, I’ve got some role models to help me handle this drive for a self-directed life.

Adam Savage

I heard Adam Savage give a talk where he mentioned that his line of work is mostly freelance. This perked up my ears. If you’ve spent any amount of time watching MythBusters, you know that Adam has a singular passion for the creative work that he does. He currently has the best job in the world because he desperately, obsessively craves the joy of making things. He’s incredibly good at it. I’m certain he never could have attained his world-class skills without first loving the work to begin with.

Nick Popovich, Super Repo Man

If you need a defaulted plane retrieved from a deadbeat, you call this guy. Nick had some flight skills and did his first repo on a whim. Now he owns a $20 million business grabbing planes from all corners of the globe. He’s good at it and he enjoys the work. Imagine the waste of his talents if he had stuck to being a traditional pilot and never realized his unique ability to resolve impossible, dangerous situations.

John Gruber

John is obsessive about details in design, typography, user experience and software development. He’s also obsessive about Apple. It shocks me that time and again, John is able to render completely accurate predictions about Apple’s direction and upcoming products. It’s a level of insight no one else on the web can match. It also puts professional investment analysts to shame. Is it incredible that six-figure salaried analysts can’t match the insight and prescience of a guy working from his home on a blog he maintains by himself? A little bit, but it should not be surprising at all. Only a love and passion for his subject matter could have made John the authority on all things Apple on the web.

My mom

I don’t know that she feels great about me saying so here, but it’s important to the legend: my mom didn’t finish high school or go to college. She does have a GED. She’s a minority for whom english is a second language. In pretty much all the ways a single mom can have the chips stacked against her, she had.

My mom loves animals – always has. It’s truly an obsession with her. In my childhood, I can recall the ownership of three ostriches, a donkey, six geese, dozens of chickens, an African Grey Parrot, dozens of dogs, some cats and multiple generations of coral reef tanks with tropical fish that made the house a viable field trip destination.

When I was very young, my mom took a certificate program at the New York School of Dog Grooming. To pay homage to James Herriot, no capped and gowned don ever looked back to his years among the spires of Oxford with more nostalgia than did my mother to her two months at NYSDG.

If I am difficult and demanding, then my mom truly is impossible. Nonetheless, she endured years of working for shitty bosses at shittier dog grooming shops. I don’t know how she did it, but one day, she had enough. I’m not sure where she got the funds, but she put together enough money to lease and renovate a commercial space, adding all of the kennels, baths, and other equipment necessary to provide absurdly clean, professional dog grooming services. For pretty much the rest of my childhood (and to this day), she was self-employed, her own boss. Despite the statistics for small business failure, my mom was and continues to be wildly successful at her trade without any training in business, marketing or finance. She doesn’t need it: she’s just incredibly good at what she does, wanted to provide the best possible service and has always loved her work. Not many other people can offer this. This was enough to ensure I never went hungry as a kid.

The message is clear: if you love the work you do, you can become so good at it that whatever rewards you seek become attainable.

I’ll say it again: I’m going to die one day. I don’t know if it’s next year or many decades from now or somewhere in between. What I do know is that expending my energies within the narrow, limiting, self-denying confines required by the traditional job is a complete waste of whatever existence I have at my disposal.

Aubrey has brought many incredible gifts of insight to my life, but chief of among them is this: you shouldn’t spend any significant amount of time doing something you don’t want to do. I owe so much of my evolution to that crucial realization.

I’m excited to be in business for myself. The nagging feeling that plagued me for so long, the feeling that I was somehow missing the point of life and wasting my time, is completely gone.

I’ve discovered a list of things that I absolutely love to do. I’m already good at some of them while others will require years of time to develop. That’s no problem – the love makes it easier to get through the rough spots. I’ve spent years aggressively growing myself to reach this point. I had no idea where I was heading.

Now I know. I can’t wait to be able to focus on what’s truly important, free from the distraction of minding someone else’s business.

GlobeJot 1.0 removed from sale pending rewrite

A couple of months back, a Washington DC-based intellectual property attorney from a prominent national firm came for a tour. Let’s call this guy Rich. I was tapped to run the tour, but when one of the owners decided to come along, I spent the bulk of the morning opening doors and walking quietly alongside the conversation. I was extra quiet when the subject turned to the recording industry. Rich explained that he wasn’t terribly popular for representing the recording industry but that it was important work. He then trotted out the same tired old tripe suggesting that a decline in recording industry revenues was caused by piracy — a decline Richard assured us could be reversed if only young people were educated on the importance of respecting intellectual property.

This is Bullshit

I listened to all of this and swallowed so hard I bruised my own throat. First of all, as has been mentioned, piracy is murderous, ruthless work done by indefensible criminals. What these guys mean is bootlegging.

I failed to ask Rich if it were possible, just even the slightest bit possible, that recording industry revenues were on the way down because the record companies make over-priced garbage. I failed to mention that education is indeed necessary… for the luddite morons who ran these businesses into the ground in the first place. I failed to point out to Rich that if each pirated track really represented a lost sale, any miraculous absence of bootlegging would have to also transform the economy dramatically as to permit people the opportunity to drop $20,000 on a half-filled iPod Classic.

I failed to say any of it. Whaddya want from me? I’m not my own man for another few weeks yet.

Even so, the encounter was instructive. I learned that there still exist real, living, breathing people who believe this bullshit. Not to be ageist, but I suspect being over 30 years old has a lot do with this, though surely there are exceptions in either direction of that mark.

The recording industry has spent millions of dollars on technical and legal measures to prevent bootlegging. The pinnacle of that achievement? A multi-million anti-piracy measure that was defeated with a Sharpie and the most impressively tarnished image of any industry that doesn’t make guns or pollution. I’m talking out of my ass, but I expect that the number of people who partake in bootlegging has only grown since this crusade began. Talk about money well spent. Can you imagine where their business model would be if, instead of wasting their money fighting an unstoppable force, they’d instead took a good hard look at the way the wind was blowing and invested that cash in reinventing their business model in such a way that made bootlegging irrelevant?

The result would be a recording industry that neither you nor I could recognize.

Instead, the RIAA makes a habit of suing the very people to whom they’d like to sell their product while attempting to destroy any service or platform that challenges the traditional ways for people to discover music.

Unstoppable Force

Anywhere there exists a non-scarce encapsulation of value, that value will be reproduced and distributed outside the bounds of the author’s license or intent. Put another way, if your shit is digital and desired, your shit will be pirated. The question with piracy isn’t whether or not it will happen. The question, rather, is whether or not your digital property is valuable enough to be worth the trouble of pirating. Trouble, here, has a very flexible definition, depending upon how much stands between wanting to distribute and being able to distribute. This varies from platform to platform, from absurdly simple with digital music to decently pain in the ass with console games.

Why? There are two simple reasons. People want things and, as we know from economics, the capacity to produce is infinitely outstripped by the capacity to desire. Secondly, and most crucially, distribution is gratifying. People feel good sharing — that’s simple human nature. In many cases, too, distribution of something digital, something protected, requires solving someone else’s puzzle. The high that comes from accomplishing something intended to be impossible is well-known nerd crack.

Piracy is Always Possible

This recipe creates a world where the dreaded boogeyman of scary piracy will always exist. Any business model where a 100% lack of piracy is integral to success is doomed to failure. What to do about this truth is a difficult question — one beyond the scope of what I can tell you here.

What’s important to understand is that time spent fighting the unstoppable is almost always time wasted.

By definition, anti-piracy measures require an investment of development time that will never benefit your paying users. Who are you working for, if not your paying users?

You have a choice. You can allocate 500 hours to one of these options:

1. Building an incredible feature set that your customers love
2. Developing a new anti-piracy scheme that will be defeated in X weeks and may genuinely annoy your paying customers

Which do you choose? The exhausted Microsoft vs. Apple comparison is apt here. If you’re Microsoft, you roll out Windows Genuine Advantage and truly piss off anyone who ever has to reinstall Windows. If you’re Apple, you sell a five-pack license and let your customers buy on their honor. I’m sure there’s a decent set of folks who install Leopard on more than their purchased share of machines, but the Leopard family pack is ranked #201 in Amazon’s software sales and was an even better seller when Leopard was new. And you know what? Apple makes more money through the family pack than if they were dicks by using anti-piracy measures and only selling single-user licenses.

I’ve Got One Boss

And it’s not me. The boss is the customer. By definition, my customer doesn’t give a damn about the boogeyman. They want the very best features in a piece of software that does everything it possibly can not to annoy them. As far as I’m concerned, every minute I spend on anti-piracy measures for my apps is a minute I should have spent making something incredibly useful. I’m in this to make people happy with incredibly useful stuff. If can’t focus my time on that, there’s no point.

The only time I should worry about writing code related to users who haven’t paid me money is when their existence will affect users who have. If pirates adversely impact resources essential to your paying users’ happiness, by all means, write a bit of throttling code that gives their requests a lower priority.

You’ve Got a Decision to Make

Whether or not you spend time writing code that benefits you instead of your paying customers is a personal choice. I can’t tell you what you should do — that conversation is one you need to have with your collaborators and moneymen. The temptation is a strong one. I remember how angry I was when I discovered Tallymander being distributed by iPhone bootleggers for the first time.

Still: last week, I submitted my latest app, GlobeJot, for App Store review. GlobeJot’s source contains precisely 0 lines of copy protection code.

The choice is made easier for me by Apple’s inclusion of good-enough copy protection for iPhone OS apps. Even without that, though, I wouldn’t bother putting up much of a fight. I want to make money by creating honest relationships with paying customers who appreciate that I spend every last ounce of my energies making something they will love to use.

If that ideal one day ceases to be realistic, I’ll find somewhere else to put my productive ability.

“You’re quitting.”

My boss is a good guy. I’ve observed to him that he is one of the most peculiar fellows I’ve ever met. Though this seems to wound him, he takes it in good cheer. While I find him utterly indecipherable, that sense of opacity doesn’t go both ways. He reads minds, when he remembers to venture outside of his own.

“…How did you know?”

I decided one afternoon in January that I would quit my job. In the midst of terrifying economic headlines, soaring unemployment and an uncertain future, I chose to separate myself from an organization that loved me, paid me well and showed me endless respect and appreciation.

“It’s nothing about working for me, or anything, is it? Because if there’s something else you’d rather be doing, we can find you a different spot, working on something else.”

Full Sail University is a private school on the northern end of Orlando. Trying to describe Full Sail takes the better part of our 200 page catalog, and even that barely scratches the surface. Let’s just say it’s one of the most incredible places anyone could ever work. I got my Bachelor’s at Full Sail and I’ve worked there six years: first as an intern, next as its first search engine marketing manager, then as a project manager for our COO.

“You’ve been a great boss. I’m not leaving because of you. And I still believe in the incredible work we do. I’m leaving because if I stay here, I’ll have a solid future with a lot of growth and responsibility. And that will be great. But I’ll never do the thing that I’m supposed to do. The thing I was made to do.”

I never planned a six year stint at a private college in Florida, of all places. But I was lucky: Full Sail took me seriously and invested heavily in my growth. I was spoiled rotten and so I stayed. Despite this prolonged comfort, somehow I felt no fear as I told my boss I’d be leaving no later than July 1st. The sense of command, clarity and confidence it gave to my future was a powerful horse that I rode into the decision.

“Early on, I had this same conversation with my boss. I was convinced I had to leave to do what I had to do. Are you sure leaving is the only way you can do this?”

Since that day, I half-heartedly worked at finding my next job. The realization came slowly, over three months. The truth is that I don’t want another job. I don’t want another boss. I am the best-qualified person to analyze and direct my energies. I am happiest when I have the freedom to split up my day into two or three chunks. I’m happiest when I can work all morning and take the afternoon off, then come back to my project at midnight and work until sunrise. I am positively blissful when making my own decisions and executing them without need for approval, delegation or committee discussion. As of today, my job search is over. I’m my next job.

“I love everyone here. It’s not that I want to get away from here. It’s that I need to make things. I need to take a space that has nothing and fill it with a something. Something that works well. Something that makes people happy. That makes their lives better. I need to go in search of how to dedicate 100% of my energies to that task.”

So on July 1st, I’ll say goodbye to my job. I’ll say goodbye to Florida on my longest roadtrip ever and make a new home somewhere around Seattle — Bellevue is looking great. I will cultivate my lifelong obsession with the creation of things that make people happy. Somehow, I will keep myself clothed, fed and out of the rain. It’s going to be hard. I’m confident that if I keep at it, continue working at it every single day until it drives me mad, then keep going anyway, I’ll be okay. The details are, as they say, just details.

Most importantly, though, I will be living for my own purposes as my own keeper.

I’m sure there will be a paycheck or two still to be collected in my future: maybe something part-time at Whole Foods to make ends meet or, heck, even some short-term officey stuff if it’s for a group who can teach me about how to better be a maker of things. The focus, though, is now all about personally setting the course for my everyday life.

I can’t wait for July.

Reader Benjamin wrote to me tonight and asked:

I have researched some into iPhone programming as I am obsessed with every application that is available for my own iPhone. The problem is that the amount of books and articles out there about programming for an iPhone is enormous. Do you have any recommendations for a few killer books to read in order to learn the process/language?

What a great question. It’s one I’ve been getting a lot from people I know since my apps went on sale.

Thanks to the popularity of the iPhone and the lure of the App Store’s profit potential, there’s plenty of crap floating around promising to teach you how to program for this new platform. Much of it sucks. Thankfully, there’s some gold to be found for iPhone SDK autodidacts. Let’s check it out.

Wikipedia

Say whatever else you want about it, Wikipedia is, unsurprisingly, host to some thorough Computer Science articles. Any time you encounter a term about programming you do not understand, consult Wikipedia. Here are a few examples to get you started:

Arrays

Loops

Model-View-Controller, the design pattern advocated by Apple for iPhone development.

Cocoa Dev Central

An incredible resource, Cocoa Dev Central hosts some excellent tutorials on Cocoa and Objective-C. It’s a great place to get started if you don’t know much and want to learn more.

C Tutorial

If you know nothing about programming, the C Tutorial is a great way to break yourself in gently. You’ll get the basics that will become your best friends throughout your work as programmer.

Objective-C Tutorial

Once you’ve done the C tutorial and you understand why it works, the Objective-C tutorial is a tidy intro to Objective-C, which is the programming language you’ll be using for much of your iPhone development.

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

After spending some time doing online tutorials, you’ll want to know whether or not you want to keep doing this. If the answer is yes, Aaron Hillegass’ excellent book is for you. You’ll learn about Objective-C and the Cocoa API. This is all translatable to the iPhone, as the iPhone SDK uses many similar frameworks and conventions in the Cocoa Touch API. About midway through, you’ll start hitting some material on desktop-specific technologies like Core Data. Once you’re at that point, it’s time to move on to…

Beginning iPhone Development

Beginning iPhone Development is accessible and friendly. Assuming you’re comfortable with what you learned in the previous resources, this book is a snap. Helpful, digestible tutorials and plenty of useful code for use in your own applications. This book covers every single thing you’ll need to get most apps up, rolling and submitted to the App Store.

Other Resources

This is by no means an exhaustive or complete list of the great resources out there for iPhone development. This is just what worked for me. Once registered through Apple’s developer program, you’ll also have access to developer forums. That community is indispensable and will help you around countless, seemingly insurmountable blocks.

Bringing it Together

Holy crap, you’re thinking. That’s a lot to read and absorb, Danilo. It is indeed. It takes some time, especially if you’re starting from scratch. Be patient with yourself. This may be the steepest learning curve you’ll ever encounter as an autodidact.

For me, I started Danilo’s Programming School. That was a commitment to myself that for one to two hours every night of the week, I would work through a tutorial or scribble notes from important subjects in previous chapters. After about two months, I hit a point of epiphany and suddenly the code was a breathing, friendly, understandable creature instead of an inscrutable block of text.

This only works if you commit to learning it consistently. It’s quite literally another language and another mode of thinking.

The results, like seeing your first product cough to life after compiling, or customers writing you because they love your work, are incredibly satisfying. If you want to bring a product into the world with your own two hands, nothing is more satisfying right now than building it for the iPhone.

Meeting any sort of dignitary from Apple would make my day worth remembering, but this guy was the real deal. He was Apple’s VP of Education, John Couch. John goes far enough back at Apple to have been recruited by a 20-year-old Steve Jobs. This guy worked on the Lisa.

Like I said: the real deal.

Apple was at Full Sail to participate in the announcement of Project Launchbox, a program where students from nearly all our disciplines get MacBook Pro laptops and pro-level software like Logic and Final Cut Studio at very deep discounts. The announcement took place as over one hundred new students — the first of over 4,000 students in the next 12 months — unpacked their new Macs. The students were salivating as they waited to plunge their power buttons for the first time.

Why does our hip but small private college warrant this attention from Apple? It probably helps that Full Sail is the first college to try this on such a massive scale. But it goes deeper than that.

One of the most resonant things John Couch told the assembled mass of students and faculty during the announcement was that education was in Apple’s DNA. And this is absolutely true: so many of today’s most passionate Mac users have memories of the platform — and Apple’s attendant philosophy of user empowerment — that span the decades back toward their childhoods. My own elementary school was loaded to the gills with Apple IIs and eventually with LC 500s. These, plus the help of an SE at home, were the devices that taught me how to be creative.

The impact of tying a brand with the formative years of a consumer can’t be underestimated. When a tool becomes an instrument of learning and adventure, the emotional bonds that develop are powerful and long-lasting. This is why we always remember our first car so fondly. In the warm embrace of that driver’s seat, we learn to navigate in traffic, to find new places, to meet new people in ways that are unlike anything we’ve ever known in childhood.

I had a moment to speak with John after the event and told him a deep truth that I am certain sounded absurd to anyone else who heard it: When I was young, some of the other kids had Christianity, but I believed in Apple. Growing up with a deep and abiding love for Apple in the 90′s wasn’t easy to do, either. “Beleaguered,” “troubled” and “embattled” were the most frequently applied adjectives for Apple by the business press in those days. My friends collected comic books but I collected Macworld and MacUser, despite the fact that the news was rarely good.

The tide changed, of course, when Steve came back. Yeah, it’s been comforting to watch the crazy earnings growth, all the white earbuds everyone is wearing, all the favorable press. Still, years of worry baked into your childhood aren’t easily wiped away. Just as the flowing cape of my loyalty to Apple followed me into adulthood, so too did the quiet, lurking shadow of my unease for its future.

Looking around a room last week to see a hundred new Macs washing the eager faces of our students in muted blue light was a stirring, powerful image. For the first time, Apple’s emergence from the dark clouds of mismanagement and obscurity was a sudden and visceral reality.

We’re making thousands of converts to the Mac faith here. We’re definitely not the only ones. This is barely the beginning. We’re minting a generation of creative professionals that are hooked on the Mac.

So what does it mean? For me, this is just the barest glimpse of a future dominated by Apple in ways we never could have imagined. Not just iPods, not just fun but ultimately inconsequential consumerism, but a real impact that permanently shifts how most people will use computers to change their worlds. In that room, surrounded by a hundred new Macs, I knew for the first time since I was a kid that Apple was going to be just fine.

Oh yeah, that video from awhile back?

Those were all for Launchbox.

But at 16 years old, none of these things mattered to me. I loved LeBaron with the sort of passion that only the young are able to muster. For the first time, I felt myself the master of my own destiny. In the saddle of this fine steed, the world was a buffet of experience just waiting for me to grab a plate. With the help of my more automotively-gifted friends, I got her running on all cylinders and enjoyed a genuinely speedy little ride.

But like so many of the gifts of youth, LeBaron was to be a transient presence in my life. Chrysler engineers designed her to be a front-wheel drive vehicle. The front of the car also happens to be where the engine lives. Wildly insecure in its housings, LeBaron decided to fling its one-ton engine downward, in the direction of my perilously-located drive axles. These mechanisms yielded without a fight, shredding themselves like discarded cigars in a garbage disposal. After a few episodes of this very thorough seppuku, not to mention a few hundred dollars in repair bills, I was faced with a miserable truth:

It was time to let her go.

In the cars since, I never gave my heart away. I knew them to be fickle beasts capable of dashing my fragile affections without a moment’s flicker of concern. More than that, none of them had the charm, the character, the absurdly fun engine that made LeBaron so easy to fall for. These vehicles were tools to be used – absolutely undeserving of my love or concern. My heart was, to these cars, a blackened, impermeable wad of indifference. And it showed: their interiors were cluttered, they were washed once or twice a year and their maintenance often suffered even worse neglect.

Years passed and the scars of that first loss lingered and faded. I graduated from college, started my career and continued life. The 1992 Buick Riviera Ghetto Special that had seen me through my final year of college was showing signs of imminent collapse after a potentially-fatal brake failure. Riviera DAR-004 was but the latest in a line of cars for which I gave not a damn.

It would be time to replace her, and I was satisfied that I would do so with an inexpensive vehicle that would be as exciting to own as a can-opener.

Which brings the reader, if he or she has indulged me this long, to October of 2006. Hunting for deals on a 2006 Sentra, which was being shoved off dealer lots with compensations including but not limited to beer and swimsuit models, I found myself visiting a Nissan dealership. A helpful fellow named Derek was happy enough to lead me in the direction of his dinky assortment of 2006 Sentras. I dutifully followed, passing a collection of glittering new cars.

And then I saw it. It was as though time, for once, slowed itself through the inexorable sluices that channel us past the details of bliss and struggle that so pepper our lives. I lived for hours in that moment as the portions of my soul that were so darkened by the traumas of past died and were reborn to a world of light and magic that defies conventional explanation.

It was a Sentra.

But not the unforgivably bland shit-kettle Sentra that had been marring the clean taste of highway driving for so many years.

This was a radically reconceived Sentra, whose lines and stylings were staggeringly reminiscent of her big sister, Maxima. Maxima was the sort of car I had leered at in 2006, in the way that men will leer at women whose charms place them in a world not generally inhabited by mortals.

Yet, here was everything I had admired in Maxima, scaled down to the world (and price) of compact sedans. Sentra was no longer entry-level in 07 and the up-market positioning showed.

Significant processor time was expended considering all of these facts, but I didn’t break stride as the moment ended and I returned to reality. In contrast to the revival of my soul, I found my verbal reaction pretty dry:

“Wow.”

“Yeah, those are the 2007’s,” Derek shared, very helpfully. Everything Derek did was helpful.

“They really sexed them up for 07,” I offered. Yeah, that was really all I had.

We continued to the 2006’s. But it was a pointless endeavor. Test-driving the 2006 model of Sentra only proved two things: it was a hideous car and there was nowhere near enough room for my 6’3” frame.

So much for picking up a cheap 2006 Sentra. But, I reasoned, so long as I was already on the lot, why not try out the 07? No harm in that.

Right? Surely.

Five hours later, I was owner of a black 2007 Nissan Sentra 2.0S. A new love affair was blooming and some part of me that had been cold and dead for as much as five years was now alive with song and joy.

The Look

First, I must re-iterate: this is not the Sentra of the past. She’s longer and more modern. The headlights enjoy a distinctive, wedge-cut shape. 45-degree angles are splashed all over the place in a much-needed geometric rebellion against the curvy, aerodynamic banality that threatened to consume every class of car in recent memory. Attention to fine details pervades the design of this vehicle, from the rear-windshield placement of the antenna to the bat wing-shaped mirrors.

This is a car that doesn’t look like an intern designed it in hours snatched between naps.

The Interior

The interface is perfection.

The interior of the Sentra 2.0S feels as though it belongs to a luxury car. The dash is expansive, inviting the eyes to drink as much as they can of the oncoming scenery. The instrument panel is neat, well-organized and attractively lit in amber.

A massive center console is dedicated to the task of managing music, trip data and climate control. Delightfully chunky buttons adorn the stereo, making its operation very comfortable. Gas mileage, trip duration, average speed and the distance the operator can drive before the tank empties are all data points that are available from the console’s large, very readable display screen. My favorite amenity, though, certainly must be the factory-standard 3.5mm audio input jack right on the front of the console – for my iPod, naturally. Rounding out the cool features of the interior are the steering wheel-mounted stereo controls, which let you adjust volume and radio presets, and the capacious glove box which Nissan boasts can comfortably accommodate a laptop computer.

Seating is comfy, which is crucial for a man of my height. Nissan reports that the 2007 model has had its cabin extended about 13 inches. This is a detail my legs can certainly confirm.

The Ride

If you want a dissertation on the technical breakdown of Sentra’s engine performance, I’ll need to direct you elsewhere. What I can tell you is that while Sentra isn’t a sports car, her performance is pretty damn good for my needs. Her handling is quick and nimble and she offers a smooth ride in both local and highway settings. The trip computer reports an average of 30 MPG for my general use, which is certainly an improvement over the estimated 15 MPG I was scoring in the Buick.

The Bottom Line

I love this car. I didn’t know I could love a car again. In the first weeks of owning Sentra, I put thousands of miles on her just for the fun of exploration at the helm of a fantastic little ship. Her interior is about as pristine today as when I drove her off the lot – a stark contrast to the neglect my previous cars suffered. Washing happens two to three times per month, and I do it personally, by hand. If a woman can’t do her makeup in the reflection of my Sentra’s hood, it’s time to visit the carwash again. Today was her first oil change – 150 miles sooner than necessary.

Purchasing Sentra was one of the biggest financial decisions I’ve made so far, rivaled only by college (which cost a whole lot more and didn’t provide nearly as much instant gratification). I’m glad to say I have no regrets about that aspect of the situation.

I can’t recommend this car enthusiastically enough. Enjoying all the details and the distinctive look of Sentra, I’m thinking I may well be a Nissan man now. I’ve got a Maxima penciled in for purchase in 2011, once this girl is paid off.

Now I know what Billy Joel was on about when he wrote “The Longest Time.”