Matznerd

Outsourcing Birthdays and Flirting

Eric Matzner — Sat, 19 May 2012 05:39:03 +0000

The above video is a video I purchased from a guy in England that I have never met. I found him on a website that is a favorite of mine, Fiverr. Fiverr is a marketplace where people list jobs they are willing to do for $5. The Gig is aptly titled “I will shout anything you want loudly, in a public bus for $5.”

I ordered this video for a girl I was courting at the time (it worked). I never thought I would end up outsourcing something like flirting, but the truth is you can outsource almost anything these days. With the availability of a market place like Fiverr or oDesk, and some creativity, I was able to outsource the boldness that it takes to stand up on a bus and yell:

“Hailey MacArthur is the most beautiful girl in the world and men would do much more than yell loudly on a bus to even have a slight chance at getting with her.”

If I can outsource something as intangible as courage and seduction, then there is little else that can’t be outsourced.

Outsourcing Works

I spent a long time looking for talented people in NYC, but it is nearly impossible for someone like me to find an incredibly talented engineer or developer to work with. Aside from the fact that I am competing directly with the Googles, Facebooks, Twitters, and Foursquares of the world, I am competing against the developers themselves. If they are not going to one of the big guys then there is a good chance they trying to start their own company. And if they are not starting their own startup, then they are probably looking for a startup with Angel or Series A funding versus a bootstraping startup like mine.

This article is not about how hard it is to find a developer (especially a Ruby one) in New York, it’s about the fact that you don’t need to, because outsourcing works.

Finding the Needles In The Haystack

After a few bad experiences with outsourced developers, I realized that it was just me choosing people who weren’t right for the job. The key is to make sure you find experienced people, with a good track record, from the right region, and who can actually understand and speak English. There are tons of extremely skilled engineers who work as full-time freelancers at an affordable (~$40 per hour) rate. These people are now preferred to me in some situations because being a freelancer means that these people have to have a wide range of skills. Many of them don’t have the luxury of only doing only backend developement. Their skills in front-end development have to be decent in order to deliver a “complete” project themselves. Their experience also leads them to know what to ask and how to make sure that your vision can be realized. If they have thousands of hours logged, you know they have at least a few hundred hours of experience dealing with people who are even less-technical than you, and so they are better able to help point you in the right direction.

If you use a magnet, it’s pretty easy to find the needles in a haystack.

Use The Power Of People

Crowds are great and everyone knows their strength, but even individuals are powerful. A person taking their time and putting energy into creating something is a magical process that should not be underestimated. Below are videos that my brother and I outsourced for my dad’s 62nd birthday. What could be better than having a cadre of people all around the world, exerting energy to sing heartily into their webcams for a man around the world that they will never meet.

May the power of outsourcing be instilled in you by the many renditions of “Happy 62nd Birthday Gary Matzner.”

What I’m Listening To May 18 2012 Edition

Eric Matzner — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:29:15 +0000

I have thousands of songs in my iTunes and across various cloud music services, but the last week I have been jamming to a small set of songs on repeat. The first one I am posting is Too Close, but Alex Clare. I had not really heard of this guy until a few months ago until an amazing song called Caroline. This new one happens to be featured in a Internet Explorer ad, but that doesn’t take away from it’s awesomeness. There is something about the chill lyrics and then the heavy hitting dubstep interludes. Alex Clare has something about his voice that hits on a really intense level, while still seeming calm.

Here is the strange video:

Alex Clare – Too Close

Next up here is a remix of KO KO’s song Float. The song is high-tempo and very positive, from the whistles to the keyboard rifts in the background. I like the original and all, but the Sound Remedy Remix is one of those remix’s that gives the music a whole new life. It adds the heavy drop that such a positive song needs to keep it’s badassness. I like dubstep and remixes, but anything with too much lazers or crazy effects (a la Skrillex remixes of Skrillex) can be too much for me. This song teeters close to the edge of my boundary at some points, but then it kills it on the drop. This is the kind of song that I heard playing through a list of blog music and it instantly grabbed my attention. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

KO KO – Float (Sound Remedy Remix)

Kavinsky – NightCall

Eric Matzner — Sat, 05 May 2012 20:19:27 +0000

Bad ass song, Nightcall, by French electro house artist Kavinsky.If it is reminiscient of Daft Punk it’s because it was produced by one of them. On the vocals are Brazilian singer of CSS, Lovefoxx. It may be familiar to you because it is in the opening sequence of the film Drive, starring Ryan Gosling. Here are the opening credits:

This song just makes me happy, and I don’t know if that’s because it sounds older than it is (made in 2010), but it just kicks ass. This song is definitely on my playlist these days. I’ve yet to have anyone not like the song.

Here is a youtube to stream and a download at the bottom:

nightcall

Over 1000 Millionaires To Be Created By Facebook IPO

Eric Matzner — Thu, 03 May 2012 10:36:54 +0000

With Facebook set to IPO on May 18th and expected to raise over 10 Billion in case, somewhere around 1000 Millionares will be created out of Facebook employees. Pretty ridiclous, but pretty cool. I hope they use their money to do good things. My favorite example of this is how Elon Musk used money from his first two startups to fund an electric car company, a solar panel company, and a rocket company. I think when young tech people make a lot of money, they want to use it to fund even cooler ideas. In other fields, and with people with old money, they don’t seem to share the same mindset of creating something awesome. They will probably invest the money institutionally or into something like real estate. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I somehow feel building and desiging rockets and sending shit into space is worth a lot more to use than someone buying a new apartment with a view of Central Park…

“Now, after a blockbuster $5billion Facebook stock exchange flotation moved a step closer today, at least 1,000 employees of the social network based in Menlo Park, California, are finally on their way to becoming millionaires. Facebook today submitted paperwork to regulators for the most anticipated initial public offering since Google in 2004, expected to value the hugely-successful company at up to $100billion. Thanks: This image in the IPO filing shows some of the employees likely to benefit. Founder Mark Zuckerberg is pictured centre under the white space”

Facebook IPO: Staff plan lavish spending with IPO set to create 1,000 millionaires | Mail Online

Incoming search terms:

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Facebook IPO: Staff plan lavish spending with IPO set to create 1 000 millionaires

NYC Bucket List

Eric Matzner — Wed, 02 May 2012 21:34:56 +0000

I found this list on Meta Filter and have co-opted it and plan to update and edit it as I go…Have any additions or subtractions? Let me know in the comments.

-Eric

Go to the Top of the Rock at sunset
- Go to Times Square late at night and take photographs
- Visit the 9/11 Memorial
- Ride the wooden escalators at Macy’s in Herald Square
- Visit the Met, MoMA, American Museum of Natural History, one last time
- Take the 6 train to City Hall and stay on as it turns around inside the old City Hall station (it might also be worth becoming an MTA museum member just to take the old City Hall station tour)
- Visit the MTA Transit Museum
- Take the ferry out to Governor’s Island
- Spend some time just people watching at Union Square
- Take a NYPL tour and make sure you see the original Winnie the Pooh stuffed animals
- Take a Grand Central tour
- Take a Central Park tour by the Big Onion
- Ride the Roosevelt Island tram
- Visit the LES Tenement Museum
- Visit the Brooklyn Flea and/or Smorgasburg
- Walk the Brooklyn Promenade
- Tour the cheese caves at Murray’s Cheeses in the West Village
- Take an AIA NY skyline and bridge cruise
- Visit the Digester Eggs at Newtown Creek
- Take a canoe tour of the Gowanus Canal
- Visit the Hall of Fame for Great Americans and Gould Memorial Library at Bronx Community College. You might recognize them from movies like A Beautiful Mind.
- Visit the Panorama of the City of New York out at the Queens Museum and Flushing Meadows Park
- I know you said no Broadway, but hopefully you’ve already seen the immersive dance/theatrical experience Sleep No More (Hitchcock inspired, loosely based upon Macbeth)?
- Here’s a list I put together on Foursquare of Strange Places and Oddities in NYC
- Eat your weight in “only in NY” type foods: bagels and smoked salmon, pastrami on rye, hot dogs & papaya juice, black and white cookies, cheesecake, egg creams, pickles, halal carts
- Have a blow out dinner at Eleven Madison Park and/or a fancy (but not super expensive) prix fixe weekday lunch at Del Posto or Jean Georges
- Take a noshing walk around the West Village and the High Line
- Take a noshing walk around Flushing
- Have a cocktail at the Lamb’s Club or Monkey Bar for the atmosphere
- Visit John’s of Bleecker (ask for your pie to be well done), Patsy’s (East Harlem only), South Brooklyn Pizza, Di Fara
- Eat at the famous halal cart at 2am, 53rd and 6th (SW corner at night, SE during the day)
- Go to City Bakery, I think they had one in LA, but it closed up shop
- Feast on offal and weird misc. parts at Kabab Cafe and flirt/chit chat with Ali
- Grab a lobster roll at Luke’s Lobster or Pearl
- Have Momofuku Ssam’s weekday Duck lunch. Or dinner. I love the Creative Asian at Momofuku Ssam Bar, Ma Peche, Fatty Cue, or Wong. Some of the most creative cooking in town is happening at these places.
- Try Empellon Cocina. Mexican cooking by an ex-Alinea and WD-50 pastry chef (Alex Stupak). (I believe the Mexican is LA is nothing like this…)
- Get a sandwich at Defonte’s
- Grab a pretzel at Sigmund Pretzelshop
- Stand in line at Shake Shack on a nice day with some friends
- Have a gut-busting delicious brunch at Breslin, Locanda Verde, Shopsin’s, Clinton St Baking Co., or Minetta Tavern. Especially Shopsin’s.
- Txikito for Basque tapas. Don’t miss the suckling pig, miss the sofrito/chorizo/quail egg pintxo, croquettas, padron peppers, suckling pig, torreja dessert or whatever is on the daily specials board.
- Takashi for local/sustainable Japanese yakiniku. Awesome high-tech electric grills. Try the uni/shiso/wagyu dish, beef belly, short ribs, heart, liver, sweetbreads, first stomach, third stomach, four stomach, tendon, or whatever is good that day. Brain cream in a tube served with caviar and fresh blinis.
- Xi’an Famous Foods for food from Shaanxi province in China. Cumin lamb hand pulled noodles!
- Bagel sandwiches with smoked salmon, capers, red onion, cream cheese at Russ & Daughters. Excellent smoked salmon, whitefish salad, sable, all the Jewish appetizing classics. Try a few smoked salmons before you settle on one. You can get a mini-sized bagel sandwich here, too, if you wish. Takeout only.
- A steak and/or a scotch at Keens (lots of history here, too). Say hi to Ms Keens in the bar.
- Go to WD-50 for avant garde/experimental cooking

Here is a map that is unrelated but of the top favorites of NYC Redditors

View Reddit’s favorite places in NYC in a larger map

Incoming search terms:

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Writing Tips From Great Writers

Eric Matzner — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:56:21 +0000

Jack Kerouack’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Prose and Life:

These were apparently posted on the wall in the hotel of Allen Ginsberg a year before the poem “Howl” was written.

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside yr own house
Be in love with yr life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You’re a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

—

David Oglivy

From a memo he penned to his firm:

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.

Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize,demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.

6. Check your quotations.

7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.

8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.

9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.

10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

David

—

Kurt Vonnegut

How to write a short story:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

—

Henry Miller

These are Henry Miller’s Commandment’s on writing from the time of 1932-1933 when he was working on Tropic of Cancer:

COMMANDMENTS

Work on one thing at a time until finished.
Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’
Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
When you can’t create you can work.
Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

In combination with the commandments above, he also followed a routine and blueprint for productivity and inspiration:

MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.

If in fine fettle, write.

AFTERNOONS:

Work of section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.

EVENINGS:

See friends. Read in cafés.

Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.

Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.

Paint if empty or tired.

Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.

Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.

—

Six Tips On Writing From John Steinbeck:

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

Although I don’t know if you should listen to his advice based on this other quote by him about disavowing all other advice and doing as your feel:

“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.”

—

Various Writers

And finally, here is a compendium of quotes from various great writers:

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created — nothing.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.” ~ Charles Bukowski

Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry.” ~ Muriel Rukeyser

A short story must have single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” ~ Saul Bellow

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” ~ T. S. Eliot

Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.” ~Stephen King

Good fiction is made of what is real, and reality is difficult to come by.” ~ Ralph Ellison

The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.” ~ Tom Wolfe

You cannot write well without data.” ~ George Higgins

Listen, then make up your own mind.” ~ Gay Talese

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Write without pay until somebody offers pay; if nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.” ~ Mark Twain

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Influence

Eric Matzner — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 04:34:56 +0000

This is an excerpt from one of my favorite books, and a classic on persuasion, Influence by Robert Cialdini. The idea that underlays the entire book is that humans have certain evolutionary triggers that can be activated. They occurs because there is so much information out there that we can’t take all of it in, so our brains have created these frameworks that speed things up by just causes a reflex type reaction. In the book, this reaction is called “Click, Whirr”. The influence triggers can be used for good or evil, but the most important part is to be aware of them and to understand when you are being influenced.

The book is full of examples and you should read it, the six principles of persuasion are:

Reciprocation – People are more likely to comply with a request if you have provided something for them first.
Commitment/Consistency- People are more willing to be moved a particular direction if they see it as being consistent with existing or recent commitment.
Authority-people more willing to follow the directions and recommendations of someone they as in position of power or expertise.
Scarcity-people want things more when the availability is dwindling or decreasing.
Social Validation – people more willing to take a recommended action if they see that other people are doing it
Liking/Friendship- People prefer to say yes to those they know and like.

One of the morals from the book is to always trust your gut feeling.

“From Page 10…

Turkey mothers are good mothers—loving, watchful, and protective. They spend much of their time tending, warming, cleaning, and huddling their young beneath them; but there is something odd about their method. Virtually all of this mothering is triggered by one thing: the “cheep-cheep” sound of young turkey chicks. Other identifying features of the chicks, such as their smell, touch, or appearance, seem to play minor roles in the mothering process. If a chick makes the cheep-cheep noise, its mother will care for it; if not, the mother will ignore or sometimes kill it.

The extreme reliance of maternal turkeys upon this one sound was dramatically illustrated by animal behaviorist M. W. Fox (1974) in his description of an experiment involving a mother turkey and a stuffed polecat. For a mother turkey, a polecat is a natural enemy whose approach is to be greeted with squawking, pecking, clawing rage. Indeed, the experiments found that even a stuffed model of a polecat, when drawn by a string to a mother turkey, received an immediate and furious attack. When, however, the same stuffed replica carried inside it a small recorder that played the cheep-cheep sound of baby turkeys, the mother not only accepted the oncoming polecat but gathered it underneath her. When the machine was turned off, the polecat model again drew a vicious attack.

CLICK, WHIRR

How ridiculous a mother turkey seems under these circumstances: She will embrace a natural enemy just because it goes cheep-cheep and she will mistreat or murder one of her chicks just because it does not. She acts like an automaton whose maternal instincts are under the automatic control of that single sound. The ethol-ogists tell us that this sort of thing is far from unique to the turkey. They have begun to identify regular, blindly mechanical patterns of action in a wide variety of species. Called fixed-action patterns, they can involve intricate sequences of behavior, such as entire courtship or mating rituals. A fundamental characteristic of these patterns is that the behaviors comprising them occur in virtually the same fashion and in the same order every time. It is almost as if the patterns were recorded on tapes within the animals. When a situation calls for courtship, a courtship tape gets played; when a situation calls for mothering, a maternal behavior tape gets played. Click and the appropriate tape is activated; whirr and out rolls the standard sequence of behaviors.”

If you are interested in getting the book, it can be found by clicking here or on the image below.

Incoming search terms:

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Tiny tUnE-yArDs Desk Concert

Eric Matzner — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:25:05 +0000

tUnE-yArDs (really annoying to spell out) is a bad ass band and while I don’t have much time to write about them right now, it is dumb to write about music anyway. Music should really be listened to, preferably live, but this is as close as you’re going to get today: a desk concert. My desk was just big enough for the saxophonist and synths to fit…

From Pitch Fork:

The stylization of the name tUnE-yArDs in print is a bit off-putting, but it at least gives people fair warning: This is not an act with any interest in politely conforming to expectations. tUnE-yArDs is the music project of Merrill Garbus, a songwriter, vocalist, percussionist, and ukulele player who has fused elements of acoustic folk, R&B, funk, Afro-pop, and rock into a bold, uncompromising hybrid all her own. Garbus is blessed with an extraordinary voice, and she wields it with great confidence, always coming off in total control of her phrasing while seeming totally uninhibited in her expression. There’s an authoritative quality to her voice– she often sings with a commanding, full-bodied boldness, but even at her softest, Garbus sounds assertive and forthright.

Words That Make You Sound Smart

Eric Matzner — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:06:00 +0000

I just stumbled across this list in one of my old notebooks from circa 2005. I think many of these were SAT related or were gathered around that time. My plan was to just memorize some sophisticated sounding words and integrate them into my essays because the reader would see it and assume I was intelligent.

The truth is that those readers are teachers and other people who only have a minute or two to devote to scoring they essay. They are doing hundreds and there is no way they have time to really go in depth with the grading. I ended up doing pretty well, and I’m pretty sure it was mostly due to these.

Cogent: forceful

albeit

nefarious

boon and bane – (for comparing and contrasting)

pernicious-evil

mundane

ephemeral-

transitory-short term

unequivical – abolsute

due dilligence

diametrically transposed

vicissitudes-changes

germane- relevant

egregious – outlandish

obstreperous – out of control

endemic – native

sedulous – dilligent

fortutious – lucky accident

pecuniary – relating to money

inculcate – instill

aquiese – consent/comply

dogmatic – inflexible

opulent – wealthy

abstruse – difficult to understand

erudite – scholar

taciturn – untalkitive

cupidity – greed

wanton – reckless

inimical – opposed to

proclivity – predisposition

state / affirm / content / establish / according/ hence / futhermore

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Story of the Broken Steamship Engine

Eric Matzner — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 03:53:35 +0000

here is an old story of a boilermaker who was hired to fix a huge steamship boiler system that was not working well. After listening to the engineer’s description of the problems and asking a few questions, he went to the boiler room. He looked at the maze of twisting pipes, listened to the thump of the boiler and the hiss of escaping steam for a few minutes, and felt some pipes with his hands. Then he hummed softly to himself, reached into his overalls and took out a small hammer, and tapped a bright red valve, once. Immediately the entire system began working perfectly, and the boilermaker went home. When the steamship owner received a bill for $1,000 he complained that the boilermaker had only been in the engine room for fifteen minutes, and requested an itemized bill.

This is what the boilermaker sent him:

For tapping with hammer: .50
For knowing where to tap: $ 999.50

Total: $1,000.00

Many of life’s problems can be solved just by knowing where to tap. Sometimes the smallest of changes can have the greatest effect. Other mechanics might have tried to replace part and do all sorts of other crazy things when all that is needed is the right knowledge of the problem. I wonder sometimes if I am doing all these crazy things trying to fix myself, when all I need is to make a small change.

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