Sometimes inspiration comes in the strangest of forms:  The spark that prompted me to take Confused Lot live was the need for a web site in order to apply for an iTunes Affiliate Program account (I have since been rejected but I’ll keep trying).  WWDC 2014 had an excellent overview of the affiliate program that got me interested in it.  The video can be found here as “Affiliate Tools for App Developers.”  After watching that a year ago I really wanted to experiment with the program but it requires ether a web site or an app in the app store.  Over the last few weeks I’ve been interaction with the iTunes store a lot, from search and buying apps to trying Apple Music.  I have also been playing with appshopper.com and was reminded of the affiliate program.  I decided I should try and get an account.  I debated releasing an app that I have partially ready but figured that would not be fair to the users.  So instead I decided to launch the website I’d been thinking about for a while but not doing anything about.

A few years ago, mostly as an excuse to play with content management systems, I started a blog about photography and technology called loosewirephoto.com (which is dead at this point).  My plan was to post regular pictures and stories about me experiencing with technology related to photography.  The name came from a project I was working on at the time to control my camera with a Raspberry PI.  (I never got around to posting about that but it was a pretty cool project that not only could control the camera but also feed it GPS coordinate and mimic the Nikon GPS accessory).  Anyway, for quite a while I had my camera rigged to a bread board and then to the PI with a mess of wires.  The name and logo came from this.  It captured the playful nature that I like to apply to learning.

At about the same time my wife (fiancee at the time) got interested in permaculture and was day dreaming about turning the vacant lots next to our house into an amazing garden (which hopefully we will still do at some point).  We really didn’t know anything about it but thought it would be cool to blog our way through all our trail and errors.  The name Confused Lot just popped into my mind.  What triggered it was that we were of course talking about the lots of land and also permaculture gardens often look a lot less organized that your standard yard.  But I also must have heard the term “confused lot” in reference to a group of people that are confused.  (A quick google search seems to show that the expression is more common in International than in the US)  But that is exactly what we would be.  As anyone just starting off on something new, that we know next to nothing about, we would be confused.  And just as with loose wire photo the name was playful, a little self deprecating, and hopefully conveyed the message that this was a safe place with little judgment, where  experimentation is encouraged, and failure is equally and success are equally celebrated on our learning journey? It turned out that the domain name was so I bought it.

Over the couple years since then we have not worked much on permaculture (we do have a very nice square foot garden) but the philosophy of learning through trial and error has endured and we are launching this site as a way to celebrate that and share what we learn along the way.

So we hope that until next time you

 keep trying til you get it

I’m also trying to get this site indexed for Derek Quam