Pigeon Point 2010 Edition

Pigeon Point 2010

This year's Tour of the German Speaking Alps qualifier turned into a much larger group gathering with 13 people participating, including a sag wagon!

The day before the tour, it rained horribly and temperatures dropped to a low of 36 degrees. The morning of the ride, it was cold, but it was clear and beautiful. Mike Samuel, Lea Kissner, Kekoa Proudfoot, Phil Sung, Cynthia Wong, Scotty Allen, Katelyn Mann, Heather Whitney, Chris, Kyle Stickle, and Li Moore all showed up to ride. In addition, Catherine Rondeau and Tiffany Lau showed up with a SAG wagon to carry the gear. This being a qualifier, Cynthia and Kekoa had to do without the SAG and ride it with gear. Lisa and I put panniers on and carried our gear as well out of sympathy.

The route took us up Montebello, which can be a bear when it's hot, but this year was pleasantly cool, which meant we could work as hard as we like and sweat only a little bit. Li elected to do the bonus climb up to Peacock Court, and did it so quickly that he had enough time to catch us before the regroup at the Montebello school. Once we got up to the end of the pavement, the fire road turned out to be well-packed due to the recent rains, making it ideal for riding: our retire tire only spun out once and I had never had such an easy time on the fire road.

On the Black Mountain summit we had a glorious panorama of the area: it was so clear that we could see all the way to San Francisco, a first for the year! Descending the fire road we saw lots of deer, and got to Page Mill Road with no incident.

Coming down West Alpine, we spotted over the local mountains Big Sur looming behind it. That makes for about 120 miles of visibility. The redwoods were cool, but not as cold as I feared, though Lisa's toes went numb. The stream down West Alpine road was as broad as I had ever seen it, and together with the Redwoods in the area was a sight to behold.

Climbing Haskins Hill was nice and cool, and the descent down the other side was as smooth and pretty as always. Pescadero Creek looked like a miniature version of the Russian River, swollen with recent rains, and brown with sediment. We rode into Pescadero and made a turn onto North road to visit the baby goats newly born at the farm. Lunch immediately followed at the Pescadero grocery, where 3 loafs of the artichoke garlic bread was quickly consumed in short order. Catherine and Tiffany showed up to help cart the partially baked bread we bought for the hostel, and reported that the hostel staff was cranky that so many of us were showing up as a group.

Li had hurt his knee and so opted to ride to the hostel in the SAG with Catherine while the rest of us went back over to Cloverdale road and went down it to Gazos Creek road. On Gazos Creek road, I had front flat, but Scotty and Katelyn kept us company while I fixed it.

Upon reaching Highway 1, we faced a painful headwind but fortunately it was only 2 miles to the hostel. Once we were checked in and hot tub spots were reserved, we commenced eating. This was the first time we had ever had this much food at the hostel, and as far as I could tell, the eating started at 5pm and did not stop until 9pm. The hot tub was as good as ever, with the cold wind outside serving as a lovely contrast for the warmth of the tub.

The next morning, I woke up a full hour later than I had wanted to. This meant that with all the cooking and eating (yes, more eating, though for the first time I did a pigeon point trip without waking up the second morning hungry), and then we made our way up the coast towards Bean Hollow Road. I cheated by leaving my CPAP machine with the car, saving us 1.5 pounds (or the weight of a full water bottle). Kyle wanted to try China grade, so opted to ride South. Heather and Chris wanted to do more mileage, so chose to ride North to Half-Moon Bay. Li's knee still wasn't any better, so he opted to ride the SAG. That left only 9 riders riding to Pescadero from Pigeon Point. The descent from Bean Hollow Road into Pescadero Road was glorious, causing Scotty to say, "Piaw knows all the pretty little roads."

Stage road was pretty as well, and we got to it after a quick stop in San Gregorio where we ran into Western Wheelers Bob & Betty on a tandem. Tunitas Creek was amazingly beautiful as well, with little waterfalls flowing at a high, and the Redwoods providing ample shade for our climb. Once at the top, we quickly decided that the fastest route home was appreciated, so I jettisoned original plans to add more climbing to the ride and we headed home on Sand Hill Road and Foothill Expressway, getting home around 3:00pm with 99 miles on the odometer.

Congratulations to Phil for finishing his first ride to the coast and back, and special thanks to Catherine and Tiffany for the amazing SAG service. What an amazing ride.

[Update: Li Moore's Pictures]

[Update: Heather & Chris's Pictures]

Compensation is hard, let's go shopping!

Whenever you hear about a spate of acquisitions by big companies of innovative small companies, there's always a temptation to point fingers and laugh at how the behemoth can't innovate any more. Of course, that's a myth, as How the Mighty Fall shows: most big companies are quite innovative (especially in capital intensive industries), and failures of large successful firms aren't usually caused by too little innovation. The problem usually has to do with incentives.

With the cost of starting a startup decreasing by the year, it is far easier for entrepreneurial employees to leave big companies and start their own thing than to push through the bureaucracy at a large company to launch their product. Part of it is because large companies have a lot to protect (compare YouTube's early days with Google video's early days, and you'll see that the innovation differences had very little to do with technology), and the other part is that a large company like Microsoft cannot launch a product without it having to scale immediately, while a small unknown startup has the luxury of making mistakes and trying several ideas out in order to find one that gains traction.

But what about incentives? Leaving aside the fact that it's very difficult to use compensation to reward creative problem solving, it turns out that it's very difficult to reward entrepreneurial activity in a large firm. You might think that you could for instance, offer an entrepreneur a higher risk/reward ratio by asking him (and possibly his team as well) to risk a portion of the salary in order to potentially receive startup-like rewards. Now, you can't offer everyone this, or you'll discover that everyone who's part of your existing fast growing revenue engine will take the deal and get out-sized rewards without actually taking any risks. The problem lies in that any project/employee who has strong enough connections to get this offer, by their very nature also has the political capital to negotiate their own goals and metrics by which they can get that out-sized rewards. This leads to extremely negative incentives, like launching a product while knowing you can't possibly scale to meet demand, or launching a product missing a critical feature that would have been needed to drive adoption in order to meet an artificial, pre-negotiated deadline. In fact, this problem is so endemic that even for external-acquisitions, earn-outs are being abandoned because of the costs and undesirable side-effects associated with them.

Ok, pre-negotiated goals don't work. How about post-facto awards? Since those aren't expected, you won't have negative incentives, and people would stay on if they believe in their projects, right? It turns out that people are actually pretty good at figuring out that a project is successful or going to be successful. Someone I know was on a project that obviously had great trajectory, and he was amazingly unhappy about large groups of senior engineers and managers suddenly descending on his (previously under-the-radar) project trying to take credit for a piece of it in order to get an out-sized award. The resulting feeding frenzy isn't good for morale, and obviously leads to entrepreneurs thinking that starting their own companies just isn't that bad an idea after all. Worse, after you hand out that out-sized awards, everybody now has an incentive to leave that project in order to find the next big thing so they can repeat the process. Of course, not rewarding such successful projects doesn't work either, since you then risk losing valuable employees to other companies.

If you ask me, there's no real easy solution to any of these problems. You'd have to have an amazing top-level manager, who is so aware of everything that happens at every level of the company to be able to avoid all of the pitfalls I detailed above, which doesn't even scratch the surface of the fundamental problems in compensation. This is one reason why when faced with these issues, many top-level executives just throw up their hands and say, "Compensation is hard, let's go shopping for acquisitions instead!"

Why the rush to get big?

I really have to wonder. What was going on in the Board of Directors when Microsoft decided to become a 60,000 person company? Were they thinking, "We are doing so well now at 30,000 people. If we were bigger, we would be even better!" Because from where I'm sitting, the bigger companies get, past a certain point (that point can be very different for different companies --- Google when it was at 1500 people was more agile than many 200 person companies), the more they suck. Now, if you take a survey of all the managers in a given company, very few of them would say, "I'm over-staffed. Take some of my folks away, please." That's because generally, the more people a manager manages, the better his chances of promotion, since he's seen as having more responsibility. So no one ever says, "I've got enough people."

This might make sense in the industrial setting, where more people means more widgets you can build. But we build software. More people usually makes a late project later. More people adds to confusion, and leads to more communications overhead. Even if you add more people and had them work on different projects, unless they're all in completely different spaces to the point where they might as well be different companies (in which case, maybe they should be!), you still have the overhead of coordinating strategy and making sure that the products fit together. So why the hurry to get big? What goes on in the head of the executives and board members' heads that lead them to think that you can double or triple the growth in headcount without dire consequences down the road? Is it always just foolish optimism? Or is it that when you're at that 30,000' level running the business, all you see are opportunities everywhere that you could get to, if only you had another 500 people here and 500 people there?

Or maybe, just maybe, there's the thought that you could lock up all the smart talent in one company and then all your competitors would suffer?

I don't know. All I can say is, the thrill of fast growth is fun, but you really pay for the consequences a few years down the road, and as far as I can tell, it just isn't worth it. Far better to grow at a pace where new people can be assimilated thoroughly, and new people always have enough old-timers around to show them what's going on. I think the ideal growth rate is somewhere between 20-50% a year, not doubling every year that many fast-growth advocates are so fond of.

Review: Manifold Time

Manifold Time is Stephen Baxter's novel about The Carter Catastrophe.

Baxter starts the story off about commercial space flight, getting you to think that it's a classic "entrepreneur-in-space" novel. The commercial space-flight section of the book (mostly about mining asteroids) is kinda hokey, since I don't see the point of sending water-based creatures into space. The amount of additional ballast required would be really prohibitive.

The Carter Catastrophe piece is not really all that convincing, either. Then Baxter brings in time-travel, casual time-like loops, and a mysterious new race of super-smart human children called the Blues. No reason is given for the rise of the Blues, and the human reaction to these seems highly suspect.

Everything escalates to a climax and then we get a let down at the end, when we see the fate of humanity in a surprising conclusion that's not very satisfying.

As is usual with Baxter novels, the characters are wooden. The female protagonist is even called Emma Stoney, and she's definitely appears to move through life as though she's stoned, hanging on after the male protagonist even after a divorce. You could see the puppet strings behind the characters.

Ultimately, I don't know why I even bothered to finish the book. I guess the plot felt a lot like an scab I can't resist picking at. It did take me more than a month though! Not recommended. (Disclosure: I picked this up during one of the many Kindle giveaways)

Checking Your Accountant's Work

Someone recently at work wrote the following in favor of getting someone else to do your taxes:

Has anybody talked about time spent and stress yet? I'm in and out between 1 and 2 hours, sip some coffee while sitting on a leather chair, and I'm out to have lunch right after.

Well, because of my Munich trip 2 years ago, I still have lingering after-effects due to tax-equalization, foreign tax credits, and what not. Therefore, my employer paid a tax-accountant to do my taxes. Unfortunately, with such a complicated tax return, the number of ways for errors to creep in multiply, not just from the accountant doing things wrong, but also from your very own communications to him as well. This makes it imperative that even if someone else does your taxes for you, you still have to check the numbers yourself. Here's how:

1. Check all the sources. That means that for every 1099-INT/DIV/B, those numbers need to show up in your tax forms. If they don't or they've been aggregated, you need to do the aggregation yourself to make sure that everything lines up. The same goes for W-2, etc.
2. Look for obvious missing items: If you usually have to file a Form 2210 but don't have to this time, make sure you find out why.
3. Schedule E (if you have one) needs to be triple-checked, as it's very hard for someone else to guess what expenses of a business are deductible, and what are not. You really can't just dump the receipts onto someone else and have them guess.
4. If you have incoming tax credits (such as first time home buyer's, energy efficiency improvements, etc), make sure those line items exist in the tax forms as well.
5. If you have foreign tax credits and they are large, make sure that all the forms exist (you need one for each form of foreign tax credit, and one for each tax system, so that's 4 Form 1116).
6. Run Turbo Tax and verify your own numbers for income tax purposes and make sure that your accountant isn't very far off. If he is far off, make sure you get an explanation in writing.

Does this all seem like so much work that you might as well do your own taxes? Yes. Even though you paid someone else to do it, you are still liable for paying the taxes, and ensuring that nothing gets lost. You're the one stuck dealing with the IRS if your accountant gets too aggressive. Unfortunately, by paying for someone else to do it, you can't just make the changes to the tax form, you'll have to get your accountant to understand why his numbers are wrong, and get him to fix it.

Over the years, if I've learned anything about finances it's this: You cannot outsource or abdicate responsibility for your finances. No one else will know or even care as much about our financial situation as you do, and if you think otherwise, you'll end up learning that lesson expensively.

Paperback edition of "An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups" now available!

It took over a week for CreateSpace to deliver, but the books are now here and ready to ship. You can now place orders at the book's web-site. Pre-orders will ship on Monday (Post Office doesn't open on Sundays).

Before the books arrived, I had nightmares about how I'd screwed up in the final order process and ended up with 100 books with nothing but blank pages. But now that the books are here and are as specified I feel relieved. I'm also glad that I kept my initial order size small, as 100 copies of a relatively thin book still takes up a sizable amount of my tiny home office. I have no idea how John Reed copes with 1500 copy runs. Then again, if I sold enough books I'm sure I could find a way to store books vertically rather than just having boxes lying around on the floor.

It does amuse me that the envelopes and the books all came in same-size boxes. Of course, lifting the book box is back breaking work!

A Game for Old-Timers

When I was in college, I spent way too much time at the Workstations in Evans Basement playing Net-Trek. Well, if you're feeling nostalgic, here's Altitude, a Net-Trek clone with wacky 2-D physics and a choice of planes, brought up to date with modern graphics. Cute, addictive, and a lot of fun. Give it a shot! Each session is short (5-10 mins), but you'll keep playing just one more session. Recommended.

Review: The Spirit Level

I have mixed feelings about The Spirit Level. On the one hand, I agree with the premise and the thesis of the book: a more equal society makes everybody happier, and every one better off, rich and poor, wealthy or not. A more unequal society leads to more problems than you might believe, including higher violence, more stress, more diseases such as heart disease, obesity, and other problems, and those problems affect everyone in society, no matter how wealthy or poor.

This book draws lots of pictures, including graphs from various studies, and shows that there are very few outliers in statistics as infant mortality, and to a high degree, inequality is correlated with all sorts of societal ills that you might not realize were related.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to go through this book without wanting to scream at the book: "Correlation is not causation!" There's precious little evidence of the causation. Now as an unabashed liberal and as someone who's seen frequently how frequently there is little correlation there is between financial success and hard work, talent, or even personality, I agree that inequality is a major problem and it's worth fighting hard to do something about it. On the other hand, I don't see anything in this book changing the minds of people whose fundamental attitude still is: "I've got mine, screw you." Unfortunately, those people are the ones with wealth and power in our society, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Nevertheless, this book is easily available at your local library, and it's worth checking it out. Recommended.

The story behind the book

I first thought of writing this book because of having to repeat myself too many times to every new employee at Google who asked me about exercising his stock options. Obviously, I never got around to it until some time in late 2008, when I wrote a blog post about startup stock compensation.

The blog post got a surprisingly anemic reception, yet it gets continual hits even today, indicating that while few people piped up and said, "Oh yeah, I'd like to read a book about this," there were always a few people searching for the answers that the blog post was about. I fleshed out the chapter a bit and showed it to a couple of friends of mine. The feedback was, "The title sucks. I didn't think I'd be interested in the topic, but once I got started I enjoyed it despite myself!"

I put the project aside and went through 2009 busy with work and travel. I went down to 80% time at my day job, but the first few months of it was spent catching up on life activities, rather than working on the book. I bought a house, which turned out to be a massive project all by itself, scanned several year's worth of slides, which was something I should have done ages ago, and before I knew it, had hit Thanksgiving with only 3 chapters of the book done.

I ran into Kickstarter by accident, and decided then and there that if anything would spur me into writing the book, paying customers would! I put up my book there, and like magic, started writing furiously. The book was written entirely in OpenOffice, using styles and templates I had found on the web as a guide to ordering my thoughts. When I found myself working on the book even during my winter vacation, I knew I would get it done, and sooner than I expected.

I searched the web about publishing solutions after reading John Reed's book. His approach of printing his own book and binding it at home didn't appeal to me, and neither did ordering a thousand copy run of something I was sure would be a small market. I thought of trying to sell it to O'Reilly books, but the thought of having to deal with a real publisher made me wince. The last time I had a book contract, there was a lot of pressure to put in fluff to make the book fatter, because that's how people buy books in bookstores. After some research, I found CreateSpace, and discovered that despite being owned and affiliated by Amazon.com, you could just treat them as a short-run printing house and not let Amazon sell it on your behalf. If Amazon did sell it on your behalf, they would take 50% of the cut. If Amazon distributed it to bookstores on your behalf, they would take 70% of the cut. Neither of those deals sounded good to me: there are maybe 100,000 engineers in the country, and at most 5% of those would be interested in startups at any given time. That caps my sales at about 5,000 copies, if I reached every one of them (I probably won't).

Once I got it into my head to do it through CreateSpace, I stitched together all the files and formatted it in various form factors to see how it looked. I ruled out 8x10, because it's bulky and hard to ship. Smaller sizes required more pages, and CreateSpace charged for printing by the page after 100 pages. I decided on 6x9 as a compromise.

Putting together the cover was interesting. Amazon provides a template, and I had a copy of Photoshop anyway from my photography hobby. It turns out that if you need to do something with Photoshop nowadays, all you need to do to google the task you want to do, and follow the step-by-step instructions. I was surprised at how easy it was.

Once all that was put together, I signed up for CreateSpace's Pro Plan (which reduced the price per copy of the book: all it takes is a 40-copy run and the Pro Plan pays for itself), and then worked on iterating on the interior and exteriors. You have to do this a couple of times because how much margin to use and how to make it look good isn't obvious, and of course print is always different than looking at photos on a computer screen.

The Kindle version was very easy. I was very familiar with MobipocketCreator from prior experience, and it sucked in my files just fine. There were a few glitches, which I dealt with by diving into the html intermediate format and directly editing the files (you can do this once the manuscript is in close to final stage). It turned out that by using the OpenOffice styles appropriately, my book lined up very easily with what Mobipocket Creator expected.

All the pre-production work took about 2-3 days of total work time. Proof reading and copy-editing was helped a lot because Larry Hosken took it upon himself to copy-edit the book in detail. Others provided gobs of input as well. The Kickstarter process is extremely valuable in this regards. You really do get people who are interested in helping out, and are familiar with the topic at hand. The final part was sending out the manuscript to everyone who was quoted in it to make sure I didn't misquote anyone. Everyone was incredibly helpful and I'm very grateful that people have been so generous with their time.

All in all, I think while having an editor, etc., would have been nice, I'm not sure I wanted to give away 90% of the income from the book to get that, given how niche a market this book will sell into. In particular, the book will more than break even even in the first printing, which makes me very happy. Now, I still would have been better off flipping burgers than writing the book, but at least I'll never have to give the same advice over and over again. I can tell people to RTFM! I learned a lot, and I think I'd be willing to write another book or two, but for the next month or two at least, most of my writing will be on this blog.

Review: John T Reed's Self-Publishing

I really liked John T. Reed's Residential Property Handbook, and bought his Self-Publishing Book because I was going to publish my own book.

John T. Reed makes 6 figures a year selling his own books. He has well over 30 books available on his web-site, and each book makes about $25 in profit. So he sells about 4000 books a year. Split over 30 titles, that's at least 133 copies per title, and indeed, he tells you to expect sales of between 100 and 1500 copies per book per year. How does he know how many to print? He prints his own books off his laser printer and binds his own copies for the first few copies, and then after a few months, orders a year's supply. This by the way explains why all his books are 8x10". It makes it harder to ship, but he saves a step by not having to cut it. Does Reed explain this in his book? No. Maybe it's obvious, but things like sizing decisions are important, so why not spend some time discussing it?

The problem with doing this is that unless you sell lots of different books, the $300 cost of a binding machine and all the space it takes up is probably better spent on other things. He does explain the costs of getting books from a book manufacturer, and since he does thousand copy runs, the costs are fine, but surprisingly high, compare to print on demand vendors such as CreateSpace. I don't know why you wouldn't just go with a print-on-demand vendor instead, especially since the cost of California real estate is high enough that stocking several thousand copies of inventory has got to be cumbersome.

As a how-to book vendor, Reed doesn't spend a lot of time telling you how to polish your prose. In fact, he says he usually writes one draft and then is done! Maybe you shouldn't do that if you're a first time author. I find a surprising number of bugs, both from the revisions in the book, and from the process itself (i.e., checking out the interior, etc). He takes a very minimal approach to the cover as well, since he sells off the internet. Unfortunately, since he has an extremely high page rank site, he doesn't have much experience with tools that other writers who might not have such highly ranked web-sites might use.

He composes in Adobe Indesign. That's a $700 piece of software! For a beginning writer, OpenOffice will do everything you need to with prose. None of Reed's books have particularly complex layout, so I don't know why he would do what he's doing, except that he has enough book volume that it doesn't matter. Stuff like this permeates the book. I think he's been in business so long that he doesn't know how to teach someone else how to bootstrap any more.

By far the bulk of the book is spent reassuring the reader that self-publishing is the right thing to do. In particular, the numbers all work out in the self-publisher's favor, as described in this article on his site.

All in all, I was disappointed by the poor value in this book. Reading the book's web-page will probably tell you all you're going to learn from the book anyway. Not recommended.

Soft-launch of books.piaw.net

My Kickstarter Project finished with 42 backers and over $1,000 in pre-orders! At this point, I've uploaded the final version of the book to Amazon, and will order a final proof and get an initial print order in by Friday.

The advantage of digital editions is that I don't have to wait to start selling the book. You can now buy the book via pay-pal or Google Checkout at http://books.piaw.net/guide/. Buy buttons for the print copies of the book will show up once print copies arrive and I can start shipping them.

I would like to thank everyone who backed me at Kickstarter, and I hope the book proves useful! This is a soft launch because I won't be putting up adwords, etc. before I start selling print copies, so if you're waiting for me to launch a major marketing blitz, just wait a week or two.

Review: The Magicians

I first read about The Magicians in an interview with Lev Grossman. In it, he proclaimed that the book was about a mash-up of Harry Potter and Narnia, set in the real world.

The book is told from the point of Quentin, who at the beginning of the novel is a bright high schooler with a crush on one of his closer classmates. When attempting to interview for a prestigious ivy-league University, circumstances intervenes and he finds himself taking an entrance exam for a wizard's college. This part is extremely well done, with head-fakes and other author's techniques use to great success to make you think that you know what's coming.

Overall, the Wizard's college part of the book was extremely well done. All the parts of Harry Potter that you might have considered childish is instead fleshed out. No fake-latin, no sorting hat. Even the spell-casting and magical training feels gritty. There's a spell-casting accident, of course, but Grossman manages to avoid evoking either Earthsea or Harry Potter.

The second section of the book, about Quentin's graduation and time in the real world, I thought was very badly done. We're given that someone so driven and purposeful in his studies would descend into alcoholism once outside the confines of school. Given my experience of top quality colleges, the kind of people that driven in school can't help but choose to maximize their impact outside school. I feel that Grossman made his characters service the plot in this case, rather than the other way around.

The last section of the book involves Fillory, the book's Narnia-equivalent. A series of novels about a family of children who visited Fillory to save the land from great evil surfaced in the 1930s, and of course, all the Wizard's college graduates have read the books and loved them, and know them by heart like any true geek would. Well, our graduates find a way to Fillory, and of course, an entire cohort decides to assault it. I love the section where they model battle-magic after spells in the D&D's Players Handbook. (Hey, what else would you have done?) I also enjoy the various vague references to D&D scattered all of the book, none of which would distract if you weren't a D&D player.

From then on, the pace of the novel accelerates and we reach the climax and after-math (which unfortunately has "sequel-potential" written all over it) are well-written and unpredictable.

I got this book out of the library yesterday, started on it last night, and finished it today. My complaint about the book is that I feel that while Grossman is a good plotter, his characters aren't as good as they could be, and his plot seem to almost work against his characterization. This is one case where the ideas behind the book are fantastic but the writer's technical capability falls quite short. Nevertheless, it is probably worth the $9.99 Kindle price, but there was no line for it at the library, so I would check that first. Mildly Recommended.

(And in case you're wondering, the parent publisher is Penguin, so it's OK to buy this book--they're not yet one of the evil publishers trying to destroy the ebook market)

Movie Review: Catfish

Disclosure: I saw this movie for free at a Google-only screening.

One could be forgiven in thinking that Google and Facebook sponsored this movie, because their properties feature so heavily in it. Yet, unlike, You've Got Mail, this is a documentary. It actually did happen to one of the film maker's brother. I guess when you're a film maker in New York, you get material whenever you can.

The star is Nev Schulman, a photographer in New York who gets a photo published in the New York Times. He receives fan mail from an 8 year old artist in the form of an oil painting of his photograph, and begins a Facebook based correspondence with her. In very little time, he becomes inter-twined with her entire family, including her older half-sister Megan.

Yet everything doesn't quite adds up, and the movie comes to a climax when Nev and his brother decide to pay a visit to Abby's family. The movie obviously comes from home-video quality cameras: everything's shaky, hand-held, and grainy. But the story is king here, and it holds up and is especially compelling. By the time we get to the climax, the film-makers believe they have a real movie, and suddenly everything becomes much higher quality. The movie is quite predictable, but just like a train wreck, I couldn't stop watching...

I got a kick out of seeing many Google products in use. Gmail, Google, Youtube, Google Maps, Google Earth and Streetview. What a riot! If you're a current or ex-Googler, watch this movie. Oh yeah, if you're a Facebooker, watch it too! Recommended, but won't lose anything if you watch it on the small screen.

Review: 9

I will admit that Up disappointed me, and though I liked Wall-E better, I felt that Pixar had not really delivered since The Incredibles. I saw 9 at the bookmobile at the same time as Sweeney Todd, and since they both had Tim Burton's name on the box, decided to pick both of them up.

I didn't like Sweeney Todd very much, so put off watching 9, but that would have been a mistake. Visually, 9 is stunning. The animation, the colors, and the tight control of palette just jumped out at me. In many places, it felt as though I was drawn into the world, since the rendered images were so real. The story is dark, set in a post-apocalyptic world and has obvious plot holes you can throw a rag-doll through, but is no worse than the typical Pixar animated movies. The characters are great, and well-acted by the likes of Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly. It is largely on the strength of the characters and their reactions to the world we explore with them that makes the movie tick. I especially love the design of the rag dolls and their weaponry, built out of scavenged office supplies.

If you're tired of the bright-cheery world of Disney/Pixar animations, take a look at 9. You will find it a worthwhile antidote. Recommended.

Review: Fables 13

With the 13th collection of Fables, Bill Willingham has jumped the shark.

The premise is that there's a different set of literary inspired beings called the literals, and one of them is the writer Kevin Thorn, who literally can write the world out of existence. There's plenty of jokes, a lot of breaking of the fourth wall, and we see one of our favorite characters subject to some indignities that don't really help the story.

Ultimately, the whole thing came and went like a bad dream. After I was done with the issue, I went back and saw that the collection even came from different comic book series, cross-over fashion. If each issue was written by a different person, I could understand the inanities, but it's all Bill Willingham! If the next book is just as insipid, I'll stop reading Fables, which is a pity, because I think 1-12 is easily some of the best fiction published in any format.

It is nearly impossible to duplicate a photo

I was complaining that the cover I built didn't have nearly the resolution I would like. The proof isn't back yet, so I can't say for sure one way or another. It might be that the cover itself will look fine. But Dan asked, "Why can't you just hike up the mountain again and try to get the picture?"

Well, yesterday was a fine day for a hike, so I set out with my 5D2 and walked up Black Mountain:

Black Mountain In Fog

As you can see, changing weather conditions make it very difficult to replicate the same picture, and all outdoor photography is like that: a capture of a fleeting moment. One of my friends once went to Paris to try to duplicate my Eiffel shot:

From Converted

It turned out to be nearly impossible, even with a similar lens and being in the same location. That's why I prefer to scout locations myself and try to look at everything with a fresh eye, rather than replicate Ansel Adam's tripod holes. Ultimately, seeing is very personal. But I don't regret yesterday's hike. Seeing Silicon Valley covered by a layer of fog was delightful!

Review: Fortune's Formula

Fortune's Formula is William Poundstone's exploration of gambling and the stock market.

He starts with an exposition of the various scientists who've worked on it. These included the usual suspects of any finance book: Claude Shannon, Black & Scholes, Robert Merton. However, the lessor known ones include Ed Thorp and John Kelly.

In many ways, Poundstone's book is about the conflicting ideas behind the efficient market hypothesis academics and the gambling hypothesis. The gamblers were largely governed by the Kelly Criterion, while the efficient market guys focused on making leveraged bets and made headlines mostly by blowing themselves up (as LTCM did). The Kelly criterion folks noted that the LTCM-type betters were betting so heavily that their expected return over the long term was effectively zero.

What is notable was that none of the Kelly criterion people in the book blown up, though Thorp's fund was shut down over tax shenanigans, indicating perhaps that his 28% return was at least partially due to cheating. In any case, the statistical arbitrage folks seem to have had unusual success in the market, though at the end of the book Poundstone indicates that since 2002, they've not been all that successful, probably because too many people entered the statistical arbitrage field after Thorp's success. Another interesting note about the apparently success was that all the portfolios were relatively small. Thorp's operation never exceeded several hundred million dollars, and Claude Shannon's portfolio at the time of this death was approximately half a million dollars. This suggests that the efficient market guys were partly correct: you can't scale up the kind of statistical arbitrage operation that Thorp was running without also eliminating the kind of opportunities that would make such operations successful. Of course, as an individual investor, several hundred million bucks is enough real money that a really smart person with access to a lot of data could probably execute large enough bets often enough to make himself wealthy for life. Thorp, by the way, was the first person to discover how to win at blackjack, the inspiration for the MIT folks in Bringing Down The House.

In any case, this book is very well written, covering all the basic theories and math without even a single equation (though there are plenty of graphs). It does take sides, and like many journalists, I'm not sure the entire story was told. However, if you have an interest in statistical arbitrage, this is a great book with a lot of fascinating stories in it. In particular, you might be surprised at the number of crooks involved in this type of operation. Highly recommended.

Review: Fables Trade Paperback 1-12

I recently bought the entire Fables Trade Paperback Collection on ebay.

I first wrote about Fables in 2007, and since then, the initial story arc has run to completion. We learn who the adversary is, we watch Fabletown fight for its survival and then finally gets its own back. Willingham somehow puts together Little Red Riding Hood, Little Boy Blue, and Pinocchio's father Geppetto all in the same story without losing plausibility. In fact, frequently when you first encounter a character in Fables, your reaction is one of both surprise and satisfaction. Of course, Cinderella would run a shoe store in New York!

The one flaw I can find in the series is the problem of the 26-page comic books. The final chapter of the big story arc seemed hastily written, to try to fit every loose-end into a 26 page issue. I guess that's no worse than the last episode of Buffy was. At least, so far, when Willingham kills off a major character, he hasn't been brought back to life yet.

In any case, the series comes highly recommended.

Review: Juliet, Naked

I was telling Cynthia earlier today that Nick Hornby is the poet laureate of the Male Obsession Syndrome (MOS). That's the mode many men (ok, maybe all men) get into where they'll obsess over a topic of interest and spend all their time thinking about it until they know every darn detail about everything. So you'll get the guy who knows everything there is about Spiderman, including every obscure super-villain who's ever showed up in Amazing Spiderman issues #1-500. High Fidelity was about a music geek, Fever Pitch was about being a soccer geek, How to be Good is about becoming a philanthropic geek...

And now Juliet, Naked, is about being a washed-out singer-songwriter-obsessed man. Or rather, that's what you think until you realize that the book is really being told from the perspective of the girlfriend of such an obsessed person, who's slowly realizing that her biggest rival isn't another woman, but the object of Duncan's obsession.

Slowly, as we go through the novel, we realize that the novel is really about the woman's counter part to MOS --- the need of a woman (in this case Anne) to obsess over her relationships, family, her need to live up to someone else's expectations, and somehow, in the midst of all that fulfill her own needs. Into the mix we throw in the object of Duncan's obsession, the singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe, who withdrew from the limelight some 15 years ago after his best-selling and brilliant album, Juliet.

When the acoustic recordings are released as Juliet, Naked, Duncan receives it and immediately blogs about it. Anne, having heard it and decided that it wasn't as good as the original Juliet, writes a counter-argument and receives a surprising e-mail response from Tucker Crowe. When Tucker visits England to in somewhat forced circumstances, Anne and Tucker finally meet, and the novel sets about providing the comedy of failed expectations and the messiness of the aftermath of a rock star's career.

While the book is funny at times, it does not have the same spark as How to be Good (still my favorite Hornby novel) or the freshness of High Fidelity. The ending feels as though Hornby wrote himself into a corner and didn't know how to extricate himself. Waiting to check it out of the library was the right decision.

Book Cover is ready!

I'm in the final phase of the book. At this point, the book has gone to everyone who's quoted in it, as well as every early backer over at Kickstarter. Shameless plug: if you want the book at the current price of $15 per copy, order it by the 24th. When the Kickstarter phase is over, the book will be priced at $29.95.

It turns out that I don't have many photos of Silicon Valley that are great, mostly because whenever I go hiking in the area, I tend to just bring a point and shoot rather than a serious camera. I have lots of great photos of San Francisco Bay, and I contemplated renaming the book to say, "Bay Area" instead of Silicon Valley for just half a second.

I'll get a proof copy of the book from CreateSpace (my PoD vendor --- which is really just a small print run vendor for me) as soon as the approval process is complete. When I get that in my hot little hands, I'll see if I need to reshoot the photo.

Anyway, after I showed the picture to Peng-Toh, he suggested that I make it black and white, so now I've posted both version. Which do you like better?

The Ebook Wars have begun

Today, McMillan's books are no longer available at Amazon's store. This is not just e-books, but paper books as well. Science Fiction authors John Scalzi and Charlie Stross have already weighed in, in favor of their publishers, of course.

The dispute in question is as follows. MacMillan would like to move away from the wholesale/retail model to an agency model. The wholesale model basically had Amazon paying MacMillan the whole sale price of each book (typically $15-17), and since Amazon was selling best-sellers at $9.99, meant that Amazon was subsidizing each best-seller at about $5 to $7 a pop. Note that Amazon didn't subsidize all books (if you're not a best-seller, you don't get such treatment), but my guess is that Amazon could continue subsidizing best-sellers indefinitely.

The agency model, by contrast, would eliminate Amazon's freedom to use best-sellers as a loss-leader, but forcing pricing of those books at MacMillan's choice (again, typically $15-$17), while granting Amazon 30% of the retail price (which would now be set at MacMillan's desired level). The net result is that Amazon would make more money on those best sellers, but also cripple the ebook market. Why would this happen? Consumers instinctively think that ebooks are worth less than paper books. That's because you can't resell an ebook, or loan it to your friend (mostly because of DRM---again, publishers could opt out of this, but they won't). Pricing an ebook at $15-17 would eliminate all ebook sales because hardcovers with a retail price of $24 would be discounted (under the wholesale/retail model) by 30% to about $18, which means that the ebook would have no price advantage. On top of that, Amazon would no longer be able to compete on price, which I would guess Amazon considers to be a major strategic issue for them.

Who's going to win this battle depends entirely upon whether other publishers join in the fight. Amazon cannot afford to cut off all book sales of more than a couple of major publishers. On the other hand, by being the first to force the issue, MacMillan will be taking the brunt of the loss of sales. I myself haven't bought a paper book from a major publisher for years, and losing e-books would simply mean that the consumers with Kindles and other e-readers will be trained to use the DarkNet rather than legitimate sources.

Ironically, the best thing that could happen to MacMillan and the publishing industry was if they lost this battle, and Amazon keeps the retail/wholesale model of sales. E-book readers are not going to go away, and training a new generation of users to pirate books by pricing them insanely high will not be good for the next generation of authors. I will note that the existing authors like Scalzi and Stross could easily sell their own ebooks online at their web-site, and given that their sites already get gazillions of visits, I think that they are already past the tipping point where their incomes would get major boosts by firing their publishers.

Marion Maneka wrote a piece over on slate about how demand for a book was inelastic. I think she's missing the picture. The audience of book readers is pretty small, and getting smaller. Even avid readers like me have to choose between reading a book, watching a movie, playing a video game, or going out hiking/cycling/sailing, etc. While slowing down the ebook market would have the effect of generating more revenue in the short term, in the long run, the entire book market (all authors and publishers) lose much more if I get fed up with the publishing industry shenanigans and decide to buy a Nintendo DS Lite instead.

Wouldn't the book publishing industry do much better with the next generation of readers hooked on $5 ebooks and paying for those?

[News Update: MacMillan is being even more evil than that: they're trying to force all ebook vendors to adopt the new contract, while forcing authors to accept a below industry average (20% vs. 25%) on ebook royalties.]
[New Update: Amazon capitulates. Book publishers will now commence shooting themselves (and the ebook market) in the foot]

Review: Baraka Blu Ray

This is the fourth time I've seen Baraka. I don't make it a point to see movies more than once as a matter of course, but when I first saw this movie in 1992, it blew me away. A film without dialogue, conversation or plot, yet telling a story with gorgeous, glorious cinematography, this movie captivated me for the entirety of 90 minutes. The next time I saw my parents, I took them to the movie. Then when Lisa and I had some time, we saw the movie on DVD.

Much has been written about the transfer process used to capture Baraka on blu-ray discs, and while critics usually succumb to hyperbole about it, I have to say in this case they are correct: the transfer is immaculate, and will provide as close to a 70mm film experience as you can expect. This is definitely a disc that will show off your home theater system if you've built one, or expose faults with it if what you've built is inadequate.

The extras on the discs are as long as the movie, and show how the film was made: the film-makers built their own equipment, and shot the whole thing mostly with 5 people. My respect for the makers went up: these weren't people who shot a ton of film only to throw most of it away; their budget was so low that they had to make every shot count.

Needless to say, this movie is highly recommended. If you haven't seen it before, make sure to see it with the best home theater set up you can get. It will blow you away.

Kindle Tips

When I gave Scarlet a Kindle for her birthday last year, I wrote up a page worth of tips for using it. Then as more and more of my friends bought one, that page got passed around, and now Larry reminds me that it's worth posting:

• List of free kindle books. These are mostly publisher promotions.
• Calibre e-book management software. This lets you manage E-books that you didn't buy from Amazon, and also lets you download all of the NYTimes, to your Kindle on a daily basis. Of course, it's probably easier to just pay $9.99 a month. :-)


• Mobile read ebook collection. All .mobi format books are essentially Kindle books. Yes, every Jane > Austen, every Sherlock Holmes, every H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo - it's all public domain, and all free, and very nicely formatted over at Mobile read, usually better than the versions sold for money on Amazon.com.


• MobiPocket Creator turns all your PDFs/Microsoft Word/etc files into Kindle books. There's no Mac version, but you can always e-mail yourself documentsand have it wirelessly sent to your Kindle for about 15cents/MB.


• Baen Books also sells $5 ebooks. Unfortunately, Baen seems to publish books for libertarian programmers rather than normal people. They do make books from other publishers available occasionally, however.


• Fictionwise.com also has magazines you might not be able to get at Amazon.com (such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction). All their "multi-format" books are DRM free and come in Kindle format, so you can use those on your Kindle.

Review: John T. Reed's Succeeding

Succeeding is John T. Reed's self-help book. Self-help books are generally boring and bland, since they have to be designed to sell to as many people as possible. Reed, however, has a very strong personality and depending on who you are, you may or may not want to read 300 pages worth of the kind of material he has on his web-site.

I enjoyed Succeeding. I think it's very much worth the time. In some cases, I came across advice in the book that I wish I had when I was 18. For instance, Reed spends an appendix and a few sections referring to his "Dating System". I discovered the same thing when I was nearly 30. He did it in a systematic fashion when he was a West Pointer in college.

His section on investing is a great summary of Unconventional Success, which is a great place to start, and shows that he's not an idiot about finances. Unlike other books on the topic, he covers the selection of appropriate financial goals, and points out that setting them too high can cause you to take more risk than you should have, and that pursuit of too much wealth distorts your life in ways that you might not imagine.

He pushes self-employment pretty hard, as he thinks that being a cog in a big machine of either the army, the federal government, or a large company is bad for people with a strong sense of ethics. To a large extent, I agree, but I've also had a good career with many Silicon Valley startups, all of which were uniformly concerned with ethics and doing the right thing, so I disagree that you have to go the self-employed route. However, self-employment is the route to wealth for most millionaires, as described in The Millionaire Next Door, and Reed is writing for the general public, not your typical Silicon Valley software engineer, so I'll give him a pass there.

I don't agree with everything he writes, but in the essential stuff (risk, reward, choice of career, staying away from alcohol, tobacco and drugs), I think he's got it right.

All in all, this book was worth $29.95, which is a good thing, since that's what you'll have to pay for a copy. Reed is self-published, and does not sell to bookstores (especially not Amazon, against which he has a grudge) and libraries.

Review: Nyko Blu Wave Remote

The PS3, as previously mentioned, makes a fantastic blu-ray and DVD player. However, it does have one flaw, which is that it can only be controlled with blue-tooth. This is not a problem if all you're doing is playing games, but when watching a DVD or a blu-ray movie, the PS3 controller would go into sleep mode after a period of inactivity, then when you need to pause, you're frantically pushing the PS button on the controller, waiting for it to re-register, and then pushing pause. This was not very conducive, and also had the disadvantage that I had to have 2 controllers in my hand, the universal remote and the PS3 controller. I could buy the Sony PS3 blu-ray remote, but then I'd still have to have 2 remotes around.

The Nyko Remote is a USB dongle with an infra-red port that comes with an infra-red remote. Since my universal remote was fully programmable, the first thing I did when I unpacked it was to program my universal remote with all the functions of the Nkyo, and then keep that remote boxed up. The remote is missing two functions, an Eject Button, and a Power on button. Given that every time I have to play a disc, I have to walk over to the PS3 and stick it into the device anyway, this is no big deal. Once the PS3 is turned on, I can navigate to the eject and power off screen functions using the remote just fine, so ejecting the disc and turning off the device is no big deal.

So now I have one device that controls all the functions of my entertainment system. The only real downside as far as I can see is that now I only have one slot on my PS3 free for charging controllers. Until Lisa decides that PS3 games are fun enough for her, I don't see this as a big deal --- I haven't even bought a second controller yet!

Needless to say, the Nkyo remote is highly recommended at the $12 Amazon.com price.

Book Update

For those of you who are wondering about the book. I'm now close enough to the finish line that I'm starting to think about things like book sizes (5x8? 6x9?), font sizes (size 10? size 12?), font type (Garmond?), and who to get to do my printing (Amazon is the current leading contender).

And yes, I horribly mis-priced the book over at Kickstarter. The final price will be likely closer to $29.95 than $15 a book, but giving my early supporters a price break seems only fair. I'm actually really shocked to see so much support, so thank you all very much. Obviously, at this point, even if Kickstarter fails to generate $1000, the book will go out.

The electronic edition actually offers a major conundrum. I'm a big fan of the Kindle, as anyone who has traveled with me knows. But the royalty split between the author and Amazon is an astonishingly low 30%/70%. I'm not expecting to get rich off this book, but at this point, it seems like I'm better off going John T Reed style and accepting Google checkout in exchange for a DRM-free version of the book! Funnily enough, the print split between Amazon and the author is a much more reasonable 50/50 split. Even that's annoying enough for me to want to go John T. Reed on everyone and just inventory and ship the books myself. (I'm not egoistic enough think that this will be a best seller by any means --- it's a highly technical book on a very niche topic)

Disappointed with Battlestar Galactica Seasons 3 and 4

After I wrote the rave reviews of Battlestar Galactica Seasons 1 and 2, I let it lie fallow for a few years, partly because I was in Germany with no real way to watch TV, but also because my friends who kept watching Seasons 3 and 4 expressed their disappointment to me.

I started watching Season 3 with low expectations, but episodes 1-4 were amazing, rivaling any of the first two seasons. The subject matter was intense, and the scripting and pacing near perfect. I started to hope.

Unfortunately, the rest of the season disappointed me. It wasn't so much so as each individual episode was bad, but the sense of an overall story-arc faded. It felt like literature professors had taken over the shows from science fiction authors, as the show started worrying more about character development (not that there wasn't plenty before, but now the show really worked on it) and meaning and symbols instead of telling a great story.

This really became obvious in Season 4, when it became very clear that Ron Moore had no idea where he was going all along, with the story contradicting itself in blatant fashion, with plot-holes you could pilot a full squadron of Vipers through. Seriously, I can put up a ton of suspension of disbelief, but the resurrection of one of the major characters with no real explanation? That takes it from science fiction to serious bible study allegories. There's a place for it, but keep it away from my fiction, especially one that worked so hard to maintain an illusion of a working military.

I wish I had stopped watching the TV series after Season 3 Episode 4, but I was curious to see if the producers and story tellers could salvage anything out of the mess they had written themselves in, and they never did. The photography was gorgeous, the actors just as great as before, but with an empty shell of story, it all turned out to be just eye candy. Someone I read recently wrote: "It's as though Lance Armstrong came into the last stage of the Tour De France in the yellow jersey, and 300m from the finish line, crashed and broke his collarbone and DNF'd." I think it was much worse than that. It was as though Lance got off his bike, and beat up one of his fans and got taken to jail and DNF'd.

Review: Drive

Drive is the latest in a series of books that really should have been a magazine article. You can get most of the gist of the book from the 20-minute TedTalk Daniel Pink gave in 2009. The talk is really good: in 20 minutes Dan explains that extrinsic rewards actually serve to reduce performance in creative tasks, and turns what would be pleasure into work. This isn't really controversial, and there's a lot of studies to prove it. For instance, Warren Buffett, who's long lived in a $300,000 house for 20 years, and picks up a salary of $100,000 a year, outperforms any number of Wall Street traders and investment bankers who get all sorts of bonuses and performance incentives dangled in front of them.

The problem with the book is that it doesn't say a lot about what you do with this knowledge. For instance, he suggests 20% time as something good. I agree. Unfortunately, I've heard of places where that 20% time was treated as a reward for good behavior, with large swaths of the organization referring to it as 120% time. Dan Pink doesn't examine the secondary and follow on effects of introducing something like this in a traditional environment with traditional management.

A friend of mine once told me that he thought the biggest mistake the company we worked for made was to introduce a career ladder for engineers. At that time, I disagreed, because I thought that the extrinsic motivation of promotions and additional stock options, etc., would generate good behavior. Having seen the follow-on effects in later years of people gaming the system, and what should have been a motivational tool turn into a de-motivational tool, I'm inclined to agree. For software engineering at least, extrinsic motivations don't work. Ditch it and ensure that people have job satisfaction instead doing work to the best of their ability.

None of that is in the book. If it was, I'd be please about paying $9.99 for the Kindle edition. As it is, I say watch the Ted Talk for free --- there's nothing new in the book. Dan's very good at explaining existing work, but isn't an original thinker capable of analyzing second-order effects. Not recommended for the price, though being a short read, you could easily check it out from the library.

Little things that matter

I'm finally watching the Season 4.5 of Battlestar Galactica, on the new PS3 setup. What amazed me about the PS3 is that it's actually a much better DVD player than my old dedicated DVD player.

You know how every time you watch a DVD it shows you the anti-piracy screen that's impossible to bypass? Well, if you watch 4 episodes that were stored on the same DVD on separate occasions on the DVD player, you get to sit through it 4 times. But on the PS3, you only see it once! That's because the PS3 remembers where you were, and restarts the DVD from where you left off.

It's this kind of attention to detail that's the reason Apple products are kicking ass. I'm so impressed that Sony's consumer group gets it as well. I get a little thrill every time I startup the PS3 for movie playing as a result.

Appendix: Equipment Reviews

The following equipment worked very well, as previously reviewed:

• Amazon Kindle
• Battery Geek CPAP-222 Battery
• Gomadic Charging System

The following performed incredibly well, but were not previously reviewed:

Blackberry Curve 8320. This was by far the most valuable phone on the trip in a ship full of phones. International data roaming meant that Lisa and I could get e-mail access at all times. With the UMA service, any phone call in a Wi-Fi connected zone was a local call to the US. Today's choice would most likely be a Blackberry 8900. Note that of all the U.S. Carriers, only T-mobile supports UMA. For international travel, there is no reason to carry any other phone. I say despite knowing that yes, the Nexus One and iPhone are faster devices. It doesn't matter how fast the device is if you can't get access to data at a decent price while traveling, which is when I want data most. Highly recommended.

Sea-To-Summit Dry Bags. Light and water proof. Exactly what you want for a sailing trip. Or a cycling trip, or a backpacking trip. Every outdoors person should have a collection of these in his closet. Highly recommended.

MSR Pack Towel. Douglas Adams on towels. This one is light and absorbs massive quantities of water. Enough said.

Cloudveil Cool Caribe Shants. I bought 2 pairs at the Sports Basement. They were great. Long enough to protect knees, short enough to be cool. I can't wait to treat them like cycling knickers. The pockets are so well designed that when I got dunked into water my wallet stayed in them and I didn't lose it. Highly recommended.

The following performed somewhat decently, but had drawbacks:

Vibram Five Fingers. This was my first trip with the Five Fingers where I finally got comfortable with them. As usual, they attracted lots of attention, with two people offering to buy them off my feet. The problem with them is that once you get sand in them, it's nearly impossible to get sand out without putting them in the laundry. On a boat trip, that's incredibly annoying. I still wouldn't use these on a long hike.

HP Mini. This was a reasonable netbook, but the battery life is terrible, I don't think we ever got more than 3 hours of battery life out of it. They keyboard was nice, and I liked being able to write on it while I was on vacation, but if I was looking for a netbook, I'd look for one with longer battery life.

Wolverine PicPac. On the one hand, this allowed us to back up all our pictures. On the other hand, it can't be treated like a normal hard drive, and had a tough time connecting once I got home. I think a better solution would be to carry a netbok and a universal card reader.

Conclusion and Thoughts

Usually when I go on vacation, the general rule is the cheaper the vacation, the better experience I have. That's because you do more on the cheaper vacations: whether it's sailing or cycling, you control your destiny by controlling your schedule, deciding where to go, when to go, and how to go. This grants you maximum bang for the buck and the S.V. Illusion seemed like one of those cases.

However, I struggle with trying to come up with who would have a good time on the Illusion. Experienced sailors will have a tough time because the boat clearly doesn't sail well. Any sailboat which regularly requires the engine to move with any decent speed doesn't really deserve the moniker. New sailors could potentially find sailing with Norman a good idea: he's a good sailor, and knows his boat inside out. However, he is also impatient, and can be difficult to get along with. More important, however, the boat just doesn't maneuver well enough to really be a good instructional boat. Not once did we come about, or gybe. I shudder to think how the boat would do on a man-overboard figure 8 (though since the engine is usually on anyway, it doesn't matter—you'd just furl the sails and motor to the man overboard).

The really big knock against the Illusion is what Ron said: "It's difficult to trust the man's judgement." I'm not sure I could recommend the experience to novices. Certainly, if I was the first person to run a formal knots lesson on the boat, don't expect your lessons to come other than in the heat of the moment, or if you're driven to learn yourself. A typical sailing certification can be had in 6 days, and will be much more useful to you.

I guess ultimately, the best way to use the Illusion is if you don't particularly care where you go, and are willing to go with whatever Norman wants to do. He's not a snorkeling fan, so don't expect good snorkeling—arrange that yourself. He won't pay to dive, so don't expect good diving, because he won't inconvenience himself by mooring or anchoring at a good dive spot, so expect to arrange that yourself. Make sure you go when the boat has at most 3 other crew on board, so that Norman isn't swamped by the responsibility. If you can meet all these conditions, you have a good chance of having a good time at a very low price. For myself, I expect that I will do my own charters after this, or find something with someone I know. There is such a thing as being too cheap.

There's apparently going to be a reality TV show to be filmed on the Illusion later on this year. This is one reality TV show that I might have to watch.

Kindle DX just went international

The Kindle DX just picked up international wireless! Unfortunately, they haven't dropped the price, indicating that the sales volume is too low to drive economies of scale. The $489 device ships on Jan 19th. For my money, the Kindle 2 is probably the better travel companion.

Sailing and Diving St. Vincent and the Grenadines

This is the index page for our recent sailing and diving trip through St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Unlike other sailing trips, I learned about this through an article in the New York Times about the Illusion.

Pictures

St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Alena's Pictures

Trip Report

• December 15th, 2009: Prologue
• December 16th, 2009: Rodney Bay to Marigot Bay
• December 17th, 2009: Marigot Bay to Rodney Bay
• December 18th, 2009: Rodney Bay
• December 19th, 2009: Rodney Bay to Bequia
• December 20th, 2009: Bequia
• December 21st, 2009: Port Elizabeth to Wallilabou Bay
• December 22nd, 2009: La Soufiere
• December 23rd, 2009: Wallilabou Bay
• December 24th, 2009: Wallilabou Bay
• Christmas Day
• December 26th, 2009: Wallilabou Bay to Young Island
• December 27th, 2009: Young Island
• December 28th, 2009: Young Island to Canouan
• December 29th, 2009: Canouan to Union Island
• December 30th, 2009: Union Island to Bequia
• New Year's Eve
• New Year's Day
• Epilogue
• Conclusions
• Appendix: Equipment Reviews

2010 Book Reviews Index

Note: The Books of the Year for 2010 have been picked.
Fiction

• Perdido Street Station
• Juliet, Naked
• The Magicians
• Manifold: Time
• The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency
• Primitive
• Freedom
• The Other Lands
• The Windup Girl
• The Hunger Games
• Ash
• The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo
• Catching Fire
• The Lost Fleet: Victorious
• The Scar
• The Girl Who Played With Fire
• Whit
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Battle Royale
• Crystal Nights and Other Stories
• The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest
  
• Mockingjay
• The God Engines
• The Fuller Memorandum
• Zendegi

Non-Fiction

• Drive
• Succeeding
• Fortune's Formula
• Self-Publishing
• The Spirit Level
• Dear Undercover Economist
• You: The Owner's Manual
• Perfect Rigor
• Predictably Irrational
• The Big Short
• Iconoclast
• Adobe InDesign CS4 One-On-One
• We Might As Well Win
• The Upside of Irrationality
• Happiness
• That was the Millennium that was
• Success Built to Last
• ECONned
• Breaking Windows
• Memoirs of a Fellwanderer
• It Takes a Genome
• Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance
• Psych Yourself Rich
• More Money Than God
• Galen Rowell's Inner Game of Outdoor Photography
• 36 Views of Mount Fuji
• Born On A Blue Day
• Look Me in the Eye
• Being Wrong
• Click: The Magic of Instant Connections
• Priceless
• Sway

Comics

• Fables 1-12
• Fables 13
• Astro City 1-5
• Astro City: The Dark Age Book 1

Review: Perdido Street Station

Perdido Street Station is China Mieville's steampunk novel set in the city of New Crobuzon. It took me two tries to read it: the first time, I checked it out of the Santa Clara County Library, but could not get past the first few chapters in the 3 weeks I had it. Then the Kindle store gave it away free, and it sat on my Kindle for a few months until I got around to it.

Mieville has probably written the best graphic novel in words. His descriptions are evocative, creating in my mind frame after frame of images corresponding to his characters --- the mad scientist Issac Dan der Grimnebulin, his artist lover Lin, and even the mayor of the city as he confers with the Demon ambassador (it is a tribute to the scope of the novel that this isn't giving away an important part of the book --- less ambitious novel would have made that scene the fulcrum of the novel). Mieville's command of the language is impeccable. He also has a huge vocabulary and is not afraid to use it or invent new ones --- reading this novel on the Kindle made me realized that the reason I rarely used the dictionary feature was because I rarely found authors with such large vocabularies!

The plot starts with Issac being asked to restore a formerly winged sapient to flight, while his artist lover gains a patron. The two threads converge, diverge, and converge again, as one of Issac's research projects goes awry, and he releases a predator into the city that proceeds to threaten the entire locale.

All through this plot presentation, Mieville ensures that the city of New Crobuzon is as much a character as any of the ones that talk and do things. We get introduced to all that various races (including one of Cactus-men), technology, and side plots. In fact, if there's any weakness in the novel, it's that Mieville seems so enraptured of his milleu, that entire pages are devoted to it that are irrelevant to plot and seem like so much padding. For example, did he need to really spend an entire chapter on how cable was laid?

Nevertheless, the plot is interesting, the characters, while perhaps stereotyped and not one hundred percent original, different enough from standard fantasy fare to be very much worth your time. In fact, if urban fantasy was this good, I would be pleased. And it is a meaty novel, so you'll get plenty for your money --- in fact, I don't think I could finish this book within 3 weeks if I didn't have a long travel day during my recent trip. If I get another long travel day ahead, I will probably buy another Mieville book to keep myself occupied and return to the city of New Crobuzon.

Recommended.

Epilogue

The rest of the trip was uneventful, as we took various taxis, planes, and so forth back home. We had a bit of time between the ferry and the flight, so our taxi driver did give us a bit of extra time. It did feel nice to have a shower, and I did learn something about American airlines. If you have a long layover and want a chance to fly stand-by for an earlier flight, don't check your baggage in after receiving it from customs. You need to go back to the ticketing counter and let them recheck the baggage after they've rebooked you for another flight.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Alena, unfortunately had her lugguage lost again on the way home, but this time, she remembered to pack all her warm clothing in her carry on, so it was only a minor inconvenience.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

New Year's Day

We woke up at 5:45am and hurriedly packed whatever we could not pack the day before, and brought all our lugguage. I woke up Alena at 6:00am, and we then waited on deck and said goodbye to everyone else, who had awakened early to see us off. Apparently, the night before, Norman had returned to the Illusion without telling anyone else, so everyone partied until 1:00am before returning. Apparently the street dancing was quite something and very exciting, though someone had told the crew that this year was particularly quiet because of the recession.

At 6:10am, Norman came up to have some parting words with us. "You didn't pay the water taxi last night. You're responsible for all the fees, since you didn't have to leave early. When the water taxi guy shows up, he won't take your bags until you pay him." Those were his last words to us.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

At 6:20, the water taxi hadn't shown up yet, so I gave him a call. He sounded groggy, as though he had been napping in his boat, but showed up with 10 minutes and delivered us to the ferry dock with plenty of time. I paid him 50EC for his trouble, we got onto the ferry, and watched as a glorious rainbow poured down from the sky. As the ferry departed the harbor, I took the last few pictures of the Sailing Vessel Illusion, quiet and serene in the morning light.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines