Unicode Names in E-mail headers

If you've corresponded with folks via gmail, you might have noticed that some folks write their English names, and then put their non-English names in parenthesis after that. For instance, in my case, I write: Piaw Na(蓝俊彪).

This use started in my office in 2005. I was complaining to Pengtoh about the pain of using Chinese input methods, and how they weren't actually easy to use on my Linux workstation anyway. Pengtoh pointed me at Mandarin Tools, and I used that to construct my Chinese name in pinyin. We then wondered whether Gmail would handle unicode in the headers fine, so we tested that by sticking our Chinese names in the Gmail settings. (You can find this in the "Accounts and Import" tab of the Gmail settings)

It turns out that Gmail handled Unicode in e-mail headers just fine. We then decided we wanted to see if we could make this convention common. We did this by ourselves, and then decided that we had to recruit non-Asians to make the meme stick as well. So Pengtoh contacted a few more of our non-Asian co-workers, and offered to construct Chinese names for them.

I knew we had succeeded when I started seeing Japanese names in parenthesis, then Hindi over the years. The unfortunate part in the early days was that many other mail readers could not handle unicode characters, either blanking them out, or turning them into gibberish. To solve this problem, I also constructed a non-unicode name for use with those mailing lists and corresponding with people who used these mailers. You can do this by adding more than one entry in the "Send Mail" as part of the Gmail settings. My hope is that all mailers everywhere can handle non-Unicode names in headers eventually.

It's not inconceivable that somewhere else, someone else came up with the same convention. However, I do not recall seeing this convention pre-2005, so at this moment, my best guess is that Unicode names in parenthesis originated in my/Pengtoh/Ovidiu's office in 2005. If you know of an alternate origin, please let me know in the comments!

Corporate Culture

Corporate culture is a nebulous term. People use it to include everything from free food to whether or not you can bring your dog to work. I personally think that far more important is the way we interact with each other, and how things get done.

One winter, I decided that it would be a good thing to run a bicycle repair workshop as a series of winter classes. I didn't (and really couldn't) teach every class myself, so I put up a shared spreadsheet, and listed a couple of sessions that I would teach, and then Mark Logan, Ryan Kauffman, Bob Sutterfield all pitched in and taught classes I couldn't teach. It was typical of Google culture that volunteer-ism was common. You could almost always get help from someone if you went up to them and asked about something. If they didn't know, they'd point you to someone who did.

Unfortunately, corporate culture is one of the first things to get diluted when a company gets big. And indeed, when Google got to 5,000, then 10,000 and finally 20,000 people events like this got less common. An attempt was made to formalize events like this as "Googles Teaching Googlers." Pardo's wheel-building lectures were made available that way. While it worked to a certain extent, the formal version to my eyes, were always a pale reflection of the spirit of community that prevailed the the company was much smaller.

Food Story 2

Growing up in Singapore meant that I really loved food, and always appreciated good food. However, I'm also cheap, and so never went to any fancy restaurants. It wasn't until Google that I actually had a formal, multi-course Western-style dinner.

By 2005, those of us who were on the Sarbanes-Compliance projects were deemed to be "done". At other companies, this might mean a bonus, but Google had something much better: in-house Chefs who could prepare a fancy meal on a budget. Many people think that the in-house Chefs at Google are an ostentatious perk that was an expensive luxury for employees, but in reality, I think the value Google got out of them in terms of extra work from employees and being able to run award-type events really cheaply meant that the culinary staff more than paid for themselves.

We sat down in a room near Charlie's (this room would eventually become the B40 gym), which had been laid out like a restaurant, complete with a special door from which food would arrive. I'd never seen table-cloths so white, nor had I ever had a place-setting with this many implements. I thought, "OMG, I'm in for a treat."

The first entrée arrived. It was a salad with dressing. I had been trained to get hungry by 6:30, and was starving, so I ate it with relish. Then came the Ceviche. That was really tasty too! Then came the sorbet. I was shocked. That's it? That was my fancy dinner? I was still hungry. "Oh well," I thought, "I can still go grab a burger at Charlie's afterwards." When the main dish arrived after the sorbet (it was Filet Mignon), I finally realized that the sorbet was a palate cleanser, not desert. The rest of the meal was fantastic.

Google ran many other "event"-type dinners. One of my favorites was the chocolate-themed dinner that Chris persuaded Charlie and the culinary team to run. That was a $20 dinner, but my goodness, you got $100 worth of food out of it. Another week, Google's culinary team ran the Cafe Crawl: visit all the Cafes in a week: Lea and I used bicycles to visit all the Cafes in one lunch period. The reward: a special meal, and a pass that let you skip to the front of the line for a week! Needless to say, I took advantage of that pass to get a huge amount of sushi.

Google cafeteria reached their height in 2007 --- when I visited Paris in 2008 for a culinary tour, I unfavorably compared some restaurants in Paris to Google's Cafe 5IVE, for instance. I was sad to return from Germany to discover that many of my favorite Chefs had left. Olivia Wu and Scott Giambastiani are still at Google though, and they still turn out meals that could blow your mind if you were used to the typical corporate cafeteria.

There's a talent war brewing in the valley over corporate Chefs, so hopefully, having great food as part of your compensation package will be more common.

P.S. I'm fasting for an annual physical/blood-test, and writing this post while fasting was a mistake!

Motivation

An friend of mine was very upset at work. "I look at my bug list and I just want to cry," she said. Now, this was a person who was single-handedly developing and supporting a program used by millions of users. It was significant, important work, and she knew it. But in the face of this hugely negative feedback, even the most self-confident of us would falter.

I had just gotten my first fan-mail as a result of the book, and asked if she had gotten any? "No! Do you think I would be so pissed if I had fan mail?" Here's the thing: there was nowhere in that program that exposed who the developer was. No about box, no credits page nothing.

Compare this to a movie, where everyone from the Key Grip to the Best Boy gets named. Open Source software at least makes a step in the right direction: the Firefox about box gives credit to everyone involved.

This made me think about all the hype I've heard over the last few years about how few engineers there were in general, and how few women engineers there were in particular. One problem is that we hide away all the people behind the amazing products we use every day. Who was the chip-designer behind the iPod's touch technology? Do you know? I know, because I went to college with her. The main excuse most corporations give is that "if we exposed the engineers behind the products, we would be giving competitors a list of people they should poach from us."

I personally think that's a piss poor excuse. Chrome was promoted by a comic book. The comic listed names of many engineers who worked on that product. As far as I know RIM, who is in dire need of a useful browser on their phone, hasn't called any of those engineers asking if they could build one for them. For the engineers who were named, however, the delight of having their names, and faces enshrined in a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud, however, has got to be at least as good as the Founder's Award they got!

Personally, I think until engineers start demanding that they be credited for important software they contributed to, and corporations start recognizing and treating them as people who are deserving the credit rather than being hidden behind a corporate brand, I think we shouldn't be surprised that kids who grow up with iPods, iPads, Android Phones, and other products chose not to go into engineering. After all, those products weren't made by people (whom they could aspire to be), they were made by faceless corporations. And court orders aside, no kid aspires to grow up to be a corporation.

Hiring Committee Stories

Google's engineering hiring is unique as far as I know. Patterned after faculty hiring by top universities, Google engineering had no hiring managers. None. This meant that all the usual job search advice by any number of books and web-sites didn't apply to Google. Bypassing HR and trying to get to a hiring manager didn't do any good. About the only thing that could have been useful would have been to get a strong employee referral (i.e., get an employee who thought the world of you to say so when he submitted your resume). The interview process went like this: you would interview with a panel of engineers, who would then write feedback to an internal database, which would then go to a hiring committee (also composed of engineers) to evaluate the feedback and provide a go/no-go decision. Since engineers might have to live with the code (and personality) of a bad hire, the hiring committee tended to be conservative on hires. Phone interviews and in person interviews were conducted almost exclusively by engineers, with directors brought in only if the candidate requested a meeting with a manager explicitly, or if the candidate himself was interviewing for a manager/director position.

For reasons explained in my book, I ended up on the Site Reliability hiring committee. At that time, the hiring committee was composed out of relatively senior engineers: Lucas, Ben, Bogdan, and various engineering big-wigs like Bill and Urs. Frequently, when the committee found feedback on hiring to be ambiguous, it would assign another interview to an engineer well-known to be decisive (i.e., someone who would be willing to stick his neck out and say "hire" or "no-hire"). This happened surprisingly frequently because many people dislike rejecting people, and occasionally, someone would write feedback that wasn't really informative enough.

We didn't always have the luxury of a second-interview, however, since some folks had to be flown in from far-away places. Google was truly a global company, and in its pursuit of talent would consider resumes from literally anywhere in the world. Now, I didn't think that Google's interviews were particularly hard, compared to startups and other well-known firms in the industry. In general, quality companies reject a large number of engineers because most people who call themselves programmers can't code.

A few incidents came to mind as being particularly funny:

One day, I came to the hiring committee and started reading feedback from interviewers. One of them turned out to be a candidate I had interviewed earlier in the week. I was doing as much as 5 interviews a week at this time, so I didn't always remember the candidate by the time I got to the committee. Lucas's feedback for the candidate started with, "I spent the first five minutes of my interview calming the candidate down after his interview with Piaw..." When the others got to this part of the feedback there was a lot of laughter. I think that was the moment I realized that Bogdan and I would get along, because he high-fived me across the table. The candidate was a no-hire, but I don't think it was because I was particularly harsh.

At one point, we came across a candidate who had to be flown over from the other side of the world. Since we knew there was to be no chance of re-evaluating this candidate if the feedback was insufficient, we asked the recruiters to make sure that we had decisive, experienced interviewers for this candidate, who seemed pretty senior. She replied, "How about Piaw, Ben, Bogdan, and Lucas?" When he heard this, Bill put his head in his hands and said, "Why don't we just save ourselves and the candidate some time and just send him a rejection letter now?" The room burst into laughter.

Our committee took hiring seriously. We agonized over many hiring (and no-hiring) decisions for many years, learned the idiosyncrasies of many interviewers, and tried to match them up to candidates as well as possible. It was very high intensity work, and on one or two occasions I had to go head-to-head and argue my case in front of VPs because I felt strongly about one candidate or another. I didn't always win, but at every point everyone's opinions were considered. I'm sure we made mistakes, but looking back, I'm not sure I would have found a better process. I for one think that the decisions the committee made were far better than the decisions each of us individually would have made.

Turns out I lied...

I didn't retire from Google, I was handed a pink slip! Thanks, Stephan, Larry, Lea, Pardo, Roberto, Catherine, Mike, and Parisa. With such appreciative colleagues, I must have been a fool to even consider retiring. Thank goodness they set me straight.

(I swear it looked more pink in person)

Orkut Story

As many people know, Google ran an annual ski trip for employees, and by the time I joined, it was getting pretty big, with Google taking up most of Squaw Valley's lodging. I remember checking in, and then heading over to my room to shower.

When I got to the room, I noticed that not only it was a suite with separate party area from the bedrooms, but the suite had a table that was piled with Vodka and alcohol floor to ceiling! I thought to myself, "Wow. Google's incredibly generous. Not only did they book an entire suite just for 2 people, they must have also negotiated some amazing deal to give everyone enough Vodka to keep them drunk for weeks!"

I took my shower and then finally noticed that my roommate had already checked in before me and left his luggage in the room. I took a look at the name tag, and that explained everything. It was Orkut Büyükkökten. The alcohol didn't come with the room, it came with Orkut! I was momentarily horrified, since I actually entertained thoughts of sleeping at night so I could go cross-country skiing the next day, but Orkut had clearly intended an all night party. I then realized that I could easily swap with someone who wanted to party all night!

Mike Samuel came to my rescue and bravely agreed to swap places with me, so I got a good night's sleep, and he had to put up with all that alcohol. Over the years, I learned to bring ear plugs with me to the ski trip, since even if I wasn't sharing a room with Orkut, the guy next door could be a hard partier.

One note about Google parties: the music is universally set too loud. I always felt as though the parties were for people about 25 years younger than I was. I thought I was alone in thinking that, and that I was being a fuddy duddy, but then the 30-year old and 25-year old Googlers told me that too! Until the company split up the departments so each department could have its own party, I never did attend what I considered a good party: one in which you could hear your colleagues talk in a social setting.

Getting confused with Meng

One of the perpetual sources of amusement to others (and occasionally myself) at Google is that for whatever reason, I get frequently confused with Meng by other people. This is very confusing to me, because Meng looks like this:

Yes, that's right. He's always shaking hands with a president.

I look like this:

From Pigeon Point 2010

(And that's my good side)

Clearly, Meng is much better looking than I am, yet people confuse me for him! I got annoyed at this at first, but then decided that since it was mostly white people making this mistake, I could understand. When I first moved to this country, all the white people looked alike to me too. It took me a while to realize that color of hair and eyes could be used as distinguishing features.

Then one day, an Asian woman mistook me for Meng. What's worse, I was even riding a bicycle. Meng doesn't ride a bicycle. About the only thing we share in common is that we both grew up in Singapore, and are friends with Pengtoh.

Then one day, Meng came up to me and said that this guy walked up to him and started talking about cycling. I felt mortified that at least once in a while the mistaken identities went the othe way.

Anyway, now that I'm no longer a googler, there's no excuse for mistaking Meng and I. Just look for the Google badge. If there's one, then it's Meng. If there's none, then it's me. Until Meng retires from Google, that is... I don't know what to do if that happens.

Google food story

When I first joined Google, the menus seemed so exotic to me that I resorted to having to search the web to figure out what was being served. The internal mailing list, food-discuss, also had fairly active discussions of certain menu items.

One particularly memorable exchange came up when the dinner menu included the entrée John Dory. The conversation went like this:

"What's John Dory?"
"It's a fish from New Zealand."
"Oh thank god! I was afraid that some hapless Googler pissed off Charlie and got turned into the dinner entrée!"

Last Day at Google

Today was my last day at Google. It's been 6.5 years since I first started at Google, and let me tell you when I first joined I did not expect to stick around for that long. My previous longest tenure was at Mpath Interactive for 3.5 years. I remember joining the company, and thinking, "Boy, this company is so huge. I'm going to get lost here." I became very pleasantly surprised that after my very first TGIF, I ran into Eric Schmidt on the way back to my cube and he knew my name, had obviously read my resume, and knew that I had "been around the block a few times as far as startups were concerned." Looking back at it and reflecting on what my starter project at Google was, I shouldn't have been so surprised.

Financially, it stopped making sense for me to stay at Google about 2 years ago. The risk-reward ratio had mostly tipped down to much less risk and correspondingly less reward, and while regular refreshers were handed out, they weren't really enough to really make a big difference to my net-worth. However, I still had interesting things to do, including my Munich assignment. Munich was such a small office that I felt like I was at a startup again, which was awesome. I felt like I did a lot there, and it was enough to keep me excited and motivated.

After my Australia trip last year, I became a part-time employee, going to a 4-day work week. Amongst other things, I scanned 10 years worth of slides, bought a house, toured Japan, and wrote a book, but somehow still never quite got caught up to everything I wanted to do. And having found a taste for long-term travel (as I got more time, I discovered that I didn't want to do more trips, but wanted to do longer trips), I wanted to do still more! I still never did find time to visit my friends, or even do any of the other nerdier things I thought I could make time for.

The final straw that made me decide to retire from Google was the realization that as an engineer and a professional, I'm highly optimized for startups. As Google got bigger, the pressure to specialize and stick to a formal role grew to the point where everything I did (and that included the assignment in Munich) came at the cost of professional advancement. I supposed I could have sat back and coasted, or as a friend of mine used to say, "rest and vest", but that's not in my personality. John T. Reed's book, Succeeding, made a very good point, which is that it's very difficult to change your personality, and trying to do so would make you very unhappy. However, it's possible and quite easy to change your context and your environment, and your life should be about finding a context and environment where your personality makes succeeding easy, rather than trying to fit your personality into an increasingly ill-fitting context.

In any case, I don't have any plans to jump right away into another work-place, startup or not. For one thing, I have at least one more book I want to write (it has nothing to do with computers or startups), and Lisa and I have booked a 5 week trip to Europe this summer, along with some Googler friends. I have hopes of doing a photography trip in the fall, and yes, I would like to do another sailing trip. Then there's friends to visit, and maybe for once I should try to attend WorldCon or GenCon, events that I have always thought of attending, but never did it because when you have a limited amount of vacation time, you would never waste it on indoor activities when there's so much left of the world you want to see.

For the immediate future, however, I plan to spend the next few weeks writing up some of my experiences at Google (no, I won't divulge any trade secrets), so if you enjoy that sort of thing, stay tuned.

Geyserville Ride

Geyserville Ride

The Western Wheeler Geyserville weekend ride started out close to Chad's weekend retreat, so he invited Lisa and I to join him and Drea at their country house not more than 5 miles away from the ride start. I had been years since I saw Chad, but he didn't look a day older than the last time I saw him --- the years had been good to him.

Chad had been a fearsome rider in his day, so I expected the pace to be fast, but it was also Drea's first ride of the year. Nevertheless, their S&S coupled Supremo with DuraAce parts and a carbon fork looked intimidatingly fast. Phil and his friend Elliot also joined us from the South Bay. With memories from the past of how this ride kept kicking my ass, we opted for the easier C ride.

The ride was gorgeous, with the first blooms of spring showing up along the road. The Geysers road is a lonely lovely county road with a very few gravel sections, and the initial rolling hills would lull you into a sense of complacency with how beautiful the whole thing was. That is, until you get to the stop sign and turn right. The 3-part climb starts out with a consistent 14% grade for 1.5 miles. On a tandem, this just means getting into your lowest gear and suffering. Add to it hot afternoon sun and no breeze, and we were in a world of hurt. Fortunately, even at 2 miles per hour we eventually made it to the initial, false summit. We drank pretty much all our water, ate a bit of food, and waited for the folks who had to walk to catch up before starting the rest of the climb.

The rest of the ride was uneventful, with glorious, sweeping panoramas of the valley as we swept back down to lunch, after which Chad, Drea, Lisa and I opted for the short cut home, since we were running late, and even with the short cut would still get 58 miles and quite a bit of climbing. Unfortunately, Lisa's camera conked out at this point so we had no more pictures the rest of the weekend. I'm hoping Phil posts his.

Day 2's ride started at Healdsburg, and we rode along the vineyards before tackling Sweetwater Springs road, a gorgeous 3 stage climb that mixed sun, hills, lovely redwoods and a beautiful stream all in good measure --- and a painful 16% grade at the end that nevertheless felt easier than the Geysers because it was shorter and shaded. Chad had a trip elsewhere planned, so he and his family had to drive to San Francisco early in the morning.

Bob & Betty pulled us for the remainder of the ride, at speeds well in excess of 20mph most of the way, which made the ride quite a bit of a workout, but we had slept well the night before and so felt quite good despite desperately just hanging on to their rear wheel. What a fun weekend!

[Update: Phil's Pictures]

Clipless pedals

A lot of people buy clipless pedals and then on their first try, fall over at a stop light because they can't clip out. This is very silly, and it has never happened to me because I did something very few other people did when I bought mine: I practiced. Here's how:

1. Find an empty parking lot that's level, and clear of cars.
   
2. Straddle your bike and clip in on the right.
   
3. Clip out.
   
4. Repeat 2-3 until you can do it repeatably without looking down.
   
5. Raise the right foot to the 2 o'clock position, and push down
   
6. The bike will move, so now that your leg is straight, lift your butt up and over the seat and sit down.
   
7. Pedal and push down on the left foot until your left foot clips in. Do not look down. If you're using Looks you may have to use your toe to flip the pedals up to the correct side, but with SPDs, you can just push straight down.
   
8. Slow down a bit with your brakes, and unclip your left foot.
   
9. As you slow down to a stop and brake, turn the handlebars slightly to the right. This will cause the bike to fall to the left and onto your outstretched left foot.
   
10. Repeat 5-9 until step 7 and step 8-9 become natural and easy.
    
11. Practice emergency stops. From about 10mph, brake hard and unclip and land.
    
12. As you gain more confidence, start from higher speeds and try it with both left and right feet. Once you can do this from about 15mph or so you're safe for the streets, though more aggressive types will want to try it from 20mph.
    

I did all this about 14 years ago when I bought my first clipless pedals. The entire learning process will take about 1-2 hours in a parking lot, though body geniuses can do it in half an hour or less. It sounds involved, but as a result I've never had the experience others may have had, which is that of rolling up to a stop light or stop sign and then falling over because I forgot to get my feet out of the clips. One note about buying pedals: don't buy pedals without wrench flats. In other words, the cheap SPD M520Ls are good, but the expensive XTs are not. The lack of wrench flats make putting on and taking off pedals a major pain in the ass. Needless to say, if you're anything but a racer, buying pedals/shoes/cleats that you can't walk in is stupid.

Review: Primitive

Primitive is billed as a thriller by Mark Nykanen. When I saw that it listed global warming as a theme, I read it (it was one of the Amazon giveaways on the kindle) just to see whether a novelist could actually get climate change right.

The plot revolves around a model who gets kidnapped by an environmental commune for her participation in various consumerist ads. The model tries to escape, and her daughter tries to find her. Most thrillers are simple-minded black-and-white, good-and-evil affairs. This one surprised me. There are no heroes.

The environmental commune commits basic mistakes (including settling on poisoned land), the authorities that's try to chase them down also commits predictable mistakes (unfortunately, no twist there). About the only sympathetic character is Sonya, the kidnapped model, who unfortunately also got a predictable consciousness raising epiphany.

On the other hand, the science isn't all made up, which surprised me. The idea of methane under the arctic ice being a driver of climate swings is well-known. The characters are believable (and believably stupid).

I hesitate to recommend this, but if you do read it, at least the science isn't terribly far off, and the characters aren't as black and white as you would expect from a thriller.

Review: Dear Undercover Economist

Dear Undercover Economist is a collection of columns of that name from the Financial Times newspaper. As you might expect, Tim Harford answers questions like an advice columnist, only from the perspective of an economist.

For instance, when a woman writes in to ask if she should propose rather than waiting for her boyfriend to do so, Harford points to a 1962 paper indicating that a world where men propose and women accept or reject is the very worst for women and the best for men. When another person writes in to ask how many different people she should date before settling down, he points to optimal experimentation theory. He similarly explains why grandparents tend to spoil grandkids (as well as providing a way to keep them from doing so).

The answers are mostly written in a flippant advice-columnist style, so reading more than 2-3 at a stretch taxed my patience. That's the main reason this book took me 5 weeks to work through. All in all, while I enjoyed the book, it's definitely not something you would read a second time. Recommended only for economics geeks.

Review: The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is the inverse of all the traditional English mystery novels. Instead of being set in England or America, it's set in Botswana, in Southern Africa. Instead of having skinny spinsters or fat Frenchmen detectives, we have a fat African woman, Precious Ramotswe, who started a Detective Agency after her father died and left her a herd of cattle.

The mysteries start off being very whimsical, and we get a good feel for Ramotswe's character: her mysteries aren't resolved so much as with brilliant deductions, but rather with a direct approach and smart questioning of subjects. It's quite obvious that this is not a set of mysteries intended to challenge your deductive skills, but a series of character and situation sketches.

We do learn quite a bit about Ramotswe's background before the novel proceeds onto more serious topics. The plot unrolls like a TV series: each episode has a main mystery, while another sub-mystery unfolds in the background, as well as a very unsubtle romance. By the end of the novel, everything's been unraveled, with the ending tied up very neatly, but we don't get the feeling that Ramotswe's done any introspection whatsoever --- none of the feeling of change or bleakness of characters found in Sue Grafton or Raymond Chandler is in evidence here.

At $2.00 for the Kindle edition of the book it was quite a bargain, but I don't think I'd pay full price for this. It will, however, make a fine airplane novel.

Hacker News Dinner

Xianhang Zhang, founder of Bumblebee Labs placed a notice on Hacker News a few weeks ago asking if there was anyone interested in having him visit their house and cooking dinner for them. I was intrigued, and signed up. Another couple of Yahoo employees were interested as well, and since we all lived in Sunnyvale, agreed to batch up our meetings. Of course, a Googler's home is unlikely to have to be better equipped for cooking than almost anybody else's home (it makes sense if you think about it!), so we ended up choosing Jaisen's home for the event.

Lisa and I walked into a kitchen that was already in full swing. What amazed me was that XianHang had already done everything since he got off the train at 5:30pm, including shopping, prep, etc. He drafted us into service to shell pistachos, form the lamb sticks (which I did very badly), and various other duties, but it was quite clear that XianHang was in charge and knew what he was doing. You can look at Jaisen's pictures to see what was involved. Lisa and I clearly didn't have what it would have taken to host this dinner.

After dinner, XianHang gave us his pitch about social interaction design. He had a very important insight, which is that most companies and social software is built as a tool, whereas in reality, what social software should do is to be built as a space (as in a building, meeting room). This is a very important distinction. For instance, he pointed out that mailing list software seems almost designed to facilitate flame wars and endless discussions over minutiae, rather than useful discussion, and you don't have to be a social software expert to realize that. In any case, it's a great presentation and I think anyone involved in social software should consider hiring XianHang for his insights. The unfortunate thing about the internet is that most software platforms are designed by engineers for engineers as a demonstration of technology and tools (my own TinyMuck 2.0 was just one such example amongst many), rather than as a space for useful interaction.

Any way, the dinner was very much time well spent. Afterwards, I gave Xianhang a copy of my book for his long train ride home. I'm glad he seemed to have liked it!

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]