Returning to the Xperia Z1

I broke my Xperia Z1 in mid December, and shipped it back to Sony for a warranty repair. Not knowing if I was going to ever get it back (Sony once hung on to one of my RMAs for over a year!), I bought a Lumia 635. Then last week, Sony finally sent me back a new (complete with box) Xperia Z1 6906, which wasn't the same as the 6903 which I had purchased. The difference is that the 6906 will handle LTE in the US, while the 6903 model has a few bands that are more frequently used outside the US. Since you're going to be restricted to 2G outside the US if you're mostly on T-mobile anyway, this was actually an improvement for me.

A few things that I miss between the Z1 vs the Lumia 635:

• The Lumia 635 has phenomenal battery life. It's a weaker phone with a smaller screen, so I wasn't tempted to use it as much, but with the Xperia Z1, I turned on all the stamina mode features of the Z1 this time around, and have to get into the habit of keeping the phone charged the whole time. The day I didn't do that, battery life was abysmal.
• The smaller Lumia 635 and the fact that it's cheaper meant that the fitness tracking feature was actually useful. I could stick it in any pocket, and didn't really care if I was going to sit on it. There's a lot to be said for having a phone so cheap that I could buy 6 of it for the price of the Z1. The compactness can be solved by buying a compact Z series phone, but you can't solve for cheapness any other way than by spending less.

But there are also many reasons to be relieved to get the Z1 back:

• That nice big screen is really sweet. When using it to shop on Amazon, or use Feedly, I never felt cramped or constrained.
• Apps. It's funny how Outlook is much better on Android than on Windows Phone. This is because Microsoft bought Accompli, but it's still nice. Similarly, I had to pay for Phonly (a view into Feedly) but Feedly on Android was free. People frequently say that having a forked Android store in the form of the Amazon App store hurts the Android ecosystem, but I disagree. Having 2 stores to shop from creates competition, which means that overall prices are lower for apps, and Amazon frequently gives me discounts or free coins to buy apps with. What this means is that apps I might have had to pay for on Windows such as Plex are essentially free on Android. Even  better, because the Amazon appstore is not tied to a Google account the way the Google Play app store is, my wife gets those apps for free too!
• That camera on the Z1 is just amazing for a smart phone camera. Enough said. As a matter of fact, together with the IP58 waterproofing rating that's the reason to get a Z series smartphone.
• Waterproofing: lots of people claim that they don't see this as a key feature. The first time you rinse off the phone casually to get rid of fingerprints, etc., everyone else in the room goes, woah, you can do that?
• Power. Smartphone processors simply haven't been improving as rapidly over the last few years, so the Z1 is still within striking distance of current flagship phone performance. This is no big deal for typical reading e-mail, checking RSS feed, etc., as the 635 shows, but for photo editing and processing videos, it's nice to be able to do this without having to resort to a desktop or a laptop.

All in all, after several months of using the Z1 and comparing it against the 635, I will admit that the improvements over the cheaper phone is probably justified, but requires surprising numbers of tweaks (e.g., to power management) to get there.

The current model Xperia Z3 Compact and Z3 phones reportedly do not suffer from the power management tweaking required to get decent battery life. They do, however, come at a much higher price ($476 and $575 are the current Amazon.com prices), which mean that they're not as immediately a no-brainer compared to the Nexus 5 as the Z1/Z1 compact are. However, since the Nexus 5 is no longer easily available, and the nearest comparable is the Moto X ($399.99), compared to those phones, the Xperia Z3 series would be a no-brainer.

Review: The Fifth Discipline

The Fifth Discipline is Peter Senge's management book about building learning organizations. I first read it in the 1990s, and recently read the new edition again. Re-reading it again nearly 20 years later is definitely an experience that's different from the first time.

As a writer, The Fifth Discipline is verbose, meanders all over the place, repeats itself frequently, and name-drops obscure people that you'd never have heard of. These properties makes it a difficult and frequently frustrating read.

As a manager, however, the fifth discipline encodes some ideas about leadership that I've found nowhere else, and hammers home certain ideas in ways that not only make sense, but have you excited about putting them in place.

The central premise of the book is that human organizations are dynamic living systems which have non-linear behavior in response to events and change. This includes several properties that make leadership challenging:

• Many incentive systems improve performance in the short term but decrease performance over the long term.
• Many feedback cycles are extremely long, far beyond what humans were evolved to deal with, and exacerbate human tendencies to either blame individuals for poor performance or put in place patch after patch to try to solve problems rather than deal with an integrative approach to problem solving. In particular, who you hire, who you fire, and who you promote has performance impact on your organization measured in years, making it difficult to get better because the feedback cycle takes so long.
• Most long term solutions and systems approach to problem solving are counter-intuitive and difficult to sell to short-term oriented business cultures. 

The tool that the book uses to illustrate this is the Beer Game, developed at MIT's Sloan school of management. The structure of the game ensures that very similar outcome happens despite having  explained the rules to very smart people and having very smart people play them. The game illustrates that given a poorly structure system and organization in place, it doesn't matter who's playing the game---it's very difficult to do a good job. In fact, the wider economy exhibits this behavior in the form of bubbles of various forms.

You can see many examples of this kind of organizational pitfalls in many Silicon Valley tech companies:

• Conventional wisdom is that whenever you promote a great engineer into being a manager you lose a great engineer and get a lousy manager. Companies frequently therefore hire managers from the outside. In the short term this solves the above problem. In the long term, however, outside managers frequently dilute the culture, and more perniciously, by not having a culture of promoting from within, in the long term you get demoralized employees and end up with retention problems.
• I can think of one case where a great engineer was promoted into a lead. This person only worked at night and never met her team-mates. She was, however, very productive (since she never actually spent any time on leadership). This led to a promotion since leads weren't evaluated on leadership. Other leads in the department took note, however, and soon leadership was devalued as everyone followed her lead. The company would end up with a culture where leads would grab all the great work for themselves, since promotions depended not on ensuring that your team was successful, but on individual performance.

The book not only illustrates the approach (called "Systems Thinking"), but in one of the appendices has a complete catalog of corporate dysfunction patterns, with diagrams of feedback cycles, diagnoses, and solutions. So if you're in a hurry, just read "The Beer Game" chapter, the section on "Systems Thinking", and then flip straight over to Appendix 2. Everything else can be treated as fluff.

Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium #2

The Walking Dead Compendium #2 is follows straight on from the first volume, which already put Rick Grimes, the protagonist through hell and back.

My big beef with the first volume was the sheer selfishness of people involved, and the implausibility that somewhere, someone hasn't actually tried to build civilization and society. When you think about the zombie menace as portrayed in The Walking Dead, they're simply not that hard to deal with.

Well, this second volume addressed most of my concerns. Rather than one nasty community after another, this volume mostly deals with a community that recruits Rick's band, integrates them into society, and then actually makes good use of what they're good at. It's very well written, and the plot twists aren't silly and stupid.

Rick himself has an epiphany about the reason civilization exists, and the series begins to turn the corner. Color me impressed. Rarely do comic books that become this successful address their biggest failings, and I can see this series becoming really good.

Recommended.

Swimming Music, Round 2

After a year and a half, my Pyle swimming headphones had a mechanical breakage which made them unusable for my swimming workouts. Long before the mechanical damage, however, the headphones had greatly diminished in sound quality, presumably through water working its way into the headphones. Replacing the ear pieces didn't help any, so I decided to switch players.

For the player, I picked the Aerb 4G IPX-8 MP3 player. It's a nice, no-frills player with a clip that clips into your goggles, while charging through the headphone port, which is the first time I'd seen that design. This is nice, because there are no fiddly doors to open and close and wear out and let water in. The problem is that it doesn't have a shuffle feature, so it'll just play all songs from beginning to end. If you want the shuffle feature you might want to upgrade to the version that comes with an FM Radio. Not having shuffle doesn't bother me much so I kept this. The battery lasts forever. I charged it once when I bought it and 2 months later my twice weekly swimming workout still has not destroyed them.

Now, the headphones that come with this (and other swimming MP3 players) are crapThey won't stay in your ear, or provide a decent seal to prevent water from coming in. However, decent headphones for swimming cost only $4.59 on Amazon, with the caveat that it'll take about a month for them to arrive via the slow boat from China. But these cheap headphones are amazing. They come with 3 clips to clip onto your goggles, and you can flip turn, and thrash about in the water and they absolutely will not come off. They seal decently and provide relatively great sound in the water. I'm buying a second pair.

Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium 1

I'm a sucker for deals, so even though I'm not a fan of zombies, The Walking Dead Compendium 1 & 2 were on sale on Google Play books, so I bought them to read. I'd read some of the early parts of the series years before, but they weren't compelling enough to draw me in. Binge reading entirely 48 issue series at a time, however, is a different experience.

First of all, in the time since the original comic series came out, story telling in the zombie-plagued future has had better story telling than when the series first started. It's no longer stupid horror stories, which I understand that this series pioneered. When compared to say, The Last of Us, The Walking Dead no longer stands as an example of how to do future dystopia right. In fact, The Last of Us being "only" a 12 hour video game feels like it does a much better job due to tighter story telling and a confined plot. The art style in The Last of Us, of course, is much much stronger than the black and white Walking Dead.

There's much to like about the series, however. The world portrayed is strong, and is as much of a character as the lead character, Rick. As a foreign born immigrant reading these books, however, it strikes me as how uniquely American these books are. The strong individualistic culture of "I've got mine, screw you!" comes across extremely well in these stories, and they are stories you wouldn't find in other cultures. For instance, at a crucial juncture in this book, a few of the characters decide that they'd stand a much better chance of survival by abandoning the group and running away, leaving the rest to die. You'd think that people who've depended on each other for survival for that long (well over a year) couldn't do that to each other, but in the individualistic libertarian morality play that is The Walking Dead, this isn't just plausible, it's the right thing to do. (They do come back later but the rationality behind that behavior isn't explained and they are punished for it)

If something like The Walking Dead was written by say, the Japanese, it'd be much more a story about how society comes together to build a future in a desperate future, rather than a story about constant betrayal and stupid decisions.

If you enjoy drama, betrayal, and a feeling of desperation as well as insight into why American culture is constantly about the strong screwing over the weak, you cannot find better source material than The Walking Dead series. But quite frankly, I wouldn't want to live in a world filled with idiots, and as Wallace Stegner frequently pointed out, American society and history is actually filled with examples of people building institutions and societies, rather than doing their own selfish things.

Review: The Marshmallow Test

By now, you've heard of the Marshmallow Test. If you haven't, go visit YouTube and search for the many videos filmed of the test. This book was written by Walter Mischel, the psychologist responsible for designing the test and describes the various follow up studies over the years to understand the nature of willpower, and whether or not it can be trained.

The marshmallow test is an indicator of executive function (EF), This book is therefore an exploration of executive function. There are several interesting attributes that just a surface understanding of the results behind the marshmallow test wouldn't get you.

First of all, it turns out that willpower or executive function is contextual. Any examination of Bill Clinton's career, for instance, shows that he had plenty of willpower when it came to his most important goals, but was of course, undone by an affair with an intern. This pattern is repeated in many Hollywood movie stars, and even military generals like David Petraeus. What happened in those cases is that for such people, their focused willpower doesn't extend to certain areas of weaknesses which was what brought them down.

Secondly, willpower is not a fixed resource. It can be drained through use, so your willpower is strongest in the morning but weakest in the afternoon and in the evening. That's why bars, etc open late at night so they get more revenue when your willpower is the lowest.

Finally, executive function can be trained. There are several strategies that many adults try, including meditation, "mindfulness", and other well-documented techniques. Mischel goes through most of them and details the reasons they succeed (or fail), and how to make the more common ones more effective.

More importantly for parents, there are definite ways of bringing up children so that they have more or less willpower. In particular, modeling is critical, as is being supportive and not over-controlling:

The message here is that parents who overcontrol their toddlers risk undermining the development of their children’s self-control skills, while those who support and encourage autonomy in problem-solving efforts are likely to maximize their children’s chances of coming home from preschool eager to tell them how they got their two marshmallows.  (Page 60)

Not surprisingly, having absent parents or growing up in an unpredictable environment also leads to lower willpower:

 Beginning in early childhood, far too many people live in untrustworthy, unreliable worlds in which promises for delayed larger rewards are made but never kept. Given this history, it makes little sense to wait rather than grab whatever is at hand. When preschoolers have an experience with a promise maker who fails to keep his promise, not surprisingly they are much less likely to be willing to wait for two marshmallows than to take one now. These commonsense expectations have long been confirmed in experiments demonstrating that when people don’t expect delayed rewards to be delivered, they behave rationally and won’t choose to wait for them. (Page 72)

That means that keeping your promises to your kids is very important. There's also pre-natal advice, and advice that reducing quarrels between parents during the first few years is critical to having a kid with more executive function.

Overall, the book is good reading, though it's rather verbose in places and doesn't always do a great job getting to the point quickly. Nevertheless, it's got plenty of practical advise, and provides details behind the workings of executive function that a surface understand of what's happening during the test wouldn't give you, so I recommend reading the book for yourself.

Interviewing and Performance

Recently, someone asked me a deep question: we all know (and Google has the data) that interviews do a poor job of predicting on-the-job performance. If that is the case, would a different form of interviewing (say, pair programming) or other form of testing do a better job?

My answer to that question is "no." What most of the other articles do not note is that Google actually does have data as to the major factor influencing on-the-job performance (at least, performance as viewed by Google's notorious promotion committees). It turns out that even in 2003-2004, Google had data indicating that your first tech lead at the company strongly predicted how well you would do in the future inside Google.

There are several reasons for this. One obvious one is that the promotion committee is likely to weigh your tech lead's comments on your performance more heavily than some other random engineer's. The deeper reason, however, can be found in the book, Chasing Stars. Fundamentally, all organizations have stated or unstated rules for how they work. Whether the on-boarding systems do a good job of explaining that to new employees and indoctrinating them in the culture very much explains future performance.

Google at the time when I joined was a largely oral culture. A typical noogler joining the engineering team would during his first week of working through the engineering training document find several bugs a day in the documentation necessitating a documentation change, if he were conscientious. Old documentation or out of date documentation was rampant, and the tech docs team had their hands full trying to keep up with the amount of code and internal APIs continually being churned. If you actually had to get work done, your most important tool wasn't the documentation or the internal search engine (which was laughably bad), but knowing who to talk to. For instance, if you needed to make a change to crawl, and your tech lead knew to say, "Go talk to Arup Mukherjee and ask him how you would do this", you were in luck and you'd be productive and efficient. If your tech lead said, "Go read the documentation," or worse, "Use the Source, Luke", not only would you waste a lot of time reading both code and documentation (as I was forced to once when dealing with the search results mixer), chances are when you were done you would probably have done it wrong, and your code reviewer would spend gobs of time correcting the way you did things, and forcing you to do everything over and over until you got it right. If that happened, you might as well kiss your "Exceeds Expectations" performance review goodbye. (And yes, I lucked into knowing people who wouldn't just tell me who to talk to, but walked me to their cube, provided introductions, and made it clear that what I was supposed to do was important enough to deserve help)

I'm fond of saying that context matters a lot when it comes to performance. This type of context-sensitive performance isn't necessarily because the tech lead deliberately led the poor engineer wrong. It was because the tech lead did not provide a suitable context for the engineer to work with, and in the process makes the job much much harder (or in some cases nearly impossible) for the new engineer. Hence if your interview process is successful in eliminating people who can't actually do the job, but you end up with variable performance or unexpectedly poor performance on the job from people who should be doing well, you need to examine your on-boarding process or the training process for your leads/managers.

The follow up to this question then is, "If performance is so context determined, why do we bother with interviews?" The answer to that is that the goal of the interview isn't to predict performance in the future. The goal of the interview is to ensure sufficient technical competency and cultural compatibility so that with a good on-boarding process or a decent tech lead/manager, the new engineer ought to be able to do a great job. Hence, when I run interviews, I don't favor esoteric problems that require dynamic programming (for instance), but basic data structure questions. While I consider basic tests such as the Fizz Buzz Test way too simple and insufficiently indicative of someone with basic computer science knowledge, coding questions that approximate that level of complexity (while still testing basic computer science concepts) is all that is typically needed to weed out people who simply can't code and shouldn't be allowed access to your source control system.

Review: Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2

My Windows Home Server (original) has been running very nicely since it was first installed in 2011. The nightly backup feature has saved my ass countless times, and I've definitely done many a restore from image instances from backup when I would try a new OS (such as Windows 10 Technical Preview) and then backed out from it. It also serves as the central file server for the home, exporting music/video/etc via DLNA to the living room PS3. All in all it's been an incredible value.

Unfortunately, WHS is showing it's age, and has been de-supported. This was running fine for us until very recently, since two of the limitations were no big deal:

1. No support for larger than 2TB disks (6TB of local storage was plenty, thank you)
2. No support for UEFI machines (we didn't have any, except for various Windows tablets, which didn't store any data worth backing up)

Then we got a Surface Pro, which is a UEFI machine. The WHS had also started getting a little flakey, and I'd eventually have to replace my desktop and laptop with newer, UEFI machines so I started shopping. 

One obvious upgrade was to go to Windows Home Server 2011, but that's also showing it's age, and lost the drive extender feature of the original WHS. We could go with hardware RAID by as explained on the Windows Home Server review, RAID is a mixed bag, since if the RAID controller fails, you'd have to replace it with an identical piece of hardware or risk losing your data. RAID isn't a great solution for home use.

Windows 8.1 has support for storage spaces, which has many interesting features that in many ways mirror what was in file extender:

1. Drop any set of storage spaces disks into any Windows 8.1 PC, and you'll be able to crack open and view all the files. This sort of commodity hardware data storage is invaluable.
2. You can mix and match drive sizes into a storage pool, and then create virtual disks that can be mirrored (RAID 1), striped (RAID 0), or with parity (RAID 5) across the multiple drives. This is very nice, since you can then upgrade storage slowly. You can even designate spare disks and "hot spares", to automate failover. This effectively lets you tell Windows to have different data policies for different type of data, for instance asking for photos to be mirrored while videos are striped.
3. You can even thin-provision virtual disks, and have Windows warn you when you need to add storage.

The problem with Windows 8.1 is that it doesn't support full bare metal backup and restores. For that feature you need Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2, a full on business server. This is when you realize what a great deal the original Windows Home Server was, since the retail cost of Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2 is more than what I paid for the original Windows Home Server hardware!

No big deal. I worked in the software industry, so I pulled some strings and got a copy at employee pricing. Then I needed hardware to run it. I thought about repurposing the Windows Home Server, but then realized it was a bad idea: I needed to do a server-to-server copy, and the Acer was also headless. While it's possible to do a Server install headless, it's not for the faint of heart.

The cheapest server you can buy is the Lenovo TS140. You can get it for around $225 for an i3 machine, 4GB RAM, and no HDD. However, I found a deal where for well under $300, I got a quad core Xeon configured with ECC RAM. Now that I was expecting to handle tens of terabytes, I figured ECC RAM was worth paying for. The extra CPU is also helpful for running server applications such as Plex, which basically transcode video sources on demand for targeted delivery.

Installing WSE 2012 R2 is straightforward. However, I learned a few things about UEFI machines and WSE 2012 R2 that weren't documented elsewhere that I looked:

1. OS updates will not work if you have secure boot turned on. Turn off secure boot.
2. WSE 2012R2 (or any version of Windows) will not allow you to use excess space on the boot drive as part of a storage spaces cluster. So effectively, your 4 drive bay server is now a 3 bay server! This isn't a big deal if you have 4TB disks in the server, since that's plenty of storage, but it does make the server smaller than you expected.
3. WSE 2012R2 is a business server. So the first thing it does is it sets up a domain. This is no big deal as it's very automated and easy. However when you connect an existing computer to a WSE server, the first thing it does is to register the new machine to the server, with the server providing the domain. This is no big deal with Windows 7: your login prompt changes so you have to hit control-alt-delete to login, but there's no difference otherwise. With Windows 8, if you previously logged in using a Microsoft cloud account, then if you login using domains, you lose all the cloud customizations you used to have! The solution to this is to hack the registry on the Windows 8.1 machine to skip joining the domain. If you were truly running a small business like a dental office, this isn't what you want (you wouldn't want your employees logging on with their cloud accounts), but for a home user who's upgrading from WHS, this is the right thing.

Other than that, everything was fine. I ran a backup and bare metal restore on my Lenovo X201, and things went smoothly. Then I tried it on the Surface Pro. The Surface Pro has 2 SNAFUs. First, bare metal restore doesn't work over WiFi (not surprising). This was easily resolved, since a USB ethernet port was already available for high speed network connectivity. Since you also need to plug in a USB thumb drive for booting, you'll need a USB hub. There are various warnings that you need a powered hub, but my unpowered hub was fine provided I only had the thumb drive and the ethernet port hooked up to it. The final SNAFU was when I tried booting using the thumbdrive and got an error. This one turned out to be secure boot's fault. Turning off secure boot on the Surface Pro got the bare metal restore working with zero hitches.

I transferred all the data over from the old WHS server. It turned out that the old server was CPU constrained. While the old server topped out at around 45MB/s, the new one peaked at 65MB/s. This is pretty sweet. I could also run the Plex Server on it without the CPU even breaking a sweat.

The nasty thing about storage spaces, however, is that it doesn't auto rebalance when you add a new drive. You can force a rebalance, however, by creating a new virtual drive after adding a new drive that makes use of the new drive, and then copying old data to it and then deleting the old virtual drive. This is kinda more futzy than I'd hoped, given that the old WHS kept ticking for years on end without me having to do manual rebalancing and all that, but again, if your old server failed, you could move the drives over to a Windows 8 PC and everything would just work, so this is a feature I'm willing to live with.

All in all, would I recommend this? If you have an old WHS that's been operating and you don't have any UEFI machines, I'd recommend sticking with the old server for as long as you can stand it and don't need to upgrade to any UEFI machines. If you have an existing old-style NAS RAID, I think the Windows solution is superior to any of the freeware servers, especially since ZFS requires gobs of RAM, and the low end servers are cheap, assuming you can snag a copy of Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2 at employee/educational institution pricing. The combination of having a file server, bare metal backup restore, file history, etc, and DLNA server is pretty sweet.

If you ask around, most people (even software engineers who should know better) rely on cloud storage or don't do backups of their data. If you shoot with a modern digital camera (as opposed to a crappy phone camera), videos and photos quickly fill up terabytes of data, making cloud storage prohibitively expensive. Under such circumstances, a home server that backs up all your computer is well worth the cost, and WSE is surprisingly efficient and easy to use. Recommended.

Review: Outlook 2013

As documented previously, I've recently run into quota issues for gmail. Along with the need to aggressively delete e-mail to get under the quota, I've finally decided to take backing up my e-mail seriously. This is important, because together with photos, a lot of e-mail is actually useful for searching and remembering details that aren't recorded any other way. Even if you've decided to pay for storage on Gmail, for instance, there's always the chance that your account gets hijacked phished or otherwise deleted/hacked, so having a backed up archive locally protects you in that event.

As a well documented cheapskate, I first tried the free solutions. Mozilla Thunderbird, for instance, is well known and popularly acclaimed. But it was too slow and couldn't really manage huge inboxes. I tried various other solutions before giving up and acquiring an Outlook 2013 license through an employee purchase program at Microsoft.

Setting up Outlook is fairly straightforward, and it auto-configures now for Gmail accounts as well as Hotmail and Yahoo mail. For Google Apps for your domain accounts, however, you have to go through custom configuration. There are a few bugs there, but eventually I got it so that everything sync'd.

Performance is decent. It can't match the search index that's built on the browser based version of gmail, but it's acceptably fast and works even when you're offline. The real feature that made me pay for a license, however, is the auto-archive feature. This essentially lets you move old e-mail into an archive which you can then access and search separately. I did an archive and the machine went away for a few minutes and created a 9GB archive of my e-mail all the way back from 2004. It's searchable, opening the folder isn't fast, but it works and I can apply filters to it and search it after creating an index, which takes forever.

The biggest pain point is that I have to force myself to keep Outlook running. (It's not a hog: 200MB of RAM is all it takes --- keeping a Chrome window open to Gmail costs quite a bit more!) The sync with a live server is also somewhat slow: I frequently get a ping on my browser window a few minutes before Outlook fetches the mail. What's also interesting is that while it automagically imports your calendar (and it does a great job of that), it doesn't automatically import contacts, and the auto-complete does not auto-populate.

What auto-archive does not do, unfortunately, is to remove archived e-mail from the IMAP server (in this case GMail). This isn't great, but on the other hand, means I can now very aggressively delete e-mail in the future.

There's a market opportunity somewhere for an e-mail app that doubles as a backup for cloud-based storage, but I'm sure people like me are a rarity (most people don't even backup their photos). However, just like Open Office Spreadsheet was never a good substitute for Excel, there's no serious alternative to Outlook if you need the capability of offline e-mail or archives.

Recommended.

Review: Indexing

Indexing is Seanan McGuire's novel about fairy tales gone amuck. It was originally sold as a serial and the structure of the novel reflects it. McGuire's also written novels by the name of Mira Grant, one of whom (Feed) I've previously reviewed as a mediocre novel.

The premise behind Indexing is that fairy tales (known as narratives) have a power all of their own, and once they get started and locked into the persons involved, will make their way to the end, uncaring and leaving dead bodies (or sleeping bodies) in their wake all in service of the story. Hence there's a secret government agency formed around finding narratives and stopping them in their tracks.

The net effect of this is as though you have the Cthulhu mythos replaced with Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, etc. The premise is interesting, but McGuire does a lot less with the premise than you might expect. Each episode revolves around one particular archetype, and in itself seems to be ok, but the overarching story linking them all is weak, as is the character development. Everyone lives up to their stereotype.

The result is disappointing: you keep reading hoping for the author to deliver a grand plot that was hinted at, only to discover something pretty prosaic. Read Fables instead.

Review: Zero to One

Zero to One is Peter Thiel's short book on how to build startups. It's a very mixed bag, but has a few interesting and important ideas. I'll try to list some of them.

Venture backed up startups shouldn't be funded to achieve "normal" returns. This should drive VC behavior: in other words, there should be no startup in a VC portfolio that do not have the potential to return 10X the rest of the portfolio. Having this discipline means that you only need about 1 in 10 startups to succeed to pay for the entire portfolio of companies. This is a very strong point, but he mixes it all up by scoffing at diversification. What you have to understand is that Thiel isn't just writing a book teaching you about startups. He's a sales person. He succeeds by convincing you (or the founders at any rate), that diversification is for wussies, and that you should bet it all on huge thing while behind the scenes he's practicing diversification by investing in lots of startups with his huge portfolio.

Another interesting point is that the goal of a company is to create products that have no close substitutes so as to enjoy monopoly profits. This is true. Warren Buffett has also frequently expressed the need to have a big moat around business you would invest in. On the other hand, we do have tons of startups all searching for that next monopoly, so it's not as easy as just he says.

Sales is important. This is a big deal, because most tech startups are founded by nerds who hate sales and marketing. This chapter is a great read for every nerd-turned-entrepreneur, and he points out that most sales jobs are named something else (e.g., "Account Executive") so that the customers aren't alerted to the fact that a sales person is talking to them. He also points out that Palantir's sales are so big that the CEO is effectively the company's sales person.

There are some other interesting titbits about various companies founded and run by the Paypal mafia, but a lot of what Thiel says has to be filtered by your B.S. filter: the man is self-serving to the nth degree, so the entire book is a sales job. In one chapter he grudgingly admits that if you examine the odds of success objectively, it makes more sense not to found startups, but to join one that's clearly on the trajectory towards outsized success (e.g., Google or Facebook before the IPO, and now probably Dropbox, AirBnB, Uber, and a  handful of others).

I hate to slap a recommended label on this book, but it's so short that you can read it in a couple of hours, so I'd say it's worth a read, provided you take it with a 20 pound burlap sack of salt and watch out for all the places where he's being self-serving.

Review: Defense Grid 2 (PS4)

I'm a big fan of tower defense games, but many of the current mobile games (such as FieldRunners) leave me cold: the production values are low, and map after map is just the same. Defense Grid: The Awakening was a great game, however, and when I saw that Defense Grid 2 was on sale on the Playstation Network over the holidays I picked it up and started playing.

One of my potential misgivings about playing a former PC game on a game console was that the controls would be awkward. To my surprise they weren't. The controls are intuitive, and actually quite a bit better than mouse and keyboard in some ways. For instance, on the PC, I'd forget about the camera controls and not notice a new swarm of enemies appearing from a different direction, but that never happened on the PS4.

The campaign took a while to play on normal difficulty, and to the games' credit, there are no difficulty spikes that cause you to scratch your head and start hunting for a youtube video the way Defense Grid: The Awakening had. On the other hand, that could be because I did play the first Defense Grid (which had no difficulty settings) thoroughly, and it could be that with higher difficulty ratings I'd have to go back to youtube again.

The best thing about Defense Grid was the production values. The game reminded you at every opportunity that it wasn't a low budget affair. This game has full voice acting at every instant, and the sound effects and maps and resultant emergent behavior between the swarms and the towers are quite spectacular to watch.

Towers have changed. The command towers have been eliminated, and stealth enemies are easier to deal with than before, while flying enemies have been eliminated. The missile tower is now a powerful land-attack tower, and is valuable for it's reach, virtually eliminating the cannon.

The game plays fair: if you place towers without thinking you'll have a tough time finishing with all your cores intact. If you think it through a bit, you can usually do a good job of eliminating all the enemies.

All in all, at full price, this game is a bit much: while there's enough content to keep you coming back, there aren't enough maps or changes from the original if you played the first one to death (which I did). But at $10 or less, it definitely belongs on your PC or console of choice. Recommended.

Review: The Golem and the Jinni

The Golem and the Jinni is Helene Wecker's debut novel. Set in turn of the century New York City, it blends together Arabic and Yiddish myths (from whence the Jinni and Golem comes from) into a story that ties together the two disparate myths in a surprisingly satisfying fashion. This mix of myths, of course, is old hat to anyone who's played D&D, but is actually fairly rare in literature.

The story moves fairly slowly, with flashbacks to the past frequent, or even a diversion to tell the story of a secondary character. These transitions are occasionally jarring, reminding you that this is Wecker's debut novel, but as far as complaints go, it's not a bad one.

The two major characters are interesting, and pretty well developed, and surprisingly enough do change as the story progresses, which actually goes against the mythos of these creatures. Wecker does, however, provide reasonable-sounding rationale (as if you really would need rationality in terms of mythic creatures) as to why these two are special.

The human characters are more much stereotyped, with one secondary character's recovery from a Jinni-inspired illness happening without explanation. I would argue that more than any single human character, New York City is itself a major character in this novel. The setting is detailed and you do get a good sense of a living city, but since I'm not a big fan of cities, I'd just leave it at that and not speculate as to whether it's an accurate depiction of New York for those who are.

In any case, the story is interesting enough that I didn't complain about how slowly it moved, but went along for a ride. That's a great accomplishment in itself, which means that I will be looking for future novels by Wecker. Recommended.

Review: Little Big Planet PS Vita

The Playstation Vita is easily Sony's least loved gaming platform. It's weaker than the PS3 or PS4 graphically, but despite that it's got a ton of potential. For instance, it has both front and rear cameras, front and rear touch screens, multi-axis gyrocsopes, twin joysticks, a d-pad, and 6 buttons. Unfortunately, relatively few games make use of all that latent potential. Golden Abyss and Tearaway are the only two that come to mind.

Little Big Planet (PS Vita) promised to also be an implementation of the game that made use of all these elements of the Vita, and by all accounts has the best implementation of Little Big Planet because of the touch screen. Set against that was that it's a platformer, which is my least favorite genre of game. The net result was that I waited until there was a sale on the game and picked it up for $7.20.

Well, it's a great platformer and an amazingly beautiful game. The voice actors were the same as the ones used in Tearaway, so the game gave me warm fuzzies the minute I booted it up and heard Stephen Fry's narration. Then the game walked me through the tutorial levels and I was hooked. Because platformers are such an old genre, the general tendency in platforming games is to set the difficulty such that "Easy" means "Difficult", "Medium" means "Not for anyone over 11", "Hard" means "Even those who are under 11 need to fake a fever to stay home in order to finish this game."  The result is that critically acclaimed games like Spelunky and Guacamelee are pretty much unplayable for me.

I'm happy to say that Little Big Planet was not designed like any of the afore-mentioned games. The difficulty is set low, and for all levels except for the stage-ending boss fights, you have infinite lives. That means even if you can't consistently do a jump or finish a stage, all you have to do is to complete it once (by accident or otherwise), and you won't ever have to do it again. The fact that this is a Vita game makes what's otherwise a frustrating genre much easier: while a PS3 or PS4  game would have to be turned off every so often to watch a video, stream a movie, etc., the Vita game can be suspended indefinitely so you can resume exactly from where you last left off. This game was compelling enough that I kept it on for days at a time, being careful to recharge the Vita in order to preserve my game state.

And yes, the game does make use of both touch screens, and the rear camera, but not the front. The two touch screen techniques in fact foreshadow their use in Tearaway, and are very usable. There's even a touch screen in a boss fight, and it's staged well enough that the fact that sometimes touch screens are finicky don't cause you to lose purely due to a hardware issue. And of course, the touch screen is delightful when it comes to customizing your protagonist hero, sackboy. You can change costumes, put stickers in the game levels, and even take pictures and use them to create your own levels.

The game has an extremely shallow story. This is par for the course for platformers. You don't play them for the story. The final boss was very challenging and required multiple attempts before I succeeded (the bosses always have a life-limit so you don't have infinite restarts), but the game played fair at every stage, requiring repetition but not insane skills.

When you're done with the story, you can turn to creating your own levels, playing contributed levels downloaded from the internet, or side games that were unlocked during your play. The side games are actually pretty fun, and some of them are even two player touch screen games, such as an air hockey simulation which I would have killed for when I was a kid on long car rides with my brothers. The sheer amount of content is incredible, and more than enough to justify the precious storage space the game takes up on the Vita.

In any case, this is definitely a must-buy game if you own a Vita. I'm glad I finally got a chance to play it. Highly recommended.

Review: How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big

Authors are strange and irrational creatures. Ask any author with multiple books out which book they wrote they like the most, and they almost invariably point at their worst selling book. For instance, Douglas Adams was very fond of his one non-fiction book, Last Chance to See. I myself am not immune to this, and despite every other book of mine being much more successful, and having been less work to write, Independent Cycle Touring is still easily my favorite.

How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big, is by Scott Adams' account, his least successful book. Therefore he spends every other blog post touting the book despite its apparent failure. I succumbed to his marketing spiel, and of course, checked it out of the library, because I'm a cheap skate and I work that way.

Part autobiography, the book is exceedingly easy to read. I'll summarize a few main points:

1. Processes and Systems are more important than goals.
2. Affirmation works (surprisingly well), but he has no idea why.
3. To be able to help others or contribute to society, you need to take care of yourself. That means that the following should be your highest priority: exercise, diet, and optimizing your personal energy level.
4. Success depends very much on luck. It's very difficult to become successful by being world class at one or two skills. You have much better chances by learning multiple skills, and being the only person who can combine those skills in a package.
5. Certain skills are particularly important: public speaking, business writing, a knowledge of practical, applied psychology, understanding basic technology, social skills, proper voice technique, good grammar, and basic accounting.
6. You can reprogram your mind to do anything. Humans are not rational, and if you think of your brain as being subject to being able to be reprogrammed, you'll be able to do things that others routinely find difficult.
7. Drink coffee. It lets you regulate your energy cycle deliberately, has many health benefits, (chiefest of which is that it puts you in the mood for exercise) and few side effects even if you become addicted.

The most comparable I've read on this topic is John T Reed's Succeeding, which I enjoyed. This book is much cheaper, but it's also much less practical when it comes to dating methods, for instance, or risk analysis, but they both come out on the same things, which is that process and systems are critically important.

The biggest weakness of Adams' book is that he's a smart guy, but he doesn't point out how important geographical location was, despite his success depending entirely on it. He mentioned moving to the Bay Area early on in his career, and his resulting career couldn't have succeeded without that move. You should always move to a location that's appropriate to your talents as much as possible.

In any case, Reed's book is much better, more detailed, and more likely to be of practical use to the average person, but Adams' book is funnier, cheaper, and probably more accessible. In any case, the book is smart and well written and worth your time.

Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Season 2 (PS4)

After playing the first season of The Walking Dead on the PS Vita, I decided that there was no way I would pay full price for Season 2, and that the Vita was not a great platform for these games. I noticed, however, that The Wolf Among Us on the PS3 didn't have any of the technical issues that the PS Vita version had, so when there was a sale on the PS4 for Season 2 for $6.25, I decided that it was worth the shot.

You see, what I've noticed is that while the games aren't really games, they've so far been consistently the kind of games I'd play all the way through to the end. The reason for this is that they're not really games, and don't depend on acquiring skill through repetition and frequent failure to discourage you. They're really more like slightly interactive TV shows, and if you view them that way you don't feel so bad that as a "player" you absolutely have no control over what happens in the story line.

In many case, Season 2 is even worse than Season 1. At least in Season 1, you made a choice early on in the game which affected which characters showed up in the next few episodes. In season 2, that illusion was completely stripped away, and you truly have no control over the outcome of the game.

This places more of a burden on the writing, and by and large the writing is actually pretty good. There are several tense moments, and in at least one episode I felt outrage and betrayal, which the added interactivity did enhance over a TV show.

The production values are excellent, with custom music (and different ending theme song for every episode!), and rendered beautifully. Because it's an animated feature, there should be no difference between playing it on a PS3, PS4, PC, or smart phone platform.

In any case, don't pay full price for this work of interactive fiction (where you actually don't have many choices anyway). Pick it up when there's a sale, and enjoy it as though you're watching a TV series, just with a controller in your hand.

Recommended at a discount.

Review: Joyland

Joyland is Stephen King's serial killer/murder mystery set in an amusement park. It is a short quick read, but a lot of fun and well worth your time.

As time goes on I've come to appreciate Stephen King's writing more and more. His voice is incredibly authentic, and serves the narrative perfectly. What's more, his narrative works on two levels: one is that of an old man in his 60s recounting an event that took place in his youth. The second is that of a man explaining how a carnival works.

King deftly sketches out all the main characters quickly and succinctly while still making each of them 3 dimensional. Like all mystery novels, every detail's important in the novel, and casual scenes described earlier in the novel become important later. Yes, like all King novels there's hints of the supernatural in the novel, but King has great restraint and a little goes a long way.

In any case, the novel is very readable, moves along at a good pace, and has next to zero padding. While not deep literature or even deeply moving, it's a fun read kept me coming back to it over and over again.

Recommended.

Review: Infamous First Light

I don't usually play or buy downloadable content (DLC) for computer games. They're rarely discounted, and at full price represent unusually poor value. For instance, Infamous First Light costs $15. Unlike typical DLC, it doesn't require the main game, Infamous Second Son to play. However, unlike DLC, main games such as Infamous Second Son are frequently discounted, and I got my copy of it at $19.95, which provide quite a bit more content. This pricing structure is usually because while main games have to be distributed through retail outlets and deliver only 50% of their retail price to the developer, DLC are instead distributed through online stores and deliver at least 70% of their retail price to the deliver. (In the case of Infamous First Light, since Sony owns the Playstation store, it gets 100% of the take, unless you go through an intermediary like Gamestop)

This month, however, Playstation Plus (which has a well-deserved reputation as the best deal in gaming) provided First Light as one of its games, so I gave it a shot.

In my review of Infamous Second Son, I noted that the neon powers of the game are the most fun to play with, and indeed, developer Sucker Punch must have recognized this, since they focused the entire DLC around Fetch, the character who had the neon powers. The story is told in the form of flashbacks from a period when Fetch has been captured by the DUP and is forced to reveal her powers and train as a DUP lackey. All this takes place ahead of the main story in Infamous Second Son, and so can be considered a prequel.

In terms of story, Fetch is a better character than Delsin: she's much less of a punk, and far more sympathetic. The problem with the plot is of course, you can see the plot twists a mile a way, even if you've never played the main game. This is the norm for video games: the plot exists as nothing but a series of set pieces for the game play to hang on.

The game play is fun. Fetch's neon powers are varied and interesting, and the game does a good job introducing those powers gradually and incrementally as part of the story. Even better, unlike the main game where you felt like you had to pursue a substantial part of the side quests in order to have a decent shot at finishing the game without a large number of deaths, the game is designed such that even if you didn't finish any of the side quests you could complete the main storyline with ease.

The reason for this is that the game is designed to keep you playing if you're a competitive gamer by comparing yourself with others on the leaderboard in a set of fixed arenas. I don't enjoy repetition, so I didn't bother with any of these, but if you are, then the game would probably keep you playing for quite a bit past the 4-6 hour main storyline.

In any case, as I've noted, DLCs are usually poor value compared to the main game, but if you can get over that or if you really enjoyed Infamous Second Son, this DLC gives you more content with the best parts attached. And of course, this month, it's yet another reason to get a subscription to Playstation Plus.

Gaming Nostalgia

I've been playing a lot of Resogun, recently. Now usually when I finish  a game, I don't ever go back to it. But Resogun has something that more recent AAA games rarely have, which is that it's very replayable.

Resogun, of course, is a throwback to the original Defender, which was an incredibly tough game. I never got good at Defender, because at a quarter a pop, as a kid I never had the kind of money to get good at any of those games, and my parents never had a game console in the house.

All the old games I have nostalgia for that I actually played, therefore had to come on a PC. What springs out to my mind is the old time infocom text adventure games. Those too, were also incredibly hard, and the only one I ever completed was A Mind Forever Voyaging, which was one of those specifically designed to be less challenging.

I remember once after an all night session of Infocom text adventures Larry Hosken, my brother, and I attended a party at Paul Holland's place on Sand Hill Road. We were playing ping pong next to an air hockey table, and one of the ping pong balls fell into the swimming pool. We looked at each other, read each other's mind, and said, "GET PING PONG BALL. PUT PING PONG BALL ON AIR HOCKEY TABLE. PUT QUARTER IN AIR HOCKEY TABLE." Clearly, thinking let an Infocom game all night had affected our brains.

And yes, I did write TinyMUCK 2.0 earlier while an intern at Bellcore (Jon Blow told me at one point that his first exposure to C was trying to read my code/modification of the original TinyMUCK).

To be honest though, when I think back to the games of that era and compare to the games of today, I'd say that today's games are better. In general, they have more finely tuned difficulty levels, the in-game tutorials are fairly well done, and  of course the visuals are just amazing these days.

So if you asked me what I'd put in my own man crate for nostalgia gaming, I'd stick in a USB 3.5" Floppy Drive and one of the Lost Treasures of Infocom packs. Or, since nowadays you can just pretty much download those games on the internet, if you ask me, I'd much rather have a PS Vita loaded with a big memory card and Resogun.

We live in the golden age of computer games, and there's just no comparison.

Review: Kindle Unlimited

During the holiday season, it was possible to get Kindle Unlimited for $5 a month for 6 months. At $10 a month, I wouldn't have gotten value out of it, but at $5/month, it wouldn't take too many books to justify the price of the subscription, so I took a leap of faith and signed up.

What If? was the first book I read on Kindle Unlimited, and it was great, justifying almost a third of the price of the subscription all by itself. But what I discovered was that the real value of Kindle Unlimited is picking up the Kindle Singles that you wouldn't have paid for and read, because those are too expensive for the amount of money they ask for.

For instance, the Playboy Interview of Milton Friedman isn't worth $1, but with a Kindle Unlimited subscription, it's worth reading just to see how much of a crazy guy he was. (And yes, he wasn't all crazy, but he was definitely an extremist, even viewed from the lens of today) I similarly enjoyed the Stephen King interview.

What I did learn is that Kindle Unlimited isn't actually unlimited. It's limited to 10 books (or interviews, whatever you call them). So you can only have a number of these things checked out at once. 10 is big enough that if you have a couple of novels out, you're not going to run through them during the course of a flight or even a week long trip. But if you fill it up with interviews or other Kindle singles, one plane flight might just wipe you out, so you have to plan ahead.

One of the interesting things about Kindle Unlimited is that if you check out the Most Read Books section, you'll discover it's full of romances and YA novels. Which tells you a lot about what the population of people who subscribe to Kindle Unlimited is. The Science Fiction and Business section, by comparison, is very disappointing, though my book of the year, Capital in the Twenty-First Century is available on Kindle Unlimited, and is well worth the read.

Now, there are number of classics available, such as The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, but chances are, you've already read them. But one person's classics is another person's casual reading, so if you missed the Harry Potter series or the Hunger Games series, Kindle Unlimited does give you access to those.

One last genre that's worth pointing out is that the entire Lonely Planet series is available on Kindle Unlimited. Since those books go out of date quickly and the Kindle edition of those books are extremely expensive to buy, it's a very good use of the Kindle Limited edition.

All in all, I think I'll get sufficient value out of the subscription for a 6 month subscription, but I'm unlikely to renew. $5/month seems right for the service, and $10/month seems too much, unless you're one of those who reads 2-3 romance novels a week.

Review: Boyhood

I'm a Richard Linklater fan. Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight were all excellent movies, as intense as any experiences you're likely to get in life. So when I saw that his work this year was Boyhood, I had very high expectations and dug out some time in my wife and my schedule to see it.

In case you missed the hoopla, the movie's gimmick is that it ages the actors in real time. In other words, the movie takes place over a period of 10 years, and the actors met every few years to shoot the next parts of the movie, so all the growing up and aging is done naturally, without need for much make up. This approach makes the movie very natural, and looks as real as a documentary.

Unfortunately, the story is terrible and banal to the extreme. Lots of threads are unresolved, but perhaps the best thing I can say about the movie is that I can use it in the future to show my kids as an example of what a terrible life awaits you if you choose to study useless subjects like psychology and photography instead of say, Computer Science.

For an example of a good movie in this genre, watch My Father's Glory instead. I feel like my hours spent watching Boyhood was wasted instead, and that the critics that praised this movie to the heavens are praising it just to be fashionable.

Managing Storage in the World of Cloud Storage

I was a Google employee when Gmail first launched. At that time, 1GB of e-mail storage was stupendously huge, and you could never use it up. I remember once calculating that the amount of storage Gmail was adding was increasing at such a rate that I could never use it up.

I turned out to be wrong. For one thing, Google has stopped increasing the amount of storage available at 16GB. While that's huge for e-mail, Google made a second move that made that amount of storage too small. It commingled PicasaWeb storage, Google Drive storage, and e-mail storage all in the same place.

While the rest of the world uses crappy cell phone cameras and uploads 1024x768 resolution photographs, I use real cameras and upload full size 10MB photos. This used up storage at a stupendous rate. For a while I was OK, since I was on a legacy storage plan which granted me an additional 20GB of storage at $5/year. But due to a snafu while I was traveling recently, my legacy plan failed to renew and I was stuck being over quota.

Now, I could pay $24/year for 100GB, but seriously? When I could get 5TB Unlimited Storage for $100/year and get Microsoft Office in addition? No thanks. I didn't grow up paying for over-priced products when cheaper alternatives are better. Heck, buying a 4TB hard drive now costs $130, which is a far better deal by any account, and of course, services like SmugMug cost $40/year for unlimited photo storage.

Now, I could just live with not posting any more new photos onto my PicasaWeb account, but being over-quota also meant that I'd stop receiving e-mail, which isn't acceptable. So I set about deleting content from my quota. Oh boy! PicasaWeb gives you no way to find out which albums are using the most storage (or using any storage for that matter, since despite my best efforts I occasionally still use my phone for photos). I also had to be careful with which photos I deleted, since many of my photo albums are linked to by various blog posts.

As a result, I ended up having to delete e-mail. I tried to move e-mail from the cloud to local storage using Thunderbird, but apparently Thunderbird was never designed to handle the kind of volume of e-mail I had using IMAP. It would tell me that it's moved data to local storage but when I visited the local storage folder none of the e-mails were there. (Needless to say, I only did this with e-mail I didn't care about, so the loss was no big deal)

After much effort, I managed to get my e-mail and web photos down to 95% of my quota, but now I'm stuck with managing my e-mail strictly to stay under quota. So I'm now going to start using a local e-mail client (I'm still reviewing alternatives but haven't found a good one yet), and then store e-mail locally rather than in the cloud for anything older than a month. It's a pain, since I enjoy using search, but the reality is, cloud storage is still too expensive compared to local storage for someone who get gobs of e-mail or has years of e-mail to store.

Ironically, what this means is that more of my photos will be available on Facebook (albeit at a lower resolution) than on Google's servers because of this pricing issue. But them's the breaks. I will  have to find a public photo solution later.

Review: Big Skinny World BiFold Wallet

I travel just a few times a year, but I'm weight conscious. Over the years, I've worn out any number of wallets and abandoned several for being impractical or worthless, but never felt compelled to write a review until now.

I bought a Big Skinny Men's World BiFold with Zipper a year ago from a GroupOn deal, and it has become my default wallet of choice for all occasions, eliminating all other wallets. The big features for me are:

1. Wide enough for non-US bills, which are frequently much wider or taller than US currency.
2. Thin Nylon. Leather stains and wears out for me very quickly, while producing fat wallets. Nylon isn't waterproof, but it's water resistant enough to survive a Tour of the Alps, and a year later has shown no sign of wear whatsoever. This is a very sturdy wallet.
3. Plenty of pockets for cards. You can't travel without a number of cards nowadays, and with 8 card pockets, this has plenty of room for my travel cards, credit cards, and business cards (yes, I actually carry printed business cards with me)

Overall, I've been extremely satisfied with this wallet. So much so that this year, when I found another Groupon Deal, I ordered two Skinny Mini Pens (so that I'm no longer forced to borrow from neighbors whenever I'm filling out customs forms), and a Big Skinny Passport Holder Wallet from them (holds 4 passports, which is what I need when I travel with family).

I give therefore Big Skinny wallets the highest recommendation. If you're using other wallets and have been dis-satisfied by them for various reasons, give one of their wallets a try. They are well-thought out and well worth their (admittedly high) price.

Cancun 2015

I'd been in Cancun before (in 2011, in fact) but only to dive in Cozumel and a cenote near Playa Del Carmen. That time, my camera flooded very early in the trip, so I was left with no pictures and therefore didn't bother with even a trip report.

This time, I had much better luck.

It is a truism that the first time you visit a place, you screw up a lot. It's only on later trips that you've optimized the heck out of your visit and can easily know what to do and when, so this trip report is more a "tips" report than any details.
We arrived on New Year's Eve, and then spent a day at the beach. The best snorkeling in the area was supposedly the Club Med next to the Westin, and I spotted an eagle ray, which was pretty good. But the winds were too high for Bowen to swim safely in the water, so we went back to the hotel's pool.
On the second I did a reef dive. The winds were high but the currents were strong, keeping the water clear. I've learned that diving in murky water does nothing for me, so this was a fairly decent experience. I soon learned why there were no dive moorings in the area. You jump in and are immediately swept into the water at 1-2 knots, too strong to swim against! So every dive was a drift dive, where you got picked up by the dive boat at the end. One of the other divers just kept throwing up, which must have been a miserable experience.
We went to Xcaret, which is a Mexican theme park. Reviews compared it with Disneyland, but it's a bit better if your kids are older or if you're adventurous. The centerpiece of the park is a kilometer worth of underground river that you get to swim through. Bowen was terrified at the beginning but enjoyed it within 200m of the swim. The place also had hammocks to lie in, a decent aquarium (not great), and various activities like swimming with dolphins, etc., which we didn't do since Bowen was still too young for it. I wouldn't recommend taking the plus package since the a la carte meals are so huge that you wouldn't save any money over just buying the a la carte package. The night show is also worth going to, but we didn't stay for the whole thing since Bowen fell asleep in the middle and we decided it was better to just return to the hotel earlier so he could sleep better.
Then I did a cenotes dive. The cenotes have the clearest water you can ever dive in, and it's mostly freshwater, which gives your gear a good rinse. Unfortunately, after that, the rest of my dives got canceled due to high wind and waves, so no more diving this time.
We'd booked our hotel through Costco, which had a deal with the J.W. Marriott in Cancun. In retrospect, staying at downtown Playa Del Carmen or at the Iberostar in Cozumel would have been a better idea, since downtown Playa Del Carmen was much more fun than downtown Cancun, and the Iberostar wouldn't try to nickel and dime you the way Marriott does.
Fortunately, the hotel next to the Marriott, the Hard Rock Hotel, had free wifi and if you wrangled a day pass, you got an all you can eat buffet too. I was impressed by nearly every one of their onsite sit-down restaurants. The kids facilities were pretty cool. The decor was garish, however, and the place was pretty darn crowded.
One nice thing about the area is cheap buses. A highlight was dining at Pericos. Authentic Mexican food, a great atmosphere, and just fun. Highly recommended. They even rolled out a bed for Bowen when he fell asleep on the bus on the way to the restaurant. A don't miss if you're in the area.
We also went to Playa Del Carmen and returned by bus, and it's a crowded and uncomfortable experience, but Bowen decided he enjoyed buses, so we put up with it.
I was disappointed that none of the hotels had hobie cats or other sailing dingies for rent, but the Hard Rock Hotel staff told me to just walk across the street to Aquaworld, where for $30 an hour I could rent a hobie cat. That took care of the sailing fix for me and Bowen. The boats were old and with a 3 year old aboard I wasn't going to push the speed limits, but it was still fun. They'd force you to go through instruction if you don't have a sailing certification so bring yours if you have it.
All in all, I'm not sure I'd have opted for another land vacation in the Caribbean, but for being stuck on land it was ok. Certainly the cenotes dives can't be had anywhere else, so if you're a diver for at least one dive you should suck it up and go for it.

Review: Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview

Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview, is a collection of interviews with the famous author before he died by his biographer, Sam Weller. It contains lots of little tidbits about the author that I did not previously know, like for instance his attendance of Comicon from its inception, that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 on rented type-writers at the UCLA library, and his involvement in several projects including architectural projects.

I also discovered several contradictory attitudes in the author which I was previously only slightly familiar with, and the book reminded me why knowing too much about authors whose work you enjoy isn't always a good idea.

At the $9.99 the price is very steep for a few short pages, but it's possible to check it out from the library and read it quickly.

Review: Final Horizon (PS Vita)

I'm a sucker for the tower defense genre, and happily sink hour after hour into the genre. One of the interesting things about the genre is that it's not usually super twitchy. In fact, in certain scenarios (for instance, certain levels of Defense Grid) you could almost just set everything up at the start and then sit back and watch the show.

Final Horizon is entirely different. First of all, the boards are small, which is a great fit for the PS Vita (though the game is available for the PS4 as well). Secondly, the activity on the game is frentic, as you furiously go from repairing towers (yes, they can be damaged in this game), upgrading them, or switching from one tower to the next as the attack evolves.

The story is forgettable, which is typical of games in this genre (though Defense Grid is a notable exception), and the music tends towards being repetitive. Unlike other games of the genre, however, each level is playable and over within a matter of 5 minutes, even the final boss level. That makes Final Horizon ideal for the PS Vita, which was what I played it on.

With the Vita, everything depends on the controls and the implementation, and I'm happy to report that Final Horizon does everything right. Scrolling, tower selection, repair, and upgrades are easy. If you screw up in this game, it's not because the controls suck.

Every mission has a primary objective for you to get through, but also multiple secondary objectives as well. While this made me play a few levels over just to try to get the secondary objectives, the game didn't build in enough of a reward (other than perhaps trophies) to get you to play over and over again until you get it done. That's probably a good thing, since I spent plenty of time playing the game and while it was good, it wasn't so good that I felt like I needed to put more time into it.

Nevertheless, it's a very different take on the tower defense genre (no fixed patterns to the incoming aliens, no pre-defined path, and destructible towers), which makes it a recommended change up from the usual games. That it easily fits onto the PS Vita for travel makes it ideal.

Review: Sand Omnibus

Hugh Howey has written yet another novel in the tradition of Wool, his previous post-apocalyptic world. In many ways, this novel amplifies both the strengths and the weaknesses of his previous novels.

Howey can write a compelling plot in cliff-hanger style. He can weave multiple threads of narratives together. What he can't do is create a world that's believable, nor can he do character development. Nearly everyone's a 2D character to start, and they don't change much, no matter what.

Sand is set in a world where the deserts are taking over the USA from the East to West. (This in itself is unrealistic, since prevailing winds are West to East and deserts should spread that way) Taking place in Colorado, the inhabitants of this world face the constantly encroaching sand, burying their houses, forcing them to build higher and higher, while constantly bailing sand away from critical infrasturcture like wells.

In a steady state world, this doesn't make sense, since dunes don't actually build up into infinity, so Howey has to explain that, and it's part of the plot of the book. There's also no explanation of where food came from, no mention of livestock, and no understanding of how even foundations can work in this environment.

What there is, however, is no shortage of cool toys. There are sarfers, sailboats used to traverse sand, and there's sand diving equipment, very similar to diving equipment used in water today, but obviously, with sand traversal and vision in mind. Howey does a decent job of working out the implications of the existence of such equipment, and uses these tools marvelously in the plot.

All in all, this is a decent airplane novel, and at the prices Howey's books usually come in (I read it for free as part of a Kindle Unlimited subscription), is worth picking up. But is it stellar? No, it's more like a throwback to the old days of science fiction where the writers didn't even have scientific backgrounds and didn't do any research for their novels. Still, much like Wool, it was compellingly readable.

Review: Oh Myyy!!

Oh Myyy!! is George Takei's how-to book about how to use Social Media if you're a celebrity. It's short, and rather than talk about how to become famous prior to social media's existence, it discusses his experience using Twitter and Facebook, and the various tools he uses to keep his audience engaged.

If you follow Takei on Facebook or Twitter, you'll see that the best thing about following him is that he reshares many photos and memes that are funny and interesting. The sprinkles those throughout the book, and most of them are indeed at least amusing.

The stories about how he uses social media to promote his causes (LGBT rights, as well as other Asian American rights) are entertaining and interesting. Keeping his audience engaged seemed to take quite a bit of work, as he had to preschedule Facebook wall posts sometimes days in advance, as well as having to turn down many requests from folks asking for help. He even mentions having to had to hire an intern to manage those requests and curate them.

As an airplane read it was breezy and entertaining, and you can't ask for much more out of it.

Mildly recommended.

Review: Afterworlds

Afterworlds is Scott Westerfield's Young Adult novel about writing. It's an ambitious work.

The book's structured between alternating chapters, winding together two separate stories. One is about Darcy Patel, a 17-year old who won the novel jackpot: a $200,000 advance for a two-book contract with a major New York Publishing house. Flush with success, she cooks up a scheme to avoid going to college, move to New York, and become a full-time novelist. This story-within-a-story is a coming of age story, well-described and imagined, but perhaps full of Scott Westerfield tropes, in which at least 50% of all couples are gay.

The other novel-within-a-novel is Patel's debut novel, a paranormal romance about a girl who learns that there is an afterlife, and that she's one of the select few who can move between the worlds of the dead and the worlds of the living.

A lesser writer would have made the two novels tie together explicitly, but Westerfield's too crafty to resort to a cheap trick like that. What he does show is the writing process, where Patel's real-world relationships, feedback from readers and editors and changes in her life, affect the outcome of her novel. The real-world sections balance out the paranormal romance, grounding it and making it less shallow, which it would have been by itself.

As a self-published writer, I've always wondered why people fall over themselves to give away 80% of their income to New York Publishing companies. This book goes a long way towards explaining that: it's a high flying life, with book tours, adoring fans, all creating a show-biz like atmosphere, a narcotic at any age.

In any case, this was a long read, but a fun one, and while neither novel would have worked separately, together, the two provide a coming of age story and a complete package that works.

Recommended.

Review: Little Tikes Pirate Ship Toddler Bed

We'd been sharing a room (but not co-sleeping) for months during our remodeling, and now it's finally time for the parents to move out of Bowen's room. To help the process along, I decided that we could have him get a new bed that would take up more room, as well as making him feel like a big boy.

We reviewed several beds online and settled on the Little Tikes Pirate Ship Toddler bed, since memories of the sailing trip in the Caribbean were fresh in his mind.

The cheapest place to buy this turned out to be at Target, the only store that didn't burden you with a ginormous shipping cost. When the package arrived I understood why. This thing was huge, about the size of a golf-cart packed.

Putting together the bed was fairly straightforward, but took the better part of 2 hours with power tools. This included Bowen "helping". The mattress turned out to be a standard size toddler mattress, so we didn't have to get a new one. The various lights on the bed require 9 AAA batteries, but the box didn't have any. Lucky for me, I happened to have a ton of batteries lying around anyway.

The nice feature of the lights on the boat is that they time out and put themselves to sleep, so you won't be replacing those batteries too often (they're all LED lights). I was worried that Bowen would be so excited that he wouldn't be able to sleep, but it turned out that he slept just fine on the bed even during the first night.

He really loves the boat, and enjoys turning the wheel, and he's now able to distinguish port from starboard, and knows how many cannons he has.

We couldn't have moved him into this bed any sooner, since we didn't have room until after the construction was complete. However, if we had the room, we should have moved him much sooner: his crib had a toddler mode, but he'd fallen off it a few times, while this toddler bed's designed in such a way that he can't roll off it, while ensuring that he could get in and out of bed himself if he was awake.

Recommended.

2015 will see the debut of a full-on Windows phone

I try not to make tech predictions, but sometimes one just kicks me in the face. Windows 8 has been a massive failure, and Microsoft is moving towards Windows 10, which promises to deliver a touch-friendly UI for touch-screen devices while providing a desktop experience for traditional PCs and laptops. Similarly, the Windows phone ecosystem has been stuck, with much fewer apps available in that ecosystem, and essentially only the low end Windows phones have any traction on the market.

If you look at the current market, the trend is clear: Windows tablets and Windows phones pretty much own the low-end of devices, with devices like the HP Stream able to get relatively good displays (1280x800), high performance (Atom Z3745 quad core), and a good single-user experience into a $100 un-subsidized package.

The next step is obvious: eliminate Windows phone and Windows RT, and run full on Windows 10 on a 5inch (or bigger) device with a telephony stack. What can you do with this device that you can't do on regular phones?

1. The Windows phone web-browser is easily the weakest browser on modern phones today. Replace that with IE 11 on Windows 8.1, and you go from the weakest browser to the most powerful browser on a mobile device, with full on access to services that Google (for instance) deliberately locked away from Windows phone devices like Youtube, Maps, and other services.
2. With a full-on Windows host and x86 processor, many of the appstore advantages that Android and iOS have become irrelevant. For instance, Garmin connect doesn't have a Windows app, but if you run real Windows on your phone, who cares? The same goes for photography apps.
3. Remote management and central device management for enterprises become a non-issue, since a Windows 10 phone would easily be managed using the same techniques desktop PCs can.
4. Application developers can abandon having to cross-compile for multiple platforms and go back to optimizing only for the x86 platform.

The arguments against are fairly obvious:

1. Viruses and malware target Windows. Who would want a virus on their phone? The answer to this is obvious: a locked down Windows 10 phone would only accept apps from the Windows app store, eliminating the possibility of viruses and malware. This contradicts #2 above, but just like on Android, you could have a checkbox that lets you access the full on OS for power users while protecting the naive ones.
2. The telephony stack on Windows 8.1 is non-existent, and Intel's SOFIA LTE chip isn't slated to launch till mid-year 2015. An immature telephony stack could create lots of problems. On the other hand, unlike the huge variety of devices that Windows has had to contend with in the past, having just one chip to target to could make the telephony stack relatively stable.
3. Having a Windows desktop available doesn't necessarily make a 5" phone form factor usable. In particular, with a 1080p display on a 5" phone, the UI elements on the desktop would be pretty much unusable. The UI issues that need to be overcome would be considerable. Note that with a phablet form factor (6" and up), this issue would be largely mitigated.

In recent months, it's been quite obvious that there aren't many reasons to shell out for a high end phone (of any manufacturer) for anything other than fashion reasons. However, a full-on Windows phone with a high quality screen could have a certain set of people (myself included) willing to pay the premium that such a phone could command, provided Microsoft and Intel find a way to deal with all the above issues. Such a product would finally allow Microsoft to escape the low-end "ghetto" that Windows Phone has been pigeon-holed into, and attack the high end of the market and provide some competition to the Android and iOS systems on the market by playing into the strength of Windows and its legacy apps.

Happy New Year!