One question that occasionally comes up at the end of a Negotiation cycle is, "Ok, now I have all these offers, how do I choose?" Typically, if you end your negotiation cycles in this state, it means that you've done an amazing job in your negotiations, since frequently, there's one stand out company and it's clear which one you should go. (When I had a choice between Yahoo, Google, and Versign in 2003, the answer was pretty obvious. Similarly, in 2010, when one of my friends had a choice between Google and Facebook, the answer was also obvious, even when the compensation numbers were ostensibly close)
In An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups I mention creating a spreadsheet so you can compare the companies involved. Well, one of the contributors to the third edition, Santhosh Srinivasan, has actually gone ahead and created it and shared it on Google Docs for all to use.
Santhosh writes that the inspiration behind the spreadsheet was LAAAM, the Lightweight Architecture Alternative Assessment Method. The idea is that you create a weighting that's important to you, and then rank each job offer independent of the weightings and then the highest scoring total would be your preferred offer.
In reality, I've never actually had to use such a spreadsheet, and neither do most of my clients. The intuitive approach works for most of us because ultimately, if you do a good job with negotiating compensation, the money difference should be so minor that who you want to work with should determine where you land. Since people are the least fungible of all, that approach works well unless you end up at a company so unstable that people come and go without your having an opportunity to work with the people you joined in order to work with. (That can happen, but your interview process should weed out such companies)
I do have friends who've built compensation models using spreadsheets, and then used that to get corporations to bid up their offers by showing that spreadsheet around to various companies. That's a viable approach.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Sharing on G+: It doesn't always mean what you think it means
Sharing on Google Plus has always bothered me, but it wasn't recently until I got a grasp on why it bugged me so much. Most of it is because Google + has no concept of where a posts comes from. Let's say I share a post to a few friends. That means only they can see it, right? Wrong. It means that they can only share it to their extended friends circle, which can be a lot of people, if one of them happens to be Robert Scoble. Given that most people can barely deal with 2 circles (friends and following is all I can bring myself to manage), what this means is that sharing privately isn't as private as you think it is. The only way to really ensure privacy is use the "Lock" feature, which prevents anyone from sharing anything.
This is annoying, but hardly the end of the world. I really don't care about privacy, and it's very likely that the future generations of internet users will care much less than the average current user as well. What truly annoys me is when somebody mis-understands the use of the circles sharing feature, and shares a previously public post as a non-public post. If I like that post, and then try to share it, I get a big red sign saying, "No, you're not allowed to share this as public, all you can do is to share it to your Extended Circles." As previously noted, the extended circles is almost as effectively public as Public, but not quite. But darn it, the original post was Public. Just because one of my "privacy conscious" friends (who isn't actually privacy conscious --- see above) didn't choose to share it publicly doesn't mean that I should have to go hunt down the original poster and search for the post and then repost it if I want it back to its original status, Public.
I'm guessing most Google+ users aren't as annoyed at this as I am, but each time I run into a post that was originally Public that I can't share publicly, it screams to me as: "Google+ designers and engineers can't keep track of the original status of the post, so now you have to do it for them." And don't blame the users. The users think they're sharing privately.
This is annoying, but hardly the end of the world. I really don't care about privacy, and it's very likely that the future generations of internet users will care much less than the average current user as well. What truly annoys me is when somebody mis-understands the use of the circles sharing feature, and shares a previously public post as a non-public post. If I like that post, and then try to share it, I get a big red sign saying, "No, you're not allowed to share this as public, all you can do is to share it to your Extended Circles." As previously noted, the extended circles is almost as effectively public as Public, but not quite. But darn it, the original post was Public. Just because one of my "privacy conscious" friends (who isn't actually privacy conscious --- see above) didn't choose to share it publicly doesn't mean that I should have to go hunt down the original poster and search for the post and then repost it if I want it back to its original status, Public.
I'm guessing most Google+ users aren't as annoyed at this as I am, but each time I run into a post that was originally Public that I can't share publicly, it screams to me as: "Google+ designers and engineers can't keep track of the original status of the post, so now you have to do it for them." And don't blame the users. The users think they're sharing privately.
Review: The Power of Habit, why we do what we do in life or business
I first ran across The Power of Habit through a New York Times excerpt from the book about How Target knew you were pregnant even if you didn't want it to know. It was an article that was data-science bait, all about big data and the power of analytics. So I stuck it into my wait list for my local library and forgot about it.
I'm all too familiar with the standard non-fiction book spiel: 80 pages worth of content, and 50 pages worth of notes and references to bulk it up with scholarly weight, and another 70 pages of fluff that adds nothing to what you learn. I'm very glad to report that this book breaks the mold. I could not put it down, even when the fluff hit big time, it's not "fluffy" by standards, and you'll learn a lot by reading the book cover to cover.
The opening of the book is rather conventional, covering the neurological basis for habits and how they get formed. But it gets interesting as Duhigg takes you to various applications of that neurology, from how Febreeze was marketed, to why toothpaste became popular and brushing your teeth became a habit. We explore case study after case study about how corporations, marketing types, and people make use of this neurological code in order to get people to behave however they want. There's even a study of how a football coach got his players to break old habits and win games, though I personally feel that the chapter on this is the weakest, because getting the team to finally gel and trust in the coach required an event entirely out of the control of the coach. However, Duhigg redeems himself by pointing out that there are keystone habits that once you establish, actually make changing many other parts of your life easier. (One of them is having good exercise habits)
We then see how organizations form habits and routine themselves in order to operate. The star of this is a pair of case studies: one about a hospital, and one about the subway system in London. The emphasis here is that habits and routine usually develop out of the need to keep political fiefdoms of a large organization out of each other's toes, rather than maximum efficiency, which is what many economists would have you believe. The result is that many important things go unemphasized. What it takes to break these habits and realign an organization is a crisis, whether it is real or imagined. As a result, you hear the axiom, "Never let a crisis go to waste." Unfortunately, Duhigg ends this section with an example drawn from the Obama administration, which did let a crisis go to waste without getting very much out of it.
There is a fascinating case study, however, about Paul O'Neil and how he ran Alcoa, realigning the organization by emphasizing something that few would have considered important to the bottom life: workplace safety. The net result was far beyond expectations, and is a highlight of the book, even more so than the Target excerpt linked above. The insight that institutional habits and routines can be created deliberately rather than evolved out of a need to keep the political types happy is an important one, and organizational builders and startups would do well to pay attention to this chapter.
In any case, by the time you're done with this book, you would have read about Starbuck's training program, gotten an analysis of why Rosa Parks arrest sparked off the civil rights movement, and gotten into the heads of a compulsive gambler and a man who murdered his wife in his sleep. Every case study is interesting, and adds value to the book. At every point you're tempted to put the book down, you're also tempted to say, "Just one more chapter," until you finish it. There's a short appendix on how you can change your own habits, though again, it's really hard so don't expect this to change your life without a ton of work.
Highly recommended.
I'm all too familiar with the standard non-fiction book spiel: 80 pages worth of content, and 50 pages worth of notes and references to bulk it up with scholarly weight, and another 70 pages of fluff that adds nothing to what you learn. I'm very glad to report that this book breaks the mold. I could not put it down, even when the fluff hit big time, it's not "fluffy" by standards, and you'll learn a lot by reading the book cover to cover.
The opening of the book is rather conventional, covering the neurological basis for habits and how they get formed. But it gets interesting as Duhigg takes you to various applications of that neurology, from how Febreeze was marketed, to why toothpaste became popular and brushing your teeth became a habit. We explore case study after case study about how corporations, marketing types, and people make use of this neurological code in order to get people to behave however they want. There's even a study of how a football coach got his players to break old habits and win games, though I personally feel that the chapter on this is the weakest, because getting the team to finally gel and trust in the coach required an event entirely out of the control of the coach. However, Duhigg redeems himself by pointing out that there are keystone habits that once you establish, actually make changing many other parts of your life easier. (One of them is having good exercise habits)
We then see how organizations form habits and routine themselves in order to operate. The star of this is a pair of case studies: one about a hospital, and one about the subway system in London. The emphasis here is that habits and routine usually develop out of the need to keep political fiefdoms of a large organization out of each other's toes, rather than maximum efficiency, which is what many economists would have you believe. The result is that many important things go unemphasized. What it takes to break these habits and realign an organization is a crisis, whether it is real or imagined. As a result, you hear the axiom, "Never let a crisis go to waste." Unfortunately, Duhigg ends this section with an example drawn from the Obama administration, which did let a crisis go to waste without getting very much out of it.
There is a fascinating case study, however, about Paul O'Neil and how he ran Alcoa, realigning the organization by emphasizing something that few would have considered important to the bottom life: workplace safety. The net result was far beyond expectations, and is a highlight of the book, even more so than the Target excerpt linked above. The insight that institutional habits and routines can be created deliberately rather than evolved out of a need to keep the political types happy is an important one, and organizational builders and startups would do well to pay attention to this chapter.
In any case, by the time you're done with this book, you would have read about Starbuck's training program, gotten an analysis of why Rosa Parks arrest sparked off the civil rights movement, and gotten into the heads of a compulsive gambler and a man who murdered his wife in his sleep. Every case study is interesting, and adds value to the book. At every point you're tempted to put the book down, you're also tempted to say, "Just one more chapter," until you finish it. There's a short appendix on how you can change your own habits, though again, it's really hard so don't expect this to change your life without a ton of work.
Highly recommended.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Review: Bringing up Bebe
I had very low expectations for Bringing up Bebe. The author's a journalist, and I didn't expect a densely packed tome of information like Brain Rules for Baby or even The Happiest Baby on the Block, which while not being rife with research, at least has a ton of practical tips on how to go about dealing with the first few months.
Druckerman's book is not dense. However, it contains a few very good tips for parents that it really should be required reading as well as the other two books. The first one is that according to Druckerman, there's a window between 2 and 4 months where sleep training can happen fairly easily. As long as the parents don't make a habit out of immediately picking up the baby for every noise he makes, the baby can learn to connect his sleep and sleep through the night without Ferberization or crying it out. This is such an important result that I'm surprised that it's the first time I ran across this study in a book. I'm going to have to track down the paper (it's a 1991 paper so it's fairly old) and see what it really says. According to Druckerman, all French parents manage to hit that window which is why all French children sleep through the night by the time they're 6 months old. If true, this is huge and worth the price of the book alone.
The overall thesis of the book is that French parents, unlike American parents, do not re-orient their lives completely around their children. The expectation is balance: moms should have their own lives, not just orient them around their children. Children should be taught to behave and wait (including fairly rigorous schedules for eating and bed time), so that adults can actually have a life. That the French have a monolithic parenting culture helps here: there's no confusion among the French as to what to do and how to bring up babies.
This includes pre-natal care. Doctors are more than happy to let pregnant patients eat seafood, including raw Oysters, under the assumption that the patients will be careful and vet the seafood properly.
The book is not very rigorous, though it does a good job of pointing out that for instance, despite the French almost universal adoption of formula feeding as opposed to breast feeding, all their birth and infant mortality statistics are better than America's by very large margins. There's no exploration of any rebellion against the status quo by French parents, and there's universally accessible day care (in the form of government run creches and kindergartens).
What I find interesting about the book is that it doesn't contradict Brain Rules for Baby, for instance. In fact, you could almost read it as a practical how-to-guide for applying the research results reported in Brain Rules, applied earlier than you would consider it possible. For instance, there's a section in Brain Rules about how setting firm boundaries and rules is important. Well, the French apply it almost as soon as their children can talk, by teaching them to see Bonjour and Au Revoir, in addition to please and thank you. There are lots of little sections that are good case studies on how to do this. Druckerman also sprinkles liberally throughout the book incident descriptions on how Americans bringing up their babies have much harder times with their children but with no better result (or rather, no better short term results --- nobody knows whether the American lead in Nobel prizes has anything to do with upbringing). There's a section on how French parents get their children to actually sit down and eat at meal time, and not make a fuss, including how by denying children snacks until actual meal times, they end up with children who are actually hungry and will eat their food rather than throwing it around.
In any case, I think this book's definitely worth reading, with lots of little pieces in it about children that are not very well organized, but nevertheless add up to good stuff. It's a pity that Druckerman's a journalist, so she feels obliged to add in lots of irrelevant personal interest material in there, but I understand that many people like that stuff, and in any case, she's no worse and usually much better than the usual parenting book. Given the competitive climate around child-rearing in America, I don't expect Bringing up Bebe to sell better than Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but in terms of useful tips and tricks it's actually a much better book, so I hope it does well. We could do with less baby-induced neurosis and better parenting.
Highly recommended.
Druckerman's book is not dense. However, it contains a few very good tips for parents that it really should be required reading as well as the other two books. The first one is that according to Druckerman, there's a window between 2 and 4 months where sleep training can happen fairly easily. As long as the parents don't make a habit out of immediately picking up the baby for every noise he makes, the baby can learn to connect his sleep and sleep through the night without Ferberization or crying it out. This is such an important result that I'm surprised that it's the first time I ran across this study in a book. I'm going to have to track down the paper (it's a 1991 paper so it's fairly old) and see what it really says. According to Druckerman, all French parents manage to hit that window which is why all French children sleep through the night by the time they're 6 months old. If true, this is huge and worth the price of the book alone.
The overall thesis of the book is that French parents, unlike American parents, do not re-orient their lives completely around their children. The expectation is balance: moms should have their own lives, not just orient them around their children. Children should be taught to behave and wait (including fairly rigorous schedules for eating and bed time), so that adults can actually have a life. That the French have a monolithic parenting culture helps here: there's no confusion among the French as to what to do and how to bring up babies.
This includes pre-natal care. Doctors are more than happy to let pregnant patients eat seafood, including raw Oysters, under the assumption that the patients will be careful and vet the seafood properly.
The book is not very rigorous, though it does a good job of pointing out that for instance, despite the French almost universal adoption of formula feeding as opposed to breast feeding, all their birth and infant mortality statistics are better than America's by very large margins. There's no exploration of any rebellion against the status quo by French parents, and there's universally accessible day care (in the form of government run creches and kindergartens).
What I find interesting about the book is that it doesn't contradict Brain Rules for Baby, for instance. In fact, you could almost read it as a practical how-to-guide for applying the research results reported in Brain Rules, applied earlier than you would consider it possible. For instance, there's a section in Brain Rules about how setting firm boundaries and rules is important. Well, the French apply it almost as soon as their children can talk, by teaching them to see Bonjour and Au Revoir, in addition to please and thank you. There are lots of little sections that are good case studies on how to do this. Druckerman also sprinkles liberally throughout the book incident descriptions on how Americans bringing up their babies have much harder times with their children but with no better result (or rather, no better short term results --- nobody knows whether the American lead in Nobel prizes has anything to do with upbringing). There's a section on how French parents get their children to actually sit down and eat at meal time, and not make a fuss, including how by denying children snacks until actual meal times, they end up with children who are actually hungry and will eat their food rather than throwing it around.
In any case, I think this book's definitely worth reading, with lots of little pieces in it about children that are not very well organized, but nevertheless add up to good stuff. It's a pity that Druckerman's a journalist, so she feels obliged to add in lots of irrelevant personal interest material in there, but I understand that many people like that stuff, and in any case, she's no worse and usually much better than the usual parenting book. Given the competitive climate around child-rearing in America, I don't expect Bringing up Bebe to sell better than Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but in terms of useful tips and tricks it's actually a much better book, so I hope it does well. We could do with less baby-induced neurosis and better parenting.
Highly recommended.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
D&D at Google
An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups describes how I ended up joining Google because of a D&D Game I joined in late 2001. Soon after I joined Google, however, most of the players in that group retired to escape California taxes, moved away, or otherwise left Google. I still ran an intermittent D&D game outside work, but there were no D&D games at work.
Ironically, one interviewee I once spoke to rejected Google's job offer because he felt that while he would fit in at Google if he was nerdy and played D&D, he didn't think that as a ballroom dancer he would fit in. He was thoroughly wrong. Ballroom dancing has always been and will probably always be more popular at Google than D&D. In terms of social acceptability, of course, there's no contest: ballroom dancing simply doesn't have D&D's stigma attached to it.
In any case, someone on the SRE team bugged me and bugged me about running a D&D game at Google until I gave in and announced that I was willing to run one. At which point she promptly backed out of being in it. Nevertheless, I started the game in November 2005, and it ran until the end of 2007, with players shuffling in and out. The players included at one point or another, Paul Tyma, Shyam Jayaraman, Taylor Van Vleet, Ron Gilbert (who didn't actually work at Google), Tom Jiang, Neal Kanodia, Roberto Peon, Mike Samuel, and various drop-ins at one point or another.
One innovation that I got from my pre-Google days was to start a blog with in-character descriptions of the game. I would award experience points for writing the blog entries, which were very very fun. Ron, in particular, would draw cartoons involving his character Deathspank and members of the party in their exploits, including some very unheroic moments. Unfortunately, Ron has since yanked the cartoons from the blog, so I'm afraid you won't get to see them.
At the end of 2007, I wrapped up the campaign after all the characters hit 20th level, and moved to Germany. That ended my involvement with D&D at Google. Just yesterday, Tom told me that there hasn't been an epic game like mine since. It was fun and challenging DMing for Googlers (I minimized prep work by running from pre-written adventures whenever possible), and I enjoyed every minute of it. It definitely taxed and challenged my organizational skills to keep the game going for so long, and I definitely felt like I lost control at the end when the characters got too powerful. But that's a fact of the game, and since then there's been another edition of D&D that I have not bothered to play with or pick up. It might be that for me, D&D is something that happens every odd edition.
Ironically, one interviewee I once spoke to rejected Google's job offer because he felt that while he would fit in at Google if he was nerdy and played D&D, he didn't think that as a ballroom dancer he would fit in. He was thoroughly wrong. Ballroom dancing has always been and will probably always be more popular at Google than D&D. In terms of social acceptability, of course, there's no contest: ballroom dancing simply doesn't have D&D's stigma attached to it.
In any case, someone on the SRE team bugged me and bugged me about running a D&D game at Google until I gave in and announced that I was willing to run one. At which point she promptly backed out of being in it. Nevertheless, I started the game in November 2005, and it ran until the end of 2007, with players shuffling in and out. The players included at one point or another, Paul Tyma, Shyam Jayaraman, Taylor Van Vleet, Ron Gilbert (who didn't actually work at Google), Tom Jiang, Neal Kanodia, Roberto Peon, Mike Samuel, and various drop-ins at one point or another.
One innovation that I got from my pre-Google days was to start a blog with in-character descriptions of the game. I would award experience points for writing the blog entries, which were very very fun. Ron, in particular, would draw cartoons involving his character Deathspank and members of the party in their exploits, including some very unheroic moments. Unfortunately, Ron has since yanked the cartoons from the blog, so I'm afraid you won't get to see them.
At the end of 2007, I wrapped up the campaign after all the characters hit 20th level, and moved to Germany. That ended my involvement with D&D at Google. Just yesterday, Tom told me that there hasn't been an epic game like mine since. It was fun and challenging DMing for Googlers (I minimized prep work by running from pre-written adventures whenever possible), and I enjoyed every minute of it. It definitely taxed and challenged my organizational skills to keep the game going for so long, and I definitely felt like I lost control at the end when the characters got too powerful. But that's a fact of the game, and since then there's been another edition of D&D that I have not bothered to play with or pick up. It might be that for me, D&D is something that happens every odd edition.
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups, 3rd Edition
My first book, An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups continues to sell very well, considering that there's essentially no marketing budget for it and it's spreading only by word of mouth. I recently ran out of the 2nd edition printing, and coincidentally, there were a few updates that needed to go in for the 3rd edition.
Over the last 2 years, it's clear that the market for books that are mostly text has shifted dramatically. When I first started selling books, printed copies accounted for 70% of sales while digital copies were the other 30%. Now it's the other way around and the tide continues to shift in favor of ebooks. As such, the costs of storing, shipping, and postage of printed books is no longer worth the amount of additional revenue I get.
Fortunately, Amazon is happy to print and ship books on an on-demand basis, so that's what I will do for printed books. This unfortunately means increased prices: Amazon wants their pound of flesh, so printed copies now cost $43.95 a pop, as opposed to $29.95. On the other hand, if the book is popular, Amazon could discount it, and of course, Amazon provides free shipping. For a limited time, you can pre-order the 3rd edition at the old price ($29.95 + shipping) from the book's web-page. I need to order copies for the freebies as well as for the library of congress, so you would be pigging back on this process. (I also need to look over the final proof one more time)
The new edition features new sections on green cards, surviving a big acquisition, negotiating between co-founders, as well as an expanded financial planning section that was asked for by readers. In addition, my friend Scarlet Tang has re-designed the cover. One big disappointment was that I had moved the book over to InDesign CS 5.5 in the hopes of producing an EPUB and Kindle-compatible editions. Unfortunately, InDesign CS 5.5 crashes whenever it attempts to export an EPUB, so I'm stuck with still only shipping PDFs. You can still use Mobipocket creator to create a Kindle edition from the PDF, but the results were not satisfactory to me, so I'll let those who want to do this bear the consequences for it.
As with the 2nd edition, everyone who's bought a copy within the last month (i.e., from April 8th) gets a free digital copy of the book. For everyone else, upgrade pricing is available. Note that you can only upgrade from a 2nd edition to the 3rd edition. No skipping from the 1st edition to the 3rd edition for $12.50. Note that Kindle edition owners do not get upgrades, nor will the Kindle version get updated to the 2nd edition. It's $9.95, which is already a hefty discount. As I've previously mentioned, if you're actively job-hunting, the full version is what you want. If you're poor or in school, then by all means buy the Kindle edition.
As for my other books, expect them to go in the same direction as the print copies run out. I aim to be done with shipping and handling by the end of the year if not sooner.
Over the last 2 years, it's clear that the market for books that are mostly text has shifted dramatically. When I first started selling books, printed copies accounted for 70% of sales while digital copies were the other 30%. Now it's the other way around and the tide continues to shift in favor of ebooks. As such, the costs of storing, shipping, and postage of printed books is no longer worth the amount of additional revenue I get.
Fortunately, Amazon is happy to print and ship books on an on-demand basis, so that's what I will do for printed books. This unfortunately means increased prices: Amazon wants their pound of flesh, so printed copies now cost $43.95 a pop, as opposed to $29.95. On the other hand, if the book is popular, Amazon could discount it, and of course, Amazon provides free shipping. For a limited time, you can pre-order the 3rd edition at the old price ($29.95 + shipping) from the book's web-page. I need to order copies for the freebies as well as for the library of congress, so you would be pigging back on this process. (I also need to look over the final proof one more time)
The new edition features new sections on green cards, surviving a big acquisition, negotiating between co-founders, as well as an expanded financial planning section that was asked for by readers. In addition, my friend Scarlet Tang has re-designed the cover. One big disappointment was that I had moved the book over to InDesign CS 5.5 in the hopes of producing an EPUB and Kindle-compatible editions. Unfortunately, InDesign CS 5.5 crashes whenever it attempts to export an EPUB, so I'm stuck with still only shipping PDFs. You can still use Mobipocket creator to create a Kindle edition from the PDF, but the results were not satisfactory to me, so I'll let those who want to do this bear the consequences for it.
As with the 2nd edition, everyone who's bought a copy within the last month (i.e., from April 8th) gets a free digital copy of the book. For everyone else, upgrade pricing is available. Note that you can only upgrade from a 2nd edition to the 3rd edition. No skipping from the 1st edition to the 3rd edition for $12.50. Note that Kindle edition owners do not get upgrades, nor will the Kindle version get updated to the 2nd edition. It's $9.95, which is already a hefty discount. As I've previously mentioned, if you're actively job-hunting, the full version is what you want. If you're poor or in school, then by all means buy the Kindle edition.
As for my other books, expect them to go in the same direction as the print copies run out. I aim to be done with shipping and handling by the end of the year if not sooner.
Monday, May 07, 2012
Review: End this depression now!
I'm a big fan of Paul Krugman, and his latest book, End this depression now! made it to my kindle as a pre-order, something I hardly ever do.
The thesis of this book is that our current recession (which Krugman considers a depression) is easily cured with existing tools in our knowledge of economics, dating all the way back to the great depression and Keynes' theory of employment. Krugman provides data and evidence for this, and then goes on to debunk opposing views one at a time, providing a fair explanation of the opposing explanation (more fair than they deserve, in many cases), and then explaining how his proposed solutions would work better.
You might think that the book is mostly focused on the USA, but Krugman spends a fair amount of time on the EU, and the Eurozone, discussing how the Euro contributes to the Eurozone's malaise. Interestingly enough, Krugman does not propose dismantling the Eurozone, which makes a solution to their economic problems much less tractable than if he had assumed that the Euro would go away, at least for the European periphery.
Would his policy prescriptions be adopted? In an ideal world with an educated citizenry that understands that prescribing more of a depression is poor policy, there's no question something would already have done. However, when examining history, even FDR had a hard time getting the New Deal passed, and that turned out to be insufficient until world war 2 came along. Neither Obama nor Romney are as enlightened as FDR, so I expect that we will muddle along until the housing crunch plays itself out.
Nevertheless, if you want to understand the financial crisis, how it played out, and how the economy in aggregate works, you can hardly turn to a better writer than Krugman. His use of the baby sitting coop as a metaphor for the economy makes the grasp of complex economic concepts clear even to those who are not economics junkies like me, and the only problem with this book is that not enough people will read it.
Recommended.
The thesis of this book is that our current recession (which Krugman considers a depression) is easily cured with existing tools in our knowledge of economics, dating all the way back to the great depression and Keynes' theory of employment. Krugman provides data and evidence for this, and then goes on to debunk opposing views one at a time, providing a fair explanation of the opposing explanation (more fair than they deserve, in many cases), and then explaining how his proposed solutions would work better.
You might think that the book is mostly focused on the USA, but Krugman spends a fair amount of time on the EU, and the Eurozone, discussing how the Euro contributes to the Eurozone's malaise. Interestingly enough, Krugman does not propose dismantling the Eurozone, which makes a solution to their economic problems much less tractable than if he had assumed that the Euro would go away, at least for the European periphery.
Would his policy prescriptions be adopted? In an ideal world with an educated citizenry that understands that prescribing more of a depression is poor policy, there's no question something would already have done. However, when examining history, even FDR had a hard time getting the New Deal passed, and that turned out to be insufficient until world war 2 came along. Neither Obama nor Romney are as enlightened as FDR, so I expect that we will muddle along until the housing crunch plays itself out.
Nevertheless, if you want to understand the financial crisis, how it played out, and how the economy in aggregate works, you can hardly turn to a better writer than Krugman. His use of the baby sitting coop as a metaphor for the economy makes the grasp of complex economic concepts clear even to those who are not economics junkies like me, and the only problem with this book is that not enough people will read it.
Recommended.
Sunday, May 06, 2012
Review: The Four Hour Body
I'm of two minds about The Four Hour Body. For one thing, it covers topics that I have yet to see in any real workout book elsewhere. For instance, much has been made of Dave "The Man" Scott's Iron Man triumphs as a vegetarian. This is the only book I've seen that actually talked to Dave Scott, where he reveals that he went back to eating meat after retiring from competition and had improved performance.
The book covers a huge amount of area. From how to lose fat to how to gain muscle, what causes infertility, how to prepare for a marathon on 3 15 minute sessions a week and some strength training, how to eat right, how to get yourself tested.
However, the problem with the book is that none of this is scientifically tested. All the results Feriss has are anecdotal. He admits in the appendix that his recommendations on diet, for instance, suffers from survivorship bias: people who've tried and failed aren't likely to report their failures. This is pretty serious, because his prescriptions are dramatic: for instance, he recommends that you eliminate variety from your diet and stick to eating the same things week in week out, except one day a week when you binge on forbidden foods. The diet recommendations are pretty standard low-carb stuff, which obviously has been shown under some circumstances to work.
He recommends working out as little as possible by relying as much as possible on interval/high-intensity training. Again, this has been shown to work. However, his test case is running a marathon. I've on the other hand, seen a number of cyclists become very strong by pursuing a Feriss-style interval-training program. However, by actually doing so little cycling, they never develop the skills to handle their bikes properly, and then end up with accidents that wouldn't have happened if they had trained traditionally, ramping up their strength by using on-bike time, ensuring that their cycling skills kept pace with their endurance, speed, and strength. Feriss gives a slight nod to this in an unrelated chapter, but I feel that he gives this short shrift.
Then there's the section on sleep, where he pushes the Everyman and Uberman polyphasic sleep cycles. The reality is, I don't think there's ever been a documented case of someone actually managing the Uberman, and it doesn't look like Feriss has even tried these for an extended period of time.
All this makes it seems like I wouldn't recommend the book, but I found it worth reading mostly because of the intense approach Feriss takes. While I'm not willing to take most of his steps (seriously, if you never found a sport you enjoyed and love enough to spend more than 4 hours a week on it, then I feel sorry for you, and this book might be your answer), I found it filled with little titbits that would be interesting, if I could find some way to verify them. I would take most of the book with a large burlap sack of salt (by the middle of the book you're convinced that Feriss has had every ailment known to man, when in reality he's a very healthy 28 year old hyping up his minor ailments as big problems so he can sound good when he "conquers" them), but as entertainment it's kind of fun reading. Just make sure you verify anything he says with a different source before undertaking the drastic changes in lifestyle he recommends.
Finally, stuff that a twenty-something can get away with doing to his body isn't something that a forty-something can get away with. I would be very cautious with his recommendations if you do not fit his profile.
The book covers a huge amount of area. From how to lose fat to how to gain muscle, what causes infertility, how to prepare for a marathon on 3 15 minute sessions a week and some strength training, how to eat right, how to get yourself tested.
However, the problem with the book is that none of this is scientifically tested. All the results Feriss has are anecdotal. He admits in the appendix that his recommendations on diet, for instance, suffers from survivorship bias: people who've tried and failed aren't likely to report their failures. This is pretty serious, because his prescriptions are dramatic: for instance, he recommends that you eliminate variety from your diet and stick to eating the same things week in week out, except one day a week when you binge on forbidden foods. The diet recommendations are pretty standard low-carb stuff, which obviously has been shown under some circumstances to work.
He recommends working out as little as possible by relying as much as possible on interval/high-intensity training. Again, this has been shown to work. However, his test case is running a marathon. I've on the other hand, seen a number of cyclists become very strong by pursuing a Feriss-style interval-training program. However, by actually doing so little cycling, they never develop the skills to handle their bikes properly, and then end up with accidents that wouldn't have happened if they had trained traditionally, ramping up their strength by using on-bike time, ensuring that their cycling skills kept pace with their endurance, speed, and strength. Feriss gives a slight nod to this in an unrelated chapter, but I feel that he gives this short shrift.
Then there's the section on sleep, where he pushes the Everyman and Uberman polyphasic sleep cycles. The reality is, I don't think there's ever been a documented case of someone actually managing the Uberman, and it doesn't look like Feriss has even tried these for an extended period of time.
All this makes it seems like I wouldn't recommend the book, but I found it worth reading mostly because of the intense approach Feriss takes. While I'm not willing to take most of his steps (seriously, if you never found a sport you enjoyed and love enough to spend more than 4 hours a week on it, then I feel sorry for you, and this book might be your answer), I found it filled with little titbits that would be interesting, if I could find some way to verify them. I would take most of the book with a large burlap sack of salt (by the middle of the book you're convinced that Feriss has had every ailment known to man, when in reality he's a very healthy 28 year old hyping up his minor ailments as big problems so he can sound good when he "conquers" them), but as entertainment it's kind of fun reading. Just make sure you verify anything he says with a different source before undertaking the drastic changes in lifestyle he recommends.
Finally, stuff that a twenty-something can get away with doing to his body isn't something that a forty-something can get away with. I would be very cautious with his recommendations if you do not fit his profile.
Thursday, May 03, 2012
Review: Google Drive
I was one of the enthusiastic early users of Google Drive way back in 2007, when it launched internally at Google. It was great. I would drop stuff into it, and I could pick things up from my laptop, desktop, or if my laptop's hard drive crashed, I'd get all the data back. Thanks to the magic of VPN, I could even get those files sync'd to my home machine. I was very sad when Google Drive got canceled.
When I started Independent Cycle Touring, I discovered that Dropbox worked better than Google Docs. I managed to wrangle some more free quota, and started putting all my important files on Dropbox. (The source files for Independent Cycle Touring alone were more than 4GB, so getting extra quota was important) At last year's Worldcon, big name authors were telling newbies to get and install Dropbox and put all important work in there so it would be backed up.
With Dropbox now worth $4B, Google Drive was hurriedly revived and launched recently. My wife and I were curious, so we played around with it a bit. First of all, the UI is lousy compared to Dropbox. When you create a new folder and move files to it, there's no way to specify "Share this with someone" directly from the Windows Explorer. You have to know to visit Google Docs on the web and then select the folder and then share it. The recipient then has to move the shared folder into her "My Drive" folder before the files are sync'd to her hard drive!! This is a major botch up! On Dropbox, if you share a folder with someone, they receive an e-mail and once they click "accept", the folder is automatically sync'd to their local drive, no questions asked. It took a while for us to figure this out.
Conflict resolution is crude: we both edited a file at the same time in Microsoft Word. On Dropbox, the simultaneous edit and saves would create multiple copies of the same file with our different edits. This could be annoying to resolve, but at least you knew what happened. On Google Drive, the first copy would save just fine, and then the other person would get a "Cannot sync this file" message with no explanation.
We didn't try syncing large numbers of files, which we know works well on Dropbox, and works badly on SkyDrive (one file at a time, no smart scheduling of small files to sync first).
Conclusion: Dropbox is still the one to beat. If I was a Dropbox user, employee, or investor, I would not be worried by Google's entry into this field. If you're already a Dropbox user, there's no need to switch. If you're a Google Drive user, you should consider switching to Dropbox. (I am not an investor in Dropbox, just a happy user)
When I started Independent Cycle Touring, I discovered that Dropbox worked better than Google Docs. I managed to wrangle some more free quota, and started putting all my important files on Dropbox. (The source files for Independent Cycle Touring alone were more than 4GB, so getting extra quota was important) At last year's Worldcon, big name authors were telling newbies to get and install Dropbox and put all important work in there so it would be backed up.
With Dropbox now worth $4B, Google Drive was hurriedly revived and launched recently. My wife and I were curious, so we played around with it a bit. First of all, the UI is lousy compared to Dropbox. When you create a new folder and move files to it, there's no way to specify "Share this with someone" directly from the Windows Explorer. You have to know to visit Google Docs on the web and then select the folder and then share it. The recipient then has to move the shared folder into her "My Drive" folder before the files are sync'd to her hard drive!! This is a major botch up! On Dropbox, if you share a folder with someone, they receive an e-mail and once they click "accept", the folder is automatically sync'd to their local drive, no questions asked. It took a while for us to figure this out.
Conflict resolution is crude: we both edited a file at the same time in Microsoft Word. On Dropbox, the simultaneous edit and saves would create multiple copies of the same file with our different edits. This could be annoying to resolve, but at least you knew what happened. On Google Drive, the first copy would save just fine, and then the other person would get a "Cannot sync this file" message with no explanation.
We didn't try syncing large numbers of files, which we know works well on Dropbox, and works badly on SkyDrive (one file at a time, no smart scheduling of small files to sync first).
Conclusion: Dropbox is still the one to beat. If I was a Dropbox user, employee, or investor, I would not be worried by Google's entry into this field. If you're already a Dropbox user, there's no need to switch. If you're a Google Drive user, you should consider switching to Dropbox. (I am not an investor in Dropbox, just a happy user)
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
Review: Among Others
Every so often, you run across a novel so sublime and brilliantly written that you want to go out and recommend it to everyone you know who loves books. Among Others is just such a novel.
The novel is clearly autobiographical in many areas, as anyone who's met Jo Walton (as I did during last year's WorldCon) might guess. But it's clearly fictional as well.
The first thing that Walton does is to turn the typical fantasy story upside down by having all the important fantastical events happen prior to the start of the novel. The protagonist has already saved the world. Now she's dealing with the aftermath and consequences of her prior actions: she'd lost her twin sister, she's made enemies out of her mother (a witch who tried to take over the world), and one of her legs is crippled, forcing her to walk with a cane. She now has to be cared for by a father who abandoned her as a child, attend a boarding school, and is in general ripped away from her previous life.
All that she has left is books. And of course, like Jo Walton (and hopefully many readers of this blog), she's a science fiction and fantasy fan, having grown up with Dying Inside, Heinlein, Asimov's, and of course Tolkein. Walton does a great job of in-cluing readers so that even if you haven't read all the novels mentioned in this novel (and you'd have to be incredibly well read to have read all of them), you will have a good understanding of what the novels are about and what the highlights of the authors' writing style is. Walton is an extremely well-read book critic, and her taste and sensibility and ability to summarize say, The first four Amber books in succinct phrases that resonate with the reader serves her well here.
Yes, it's a teenage coming of age novel, but unlike popular teenager novels nowadays, this book could be described almost as the perfect antidote to Twilight and others of its ilk. The heroine/protagonist doesn't do anything stupid, is incredibly level headed about love and sex, but the author also takes care to bring you the subtle nuances of what it means to be a girl in an English boarding school, with all the intrigues and pointless shaming. However, since the protagonist had already done so much with her life, she doesn't succumb to typical high school angst. When she acquires a boyfriend, she does so with no drama, though there might have been a little magic involved.
Yes, there's magic in the book, and fairies. But it's done in a very subtle fashion, very appropriate to the setting of an English boarding school. There's nothing flashy about it, and how magic goes about its business isn't obvious.
This is a slow paced book, similar to Crossing to Safety, and it is a testament to Walton's skill that the reader does not feel the slow pace at all. When the climax comes, it sneaks up on you, and when you see how the protagonist resolves it the thematic fit and elegance almost hits you in the head, which would be a little too much for any other novel, but works very well in this one.
If you enjoy novels, especially science fiction and fantasy of the era (the book is set in the late 1970s), then you owe it to yourself to read this book. It really is a trip and if not the best novel I've read this year, pretty darn close.
Highly recommended
The novel is clearly autobiographical in many areas, as anyone who's met Jo Walton (as I did during last year's WorldCon) might guess. But it's clearly fictional as well.
The first thing that Walton does is to turn the typical fantasy story upside down by having all the important fantastical events happen prior to the start of the novel. The protagonist has already saved the world. Now she's dealing with the aftermath and consequences of her prior actions: she'd lost her twin sister, she's made enemies out of her mother (a witch who tried to take over the world), and one of her legs is crippled, forcing her to walk with a cane. She now has to be cared for by a father who abandoned her as a child, attend a boarding school, and is in general ripped away from her previous life.
All that she has left is books. And of course, like Jo Walton (and hopefully many readers of this blog), she's a science fiction and fantasy fan, having grown up with Dying Inside, Heinlein, Asimov's, and of course Tolkein. Walton does a great job of in-cluing readers so that even if you haven't read all the novels mentioned in this novel (and you'd have to be incredibly well read to have read all of them), you will have a good understanding of what the novels are about and what the highlights of the authors' writing style is. Walton is an extremely well-read book critic, and her taste and sensibility and ability to summarize say, The first four Amber books in succinct phrases that resonate with the reader serves her well here.
Yes, it's a teenage coming of age novel, but unlike popular teenager novels nowadays, this book could be described almost as the perfect antidote to Twilight and others of its ilk. The heroine/protagonist doesn't do anything stupid, is incredibly level headed about love and sex, but the author also takes care to bring you the subtle nuances of what it means to be a girl in an English boarding school, with all the intrigues and pointless shaming. However, since the protagonist had already done so much with her life, she doesn't succumb to typical high school angst. When she acquires a boyfriend, she does so with no drama, though there might have been a little magic involved.
Yes, there's magic in the book, and fairies. But it's done in a very subtle fashion, very appropriate to the setting of an English boarding school. There's nothing flashy about it, and how magic goes about its business isn't obvious.
This is a slow paced book, similar to Crossing to Safety, and it is a testament to Walton's skill that the reader does not feel the slow pace at all. When the climax comes, it sneaks up on you, and when you see how the protagonist resolves it the thematic fit and elegance almost hits you in the head, which would be a little too much for any other novel, but works very well in this one.
If you enjoy novels, especially science fiction and fantasy of the era (the book is set in the late 1970s), then you owe it to yourself to read this book. It really is a trip and if not the best novel I've read this year, pretty darn close.
Highly recommended
Independent Cycle Touring at Google
For bike to work week, I've agreed to reprise the Independent Cycle Touring in Europe presentation at Google's campus at HQ. It will be held at Serville Tech Talk area on May 9th, from 1:00pm to 3:00pm (bring your boxed lunch, I don't mind you eating while I talk).
The organizer, Anna Walters, is open to allowing outside visitors to attend the talk. If you are not a Google employee, please RSVP to me by the end of the week by leaving a comment on the blog so we can get a headcount, and Anna can see if Google is willing to accommodate that many visitors.
Googlers: I will keep the Q&A period relevant only to the talk, so bring your cycling questions. I worked at Google for many years, and remember teaching the League Road 1 course on campus in building 42 one evening. I was demonstrating how to fix a flat when Wayne Rosing walked by and peaked into the conference room we had commandeered for the session. He smiled, shook his head, and walked on by.
This talk was very well received at REI, so I look forward to giving it at Berkeley, where I launched many many bike tours (as well as supporting wheel building sessions). If you can make it, please come.
Independent Cycle Touring in Europe:
Imagine pedaling through quaint mountain hamlets in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, past fields of wildflowers in Germany’s Black Forest, along the shores of lovely lakes near Salzburg in Austria, or high above the Mediterranean in the French Pyrenees… With its diverse landscapes, vast network of roads and cycle paths, and bike-friendly accommodations, Europe is a fantastic cycling destination. Tonight, independent cyclist and guidebook author Piaw Na will share his expertise on planning bike tours in Switzerland, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, England, and Scotland. Piaw will cover the nuts and bolts of organizing an independent tour, including route-planning, seasonal considerations, lightweight gear, training, transporting bikes on planes/public transit, navigation tools, accommodations, and more.
The organizer, Anna Walters, is open to allowing outside visitors to attend the talk. If you are not a Google employee, please RSVP to me by the end of the week by leaving a comment on the blog so we can get a headcount, and Anna can see if Google is willing to accommodate that many visitors.
Googlers: I will keep the Q&A period relevant only to the talk, so bring your cycling questions. I worked at Google for many years, and remember teaching the League Road 1 course on campus in building 42 one evening. I was demonstrating how to fix a flat when Wayne Rosing walked by and peaked into the conference room we had commandeered for the session. He smiled, shook his head, and walked on by.
This talk was very well received at REI, so I look forward to giving it at Berkeley, where I launched many many bike tours (as well as supporting wheel building sessions). If you can make it, please come.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Cal Alumni Panel
I'll be one of the Alumni on the panel in Berkeley on Friday. If you'll be in Berkeley, please feel free to drop by! I won't be promoting books: the idea is we'll be answering questions about what you end up doing after you graduate. We'll have a startup guy, a big corporation guy, an indie game designer, and a college professor. It'll be diverse, and we'll have a lot of fun. I expect to be the least accomplished guy on the panel.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Google shows that Moore's Law can go backwards
I used to pay $5/year for 20GB of additional Google storage. With the launch of Google Drive, however, Google has changed the prices on storage, and it's dramatically higher. It's now $2.50/month for 25GB, or $30/year, 6 times more expensive.
Fortunately, as long as you keep renewing your current Google plan, your price will remain at $5/year. I don't know whether the old plans allocates storage for Google Drive (there's no easy way to find out), but be very careful if you wish to upgrade your storage plans for Google Drive.
Or use Skydrive instead. At $10/year for 20GB, it's a much better deal. Plus, it comes with more free storage.
I don't know what caused Google to try to pull this stunt, but I guess online storage is immune to Moore's law. (I could discuss the technical reasons for this, but they have to do with Google's internal infrastructure and nothing to do with what you should pay for online storage)
Fortunately, as long as you keep renewing your current Google plan, your price will remain at $5/year. I don't know whether the old plans allocates storage for Google Drive (there's no easy way to find out), but be very careful if you wish to upgrade your storage plans for Google Drive.
Or use Skydrive instead. At $10/year for 20GB, it's a much better deal. Plus, it comes with more free storage.
I don't know what caused Google to try to pull this stunt, but I guess online storage is immune to Moore's law. (I could discuss the technical reasons for this, but they have to do with Google's internal infrastructure and nothing to do with what you should pay for online storage)
Excellent Customer Service from HP
I bought a HP ZR2740w late last year, and I'd been happily operating on it since then. Until yesterday noon, when the monitor suddenly turned itself off. Unplugging it and plugging it back in didn't work, and neither did pushing the power button repeatedly. It literally just died while on the job.
It took a while to navigate HP's web-site in order to get a phone # to call (and yes, it was past Amazon's return period, and I would have been tempted to return it otherwise), but I eventually got through and talked to a real person. After one transfer, I found myself talking to a competent technician who authorized a repair and told me that a new monitor would get to me in 2-3 business days.
My jaw dropped this morning when my doorbell rang and a replacement monitor showed up from HP. They cleverly just shipped the panel, so I can just reuse my base, cables, etc. This was total customer satisfaction: replacement sent and arrived in less than 24 hours, complete with a UPS return tag. In other words, HP footed the bill for the return both ways, and there was no need for me to ship them the old monitor first so they could verify that it was well and truly broken.
All in all, you should have as good a product as possible, but everybody makes mistakes, and what's important was that HP corrected theirs quickly and with no fuss, unlike my experience replacing a Mac. We will see how this replacement monitor lasts.
It took a while to navigate HP's web-site in order to get a phone # to call (and yes, it was past Amazon's return period, and I would have been tempted to return it otherwise), but I eventually got through and talked to a real person. After one transfer, I found myself talking to a competent technician who authorized a repair and told me that a new monitor would get to me in 2-3 business days.
My jaw dropped this morning when my doorbell rang and a replacement monitor showed up from HP. They cleverly just shipped the panel, so I can just reuse my base, cables, etc. This was total customer satisfaction: replacement sent and arrived in less than 24 hours, complete with a UPS return tag. In other words, HP footed the bill for the return both ways, and there was no need for me to ship them the old monitor first so they could verify that it was well and truly broken.
All in all, you should have as good a product as possible, but everybody makes mistakes, and what's important was that HP corrected theirs quickly and with no fuss, unlike my experience replacing a Mac. We will see how this replacement monitor lasts.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Review: InterGalactic Medicine Show Awards Anthology, Vol. I
I picked up InterGalactic Medicine Show Awards Anthology, Vol. I when it was a giveaway on the Kindle store for free. The cover price is $5, which is about $1.50 more than an issue of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. In terms of quality, the stories are very much hit and miss. For instance, Peter S. Beagle's opening story, Trinity County, is not one of his best. While it's an excellent exposition of a world in which genetic engineering has gone crazy, it does not have as much emotional impact as any of his other stories. The runner up, Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain, is a neat send-up of the Zombie genre, but feels a bit tired. The true gem in the book, The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived is beautifully written and explores cloning in a fresh way, however. Another one, The American is a great story about American hegemony in the future, which I found very readable and fun at the same time.
There were several other haunting stories in the volume, including one about traversing multiverses, one about sentient machines. Many other stories fall into the fantasy genre, and while I don't care about them as much, one of them turns The Little Mermaid on its head, which I enjoyed very much.
All in all, the collection of short stories is worth reading, and even at the full price of $5, is more value for money than the typical issue of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. The short stories are short enough that you can read one per night and then when you get to the end you'll want more. Recommended.
There were several other haunting stories in the volume, including one about traversing multiverses, one about sentient machines. Many other stories fall into the fantasy genre, and while I don't care about them as much, one of them turns The Little Mermaid on its head, which I enjoyed very much.
All in all, the collection of short stories is worth reading, and even at the full price of $5, is more value for money than the typical issue of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. The short stories are short enough that you can read one per night and then when you get to the end you'll want more. Recommended.
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Review: I am Legend
I picked up I am Legend during a Kindle sale after seeing the hugely positive reviews on Amazon. This is the risk with buying so called classics of the genre. When the book was first published in 1954, it was probably incredibly ground-breaking: someone's dissected the anatomy of vampires, and postulated a world in which the vampires have taken over and there's only one man left.
The story is not at all Hollywood: there's no happy ending, there's a consistent theme of despair and desperation with almost no redemption at all in the story. The protagonist is almost entirely clue-free throughout the book. If the book was any longer it would have been too painful to read.
Unfortunately, since 1954, there's been many good books with similar themes, and that are quite a bit more readable. Many of them are easy to find and enjoyable reading, Stephen Brust's Agyar being an obvious example.
While this book was so short it could hardly be a waste of time, it certainly does not live up to the reviews. Not recommended.
The story is not at all Hollywood: there's no happy ending, there's a consistent theme of despair and desperation with almost no redemption at all in the story. The protagonist is almost entirely clue-free throughout the book. If the book was any longer it would have been too painful to read.
Unfortunately, since 1954, there's been many good books with similar themes, and that are quite a bit more readable. Many of them are easy to find and enjoyable reading, Stephen Brust's Agyar being an obvious example.
While this book was so short it could hardly be a waste of time, it certainly does not live up to the reviews. Not recommended.
Friday, April 20, 2012
My Next PC Will Be Home Built
My 3 year-old HP m9600t is now starting to be flakey. 3 years is about the usual amount of time it takes for a desktop to die, but the nice thing about owning a PC (versus a Mac), is that you can usually reuse components over time, provided you didn't buy a proprietary machine and build your own. Since the machine is still mostly working, I can leisurely pick over components, etc., and buy stuff as they come on sale. However, I'm happy to use my blog as a platform to shop for components. My suspicion is that I'll be able to keep my existing HDDs, and video card (Radeon 4850), though it would be nice if the machine gave me an upgrade path.
Here are my priorities:
- Fast enough to handle lightroom and video editing.
- Quiet. This means large fans running at low speed.
- Power efficient. No more desktop PC behaving like a space heater.
- Must have hot-swappable hard drive bays. I would like to have 4 hard drive bays, though I could live with just 2 if necessary.
- Must be easy to work on. No more pinching my fingers to install memory or hard drives.
- Plenty of USB slots (USB 3?).
- Room for upgradability
- Must drive my 27" monitor together with my 24" monitor.
- Reliable. I'm not willing to put up with flakey BIOS and such.
- Built in memory card readers for SD cards and CF.
- High quality sound.
- Blu-ray
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Review: Box.net
I'm an unabashed fan of Dropbox. In fact, when I wear my Dropbox sweat-shirt, I get random people walking up to me telling me how great Dropbox is. I haven't seen so many unsolicited declarations of love for a corporation's product since I started wearing Google shirts in 2003.
Nevertheless, once in a while I get chafed by the quota limits, and I have to check out the competition. I picked up a 50GB Box.net account a while back due to the Android promotion, and recently tried to use it to share videos that Steve shot on my GoPro camera during the trip.
Well, to cut things short, it's a big major fail. The UI sucks, mostly because it's tied to a web-browser. To be fair, Google made the same mistake in killing G-Drive and assuming that the web-browser was the future of all computer interactions. Dragging and dropping to the browser works, but using the browser to upload large files is stupid and senseless. Furthermore, there's a 2GB upload limit, which defeats the purpose of having a big quota.
Given how the interaction model completely misses the point of shared files, I predict that box.net will be unable to out-compete either Dropbox or Google. If they have an offer to buy the company, they should take it because they will not make it as an independent company.
Not recommended.
Nevertheless, once in a while I get chafed by the quota limits, and I have to check out the competition. I picked up a 50GB Box.net account a while back due to the Android promotion, and recently tried to use it to share videos that Steve shot on my GoPro camera during the trip.
Well, to cut things short, it's a big major fail. The UI sucks, mostly because it's tied to a web-browser. To be fair, Google made the same mistake in killing G-Drive and assuming that the web-browser was the future of all computer interactions. Dragging and dropping to the browser works, but using the browser to upload large files is stupid and senseless. Furthermore, there's a 2GB upload limit, which defeats the purpose of having a big quota.
Given how the interaction model completely misses the point of shared files, I predict that box.net will be unable to out-compete either Dropbox or Google. If they have an offer to buy the company, they should take it because they will not make it as an independent company.
Not recommended.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Long Term Review: Canon S100
It's been 4 months since I wrote my first impressions review of the Canon S100. Since then, the camera has been to Hawaii and the British Virgin Islands, and taken lots of pictures of my kid as well.
I'd say that the slimmer form factor has been a bigger deal than I expected. The camera slides into and out of pockets easily, and is far more accessible than any of my previous cameras. The GPS sensor is very nice, and as a result, more of my photos are geo-tagged than ever. Video quality is nothing short of amazing for such a small camera (see: my turtle video, for instance). I get a tingle of delight every time I see the output from this camera, though it still doesn't hold a candle to the 5D Mk 2.
My big complaints are: the charger instead of having 2 LEDs to indicate a full charge, now only has 1 LED that changes color. As a red-green color blind person, I find this very annoying: I have no way of telling whether the battery's charged without asking my wife! My second complaint is that the underwater housing is a little too snug. I no longer have any room to squeeze in a silica gel pack, and so as a result, over time in a humid area (e.g., the tropics), you'll get fog inside the camera housing, which renders your underwater or snorkeling photos worthless.
But seriously, those are nit-picks. This camera is awesome. I highly recommend it. I wouldn't waste my time with any other point and shoot.
I'd say that the slimmer form factor has been a bigger deal than I expected. The camera slides into and out of pockets easily, and is far more accessible than any of my previous cameras. The GPS sensor is very nice, and as a result, more of my photos are geo-tagged than ever. Video quality is nothing short of amazing for such a small camera (see: my turtle video, for instance). I get a tingle of delight every time I see the output from this camera, though it still doesn't hold a candle to the 5D Mk 2.
My big complaints are: the charger instead of having 2 LEDs to indicate a full charge, now only has 1 LED that changes color. As a red-green color blind person, I find this very annoying: I have no way of telling whether the battery's charged without asking my wife! My second complaint is that the underwater housing is a little too snug. I no longer have any room to squeeze in a silica gel pack, and so as a result, over time in a humid area (e.g., the tropics), you'll get fog inside the camera housing, which renders your underwater or snorkeling photos worthless.
But seriously, those are nit-picks. This camera is awesome. I highly recommend it. I wouldn't waste my time with any other point and shoot.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Long Term Review: Battery Geek 222 Battery
As many of you know, I rely on a CPAP machine so I can breath at night. The Battery Geek C222 is sufficient to run the machine for 1.5 nights, which is enough on a sailboat since I can run the generator during the day, and Sunlinq 12W Solar Panel if the boat is stationary and I have good sun (which is all the time in the Caribbean). At the start, I was worried about the battery since it had been quite a few years since I bought it, and Li-Ion batteries are well known for deteriorating over time. The good news is that there's no sign of deterioration whatsoever. The battery still goes all night.
What's impressive is that it takes a charge very well from the Sunlinq solar panel. If I leave it in the sun most of the day, it seems to charge fully. If I plug it into the ship's power, the charger runs for at most an hour before it turns green, indicating a full charge indicator. The problem with the battery is that the charge indicator on the battery sucks, meaning that it lights up 5 bars no matter the state of the battery's discharge, so I have to rely on the charge indicator on the charger.
Battery Geek seems to have gone out of business, but you can bypass the middleman and buy direct from China from M&D. They only sell to whole-sellers, but if you say you want to buy a sample to test they'll accommodate you. Since I do have a retail license, I could also potentially place a bulk order and sell them, but since I have no idea what the size of the market is, if you think you would want one, leave me a note or send me e-mail.
In any case, the battery and Sunlinq solar panel are highly recommended, especially for sailing cruisers in the Caribbean.
What's impressive is that it takes a charge very well from the Sunlinq solar panel. If I leave it in the sun most of the day, it seems to charge fully. If I plug it into the ship's power, the charger runs for at most an hour before it turns green, indicating a full charge indicator. The problem with the battery is that the charge indicator on the battery sucks, meaning that it lights up 5 bars no matter the state of the battery's discharge, so I have to rely on the charge indicator on the charger.
Battery Geek seems to have gone out of business, but you can bypass the middleman and buy direct from China from M&D. They only sell to whole-sellers, but if you say you want to buy a sample to test they'll accommodate you. Since I do have a retail license, I could also potentially place a bulk order and sell them, but since I have no idea what the size of the market is, if you think you would want one, leave me a note or send me e-mail.
In any case, the battery and Sunlinq solar panel are highly recommended, especially for sailing cruisers in the Caribbean.
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