It's been almost 3 years since I last wrote about my Honda Fit. Recent events have reminded me that I need to come back and write a review of this car, especially since my life has changed quite a bit.
I originally bought the car as a bicycle carrier. It serves that function exceptionally well. Even now, I have not bothered installing a hitch rack on it as I've always been able to carry all the bike I need inside the car. This is huge, given how small the car is. The car's been exceptionally easy to park --- I've found parking places for it where a bigger car would not have fit. The true testimonial for how much fun the car is to drive came when I exchanged homes with a French couple during the summer. They had the option of either driving the Honda Fit or my wife's BMW, but they chose to drive the Fit all the time, even for the long drives to Yosemite, when the BMW might have been more comfortable.
The true brilliance of the Honda Fit only became realized after I had a child. The first time I went to install a car seat into the Fit I was amazed. After 2002, LATCH systems were required for all new cars sold in the USA. But the way the LATCH system is implemented varies wildly between car manufacturers. Honda has easily the best LATCH system I have seen yet! Near the bottom of the rear passenger seats are slots that a LATCH-compatible tether can be plugged into and attached. This car seat then plugs in and goes. No fuss, just a strap is tensioned and the seat is anchor'd solidly. You would think that this would be the standard for cars, but XiaoQin's BMW's LATCH hooks were non-existent or inaccessible, and I had to resort to the seat-belt system instead. The same went for my brother's Mazda 3. Arturo tells me that the Subaru's LATCH system is similarly good compared with the Honda's. The general consensus seem to be that the German car manufacturers are horrible offenders, with the American car manufacturers similarly bad (our rented minivan in Hawaii did not have LATCH connectors either).
Bowen is getting close to outgrowing his 22 pound Chicco car-seat, so I went and installed the Evenflo Triumph today. What amazed me was that in forward facing position (which we're not going to use yet), the Evenflo has a third tether which would go up to the ceiling of the car for additional stability. Well, I looked for it, and sure enough there it was sitting in the middle of the rear waiting for the day Bowen needs it. Color me impressed.
Now, if you're going to have two kids, chances are, the Fit might not be sufficient (though perhaps a trailer would actually alleviate most of your cargo needs concern, so there's no need to buy a bigger car). But seriously, I didn't consider having kids when I bought the car, and the fact that the car accommodated all these changes in my life with aplomb is impressive. The BMW simply doesn't compare. And as far as price performance is concerned, the Honda just kills nearly everything else.
In any case, I've been very impressed so far by the economy, the reliability, and the incredibly well designed interior of the Honda Fit. If something happened to my Honda tomorrow I'd run out and buy another one. Highly Recommended.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Review: The Guardian of All Things
The Guardian of All Things purports to be a book about the story of memory. That tickles so many geek flash-points in me that I placed the book on hold right away at the library. The first half of the book is exciting: we get an overview of how memory shaped humanity, of how early writing evolved from scratches in the sand to more permanent forms like clay tablets, and then papyrus. Then we cover parchment, scribing/copying of books and finally paper.
Unfortunately, it feels as though by the time the author gets around to discussing paper he's lost interest in the topic. We never do get a good overview of how paper evolved. By the time we arrive at the modern era, the narrative is now rushing at a breakneck pace. We get hints of intriguing stories. For instance, Al Shugart founded Seagate in order to take advantage of the anticipated demand in hard disk drives sized for personal computers. But what people did not know was that Shugart had formerly founded another company which got bought by Xerox. That company, Shugart Associates, invented the 5.25" floppy disk, which was designed to be just a bit too big to fit in a shirt pocket, since they believed that carrying a disk that way would likely damage it.
While these little intriguing details were dropped in here and there, entire pieces of computer history was dropped. For instance, there's no mention of DAT tapes. The cassette audio tape was given barely a mention, and the entire history of film (silent and audio) was squeezed into two pages. Instead, we get a final chapter full of speculation (admitted good speculation --- for instance, Malone is appropriately skeptical of Ray Kurzweil's Singularity) which doesn't even begin to touch on the way Google and Facebook use storage nowadays. There's another intriguing side story about how a Carrington Event might actually wipe out a large amount of electronic storage. There's no substantiation about this event, and it doesn't seem very likely, but this sort of side-mention reduces Malone's credibility.
In other words, you might want to read this book, and I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it, but treat it like summer reading and don't take anything you read seriously, or at least, without triple checking the references.
Unfortunately, it feels as though by the time the author gets around to discussing paper he's lost interest in the topic. We never do get a good overview of how paper evolved. By the time we arrive at the modern era, the narrative is now rushing at a breakneck pace. We get hints of intriguing stories. For instance, Al Shugart founded Seagate in order to take advantage of the anticipated demand in hard disk drives sized for personal computers. But what people did not know was that Shugart had formerly founded another company which got bought by Xerox. That company, Shugart Associates, invented the 5.25" floppy disk, which was designed to be just a bit too big to fit in a shirt pocket, since they believed that carrying a disk that way would likely damage it.
While these little intriguing details were dropped in here and there, entire pieces of computer history was dropped. For instance, there's no mention of DAT tapes. The cassette audio tape was given barely a mention, and the entire history of film (silent and audio) was squeezed into two pages. Instead, we get a final chapter full of speculation (admitted good speculation --- for instance, Malone is appropriately skeptical of Ray Kurzweil's Singularity) which doesn't even begin to touch on the way Google and Facebook use storage nowadays. There's another intriguing side story about how a Carrington Event might actually wipe out a large amount of electronic storage. There's no substantiation about this event, and it doesn't seem very likely, but this sort of side-mention reduces Malone's credibility.
In other words, you might want to read this book, and I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it, but treat it like summer reading and don't take anything you read seriously, or at least, without triple checking the references.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Overview: Video Editing Software
One of the strange things that happen to you as a parent is that you suddenly end up shooting lots of videos. Lots and lots of video. Gigabytes worth. Most of the time, this is not a big deal. For instance, if you shoot a short segment of your baby playing around, you can just post it on Facebook or YouTube, and you'd be done. Most of the time, you don't even bother editing the video, attaching a sound-track, or stitching multiple videos together.
That changes when you hit certain milestones, like Bowen's upcoming birthday. While you could just slap together everything you had over the past year together, chances are, you don't really want to put together all the videos and just say "done." You want to pick out certain highlights, maybe add some interstitials or captions, maybe even attach a soundtrack. If some of your shots were done in less than ideal conditions, you might want to go for contrast adjustment or color correction. If your footage was shot randomly in different formats, you would need to reconcile all those formats and output either to DVD, Blu-Ray, or MPEG format. Since I refuse to buy Apple products as long as I have a choice about it, this overview covers only Windows PC products.
For basic videos like this one of Mike Samuel riding in Downieville, the simplest option is the free Windows Live Movie Maker.The user interface is very intuitive, attaching a sound-track is easy, and you can easily caption, edit, and output to YouTube or WMV format. (Which I usually then transcode to MP4 using Handbrake) If you do most of your shooting outdoors with no color-correction needed, then this is all you will ever need and you'll be happy. I've yet to run into a clip that Windows Live Movie Maker can't handle, and I have not run into any length or capacity limitations. The software also makes full use of my quad core machine, and is parsimonious in its memory use.
When do you need more? The big one for me was color correction. If you shoot in fluorescent lighting or tungsten lighting, then just as with stills, the footage will look orange or green. Another possibility is if you shoot with formats unsupported by Windows Live Movie Maker (unlikely) or if you want multi-track audio (e.g., 1 voice track, one music track, and 1 narration track).
My brother had a copy of Adobe Premiere Pro lying around as shelfware, so I tried that first. Professional level software is great if you have professional needs. But if you're a parent pressed for time, the interface is just too much. I ended up running away from it in horror.
A friend of mine's an Adobe employee, so I got a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements 10 instead for about $25. This is the version of Premiere with "training wheels." By default, you get "Scene Mode", which basically lets you drag and drop clips into a timeline, rearrange them, add an audio track, add in title screens and then go. If you decide that's too basic, you can flip it into Timeline mode, and now you have an advanced UI to go with more advanced needs.
The tool is obtuse. For instance, to do color correction tool, you first select the "Effects" button, and then select "Auto Color", and click Apply. There's no preview, so you have no idea what you did until you hit the "Render" button to see the impact of your selection. "Render", of course, is the equivalent of "compile". It's time consuming, chewing up nearly all your CPU for minutes if not hours at a time, and then giving you a chance to see that you screwed up your settings only to try all over again. There's a three-way color corrector tool as well. Unfortunately, if you're color-blind like me, you have to use that tool with your wife standing behind you checking to make sure you didn't screw up too badly with the tool. This is not a tool for the faint of heart, but it gets the job done.
The worst part about Adobe Premiere Elements is that it is SLOW. By this, I don't just mean the frustrating "render" times. The interface is laggy, at times taking forever to respond to your mouse clicks or dragging the slider bars around as you edit your video. I have no idea what it is the software is doing underneath the covers. The only thing I could think of is that the geniuses at Adobe decided to use Ruby to write the UI and then implemented it in the most naive way possible. The software doesn't crash often, but it does crash often enough that I'm grateful for the frequency Premiere Elements "auto-saves" for you.
The most challenging part of the video editing process is selecting the clips and getting it into the Premiere Elements for you to use. You might think that since Lightroom and Premiere Elements were both Adobe tools, there'd be a simple drag-and-drop interface between Lightroom and Premiere Elements so that stuff that's flagged in Lightroom can easily be selected for use in a video. Well, you'd be wrong. There's no integration at all between the two pieces of software, which means that I'm forever clicking "Show in Explorer" in Lightroom, and then manually dragging the file into Premiere Elements. This is the kind of stuff that makes me wish that Microsoft would get into the video editing/photo editing business just so Adobe has some competition in this area.
If editing videos taxes your patience, rendering it will push your hardware setup to the limits. I have a i7-920 processor with 10GB of RAM installed. Pushing the "Export" button will make my PC go away for 2-3 hours at a time in order to render a 1 hour video. With the CPU monitor running, I could easily see that all 4 cores were in full use --- the CPU fan runs at full speed and nearly everything else on the PC slows to a crawl. I'm the kind of person who's never tempted to buy faster hardware as long as my existing computer runs, and the long render times caused me to start browsing around to see if faster hardware would reduce my pain for this once a year event. (Turns out the answer is "no": I bought my PC in 2009, and in 3 years, PC CPUs have increased in speed by only 2X --- not nearly enough to justify the upgrade. When 8 core CPUs become cheap enough for consumer use, I might revisit)
Despite all this, I'm sticking with Premiere Elements 10 for my big video projects. That's because the learning curve is so steep that once you've gotten comfortable with the software, it's not even worth considering say, upgrading to Elements 11 without a compelling feature (such as say, software image stabilization) that would make it worth paying that learning curve price all over again. Such is the state of video editing today. In any case, Intel has said for years that in-home photo editing would be a compelling reason for consumers to upgrade CPUs, and I disagree. The state of software is such that I don't see the typical user doing this, ever. It's just too hard.
That changes when you hit certain milestones, like Bowen's upcoming birthday. While you could just slap together everything you had over the past year together, chances are, you don't really want to put together all the videos and just say "done." You want to pick out certain highlights, maybe add some interstitials or captions, maybe even attach a soundtrack. If some of your shots were done in less than ideal conditions, you might want to go for contrast adjustment or color correction. If your footage was shot randomly in different formats, you would need to reconcile all those formats and output either to DVD, Blu-Ray, or MPEG format. Since I refuse to buy Apple products as long as I have a choice about it, this overview covers only Windows PC products.
For basic videos like this one of Mike Samuel riding in Downieville, the simplest option is the free Windows Live Movie Maker.The user interface is very intuitive, attaching a sound-track is easy, and you can easily caption, edit, and output to YouTube or WMV format. (Which I usually then transcode to MP4 using Handbrake) If you do most of your shooting outdoors with no color-correction needed, then this is all you will ever need and you'll be happy. I've yet to run into a clip that Windows Live Movie Maker can't handle, and I have not run into any length or capacity limitations. The software also makes full use of my quad core machine, and is parsimonious in its memory use.
When do you need more? The big one for me was color correction. If you shoot in fluorescent lighting or tungsten lighting, then just as with stills, the footage will look orange or green. Another possibility is if you shoot with formats unsupported by Windows Live Movie Maker (unlikely) or if you want multi-track audio (e.g., 1 voice track, one music track, and 1 narration track).
My brother had a copy of Adobe Premiere Pro lying around as shelfware, so I tried that first. Professional level software is great if you have professional needs. But if you're a parent pressed for time, the interface is just too much. I ended up running away from it in horror.
A friend of mine's an Adobe employee, so I got a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements 10 instead for about $25. This is the version of Premiere with "training wheels." By default, you get "Scene Mode", which basically lets you drag and drop clips into a timeline, rearrange them, add an audio track, add in title screens and then go. If you decide that's too basic, you can flip it into Timeline mode, and now you have an advanced UI to go with more advanced needs.
The tool is obtuse. For instance, to do color correction tool, you first select the "Effects" button, and then select "Auto Color", and click Apply. There's no preview, so you have no idea what you did until you hit the "Render" button to see the impact of your selection. "Render", of course, is the equivalent of "compile". It's time consuming, chewing up nearly all your CPU for minutes if not hours at a time, and then giving you a chance to see that you screwed up your settings only to try all over again. There's a three-way color corrector tool as well. Unfortunately, if you're color-blind like me, you have to use that tool with your wife standing behind you checking to make sure you didn't screw up too badly with the tool. This is not a tool for the faint of heart, but it gets the job done.
The worst part about Adobe Premiere Elements is that it is SLOW. By this, I don't just mean the frustrating "render" times. The interface is laggy, at times taking forever to respond to your mouse clicks or dragging the slider bars around as you edit your video. I have no idea what it is the software is doing underneath the covers. The only thing I could think of is that the geniuses at Adobe decided to use Ruby to write the UI and then implemented it in the most naive way possible. The software doesn't crash often, but it does crash often enough that I'm grateful for the frequency Premiere Elements "auto-saves" for you.
The most challenging part of the video editing process is selecting the clips and getting it into the Premiere Elements for you to use. You might think that since Lightroom and Premiere Elements were both Adobe tools, there'd be a simple drag-and-drop interface between Lightroom and Premiere Elements so that stuff that's flagged in Lightroom can easily be selected for use in a video. Well, you'd be wrong. There's no integration at all between the two pieces of software, which means that I'm forever clicking "Show in Explorer" in Lightroom, and then manually dragging the file into Premiere Elements. This is the kind of stuff that makes me wish that Microsoft would get into the video editing/photo editing business just so Adobe has some competition in this area.
If editing videos taxes your patience, rendering it will push your hardware setup to the limits. I have a i7-920 processor with 10GB of RAM installed. Pushing the "Export" button will make my PC go away for 2-3 hours at a time in order to render a 1 hour video. With the CPU monitor running, I could easily see that all 4 cores were in full use --- the CPU fan runs at full speed and nearly everything else on the PC slows to a crawl. I'm the kind of person who's never tempted to buy faster hardware as long as my existing computer runs, and the long render times caused me to start browsing around to see if faster hardware would reduce my pain for this once a year event. (Turns out the answer is "no": I bought my PC in 2009, and in 3 years, PC CPUs have increased in speed by only 2X --- not nearly enough to justify the upgrade. When 8 core CPUs become cheap enough for consumer use, I might revisit)
Despite all this, I'm sticking with Premiere Elements 10 for my big video projects. That's because the learning curve is so steep that once you've gotten comfortable with the software, it's not even worth considering say, upgrading to Elements 11 without a compelling feature (such as say, software image stabilization) that would make it worth paying that learning curve price all over again. Such is the state of video editing today. In any case, Intel has said for years that in-home photo editing would be a compelling reason for consumers to upgrade CPUs, and I disagree. The state of software is such that I don't see the typical user doing this, ever. It's just too hard.
Friday, October 12, 2012
Long Term Review: Nexus 7
Well, 3 weeks isn't a very long time to write a long term review of the Nexus 7 unless, unfortunately, your device was a complete and utter dud and disaster.
Here's what happened: after I used the device a bit, it started getting sluggish. I wondered why everyone else was raving about the device. While a factory reset would get it fast again, I really did not enjoy having to reinstall the device every single time. A search for "Nexus 7 slow" didn't return many results, but a search for "Nexus 7 sluggish" granted me a Forum entry, which in turn led to this PSA.
Fundamentally, the 16GB variant of the Nexus 7 ships with defective eMMC packages. That means that if you load up the 16GB variant until there's less than 3GB of storage left, the machine grinds to a quick and sudden halt. Let me describe how slow it is: I could barely factory reset the device because it would not recognize my drawing the unlock pattern in order to do so. I had to reboot the device, and during the window in which the device was still (relatively) responsive, reset the device.
Some people reported that a factory reset sped up the device. Not so for me. I ran Androbench after a reset, and it reported a random write speed of 139 IOPs. (A standard N7 should be capable of 7000+ IOPs)
I called Google support and asked to return the device so my brother could get his money back (it was a birthday gift). Turned out I was 6 days too late. I also could not get the 8GB variant of the device instead, which does not suffer from this problem. The customer rep assured me that this was a rare problem, but given the amount of traffic on the internet about this issue, and a verification with a friend of mine who bought the 16GB Nexus 7 also had the same problem. I'm willing to bet that it's not a rare problem, but just a problem that's so subtle that many customers just live with it, not knowing that the product isn't supposed to be this sucky.
You might wonder why Googlers don't have this problem. It turns out that most Googlers have only the 8GB version of the device, and the folks I spoke to said they mostly used theirs to check e-mail. This is the same reason why Apple didn't find out they had a maps problem --- they didn't actually have any power users on their dogfood list.
I understand that there will be screwups, I understand that no product can be perfect. However, Google's customer service clearly doesn't reflect the reality of the situation, which is the 16GB Nexus 7 is a dud and a defective product from the get-go, and never should have shipped. I am therefore rescinding my "recommended" tag on the Nexus 7 review.
If you want a tablet and need more the 8GB of storage, get a Kindle Fire or an iPad instead. (Frequent readers of this blog are aware of how much it hurts me to recommend an Apple product over an Android product) Google (and Asus) should be ashamed of themselves for foisting off such garbage onto the world.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Brief Children's Book Reviews
I've been reading to Bowen since very early in his life. As Brain Rules For Baby indicates, it almost doesn't matter what you read to baby --- you can even just read the phone book to him and it'd have the same impact. However, it makes a big difference to the person who has to read the book --- Bowen might not mind reading the same book over and over again, but I mind! I wouldn't say that Bowen hasn't exhibited any taste in books --- in fact, he seems to enjoy chewing on quite a few of them.
Here's a summary of the books I've been reading to him:
- Thieves and Kings. This is a great comic book series interspersed with text and pictures. In his early days, Bowen didn't have color vision, so black and white comics were fascinating to him. Recommended.
- The Princess Bride. I got through about 75% of this before he decided that books without pictures were lame.
- Astro City, Vol 1-3.The colorful pictures were great. But the paper quality definitely would not withstand a 6 month old's chewing, so I abandoned these in the middle of volume 3.
- But Not The Hippopotamus. One of his first board books. After about 20 readings, I have the darn thing memorized. Thanks a lot, Scarlet. Recommended.
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Another gift from Scarlet. He's thoroughly fascinated by the holes in the book. Recommended.
- Boynton's Greatest Hits: Volume II. After the introduction to Boynton, I went and bought a few of the boxed sets. They're nice and short and easy to read. But also too easily memorized. I'm pretty bored of them, but it took about 30-50 readings of each before I got bored, which is good. He loves turning the pages of the board books because he can do so easily. Recommended.
- Big Box of Boynton. I didn't think this set was as good as the above. The best of the lot was Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs! I guess there's no boy who isn't fascinated by Dinosaurs.
- Big Blue Book of Beginner Books. These didn't survive 3 readings before I got bored. The pages aren't as flippable as a board book. I wouldn't get another one of these until he starts reading by himself.
And no, I won't add these to my 2012 Reviews list. I don't want to artificially inflate that list with books that Bowen's reading.
Review: Kill Decision
Dan Suarez's Daemon was a great thriller. His follow up, Freedom, was a little lack-luster, and Kill Decision's starting to make me think that his first novel was a fluke.
The novel revolves around autonomous drones. Unmanned Air Vehicles are already a significant part of war today, in some ways reducing combat to something of a remote control video game. The idea then is to forget about the human part of the equation but go for full autonomy, including enough intelligence on the part of the machine to plan and launch an assault. Take that a bit further and you end up with the Terminator series of movies.
In this particular case, the model is that of an aggressive killer ant colony. To reify the point for the readers, the novel revolves around Linda McKinney, a professor who studies weaver ants, which are the most aggressive ant species on the planet. She's constructed a computational model of ant behavior, and posted it as part of research.
A series of events lead to her research being captured and then turned into practical, deadly use. On McKinney's side are some special forces type.
Suffice to say, we get action, romance, and lots of bullets shot in a Hollywood-style action movie, which you might enjoy if you could turn off your brain.
However, the premise is just too unbelievable. First, there aren't any safeguards for turning the resultant weapons on and off. Secondly, you would have to build a lot of such drones, and they would have to carry a lot of supplies on them since you couldn't actually get close enough to refuel them! Finally, if you were going to do this, you would build your own swarm intelligence system, not model it after something in nature.
The characters are wooden and cliched, and don't get much development during the course of the novel. While the book might be entertaining as light summer reading, I feel that it's a disappointment after reading Daemon or even Freedom. Go (re)read those instead.
Tuesday, October 09, 2012
A Wealthfront Update
I've recommended Wealthfront in the past on this blog, yet I've not been a customer of them until relatively recently. In part, this is because I have legacy portfolio problems: it would cost me a lot in taxes to unwind my portfolio and move it around, so unless the numbers are compelling, I have no reason to do it. The other thing is, as I mentioned in the above blog post, that you can always use Wealthfront's tool and then mirror your own portfolio after that.
Well, while having a discussion with Andy and the Wealthfront team, we had a discussion about tax-loss harvesting. Disclosure: Some of the features to be discussed came out of our discussion, so I'm naturally biased towards the product.
Here's the deal: most of us do naive, year-end-based tax-loss harvesting. In other words, at the end of the year, we check our balances, and if we see losses, we harvest them and then buy equivalent securities, or just sit in cash for the wash-sale period (31 days) and then buy back the original securities. According to Wealthfront's back-testing, this kind of tax-loss harvesting nets an additional 50 basis points (0.5%).
You can take a more sophisticated approach to this. For instance, Parametric Portfolio Management advocates a strategy where you build an approximate index and then tax-loss harvest individual securities. The biggest problem with that approach is if you eventually end up with no more tax losses to harvest, you're stuck with 500 or so securities in a separately managed account, and you'd find yourself wondering "what the heck do I do now?!" As far as I can tell, that's why few Googlers went with Parametric's approach.
Wealthfront's approach is much less headache inducing. The idea is that instead of just naively tax-loss harvest at the end of the year, you can tax-loss harvest at any time, as long as the cost of taking the losses is lower than the volatility of the asset in question. Now, once you do that, you have to take into account what happens if new money gets added to the account (not a problem), and when to switch back. Wealthfront's back-testing indicates that over the last decade (which has been very volatile), this would have netted an additional 100 basis point (1%) in performance a year!
Before you dismiss this as tiny, think about it this way. If your portfolio averaged 10% gain a year, an additional 1% is a performance improvement of 10%! (It's very hard to get 10% a year, by the way --- most realistic numbers are in the 6-8% range, making an incremental 1% huge) By the way, if your financial adviser has you in actively managed funds, then it's tough for him to do tax loss harvesting for you because it'd be hard to get equivalent funds to trade into. Historically, Wealthfront's approach of continuous tax-loss harvesting was only applied to separately managed accounts.
This new feature makes Wealthfront a compelling option for managing money. The additional 50 basis points gained from continuous tax-loss harvesting more than compensates for Wealthfront's 25 basis point management fee. And of course, if you're the kind of person who doesn't even do the naive tax-loss harvesting the number's even better. Even more importantly, these numbers are derived using existing, historically low tax rates. If tax rates go up in the future, Wealthfront's win will be even bigger. And of course, anyone who's been in the financial markets over the last 10 years knows that we've seen signs of increasing volatility: 2 asset bubbles and at least one Minsky moment. This sort of situation make automated rebalancing and tax-lost harvesting ideal. Wealthfront will give you statements at tax reporting time so that you don't have a reporting nightmare on April 15th. I suggested that they give you reports timed for the IRS estimated tax payment deadlines as well.
After I saw Wealthfront's presentation, I went home and opened a Wealthfront account. I do not foresee moving all my assets there because of the above-described reasons, but I can see myself moving liquid assets there over time. I've endorsed Wealthfront in the past, but this time, I'm actually putting (some of) my money where my mouth is. (Disclosure: Wealthfront waived management fees on my account because my previous product endorsement gave them many new customers --- this fee waiver predated the tax loss harvesting feature, and did not move me to sign up as a customer until I saw the tax loss harvesting presentation)
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Review: Sony Ericsson MW600 Bluetooth Stereo Headphones
My beloved Samsung SBH 500 Bluetooh Headphones died a year or so ago, and it's been a chore finding a suitable replacement. In the interim, I made do with wired headphones, but the last straw came when my ham-fisted handling of the headphones finally created enough wear on my N1 that the headphones just wouldn't stay in the headphone jack, creating sudden music stoppages.
The Sony Ericsson MW600 is by far the most promising of the bluetooth stereo headphones I've tried recently. The best thing about it is that it isn't a fully integrated headset with headphones. Instead, it's a blue-tooth receiver and microphone that turns any standard set of headphones into a bluetooth headphone! Yes, that means my beloved PX100 are now blue-tooth compatible, which grants me no end of delight. Now, this also means you can't be like Uhuru from star trek and hang the headset off your ear, but in practice, any set of ear buds would let you just plug one ear in and clip the microphone to your shirt/blouse so you can talk while hands free in the car or on the bike.
Pairing: the process was straightforward, and I had no problem pairing the MW600 with my Nexus One, my Nexus 7, and my desktop PC. Selecting between them is a little tricky, since the touch strip is a little finicky (and the LED display is difficult to read outdoors), but I managed it. The sound quality is nothing short of amazing. Unlike the SBH500, which tended to be finicky outdoors, the MW600 does not care whether it is indoors or outdoors. There's a built in radio receiver, which also sounds pretty good, even indoors.
The cons? The volume control is a touch strip, and is not great. The forward/back/play/pause buttons aren't clearly delimited, and can be easily confused. I expect that to be no problem as I get used to it. There are reports on the internet that the clip is fragile. I expect the last to hit me eventually, but I've got a bunch of superglue handy.
In any case, I'll be keeping this headset, unlike the other headsets I've sent back. Recommended
Monday, September 24, 2012
First Impressions: Google/Asus Nexus 7
I'm writing this review late, since there are plenty of Nexus 7 reviews out there. However, I did get the Nexus 7 as a birthday present recently, so that's my excuse. Why the Nexus 7, instead of say, one of the latest flock of Kindle Fires?
I could complain about my frustration with not having access to the native GMail App, and how I dislike the forking of Android, even though I understand the business reasons behind them. However, by far the most annoying one is that the latest Kindle Fires simply do not have GPS! Now, you might think that the lack of a GPS shouldn't matter to a device that doesn't have always-on connectivity, but first, Google Maps recently offered an off-line capability (though one that's not quite completely useful --- for instance, navigation absolutely does not work when off-line). Secondly, Frank Spychalski pointed me at this article about using the Nexus 7 for outdoors, and it looked quite usable: you do have to spend $15 for U.S. Topo maps (which is easily paid for by the $25 Google Play credit), but it's a much better screen than say, the Garmin Edge 800, and a better deal than the Garmin Topo U.S. at $60.
By the way, I spoke to a Kindle designer on my recent Birthday Trip and he assured me that the next iterations of the Kindle Fires will have GPS. So what about the device proper? My brothers splurged and got me the 16GB Nexus 7, so the first thing I did after charging it was to login and start loading up all the apps I had deleted from my phone ages ago due to the N1's meager 256MB of internal storage. It's interesting to see which applications makes a difference versus just using the plain old web-browser: apps like Quora, for instance, are surprisingly useful because the web-site is mis-designed for a smaller device. Apps like Delicious, for instance, are required otherwise the other apps wouldn't know how to share to delicious, not because anybody sane would want to use the delicious apps. By far the most sophisticated apps are games. The big screen, high definition display, and touch screen and tilt device makes the games great. The battery life was also decent: I could run MyTracks for 2 hours and change, and still run the machine intensively for the rest of the day without draining the battery. That was a surprise. Outdoors, the screen was usable, though not as bright as I would like it to be.
The speakers are the weakest part of the Nexus 7. They sound pretty terrible. Fortunately, the headphone jack works without fuss.
I paired the Logitech PS3 Media Board to the device (it was what I had lying around, and I'm not about to buy a new keyboard just for the device), and it worked great. My typing speed is as fast as on a real computer, and I couldn't out-type the machine. What's even more impressive was that the touchpad worked! That was unexpected and as a result I can IM as quickly from the N7 as I do from the desktop --- my friends couldn't tell the difference.
Despite all that, I still found myself returning to my desktop machine for blogging, and I still refrained from reading important articles on the Google reader app. The truth is, if you're a photographer, you still end up booting your PC to read photos off an SD card, and I can't imagine preferring a 7" screen to a 27" display for serious writing. However, what I do see myself doing is using this to do a quick check of e-mail without booting up my power hungry PC in the morning, checking my Calendar, and so-forth. Also, I had been contemplating buying another laptop for travel purposes so that XiaoQin and I could each have a laptop, and I could see this eliminating the need to carry another laptop. Of course, carrying the Logitech keyboard is not ideal (I'm certainly not about to carry it onto the plane), but on the plane, I expect to just watch movies on it.
Ultimately, if the Nexus 7 died tomorrow would I run off and buy another one? Probably not. It's still not as good a fit for my life as say, the Kindle Keyboard in combination with a smartphone. In summary, I recommend the Nexus 7 over say, the Kindle Fires or the iPads.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Trip Report: Downieville
This year I resurrected one of my ancient traditions: the birthday trip! In recent years, that practice fell into disuse because when you work and have limited vacation time and your favorite place is the Alps, you tend to spend your vacation days in the high summer instead of during the Indian Summer.
This year, my choice was Downieville. Alex had done an expedition several years ago, and highly recommended Downieville Outfitters. I called them, arranged bike rentals for XiaoQin and I, an instructor for XiaoQin, and lodging.
Mike Samuel, who had joined me on many previous Tours found out that the trip coincided with one of his rare visits to the Bay Area, and like the champ he is, signed up for it right away.
Having committed to the trip, I was suddenly terrified that my mountain biking skills (which were nothing much to speak of) had deteriorated over the years to the point where the baby hills would destroy me, let alone a 4000' single track descent, so Eva, Tom and I went to Wilder Ranch and rode every single track trail we could find. It felt mostly natural by the time I was done, so I still felt chicken.
We showed up at the outfitter with pedals, helmets, gloves and cycling attire. They rented us Specialized Enduros, which are fully suspended bike that are very light at 28 pounds each. But it was both our first time on fully suspended bikes and the first time you sit on a bike and it sinks below you is pretty disconcerting. Even with the seat set at the max height, it still felt like we were pedaling bikes that were just a few inches too small for us. This is apparently what it's like when you're pedaling a downhill bike: you're not expected to climb that much.
We got dropped off at the top of the Sunshine trail, and after adjustment, we headed down the hill. I expect descending to be less effort than climbing, but the first few switchbacks had me panting, not from pedaling, but from the sheer effort of wrestling the bike and fighting my instincts, not to mention the terror of falling. After a while I got used to the bike and got a little aggressive, and promptly fell, skinning my knee by just a couple of hairs. This was OK.
Mike was also having trouble getting used to mountain biking again after a 10 year hiatus, so we comforted each other and didn't push --- on anything too questionable, we would stop and walk it. Even being chickenshit, however, our skills noticeably improved by the end of the ride, and we were doing 2-3 foot drops with the seat coming up to my chest a few times without too much panic. We were even getting better about knowing when to stop to raise the saddle and when to drop it.
Who got back to town at about 1:30pm after a 3 hour 40 minute journey. XiaoQin had long since been back to town from her ride with her instructor/guide, and she had had fun though she was also a little freaked out by her first single-track descent. She didn't want to do any more climbing, so Mike and I went in for a second run at Downieville.
What a difference practice makes. This time, both Mike and I made it down Sunshine and Butcher Ranch relatively fast. We could make corners, and could even relax and look at the scenery. We had big smiles at the end of each segment, and could even contemplate doing this as a break from serious road biking. We could begin to see why many downhill mountain bikers were gravitationally challenged --- once you learn to relax on the bike, you can go faster and not spend all your energy fighting the bike. We could even ride some of the sharp rocks that freaked us out, though we still walked far more than all the other cyclists on the trail.
We finished the second run at 5:30pm, returned the bikes, got our pedals back, and had a beer before Mike took off for the Bay Area.
The next day, XiaoQin and I drove up to hike a bit of the Pacific Crest Trail. We didn't go far because it was hot, and we suffered from Europhile syndrome --- once you've seen the Alps, the Sierra just doesn't pretty.
We headed back from the Bay Area pretty happy, and I'll ask XiaoQin if she wants to do any more mountain biking in the future. In any case, I now had a better understanding of what makes downhill mountain biking special, and why people do it. Recommended
Update: Video:
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Update: Video:
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Wealthfront's Startup Equity Calculator
Wealthfront has a great startup equity calculator post on their blog that's worth reading for every engineer who intends to work at a startup.
It has a few interesting data points, one of which is that Hardware Engineers tend to get more equity on average than software engineers. This could be because on average, companies that require hardware engineers tend to go for experienced hardware engineers, while it's not unusual for startups to hire new grads for software engineering work.
Rachleff also makes the point that it makes much more sense to manage your career than to manage your wealth. That's true for new graduates. It's definitely not true for people at the mid-point of their careers, which in Silicon Valley is a much younger age than anyone outside the Valley would believe. I think Rachleff understates how important proper handling of your finances are. After I left Google, I had the privilege of speaking to many people about wealth management. There were a surprising number of people who had more stock than I did with worse financial outcomes almost a decade later. The difference between having a good financial plan and trying to time the markets or relying on a crooked financial advisor are enormous!
In any case, a number of my clients implicitly understand this --- some of them have explicitly turned down multi-million dollar retention packages at big companies (or in some cases refused to even start negotiating for those) in favor of unknown outcomes at startups. Even if those startups do not succeed, the skills they learn and exposure to an environment that requires all their talents, rather than a subset of them, will eventually lead to far more success.
First Impressions: Resmed S9 Autoset with iH5 Humidifier
I've been a CPAP patient for years. For many years, my CPAP machines have been made by Respironics because that was what the doctor ordered. The Respironics machines unfortunately were all bulky, clunky, heavy and noisy. Yes, that includes the latest and greatest System One. To combat the bulk, clunkiness, and weight, for many years I used the Puritan GoodKnight 420E Auto-CPAP machine. That machine was quieter, lighter, and had a much lighter system weight. It accompanied me on nearly every bicycle tour of the alps in recent years, but had one fatal problem: it was fragile. Sticking a machine in a saddlebag is probably the toughest thing you can do to anything, but the Puritan Bennett machines, when taken apart, were found by Pardo to be not designed for robustness.
Well, someone not-to-be-named killed my Puritan Bennett machine last year, and on my recent Portland trip, my Respironics started flaking out. So I took a bit of time to research if I could have a machine that did it all: lightweight and robust for travelling, quieter (so my wife would stop complaining), but still good enough for home use. (The Puritan Bennett wasn't recommended for home use because the machine wasn't as sophisticated in terms of algorithms for matching pressure to your needs)
Enter the Resmed S9: it's light, and has an option to buy a 30W power supply to make the total system weight even lighter, which is a great plus for a cycle tourist. It's humidification system is as sophisticated as the Respironics. The technician at Sleepquest in San Carlos confirmed to me as well that she received fewer repair requests for the Resmed than for the Respironics systems. It also features a heated humidifier hose, a filter cover (which indicates a design for noise reduction which never seems to occur to the respironics people), and is a slicker looking machine in general (not important, because the ideal place for a CPAP machine is as low as possible, out of sight).
The humidifier snaps together with the air pump easily. The machine has a knob and a power button. The knob gives you last night's statistics (including leaks!), as well as a way to adjust the humidifier and whether you're using a nasal pillow, full face mask, etc. One difference from the Respironics is that while the Respironics would automatically turn on when you started breathing through the mask or nose, you have to manually activate the ResMed S9. The machine is quiet. I don't think I'd ever heard such a quiet machine before.
After one night with the machine, I don't feel any different than with the Respironics. Though (I'm not motivated enough to test one thing at a time) I was also trying a new nasal pillow system instead of a full face mask. Looking at the statistics this morning, it looked like I had fewer apnea events than usual using the new machine (and nasal pillow). Obviously, one night does not make a trend, so assuming there's any interest in this, I'll come back in 3 months and post again.
Nevertheless, as far as I'm concerned, this machine is a win-win-win over the Respironics so far. If you're due for a CPAP machine replacement soon, I would recommend that you get this machine over the Respironics just for the reduced noise level alone. Everything else is icing on the cake.
Well, someone not-to-be-named killed my Puritan Bennett machine last year, and on my recent Portland trip, my Respironics started flaking out. So I took a bit of time to research if I could have a machine that did it all: lightweight and robust for travelling, quieter (so my wife would stop complaining), but still good enough for home use. (The Puritan Bennett wasn't recommended for home use because the machine wasn't as sophisticated in terms of algorithms for matching pressure to your needs)
Enter the Resmed S9: it's light, and has an option to buy a 30W power supply to make the total system weight even lighter, which is a great plus for a cycle tourist. It's humidification system is as sophisticated as the Respironics. The technician at Sleepquest in San Carlos confirmed to me as well that she received fewer repair requests for the Resmed than for the Respironics systems. It also features a heated humidifier hose, a filter cover (which indicates a design for noise reduction which never seems to occur to the respironics people), and is a slicker looking machine in general (not important, because the ideal place for a CPAP machine is as low as possible, out of sight).
The humidifier snaps together with the air pump easily. The machine has a knob and a power button. The knob gives you last night's statistics (including leaks!), as well as a way to adjust the humidifier and whether you're using a nasal pillow, full face mask, etc. One difference from the Respironics is that while the Respironics would automatically turn on when you started breathing through the mask or nose, you have to manually activate the ResMed S9. The machine is quiet. I don't think I'd ever heard such a quiet machine before.
After one night with the machine, I don't feel any different than with the Respironics. Though (I'm not motivated enough to test one thing at a time) I was also trying a new nasal pillow system instead of a full face mask. Looking at the statistics this morning, it looked like I had fewer apnea events than usual using the new machine (and nasal pillow). Obviously, one night does not make a trend, so assuming there's any interest in this, I'll come back in 3 months and post again.
Nevertheless, as far as I'm concerned, this machine is a win-win-win over the Respironics so far. If you're due for a CPAP machine replacement soon, I would recommend that you get this machine over the Respironics just for the reduced noise level alone. Everything else is icing on the cake.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Review: A Distant Soil, Books 1-4
I first reviewed A Distant Soil in 2005 here on this blog. I recently noticed that the library had books 1-4, and hoping that the story had since been finished, I checked the books out of the library and read them all.
The books were particularly slow going for me, and I realized after a bit why: while many pundits are contented to talk about how you should have graphic novels appeal to girls, Colleen Doran actually went out and did it. The books are full of talking heads, and heavy on text balloons. While there's a "saving the world" plot going on, characters take the time out to worry about their hair. The character oriented pacing essentially led to long sections where characters were flirting, bantering, or teasing each other, rather than the usual sequence of action event after action event.
The book revolves around a brother-sister pair who escaped from a lab where they were confined, only to discover their origins. They're separated and kidnapped by two factions of an alien race, and they learn about the alien race and the power structure from two different directions, neither of which are telling the complete truth, and neither of which have the complete picture.
The result is a plot and story that's slow, long and drawn out, and action that drags. But the artwork is gorgeous. The men are beautiful, the women a good diverse lot, not all of whom served as love interests for the male characters, and the aliens unfortunately all too human (which given the nature of the story, makes sense). There's no science at all in this story, so it's not properly science fiction, but rather fantasy. There's a significant amount of sex in this story, so this isn't something you would hand to your 12 year old. (If you're looking for something for that 12-year old, please try Jeff Smith's delightful Bone)
I was wondering why the story line hadn't been completed yet, so I checked on Colleen Doran's web-site: it seems that she's still trying to finish the story. I'm not sure I can recommend this book to everyone: it's hyper-targeted towards girls, and I had to make myself read it. Check the first book out of your local library and if it grabs you read the rest of it and be prepared for a long wait to the finish. That's one of the problems with the independent artists, with no commercial pressure to push to finish the story, there's no way to tell when it'll finish, if ever. (I'm looking at you, Mark Oakley)
The books were particularly slow going for me, and I realized after a bit why: while many pundits are contented to talk about how you should have graphic novels appeal to girls, Colleen Doran actually went out and did it. The books are full of talking heads, and heavy on text balloons. While there's a "saving the world" plot going on, characters take the time out to worry about their hair. The character oriented pacing essentially led to long sections where characters were flirting, bantering, or teasing each other, rather than the usual sequence of action event after action event.
The book revolves around a brother-sister pair who escaped from a lab where they were confined, only to discover their origins. They're separated and kidnapped by two factions of an alien race, and they learn about the alien race and the power structure from two different directions, neither of which are telling the complete truth, and neither of which have the complete picture.
The result is a plot and story that's slow, long and drawn out, and action that drags. But the artwork is gorgeous. The men are beautiful, the women a good diverse lot, not all of whom served as love interests for the male characters, and the aliens unfortunately all too human (which given the nature of the story, makes sense). There's no science at all in this story, so it's not properly science fiction, but rather fantasy. There's a significant amount of sex in this story, so this isn't something you would hand to your 12 year old. (If you're looking for something for that 12-year old, please try Jeff Smith's delightful Bone)
I was wondering why the story line hadn't been completed yet, so I checked on Colleen Doran's web-site: it seems that she's still trying to finish the story. I'm not sure I can recommend this book to everyone: it's hyper-targeted towards girls, and I had to make myself read it. Check the first book out of your local library and if it grabs you read the rest of it and be prepared for a long wait to the finish. That's one of the problems with the independent artists, with no commercial pressure to push to finish the story, there's no way to tell when it'll finish, if ever. (I'm looking at you, Mark Oakley)
Friday, September 14, 2012
Now Available on Amazon: Independent Cycle Touring
That was the shortest "out of print" period in history. Thanks to the magic of automation, Amazon now has copies of Independent Cycle Touring available for sale. It qualifies for free shipping to anywhere Amazon ships to.
Now that's customer service! (AirBnB)
Yesterday, I wrote about my less than satisfactory experience with AirBnB. Today, AirBnB's customer service rep contacted me and said they did an investigation, and did find the cleaning fee to be inappropriate. They've reversed the charge.
Every company will screw up at some point or another. What seals a customer's loyalty is how they deal with the screw up. AirBnB clearly shows that they understand this. My wife and I will probably be willing to give them another try in the future because of this.
Every company will screw up at some point or another. What seals a customer's loyalty is how they deal with the screw up. AirBnB clearly shows that they understand this. My wife and I will probably be willing to give them another try in the future because of this.
Independent Cycle Touring now sold out!
Independent Cycle Touring just sold out of its first printing. To date, this has been the book that's taken the longest to sell out, which is a pity.
The paperback book will be temporarily unavailable until I get Amazon to stock it. When it does come back in stock, it will cost $39.95 rather than the previous $29.95. Why? Because Amazon takes a hefty fee in exchange for the "marketing" I get for selling in on the biggest e-commerce site in the world. On the other hand, it will mean that my UK customers will get free shipping! Originally, I had hoped that the book would sell quickly enough that I could go with a big printer and lower the price further, but it's clear that compared to my other books, this one doesn't sell as well, and I will stick with print on demand.
In the mean time, electronic copies are still available and I've lowered the price to $11.95 to reflect my reduced margins. It's still the best cycle touring book ever written, and yes, I've verified that it reads rather nicely on the Kindle Fire, which means that it should do fine on both the Nexus 7 and the iPad.
The paperback book will be temporarily unavailable until I get Amazon to stock it. When it does come back in stock, it will cost $39.95 rather than the previous $29.95. Why? Because Amazon takes a hefty fee in exchange for the "marketing" I get for selling in on the biggest e-commerce site in the world. On the other hand, it will mean that my UK customers will get free shipping! Originally, I had hoped that the book would sell quickly enough that I could go with a big printer and lower the price further, but it's clear that compared to my other books, this one doesn't sell as well, and I will stick with print on demand.
In the mean time, electronic copies are still available and I've lowered the price to $11.95 to reflect my reduced margins. It's still the best cycle touring book ever written, and yes, I've verified that it reads rather nicely on the Kindle Fire, which means that it should do fine on both the Nexus 7 and the iPad.
Market Efficiency
Most companies understand not to cheap out on machines for engineers. The cost of a top end development machine is about $5,000, and when you're shelling out $100K a year, even a brand new machine every year just doesn't cost that much (in practice, nobody upgrades every year --- there's enough overhead when switching machines that doing it every other Moore's cycle --- 36 months makes much more sense). And every bit of increased productivity means you get that much more out of the $100K/year asset.
But once in a while, companies come across an under-priced engineer. Whether because they're inexperienced and didn't know how to negotiate, or whether they were initially offered less compensation because they were an unproven quantity, it's extremely tempting to keep under paying them for as long as you can get away with under paying them. What's happening in this case is that management thinks that they've stumbled across an engineer who's an idiot savant --- that somehow it's possible to be a great engineer who happens to be clueless as to his net-worth. There's no doubt that such people exist (I know some of them), and if you're at a big company that risk might pay off, but it's an insane risk to take at a startup where every engineer matters.
Here's what eventually happens. The engineer has friends, and eventually his curiosity will lead him to compare compensation with those friends. When he learns that he's significantly underpaid, he'll get pissed off enough to interview, and if you're lucky enough, to ask you for a raise. At this point, you'll have to give him a raise. If you're smart, you'll give him a raise, and compensate him for his lost wages as a result of you underpricing him in the first place. Most companies might do the first but rarely do they do the second. The consequences of not doing the second is that the engineer you've pissed off is out interviewing, and will end up with higher offers and you'll end up paying back those lost wages anyway, assuming you manage to keep him. If you don't, you'll spend that money recruiting and training a new engineer to replace him.
You might argue that a startup can't afford cash and raises. You might be right. But there's no excuse even then: if you can't afford cash, then you can provide additional equity. Equity is even better, since you can tie that to a vesting period, which would keep the employee loyal for years to come, and raise the bar for anyone else trying to poach your employees.
One of the things that impressed me about Google was its willingness to raise new graduates to market rapidly --- it was not unusual for a new graduate at Google to get a 30% raise on her first promotion, reflecting her increased value. However, Facebook was even better in that regard. I've had reports of Facebook granting retention packages even before the new employee's first year is up for review! This is a great approach, because the employee considers this unasked-for raise a gift. What happens to you when you receive a gift? You feel obliged to give back. So not only have you made a high performing employee happy, you've ensured that he's going to work even harder for you, at least in the near term! Contrast this with the employee mentioned above who had to ask for his raise (after realizing that he was underpaid): he didn't feel like he got a gift, he got screwed. Even raises that come from promotions don't feel like a gift, because the employee felt like he had to work for it.
Regardless of the performance of its stock, I've made the statement in recent years that Facebook probably has the best engineering management in Silicon Valley, and this is just one example of what they do better than anybody else. (Note: the author does not own any Facebook stock)
But once in a while, companies come across an under-priced engineer. Whether because they're inexperienced and didn't know how to negotiate, or whether they were initially offered less compensation because they were an unproven quantity, it's extremely tempting to keep under paying them for as long as you can get away with under paying them. What's happening in this case is that management thinks that they've stumbled across an engineer who's an idiot savant --- that somehow it's possible to be a great engineer who happens to be clueless as to his net-worth. There's no doubt that such people exist (I know some of them), and if you're at a big company that risk might pay off, but it's an insane risk to take at a startup where every engineer matters.
Here's what eventually happens. The engineer has friends, and eventually his curiosity will lead him to compare compensation with those friends. When he learns that he's significantly underpaid, he'll get pissed off enough to interview, and if you're lucky enough, to ask you for a raise. At this point, you'll have to give him a raise. If you're smart, you'll give him a raise, and compensate him for his lost wages as a result of you underpricing him in the first place. Most companies might do the first but rarely do they do the second. The consequences of not doing the second is that the engineer you've pissed off is out interviewing, and will end up with higher offers and you'll end up paying back those lost wages anyway, assuming you manage to keep him. If you don't, you'll spend that money recruiting and training a new engineer to replace him.
You might argue that a startup can't afford cash and raises. You might be right. But there's no excuse even then: if you can't afford cash, then you can provide additional equity. Equity is even better, since you can tie that to a vesting period, which would keep the employee loyal for years to come, and raise the bar for anyone else trying to poach your employees.
One of the things that impressed me about Google was its willingness to raise new graduates to market rapidly --- it was not unusual for a new graduate at Google to get a 30% raise on her first promotion, reflecting her increased value. However, Facebook was even better in that regard. I've had reports of Facebook granting retention packages even before the new employee's first year is up for review! This is a great approach, because the employee considers this unasked-for raise a gift. What happens to you when you receive a gift? You feel obliged to give back. So not only have you made a high performing employee happy, you've ensured that he's going to work even harder for you, at least in the near term! Contrast this with the employee mentioned above who had to ask for his raise (after realizing that he was underpaid): he didn't feel like he got a gift, he got screwed. Even raises that come from promotions don't feel like a gift, because the employee felt like he had to work for it.
Regardless of the performance of its stock, I've made the statement in recent years that Facebook probably has the best engineering management in Silicon Valley, and this is just one example of what they do better than anybody else. (Note: the author does not own any Facebook stock)
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Review: AirBnB
We used AirBnB twice this time on our recent trip in Europe. The first stay was a 4 day stay at the beginning of our visit to France, and the second stay was a one night stay.
I'm a big fan of AirBnB the company, so I wanted to write a positive review of my stay, but both stays left a bad taste in my mouth, for different reasons. The first place was fine. The price wasn't exactly cheap, and it wasn't in a great location in Paris, but it was quiet, and the place while not super-duper clean, was acceptable.
However, after we moved out, the owner contacted us and asked for a cleaning fee. When we asked to see why, she sent us a picture of a stove surface that would have taken us 3 minutes to clean up (at worse), and a few pieces of tissue scattered on the living room table. The cleaning fee wasn't stupendous (35EUR), but we certainly felt as though she deliberately didn't meet us when we left just so that she could make a little bit of extra money off us. [Update: AirBnB has since refunded us the "cleaning fee" --- what a great company!]
The second stay was much worse. The pictures and the text described the place as suitable for 5 people. But when we showed up, it was clear that the pictures were deceptive: two of the "rooms" were really a single space, separated by a single stair case. The third room was a child's bedroom with a roll out mattress. The place was very small, and there was practically no space for Bowen to play freely. For one night it was OK, but we would have been mad if we'd tried to stay there for a few days. Worse than that, the person who ran the apartment lied on the AirBnB site about her address, which meant that my instructions for the airporter pick up address was wrong. This wasn't a big deal, since I could call and change the pickup location, but it lended the entire affair a bit of a sleazy feel.
Contrast this with my experience in europe with Booking.com. We used them for 4 locations in France and Austria, and each time the bookings along with the reviews have been exactly what we wanted. The prices were also comparable to AirBnB.
In short, traveling with a family is probably the wrong model for AirBnB. I suspect that if we had been a couple traveling on our own, AirBnb would have served up much better offerings than comparable hotels. As it is, I think I would have been better off booking a hotel and paying a bit more for our stays. While this experience isn't necessarily enough to put me off AirBnB in the future, I think I will avoid them when booking trips for my family.
I'm a big fan of AirBnB the company, so I wanted to write a positive review of my stay, but both stays left a bad taste in my mouth, for different reasons. The first place was fine. The price wasn't exactly cheap, and it wasn't in a great location in Paris, but it was quiet, and the place while not super-duper clean, was acceptable.
However, after we moved out, the owner contacted us and asked for a cleaning fee. When we asked to see why, she sent us a picture of a stove surface that would have taken us 3 minutes to clean up (at worse), and a few pieces of tissue scattered on the living room table. The cleaning fee wasn't stupendous (35EUR), but we certainly felt as though she deliberately didn't meet us when we left just so that she could make a little bit of extra money off us. [Update: AirBnB has since refunded us the "cleaning fee" --- what a great company!]
The second stay was much worse. The pictures and the text described the place as suitable for 5 people. But when we showed up, it was clear that the pictures were deceptive: two of the "rooms" were really a single space, separated by a single stair case. The third room was a child's bedroom with a roll out mattress. The place was very small, and there was practically no space for Bowen to play freely. For one night it was OK, but we would have been mad if we'd tried to stay there for a few days. Worse than that, the person who ran the apartment lied on the AirBnB site about her address, which meant that my instructions for the airporter pick up address was wrong. This wasn't a big deal, since I could call and change the pickup location, but it lended the entire affair a bit of a sleazy feel.
Contrast this with my experience in europe with Booking.com. We used them for 4 locations in France and Austria, and each time the bookings along with the reviews have been exactly what we wanted. The prices were also comparable to AirBnB.
In short, traveling with a family is probably the wrong model for AirBnB. I suspect that if we had been a couple traveling on our own, AirBnb would have served up much better offerings than comparable hotels. As it is, I think I would have been better off booking a hotel and paying a bit more for our stays. While this experience isn't necessarily enough to put me off AirBnB in the future, I think I will avoid them when booking trips for my family.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Trip Report: Portland
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| Portland 2012 |
My brothers and I decided to take our parents to Portland for my mom's 70th birthday. This was the first family trip for a while, though unfortunately my youngest brother couldn't make it for private reasons. We arrived on Friday to the warmest I've ever seen a pacific northwest city. It was well into the 90s. We walked over to Powell's Books, the biggest bookstore in the Western Hemisphere.
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We got back to Portland and had dinner at Karam, a Lebanese restaurant. The lamb dishes were great, but don't order any beef there. It's cooked way too dry.
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| From Portland 2012 |
Conclusion: Portland physically most reminded me of Bordeaux, with the small size of the downtown area and the big central river running across it. The food, of course, doesn't compare to Bordeaux, and neither does the wine. The beer, however, is significantly much better than French beer, and if you're there, do drive out to Full Sail Brewery because it's great food and excellent beer. Do take the time to do the brewery tour if you can manage it.
Would I go out of my way to see Portland again? Probably not. But it's a fine weekend trip if you've never been there before. Portland's a bike friendly city, but personally, it's hard to beat the Bay Area for cycling goodness.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Review: Whiteout Volume 2 (Melt)
Whiteout: Melt returns to the world introduced in Whiteout. Carrie Stenko, the protagonist in the first book, returns, this time to investigate an explosion at a Russian base which is suspected of harboring weapons.
Along the way, she meets her Russian counterpart, and they start tracking down a group of suspects who absconded with some valuables.
Unlike the previous story, which was a murder mystery, this one was essentially a thriller, with the identity of the criminals provided right at the start and then the story turns into a pursuit through the Antarctic wilderness. The story is simple, but Carrie gets no character development (and she clearly didn't learn from her previous outing into Antarctica).
It's fine as an airplane read, but it's too short and I finished the book between the plane leaving the gate and reaching cruising altitude. My problem with both books is that they didn't make any use of the graphic novel medium, and could easily have worked as prose novels instead. And if you really want to learn about Antarctica, I suggest you go to the source: read Roland Huntford's The Last Place On Earth instead.
Along the way, she meets her Russian counterpart, and they start tracking down a group of suspects who absconded with some valuables.
Unlike the previous story, which was a murder mystery, this one was essentially a thriller, with the identity of the criminals provided right at the start and then the story turns into a pursuit through the Antarctic wilderness. The story is simple, but Carrie gets no character development (and she clearly didn't learn from her previous outing into Antarctica).
It's fine as an airplane read, but it's too short and I finished the book between the plane leaving the gate and reaching cruising altitude. My problem with both books is that they didn't make any use of the graphic novel medium, and could easily have worked as prose novels instead. And if you really want to learn about Antarctica, I suggest you go to the source: read Roland Huntford's The Last Place On Earth instead.
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