I've often maintained that fiction is as good a source of leadership training as non-fiction, since much non-fiction is written in terms of platitudes and generalities, while fiction frequently presents specific situations. Of course, leaders in fiction are always superb, but humans always learn better from positive examples than from negative examples, so that's not a bad thing.
I was watching the Battlestar Galactica reboot's Hand of God episode the other day with Xiaoqin, and was particularly struck by how great an example of leadership the episode had in the form of commander Adama. We see him in various different roles that illustrate what role leadership plays, and what a great manager should do.
The episode begins with a planning meeting. Adama's role here is simple: he needs the proper diversity of thinking and expertise in the planning stage to design the best plan for the assault on the Cylon base. Note that while the news media loves to consider diversity of races as a proxy for diversity of thinking, here Adama cares very much about having a diverse of mindset. He turns to Starbuck (Kara Thrace) to provide that. Not only that, at the meeting he carefully backs up Starbuck, by telling both Apollo and Colonel Tigh: "With all due respect, none of us are as crazy as Starbuck." There are lots of subtleties about that meeting, including that Starbuck and Tigh hate each other, and Adama is aware of that. Notice how deftly he shuts down the name calling that the two of them were about to start, which would have been unproductive and prevented a good plan for being formed. Leadership is frequently about bringing the right people in the room and managing the context so that you can get the most out of everyone, and this is a great example.
Starbuck is a great pilot. In the arena of technical management, she'd be considered a great tech lead. That made her a natural to lead the assault, but her healing leg meant that she had to be kept out of the fight. Adama convinces Starbuck of this not by giving her an order, but by showing her that her legs are not yet strong enough to let her perform at her best. This is another great example of leadership as persuasion: it's not enough to say "no, you shouldn't do this." You have to provide examples why.
Then there's the scene where Apollo is up the night before the mission. He's anxious, and already defensive because everyone knows that Starbuck's the best pilot in the fleet but he's having to substitute for her. Adama's aware of this, and carefully steers Apollo's anxieties away from this, providing assurance that he's going to do a great job. He even hands Apollo his personal lucky charm to assist. He then tells Apollo to get some rest in preparation for the mission.
During the execution of the mission, Adama provides leadership mentoring to Starbuck, telling her that once she's laid down the plan, the execution is in the hands of the others, and that her obvious anxiousness would actually undermine the operation if she doesn't retain a good grip on herself in the operations room. Not only does that calm her, he's clearly also grooming her as a future leader.
Finally, when the operation is successful and everyone's celebrating, notice what Adama does. He carefully places himself at the edge of the celebration. He's cheering folks on, and there to receive the lucky charm back from Apollo, but at no point does he attempt to steal the credit for the success. His people are allowed to say to themselves, "We did this great thing!" This is servant leadership at its greatest, and you very rarely see it in real life.
Of course, the fictional universe Adama is in is very stark. Adama isn't racing for the next promotion (there's no one to promote him), and the stakes are high, so it's easier to motivate people to do the right thing. But that's actually not that much different from a startup (getting a promotion at an unsuccessful startup isn't going to do much good). But it's still great to watch a great leader in action, and I can only think of a very small handful of people who in real life could match what Adama did in this episode.
If you haven't already seen this, it's well worth the $1.99 to watch this episode for these leadership lessons. As a technical manager, it's well worth the 44 minutes of your time.
Thursday, March 05, 2015
Wednesday, March 04, 2015
Review: Uncommon Stock, Version 1
Business novels are rare, and rightly so. They're impossible to get right, and most are simply downright boring. For instance, I love DeMarco's Peopleware, but The Deadline is boring and insipid. Typically, the best way to get good ideas about leadership and management is to read fiction that's not intended to be about business. (Battlestar Galactica's first two seasons, and any of the Horatio Hornblower series come to mind)
Uncommon Stock, therefore, surprised me in being readable. Not only is it readable, the characters are well-written and not completely stupid. The conflicts between the technical co-founder and the business co-founder is well-done, with very well negotiated scenes, and the exposition about term sheets, venture funding, and angel investors (as well as the worthlessness of startup competitions) is interesting. Complete with the baggage that the startup is about accounting, and you've got challenging material that's surprising that the author managed to make interesting.
There are a few gotchas in the book. The first is that the novel is clearly setup for sequels, and that makes the novel weaker. The author felt obliged to stick in a long running plot-line (some obvious bad guys who are dumb enough to send thugs solo to kill people) that's not resolvable in one novel and that "spices up" the startup process. This betrays a lack of faith in the topic of the novel not being exciting enough by itself. The second is that the fifty-fifty split in a startup is an inherently unstable structure (as Raising The Bar describes), and you'd expect it to cause trouble, but it doesn't.
Regardless, though, the novel is an achievement in that it's interesting to read, doesn't have too many stupidities, and if you don't know much about the startup world, does a good enough job at explaining the necessity of a vesting schedule for founders, for instance. It's worth a quick read.
Mildly recommended.
Uncommon Stock, therefore, surprised me in being readable. Not only is it readable, the characters are well-written and not completely stupid. The conflicts between the technical co-founder and the business co-founder is well-done, with very well negotiated scenes, and the exposition about term sheets, venture funding, and angel investors (as well as the worthlessness of startup competitions) is interesting. Complete with the baggage that the startup is about accounting, and you've got challenging material that's surprising that the author managed to make interesting.
There are a few gotchas in the book. The first is that the novel is clearly setup for sequels, and that makes the novel weaker. The author felt obliged to stick in a long running plot-line (some obvious bad guys who are dumb enough to send thugs solo to kill people) that's not resolvable in one novel and that "spices up" the startup process. This betrays a lack of faith in the topic of the novel not being exciting enough by itself. The second is that the fifty-fifty split in a startup is an inherently unstable structure (as Raising The Bar describes), and you'd expect it to cause trouble, but it doesn't.
Regardless, though, the novel is an achievement in that it's interesting to read, doesn't have too many stupidities, and if you don't know much about the startup world, does a good enough job at explaining the necessity of a vesting schedule for founders, for instance. It's worth a quick read.
Mildly recommended.
Tuesday, March 03, 2015
Review: Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee Costco package
I was intrigued by varying reviews of Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee, but the priced seemed prohibitive. Costco, however, sells a package where you get 4 pounds of blend and 1 pound of pure coffee for about $60, so I figured it was worth trying once just to see what the most expensive coffee bean in the world tasted like.
The pure Blue Mountain Coffee is pretty good. There's not much of an aroma when you grind the beans, but the taste is very pure. There's almost no bitterness, and there's no need to add milk or sweetener in the coffee: you should just drink it black. In fact, add milk and it doesn't taste as good as the cheap stuff. You can get this for about $30/pound if you don't want to buy it in a package.
I expected the blend to be a step down, being at most 5% of the good stuff. In reality, however, it has many of the characteristics as the pure stuff, with a little bit more bitterness, but not enough for me to want to add milk or sweetener. At $9/pound, it's not bad if you're in the habit of drinking the coffee black.
I think I do enjoy coffee with milk, however, so I'll probably go back to the $5/pound cheap costco coffee in the future.
The pure Blue Mountain Coffee is pretty good. There's not much of an aroma when you grind the beans, but the taste is very pure. There's almost no bitterness, and there's no need to add milk or sweetener in the coffee: you should just drink it black. In fact, add milk and it doesn't taste as good as the cheap stuff. You can get this for about $30/pound if you don't want to buy it in a package.
I expected the blend to be a step down, being at most 5% of the good stuff. In reality, however, it has many of the characteristics as the pure stuff, with a little bit more bitterness, but not enough for me to want to add milk or sweetener. At $9/pound, it's not bad if you're in the habit of drinking the coffee black.
I think I do enjoy coffee with milk, however, so I'll probably go back to the $5/pound cheap costco coffee in the future.
Monday, March 02, 2015
Review: Macross
Years ago, I wrote a review of the Macross TV series. I wanted to hyperlink to it recently while writing another review, but realized that it came from an old website which I never updated and has now been lost in time. So I'm reposting this review. Macross was one of the best shows out and still holds up well today, and it turns out that my AnimEigo set is now a collector's item. Who knew?
Introduction
I first saw Macross when I was a kid of about 15 in Singapore, rushing home from school every Thursday evening to try to catch the latest episode, which had been dubbed into Mandarin by the Taiwanese. My brother recently got a DVD player, borrowed the entire TV series (36 episodes) from his friend Jason, and we watched it all over again, this time in the original Japanese with Chinese subtitles. What a difference 13 years make!
Macross is a girl’s story
For some reason, when you’re a kid, you don’t notice that Macross is really a girl’s story. Sure, it’s got giant transforming robots. It’s also got space batttles, lots of neat gadgets, and a cool science fiction plot that stands up even to adult scrutiny (well, the corny parts of the science fiction plot are motivated by the romantic bent of the whole series). But the heart and soul of Macross is the romance between the main characters. Nobody’s motivated by anything else!
The plot revolves around 3 main characters. Hikaru Ichijou, a boy pilot who grows up eventually to be a squadron leader, Linn Minmei (also spelled Lynn MinMay), a school girl of about 16 who wins a beauty contest and goes on to become a pop singer, and Misa Hayase (a good translation might be Lisa Hayes, which the American "Robotech" uses), a flight controller/battle coordinator for the ship, Macross. Of course, there’s a love triangle between them, and how the interaction between the characters play out and whom Hikaru eventually decides in favor of presents the series with its romantic climax. To give you an idea of how unimportant the military climax was, it occurs fully 8 episodes before the end of the series, to give the creators more time to focus on what was obviously dear to their hearts. The science fiction elements of the plot are discussed elsewhere (see below for a collection of links to various home pages), so I won’t go into them in detail.
So, ok, Macross is a trashy romance/soap opera. But if all soap operas were like this I’d watch them. None of the characters are stilted or artificial. Hikaru seems like a dork at times, but he does wake up to his situations and corrects himself. Lynn Minmei seems like your stereotypical cute airhead at first, but even she has to suffer the consequences of her decisions and becomes a stronger person. Misa Hayase seems like a rigid, strictly military person, but she suffers from her own bouts of insecurities and when she eventually gives in to her feelings becomes such a sympathetic character that you find yourself rooting for her. Nobody’s a bad guy (or a bad girl), and character development is handled consistently and with great care. Everybody has to suffer a little in order to grow up, and the primary characters in Macross are not immune to suffering. A common theme seems to be that the characters have to let go of their desires in order to deserve what they desire. But unlike the morality plays you see in Saturday morning cartoons, these themes are handled very subtly (so subtly that they were lost on me, of course, when I was a kid).
How has Macross aged over the last 15 years for me personally? What I’ve found is that the situations I found myself in over the last 10 years or so were in some ways paralleled in Macross. There are lots of little touches, like in the ambiguous way Minmei treats Hikaru throughout most of the series was something I’ve encountered in the Asian dating scene. It is entirely possible that if you're not familiar with how Asian-Asian dating works a very few of the cultural cues might not work for you. There are some poignant moments, like the time when Misa Hayase waits a whole day at a road side cafĂ© for Hikaru, who shows up in the evening after being much delayed. While Misa is waiting, a little friendly dog comes up to her and she looks at him and says, "Hey, you’re alone too." She picks him up and starts feeding him but in the middle of it the dog’s owner (a little girl that we can’t quite see) shouts the dog’s name from across the street and the dog leaps out of Misa’s arms and bounds towards the little girl. Hikaru shows up right after that and the parallels that the preceding scene has with Misa's relationship with Hikaru and Minmei just about broke my heart. These quiet scenes become by far the most powerful ones. They have a haunting quality that sticks with you even after you’re done watching the series.
While technology mostly stays in the background, the characters in Macross are facile with it, and use it naturally as part of day-to-day life. In one episode, for instance, as Hikaru escorts Misa's shuttle towards Earth, he sends a farewell message to her by signalling (in Morse code) with the wing-tip lights on his fighter.
There are quite a number of corny scenes however. Given the series' preoccupation with romance, it shouldn't surprise you that characters find themselves working through their issues while bombs are literally falling around them. But then again, I've already told you that Macross is a trashy romance, haven't I?
One of the things I missed watching the series in Singapore was the end title credits. The end credit sequence shows a helmet, and a photo album. A hand moves in and turns the photo album’s pages, revealing photographs of Minmei, and Minmei and Hikaru. The helmet is a standin for Hikaru’s pilot’s helmet, but what you don’t realize is that the hand moving the photo album isn’t Hikaru’s (the helmet doesn't belong to Hikaru, either)! The scene shows up 28 episodes into the series. The final episode ends with a freeze-frame, and a hand turns the page over to the end of the photo album while the caption comes up "2012: So long!", giving one a sense of closure about the story as a whole. The end theme is also sung by a different performer for the last episode. It is little touches like that that distinguish the long running Japanese/Asian TV series from the American series. It is quite obvious that Macross was a story planned with a beginning, middle, climax, and end right from the start, while American series (except for the mini-series, which don't typically run as long as the Asian series) do not usually have the coherency of a single vision guiding their work.
Animation
All TV animation series have to be relatively low budget. Watching all 36 episodes in order in relatively short time gives you a very good sense as to which episodes were important to the producers. There are entire episodes that seem stitched togther from flashbacks in order to either let the audience catch up from the previous episode or in order to meet a deadline. Then there are episodes like the military climax, or the last 4 episodes of the series, where the producers pull out all stops---the machines and ships look almost real, and the women and men look gorgeous. It almost looks as if Misa Hayase underwent a facelift in the last 8 episodes of the series! Even in the best-drawn episodes, however, budget seems a primary consideration: you can definitely recognize battle scenes that have been cut and spliced from previous episodes. However, don’t let this deter you—even the badly drawn episodes have the virtue that the story line is consistently high quality. There’s an episode devoted to Hikaru’s dream sequence that is hilarious, for instance. It is not at all unusual to find humor thrown into the mix to good effect, and even the serious episodes can have a bit of farce thrown in.
Minmei's singing
A frequent source of derision whenever the Macross comes up among anime fans is Minmei's pop songs. If you like Japanese pop, there's nothing wrong with her performance. Iijima Mari is a pop/idol singer who did voice-acting as Lynn Minmei when she was nineteen (Minmei is 16 at the start of the TV series), so not only was she a good fit for Minmei's voice, she could sing as well. If your exposure to Minmei was through the American dubbed series, you will definitely find Iijima Mari to be at least someone who can hit the notes when she wants to. That said, however, even Iijima Mari is embarrassed about the most overused song in Macross, Watashi no Kare wa Pairotto (My boyfriend is a pilot). Apparently, things that weren't embarrassing to sing when you were nineteen have a way of catching up to you when you're 35. Well, you can always fast-forward through the singing without missing anything.
The background music in Macross is reasonably well-done. In fact, if you watch any kind of Asian television, you will run into some low-budget Taiwanese shows that have "borrowed" background music from Macross. (Presumably, they just cut their background music from the myriad CDs that have sprung up) If you're going to buy a soundtrack album, the movie soundtrack has the best orchestrations.
Is it worth 18 hours?
So how do I feel about spending 18 hours watching this series over a period of a few weeks? I’d do it again. I wouldn’t do it unless I could watch all of it, since you will not be satisfied without getting to know the climax and the ending, and there’s no easy way to skip episodes without missing some character or plot development. There is one catch-up episode around episode 12 that you can skip because it’s used to catch laggards up with the series, and that’s about it. If I had only 2 hours to spend, I’d definitely just watch the last 4 episodes or perhaps the last 8 episodes if I had more time. (These are the "reconstruction of Earth" episodes—other science fiction shows have the heroes saving the world, this one has the heroes failing to save the Earth) These episodes focus almost solely on the romance, but the caveat is that you’ll miss a lot without getting the setup that the first twenty-something episodes give you. For instance, Roy Fokker plays a major part early on in the series, and episode 33 doesn’t make much sense if you don’t know who he is. If you can, watch the series in the original Japanese. Not only is the voice acting much better, but you’ll get a stronger sense of what gets lost in the translation. (I’ll never forgive whoever translated "Merry Christmas" into a long awkward Chinese sentence!) There’s a surprising amount of English in the TV series, too, so you might not find yourself as lost as you might imagine.
The movie
A final word before going into the hyperlinks. The movie isn’t the same story as the TV series. If you’ve seen the movie, it will still be worth your while to watch the TV series, just as it’s worth your while to read a novel of a movie that was made from a novel. There are many plot differences between the movie and the TV series. Outright contradictions are common: in the TV series, Minmei is never kidnapped by the Zentraedi, while in the movie, she was captured and persuades the aliens to return her with her songs! Your feelings about the characters will be much stronger if you watch the TV series. If you had to choose one or the other (and given that the movie’s only 90 minutes but the TV series is 18 hours, they’re not quite comparable), the TV series is definitely better. The movie, as might be expected, has gorgeous animation, and if you want to see the characters drawn at their best, that’s a good place to see them!
Web-sites
Just a note. I've tried to keep spoilers away from this review of Macross in the hopes that you'll go ahead and try to watch it. Some of the hyperlinks below contain spoilers that you might not want to see. (In particular, the compendium site can be very dangerous)
Introduction
I first saw Macross when I was a kid of about 15 in Singapore, rushing home from school every Thursday evening to try to catch the latest episode, which had been dubbed into Mandarin by the Taiwanese. My brother recently got a DVD player, borrowed the entire TV series (36 episodes) from his friend Jason, and we watched it all over again, this time in the original Japanese with Chinese subtitles. What a difference 13 years make!
Macross is a girl’s story
For some reason, when you’re a kid, you don’t notice that Macross is really a girl’s story. Sure, it’s got giant transforming robots. It’s also got space batttles, lots of neat gadgets, and a cool science fiction plot that stands up even to adult scrutiny (well, the corny parts of the science fiction plot are motivated by the romantic bent of the whole series). But the heart and soul of Macross is the romance between the main characters. Nobody’s motivated by anything else!
The plot revolves around 3 main characters. Hikaru Ichijou, a boy pilot who grows up eventually to be a squadron leader, Linn Minmei (also spelled Lynn MinMay), a school girl of about 16 who wins a beauty contest and goes on to become a pop singer, and Misa Hayase (a good translation might be Lisa Hayes, which the American "Robotech" uses), a flight controller/battle coordinator for the ship, Macross. Of course, there’s a love triangle between them, and how the interaction between the characters play out and whom Hikaru eventually decides in favor of presents the series with its romantic climax. To give you an idea of how unimportant the military climax was, it occurs fully 8 episodes before the end of the series, to give the creators more time to focus on what was obviously dear to their hearts. The science fiction elements of the plot are discussed elsewhere (see below for a collection of links to various home pages), so I won’t go into them in detail.
So, ok, Macross is a trashy romance/soap opera. But if all soap operas were like this I’d watch them. None of the characters are stilted or artificial. Hikaru seems like a dork at times, but he does wake up to his situations and corrects himself. Lynn Minmei seems like your stereotypical cute airhead at first, but even she has to suffer the consequences of her decisions and becomes a stronger person. Misa Hayase seems like a rigid, strictly military person, but she suffers from her own bouts of insecurities and when she eventually gives in to her feelings becomes such a sympathetic character that you find yourself rooting for her. Nobody’s a bad guy (or a bad girl), and character development is handled consistently and with great care. Everybody has to suffer a little in order to grow up, and the primary characters in Macross are not immune to suffering. A common theme seems to be that the characters have to let go of their desires in order to deserve what they desire. But unlike the morality plays you see in Saturday morning cartoons, these themes are handled very subtly (so subtly that they were lost on me, of course, when I was a kid).
How has Macross aged over the last 15 years for me personally? What I’ve found is that the situations I found myself in over the last 10 years or so were in some ways paralleled in Macross. There are lots of little touches, like in the ambiguous way Minmei treats Hikaru throughout most of the series was something I’ve encountered in the Asian dating scene. It is entirely possible that if you're not familiar with how Asian-Asian dating works a very few of the cultural cues might not work for you. There are some poignant moments, like the time when Misa Hayase waits a whole day at a road side cafĂ© for Hikaru, who shows up in the evening after being much delayed. While Misa is waiting, a little friendly dog comes up to her and she looks at him and says, "Hey, you’re alone too." She picks him up and starts feeding him but in the middle of it the dog’s owner (a little girl that we can’t quite see) shouts the dog’s name from across the street and the dog leaps out of Misa’s arms and bounds towards the little girl. Hikaru shows up right after that and the parallels that the preceding scene has with Misa's relationship with Hikaru and Minmei just about broke my heart. These quiet scenes become by far the most powerful ones. They have a haunting quality that sticks with you even after you’re done watching the series.
While technology mostly stays in the background, the characters in Macross are facile with it, and use it naturally as part of day-to-day life. In one episode, for instance, as Hikaru escorts Misa's shuttle towards Earth, he sends a farewell message to her by signalling (in Morse code) with the wing-tip lights on his fighter.
There are quite a number of corny scenes however. Given the series' preoccupation with romance, it shouldn't surprise you that characters find themselves working through their issues while bombs are literally falling around them. But then again, I've already told you that Macross is a trashy romance, haven't I?
One of the things I missed watching the series in Singapore was the end title credits. The end credit sequence shows a helmet, and a photo album. A hand moves in and turns the photo album’s pages, revealing photographs of Minmei, and Minmei and Hikaru. The helmet is a standin for Hikaru’s pilot’s helmet, but what you don’t realize is that the hand moving the photo album isn’t Hikaru’s (the helmet doesn't belong to Hikaru, either)! The scene shows up 28 episodes into the series. The final episode ends with a freeze-frame, and a hand turns the page over to the end of the photo album while the caption comes up "2012: So long!", giving one a sense of closure about the story as a whole. The end theme is also sung by a different performer for the last episode. It is little touches like that that distinguish the long running Japanese/Asian TV series from the American series. It is quite obvious that Macross was a story planned with a beginning, middle, climax, and end right from the start, while American series (except for the mini-series, which don't typically run as long as the Asian series) do not usually have the coherency of a single vision guiding their work.
Animation
All TV animation series have to be relatively low budget. Watching all 36 episodes in order in relatively short time gives you a very good sense as to which episodes were important to the producers. There are entire episodes that seem stitched togther from flashbacks in order to either let the audience catch up from the previous episode or in order to meet a deadline. Then there are episodes like the military climax, or the last 4 episodes of the series, where the producers pull out all stops---the machines and ships look almost real, and the women and men look gorgeous. It almost looks as if Misa Hayase underwent a facelift in the last 8 episodes of the series! Even in the best-drawn episodes, however, budget seems a primary consideration: you can definitely recognize battle scenes that have been cut and spliced from previous episodes. However, don’t let this deter you—even the badly drawn episodes have the virtue that the story line is consistently high quality. There’s an episode devoted to Hikaru’s dream sequence that is hilarious, for instance. It is not at all unusual to find humor thrown into the mix to good effect, and even the serious episodes can have a bit of farce thrown in.
Minmei's singing
A frequent source of derision whenever the Macross comes up among anime fans is Minmei's pop songs. If you like Japanese pop, there's nothing wrong with her performance. Iijima Mari is a pop/idol singer who did voice-acting as Lynn Minmei when she was nineteen (Minmei is 16 at the start of the TV series), so not only was she a good fit for Minmei's voice, she could sing as well. If your exposure to Minmei was through the American dubbed series, you will definitely find Iijima Mari to be at least someone who can hit the notes when she wants to. That said, however, even Iijima Mari is embarrassed about the most overused song in Macross, Watashi no Kare wa Pairotto (My boyfriend is a pilot). Apparently, things that weren't embarrassing to sing when you were nineteen have a way of catching up to you when you're 35. Well, you can always fast-forward through the singing without missing anything.
The background music in Macross is reasonably well-done. In fact, if you watch any kind of Asian television, you will run into some low-budget Taiwanese shows that have "borrowed" background music from Macross. (Presumably, they just cut their background music from the myriad CDs that have sprung up) If you're going to buy a soundtrack album, the movie soundtrack has the best orchestrations.
Is it worth 18 hours?
So how do I feel about spending 18 hours watching this series over a period of a few weeks? I’d do it again. I wouldn’t do it unless I could watch all of it, since you will not be satisfied without getting to know the climax and the ending, and there’s no easy way to skip episodes without missing some character or plot development. There is one catch-up episode around episode 12 that you can skip because it’s used to catch laggards up with the series, and that’s about it. If I had only 2 hours to spend, I’d definitely just watch the last 4 episodes or perhaps the last 8 episodes if I had more time. (These are the "reconstruction of Earth" episodes—other science fiction shows have the heroes saving the world, this one has the heroes failing to save the Earth) These episodes focus almost solely on the romance, but the caveat is that you’ll miss a lot without getting the setup that the first twenty-something episodes give you. For instance, Roy Fokker plays a major part early on in the series, and episode 33 doesn’t make much sense if you don’t know who he is. If you can, watch the series in the original Japanese. Not only is the voice acting much better, but you’ll get a stronger sense of what gets lost in the translation. (I’ll never forgive whoever translated "Merry Christmas" into a long awkward Chinese sentence!) There’s a surprising amount of English in the TV series, too, so you might not find yourself as lost as you might imagine.
The movie
A final word before going into the hyperlinks. The movie isn’t the same story as the TV series. If you’ve seen the movie, it will still be worth your while to watch the TV series, just as it’s worth your while to read a novel of a movie that was made from a novel. There are many plot differences between the movie and the TV series. Outright contradictions are common: in the TV series, Minmei is never kidnapped by the Zentraedi, while in the movie, she was captured and persuades the aliens to return her with her songs! Your feelings about the characters will be much stronger if you watch the TV series. If you had to choose one or the other (and given that the movie’s only 90 minutes but the TV series is 18 hours, they’re not quite comparable), the TV series is definitely better. The movie, as might be expected, has gorgeous animation, and if you want to see the characters drawn at their best, that’s a good place to see them!
Web-sites
Just a note. I've tried to keep spoilers away from this review of Macross in the hopes that you'll go ahead and try to watch it. Some of the hyperlinks below contain spoilers that you might not want to see. (In particular, the compendium site can be very dangerous)
- The Official Macross Website. Hosted in Japan, this is a very poor site with relatively few stills from the movie or the TV series. However, the description of the characters in "Japlish" is hilarious! If you want to see pictures of the characters I've mentioned, this site contains no spoilers.
- The Macross Compendium. This is the mother of all fan-sites, and has a chronology as well as explanations of all the varying Macross TV series.
Friday, February 27, 2015
Review: Arrow Season 1
Green Arrow is definitely one of the second tier heroes in the DC universe. This is both a good thing and a bad thing when you build a TV show like Arrow after him. There's not a ton of baggage associated with the character, so the writers and directors have free reign over what to make of him. I don't even remember his origin story from the comics.
I watched the TV show on Blu Ray on a HDTV system setup at optimal viewing distance. The transfer and quality of the picture is amazing. You can see every pore on the faces of the characters on closeup. This is a show where the production values are definitely way up there.
The plot revolves around Oliver Queen (Green Arrow, though he's never referred to as such in the show), a billionaire by inheritance who was rescued off an island he was stuck on for 5 years. The story then flips back and forth between his time on the island, where he went from being a playboy to becoming a badass, and his time in Starling City, where he uses his badass MMA skills (with several trick arrows) to beat up bad guys and in some cases kill them.
The story is dark: as dark as the Batman movies, but not as deep as say, Buffy. It's decent watching, but I wouldn't put it up there with my favorite TV series (either Buffy or Macross). Nevertheless, the set pieces are jaw-droppingly beautiful, and tastes vary so you might as well take a look.
Mildly recommended.
I watched the TV show on Blu Ray on a HDTV system setup at optimal viewing distance. The transfer and quality of the picture is amazing. You can see every pore on the faces of the characters on closeup. This is a show where the production values are definitely way up there.
The plot revolves around Oliver Queen (Green Arrow, though he's never referred to as such in the show), a billionaire by inheritance who was rescued off an island he was stuck on for 5 years. The story then flips back and forth between his time on the island, where he went from being a playboy to becoming a badass, and his time in Starling City, where he uses his badass MMA skills (with several trick arrows) to beat up bad guys and in some cases kill them.
The story is dark: as dark as the Batman movies, but not as deep as say, Buffy. It's decent watching, but I wouldn't put it up there with my favorite TV series (either Buffy or Macross). Nevertheless, the set pieces are jaw-droppingly beautiful, and tastes vary so you might as well take a look.
Mildly recommended.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Review: Console Wars
Console Wars is Blake Harris' account of the rise and fall of Sega of America during the 1990s. Despite the title, it focuses almost exclusively on Sega, devotes relatively little time to Nintendo, and Sony's efforts only makes cameo appearances, even though it was the Sony that would ultimately dominate the generation.
Written like a novel, the protagonist of the account is Tom Kalinske, the CEO Sega recruited from Mattel to run Sega of America. Deficient in the account are any technical details, such as the actual creation of any of the consoles or games that feature during the actual wars.
This is as it should be. Sega of America was chiefly a marketing operation. While they had minor inputs as far as the character of Sonic the Hedgehog went, they couldn't dictate either hardware or software strategy, though they did bankroll a few games, such as Ecco the Dolphin.
This is by no means a bad thing. As a technical person, I've always been mystified by marketing and the efforts that go behind it. My preference, of course, has always been to work on product that would sell themselves, ranging from Purify, to of course, Google search. Harris does a good job de-mystifying that process, and explaining (through illustration) how important market positioning, branding and courting the press matters.
In the end, of course, we all know the end of the story. Marketing can only go so far: it makes the difference when your product is actually technically competitive, but no amount of marketing could save the Sega Saturn from the technical onslaught of the Playstation. It's a pity that Harris didn't go into that second half of the story, but again, as a story largely about marketing, Console Wars ended at exactly the right place.
Ultimately, the book illustrates a key principle in technology companies: you cannot control your fate without control over the technical development of future products. No matter how brilliant an executive Kalinske was, when he could not persuade his masters at Sega Japan to work on machines that would match the competition, he was doomed to failure.
The book also clearly illustrates the problems and politics associated with a multi-national corporate organization. Kalinske's American team clearly found the Japanese team inscrutable, and were frequently frustrated by Sega Japan's inability to pay attention to them despite their success. This is a great lesson for any one who struggles to get their remote office recognized from halfway across the world.
Recommended.
Written like a novel, the protagonist of the account is Tom Kalinske, the CEO Sega recruited from Mattel to run Sega of America. Deficient in the account are any technical details, such as the actual creation of any of the consoles or games that feature during the actual wars.
This is as it should be. Sega of America was chiefly a marketing operation. While they had minor inputs as far as the character of Sonic the Hedgehog went, they couldn't dictate either hardware or software strategy, though they did bankroll a few games, such as Ecco the Dolphin.
This is by no means a bad thing. As a technical person, I've always been mystified by marketing and the efforts that go behind it. My preference, of course, has always been to work on product that would sell themselves, ranging from Purify, to of course, Google search. Harris does a good job de-mystifying that process, and explaining (through illustration) how important market positioning, branding and courting the press matters.
In the end, of course, we all know the end of the story. Marketing can only go so far: it makes the difference when your product is actually technically competitive, but no amount of marketing could save the Sega Saturn from the technical onslaught of the Playstation. It's a pity that Harris didn't go into that second half of the story, but again, as a story largely about marketing, Console Wars ended at exactly the right place.
Ultimately, the book illustrates a key principle in technology companies: you cannot control your fate without control over the technical development of future products. No matter how brilliant an executive Kalinske was, when he could not persuade his masters at Sega Japan to work on machines that would match the competition, he was doomed to failure.
The book also clearly illustrates the problems and politics associated with a multi-national corporate organization. Kalinske's American team clearly found the Japanese team inscrutable, and were frequently frustrated by Sega Japan's inability to pay attention to them despite their success. This is a great lesson for any one who struggles to get their remote office recognized from halfway across the world.
Recommended.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
First Impression: Co-Motion Periscope Quad Convertible (Triplet configuration)
Monday, February 23, 2015
Review: The Pillars of the Earth
The Pillars of the Earth is Ken Follett's historical novel about the building of a Cathedral in Kingsbridge, England in the 1100s. It's certainly not the kind of the book I usually read, and I expected to stop reading after a couple of chapters, but it rapidly become compelling reading and I found myself reading it continually. It's bee a while since a book captivated me, and it was an unexpected pleasure.
What makes the book interesting is the description of political maneuvering throughout the country at the time, with the church, the earls and kings all maneuvering to rule the land. There are a few interesting romances in the book, and they lend human interest to the entire affair, but are really secondary to the overall plot.
I found the characters interesting, and the depiction of the treatment of women in the era is probably accurate, with a few anachronisms that I never would have known about without referring to Wikipedia.
What's fun about the book is that the author plays a very long game. Insignificant events right at the end of the book get used later on, which then leads to interesting plot points. The villains are suitably villainous, and the protagonists, while not without their fault, are plausible. For instance, Prior Philips grows from being politically naive to becoming able to take advantage of setbacks and turn them into strengths, even to the point of humbling a king.
The book is written in clear transparent style, and is very accessible as a result. The language is clearly not that which would have been spoken during that era, but on the other hand, I'd much rather not have to struggle through Old English or Latin in order to understand what's happening.
I can recommend this book, even if you're not normally a fan of historical fiction, and have no real interest in religious affairs.
What makes the book interesting is the description of political maneuvering throughout the country at the time, with the church, the earls and kings all maneuvering to rule the land. There are a few interesting romances in the book, and they lend human interest to the entire affair, but are really secondary to the overall plot.
I found the characters interesting, and the depiction of the treatment of women in the era is probably accurate, with a few anachronisms that I never would have known about without referring to Wikipedia.
What's fun about the book is that the author plays a very long game. Insignificant events right at the end of the book get used later on, which then leads to interesting plot points. The villains are suitably villainous, and the protagonists, while not without their fault, are plausible. For instance, Prior Philips grows from being politically naive to becoming able to take advantage of setbacks and turn them into strengths, even to the point of humbling a king.
The book is written in clear transparent style, and is very accessible as a result. The language is clearly not that which would have been spoken during that era, but on the other hand, I'd much rather not have to struggle through Old English or Latin in order to understand what's happening.
I can recommend this book, even if you're not normally a fan of historical fiction, and have no real interest in religious affairs.
Friday, February 20, 2015
My Color Rant
Like 8% of men, I'm color blind. In normal day to day life, this isn't much of a disability. For instance, traffic lights are designed by men, so the red in the light is tinted with yellow, and the green in the light is tinted with blue, so the difference in the colors are very very distinctive. The same goes for lights for entering and leaving ports.
In recent years, the most annoying color-sensitive objects are those designed for the general consumers by UI designers who don't know any better. In particular, those devices that are not designed for use by men tend are the greatest offenders.
Take, for instance, Canon's digital cameras. The S90 was clearly designed by a person sensitive to color blindness. The charger had 2 LEDs: one for charging, one for charged. Even if you were color blind, you could use the position of the lit light to tell when a battery had been charged. My Makita power tools and the Canon 5DMk2 (and other professional series cameras) are also designed correctly. Rather than depend on color, the chargers blink while charging and become steady when charged. Note that making devices that the color blind can use in no way makes the experience worse for those who are not color blind!
By contrast, the Canon S100 was not designed by the same people. Instead of 2 LEDs, it was designed to have only 1 LED. That flipped from red to green when charged. And of course, there was no way for me to tell when the battery is charged, which drives me bonkers. Countless cell phones have the same issue (though to my relief, the Sony Xperia Z1's charged indicator flips between red and blue instead of red and green, which is at least usable by me, though not by a mono-chromat). And of course, web-sites that use red and green are also similarly annoying.
Do industrial design schools or UI design classes in schools not have disabilities/color-blindness studies as part of their curriculum? Or do those designers just not care? How can even one company like Canon have such completely disparate policies for products in the same product line?
In recent years, the most annoying color-sensitive objects are those designed for the general consumers by UI designers who don't know any better. In particular, those devices that are not designed for use by men tend are the greatest offenders.
Take, for instance, Canon's digital cameras. The S90 was clearly designed by a person sensitive to color blindness. The charger had 2 LEDs: one for charging, one for charged. Even if you were color blind, you could use the position of the lit light to tell when a battery had been charged. My Makita power tools and the Canon 5DMk2 (and other professional series cameras) are also designed correctly. Rather than depend on color, the chargers blink while charging and become steady when charged. Note that making devices that the color blind can use in no way makes the experience worse for those who are not color blind!
By contrast, the Canon S100 was not designed by the same people. Instead of 2 LEDs, it was designed to have only 1 LED. That flipped from red to green when charged. And of course, there was no way for me to tell when the battery is charged, which drives me bonkers. Countless cell phones have the same issue (though to my relief, the Sony Xperia Z1's charged indicator flips between red and blue instead of red and green, which is at least usable by me, though not by a mono-chromat). And of course, web-sites that use red and green are also similarly annoying.
Do industrial design schools or UI design classes in schools not have disabilities/color-blindness studies as part of their curriculum? Or do those designers just not care? How can even one company like Canon have such completely disparate policies for products in the same product line?
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Returning to the Xperia Z1
I broke my Xperia Z1 in mid December, and shipped it back to Sony for a warranty repair. Not knowing if I was going to ever get it back (Sony once hung on to one of my RMAs for over a year!), I bought a Lumia 635. Then last week, Sony finally sent me back a new (complete with box) Xperia Z1 6906, which wasn't the same as the 6903 which I had purchased. The difference is that the 6906 will handle LTE in the US, while the 6903 model has a few bands that are more frequently used outside the US. Since you're going to be restricted to 2G outside the US if you're mostly on T-mobile anyway, this was actually an improvement for me.
A few things that I miss between the Z1 vs the Lumia 635:
A few things that I miss between the Z1 vs the Lumia 635:
- The Lumia 635 has phenomenal battery life. It's a weaker phone with a smaller screen, so I wasn't tempted to use it as much, but with the Xperia Z1, I turned on all the stamina mode features of the Z1 this time around, and have to get into the habit of keeping the phone charged the whole time. The day I didn't do that, battery life was abysmal.
- The smaller Lumia 635 and the fact that it's cheaper meant that the fitness tracking feature was actually useful. I could stick it in any pocket, and didn't really care if I was going to sit on it. There's a lot to be said for having a phone so cheap that I could buy 6 of it for the price of the Z1. The compactness can be solved by buying a compact Z series phone, but you can't solve for cheapness any other way than by spending less.
But there are also many reasons to be relieved to get the Z1 back:
- That nice big screen is really sweet. When using it to shop on Amazon, or use Feedly, I never felt cramped or constrained.
- Apps. It's funny how Outlook is much better on Android than on Windows Phone. This is because Microsoft bought Accompli, but it's still nice. Similarly, I had to pay for Phonly (a view into Feedly) but Feedly on Android was free. People frequently say that having a forked Android store in the form of the Amazon App store hurts the Android ecosystem, but I disagree. Having 2 stores to shop from creates competition, which means that overall prices are lower for apps, and Amazon frequently gives me discounts or free coins to buy apps with. What this means is that apps I might have had to pay for on Windows such as Plex are essentially free on Android. Even better, because the Amazon appstore is not tied to a Google account the way the Google Play app store is, my wife gets those apps for free too!
- That camera on the Z1 is just amazing for a smart phone camera. Enough said. As a matter of fact, together with the IP58 waterproofing rating that's the reason to get a Z series smartphone.
- Waterproofing: lots of people claim that they don't see this as a key feature. The first time you rinse off the phone casually to get rid of fingerprints, etc., everyone else in the room goes, woah, you can do that?
- Power. Smartphone processors simply haven't been improving as rapidly over the last few years, so the Z1 is still within striking distance of current flagship phone performance. This is no big deal for typical reading e-mail, checking RSS feed, etc., as the 635 shows, but for photo editing and processing videos, it's nice to be able to do this without having to resort to a desktop or a laptop.
All in all, after several months of using the Z1 and comparing it against the 635, I will admit that the improvements over the cheaper phone is probably justified, but requires surprising numbers of tweaks (e.g., to power management) to get there.
The current model Xperia Z3 Compact and Z3 phones reportedly do not suffer from the power management tweaking required to get decent battery life. They do, however, come at a much higher price ($476 and $575 are the current Amazon.com prices), which mean that they're not as immediately a no-brainer compared to the Nexus 5 as the Z1/Z1 compact are. However, since the Nexus 5 is no longer easily available, and the nearest comparable is the Moto X ($399.99), compared to those phones, the Xperia Z3 series would be a no-brainer.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Review: The Fifth Discipline
The Fifth Discipline is Peter Senge's management book about building learning organizations. I first read it in the 1990s, and recently read the new edition again. Re-reading it again nearly 20 years later is definitely an experience that's different from the first time.
As a writer, The Fifth Discipline is verbose, meanders all over the place, repeats itself frequently, and name-drops obscure people that you'd never have heard of. These properties makes it a difficult and frequently frustrating read.
As a manager, however, the fifth discipline encodes some ideas about leadership that I've found nowhere else, and hammers home certain ideas in ways that not only make sense, but have you excited about putting them in place.
The central premise of the book is that human organizations are dynamic living systems which have non-linear behavior in response to events and change. This includes several properties that make leadership challenging:
As a writer, The Fifth Discipline is verbose, meanders all over the place, repeats itself frequently, and name-drops obscure people that you'd never have heard of. These properties makes it a difficult and frequently frustrating read.
As a manager, however, the fifth discipline encodes some ideas about leadership that I've found nowhere else, and hammers home certain ideas in ways that not only make sense, but have you excited about putting them in place.
The central premise of the book is that human organizations are dynamic living systems which have non-linear behavior in response to events and change. This includes several properties that make leadership challenging:
- Many incentive systems improve performance in the short term but decrease performance over the long term.
- Many feedback cycles are extremely long, far beyond what humans were evolved to deal with, and exacerbate human tendencies to either blame individuals for poor performance or put in place patch after patch to try to solve problems rather than deal with an integrative approach to problem solving. In particular, who you hire, who you fire, and who you promote has performance impact on your organization measured in years, making it difficult to get better because the feedback cycle takes so long.
- Most long term solutions and systems approach to problem solving are counter-intuitive and difficult to sell to short-term oriented business cultures.
The tool that the book uses to illustrate this is the Beer Game, developed at MIT's Sloan school of management. The structure of the game ensures that very similar outcome happens despite having explained the rules to very smart people and having very smart people play them. The game illustrates that given a poorly structure system and organization in place, it doesn't matter who's playing the game---it's very difficult to do a good job. In fact, the wider economy exhibits this behavior in the form of bubbles of various forms.
You can see many examples of this kind of organizational pitfalls in many Silicon Valley tech companies:
- Conventional wisdom is that whenever you promote a great engineer into being a manager you lose a great engineer and get a lousy manager. Companies frequently therefore hire managers from the outside. In the short term this solves the above problem. In the long term, however, outside managers frequently dilute the culture, and more perniciously, by not having a culture of promoting from within, in the long term you get demoralized employees and end up with retention problems.
- I can think of one case where a great engineer was promoted into a lead. This person only worked at night and never met her team-mates. She was, however, very productive (since she never actually spent any time on leadership). This led to a promotion since leads weren't evaluated on leadership. Other leads in the department took note, however, and soon leadership was devalued as everyone followed her lead. The company would end up with a culture where leads would grab all the great work for themselves, since promotions depended not on ensuring that your team was successful, but on individual performance.
The book not only illustrates the approach (called "Systems Thinking"), but in one of the appendices has a complete catalog of corporate dysfunction patterns, with diagrams of feedback cycles, diagnoses, and solutions. So if you're in a hurry, just read "The Beer Game" chapter, the section on "Systems Thinking", and then flip straight over to Appendix 2. Everything else can be treated as fluff.
Recommended.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Review: The Walking Dead Compendium #2
The Walking Dead Compendium #2 is follows straight on from the first volume, which already put Rick Grimes, the protagonist through hell and back.
My big beef with the first volume was the sheer selfishness of people involved, and the implausibility that somewhere, someone hasn't actually tried to build civilization and society. When you think about the zombie menace as portrayed in The Walking Dead, they're simply not that hard to deal with.
Well, this second volume addressed most of my concerns. Rather than one nasty community after another, this volume mostly deals with a community that recruits Rick's band, integrates them into society, and then actually makes good use of what they're good at. It's very well written, and the plot twists aren't silly and stupid.
Rick himself has an epiphany about the reason civilization exists, and the series begins to turn the corner. Color me impressed. Rarely do comic books that become this successful address their biggest failings, and I can see this series becoming really good.
Recommended.
My big beef with the first volume was the sheer selfishness of people involved, and the implausibility that somewhere, someone hasn't actually tried to build civilization and society. When you think about the zombie menace as portrayed in The Walking Dead, they're simply not that hard to deal with.
Well, this second volume addressed most of my concerns. Rather than one nasty community after another, this volume mostly deals with a community that recruits Rick's band, integrates them into society, and then actually makes good use of what they're good at. It's very well written, and the plot twists aren't silly and stupid.
Rick himself has an epiphany about the reason civilization exists, and the series begins to turn the corner. Color me impressed. Rarely do comic books that become this successful address their biggest failings, and I can see this series becoming really good.
Recommended.
Monday, February 16, 2015
Swimming Music, Round 2
After a year and a half, my Pyle swimming headphones had a mechanical breakage which made them unusable for my swimming workouts. Long before the mechanical damage, however, the headphones had greatly diminished in sound quality, presumably through water working its way into the headphones. Replacing the ear pieces didn't help any, so I decided to switch players.
For the player, I picked the Aerb 4G IPX-8 MP3 player. It's a nice, no-frills player with a clip that clips into your goggles, while charging through the headphone port, which is the first time I'd seen that design. This is nice, because there are no fiddly doors to open and close and wear out and let water in. The problem is that it doesn't have a shuffle feature, so it'll just play all songs from beginning to end. If you want the shuffle feature you might want to upgrade to the version that comes with an FM Radio. Not having shuffle doesn't bother me much so I kept this. The battery lasts forever. I charged it once when I bought it and 2 months later my twice weekly swimming workout still has not destroyed them.
Now, the headphones that come with this (and other swimming MP3 players) are crapThey won't stay in your ear, or provide a decent seal to prevent water from coming in. However, decent headphones for swimming cost only $4.59 on Amazon, with the caveat that it'll take about a month for them to arrive via the slow boat from China. But these cheap headphones are amazing. They come with 3 clips to clip onto your goggles, and you can flip turn, and thrash about in the water and they absolutely will not come off. They seal decently and provide relatively great sound in the water. I'm buying a second pair.
Recommended.
For the player, I picked the Aerb 4G IPX-8 MP3 player. It's a nice, no-frills player with a clip that clips into your goggles, while charging through the headphone port, which is the first time I'd seen that design. This is nice, because there are no fiddly doors to open and close and wear out and let water in. The problem is that it doesn't have a shuffle feature, so it'll just play all songs from beginning to end. If you want the shuffle feature you might want to upgrade to the version that comes with an FM Radio. Not having shuffle doesn't bother me much so I kept this. The battery lasts forever. I charged it once when I bought it and 2 months later my twice weekly swimming workout still has not destroyed them.
Now, the headphones that come with this (and other swimming MP3 players) are crapThey won't stay in your ear, or provide a decent seal to prevent water from coming in. However, decent headphones for swimming cost only $4.59 on Amazon, with the caveat that it'll take about a month for them to arrive via the slow boat from China. But these cheap headphones are amazing. They come with 3 clips to clip onto your goggles, and you can flip turn, and thrash about in the water and they absolutely will not come off. They seal decently and provide relatively great sound in the water. I'm buying a second pair.
Recommended.
Friday, February 13, 2015
Review: The Walking Dead Compendium 1
I'm a sucker for deals, so even though I'm not a fan of zombies, The Walking Dead Compendium 1 & 2 were on sale on Google Play books, so I bought them to read. I'd read some of the early parts of the series years before, but they weren't compelling enough to draw me in. Binge reading entirely 48 issue series at a time, however, is a different experience.
First of all, in the time since the original comic series came out, story telling in the zombie-plagued future has had better story telling than when the series first started. It's no longer stupid horror stories, which I understand that this series pioneered. When compared to say, The Last of Us, The Walking Dead no longer stands as an example of how to do future dystopia right. In fact, The Last of Us being "only" a 12 hour video game feels like it does a much better job due to tighter story telling and a confined plot. The art style in The Last of Us, of course, is much much stronger than the black and white Walking Dead.
There's much to like about the series, however. The world portrayed is strong, and is as much of a character as the lead character, Rick. As a foreign born immigrant reading these books, however, it strikes me as how uniquely American these books are. The strong individualistic culture of "I've got mine, screw you!" comes across extremely well in these stories, and they are stories you wouldn't find in other cultures. For instance, at a crucial juncture in this book, a few of the characters decide that they'd stand a much better chance of survival by abandoning the group and running away, leaving the rest to die. You'd think that people who've depended on each other for survival for that long (well over a year) couldn't do that to each other, but in the individualistic libertarian morality play that is The Walking Dead, this isn't just plausible, it's the right thing to do. (They do come back later but the rationality behind that behavior isn't explained and they are punished for it)
If something like The Walking Dead was written by say, the Japanese, it'd be much more a story about how society comes together to build a future in a desperate future, rather than a story about constant betrayal and stupid decisions.
If you enjoy drama, betrayal, and a feeling of desperation as well as insight into why American culture is constantly about the strong screwing over the weak, you cannot find better source material than The Walking Dead series. But quite frankly, I wouldn't want to live in a world filled with idiots, and as Wallace Stegner frequently pointed out, American society and history is actually filled with examples of people building institutions and societies, rather than doing their own selfish things.
First of all, in the time since the original comic series came out, story telling in the zombie-plagued future has had better story telling than when the series first started. It's no longer stupid horror stories, which I understand that this series pioneered. When compared to say, The Last of Us, The Walking Dead no longer stands as an example of how to do future dystopia right. In fact, The Last of Us being "only" a 12 hour video game feels like it does a much better job due to tighter story telling and a confined plot. The art style in The Last of Us, of course, is much much stronger than the black and white Walking Dead.
There's much to like about the series, however. The world portrayed is strong, and is as much of a character as the lead character, Rick. As a foreign born immigrant reading these books, however, it strikes me as how uniquely American these books are. The strong individualistic culture of "I've got mine, screw you!" comes across extremely well in these stories, and they are stories you wouldn't find in other cultures. For instance, at a crucial juncture in this book, a few of the characters decide that they'd stand a much better chance of survival by abandoning the group and running away, leaving the rest to die. You'd think that people who've depended on each other for survival for that long (well over a year) couldn't do that to each other, but in the individualistic libertarian morality play that is The Walking Dead, this isn't just plausible, it's the right thing to do. (They do come back later but the rationality behind that behavior isn't explained and they are punished for it)
If something like The Walking Dead was written by say, the Japanese, it'd be much more a story about how society comes together to build a future in a desperate future, rather than a story about constant betrayal and stupid decisions.
If you enjoy drama, betrayal, and a feeling of desperation as well as insight into why American culture is constantly about the strong screwing over the weak, you cannot find better source material than The Walking Dead series. But quite frankly, I wouldn't want to live in a world filled with idiots, and as Wallace Stegner frequently pointed out, American society and history is actually filled with examples of people building institutions and societies, rather than doing their own selfish things.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Review: The Marshmallow Test
By now, you've heard of the Marshmallow Test. If you haven't, go visit YouTube and search for the many videos filmed of the test. This book was written by Walter Mischel, the psychologist responsible for designing the test and describes the various follow up studies over the years to understand the nature of willpower, and whether or not it can be trained.
The marshmallow test is an indicator of executive function (EF), This book is therefore an exploration of executive function. There are several interesting attributes that just a surface understanding of the results behind the marshmallow test wouldn't get you.
First of all, it turns out that willpower or executive function is contextual. Any examination of Bill Clinton's career, for instance, shows that he had plenty of willpower when it came to his most important goals, but was of course, undone by an affair with an intern. This pattern is repeated in many Hollywood movie stars, and even military generals like David Petraeus. What happened in those cases is that for such people, their focused willpower doesn't extend to certain areas of weaknesses which was what brought them down.
Secondly, willpower is not a fixed resource. It can be drained through use, so your willpower is strongest in the morning but weakest in the afternoon and in the evening. That's why bars, etc open late at night so they get more revenue when your willpower is the lowest.
Finally, executive function can be trained. There are several strategies that many adults try, including meditation, "mindfulness", and other well-documented techniques. Mischel goes through most of them and details the reasons they succeed (or fail), and how to make the more common ones more effective.
More importantly for parents, there are definite ways of bringing up children so that they have more or less willpower. In particular, modeling is critical, as is being supportive and not over-controlling:
Overall, the book is good reading, though it's rather verbose in places and doesn't always do a great job getting to the point quickly. Nevertheless, it's got plenty of practical advise, and provides details behind the workings of executive function that a surface understand of what's happening during the test wouldn't give you, so I recommend reading the book for yourself.
The marshmallow test is an indicator of executive function (EF), This book is therefore an exploration of executive function. There are several interesting attributes that just a surface understanding of the results behind the marshmallow test wouldn't get you.
First of all, it turns out that willpower or executive function is contextual. Any examination of Bill Clinton's career, for instance, shows that he had plenty of willpower when it came to his most important goals, but was of course, undone by an affair with an intern. This pattern is repeated in many Hollywood movie stars, and even military generals like David Petraeus. What happened in those cases is that for such people, their focused willpower doesn't extend to certain areas of weaknesses which was what brought them down.
Secondly, willpower is not a fixed resource. It can be drained through use, so your willpower is strongest in the morning but weakest in the afternoon and in the evening. That's why bars, etc open late at night so they get more revenue when your willpower is the lowest.
Finally, executive function can be trained. There are several strategies that many adults try, including meditation, "mindfulness", and other well-documented techniques. Mischel goes through most of them and details the reasons they succeed (or fail), and how to make the more common ones more effective.
More importantly for parents, there are definite ways of bringing up children so that they have more or less willpower. In particular, modeling is critical, as is being supportive and not over-controlling:
The message here is that parents who overcontrol their toddlers risk undermining the development of their children’s self-control skills, while those who support and encourage autonomy in problem-solving efforts are likely to maximize their children’s chances of coming home from preschool eager to tell them how they got their two marshmallows. (Page 60)Not surprisingly, having absent parents or growing up in an unpredictable environment also leads to lower willpower:
Beginning in early childhood, far too many people live in untrustworthy, unreliable worlds in which promises for delayed larger rewards are made but never kept. Given this history, it makes little sense to wait rather than grab whatever is at hand. When preschoolers have an experience with a promise maker who fails to keep his promise, not surprisingly they are much less likely to be willing to wait for two marshmallows than to take one now. These commonsense expectations have long been confirmed in experiments demonstrating that when people don’t expect delayed rewards to be delivered, they behave rationally and won’t choose to wait for them. (Page 72)That means that keeping your promises to your kids is very important. There's also pre-natal advice, and advice that reducing quarrels between parents during the first few years is critical to having a kid with more executive function.
Overall, the book is good reading, though it's rather verbose in places and doesn't always do a great job getting to the point quickly. Nevertheless, it's got plenty of practical advise, and provides details behind the workings of executive function that a surface understand of what's happening during the test wouldn't give you, so I recommend reading the book for yourself.
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Interviewing and Performance
Recently, someone asked me a deep question: we all know (and Google has the data) that interviews do a poor job of predicting on-the-job performance. If that is the case, would a different form of interviewing (say, pair programming) or other form of testing do a better job?
My answer to that question is "no." What most of the other articles do not note is that Google actually does have data as to the major factor influencing on-the-job performance (at least, performance as viewed by Google's notorious promotion committees). It turns out that even in 2003-2004, Google had data indicating that your first tech lead at the company strongly predicted how well you would do in the future inside Google.
There are several reasons for this. One obvious one is that the promotion committee is likely to weigh your tech lead's comments on your performance more heavily than some other random engineer's. The deeper reason, however, can be found in the book, Chasing Stars. Fundamentally, all organizations have stated or unstated rules for how they work. Whether the on-boarding systems do a good job of explaining that to new employees and indoctrinating them in the culture very much explains future performance.
Google at the time when I joined was a largely oral culture. A typical noogler joining the engineering team would during his first week of working through the engineering training document find several bugs a day in the documentation necessitating a documentation change, if he were conscientious. Old documentation or out of date documentation was rampant, and the tech docs team had their hands full trying to keep up with the amount of code and internal APIs continually being churned. If you actually had to get work done, your most important tool wasn't the documentation or the internal search engine (which was laughably bad), but knowing who to talk to. For instance, if you needed to make a change to crawl, and your tech lead knew to say, "Go talk to Arup Mukherjee and ask him how you would do this", you were in luck and you'd be productive and efficient. If your tech lead said, "Go read the documentation," or worse, "Use the Source, Luke", not only would you waste a lot of time reading both code and documentation (as I was forced to once when dealing with the search results mixer), chances are when you were done you would probably have done it wrong, and your code reviewer would spend gobs of time correcting the way you did things, and forcing you to do everything over and over until you got it right. If that happened, you might as well kiss your "Exceeds Expectations" performance review goodbye. (And yes, I lucked into knowing people who wouldn't just tell me who to talk to, but walked me to their cube, provided introductions, and made it clear that what I was supposed to do was important enough to deserve help)
I'm fond of saying that context matters a lot when it comes to performance. This type of context-sensitive performance isn't necessarily because the tech lead deliberately led the poor engineer wrong. It was because the tech lead did not provide a suitable context for the engineer to work with, and in the process makes the job much much harder (or in some cases nearly impossible) for the new engineer. Hence if your interview process is successful in eliminating people who can't actually do the job, but you end up with variable performance or unexpectedly poor performance on the job from people who should be doing well, you need to examine your on-boarding process or the training process for your leads/managers.
The follow up to this question then is, "If performance is so context determined, why do we bother with interviews?" The answer to that is that the goal of the interview isn't to predict performance in the future. The goal of the interview is to ensure sufficient technical competency and cultural compatibility so that with a good on-boarding process or a decent tech lead/manager, the new engineer ought to be able to do a great job. Hence, when I run interviews, I don't favor esoteric problems that require dynamic programming (for instance), but basic data structure questions. While I consider basic tests such as the Fizz Buzz Test way too simple and insufficiently indicative of someone with basic computer science knowledge, coding questions that approximate that level of complexity (while still testing basic computer science concepts) is all that is typically needed to weed out people who simply can't code and shouldn't be allowed access to your source control system.
My answer to that question is "no." What most of the other articles do not note is that Google actually does have data as to the major factor influencing on-the-job performance (at least, performance as viewed by Google's notorious promotion committees). It turns out that even in 2003-2004, Google had data indicating that your first tech lead at the company strongly predicted how well you would do in the future inside Google.
There are several reasons for this. One obvious one is that the promotion committee is likely to weigh your tech lead's comments on your performance more heavily than some other random engineer's. The deeper reason, however, can be found in the book, Chasing Stars. Fundamentally, all organizations have stated or unstated rules for how they work. Whether the on-boarding systems do a good job of explaining that to new employees and indoctrinating them in the culture very much explains future performance.
Google at the time when I joined was a largely oral culture. A typical noogler joining the engineering team would during his first week of working through the engineering training document find several bugs a day in the documentation necessitating a documentation change, if he were conscientious. Old documentation or out of date documentation was rampant, and the tech docs team had their hands full trying to keep up with the amount of code and internal APIs continually being churned. If you actually had to get work done, your most important tool wasn't the documentation or the internal search engine (which was laughably bad), but knowing who to talk to. For instance, if you needed to make a change to crawl, and your tech lead knew to say, "Go talk to Arup Mukherjee and ask him how you would do this", you were in luck and you'd be productive and efficient. If your tech lead said, "Go read the documentation," or worse, "Use the Source, Luke", not only would you waste a lot of time reading both code and documentation (as I was forced to once when dealing with the search results mixer), chances are when you were done you would probably have done it wrong, and your code reviewer would spend gobs of time correcting the way you did things, and forcing you to do everything over and over until you got it right. If that happened, you might as well kiss your "Exceeds Expectations" performance review goodbye. (And yes, I lucked into knowing people who wouldn't just tell me who to talk to, but walked me to their cube, provided introductions, and made it clear that what I was supposed to do was important enough to deserve help)
I'm fond of saying that context matters a lot when it comes to performance. This type of context-sensitive performance isn't necessarily because the tech lead deliberately led the poor engineer wrong. It was because the tech lead did not provide a suitable context for the engineer to work with, and in the process makes the job much much harder (or in some cases nearly impossible) for the new engineer. Hence if your interview process is successful in eliminating people who can't actually do the job, but you end up with variable performance or unexpectedly poor performance on the job from people who should be doing well, you need to examine your on-boarding process or the training process for your leads/managers.
The follow up to this question then is, "If performance is so context determined, why do we bother with interviews?" The answer to that is that the goal of the interview isn't to predict performance in the future. The goal of the interview is to ensure sufficient technical competency and cultural compatibility so that with a good on-boarding process or a decent tech lead/manager, the new engineer ought to be able to do a great job. Hence, when I run interviews, I don't favor esoteric problems that require dynamic programming (for instance), but basic data structure questions. While I consider basic tests such as the Fizz Buzz Test way too simple and insufficiently indicative of someone with basic computer science knowledge, coding questions that approximate that level of complexity (while still testing basic computer science concepts) is all that is typically needed to weed out people who simply can't code and shouldn't be allowed access to your source control system.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Review: Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2
My Windows Home Server (original) has been running very nicely since it was first installed in 2011. The nightly backup feature has saved my ass countless times, and I've definitely done many a restore from image instances from backup when I would try a new OS (such as Windows 10 Technical Preview) and then backed out from it. It also serves as the central file server for the home, exporting music/video/etc via DLNA to the living room PS3. All in all it's been an incredible value.
Unfortunately, WHS is showing it's age, and has been de-supported. This was running fine for us until very recently, since two of the limitations were no big deal:
Unfortunately, WHS is showing it's age, and has been de-supported. This was running fine for us until very recently, since two of the limitations were no big deal:
- No support for larger than 2TB disks (6TB of local storage was plenty, thank you)
- No support for UEFI machines (we didn't have any, except for various Windows tablets, which didn't store any data worth backing up)
Then we got a Surface Pro, which is a UEFI machine. The WHS had also started getting a little flakey, and I'd eventually have to replace my desktop and laptop with newer, UEFI machines so I started shopping.
One obvious upgrade was to go to Windows Home Server 2011, but that's also showing it's age, and lost the drive extender feature of the original WHS. We could go with hardware RAID by as explained on the Windows Home Server review, RAID is a mixed bag, since if the RAID controller fails, you'd have to replace it with an identical piece of hardware or risk losing your data. RAID isn't a great solution for home use.
Windows 8.1 has support for storage spaces, which has many interesting features that in many ways mirror what was in file extender:
- Drop any set of storage spaces disks into any Windows 8.1 PC, and you'll be able to crack open and view all the files. This sort of commodity hardware data storage is invaluable.
- You can mix and match drive sizes into a storage pool, and then create virtual disks that can be mirrored (RAID 1), striped (RAID 0), or with parity (RAID 5) across the multiple drives. This is very nice, since you can then upgrade storage slowly. You can even designate spare disks and "hot spares", to automate failover. This effectively lets you tell Windows to have different data policies for different type of data, for instance asking for photos to be mirrored while videos are striped.
- You can even thin-provision virtual disks, and have Windows warn you when you need to add storage.
The problem with Windows 8.1 is that it doesn't support full bare metal backup and restores. For that feature you need Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2, a full on business server. This is when you realize what a great deal the original Windows Home Server was, since the retail cost of Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2 is more than what I paid for the original Windows Home Server hardware!
No big deal. I worked in the software industry, so I pulled some strings and got a copy at employee pricing. Then I needed hardware to run it. I thought about repurposing the Windows Home Server, but then realized it was a bad idea: I needed to do a server-to-server copy, and the Acer was also headless. While it's possible to do a Server install headless, it's not for the faint of heart.
The cheapest server you can buy is the Lenovo TS140. You can get it for around $225 for an i3 machine, 4GB RAM, and no HDD. However, I found a deal where for well under $300, I got a quad core Xeon configured with ECC RAM. Now that I was expecting to handle tens of terabytes, I figured ECC RAM was worth paying for. The extra CPU is also helpful for running server applications such as Plex, which basically transcode video sources on demand for targeted delivery.
Installing WSE 2012 R2 is straightforward. However, I learned a few things about UEFI machines and WSE 2012 R2 that weren't documented elsewhere that I looked:
- OS updates will not work if you have secure boot turned on. Turn off secure boot.
- WSE 2012R2 (or any version of Windows) will not allow you to use excess space on the boot drive as part of a storage spaces cluster. So effectively, your 4 drive bay server is now a 3 bay server! This isn't a big deal if you have 4TB disks in the server, since that's plenty of storage, but it does make the server smaller than you expected.
- WSE 2012R2 is a business server. So the first thing it does is it sets up a domain. This is no big deal as it's very automated and easy. However when you connect an existing computer to a WSE server, the first thing it does is to register the new machine to the server, with the server providing the domain. This is no big deal with Windows 7: your login prompt changes so you have to hit control-alt-delete to login, but there's no difference otherwise. With Windows 8, if you previously logged in using a Microsoft cloud account, then if you login using domains, you lose all the cloud customizations you used to have! The solution to this is to hack the registry on the Windows 8.1 machine to skip joining the domain. If you were truly running a small business like a dental office, this isn't what you want (you wouldn't want your employees logging on with their cloud accounts), but for a home user who's upgrading from WHS, this is the right thing.
Other than that, everything was fine. I ran a backup and bare metal restore on my Lenovo X201, and things went smoothly. Then I tried it on the Surface Pro. The Surface Pro has 2 SNAFUs. First, bare metal restore doesn't work over WiFi (not surprising). This was easily resolved, since a USB ethernet port was already available for high speed network connectivity. Since you also need to plug in a USB thumb drive for booting, you'll need a USB hub. There are various warnings that you need a powered hub, but my unpowered hub was fine provided I only had the thumb drive and the ethernet port hooked up to it. The final SNAFU was when I tried booting using the thumbdrive and got an error. This one turned out to be secure boot's fault. Turning off secure boot on the Surface Pro got the bare metal restore working with zero hitches.
I transferred all the data over from the old WHS server. It turned out that the old server was CPU constrained. While the old server topped out at around 45MB/s, the new one peaked at 65MB/s. This is pretty sweet. I could also run the Plex Server on it without the CPU even breaking a sweat.
The nasty thing about storage spaces, however, is that it doesn't auto rebalance when you add a new drive. You can force a rebalance, however, by creating a new virtual drive after adding a new drive that makes use of the new drive, and then copying old data to it and then deleting the old virtual drive. This is kinda more futzy than I'd hoped, given that the old WHS kept ticking for years on end without me having to do manual rebalancing and all that, but again, if your old server failed, you could move the drives over to a Windows 8 PC and everything would just work, so this is a feature I'm willing to live with.
All in all, would I recommend this? If you have an old WHS that's been operating and you don't have any UEFI machines, I'd recommend sticking with the old server for as long as you can stand it and don't need to upgrade to any UEFI machines. If you have an existing old-style NAS RAID, I think the Windows solution is superior to any of the freeware servers, especially since ZFS requires gobs of RAM, and the low end servers are cheap, assuming you can snag a copy of Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2 at employee/educational institution pricing. The combination of having a file server, bare metal backup restore, file history, etc, and DLNA server is pretty sweet.
If you ask around, most people (even software engineers who should know better) rely on cloud storage or don't do backups of their data. If you shoot with a modern digital camera (as opposed to a crappy phone camera), videos and photos quickly fill up terabytes of data, making cloud storage prohibitively expensive. Under such circumstances, a home server that backs up all your computer is well worth the cost, and WSE is surprisingly efficient and easy to use. Recommended.
Monday, February 09, 2015
Review: Outlook 2013
As documented previously, I've recently run into quota issues for gmail. Along with the need to aggressively delete e-mail to get under the quota, I've finally decided to take backing up my e-mail seriously. This is important, because together with photos, a lot of e-mail is actually useful for searching and remembering details that aren't recorded any other way. Even if you've decided to pay for storage on Gmail, for instance, there's always the chance that your account gets hijacked phished or otherwise deleted/hacked, so having a backed up archive locally protects you in that event.
As a well documented cheapskate, I first tried the free solutions. Mozilla Thunderbird, for instance, is well known and popularly acclaimed. But it was too slow and couldn't really manage huge inboxes. I tried various other solutions before giving up and acquiring an Outlook 2013 license through an employee purchase program at Microsoft.
Setting up Outlook is fairly straightforward, and it auto-configures now for Gmail accounts as well as Hotmail and Yahoo mail. For Google Apps for your domain accounts, however, you have to go through custom configuration. There are a few bugs there, but eventually I got it so that everything sync'd.
Performance is decent. It can't match the search index that's built on the browser based version of gmail, but it's acceptably fast and works even when you're offline. The real feature that made me pay for a license, however, is the auto-archive feature. This essentially lets you move old e-mail into an archive which you can then access and search separately. I did an archive and the machine went away for a few minutes and created a 9GB archive of my e-mail all the way back from 2004. It's searchable, opening the folder isn't fast, but it works and I can apply filters to it and search it after creating an index, which takes forever.
The biggest pain point is that I have to force myself to keep Outlook running. (It's not a hog: 200MB of RAM is all it takes --- keeping a Chrome window open to Gmail costs quite a bit more!) The sync with a live server is also somewhat slow: I frequently get a ping on my browser window a few minutes before Outlook fetches the mail. What's also interesting is that while it automagically imports your calendar (and it does a great job of that), it doesn't automatically import contacts, and the auto-complete does not auto-populate.
What auto-archive does not do, unfortunately, is to remove archived e-mail from the IMAP server (in this case GMail). This isn't great, but on the other hand, means I can now very aggressively delete e-mail in the future.
There's a market opportunity somewhere for an e-mail app that doubles as a backup for cloud-based storage, but I'm sure people like me are a rarity (most people don't even backup their photos). However, just like Open Office Spreadsheet was never a good substitute for Excel, there's no serious alternative to Outlook if you need the capability of offline e-mail or archives.
Recommended.
As a well documented cheapskate, I first tried the free solutions. Mozilla Thunderbird, for instance, is well known and popularly acclaimed. But it was too slow and couldn't really manage huge inboxes. I tried various other solutions before giving up and acquiring an Outlook 2013 license through an employee purchase program at Microsoft.
Setting up Outlook is fairly straightforward, and it auto-configures now for Gmail accounts as well as Hotmail and Yahoo mail. For Google Apps for your domain accounts, however, you have to go through custom configuration. There are a few bugs there, but eventually I got it so that everything sync'd.
Performance is decent. It can't match the search index that's built on the browser based version of gmail, but it's acceptably fast and works even when you're offline. The real feature that made me pay for a license, however, is the auto-archive feature. This essentially lets you move old e-mail into an archive which you can then access and search separately. I did an archive and the machine went away for a few minutes and created a 9GB archive of my e-mail all the way back from 2004. It's searchable, opening the folder isn't fast, but it works and I can apply filters to it and search it after creating an index, which takes forever.
The biggest pain point is that I have to force myself to keep Outlook running. (It's not a hog: 200MB of RAM is all it takes --- keeping a Chrome window open to Gmail costs quite a bit more!) The sync with a live server is also somewhat slow: I frequently get a ping on my browser window a few minutes before Outlook fetches the mail. What's also interesting is that while it automagically imports your calendar (and it does a great job of that), it doesn't automatically import contacts, and the auto-complete does not auto-populate.
What auto-archive does not do, unfortunately, is to remove archived e-mail from the IMAP server (in this case GMail). This isn't great, but on the other hand, means I can now very aggressively delete e-mail in the future.
There's a market opportunity somewhere for an e-mail app that doubles as a backup for cloud-based storage, but I'm sure people like me are a rarity (most people don't even backup their photos). However, just like Open Office Spreadsheet was never a good substitute for Excel, there's no serious alternative to Outlook if you need the capability of offline e-mail or archives.
Recommended.
Sunday, February 08, 2015
Review: Indexing
Indexing is Seanan McGuire's novel about fairy tales gone amuck. It was originally sold as a serial and the structure of the novel reflects it. McGuire's also written novels by the name of Mira Grant, one of whom (Feed) I've previously reviewed as a mediocre novel.
The premise behind Indexing is that fairy tales (known as narratives) have a power all of their own, and once they get started and locked into the persons involved, will make their way to the end, uncaring and leaving dead bodies (or sleeping bodies) in their wake all in service of the story. Hence there's a secret government agency formed around finding narratives and stopping them in their tracks.
The net effect of this is as though you have the Cthulhu mythos replaced with Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, etc. The premise is interesting, but McGuire does a lot less with the premise than you might expect. Each episode revolves around one particular archetype, and in itself seems to be ok, but the overarching story linking them all is weak, as is the character development. Everyone lives up to their stereotype.
The result is disappointing: you keep reading hoping for the author to deliver a grand plot that was hinted at, only to discover something pretty prosaic. Read Fables instead.
The premise behind Indexing is that fairy tales (known as narratives) have a power all of their own, and once they get started and locked into the persons involved, will make their way to the end, uncaring and leaving dead bodies (or sleeping bodies) in their wake all in service of the story. Hence there's a secret government agency formed around finding narratives and stopping them in their tracks.
The net effect of this is as though you have the Cthulhu mythos replaced with Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, etc. The premise is interesting, but McGuire does a lot less with the premise than you might expect. Each episode revolves around one particular archetype, and in itself seems to be ok, but the overarching story linking them all is weak, as is the character development. Everyone lives up to their stereotype.
The result is disappointing: you keep reading hoping for the author to deliver a grand plot that was hinted at, only to discover something pretty prosaic. Read Fables instead.
Friday, February 06, 2015
Review: Zero to One
Zero to One is Peter Thiel's short book on how to build startups. It's a very mixed bag, but has a few interesting and important ideas. I'll try to list some of them.
Venture backed up startups shouldn't be funded to achieve "normal" returns. This should drive VC behavior: in other words, there should be no startup in a VC portfolio that do not have the potential to return 10X the rest of the portfolio. Having this discipline means that you only need about 1 in 10 startups to succeed to pay for the entire portfolio of companies. This is a very strong point, but he mixes it all up by scoffing at diversification. What you have to understand is that Thiel isn't just writing a book teaching you about startups. He's a sales person. He succeeds by convincing you (or the founders at any rate), that diversification is for wussies, and that you should bet it all on huge thing while behind the scenes he's practicing diversification by investing in lots of startups with his huge portfolio.
Another interesting point is that the goal of a company is to create products that have no close substitutes so as to enjoy monopoly profits. This is true. Warren Buffett has also frequently expressed the need to have a big moat around business you would invest in. On the other hand, we do have tons of startups all searching for that next monopoly, so it's not as easy as just he says.
Sales is important. This is a big deal, because most tech startups are founded by nerds who hate sales and marketing. This chapter is a great read for every nerd-turned-entrepreneur, and he points out that most sales jobs are named something else (e.g., "Account Executive") so that the customers aren't alerted to the fact that a sales person is talking to them. He also points out that Palantir's sales are so big that the CEO is effectively the company's sales person.
There are some other interesting titbits about various companies founded and run by the Paypal mafia, but a lot of what Thiel says has to be filtered by your B.S. filter: the man is self-serving to the nth degree, so the entire book is a sales job. In one chapter he grudgingly admits that if you examine the odds of success objectively, it makes more sense not to found startups, but to join one that's clearly on the trajectory towards outsized success (e.g., Google or Facebook before the IPO, and now probably Dropbox, AirBnB, Uber, and a handful of others).
I hate to slap a recommended label on this book, but it's so short that you can read it in a couple of hours, so I'd say it's worth a read, provided you take it with a 20 pound burlap sack of salt and watch out for all the places where he's being self-serving.
Venture backed up startups shouldn't be funded to achieve "normal" returns. This should drive VC behavior: in other words, there should be no startup in a VC portfolio that do not have the potential to return 10X the rest of the portfolio. Having this discipline means that you only need about 1 in 10 startups to succeed to pay for the entire portfolio of companies. This is a very strong point, but he mixes it all up by scoffing at diversification. What you have to understand is that Thiel isn't just writing a book teaching you about startups. He's a sales person. He succeeds by convincing you (or the founders at any rate), that diversification is for wussies, and that you should bet it all on huge thing while behind the scenes he's practicing diversification by investing in lots of startups with his huge portfolio.
Another interesting point is that the goal of a company is to create products that have no close substitutes so as to enjoy monopoly profits. This is true. Warren Buffett has also frequently expressed the need to have a big moat around business you would invest in. On the other hand, we do have tons of startups all searching for that next monopoly, so it's not as easy as just he says.
Sales is important. This is a big deal, because most tech startups are founded by nerds who hate sales and marketing. This chapter is a great read for every nerd-turned-entrepreneur, and he points out that most sales jobs are named something else (e.g., "Account Executive") so that the customers aren't alerted to the fact that a sales person is talking to them. He also points out that Palantir's sales are so big that the CEO is effectively the company's sales person.
There are some other interesting titbits about various companies founded and run by the Paypal mafia, but a lot of what Thiel says has to be filtered by your B.S. filter: the man is self-serving to the nth degree, so the entire book is a sales job. In one chapter he grudgingly admits that if you examine the odds of success objectively, it makes more sense not to found startups, but to join one that's clearly on the trajectory towards outsized success (e.g., Google or Facebook before the IPO, and now probably Dropbox, AirBnB, Uber, and a handful of others).
I hate to slap a recommended label on this book, but it's so short that you can read it in a couple of hours, so I'd say it's worth a read, provided you take it with a 20 pound burlap sack of salt and watch out for all the places where he's being self-serving.
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