Greece 2013

We went to Greece this year for a sailing trip, bookended by days in Athens and Thira (on Santorini). I'll break up the visit thus into those 3 sections. This is the index page. I'll post links to other people's pictures as they get them up.

Photos:

• Arturo's photos

Trip Report:

• Thira/Santorini
• Sailing in the Argolic and Northern Cyclades
• Athens
• Conclusions

Review: The Best American Essays 2011

I picked up The Best American Essays 2011 during an Amazon sale for about $1.99. At that price, it was a good buy for the 3-4 good articles in it. The articles span a lot of topics, and too many of them are simple mood pieces or have too much literary flourish for me to have patience. There are a few deeply analytical ones, but even the piece on say, the slow decline of Detroit read too much like a fancy pansy literary piece rather than hard hitting journalism. At the default Kindle price of $8.99, this is a rip off.

Not recommended. I had to force myself to read about half the book.

Review: The Fine Print

The Fine Print is David Cay Johnston's book about how corporations rip off the American people. The book starts with a great science fiction story: imagine a world where after a strange event happens, some people are discovered to be immortal. They can still be killed and die through accidents, but they will not age and will not die of old age. Further, the strange event has changed them so that they are now solely motivated by money. The answer of course, is that this science fiction story is not science fiction at all, but the "people" involved are called corporations.

In chapter after chapter, Johnston takes on one aspect after another of corporate malfeasance. Whether it's AT&T/Verizon/Comcast ripping you off on your phone bill and charging you insane amounts of money for service that would cost one third what citizens of other developing countries pay, or PG&E neglecting maintenance of gas pipelines leading to massive explosions and people dead, there's even grist here to get your blood boiling and hopefully you mad enough.

Johnston knows all of these topics well, and leverages his facility with numbers and his strong sense of journalism to bring the stories to life. Some chapters are short (like the ones on Hollywood tax breaks), and some are long, but they all go a long way to debunk the myth that there is such a thing as a virtuous, successful capitalist in modern American society. Neither Google nor Warren Buffett come off as the heroes they are portrayed as in popular press.

Despite all that Johnston shrinks back from the obvious conclusion: the modern limited liability corporation is a terrible legal construct and a lousy way to run society --- there are no circumstances under which a society with such entities wouldn't end up corrupt and undemocratic. Yes, there are other developed countries that do a good job of keeping such entities under control (Western Europe, for instance), but they're also societies that come under frequent pressure to follow the Washington consensus.

This is a book that won't get read by enough people to make a difference, but you know what, you should read it anyway. Highly recommended.

Review: Redshirts

I'm  a big fan of John Scalzi's sense of humor, especially in Old Man's War. However, when I heard about Redshirts, I was less than 100% excited. While it is ridiculous that Red-shirts dropped dead all the time on away team missions, I didn't think that the joke itself could sustain an entire novel. As a result, I waited until I could check it out from the library before reading.

Unfortunately, I was right. The central premise is funny. You've got a crew that's scared to go on away missions, and you've got characters that get shot and wounded only to recover all the time on missions. You've got technical gobbledy gook with ridiculous technical solutions, how despite how advanced the ship is, nobody sends e-mail and messages are always delivered in person. It's pretty funny, but it lasted about half the book and then the rest of the novel becomes a farce, barely worth reading.

I eventually limped along to the end, but only out of a sense of masochism. I wouldn't recommend anybody put themselves through the entire novel. Read until the sense of fun is over and then abort the mission.

Not recommended.

Re-read: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteneance

I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in high school, and reading it then was an amazing discovery. I remember not being able to stop reading it, going on until well past midnight, barely able to stop when it was time to sleep, and finishing it the next day. When I saw that the Kindle edition was down to $2.99, I didn't hesitate and bought it and read it again.

Books are different beasts when you read them a second time. The first time I loved the description of the scientific method and it's application to debugging computer programs (in addition to the problems you find when you need to repair a motorcycle):

When you’ve hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, “Okay, Nature, that’s the end of the nice guy,” and you crank up the formal scientific method. For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up. (Loc 1603)

This time around, I found another part of the story, the story about a father and son, re-united after a horrifying personal disaster, and the realization that it as his son that brought him out of the psychiatric ward:

We’re related to each other in ways we never fully understand, maybe hardly understand at all. He was always the real reason for coming out of the hospital. To have let him grow up alone would have been really wrong. In the dream too he was the one who was always trying to open the door. I haven’t been carrying him at all. He’s been carrying me! (Loc 6249)

What's great about the book is that all this is interspersed with a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California. It's full of little tips about cycle touring that indicate that Pirsig did do quite a bit of motorcycle touring, though he does spend way too much time on a freeway in California instead of riding down the coast. (And much like most tourists, he makes the mistake of visiting the California coast during the summer, when it's mostly fogged in) There are also little interesting observations about people on the road:

While we wait for chocolate malteds I notice a high-schooler sitting at the counter exchanging looks with the girl next to him. She’s gorgeous, and I’m not the only other one who notices it. The girl behind the counter waiting on them is also watching with an anger she thinks no one else sees. Some kind of triangle. We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives. (Loc 4385)

Ultimately, the book's a philosophical novel, with lots of explanation of the authors' ideas about the nature of Quality, the split between the arts and the sciences, and his attempts to unify the two by keeping Quality undefined as, "You know it when you see it." For a rhetoric class at the places Pirsig has taught, I think this approach might work. For those of us working in technology, however, I'm not sure that non-definition is useful. There's a certain sense that those who care passionately enough about their work enough to have strong opinions and defend them are better engineers than those for whom engineering is "just work." On the other hand, you could argue that in many ways, the constant arguments over the quality of say, the choice of programming language is well over-blown, and people would mostly be better of getting work done than engaging in the low-Quality flame wars that you find on the internet.

Regardless of how you feel, however, the novel is thought-provoking, interesting, and never dull, despite being mostly about ideas, rather than being about characters or plot. It's a great book and well worth reading and re-reading. Highly recommended.

Review: Big Skinny World Bifold Wallet

I answer a lot of questions on Quora, but the one time I asked a question, I never got a satisfactory answer. I travel enough internationally that I find domestic wallets to be useless, since they can't handle cash that's too wide or tall, which many international currencies are. I was using a wallet I picked up in Switzerland a few years ago. That wallet was nice, especially since it had multiple pockets for cash and coins, letting you sort say, Euros and dollars, or Euros and CHF. However, it's leather, doesn't have sufficient pockets for the large number of cards I carry, and is slowly being worn out.

I found a coupon for a Big Skinny World Bifold, and ordered one. It's made out of Nylon rather than leather , so it's much lighter than my old wallet, which is nice. It's also wide enough and tall enough for non-US currency. It has an outside zipper for coins and keys, and sufficient card slots for 16 cards as well as two inner pockets for business cards and other sundries. It ended up being quite a bit slimmer than my old Swiss wallet.

Recommended.

Review: Your Child's Growing Mind

Mike Samuel recommended Your Child's Growing Mind to me, and while it was a good read, it's written in a verbose fashion, full of useless anecdotes that don't reflect research findings, with the interesting research findings almost deliberately obfuscated.

For instance, in the section on enriched environment, she notes that lab rat studies showed that a cage with lots of toys, etc would build a rat with a bigger brain, a free roaming rat that played outside the cage would have a bigger brain than even the enriched rat's brain. This demonstrates that free play and spending time outside with freedom to explore is far more important than how many toys you can buy your child, but strangely this passage received no emphasis.

The book is strangely light on early childhood development, but once it get to elementary school, starts providing tips on reading, writing, and math. Each section is full of tips on how to teach your kids the relevant skills, including sections on what play activities are great for letting the entire family participate. The tips are split by age group, and there's good explanation on what works. There's a big emphasis on trouble-shooting learning problems with adequate prescription.

Like all such books written by Americans, it has zero information about bilingual or multi-lingual households, and there's apparently been no academic research on how best to optimal the environment for multi-language learning in such households. I wonder if European books are better in this regard.

I would recommend referring to this book over the years (especially if your child has a learning disability), but you should still read John Medina's Brain Rules for Baby first.

Review: Wool

I picked up Wool because I'd read about the success of the author, Hugh Howey, in going completely independent, first selling the book as a serial on the Kindle store, culminating in selling the paperback rights to a traditional publisher while keeping the electronic rights to himself. The omnibus is frequently on sale at a good price, indicating that Howey understands how to market and price fiction in the digital/electronic era, unlike any of the dead-tree publishers he's competing against.

The book is an addictive read. The traditions of serial writing are clear, and Howey is a master of them: keep the cliffhangers coming quickly and in rapid succession, and never leave the reader in a state where he can get a breath in to get distracted by other pressing matters. The characters are wooden and there's next to no character development, but the world of an underground Silo following some sort of catastrophe (what exactly happened is never revealed, but we do learn that it's man-made) is the main focus, and the reveal happens at a pace that's compelling and fun to read.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

What the book isn't, however, is great science fiction. There are too many plot-holes and things that don't make sense. For instance, the great villain is the head of IT, and we read about the mysterious PACT and that power for servers make up for the biggest power draw on the generators. This makes no sense, since as far as I can tell, there's nothing for those servers to actually do. If all you need is for the servers to store data, they can do their job just as easily powered down as up, and there's no reason for them to draw power. Furthermore, Howey clearly has no idea of the kind of machinery and equipment needed to run modern equipment. Even the manufacture of a single hard drive or flash chip requires factories and a sequence of production steps far larger than the Silos described. Most science fiction novels have characters as wooden as what you'll find in Wool, but most science fiction novels have much better science.

If you can ignore these huge gaping plot-holes (big enough to drive a Google data-center through), however, the book is a fun read. It's the perfect airplane novel, and I can therefore recommend it as such. I expect to buy Howey's other books before my next long flight.

PSA: Do take the undergraduate compilers class

We just closed our hiring cycle for summer interns at Quark. During this period, we vetted tons of transcripts and resumes from top tier universities including CMU, Berkeley, and Stanford. Our hiring standards are demanding, and I personally did a lot of interviewing. Congratulations to Kevin and Kevin.

If you're a Cal student, I have very specific knowledge of the classes offered. Once upon a time, CS 162 (Operating Systems) and CS 164 (Compilers) were considered core classes in the CS curriculum. They were required of all CS graduates. In this day of "applications first" approach to CS, CS 162 is still required but CS 164 is now optional.

From the perspective of a hiring manager, however, taking CS164 early in your undergraduate career signals several very positive things:

1. You're not intimidated by challenging classes that require lots of coding. The ability to do well in CS 164 depends very much on your ability to utilize tools, write a lot of code, and test and debug at a meta-level that none of the other classes require.
2. You're not satisfied with understanding computers at the topmost abstraction layers. You want to dig beneath the abstraction layer of a programming language and understand how they work, down to the point of producing assembly for the machine to execute. The reason CS162 and CS164 were required in the past was that digging beneath those abstraction layers was highly prized for anyone doing any kind of work. (CS152 is very nice as well, since you now get down to the logic layer --- knowing how to do anything at the transistor level isn't necessary, but it's also useful)
3. CS164 requires full use of almost all data structures you were taught in your data structures class. You'll build parse trees. You'll use symbol tables. You'll need to walk trees and do type-checking. CS164 integrates all the knowledge you got from data structures. Getting this in early in your career will only benefit you.
4. People who take CS164 will not balk at writing a parser, or even designing a whole new programming language or DSL in order to better solve a problem. This approach of meta-programming (or Meta-Object Protocols) is very useful and the skills necessary to implement it in a non-LISP environment are only available for people who know how to write compilers and other language translators.

I know it's fashionable now to deride the traditional computer science education with its emphasis on hardcore topics. But when I interview students with the traditional computer science education versus students without, the difference is clear: the former are much better problem solvers, and write better code. Ultimately, they'll make better hires and will get more and better job offers.

So for those at Cal: take CS162 and 164 as early as you can. For those elsewhere, please don't neglect your systems classes. They'll make you stronger engineers.

Review: The Signal and The Noise

I've been a big fan of 538 and Nate Silver since the 2008 elections. The Signal and the Noise is his book about predictions, the state of the art, how they work, how they don't work, and the intersection of those concepts along with his interests. Nate Silver's a very smart guy, which means that his interests are broad and fascinating.

What comes through the book is Silver's humility --- he claims that he was extremely successful because political predictions as set by TV pundits and Fox News sets a particularly low bar that's easy to beat if you just do a pretty good job. Note that Silver's models, however, beat the so-called prediction markets like InTrade, for instance, which means that not only did Silver beat the TV pundits, but he also beat fairly size-able markets with real money sitting on the line.

What's fascinating about the book is we see how Silver sees the world through the prediction lens. He even treats Chess as a prediction problem, and his write-up of the Kasparov vs. Deep Blue matches gave me insight into the matches that I didn't know prior to reading his book.

Silver also covers epidemic modeling, weather forecasting (including hurricane forecasts), earthquakes, stock markets, economic bubbles, sports, poker, and global climate change. His explanation of Bayesian reasoning, its' history, and application in the modern world is as clear and enlightening as any I've seen, and his considered understanding of our prediction failures is profound and insightful. Fundamentally, weather forecasting has been the most successful of the disciplines examined in the book, and Silver explains why.

The biggest weakness of the book is one that a perceptive reader will see as a theme over and over again. Fundamentally market incentives skew predictions. For instance, the political pundits have incentives to make big predictions and tell stories that are wrong, because they're more entertaining to the masses than Silver's nuanced analysis. Economists, mutual fund managers, and all have incentives to be wrong conventionally than to be right unconventionally. It is because of these distortionary effects that many of our predictions fail, rather than because we do not have the tools to do the job correctly, or because Bayesian reasoning isn't widely utilized.

Having said that, the book is fascinating, interesting, and enlightening. It's the best book I've read all year, and hence comes highly recommended.

Review: Teach Your Children Well

After reviewing a book about the under-privileged kids amongst us, I had to go read a book about the very other end of the spectrum --- the over-privileged, over-scheduled, ultra-achieving kids in the San Francisco area. Teach Your Children Well covers mostly the ails of the upper-middle class and their children.

These include overly packed schedules, worrying about bullying and cyber-bullying, whether they're the best piano player and able to get into Carnegie Hall, etc., etc.

Madeline Levine advocates taking a holistic approach to the child, noting that it's far better for children to grow up to be good people rather than necessarily great mathematicians, engineers, doctors, or artists. She clearly lives in San Francisco, where most parents worry much more about their children's math classes than their ability to draw or play sports.

While Levine clearly has a good heart, I'm not sure her book can be very effective. It's one thing for her and her patients to abandon the rat race or paper chase, but unless/until society values ethics more than a big paycheck, the bankers on wall street will still command more respect than the people who did not cheat. That's what's driving society, and it has nothing to do with parents being pushy.

What's more, as I've noted over and over again on this blog, the world just simply does not need more English major journalists. Such journalists and writers actually do more harm to the topics they cover than if they did not exist, and I'm not sure a society should value such work. So to that extent I agree far more with the parents who think that their daughters should actually work hard at Math rather than say, "But I'm so much better at fashion."

I wanted to recommend this book. I certainly have no intention of pushing my son into things he doesn't like for the sake of being able to brag about piano recitals or other some such nonsense. But the entire book reeks of privilege and Levine lives in a society full of trust fund babies and people who not only have therapists but also have multiple therapists for their children. Such children will live in privilege regardless of how little Math they do and how little Science they know. But children of immigrants will have no such luxuries, and if you come from such a background you might find Levine's stories and anecdotes more than a little detached from reality. Hence: not recommended.

Wharton Business School Presentation

How to hire and keep engineers happy public from Piaw Na

I was the lunch speaker today at the Wharton Business School in San Francisco. The school runs an executive MBA program, with about 100 students a year. It's a 2 year program running mostly on Fridays and Saturdays. I gave a 40 minute talk at high intensity because I prepped for an hour with questions.

One question that came up was where can you learn to code? While I'm not a big fan of the various programming boot camps for professional programmers, for MBAs, it could very well be just the thing. The school itself had fantastic facilities, and the lecture hall was the best room I'd ever given a presentation in, with stadium-style seating and the lecturer standing in the pit subject to questions all around. Definitely an experience to be had.

As usual, the above slides are sanitized for public consumption. The presentation given to the business school students is a lot more peppered with interesting case studies from industry. Having said that, with my new full time job, my time for speaking engagements is a lot more limited and I will curtail them going forward.

Review: How Children Succeed

In this age of hyper-parenting, queuing up and applying to pre-schools, one would expect How Children Succeed to be a book full of stories about tiger-moms and their high achieving scions. Refreshingly, this is a book about the students and families struggling to get out of poverty.

We get a smattering of mention of various studies, culminating in an introduction to the Tools of the Mind program. Strangely enough, my affluent neighborhood is full of Kumion cram schools as well as Montessori specialty kindergartens, but nobody brags about their Tools of the Mind curriculum. It's very likely that the tools of self-discipline, planning, and taking action is cultivated by upper middle class households as a matter of course, though one would think that something like Tools of the Mind would be useful no matter which strata of society you come from.

We don't get any expositions of music prodigies (thank goodness!), but instead get a long chapter about one teacher's attempt to successfully teach her disadvantaged kids to play chess and beat the upper class private schools in competition. It's a mesmerizing read, and worth your time. The punchline is that she coaches one of her star chess players on academics and absolutely fails to make a dent, showing you that success in one aspect of life doesn't get you far anywhere else.

Does this book teach you something you don't already know? Not really. It's a typical English major book, lacking pointers to studies as well as deep interviews with people who explore the development of executive function in children. But it's worth reading anyway. Recommended.

Internships

The conventional wisdom on interns is that you cannot expect to get significant work done by interns: they take time to train, and by the time they leave your company, you can't possibly have trained them to the point where they're productive and pay for themselves in terms of work done.

I've led internship programs at Mpath and Google, and each time I've defied conventional wisdom. Mike Danylchuk, Alex Murkes and Carolynne Surfleet all interned for me at Mpath, and they did tremendous amounts of work. Both Alex and Mike converted to become full time employees, and were immensely productive.

At Google, Stephen Chen, Phil Sung, Matei Zaharia, and Nikola Postolov all interned for me at Google. All 4 were immensely productive, and Stephen and Phil eventually became Google employees. All these engineers made huge contributions to their projects, and more than paid for their training time.

I attribute my past successes at hiring interns and managing them to two factors:

1. I don't lower my standards when hiring interns. I interview and apply the same metrics to interns as I do to full time employees. You can do this if you focus on fundamental computer science and coding problems during your interviews.
2. I don't give interns "make work" or insignificant work. I put them on high risk projects with complete ownership of a project from end-to-end. They do the design, they code, they test, and they deploy. The sense of ownership and satisfaction with the end result gives them a hugely positive experience. This doesn't mean I just let them do their thing --- I provide design reviews and code reviews, and I provide suggestions as to which projects would be good uses of their time and talents, but providing autonomy is the key to engineering happiness.

I used to think that this modus operandi was par for the course in the tech industry, but one day I sat on a hiring committee for interns who wanted to convert into full-time employees. My jaw dropped constantly in horror at what some of my colleagues were doing to their interns:

• Putting interns on demoware, code that effectively would have to be thrown away if the data input ever had to change.
• Having interns pair program with each other, relieving the mentor of the need to code review or provide feedback to the interns. Unfortunately, this also meant the intern supervisor had no clue how his interns were doing, and whether they would be a worthy hire.
• Writing glowing reviews for an intern who did very little or next to no work (had no checkins into the source control system).

Well, here at Quark Games, we're kicking off our summer internship program next week with visits to both the Berkeley and Stanford Career fairs (we'll also consider full time applicants). I guarantee we won't' do any of the crazy things described above, and my aim is to have fully productive interns all summer. While we're only visiting these two schools because they're easily within driving distance, we'll accept applicants from any school. Feel free to send me e-mail or apply through Quark Game's site if you're interested.

Long Term Review: Republic Wireless

In my earlier review of Republic Wireless, I mentioned that I would likely give up the phone and return it and switch to Ting instead. Well, I ended up not doing that. The phone is slow, it's got wide variance in battery life --- in normal usage I'd end the day with 40% of the battery, but some times for no apparent reason I'd drain the battery by 8pm.

At my new job, however, I have no desk phone, but excellent wifi, which meant that the wifi calling feature that Republic Wireless offers is what I depend on day in day out in order to take and make phone calls from the office. While those calls aren't as often as you might expect, they still happen on a regular basis, and usually when they happen I need to take them, rather than have them go to voice mail.

The unlimited data has also come in very handy over time --- given the size of web pages nowadays, even a few minutes of surfing can run well over 100MB of data, which would pop you over to the next tier on Ting. Given that I occasionally walk to work (a 30 minute journey each way), having access to data means I can stream wireless music or use TuneIn to pick up KQED or other radio station, which has been very nice whenever I do walk to work.

Most people aren't as cheap as I am when it comes to phone plans, but $19/month unlimited voice/data/text is almost too good to be true, and I for one hope that Republic Wireless succeeds in their quest to change the way cell phones work. For most people in Silicon Valley, I'd venture to say that Republic Wireless' plan would be exactly what they want. I can't wait for them to introduce better phones and I for one am surprised that such a game changing startup is happening outside of Silicon Valley.

Highly Recommended.

Review: The Amazing Spiderman 2012

I missed the reboot of the Spiderman movies last year, so caught it on my Nexus 7 instead recently. The Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies were great, especially the second movie where the scene where the subway passengers lifted Peter Parker up over their heads and said, "it's just a kid" moved me in a way few other superhero movies did. I bought Marvel stock based on how I felt about those movies and those paid me back very well. The third of the series is not worth your time watching, but even Christopher Nolan screwed up with The Dark Knight Rises.

Unfortunately, The Amazing Spiderman just cannot live up to those standards. If the other movies didn't exist, this one might be barely acceptable. First of all, Andrew Garfield just does not pull of Peter Parker very well. He's too stylish and good looking for someone who's supposed to play an awkward nerd who's frequently bullied. Emma Stone did portray a smart and spunky Gwen Stacy, and I was pleased with the way her father, Captain Stacy was portrayed.

Gone, however, is the strong sense of morality that Spiderman always had. Gone is the motto, "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility." Gone is the closure that Peter Parker had when he caught the crook who'd killed Uncle Ben and discovered that his apathy had cost the life of a loved one. Instead we have a murky sense of betrayal that Parker was orphaned, and a villain who's transformation into one makes no sense in either plot or moral sensibility. Just as badly done: Parker's second job as a photographer is gone --- he now comes off as a freeloading high schooler with an attitude problem rather than the likable nerd with a secret.

I don't regret the time spent watching the movie, but I do regret that the stars/director who made my favorite superhero series asked for so much money that the franchise got rebooted early and we ended up with a lousy Peter Parker. I definitely would pass on watching the sequel in the theaters.

Review: Suzanne Vega @ Villa Montalvo

I'm a bigger fan of concert venues than I am of individual performance artists. My list of great venues in the Bay Area include:

• The Mountain Winery in Saratoga
• Villa Montalvo's Carriage House and Theater
• The Warfield in  San Francisco
• The Oprheum in San Francisco
• The Greek Theatre in Berkeley

All of these theaters, unlike the larger venues, offer close intimate seating where you can see the performer, rather than stadium seating where you have to see the performer on a big screen. My view on those is you might as well stay home and watch YouTube.

When I saw that Suzanne Vega was going to be live at the Carriage House in February 9th, I made it a point to bring my wife to it. I'd never seen her live before, but I liked her introverted lyrics and my wife thought she was good after watching some videos on YouTube.

Vega did not disappoint. Her second song on the set, Small  Blue Thing, blew me away. I had heard  the song on CD before, but it did not had the impact the live performance had. I said "wow, that's beautiful to my wife" and then heard someone else in the audience say loudly, "Wow!" The rest of the concert went by in a trance, with Vega playing some new songs mixed in with some old favorites.

It did not come off without a hitch. In particular, my favorite song of hers, The Queen and the Soldier was marred by her coughing in the middle and then having to regain her place with the help of the audience. I also felt the non-a capella version of Tom's Diner was too distracted by the electric guitar. Nevertheless, most arrangements were just her accompanied by an electric guitarist, so you couldn't accuse the concert of being overly elaborated or over-produced.

I had a great time, and if you get a chance to see her in an intimate venue while she's on tour, I highly recommend doing so.

First Impressions: Ting Galaxy Note 2

I bought my wife a Galaxy Note 2 from Ting.com for Christmas. The selling point of buying from Ting as opposed to say, AT&T, Verizon, T-mobile, or Sprint is that you buy a phone without a contract, and Ting charges you by usage rather than a flat $70 (and up) with a 2-year contract, which is far more expensive than paying for a phone up front and then paying per megabyte or per minute for use. It is possible to pay $30/month for unlimited T-mobile prepaid voice + data, but T-mobile coverage is so pathetic inside the Bay Area that your phone would effectively be an ornament if you were to choose the service. That works very well if you're an iPhone user, but is not very practical for anyone else.

Ting's plan charges $6/device, and then $3/month for 100 minutes and $3/month for 100MB, with a gradually decreasing cost as you consumer more data or more minutes. In the extreme, if you're fond of using uncapped data for viewing videos or streaming music, then you're likely to pay more. However, Bay Area professionals live in a wifi zone at home, and have access to wifi at work, so are very unlikely to stream large amounts of data during the course of a typical non-travel month. In practice, my wife uses $12 worth of Ting service a month.

The phone's screen is huge and a delight. It's also fast. While both Ting and Republic Wireless ostensibly resell Sprint's service, on head to head comparison there's no doubt that for whatever reason, the Galaxy Note 2's faster when loading web pages over 3G. The battery life is also incredible --- my wife usually gets at least 2 days a charge, and it's gotten to the point where she frequently forgets to charge the phone because it so rarely needs it.

The UI is wonky and strange if you're used to Nexus devices. There's all sorts of switches and sliders for controlling data usage, and we got a bit too aggressive at first with turning off background data, and then discovered that Google Navigation didn't work if you got that aggressive. Backing off that aggressiveness a bit and we ended up with very parsimonious use of data yet all the usual services worked (push e-mail, navigation, etc).

Samsung's also been very good about supporting users: soon after getting the device, there was an offer for a free Flip Cover as well as a free 5-pack of TecTiles in order to take advantage of the NFC built into the phone. I doubt very much that my wife will ever get conversant enough with phone technology in order to use it, but it still speaks volumes as to Samsung's support.

All in all, having used the phone for more than a month and getting $12/month of use out of it, I'm very impressed and can recommend the phone and service package to anyone who's lusting after a fast phone.

Review: The Best American Science & Nature Writing

Amazon had The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2012 on sale for $1.99, and when I saw Dan Ariely's name on it, I figured it was a good deal. It's a very good collection, but not nearly as good as last year's selections.

The most chilling story in the collection is the one on global atmospheric pollution --- fundamentally the scale of China's pollution into the atmosphere can only be believed by measuring it from Washington and Oregon's mountains. I also enjoyed the article about growing meat in laboratories

Perhaps one reason the articles are less interesting is because Ariely finds the geeky internet stuff interesting while perhaps I do not as much. The articles on Bitcoin and the Turing test would be interesting if you're not a computer scientist. The hero-worshiping article about Nathan Myhrvold's $400+ book on Modernist Cuisine is also not what I would have expected in this book.

Nevertheless, every article is good reading and a lot of fun. Recommended.

Startup Engineering Management visits Wharton School of Business in San Francisco

Did you know that Wharton School of Business had a San Francisco Branch? I didn't, until James Kilpatrick, affiliated with their entrepreneurship program contacted me and asked if I was willing to give a talk to the students in the program. Given the prestige of Wharton, who was I to turn them down?

The talk will happen in Wharton's San Francisco campus on Saturday, March 16th around noon. (Yes, it's a weekend MBA program) The talk will be directed towards MBA students who are mostly not technical. Hence, it will be about "attracting, recruiting, retaining, and keeping engineers happy at a startup." The school of business has about 30 free spaces available for non-MBA students who are interested in Wharton's MBA program to attend, in addition to its current students who may attend the talk.

If you're interested in going to the talk, please send e-mail to James Kilpatrick telling him you want to attend the talk, and he'll send you the details if there's enough room. Those attending the talk from outside will need to stay fora short admissions information session with Director of admissions Katherine Lilygren.