A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Mitt pays $3M+ in taxes a year — that is a s%^tload of money, whatever the rate. And people want another $3M a year out of him? When I see numbers this size, I wonder more about where it is all going — shouldn’t we spend more time on what the heck the government is doing with all this money? OK yes I am a big fan of fairness and I hate the shenanigans that have gone on at our largest financial institutions, but we ought to spend a lot more time looking at what we are getting for all our tax dollars. I get more outraged about handouts to big banks than I do about this tax rate issue.

SOPA and PIPA are beyond dangerous — the whole tech industry has been railing like crazy against these, it sure would be good if the industry would focus instead on how to help content creators protect their IP and get paid for their work. I’d like to see authors and singers and movie directors get paid a lot of money, I think they should be allowed to charge whatever they want for their products, I don’t think any of us have the right to copy their works willy nilly. These industries employ a lot of creative people in good jobs in the USA and I think we should encourage this. It is easy to sit back and pee all over the movie industry and the Senate and House, but we should spend time on more productive activities that help solve the problems.

Apple blows it out. Ok I lied, I am not feeling contrary about Apple at all. Blowing it out of the water, customers love them, competitors in disarray, upside internationally and in PCs, iPad 3 and iPhone 5 and Apple TV opportunities ahead of them. Apple has only their own egos to fear.

My grandfather once told me “The day you stop learning is the day you start dying.” I’ve had a lifelong commitment to education and I am still learning every day. There is so much going on in education, the choices are broader every day, with so many efforts to increase access and lower costs. Some things I’ve been learning about:

• played around this weekend with Apple’s new ibook publisher — Tons of coverage of the event announcing this week, see for instance http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/apple-textbook-event/. The goal is noble — allow millions of people to create textbooks, targeting the iPad of course, and dramatically cut the price of textbooks, and the carrying weight of textbooks. The tool works although it is a little buggy yet. I made a first textbook — basically i poured all the portfolio company summaries from the ignition partners website into a textbook format (a tool that would automatically pour CMS content into a textbook would be handy). These textbooks are really just another form of app for the iPad with a dev tool that is substantially friendlier to use than Xcode. If you can author a powerpoint presentation, you can author a textbook. There is nothing super revolutionary about the resultant products but this is a good step towards electronic textbooks.
• signed up for a course at udacity.com — We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we’ve connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students in almost every country on Earth. Know Labs was founded by three roboticists who believed much of the educational value of their university classes could be offered online for very low cost. A few weeks later, over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled in our first class, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” The class was twice profiled by the New York Times and also by other news media. Now we’re a growing team of educators and engineers, on a mission to change the future of education.
• thinking about taking a course at Digipen as well. They’ve done great work, the team for Portal came out of Digipen.
• at Wolf’s advice, learning about the Dalton research group at the UW. A traditional university setting but exciting content.

My brain’s a little tired but excited about the opportunities!

From today’s NYT article on Apple’s offshore manufacturing:

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries”, a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

I’m not completely angry about this view, this might be the correct and legitimate attitude for a multinational corporation. But it is clearly not the correct attitude for a US citizen and participant in the political process. Citizens do have an obligation to solve America’s problems.

On a table labelled “Noteworthy Fiction” at the downtown Seattle Barnes & Noble I find the following 3 books along with about 20 others:

• Halo Glasslands by Karen Traviss. Based on the hit XBox game, the 8th in the series.
• Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Dominion by Eric Van Lustbader. Not a new Bourne novel by the (deceased) Robert Ludlum but something contracted by his estate.
• The Sixth Man by David Baldacci. Baldacci.

These may be incredibly entertaining books, I have no idea (tho based on Amazon reviews I am pretty sure I would hate “Halo Glasslands”). I’m not a book snob. I read tons of escapist fare, I love the Jack Reacher novels, I like Harlan Coben, I read science fiction voraciously, I enjoy YA fiction and graphic novels (or “comic books” as I still call them). I read some highbrow stuff too but I enjoy popular fiction. I’ve read every original Ludlum work, I’ve played Halo, I might even be the target audience for these books.

However, I would never call a Reacher novel “noteworthy”. No one is going to be discussing Lee Child novels 100 years from now in a literature class. I expect something of import on a table labelled “noteworthy”. The latest from a Nobel winner. Man-Booker nominees. Pulitzer Prize winners and nominees. Edgar Award winners. Maybe a Hugo or Nebula award winner. Works that will surprise and challenge me.

B&N has plenty of room, they can have plenty of other tables with bestsellers and hot books and the best beach reads and books for long airplane rides and books for Stephen King fans and movie tie-in books and all the other kinds of books that may sell well and may be entertaining. But dammit, can’t they have a table that shows some thought in its selections, that appeals to people who buy and read a lot of books?

This is (one reason) why retail bookstores are in trouble. There is nothing thoughtful or special about the in-store experience. B&N has taken away book space and given it to Nook displays, calendar displays, DVD sales (really? who pays these prices for DVDs?), in-store cafes, etc etc. They’ve invested nothing as far as I can tell in merchandising and selling books. I buy 100s of physical and ebooks during a year, but I left B&N empty-handed. If B&N can’t get me to buy a book each time I am in their store, they are screwing up, my bar just isn’t that high.

Since I am semi-retired from Halloween prop-building (tho I still have 2 storage pods full of gear if anyone wants to buy some skeletons, tombstones, etc…) I have not been buying as many tools and workbench gadgets as I used to. If I was buying, I’d be trying these out:

• Planet Pocket Tool — small handmade tools with an arty bent. I never have time to follow the site and get in on the deals.
• Grabber. indispensable for fat-fingered guys like me.
• Fathead tweezers. ANother very nicely machined tool.
• Blackfire flashlight. Always need a clampy light.
• Cubify. I would LOVE to have a cost effective 3d printer.
• Inpection Camera. OK no real use for this but isn’t it cool? I am sure I could justify somehow.

• Photo Lens Burrito Wrap. Seems awesome.

First off, we are surving the 2012 Snowpocalypse. Office traffic is light but folks are here.

On the business front, it was announced that we led a round in Symplified. Great company building some pretty essential tools to manage employee identity and engagement across the web, can’t imagine how companies manage their voice and presence without this.

We also joined the investor group behind Whiptail, who build high-scale SSD arrays to replace spinning disks. Spinning disks — seems like we will look back at these in 100 years and laugh, or at least class them as a steampunk kind of gadget.

Excited to work with both companies.

• Trello. I really want to like this, the simple notecard interface is nice. But a little too structured for me, I’d prefer basically free form notes and less database-y feel. And I need an iPad/iPhone app, an iPad version of this could be awesome. Maybe I just really want a little better organization tools in Evernote, I don’t use the Evernote folders and tags much, I don’t really understand when to use tags and when to use folders.
• Picscatter. Great way to create a Facebook timeline header picture.
• The Tivo iPad app seems to work very well. Way easier to use than the onscreen guide and tivo remote. I’ve also used the xfinity/comcast app which is not surprisingly a little clunkier. It is sad how marginalized Tivo has become tho, they really overplayed their hand. Tivo doesn’t seem to have created a win/win partnership opportunity with cable/satellite providers and so they have all created and pushed their own crappy DVRs. I am sure Apple has learned from their iPhone experience and Tivo’s missteps, I would expect Apple to create upside opportunity for their partners and to have much greater success than Tivo.

Johnz recently asked me about photo backup and sharing strategies.

I’ve settled on two basic schemes for the moment.

• My “autonomic” choice is backblaze tho you could just as well use carbonite or crashplan or any of the other N choices. This is a “set and forget” system — I tell it to backup my hard disk, and it just chugs away all the time and keeps me backed up. If my machine ever explodes or my house burns down, I have a recovery option. Now I’ve never had to test the recovery, so fingers crossed, but I have a plan. And this provides me great backup, but provides no sharing features or even remote use for myself.

• For more intentional sharing and remote use, I use smugmug. A little overkill for amateur photographer, but provides great viewing and sharing features. And integrates well with Aperture or Lightroom. And has a decent iphone app.

An alternatives I’ve considered: Dropbox would be super easy to use if I just cared about my own remote access, and is pretty appealing. But no sharing. But I could dump intentionally shared images up to facebook or flickr. This would not be an unreasonable combination to use.

Mix and match all these as you wish…but I hope you are using something, because it would suck to lose all your photos to a machine failure.

A little all over the place so far this month:

• The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. Good discussion of a classic design methodology, applies to software as well as architecture. Not a scalable scheme at all — the author argues for intensive customization with great involvement from the intended users — but still important for some classes of projects, and most importantly, talks about the need to really inject character and soul into design, which is important for all projects.
• Ventus by Karl Schroeder. Classic coming of age myth, with a little high fantasy, nanotechnology, and space opera thrown in. Quite engaging.
• My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber. I read this years ago, and it ages well, Thurber was a fine writer. He was a contemporary of my grandfather’s at OSU I believe, so I feel a little personally attached to Thurber and his tales.
• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. I had watched part of the lecture some time ago, but finally got to the book, a gift from some nice folks at CMU. If you read only one biographical book this year about a tech industry figure dealing with pancreatic cancer, this is the one to read — a great message by a very thoughtful man.

I read all these in paper versions as I am trying to dig thru the pile of paper on the nightstand. This paper stuff seems so antiquated compared to the Kindle.

Also of note today is Bluestacks’ winning the CES best software award, and Splunk’s filing. Congrats to both teams on their progress.

One of the companies in our portfolio, Korrio, is bringing out tools to allow parents to monitor the brain health of their child athletes. This is a great step, I wish this had been around when we had young student athletes in the family. You don’t have to dig around very much to see the frightful effects of head impacts in sports, and anything that raises awareness of the issue and provides tools to manage is a very good thing. There is a lot more to do, I’d love to see impact monitors in helmets that track instantaneous and cumulative impact forces, but this is a great first step, awesome to see this work happening.

• Cutting the Cord on Cable. Wish I could get there but live HD sports still keeps me stuck to cable/satellite provider. I’ve tried the streaming options and they are weak — poor selection of games/sources (I need ESPN/ABC channels + BTN + Fox Sports channels + upcoming Pac12 network), lots of stutter, not HD content. I will probably be one of the last cable subscribers in the country.
• Men with deep voices lack sperm. I was a tenor in choir.
• Do programming puzzles in interviews work?. I don’t think I’ve ever asked these kinds of questions, or at least not in 20 years.
• Gamification sucks. Respect your users.
• The Verge and The Wirecutter — good tech sites.
• If you are busy, you are doing something wrong.
• 10 new-ish programming languages. WOuld like to learn more about Chapel, haXe, X10, OPA.
• DSLRs are a dying breed. Not another “camera phones are going to win” article, but a smarter take on the mirrorless trend.

Rich writes about his biking obsession, I had no idea that you could get power-sensing pedals those days. Guys at Cornell are putting accelerometers in golf clubs. Many many groups have put accelerometers in football helmets to study concussions. The NFL is discussing sensors in balls.

Given the continued reductions in cost, size, and power needs of sensors, you have to believe that every piece of sporting equipment will be instrumented in the near future. Balls will report their speeds and acceleration, clubs and rackets will report forces applied and where the ball hit, helmets will report impact data and alert coaches as to when players should be pulled off the field. The NFL will know exactly and definitively when a touchdown is scored, when a first down is achieved. Pro sports will use this technology to protect players, to drive even more stats and on-screen graphics and in-stadium pageantry. Recreational equipment providers will use this to sell more gear and better instruction — enthusiasts will buy anything that will improve their game. Youth sports will use this to protect players — parents will spend on child safety.

We always pick up a new board game at the holidays, in the past Settlers of Cataan and Ticket to Ride have been huge winners. This year it is Survive which is a great game — super easy to learn, quick to play, and a great level of conflict. It has the Settlers attribute of a new board layout each game which keeps it fresh. If you like board games, recommended. If you were raised in the USA and think board games == Monopoly (barf), give one of these a try.

• Blacksnake’s Path by William Heath. Heath could have written a dry history of the settling of the Northwest Territories and the conflicts between the settlers and the Native Americans. But instead he wrote a fictionalized story of a frontiersman, William Wells, and his life on both sides of the conflicts. Interesting, particularly for those of us from that part of the US. 5 stars on amazon (tho thinly reviewed), 3.88 on goodreads, I’ll give it a 4.
• You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney. A great set of essays on our psychological failings — how we make emotional decisions and rationalize them away, how susceptible we are to marketing tricks, how terrible we are at calculating probabilities, and so on. Very informative. 4.5 stars on amazon, 3.97 on goodreads, definitely a 4 star read.
• Bossypants by Tina Fey. Ok but not worth all the gushing accolades. Yes we all like Tina Fey but this is nothing special. 3 stars from me, versus 4 on Amazon and Goodreads.
• Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff. WWII plane crash in New Guinea amongst stone age tribes. Excellent telling of the story. 4 stars on amazon, 3.75 on Goodreads, 4 for me.

So I read the NYTimes Future of Computing Science section today and was pretty underwhelmed. The presentation of the articles was incredibly dull with almost no visualization. The articles themselves were mostly soporific. The quantum computing article told me nothing. The bioengineering article didn’t inspire. Nothing else did anything for me. I usually like the Science Times section but this was the most boring edition of the year, and I’m not the only one who thinks this way, the non-nerds in the house agree.

It is way more inspiring to play with the latest video games, or to play with the latest devices and apps, or to talk with young entrepreneurs. I’m surprised at how dull the topic seemed in the Times. This edition will not inspire any young people to enter the field.

• The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Late in life, a man is confronted with relationships and events from early in his life, and tries to make sense of them, struggling with his faulty interpretation of events. At my age, I find this story resonates with me. Amazon at 4 stars, Goodreads almost 4, it is a fine tale.
• The Affair by Lee Child. Purportedly the back story on the Reacher character — how he came to lead his life of opportunistic vengeance. Good but doesn’t really explain how Reacher’s personality evolved — he is pretty quick to violence in this first book, how did he get that way? Amazon and Goodreads both at 4 stars, just a 3 for me.
• In The Woods by Tana French. A detective, damaged by an unsolved tragedy in his childhood, investigates a murder in his childhood neighborhood, and the unresolved issues of his youth overwhelm him. Nice. Amazon only gives 3 stars, Goodreads 3.6, there are large divergences in the reviews. I tend to be more towards 4 stars.
• The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. YA science fiction about an off-earth colony struggling with a native disease with unusual effects. Interesting premise but the main character is unappealing. Amazon and Goodreads give this about 4 stars, I’m just a 3 star.
• The Gray Man by Mark Greaney. A super assassin. Kind of fun. 4 stars on Amazon, 3.96 on goodreads, that all seems a little over the top, but it is a solid book.
• The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson. The upcoming movie finally motivated me to read these — I had delayed for a long time, fearing that their Da Vinci Code-like popularity. But the first book was awesome, contrasting two highly moral characters, one pursuing truth, one pursuing justice. The second book was ok but the super-human nemesis was a bit trite. The third was again great but in a different way — the interplay of media, criminals, victims, police, government agencies, and the good and bad players in each of these organizations made for compelling reading. Worth the buzz. 4+ stars for the first and third.
• Rule 34 by Charles Stross. Eh. A near future with commerce, internet, spam, fabrication all run rampant. Interesting trends but characters are dead dull. Giving up at halfway point. Amazon says 4 stars, Goodreads says 3.74, but this is just a 2 star for me.

I’ve been offline for a while, my father-in-law passed away just before Thanksgiving: Garry Nathan Curren. Too early.

I learned many things from Garry — the man was a mechanical master, could debug and fix any piece of mechanical equipment, was a wizard with cars. His garage setup is phenomenal. I am mechanically inept, but not bad at book learnin’ and computery stuff. One day many years ago I was hanging out in his garage, and he asked me how I managed to do so well in school — it didn’t come as easily to him. I replied that I really didn’t know, I just seemed to have good instincts. I asked him how he could look under a car hood and listen and know exactly what to do, and his reply was “I just know which way to jump”.

It really drove home for me that there are all kinds of intelligence — you can be smart about cars, people, computers, organizations, politics, biochemistry, languages, music composition, cooking, etc etc etc. There is no one “smart”, there are many kinds of smart, and all of the different kinds of smart are valuable and have their place.

Garry was also a thoughtful man — dedicated to learning, a great follower of history and science, always picking up something new. This always resonated with me. And he was an incredibly kind man — helpful to everyone, kind to his dogs, loved his family. We will all miss him.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare sets first day sales record. What stunning numbers. I don’t think Skyrim will do the same but a huge week for online entertainment. There is clearly huge demand for great entertainment content, pretty much insatiable demand. And why not, these games give hours and hours of entertainment, the per-hour price is super low.

I had a great week last week that left me feeling incredibly optimistic about the Seattle economy.

First, Techstars Seattle Demo Day. What a super event, lots of coverage of it. Great young companies, enthusiasm, great pitches, good progress in fundraising. Big audience with great energy. Super job by @andysack and everyone involved, a model for everyone else in the Seattle community who wants to nurture startups. We need more of these events, not just in cloud/web. I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurship events at UW and they are constrained by mentoring, hiring, seed financing — exactly what the techstars guys are providing. One of the companies, Romotive, has also done a great job leveraging Kickstarter and have generated a lot of early revenue — the rise of crowd-sourced pre-sales/funding is a fascinating and positive evolution.

Everyone was hiring at the event. As an indicator of how desperate people are to hire, I had two guys try to hire me. If you think I am the answer to your problem, you are pretty desperate.

Then I spent the better part of a day in a meeting with the UW College of Engineering Visiting Committee. Some great data on the College of Engineering — most programs are massively oversubscribed, turning away students in bunches, doing a great job placing students. Great evolution in programs, great facilities, great staffing. The College could probably push out many more engineers and is constrained by state economic policies; with tweaks to tuition and governance, it seems like the pipeline could open much more broadly. And we also had a chance to listen to President Young speak who seems to have a very open attitude about IP licensing, he seems to recognize that getting IP out of the university and to work is important.

I left the two days feeling like a lot of piece parts are coming together fast. Seed funding. Crowd sourcing. Mentoring. Training/Education. And with iteration and tweaking, we could see an explosion of economic growth in the Seattle area. Exciting times.