A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

The Samsung NX200 is my 2nd try at moving to a mirrorless camera for my main camera. I previously tried a recent Olympus PEN and it is ok but feels cheap. And with all of Olympus’s corporate woes, hard to feel good about settling on it.

The Samsung tho feels rock solid, a great body. The flash unit is slick. I am still grinding thru all the controls and don’t have an opinion yet on them. But one feature stands out — the AMOLED screen is gorgeous. Great contrast, vibrant, good in daylight. Really beautiful.

Now I just need to pick up some lenses for it — like the long zoom lens

John Scalzi wrote an excellent essay today on the impermanence of art — none of us know the top 10 books of 100 years ago, or even the authors of the books.

I’m betting the same dynamic holds true in popular music, or in almost every other area of human endeavor. Certainly holds true in software, with obviously even faster aging out. 

Enjoy what you are doing today, work with people you like today, help make people’s lives better today, because in the long run, our efforts are largely immaterial. 

You could view this as depressing but I view it as wonderfully freeing — don’t worry about making mistakes or heading down the wrong path or looking the fool, in the long run it really doesn’t matter, so take some chances today and try to make a difference now in someone’s life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Happy 50th Birthday to the Phantom Tollbooth. I am sure I read this book a half-dozen times as a kid and is certainly one of the reasons I became such a reader. What a great book, I am tempted to go re-read it now.

November is shaping up to be quite the race in the Big10, I have to say, the addition of divisions and a championship game have created a great new dynamic (and makes me rethink my objection to a playoff, hmmm.)

Many sites have written about all the permutations of possible teams in the championship game, and the surprising fact that OSU is not out of it, and in fact has a very good shot at making the game. Being a bit of a nerd, I decided to play around with a Monte Carlo simulation of the race to the championship game.

I wrote a little C program that does any arbitrary number of iterations of the rest of the season and examines the results to determine the championship game participants. The outcome of each game is determined randomly — a random number is selected from 0-1 and used as an index against the a priori probability (as made up by me) that each team would win the game. I.E., if you believe Northwestern has a 70% chance of beating Minnesota, then any random number from 0 to .7 implies a Northwestern win. I used the c rand function with a time-based seeding on each run, please no complaints about the quality of my random numbers, I am just simulating football games for gosh sakes. I toyed around with the a priori probabilities a little to see how sensitive the outcomes were. And then at the end of the season, I apply all the tiebreakers if necessary to see what teams represent the divisions in the title game. I ran the simulation 1000 times, and a few runs of 10,000 trials just for yuks. The 1000 run simulation

So — the Legends division. Not surprisingly, due to the weakness of their remaining schedule, MSU is the title game rep ~2/3rds of the time. Nebraska about ~1/3, and Michigan picks up a smattering (1%) of appearances. Since Michigan has already lost to MSU, if they ever end up tied in the standings, MSU always takes the spot. Michigan needs MSU and Nebraska to both falter (and can control the Nebraska since they have yet to play) and also needs to beat OSU, Illinois, Iowa. A tough road. This weekend’s play won’t shake things up much, the most interesting game is the Michigan-Iowa game, I would have picked Iowa a week ago but losing to Minnesota has shaken my faith in the F(erentz) Troop. The Nov 12th weekend will be more entertaining — MSU@Iowa, Michigan@Illinois, Nebraska@PSU. And then Nebraska@Michigan Nov 19th. It seems unlikely that Michigan will still be in the hunt by the time of the Ohio State game.

The Leaders division is far more interesting. PSU has the inside track, no surprise being up 2 games on everyone else at this point. They take the title game spot 30-60% of the time, depending on how you view the likelihood of them winning their remaining games. If you think they are a slight favorite in all their remaining games, then 60%. If you think they are a modest underdog, then 30%. OSU has a surprisingly good shot, 20-25%, depending on how you rate their odds against Michigan and PSU, and because they are in a good tiebreaker position having beaten Wisconsin. Wisconsin picks up the pieces and has the weakest chance due to the OSU loss. The Nov 5th weekend will likely teach us nothing as PSU has a bye, OSU has Indiana, Wisconsin has Purdue. The Nov 12th Nebraska@PSU game is one to watch, and then Nov 19th with Wisconsin@Illinois and PSU@OSU is a defining weekend. There is a very real chance that on the final weekend, all 3 teams need a win to make it to the game — OSU is at Michigan and PSU is at Wisconsin, so that should be a great day.

So someone asked me “Hey, with your views on the Occupy movement, how do you feel about the fact that the top 10% pays 70% of federal income tax? Is that fair?”

First of all, this is NOT the Occupy issue that gets me most excited — I am much more interested in limiting corporate political contributions. But I do have a view.

I have no idea if these statistics are accurate, but I assume that the top 10% does pay a much larger share of the total income tax load. So is that fair? Well, I am guessing that the top 10% also own a huge of the Audis and BMWs in the country, eat a disproportionate share at the finest restaurants, take a huge of the vacation trips to Hawaii, have a disproportionate share of the nicest houses, etc etc. Gosh that doesn’t seem fair either.

The goal of our market system and society is not fairness in outcomes; there is always going to be variance in outcomes, sometimes due to skill, sometimes due to luck. Some people will earn a lot more, and will get a greater share of the positive benefits as well as costs. Rather, the goal is equality of opportunity — every citizen should have the opportunity to achieve their dreams, no doors should be closed at the start of their life/career.

Thus I don’t get cranked about higher tax burdens or higher tax rates for the wealthy. So someone who is extraordinarily successful has to carry a higher share of the cost of operating our society, well boo hoo. I do get more cranked about issues that affect equality of opportunity — lack of funding for public schools, lack of equal healthcare for all children, lack of access to other education for lower income students (and this is why we give a lot to scholarship programs at OSU, at UW, at the Point Foundation, etc).

Outcomes will never be equal and we shouldn’t try to level them out, the free market system is powerful and we need to nurture it. But we should try to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to pursue happiness — and to me that means everyone gets a fair starting point: a reasonable education, good health, and no crushing debt load to start out.

So Nest is the newest shiny toy for the tech industry and media to get all excited about, a ton of coverage this week — for a thermostat. Obviously some of the ardor will fade — how long can anyone stay excited about a thermostat? But I do think there is a theme here which has some enduring value. 

I’m not really that excited about the UI and learning features of the Nest thermostat. I am able to navigate my smart thermostat today, and I just don’t need to futz with it very often. In our new house it took me a couple days to get things where I wanted them but I’ve moved on and haven’t had to look back. 

But I am totally excited about the remote access for the Nest thermostat, the web interface. Our houses are the biggest asset we own, and the cloud presence of our house is either missing or spewed all around the web in random places. There are so many things I should be able to do: 

• Remote utility management. Remote thermostat is a nice start. I want remote utility management in general — what’s the temp right now, what’s my water usage, change my temp, change my water heater temp, turn on/off my sprinklers, check my power usage, turn on/off appliances/circuits, check my usage and billing history, etc. I can get pieces of this but it is hard hard hard to get it all and to integrate it all into a single cloud interface.
• Remote security. Webcam monitoring, alarm monitoring, history of access to house, remote door lock management. Again you can get piece parts of this but cobbling together is a significant pain.
• Remote doorbell. When someone rings my doorbell, I want an instant notification on my smartphone, I want to see the video feed from my door, and I want to be able to talk thru the intercom. The person at the door should have no idea if I’m in my kitchen or on a business trip. This is part of the security topic but is more compelling than most of the security features.
• Bills. Utility bills, consumption history, how I compare to others, bill payment.
• Financial info. Mortgage status — balance, rate, is it time to refi. The estimated sale value of my house. Mortgage document storage. Tracking of improvements to the house — costs, documentation — so I can correctly calculate cost basis at sale time.
• Service. All the warranty terms and docs for all the appliances and other features of my house. A place to track service records, to record preferred vendors, to get vendor recommendations. A service advisor — what maintenance should I expect to do in the next year based on what is known about my house — time for roof inspection, approaching lifetime of water heaters, time to repaint, what is my likely cost in the next year for all this.

You can get a ton of this info today but it is spewed all over the web. To access all the info about your house, you would have to access the Nest site, any smart metering site, a remote security site (or several for webcam, door locks, monitoring service), each of the utility websites, your bill payment web site, your mortgage provider website, zillow, redfin, etc. 

I’d love to have a portal that integrates all this via user configurable widgets into a single interface — my home at a glance. And gives me great mobile access to all the info and features. And just gets better as I add nicely designed devices into the house — a Nest thermostat, a great doorbell/webcam, internet-controllable door locks, etc.

I’m sure the Nest guys are thinking broadly about the entire space, with a general name like Nest they must have ambitions beyond thermostats. I’m excited to watch their evolution. I’d love to have better command of the largest asset I own.

Daring Fireball points to a pretty thorough takedown of QR codes as used in print ads. The original design goal — Toyota invented these to track parts — makes sense, but jamming these into consumer media is just strange.

• Users can already type in your URL or a sentence, or speak into Siri, or do an image search with their phone. Is taking a snap of this code thing really so much better?
• There’s a history of companies trying to stuff proprietary ID systems in between users and product/service providers. These visual codes are one such thing. AOL Keywords, RealNames are text-based equivalents. They all try to get advertisers to stuff these in ads, but I don’t see how this really serves users or advertisers, it mostly just serves the companies with the proprietary ID system.
• Ultimately, if your product/ad/message is so forgettable that you think jamming a QR code or text string in will help, well, there is a deeper problem.