Charlie Rose Interview:

Charlie Rose: How do you find a balance in all this? Father, chairman of a major company, a foundation, and then all these other ventures? How does the balance come to you?

Bill Gates: I don’t mow the lawn.

It’s like we’re twins.

So I’ve been acquiring and playing with 50-100 year old electrical lab instruments.

My latest is a reed-type frequency meter, I didn’t even know these things existed. Great admiration for the people who originally designed these things, a very clever little design. We tried a brief experiment to get it running today, but no response. We may not have been applying enough voltage, the wires in these things could probably handle 50+ amps.

I’ve also got this potentiometer, utterly crazy looking, and with controls and labels that are a mystery to me – terminals labeled E+ and E-, H and H1, L and L1, BA+, R, and a couple others. A big wonking selector switch that looks like it could transmit 50 amps, and a fine tuning gauge. I’ll be putting an ohmmeter on this thing to see what the hell is going on.

I’ve also got some more awesome potentiometers and voltmeters. As well as a variable capacitor. These things were built for the ages – massive wires, plenty of ventilation, solid wood and metal and bakelite construction. They are all amazingly beautiful.

I’m working to bond an arduino to some of these so I can use them for more mundane modern purposes. But they look great just sitting on the shelf.

• Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton. A family is shattered by a school fire, and the critically injured mother battles to protect her kids and uncover the truth around the events. Great story about the relationship between a woman and her family, tested by extreme events. The voice used in the story is a little confusing at times – I read the Kindle version, I wonder if the printed version used typography to better set apart the actions and thoughts of various characters.
• Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin. Great detective tale featuring an abrasive self-destructive sleuth. I should read more in the series.
• The Doctor of Thessaly by Anne Zouroudi. Another great detective character and story. In both this tale and the Rankin, the leads care about justice and to hell with the rules. But they go about it totally different ways. The Rankin character is a blunt rusty knife, the Zouroudi character is a judo master. Fun stuff.
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. Fascinating but challenging read about life in the Mumbai slums. Challenging because the lives depicted are so brutal, the culture so corrupt. I’m left wrung out, and having no idea how to do anything about.
• The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham. Well written and pretty crisp, a nice coverage of what the phrase “the rule of law” means, its history, and implications for today. Worthwhile.
• Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. Eh. Teenage boys can be creeps, I don’t need a whole novel pointing this out over and over and over again.

In all my playing around with arduinos and raspberrypis, I haven’t really gotten into wearables. But for some reason this color sensor just seems totally cool. And then I get drawn to the lux sensor and the GPS module and accelerometer and well just about all of it. I don’t really have a great idea what to do with it – maybe tie it into OneBusAway and have something light up with the bus is near, time and gps wise?

Where am I going to buy $500 pens now? I’m devastated.

I hope they open a cupcake shop in the spot, we need more of those.

Great show last night, I feel very fortunate to have seen Prince in a small venue. A rocking show – just his current small backing band of 3 women on drums, bass, and guitar. Opened with a few classics, including a nice variant on “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man”. A lot of his new material. A nice cover of the Cars’ “Let’s Go” with a shout out to Boston. A really nice cover of “Crimson and Clover”. Along the way Prince was in great lead guitar form, and also picked up the bass at one point for a great solo.

He is a captivating performer. I’ve seen Jack White in a small venue and Buddy Guy, they both pour a lot of emotion into their guitar work, Prince is up there as well.

Everyone has written about forcing the stupid touchscreen down our throats, that annoys the heck out of me too. But maybe I can get used to it.

But moving beyond that, I just want to use a damn printer. There is nothing about printers on the home screen. When you type in “printers” it says it can’t find anything. Awesome. So I bring up the stupid f&*king charms (because menus and ribbons and taskbars weren’t good enough ways to start programs, let’s invent a whole new system, yay), choose Settings, choose “Change PC Settings”. Oh there is nothing called “printers” in this list either. OK click on devices and you can add a device, and then it tries and tries to search for devices. Meanwhile it is showing me a crappy list of devices I do have – great I have a “HL_DT_ST BD-RE WH08LS20” installed, that is good to know. Oh and I have devices called “Microsoft XPS Document Writer” and “Send To OneNote 2013”. Where are those on my desk? Those are so much more important to me than my damn printer.

I know it isn’t cool and strategic to print anymore. But people still need to f&*king print. I eventually found a way to add a printer but don’t ask me where the hell I found it.

Oh and the arduino software won’t install on it, apparently the arduino board is not trusted. To install it, you have to boot into the secret system setup mode which you get to deep in the control panel, and choose to turn off driver signing enforcement. Except this super secret startup mode hangs on my brand new machine and I have to power cycle. That is great, you certainly don’t want the most active community of tinkerers using your operating system.

Oh and I am using with dual monitors – one plain old monitor and one touchscreen. DON’T DO THIS. It sounded like a great idea, keep the new interface off in one screen in its little ghetto, and run all my real apps on the other screen. Except the touch interface is horribly confused now – a touch on my touch screen moves the pointer on my non-touch screen.

Yes I am doing perhaps somewhat niche-y things but Windows used to be good at that, damn it. It would run on anything and let you do anything. Now it is just an OSX/iOS wannabe and not very good at that.

Not in a good mood.

• Ghostman by Roger Hobbs. Excellent thriller about a world-class thief trying to thread the needle between rival criminal organizations and law enforcement. Great character. I’d read more featuring.
• Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. I don’t read many popular business books, they are all so repetitive and derivative. This book wasn’t terrible – the authors aren’t trying to sell you on their thesis, but are giving you a compendium of tools for thinking about business models
• The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng. Excellent story about a young ethnic Chinese woman in Malaya during and after WWII. The intertwining of many cultures, the horrific treatment of groups by the rulers of the moment, and how everyone coped and survived. A window into a part of the world and its history of which I have been largely ignorant.
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. Two teenage cancer sufferers find love amidst their tragedy. Not an easy read but will grab you. Apparently under production as a movie.
• Extinction Machine by Jonathan Maberry. Eh. Super tough government agent violently unravels a conspiracy involving aliens. Not very original.
• The Dragon’s Path by Daniel Abraham. High quality fantasy. Not quite as bold as Game of Thrones but pretty darn good with compelling characters and a bit lighter tone than Game of Thrones.
• The Double Game by Dan Fespeman. Held my attention but the motivations of main character seemed like nonsense.

• CircuitLab – worth watching. Today it is kind of a toy, but if this could grow, say, into a tool that would let me design and emulate SOC-based systems, and then outsource the parts supply, circuit board mfr, and even assembly of them, well that could be cool.
• PaintCode – if I was doing iOS/osx app development, this seems like a must have. Laying out visuals and then creating all the boilerplate framework is tedious and boring.
• Pressgram – Love this idea. Never understand why people gift content to other branded services, this lets people own and control their own content.
• Some Ecards Store – I’d like to buy a bunch of the coffee mugs and stock our office with them.
• Tabular – I don’t have enough time (or, to be honest, enough skill) to engage in my secret desire to compose music, but if I did…
• 2 factor Apple ID auth – purportedly you can turn this on but it has been a failure for me, apple claims i set some security question answers that i have never seen before, and now I am locked out of my account after too many tries. Awesome.
• WindowsRT jailbreak tool – something to do with my stupid surface machine

[caption id=”attachment_6498” align=”alignright” width=”200”] What We See[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_6499” align=”alignleft” width=”200”] What Minnesota Sees[/caption]

So Minnesota fired Tubby. @MedcalfByESPN is pretty clear that the real problem lies within the Minnesota athletic program and community – failure to build facilities, failure to support program, etc:

That’s the truth. Gophers need to invest a lot of money to right the ship. I’m gone. Feel free to disagree.

You can get lost in Minneapolis. When the Gophers are good, everyone cares. When they’re not, they go away. That’s just how it is.

The Gophers need so many additional resources to compete with the best teams in the Big Ten and the country. Limited investment.

Pretty classic mediocre team problem. The institution thinks it is a premier program, and thinks it deserves premier people and premier results. The truth is different.

I have a need to collaborate on some complex documents and I am trying out Sphinx as the document build system. Plays nice with github, promises to play well with code (tho I haven’t really tried that out yet), uses reStructuredText for markup. I would have preferred that it used markdown (well, multimarkdown, I kind of need tables), but rST seems fine. Sphinx builds HTML, text, PDF, and a bunch of other output formats.

I also need some simple flowchart imagery and GraphViz seems like the way to go – auto generation of flowcharts, etc from simple text descriptions. Again plays nice with github, with my favorite text editor, etc.

For text editing I have moved to Sublime Text. I love bbedit but I do have the occasion to use a Windows machine and Sublime has versions for both OSX and Windows.

Oh and finally I occasionally need a more complex drawing. The Wacom Bamboo Stylus + Lekh Diagrams on the iPad seems to be a great combo. My drawing skills blow, I really like how Lekh Diagrams autocorrects my rectangles, triangles, circles, etc.

• Alys, Always by Harriet Lane. A young woman witnesses a tragic accident and is then drawn into the family of the victim. Or insinuates herself into the family. I thought the tale was a little underdeveloped as either a suspense novel or as a character study, so just ok.
• Dhalgren by Samuel Delany. I read this years ago on my first sweep through the SF canon. I was probably too young and didn’t understand it. Now I am older and I still am at sea, it is just weird shit. I am just too linear I think. Or too linear at this moment in my life.
• Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus. Purportedly one of Germany’s most popular mystery writers – but I suspect Germans have better taste than this. Stilted dialogue, choppy language – a product of bad translation? Whatever, I gave up 40% of the way in. Blech.
• The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman. Strong reviews, but just seems kind of pointless. The lives of wastrels in the mid1900s, as they bounce around but never quite engage with the events of the day. If the message is “most of us will live pointless lives and leave no footprint on the world”, well, ok. But who needs to read this?
• Fade to Black by Francis Knight. Blade runner-inspired fantasy set in a noirish city, with of course plots and corruption mixed in. Solid.

I liked Google Reader. It was a great way for me to keep up with content across a variety of interests – I had groups for college football, for tech, for books, for economics. I knew that I could always go to Reader and get caught up on a topic. As others have noted, it was probably the single Google product that I used more than anything.

Judging by Twitter reaction, a lot of other people liked Reader too, and in particular, use of Reader seemed to be biased towards the influentials in each of the disparate communities I followed. The leading college football writers were all saddened to see reader go. Leading tech writers. etc. “Marcelo”:http://blog.calbucci.com/2013/03/google-is-about-to-learn-tough-lesson.html says it well, Google just walked away from a product used disproportionately by influentials, and this seems like an ill-considered move. Most startups would kill for the audience that Google Reader had.

Of course Google isn’t really a startup any more, as this move demonstrates. Google is willing to walk away from customers to achieve some strategic goal. Google is willing to dump a product with users, to try to force people to more “strategic” products like Google+. Google prioritizes their competition with Facebook over user satisfaction. Google prioritizes the needs of advertisers, who probably never loved Reader, over the needs of users. It all seems a little arrogant and self-centered.

But no time for whining. Google owned Reader and they get to decide what to do with it. Twitter is fun but is no replacement for Reader – I didn’t have to wade thru a stream of gunk to get to content on Reader, and Reader never had the snark of Twitter – I like a certain amount of snark, but not all the time. I’ve moved initially on to Feedly which slurped up all my Reader groups and feed info nicely, seems relatively fast, is a lot more expressive that Google Reader. I’m not unhappy. Reader had been static so long, Google had really given up on it years ago, it was time to move on. As “others have noted”:http://corte.si/posts/socialmedia/rip-google-reader.html, Reader was probably hurting the market more than helping it, people can now move on to better solutions that are more user focused.

I worked for part of my career in the Personal Systems group at Microsoft. The Personal Systems group was full of great people, was a very successful business (MSDOS and Windows 3.x/95), and there was just a great vibe in the organization. I think I had a decent reputation as a manager and peer, but as they say “a rising tide lifts all boats”, and it was easy to seem smart and effective when I was part of a great team and business.

In early ‘98 (I think), I moved over to the MSN group, Microsoft’s first major foray into online services. The joke inside Microsoft was that “moving into the MSN group caused 20 points of IQ to evaporate”, and I fared no better than anyone else. The group was dysfunctional, there were too many people without great product shipping experience, the strategy was unclear, the whole thing was just a cesspool. Ultimately I left Microsoft in large part due to my experience in this group – there was no coherent view of what the strategy should be (at every level of the company), and I was going to have spend years moving people out of the organization, which was not a challenge I wanted to take on.

I’ve been reading all the negative press around the “NCAA and Emmert”:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/sports/ncaafootball/calls-for-reform-grow-louder-for-ncaa-and-mark-emmert.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& this week. The mishandling of the Miami case, Pete’s broadside against the NCAA, stupid amateurism decisions, etc. A lot of finger pointing at Emmert and calls for a change in leadership.

I have no idea if Emmert is a great guy or not, but he is in a broken system. The entire premise of the NCAA is wrong. Billions of dollars sloshing around in the system, flowing to the institutions and media companies and adults, and just a dribble flowing to the athletes. The system is doomed to failure, there is going to be leakage everywhere. As long as Emmert tries to maintain the system, he is going to look like an incompetent. If he really cares about the student athletes, he’d be wise to step outside the system and attack it.

On the heels of “B&N’s rumored step back from the Nook”:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/barnes-noble-weighs-its-nook-losses.html, I bet he is “more forlorn than ever”:http://theludwigs.com/2010/04/the-nook-dude-at-the-barnesnobles-looked-forlorn-today/.

This was an easy one to predict. Competing in consumer hardware against Apple (and Samsung), and with an undifferentiated product relative to the Kindle? The Nook was born with 2.5 strikes against it. Maybe there were ways that B&N could have succeeded – a device that made the retail experience better? That authors or publishers liked better than alternatives? – but competing head-to-head on hardware specs was doomed from the get-go. A lot of shareholder money wasted in direct spend on the Nook, and in opportunity cost as B&N chased this pipe dream and failed to innovate in their core business.

It will still be interesting to watch AMZN in this market. They will not be able to compete with Apple, Samsung on mainstream tablets. But they don’t necessarily need to, they can still be the best online retailer without making their own devices.