January 2008 Archives

I'm getting ready to go right now. I can hardly put the book down, but common sense says I have to keep packing.

Click on that link and it will connect your phone to my voice mail. I'll then get an email with your voice mail in it. If I choose to do so, I could also have it connect us directly using one of my many phone numbers.

It's "Yet another company" offering the "one number" to rule them all. This time it's google that owns them, so it might get some traction. We'll see. Who wouldn't like a universal phone number.

If you have been around me for even a few minutes lately you've probably heard about my plans to visit India.

One place I am headed to is Darjeeling, in the foothills of the Himalaya's.

I had a very hard time picking where in India I should visit. I finally narrowed down my choices and decided that I should visit Darjeeling. The lure of tea plantations and the Himalaya's was a huge factor, but another factor was this little train called the Toy Train. I'm not a huge railroad buff, but I knew I wanted to travel on a train in India - this one was too cool too pass up.

My mom dug up some of my old books to pass along to Matthew.

It was fun to see them. I was surprised to see what good care I took of these books.

It's funny to this day there are a few books in this lot where I am not entirely sure that I read the full, un-abridged, no pictures version of the book.

Thanks Mom!

Check out this google page showing edits on google map in near real time. It's kind of mermerizing. I just saw someone move a pizza place in Minneapolis. This is much better then TV during the writer's strike.

• Interesting article on psychopaths

  I loved this quote, "It could even be argued that the criteria used by corporations to find effective managers actually select specifically for psychopathic traits: characteristics such as charisma, self-centeredness, confidence, and dominance are highly correlated with the psychopathic personality, yet also highly sought after in potential leaders. It was not until recent years—in the wake of some well-publicized scandals involving corporate psychopaths—that many corporations started to reconsider these promotion policies." I can say I've ever worked for a psychopath yet, although I've heard the horror stories.

• The Feltron Report 2008.

  Instead of a form Christmas letter, this guy packages up his year in corporate annual report form.

• Scoble write about "What to do if you’re laid off in 2008 recession"

  There is a ton of good advice, although I've never heard of someone who can continue to go to the office after they are laid off.

• 40 years of driving on the right side in Sweden

  Evidently Sweden switched the side of the road they drive on in 1967. Who knew? What if the US decided to start driving on the left? Ron Paul should look into that. I think you might be able to accomplish this in Minnesota if you had to given our large Swedish population, but the rest of the country would be a steaming wreck. [Link courtesy of glt]

I love reading books for pleasure. A few years ago I realized that there are lots of people who rarely or never read a book for fun. There were a few interesting articles lately on this topic you might want to check out.

• "Twilight of the Books" - New Yorker article
• "To Read or Not To Read" - NEA Study on Reading

The basic finding is that reading for pleasure and rates of reading proficiency both appear to be trending downwards in young adults. The NEA study attempts to correlate other items like education attained, rates of voting participation, rates of volunteer activities in order to highlight the fact that if reading is lost as a past time perhaps societal losses will be experienced beyond the local bookseller and publisher. The reading rates for voters was especially interesting to me. While people always bemoan rates of voter turn out, since voters tend to be readers and non-voters tend to be non-readers perhaps this is a better informed electorate.

The NEA document is pretty long, you might want to wait for the movie version.

I am planning a trip to India. Everything I read speaks to the contrasts found in India. I noticed this article, "Book now for the flight to nowhere" over the weekend. A man bought a non-functioning plane and uses it to provide entertainment to people who might never be able to ride in a plane. It's funny since although I like traveling I wouldn't really want to sit in a plane for fun - although I can imagine wanting to if I never had. I guess to some degree we all want something we can't have.

The other article that caught my attention was "The Ink Fades on a Profession as India Modernizes". It was a story about a gentleman who used to be employed as a free-lance letter writer. As you can imagine as literacy improves, cell phones become ubiquitous and email and txt msg is more prevalent his chosen work is shrinking. I am hoping I can find someone like this who will either a) write a letter home for me or b) allow me to write some letters for his customers.

A few years ago I ran into the web site "Big Dead Place" and it reignited my fascination with Antarctica. I have read a lot of the first hand accounts of early explorers. Reading how people cope with the challenges given current technology and resources makes for an interesting contrast.

I ran into a mention of the book "Life on the Ice" on the O'Reilly Radar. Since I was Christmas shopping at the time, I decided I needed a copy of the book.

The book is a collection of fairly personal essays about Antarctica. The writing was unusually good. I suppose you really get a chance to compose your thoughts during six months of darkness. There were essays focused on the natural beauty, the human relationships and covered some aspects of the science projects that go on. The comparisons between penguin and human behavior made me laugh out loud at least once.

I would sure like to get a chance to visit there someday. I'm not sure if I have what it takes to winter over, but I would love a nice long visit.

Given my next big trip will be to India, maybe I should pick up "Travelers' Tales India: True Stories" by the same publisher.

This is my favorite place to have a cup of coffee in Wisconsin Rapids. They have neat books, funny store displays and cheap coffee.

When I was last there I realized I taught Matthew how to play chess but completely neglected checkers. I fixed that.

I was stunned to read that Sun bought MySQL AB for One Billion dollars.

Sun is one of my favorite technology companies. If faced with having to choose a commercial UNIX system I would choose Sun hands down. I love the tool set especially some of their latest hits like DTrace, Open Office and their T2 processors.

MySQL is hands down my favorite database to develop code with. It's fast, it's easy and it scales. I've worked with the software on both a free and commercial basis and I have been very happy with the product and the support offered by the company.

Why was the marriage so shocking? I simply can't believe the price tag. How will Sun recoup a billion dollars from this investment. It will take a lot of consulting and support contracts to return that much money to it's stock holders. I admit I'm happier than if a competitor had scooped them up and buried the product deep underground.

Who benefits most? I'm willing to bet Tim O'Reilly makes more money from this acquisition than Sun ever will. Hopefully, I'm wrong.

I'm half way through this O'Reilly book and it is inspiring. I can tell you from experience that looking at well designed code is a real pleasure. This book is a collection of essays about computer code. Most of the essays do a great job at taking a particular piece of code and explaining something about that code that makes it stand out as beautiful for one reason or another. If you care about the craft of creating computer programs you will probably enjoy this book. This book had me hooked immediately when it's first essay was by none other than Brian Kernighan.

Here is a summary of what I learned from my latest sales on Ebay. All of these items below are obvious to most people I think.

1. Make sure you have those neat little USPS flat rate boxes.
2. Make sure things fit in those neat little USPS flat rate boxes.
3. I need a postal scale.
4. The APC machine at the post office is slow, although not as slow as waiting in the line behind the group of people who need a passport.
5. Use reserve pricing so you don't sell things for one penny. If you ignore this rule double check the price of shipping. Doh!

And last but not least ... "People will buy almost anything."