Nook 1.5

The Nook 1.5 software is out. I'm sure there are many of new features. The only one I care about is page turning. Page turning on the e-Ink display is now very fast.

Getting things done & Making it all work.

A few years ago I read "Getting Things Done." In a fit of inspiration I set my files up as the GTD recommended. I rarely touched the files since then since then. For the most part my mail just sits in a big unsorted pile. I auto-pay everything so there is little reason to open mail.

Maybe this means I should just throw most of my bills out? I know I'm supposed to keep them for one year.

Perhaps I need to set up a generic bill folder for each year, and then purge the folder after a year?

Reading "Making it All Work" the followup to "Getting Things Done" makes me think about that. In all likelihood I will follow the same habit-- throw all bills in a pile. But still, it inspires me.

Kinect

I'm surprised how good the Kinect is. And a little disappointed. Sound contradictory enough? Good. Then let me explain.

The Kinect tracks your bodies motion amazingly well. It's not flaky or half assed. It really tacks your bodies motion. The disappointment then stems, not from the Kinect controller, but from the concept of motion tracking-- you have to watch your hands or you accidentally select something.

Or, if you are like me, you are big. If I have to raise my hand, then it hits the ceiling.

None of these problems are fatal. In fact, with a year or two of polish they kinect may become the next big thing.

Making it All Work

By David Allen.

I have a fascination with procrastination books. Part of me hopes that with the right trick, the right philosophy, the right training, I will unlock my inner hardworking, creative drive.

I'm starting to think though that everyone procrastinates. There is no silver bullet. Really productive people just focus on the really important things and cut everything else out.

Back to David Allen, he of "Getting Things Done" fame. He has a few good insights on they way work work, how we get bogged down and how to be more productive.

To oversimplify, Allen believes in organization and systems. Simple, clean, efficient systems that deal with most any situation.

Allen also feels we soak up to much of our space and time with crap, mental and physical. How can we focus when there are so many distractions? He suggests we spend more time asking "What does this thing mean to me?" and getting rid of that which is meaningless.

At some point in the future, I will read this book again. There is lot of good stuff in it, but I'm not in a frame of mind where I can take it up.

Urbania

Urbania. I put this in the same class of movies as The Fountain-- somewhat experimental movies that fail, but with a little tweaking could have been great.

The concept of Urbania is that urban legends are happening to people around Charlie, while Charlie is part of a new urban legend of his own making. Charlie's neighbor is an old lady who puts her poodle in the microwave. Charlie meets someone who was drugged and had his kidney stolen and so on.

The problem is that the movie does have a single story at it's core-- revenge for Charlie's slain lover. The urban legends woven into the story are inconsequently and distracting. They could have been cut to yield a tighter and more focused movie. The revenge story was very good. It didn't need to be dressed up.

The other weakness to the movie is that it had too much fancy camera work. A little fancy camera work is nice, but too much and I get distracted. I stop paying attention to the movie start noticing way things were filmed. It was very well constructed. However the construction wasn't well integrated with the story.

Alexander Von Humboldt Or What May Be Accomplished in a Life Time

By F. A. Schwarzenberg.

I wanted to love this book, the story of Alexander Von Humboldt. Humboldt explored the world during the early 1800's, documenting his discoveries.

But this book... it sucked the energy out of me. I failed to make it through.

"What May Be Accomplished in a Life Time" is not a linear biography. It consists of many little anecdotes about Von Humboldt, each no more than a half a page. Every anecdotes praises Humboldt for something he did, then tells a little story to illustrate the point. Praises for this thoroughness is followed by a story of him taking detailed notes. Praise for his persuasiveness is followed by a story of how he changed someones mind. And so on. And so on.

Between the anecdotes there is much empty, flowery verbiage.

At a higher level, the stories don't connect together. They are not told in chronological order or according to another theme. All I really learnt was that than Schwarzenberg admired Von Humboldt and wanted you to feel the same.

The Inner Game of Tennis.

By W. Timothy Gallway.

The book is about the useful mental attitudes to adopt while playing Tennis. The book has made it's rounds in other circles as it's principles can be applied to any task.

Ideas from the book...

When learning, or performing any task, don't judge yourself. Neutrally observe yourself performing the task. Form a picture in your mind of what success looks like. Then practice. The idea is that a picture is worth a thousand words. For success, hundreds of things must go right. Communicating all of them is very error prone-- you can't possible keep all of the success criteria in your mind. And if you focus on improving one area, it may be at the detriment of others. Envision success and observe yourself practicing.

Judging yourself is not effective. We learn by making mistakes-- we learn like a toddler. It is pointless to beating yourself up, or judging yourself as bad when you make a mistake. You made a mistake. You still have more to learn. Get on with the practice.

The book also has an interesting take on competition. Competition can drive us and challenge us, yet if we use it to judge ourselves, it's unhealthy. We are not better people because we win a game of tennis. Weither you win or lose, you are still the same person.

But, competition can drive us to improve ourselves. Only the best competitors can push us to our limits and push us to improve.

The Art of Travel

by Alain de Botton.

I enjoy de Botton's writing; the way he marries the philosphical with the practicle, his clever and insightful phrasing.

The Art of Travel is no different. de Botton writes about the travels of many poets and artists of history-- Van Gogh, Wordsworth and many others. And then he relives some of these journies for greater insite. For example, he travels to the south of France in Van Gogh's footsteps. This trip leads him to a greater understanding of Van Gogh's art-- his novel use of colour, his distinct style.

At some point I will re-read this book.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I find it difficult to distinguish between "The Black Swan" and Taleb's previous book "Fooled By Randomness." You could easily move chapters between the two and not notice the edits.

This doesn't change the fact that Taleb deals with deeply important themes-- randomness and our perpetual inability to distinguish between luck and skill.

These are difficult subjects. He does have great points when argues that success and successful people have luck to thank as much as their own skill. On the other hand, you try telling that to a millionaire.

The book also covers predictions-- spotting the kind you can trust, spotting pure fiction, and how to plan for it all.

Contingency and opportunity planning play a large part in Taleb's world.

Stylistically, the book is a fun read. Taleb is fond of ornate examples and interesting stories that illustrate his points. This can work against him a little though in that it's hard to take the book seriously.

Details I want to remember....

There are different kinds of randomness. Taleb refers to this as comming from Mediocristan or Extremistan.

Randomness from Mediocristan is simple and predictable and easy to model. For example, if you weigh a thousand people, you will come up with an average and distribution for that sample. If you then add the worlds heaviest or worlds lightest person to that sample, your average wouldn't change much. Our weights are random but from Mediocristan.

Contrast this with randomness from Extremistan. If you calculated the average wealth of one thousand people, you would also come up with an average and a distribution. But, if you added the worlds richest man to this sample, his wealth would totally blow your average and distribution out of the water.

This difference brings us to the center of Taleb's thesis; due to various biases especially survivor bias, and because we often assume that randomness is from Mediocristan and when it really from Extremistan, we make choices that are really gambles because we are not aware of the risks.

Google Voice and wireless speculation...

Prediction-- Within five years, you will be able to make free wireless calls in major cities. No cell plan. No contracts. This service will be very practical; not a hacker gimic.


Why do I predict this-- two things. Google Voice and the plethora of free wireless internet hotspots.


Google voice is a VOIP service from Google. I tried it out because it lets me call home, to Canada, for free.

Even better, through Google voice I can get a phone number for free.


The service works very well. I've called many times now. The call quality is excellent. Setup was simple, I just had to plug a headset into my laptop and install the Google Voice plug-in for my browser.


On to free wireless hot spots. I use the internet regularly on my cell, yet I don't have a data plan. Open 802.11. A/B/G/N endpoints are very common. Of course work and home are covered. Bout, out in the street, I seldom have to walk more than one hundred feet to find one. Granted, these tend to be unintentionally open Linksys routers with the default password. Still, many places intentionally offer free wireless access--- coffee shops, restaurants, hotels, library's, malls. I'm not talking about crappy low speed access. I'm talking high quality, high speed access.


If you combine these two ideas-- free VOIP and free internet access, you get free wireless phone service. A combination that works today. Give it a few years to smooth out the internet coverage and this will become common.

A Whole New Mind

By Daniel Pink.

Pink's argument... if a job can be done more cheaply by some one in the 3rd world or by a computer. or if the job is irrelivant in an age of plently, then job will be a comodity. The jobs of the future require more creative, right brained thinking.

Pink is careful to not say that right brained thinkers will rule. Rather he argues that we need both sides of the brain. None-the-less he spends the bulk of his time discussing right brained thinking.

For Pink, the six right brain skills are...
1. Design
2. Story
3. Symphony (Seeing the whole picture)
4. empathy
5. Play
6. meaning

How the Mighty Fall

By Jim Collins. Collins digs into the collapse of several large companies to uncover the themes driving the collapse.

Collins contends that collapse goes through five stages...

Stage 1. Hubris born of success. The companies views success as an entitlment. When “we are successful because we do these specific things” replaces penetrating understanding and insight from “we are successful because we understand why we do these specific things,” decline will likely follow.

Stage 2. Undiciplined persuit of more.

The greatest warning sign for declining companies is a declining proportion of key seats filled with the right people. Collins covered this in "Good to Great" as well. He strongly belives that great people drive success more than great vision or process.

Stage 3. Denial of risk and peril. when those in power blame others or external factors for what has gone wrong, rather than confronting the frightening reality that the company may be in serious trouble. Another manifestation of denial that occurs in stage 3 is obsessive reorganisation. Reorganising and restructuring can create a false sense that you are actually doing something productive. When you begin to respond to data and warning signs with reorganisation as a primary strategy, you may well be in denial

Stage 4. Grasping for salvation. begins when an organisation reacts to a downturn by lurching for a silver bullet. The key point is that they go for a quick, big solution to jump-start a recovery rather than embarking on the slower more arduous process of rebuilding long-term momentum. The signature of mediocrity in dying companies is not an unwillingness to change, but chronic inconsistency.

That's in important point-- silver bullets don't work, or rather they don't appear reliably enough to use as a strategy.

Stage 5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death.

Unstuff Your Life!

by Andrew J. Mellen.

"One home for everything and like with like."

Some books have one thought; everything else is detail, evidence, implications or padding.

The author pursues his thought, "One home for everything and like with like" to its logical extremes, in the kitchen, the office, the closet, the basement. All the wile he assures us the we are not our stuff, that we will feel better without it.

The New Articulate Executive

By Granville Toogood. Does it sound pretentions that I read this?

I skimmed through it really. There is a large section on working with teleprompters and being infront of cameras that I just didn't need.

I will probably go over the rest of the book again. It has a lot of good information on how to talk. I say talk and not present because the book is kind of anti-presentation. Too often people deliver a presentation that doesn't involve the people who are listening.

When you speak...

• Get to the point. In fact, make your point first and not as the conclusion.
• Don't wing it. Prepare.
• People will judge you by poor grammer and spelling mistakes. They are not that hard to eliminate, so put some effort into it.
• If you talk for longer than 18 minutes, then people will loose interest.
• If you are using Powerpoint, then don't use word slides unless you really have to. Don't read from the Powerpoint.
• Start talking about the next slide before you present it. This will show that you are talking about something you know and not reacting to the Powerpoint.

Blackberry Planet

By Alastair Sweeny.

The story of Research in Motion. From their early days, to their current market dominance. Rather than being told as a narrative, the book contains dozens of short stories about different aspects of the company-- how they formed, the people who use them, their patent woes, quest for market dominance, etc.

How to measure anything.

By Douglas W. Hubbard

I need to re-read this at some point. It's a useful book. Much of it covers how to practically use slightly advanced statistics.

It is better to be approximately right than exactly wrong. When you want to measure something, ask what decisions the measurements will drive. When you answer that question, you will probably discover that you don't need as much accuracy as you think.

Measure in terms of ranges, say the 90% confidence interval, and not by specific numbers. Specifics hide the amount of error you have and give you a false sense of accuracy.

Try guessing a 90% confidence interval by asking yourself two questions. What number is the answer probably larger than, but possibly not? What number is the answer probably less then, but probably not?

If you have 5 samples, the 90% confidence interval is between the largest and smallest sample.

If you have 8 samples, the 90% confidence interval is between the 2nd largest and the 2nd smallest sample.

Beware of using weighted scores to make decisions. Your biases can compound instead of cancel out. For exmaple, four one star movies do not provide the same happieness as as one four star movie.

Eureka!

By Marlene Wagman-Gelle

A fun read but not meaty. The author tells the story of dozens of eureka moments that lead to various creations-- Readers Digest, Alcoholics Anonymous, Dr Seuss, the Slinkey... the list goes on. At some point I stopped reading and started skimming. That turned the book into a list of triva... Inventor-Name-Here had an idea which became Company-Name-Here. Here is some trivia about his life.

What got you here won't get you there...

By Marshall Goldsmith

Its been about a month since I read "What got you here won't get you there..." I remember seven things about this book. They seem to be important things, so I'm going to write them down.

1. Watch out for the subtle ways we say "I'm better than you." or "I'm right, you're wrong" Perhaps we don't admit our mistakes, don't take responsibility for problems, forget to give proper credit, don't listen, are too negative or are too quick to dismiss other people and their ideas. The subtext of all of this is "I know better than you."

2. Listen. Don't respond with "No" or "But" or "However" or something else that subtly says "You are wrong. I know better than you."

3. Think carefully about what you say and do. If your words and actions aren't helpful, then are they necessary?

4. Say "Thank you" more often. When someone gives you negative feedback, don't argue with them or try to justify yourself. Just say "Thank you."

5. Apologize for your mistakes. Don't make long drawn out apologies-- they end up turning into excuses. Just say "I'm sorry."

6. Solicit feed back more often. Don't ask "What did we do wrong? What could we have done better?" as that just solicits a rehash of the past, and you can't change the past. Instead ask "What can we do better in the future?"

7. You can't change the past. There is very little reason to keep rehashing it.

nook.

I got myself a nook.

I've been thinking about e-Readers for over a year now. More and more, the books I read are available in on-line form, sometimes for free. I'll download these, print them at work then read them in bed.

The e-Reader market seems to be very full with dozens of offerings. The Kindle, nook (I hate it when product's don't use proper capitalization) and Sony e-Reader being leaders. Until recently even the small eReaders have been $200.00 or more. For some reason, in the past month prices for the popular readers have dropped to $150.00. Blame it on the iPad, or the Kobo.

I seriously evaluated the Sony e-Reader, the Kindle and the Nook.

The Kindle doesn't work with eBooks from my local or work library. That's where I get most of my eBooks, so the Kindle was out.

Initially I was worried about the nook. Older reviews weren't exactly glowing. Also, it's from a bricks and mortar book store. Old style companies rarely produce great new-market technologies. If Barnes and Noble decided that hi-tech electronics and web services were not their forte then the nook would be abandoned.

Sony and Amazon have a great history of inventing new markets. Barnes and Noble does not.

But, when you compare the nook to the Sony, the nook wins. Esthetically, the nook has a clean minimalist design. The 6'' nook is $30.00 less than the 6'' Sony. The Sony's display has more glare, a problem for a reading device. The nook has wi-fi. Sony's does not. The nook's online abilities appear to be better thought out than the Sony's-- I can download books, even free books, without plugging the device in. That is a very nice.

Now, the nook does have it's problems. Navigation can be clunky-- it took me half a day to learn how to do the 'swipe' gesture. Regular RSS Blogs cannot be synchronized to the nook, not a fatal flaw, but it would be nice.

So, overall I'm very happy with it. We'll see if this device sticks or as Tyco said, if it shifts from gadget to device

The Invisible Gorilla...

"The Invisible Gorilla" is a decent book about the mistakes our minds regularly make.

1. We can only focus on one thing. We multi-task poorly-- driving and talking on a cell phone for example. This is the mistake the book is titled after-- people paying close attention to the passing of a basketball game regularly fail to notice a man in a gorilla suit walking accross the basketball court.

2. Our memory is very frail. We may remember the emotion we felt, but the details are regularly dreamed up to fit the situation. Leading questions can cause us to remember things that didn't happen.

3. The illusion of knowledge-- Confidence. We think we understand things better than we do. Confidence is as much a sign of ignorance as it is of understanding. Confidence is as much a personality trait as it is a statment of the situation.

4. The illusion of knowlelge-- Probability and Limits. We prefer experts who act like they know more than they do. If one weather forcaster says "There is an 80% chance of rain each day for the next five days" and the other forcaster says "There is a 95% chance of rain each day for the next five days" and it rains four out of five days, then we will prefer the latter forcaster because she we more confident, and not the former who was more accurate.

Most all knowledge is as accurate as the weather forecast. We just don't realize it. For weather forecasts we are given daily feedback that let's us double check it's accuracy. This is not so for other news and information.

5. Jumping to conclusions. We perceive patterns in randomness. We look at events that happen together and assume they have a causal relationship. We tend to interpret events that happened early as the causes of events that happened later.

6. We like to believe there are tricks-- subliminal audio tapes, pills, music, that magically unleashes the full power of our brain. We use far more than the 10% of our brain that is oft quoted. If we only used 10% of our brain, stroke victims would recover far more rapidly.

7. Beware your gut and your intuitions. Sometimes your instincts are right. Often they are wrong. Understanda and educate your gut so that you can determine the sitations where it does a good job, and ignore it otherwise.

August Rush

Good movie. A little sappy but worth watching. August Rush is a child prodigy musician who is trying to find his long lost parents.

I had a problem with the way August Rush was filmed. In the movie, August is a talented musician. In real life the actor who plays him is not. There are many shots of the actor gesturing around instruments while people look on in amazment, but few shots of the actor's hands actually playing instruments. After a while, the misdirection is distracting and obvious.

Into the Wild

Into the Wild is the story of Christopher McCandless who ran away from society, off into the Alaskan wilderness where he survived for about four months before starving to death.

It's a good movie. It irritated Mark though, because in the end, the story is about a selfish and stupid kid who can't get over the fact that his parents weren't nice people. The kid perverts that into believing that being rational is wrong, that relationships and that all of society are sick and that happiness only comes from nature. He runs away from it all ill prepared to survive in the wilderness.

Don't confuse independence with luck and living off the kindness of strangers. There is a reason we have society and it's not because it's easy to live in the bush.

I was willing to view the movie more charitably until I read more about McCandless. He really was stupid, selfish and lived off the kindness of strangers and not rebelling against society and trying to make his world a better place. The movie glosses over that to present a story about a man who died living his life without compromise.

Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This is really not a cynical book. It's really a book that chastises those who don't want to admit how much chance really affects our world, our choices, our success and our failures.

It also serves as a lesson to guard your thinking against randomness and, just as importantly, what we mistakenly think randomness is.

We over estimate causality.

We view the world as more explainable than it really is. We look at history and say "This caused that." The reality is that when you make a decision, you don't have the benefit of hind sight and all the choices open to you are not apparent.

"A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point"

"Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation, as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method). Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!"

We look at the winners and try to learn from them. If we don't know how many losers there are, then these winners may just be the lucky. We should study losers more. He faults "The Millionaire Next Door." series here pointing out that many millionaire habits are also habits of the poor.

He points out that if 10,000 people a year become financial advisers and every advisor is only as good as chance, then after 10 years you will have 10 advisers who have been successful for no reason other than chance, yet these 10 will be studied and admired.

We don't intuitively understand distributions. Random does not mean that everything is 50/50.

Russian Roulette is an example of a distribution that is not 50/50. We play Russian Roulette far more often than we realize. What if you earn a million dollars every time you pulled the trigger and live? What if the gun has a hundred chambers and one bullet? What if you don't know how many chambers the gun has? What if the gun has a thousand chambers but the bullet will kill a hundred people?

He argues that investment banks in the sub prime mortgage market played Russian Roulette without realising it.

Teleb is also the creator of "The Black Swan Theory' of statistics-- the idea that no matter how many white swans you see, you never have proof that there are no black swans.

As a consequence of Black Swan Theory, he argues that it is dangerous make plans that blow up or catastrophically fail. Catastrophes happen far more often than we think and our models and predictions are very likely to be wrong. This was the failure of LTCM. They had a model of how the world worked and this model worked well enough that for a few years they were very successful. But their model didn't accommodate the one-in-a-million chance events that really end up happening once or twice a decade (The sub prime mortgage melt down, 9/11, the Asian financial collapse. The Mexican currency collapse. The Russian currency collapse. the .com boom and bust)

"Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average"

"The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death"

"We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract."


"It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.:'

"Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.” Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them."

"Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab."

"Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control"

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I first saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch back in 2001. I don't remember much of it, so I didn't have high expectations when we rewatched it on DVD.

Damn, the music is good. I guess I wasn't into punk & glam rock back in 2001. Now I've downloaded the sound track and repeatedly listen to it.

The ending is weak but it's short and has good songs, so I'll forgive it.

Let that be a lesson to all film makers. If your movie has a bad ending then edit it down and include a good tune.