I’m not a huge baseball fan. I grew up in Dallas and dealing with the Texas Rangers in the Billy Martin / Jeff Burroughs / Ferguson Jenkins / Jim Sundberg era was a tough gig. Plus, by that time the Dallas Cowboys were America’s team and Roger Staubach was every kids hero (at least in Dallas.)
By the time I moved to Boston in 1983, I was ruined on baseball. I go to a couple of games a year – mostly just to generate stories that people can tell their grandkids. Amy is a big fan, but since the scores at the Rockies games are really football scores (I’m always surprised when the winning team doesn’t score at least double digits), it’s mostly just a good time to hang out and get a sunburn.
When David Halberstam died a few months ago, I decided to read all of his books (similar to what I’m doing with Vonnegut.) I had a copy of Summer of ’49 (<— note the SmartLink – play with it) on my shelf of infinite books to read so I grabbed it and consumed it over the last few days. It seemed fitting to finish it up on the 4th of July.
I thought of my dad 5,417 times while I read this book. These were his and my uncle Charlies’ Yankees. My dad was 11 that summer and it must have been an awesome time for him and Charlie. The Yankee / Red Sox rivalry was at one of its apexes, DiMaggio was the man, Yogi Berra was behind the plate, and the great Yankee run under Casey Stengel had just begun.
The age of radio was at its peak and the dawn of the TV age was beginning. Mel Allen was the great Yankee radio announcer. Halberstam captures the relationships between everyone well – including Allen and the writers – and his descriptions of the games helped me understand the difference between radio baseball and TV baseball.
Overall, Summer of ’49 is a beautiful book. You don’t have to be a baseball fan to love it, but you do have to be interested in understanding the summertime in a different era. Members of the Red Sox Nation will also love this book, even though it is heartbreaking at times, since that’s something all card carrying Red Sox Nation members understand.
Next up – The Design of Everyday Things – a book at least 11 people have recommended I read.
My buddy Ben Casnocha had his book My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley reviewed in the NY Times today by Harry Hurt III. Ben told me about this last week and is justifiably excited.
One of my favorite lines from Ben is “I don’t want to be normal. I want to be something else.” Hurt picks it as the theme of his review and does a great job capturing the essence of the book.
I’ve never wanted to be normal either and I love having friends who aren’t.
Ben Casnocha’s book My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley is at the top of Amazon’s Movers and Shakers list today.
Daily rank of #127 (up 18,848% from yesterday as of 4pm Eastern Time.) Congrats Ben – that’s really cool. Updated – at 4pm, it was actually ranked 94 and up 29,131% from yesterday.
Over the last few years Amy and I have become close friends with Ben Casnocha. We adore the guy. Ben started his first company – Comcate – at age 14. As of today (age 19), he’s now a published author as his first book – My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley – is officially available.
As an early reader / reviewer of the book, I highly recommend it. The story is oriented around Ben’s experiences as a teenager trying to deal with the pressures of both teenage and adult “business / entrepreneurship” life simultaneously. He does a magnificent job of articulating the characteristics of a startup without being preachy and weaves in a number of vignettes from experienced friends and colleagues. It is simultaneously personal, educational, and emotionally deep.
If you are an aspiring (or existing) entrepreneur, My Start-Up Life is required reading. If you are a TechStars entrepreneur, Ben will be out in Boulder in June – pick up a copy so you can pepper him with questions
In addition to recommending that you buy the book right now, Ben and I are going to do a giveaway on this blog of an autographed copy of the book to the commenter who has the best haiku with the word “start-up” in it. Join in the fun – now!
I’m in Boston this weekend for the annual Feld Men’s Trip with my dad (Stan), my uncle (Charlie), my brother (Daniel), and my two cousins (Jon and Kenny.) We had tickets to tonight’s Red Sox vs. Braves game (very expensive ones – thanks StubHub) and have tickets to tomorrow afternoon’s game (and now rescheduled evening) game.
The weather has not cooperated. I’ve been here since yesterday afternoon and it has been raining continuously. We just finished our traditional annual steakhouse dinner at Abe & Louis (don’t ask what veggie-boy Brad ate) and we slogged our way back to the hotel in the monsoon.
Since it’s all of 8:11pm, I thought I’d check a few things online before bed. I saw a note from Tom Evslin that his new Amazon Short titled The Interpreter is up. I loved Evslin’s last book Hackoff.com (and think Tom is a hysterically fun nerd writer.) I downloaded the PDF and am struggling to toss it on my Sony eReader. Not quite as fun as a Red Sox game, but a lot less expensive.
Update: Getting the book onto the eReader wasn’t a big deal. However, reading it will be a nightmare because of the lack of font formatting (font standards – uh huh.) And the eReader software seems to think the name of “The Interpreter” is “Microsoft Word – Main.doc.” Other than that, it’s great.
I’ve gotten to know David Cohen and David Brown through our work together at TechStars. DavidC and I have talked a little about Pinpoint (the company that the David’s co-founded) and I’ve had one meeting at ZOLL Data Systems (the company that DavidB runs that is a subsidiary of the company that acquired Pinpoint.) But I didn’t really know their story.
DavidB took some time off (left ZOLL but then went back.) During this time he wrote No Vision, All Drive. I love self-told, first person, authentic entrepreneurial stories (one of my favorites was The MouseDriver Chronicles.) DavidB did a great job of telling the Pinpoint story – starting at the very beginning – and sticking to the story rather than veering into the prognostication zone that so many authors of business stories feel compelled to go to.
Pinpoint (and subsequently ZOLL Data Systems) is one of the great sleeper stories in the Boulder software scene. They grew steadily from founding, survived the bubble gracefully, never raised any capital, and had a very nice exit when ZOLL acquired the company. DavidB’s tale will be familiar to any startup entrepreneur and is inspiring to anyone that aspires to start a company. The anecdotes about DavidC were hysterical and help me better understand one of my co-conspirator at TechStars.
I’m on a “read each Kurt Vonnegut book in order that he wrote them” (I’m on number two – The Sirens of Titan.) I’m putting a non-fiction book in between each Vonnegut book – No Vision, All Drive was a good choice.
Finally, Amy just wrote about our morning visitor if you want more “bear in the driveway pictures.” I still haven’t gone running and can’t figure out how to get my butt out of the house.
I love new toys. It had been a while (at least two weeks) since my last one. I was sitting next to Howard Morgan at a meeting catching up and he asked me if I had gotten a Sony Reader (PRS-500) yet. Both of us are voracious readers and travelers – picture me lugging at least three books with me wherever I go.
Howard said the Sony Reader had changed his reading life. I bought one online that afternoon (Sony uses Intershop software for their ecommerce – man – I’d forgotten they still existed.) I read my first book on it today – Simple Genius by David Baldacci.
It was awesome (the book and the Sony Reader.) I loaded it up with a couple of David Halberstam books and I’ll leave the pile of hardback books behind on my seven day trip next week.
I had an early ebook device (I can’t remember who it was from) and it was “ok” but too big, too heavy, the battery life was too short, and the screen wasn’t quite right. The Sony Reader seems to nail it all and after spending four hours with it this afternoon, I’m looking forward to my next book on it.
I’ll check back in after a few more books and tell you if I’m still loving it.
Syriana was one of my favorite movies last year – the Bob Barnes character captured my imagination completely. When I found out that Bob Baer’s books See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil were the inspiration behind the movie, I immediately one-clicked them on Amazon.
I’m hugely cynical about the intelligence machinery of our government. I’ve been exposed to enough spin in my life to understand that the cliche “things are rarely as they appear” is deeply valid. In trying to understand my obsession with 24, I think I’ve concluded that it represents the “anti-me” – I get to spend one hour a week living in a parallel universe that isn’t in line with my values.
See No Evil was a delicious romp through this terrain by someone who lived this for twenty years. Baer’s writing is sharp witted and he takes no prisoners in his critique of the people he worked with and his increasing disillusionment with the CIA.
Next up is Sleeping with the Devil right after I knock off Supreme Conflict.
Machine Beauty by David Gelernter was phenomenal. I love the notion that a book written in 1998 should be classified as “a classic”, but given the premise of the book and the evolution of technology during the last decade, it fits this categorization perfectly.
Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale. Machine Beauty is his treatise on the “elegance at the heart of technology.” The first third of the book is his philosophical setup; the last third is his future vision – including a description of Linda and Lifestreams. These are both fun and interesting.
The “classic” is his middle section detailing his view of the evolution of the aesthetics of computers, most notably the desktop metaphor and user-interface. It’s not “just another history” – Gelernter is a clever and engaging writer and even though the history is now 10 years old, it holds up nicely.
I’ve been spending some time lately working on a theme called human computer interaction (HCI). I’ve seen some amazing stuff in the past year around HCI, the radical success of Guitar Hero prompted me to think harder about different ways of interacting with computers, and the Nintendo Wii reinforced this. I’ve concluded that the world is ready for a new HCI model; while WIMP will be around for a long time, in many ways it has reached the same types of limitations that the text-based interaction model reached before the Xerox Alto appeared.
Gelernter anticipates a lot of this in Machine Beauty. I don’t like his particular implementations (although if I manage to put my brain into 1998 context, they are pretty impressive), but his paradigms are thought provoking. His narrative reminds us to remember that the huge breakthroughs are fundamentally elegant and successful implementations tend to build on these. This appeals deeply to my inner architect / art lover which – of course – is part of the point.
Beautiful.