Category: Things I Like
Amy and I have been sponsors of the Boulder International Film Festival for a while. We’ve also been helping fund documentaries and have received several executive producer credits. Two of these films are in the 2023 Boulder International Film Festival on March 2 – 5, 2023.
Afghan Dreamers is the story of an all-girls robotics team in Afghanistan who risks it all to prove that they can compete against anyone worldwide. Working in secret in a province under strong Taliban influence and the threat of violent retribution, the high-school-aged team members struggle in the face of immense odds and ever-present danger. They single-handedly begin to change perceptions in their entrenched Islamic culture. The film focuses on three team members – Fatemah, Somaya, and Lida – who become role models for the next generation.
I met David Cowan in 1988 when he was an undergraduate at Harvard and I was a graduate student at MIT. We became friends and regulars at Maven’s Deli in Harvard Square. Our first project was Feld Technologies reselling (not very successfully) a software product called DataRoute that David wrote for his father’s law firm. The phrase “Today is the day to route with DataRoute” still hangs out in the dark recesses of my memory.
David has produced several films and called me up when he started working on Afghan Dreamers. He knew I’d be an easy mark for joining in on the film based on my support of women and girls in computing. He did all the work, so I merely provided some money and moral support. I saw an early cut, but that was before the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which added some extreme plot twists to the story. Amnesty International gave the film the Best Human Rights Film Award for 2022 at the Galway premiere, and the Woodstock Film Festival gave it Honorary Mention for Best Documentary Feature.
I look forward to seeing the final cut at Boulder High School on Saturday, March 4th.
My Sister Liv is the story of two inseparable sisters, Tess and Liv. However, as Liv enters adolescence and struggles with the relentless pressures of social media, depression, body dysmorphia, and, often, suicidal thoughts, her big sister Tess desperately struggles to save her. My Sister Liv is a rare and riveting journey into Liv’s raw emotions and fears as a young life on the edge. As Tess and her family learn to cope after unthinkable loss, they begin the heartbreaking journey to understanding the circumstances that led to Liv’s death and talk to experts to provide hope and solutions for this ever-growing epidemic.
Three of our friends—Grant Besser, Melissa Grumhaus, and Jason Lynch—introduced or mentioned Olivia Ahnemann, one of the producers of My Sister Liv, to us. After some discussion, we also decided to provide financial support for this film. We will also be watching it for the first time at Boulder High School on Saturday, March 4th.
Amy and I will have a double feature day at the Boulder International Film Festival on March 4th. I hope to see you there.
I’ve co-founded or been an early investor in many things. One of my favorites is the MIT Banana Lounge. I will be hanging out there Tuesday afternoon and doing an AMA from 2pm to 4pm.
It began with an email from Zoe Sheill. I met Zoe at PSL when she was an intern the summer before her freshman year at MIT. We stayed in touch, and I went bananas when I got the following email from her on May 3rd, 2021.
… Right now, though, we’re running into a bit of trouble raising the money for starting the banana lounge again in the fall. In the past, we’ve given out about a quarter of a million bananas per semester, and about 76% of our budget is just bananas. The Undergraduate Association funded us in previous years – they are now using their limited money for newer projects now that the banana lounge has gotten a lot bigger (over 15k students would visit the lounge per week). Malte (the student that started the banana lounge 3 years ago), me, and Greg had a meeting a while ago and Greg recommended talking to you as a successful MIT alum and someone also excited about the possibilities with bananas.
After some back and forth, I agreed to provide the needed funding. Zoe responded with:
Our banana guy for 2021-22, I’m so excited! You are saving Banana Lounge. So many students will benefit from this and we are very much looking forward to sharing your story with them. I’m humbled by your generosity and the team is grateful and excited, thank you.
The MIT Banana Lounge has become a core part of the institution. Its fame began with a tweetstorm by Iain Cheeseman, a professor at the Whitehead Institute and the MIT Department of Biology.
More fame followed with articles in Boston Magazine (The World Needs More Ideas Like the MIT Banana Lounge) and the Boston Globe (At MIT’s ‘Banana Lounge,’ it’s not just the free food that’s a-peeling.) It appeared in Psychology Today (The Psychology of MIT’s Banana Lounge). The MIT Class of ’62 hunted it down, and MIT President L. Rafael Reif spent about five minutes on it in his Charge to the Class of 2022.
I get an update from the team every few months. The stats so far for the 22-23 academic year (through January) follow:
- Bananas: 299,460 at 97.8% reliability and 0.53% waste
- Drinks: 36,240 cups
- Deliveries: 50
The complete 22-23 academic year plans include 600,000 bananas and 500,000 student visits.
After I provided the funding in 21-22, I was joined by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy (co-founders of Harmonix) along with MIT Undergraduate Asociation and some students and recent alumni.
Because it’s MIT, I get graphs in my periodic updates.
I’ve moved on from sponsoring bathrooms, although I finally did get a bathroom sponsored at MIT. It’s top secret where it is, so don’t tell the MIT administration if you happen to find it.
Of all the business and technology writers out there, including bloggers, I think the best one, at this moment, is Matt Levine. He’s the only person currently writing on Planet Earth that I find myself reading every word of everything he writes.
For the last few months, he has been mostly writing about three topics:
- The Twitter Elon Musk Soap Opera
- Why (and How) Much of Crypto Is A Plain, Old, Ponzi Scheme
- Other Crazy and Fucked Up Things in Finance
For a flavor of his writing, read the following 11 chapters of Matt’s writing (listed in chronological order). Then, subscribe to his newsletter and get a magnificent medium-form article in your inbox every other day or so.
- Meme Stocks Were Too Good to Robinhood: Also Russian debt and crypto depositors.
- Don’t Cheat on the Ethics Exam: Also CoinFlex, Spirit and cheerleading for risk.
- Crypto Loves Its Shadow Banks: Also Archegos, CLOs and bond market liquidity.
- Say No to YES: Also 10b5-1 plans, crypto bailouts, Tether, MicroStrategy and ethics rules.
- Archegos Analyst Wants His Money Back: Also Russian assets, universal owners vs. labor and KYC/SOW.
- Voyager Has Some Tokens: Also vibes and Ben & Jerry’s.
- Nickel Big Shot Called the Shots: Also GameStop, SoftBank, Luna, Percent and index funds.
- Elon’s Out: Musk lost interest in pretending to buy Twitter.
- The Price of Not Buying Twitter: Also Twitter miscellanea, Celsius and Axie.
- I Was Told There’d Be a Cake Merger: Also a threatening letter, a toehold stock position, a venture-capital paper and a tweet from an undisclosed location.
- Twitter Still Wants Musk’s Money: Twitter sued Elon Musk for an outcome that no one wants.
Matt – thank you for making me snort or laugh out loud several times on the days you write.
My partner Ryan shared this with me. It’s a 10-minute video showing the evolution from System 0.97 to macOS 13 Ventura. I had an original Macintosh 128K which is now enjoying its retirement at the Media Archaeology Lab. Enjoy!
The only time I go outside right now is to go running. I had an awesome run in the dark at 5:30am today in 10 degrees. There were only two cars that passed me and one person near the end of my run walking his dog.
As Amy and I sit in our office in Aspen and grind away, we are blessed with a magical view.
A few moments ago, my EA Annie sent me a link to WindowSwap. It’s a treasure. I felt like hanging out in Ukraine for a bit, so off I went.
Each video is 10 minutes long with sounds, so on a big monitor, it feels pretty close to looking out the window.
On my run yesterday, I listened to Tim Ferriss interview Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy.
I know both Tim and Naval. I have a mostly virtual relationship with each of them (I think I’ve been in the same physical space with Tim twice and never with Naval), but they are two people I’ve learned a lot from over the past decade.
When I run, I listen to one of four things.
- Nothing
- Podcasts
- Audible Books (mostly science fiction)
- Music, but generally my long time standards (Pink Floyd, Boston, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rush)
I go through phases, and I’m in a Podcast / Audible phase. I’m a little bored of Diamond Age (I’m halfway through in a slow spot), so I fired up a random Tim Ferriss podcast. I noticed he’d done one recently with Naval, so that was it.
The crypto stuff was good, but I was much more intrigued by everything else. I’m a big fan of Richard Feynman, so when Naval started rolling out Feynman quotes, he had me. There was a ton of wonderful in the back and forth between Tim and Naval, and when Naval got on a roll on a topic, the running just vanished into the background.
A fun sleeper idea in the middle of things was that Naval, who has over a million followers, doesn’t follow anyone on Twitter. I only use Twitter to broadcast things these days, so I think I’ll try that hack for a while and see if it works.
I haven’t been blogging much lately – on purpose. I’ve been trying to reset a few things in my writing and decided to go inward for a few months, starting around my birthday. I believe the reset has happened and listening to Naval and Tim helped reinforce a few things I’ve been playing around with now that I’m 55 years old.
Tim / Naval – thanks. I enjoyed listening to y’all.
Last week I participated in a virtual tour of the Media Archaeology Lab. Amy and I are financial supporters, I gave them my vintage computer collection several years ago, and we’ve underwritten their acquisition of several collections. I believe the Media Archaeology Lab is now one of the largest collections of working vintage computers.
“Working” is an important part of the phrase. The team at the Media Archaeology Lab, including Dr. Lori Emerson and Dr. libi rose striegl are magicians who, along with many student volunteers, loving take care of, well, everything.
When most people who had an Apple ][ or Apple //e think of Zoom, they think of Zoom Telephonics or WGBH-TV’s Zoom.
When I saw bpNichol’s Computer Poems streaming on Zoom, I responded with, “Holy shit, this is awesome.” Yeah, that wasn’t very poetic of me.
A few minutes later, we saw Super Mario Bros. running on a Commodore 64. We talked about the history of Nintendo not liking this and their subsequent DMCA takedown notice. Some companies have no sense of nostalgia.
Here’s how you stream from an Apple //e to Zoom.
- The Apple //e has an RCA jack for the monitor, so all you need to stream is an RCA cable and an AV to USB adapter.
- Run the RCA cable from the Apple to the converter.
- Plug the USB into your computer.
- When you open your preferred video streaming software (Zoom, OBS, Twitch), the converter will show up as one of your camera options.
- Audio with the Apple //e is a little more complicated. You need an upgrade to the sound card, such as a ReActiveMicro Mockingboard v2.2, to get an audio line out. The Mockingboard has a 3.5mm audio jack, so you need a 3.5mm – RCA splitter from that to the AV converter.
Here’s how you stream from a Commodore 64 to Zoom
- The Commodore 64 has an RF jack on the back that carries both image and sound, requiring something that can convert that signal to split audio and video channels.
- A VCR is faster, easier, and more reliable than any other converter, but you can also use an RF modulator.
- The RF cable runs from the back of the Commodore to the Coax-IN on the VCR via an RF-Coax converter.
- Then connect RCA cables from the AV-OUT on the VCR to the AV-USB converter.
- As with an Apple, when it is all set, the AV-USB converter shows up as a camera in your camera menu on any streaming software
If you want to see the full poem by bpNichol, here it is on Youtube.
If this is interesting to you, please consider making a cash donation to support the Media Archaeology Lab‘s operations. If you have vintage computers you’d like to donate, drop me an email.
If you can’t imagine that a drama about chess would be riveting, you need to watch The Queen’s Gambit. And, if you love (or even like) chess, start watching it tonight.
The first two episodes are the Opening. The Middlegame happens in episodes 3, 4, and 5. The Endgame is episodes 6 and 7. Each is delicious. The Endgame is spectacular.
We watched it in three nights. Last night was episode 5, 6, and 7. We normally would have gone to bed after episode 6, but we played through rather than taking an adjournment.
So wonderful. Thanks Netflix for the distraction from everything else.
Here’s a simple one to make your 10 hours a day on Zoom more enjoyable.
Hide Self View
Click on the three little dots next to Mute in your video window. Choose “Hide Self View.”
The following view …
is much better to look at that the one with my own picture in it.
Staring at yourself for 10 hours a day is exhausting. If you are having trouble relating to this, put a mirror on your desk in front of you and look at it all day. That’s basically what you are doing when you don’t hide self view.
For some crazy reason, Zoom hasn’t made this a default feature yet (Dear Zoom, make it a default to Hide Self View).
I started doing this about a month ago. It has blown my mind how less tiring the day of endless Zoom is and how easier it is to concentrate when I’m not constantly looking at my face on the screen.