Michael Parekh pointed me to an awesome 10 minute movie of how the United States came together.
Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk has replaced James Frey’s books as the best book of the year. Several people recommended it to me and it was simply awesome.
Rawicz tells the story of his arrest, interrogation, trial, and sentencing for espionage in Russia in 1939. Of course all of this is bogus as he’s merely Polish and has done nothing wrong, but he is stubborn and – rather than admit false guilt (and surely be executed), he hangs in there for a year of abuse and is sentenced to 25 years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp.
This is where the real story begins. Rawicz describes – in horrifying detail – the deportation to the labor camp. Upon arrival, not surprisingly, the first task for the new prisoners – in the midst of a hideous Siberian winter – is to build their own shelter. This kind of stuff goes on for a while and about 100 pages in, Rawicz starts plotting his escape.
Rawicz and six of his fellow prisoners split one night. The second half of the book is the incredible story of their journey south from northern Siberia, across Russia, through Mongolia, across the Gobi Dessert, over the mountains of Tibet, and finally into India. My description couldn’t do justice to this journey – Rawicz’s description is excruciatingly magnificent.
The entire journey – most of it on foot – is over 4,000 miles from Moscow to India. If you are ever having a difficult day, feel like giving up hope, or merely view the things ahead of you as “a challenge”, pick up this book, open to any page, read 10 pages, and be humbled (and re-calibrated).
Spectacular. Thanks to all who suggested I read it.
I have used a two monitor setup for several years (I’m about to try three just for the hell of it.) I discovered Ultramon the other day, downloaded it, and my life will never be the same. If you use two more more monitors on your PC setup, this is a must have app.
Following are some of the features that I’m already using:
- Multi-monitor windows management
- Taskbar on each monitor (showing only apps on that monitor)
- Tie apps to particular monitor
- Setup / switch between multiple display profiles
- Different wallpaper on each monitor
- Different screen savers for each monitor
There are plenty of other features, some of which I’m sure I’ll discover over time. Installation is trivial and was flawless for me. I’ve been using it for three days and can’t imagine not having it.
Live8 is just awesome. I’ve been tethered to my computer for a while watching it live on AOL.
Pink Floyd is on stage right now in London (the first time since 1981 as a full band, including Roger Waters.) I love Pink Floyd. I once listened to Dark Side of the Moon for an entire semester during college (I had an early CD player – I started it at the beginning of the semester, pressed the repeat button, and pressed stop at the end of the semester. Yes – I occasionally turned the volume down to sleep at night.) I have fond memories of my mom yelling “turn down that shit” when I was home from college visiting for the summer blasting The Wall.
They started with “Breathe In The Air”, then “Money“, then “Wish You Were Here”, and finished with “Comfortably Numb.” Man, these dudes look old (except for David Gillmour), but boy can they sing and play their instruments.
Seeing a teenager in the crowd wearing a Dark Side of the Moon prism t-shirt made me smile. I wonder if he can sing the following lyrics backwards like I can.
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
running over the same old ground. What have we found?
The same old fears, wish you were here.
or maybe
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now.
The child is grown, the dream is gone.
I have become comfortably numb.
Go sign the Live8 online message to the leaders at the upcoming G-8 Summit.
To: The 8 most powerful leaders in the world
50,000 people are dying, needlessly, every day of extreme poverty.
At this year’s G8 summit meeting, it is within your power to put an end to this tragedy. It is an extraordinary opportunity which it would be shameful to ignore. We urge you to take these 3 steps to make extreme poverty history…
- double the aid sent to the world’s poorest countries,
- fully cancel their debts,
- change the trade laws so that they can build their own future.
Technorati has a bunch of Live8 tag action going on so I figured I’d add to the mix. live8; live8 pink floyd
I started my summer school program today. Yeah – I know it’s Saturday – but so what. I turned off my email (eek) and settled into an hour of Brian Harvey’s Computer Science Logo Style.
I’d already read the first two chapters (Exploration and Procedures) so after downloading Berkeley Logo 5.4 I fiddled around with some of the examples that I was struggling to parse without playing around with them, such as:
print word word last “awful first butfirst “computer first [go to the store, please.]
Chapter 3 was descriptively titled “Variables.” I took a little detour as I figured out how to change my editor to notepad2.exe (seteditor “n.exe after I renamed notepad2 to n and put it in the ucblogo director – DOS path hell, ugh – boy what an emotional victory to get that working.)
Well – my hour is up. Boy – that went fast. Time to go running. Bye.
Ah – today was delightful. I love the first day of a month, especially if it’s the day after the end of a quarter. Amy and I have a standing date on the first day of every month (“life dinner”) where we get together and reflect on the previous month. Tonight, we chowed down on sushi at Alibi (the one sushi place in Homer – buried at the back of a smoky bar) with our friend Nancy who is visiting for a few days.
Throughout the day (and at the end of the day yesterday) I got updates from a number of my companies about how they closed out the quarter for sales and on the top line. Several ended up nicely ahead of plan, most were close to plan (we are talking about early stage companies, so close is fine), and a few had a disappointing quarter. Overall, Q205 looks like it was a solid business quarter for young private tech companies (at least mine).
I consumed book two of the daily Homer bookathon – Jim Cramer’s Real Money. Cramer cracks me up on those rare occasions that I stumble upon him on TV (usually at a health club somewhere) and I liked his last book. This one wasn’t so good. Several people have recommended Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk – that’s up next (and – by the look of it – will probably take more than a day).
FeedBurner held a hackathon last week and created seven new features. I think the idea of a one day coding jamfests is great – classic “web 2.0” stuff where you can quickly put small features immediately into production. If you are one of the 50,156 FeedBurner publishers (as of 7/1/05), you now have a manual ping page, feed geotagging, title/description modification, “feedmedic” validator, Javascript circulation ticker, Image enclosures (gif/jpeg/png), and a Mac OS Dashboard Widget for tracking stats. Nothing heavy – just fun and cool.
I love three day weekends – lots of time to think, reflect, read, run, and chill. Enjoy the long summer nights, wherever you are.
Scott Moody sent this article about The Martun restaurant in Kaohsiung as an add-on to my post about the best toilets in this world. Even I found this a little hard to swallow.
My summer “book a day diet” began with a chewy one. Fortunately it was short (a “bookette” – only 62 pages). John Kenneth Galbraith is 95 years old. So – that makes him the Yoda of economists. And – sometimes – I felt like I was reading something Yoda written had.
Economics of Innocent Fraud is not the first of his books that I’ve read; I hope it’s not the last. Galbraith takes on the gap between “conventional wisdom” (a phrase he coined) and “reality” and uses the construct of both unintentional (innocent) and intentional fraud to explain how humans continue to snooker themselves. His writing is dense, but delightful (almost poetic at times) and his wit is beyond acerbic. About halfway through the bookette I let out a giggle and said “now he’s going to take on Greenspan and the Fed.” Amy looked over at me with an amused twinkle in her eye and said “you really are a geek, aren’t you.”
To give you a taste, following is the concluding paragraph from the chapter “The Corporation As Bureaucracy” where Galbraith asserts the “conventional wisdom” that management is accountable to the stockholders of a corporation is baloney.
“There are times when the need for economic and political understanding requires direct, openly adverse comment: Reference to corporate management compensation as something set by stockholders or their directors is a bogus article of faith. To affirm this fiction, stockholders are invited each year to the annual meeting, which, indeed, resembles a religious rite. There is ceremonial expression and, with rare exception, no negative response. Infidels who urge action are set aside; the management position is routinely approved. The shareholders who previously suggested some social policy or environmental concern have their proposals printed with supporting argument. These are uniformly rejected by management. The only significant recent exception has been at the meetings of the highly intelligent, socially eccentric and financially success Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. of Omaha, Nebraska. Proposals by its stockholders are frequently accepted; some have thought this by prearrangement with management. In any case, it represents a highly exceptional tolerance on the part of the corporation. No one should be in doubt: Shareholders – owners – and their alleged directors in any sizable enterprise are fully subordinate to the management. Though the impression of owner authority is offered, it does not, in fact, exist. An accepted fraud.”
We have a bunch of cool companies. One of my new favorites is Sling Media who makes the ultraspiffy Slingbox. My collegue Ryan McIntyre sits on their board and has a comprehensive post with links up about this nifty new device that helps you watch your television (cable, satellite, or DVR) wherever you are. You can watch Ryan and the CEO of Sling – Blake Krikorian – talking about this type of stuff on The ISV Show.
If you are so inclined, you can treat yourself to a new toy this holiday weekend and – instead of buying a car at the endless “4th of July sales” – wander over to your local CompUSA (or the CompUSA web site) and pick yourself up a Slingbox.