3 Chefs Eat Their Way Thru Spain

I just read “Big bucks, fine food on trip to Spain” – Yahoo/AP in the weekend paper. Very entertaining This would be a great trip.

I really like these snippets

“We mastered the three-hour lunch, followed by the five-hour dinner.”

“We’re gastro freaks.”

Sigur Ros Tracks

Sigur Ros‘ website’s download section has some great songs in it. If you’ve never listened to this awesome band before give these a try. I really like #4 “the nothing song” and #8 “the pop song”. My kids call this “meditation” music

• untitled #4 (a.k.a. njósnavélin / the nothing song)
  • from the 2002 album ( )
  • mp3 format (6:57 minutes | 8.1 megabytes)
    

• untitled #8 (a.k.a. popplagið / the pop song)
  • from the 2002 album ( )
  • mp3 format (11:42 minutes | 13.6 megabytes)
• starálfur
  • from the 1999 album ágætis byrjun
  • mp3 format (5:54 minutes | 6.5 megabytes)
• olsen olsen
  • from the 1999 album ágætis byrjun
  • mp3 format (8:00 minutes | 8.6 megabytes)

Tech – No Life Balance

I’m uncomfortable with Marc Andreesen’s recent Career Planning disclaimer

Disclaimers:

* These posts are aimed at high-potential people who want to excel throughout their careers and make a significant impact on their fields and the world. These posts are not appropriate for people for whom work/life balance is a high priority or for whom lifestyle is particularly important — if that’s you, there are plenty of existing career planning resources for you already!

I have to agree with him that career advancement in technology comes at the expense of “life balance”. I remember one of the first actions that PMCS’s first HR director took — She rounded up the founding team, and then told us that the fact that none of us used any of our holiday time for 4 years straight was a recruiting nightmare. I was, personally, reprimanded for not taking any time away from work when my first child was born. (yes I’m that dumb).

That said — I’m very uncomfortable with the “glorification” of “no balance” without discussing the ramifications of this choice. If one is going to choose this route, they need to treat themselves like a pro athlete. I wrote a very personal note on the topic in my marketing rants — I Forget What 8 Was For? – What the !@#$ Does Marketing Do?

DSL Prime quotes – Does ATM-like control live on at DT? More FTTH converts. WiMax dreams

Dave Burstein’s DSL Prime always has good bits. I particularly like this weeks banter on Deutche Telekom (control) vs Iliad’s Free (simple) discussion. It reminds me of Wired’s 1996 article describing ATM vs IETF in “Netheads vs Bellheads”.

Here are some other interesting quotes from the full post.

Coming in DSL Prime is the news KPN in Holland is junking their “fiber/DSL” for true GPON fiber all the way home capable of delivering hundreds of megabits. British Telecom has essentially made the same decision, but is trying to get concessions from Ofcom’s Ed Richards first.

WiMAX Future: One Day, Equipment Cost Similar to DSL
Waiting for the chipsets
Wimax modems are typically three times the $25-$40 cost of basic DSL gear, keeping growth slow. Mania Brooks pf ZyXEL, who won the contract to supply Sprint in the U.S., expects dramatic change when Intel and others ship their chipsets promised for late 2008. “Except for the chipset, WiMAX equipment is little different from DSL. The costs go up because most customers want WiFi, 2 channel VOIP, and other features, but the basic ships are the main reason prices are still high.” She predicts that prices for basic models will rapidly fall below $100 as the new chips arrive, although $50 pricing is still far away.

Jens Lekman & Jonathan Richman

I’m really enjoying Jens Lekman’s new album.

The longer I listen to it the more Jens reminds me of Jonathan Richman. Brings back great memories of seeing JR play at the East Van Cultural Center. After the show JR came out and chatted with the audience in the adjacent bar. I remember him commenting on my sweater. Great Memories and great album. I’m going to go see Jens when comes to town.

LastGraph

Tip to Fred Wilson’s blog for pointing me to Last Graph. This is very cool Sums up my computer listening for 2007. It is interesting how small Dinosaur Jr is on this graph ’cause this years album is played a lot on my iPod and in my car, but not here at my terminal.

System-on-a-Chip (SoC) vs Network Processor (NPU) – What’s the Difference?

This week Broadcom announced their latest SoC a “3G phone on a chip”. It reminded me that I’ve been very hard on Network Processor’s (NPU’s) for a long time, and that I’ve been rather silent about my support of SoC’s like BRCM’s. What gives?

Many point out to me that SoC’s and NPU’s are technically the same. NPU’s and SoC’s are both highly integrated “programmable” semiconductor devices. The subtle difference is that an SoC vendor is deploying programmable elements to solve specific problems in a narrower application space. The vendor of an SoC is providing a finished ( or close-to-finished ) solution. The SoC vendor could have easily “hard-coded” the device, but the best way to provide the solution was to deploy programmable elements.

In summary, the subtle difference is that an “SoC Solution/Ecosystem” is provided by a “system focussed vendor leveraging technology” and the “NPU device” is provided by a “technology focussed vendor”. The SoC vendor knows the system problems that they want to solve and thus can prove that the solution delivers. The NPU vendor does not fully know the system problems that their device will be required to solve and thus have to work very closely with their customers to prove that it works.

Sharing Apple iCal on Home Network

When I was searching for “HowTo” articles wrt/ sharing iCal on my home network I found a quite few sites. This old one at O’Reilly Mac Devcenter worked great for me.

PMC-Sierra’s Bob Bailey Retires

I was shocked to hear of Bob Bailey’s retirement today. He’s been PMC’s CEO for so long I expected him to be there forever. With the departures of Kevin and recently Greg it did make me begin to wonder about Bob’s future at PMC. Surely the stress of the past decade was affecting him too.

On my front, I learned a lot from him.

I can still remember him grilling me on customer lists back in the early ’90’s – Where is the list? Who are the decision makers? What’s the priority? What do they want?

Always stressing “fundamentals”, the necessity of everyone “blocking & tackling” and that old-school wasn’t a bad “phrase”. PMC is all about relationships, credibility and delivering on promises.

Thanks Bob. It’s been a great adventure. All the best in your new endeavours.

Ender Wiggin Series is a Drug!

I innocently started reading/listening Enders Game a few weeks ago on the recommendation of Andrew@Nyquist. In the past few days I kept telling myself that I had to move onto something else when I finished book 3 Xenocide. This series is taking up all of my time I’m addicted to it. Just like I was with Neal Stephenson’s books. I can’t leave these books for more than a few hours at a time.

Today I finished Xenocide. The audiobook is great. I really liked the chapter introductions between “Human” and “The Hive Queen”. There are also plenty of narrators which make it much easier to follow than most audiobooks. Overall, the audio for this series is exceptional.

Of course an addict can’t hold back. I found myself downloading book 4 Children of the Mind just a few minutes ago This is supposed to be the final book in the series. I sure hope so. I’ve got to get a life again.