Summer Reading – Watchmen is So Cool & Captivating

I’m breaking silence to note my favorite read of the summer. It’s the comic compilation of Watchmen.

If you’re a “dad” like me you’ve watched The Incredibles many times and wondered where the ideas came from. This Watchmen comic seems to have been a big influence. Of course Watchmen is not clean and “Disnified”. I’ll leave it at that. Very cool.

Good stuff for a lazy Labour Day Weekend. Here is the amazon link.

I’ve got the “Curse of Knowledge”

I think you suffer from the “curse of knowledge”.
You don’t know what it is like not to know what you already know.

I’ve finally reviewed the student evaluations for the course I taught in the fall. This was my favorite comment. It is spot on. I found that the more I knew the material, the harder it was to talk about it. So weird

Chalk up another one for Made 2 Stick

Reading | The Snowball – Warren Buffett

I’m fascinated by The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. I’ve owned BRK a few times, but never dug into the “man”. I’m now almost halfway thru, and am really looking forward to the last half. It’s always amazing to see how many setbacks a “super-star” has to navigate thru. Gives hope to the rest of us.

This is my first biography in a while. I’m glad that Harvey Schachter mentioned this book in his best of 2008 list ’cause I’m certain that I wouldn’t have given a second look.

The only negative about this book is its length — 838 pages in print, or 37 hr and 1mins in audio. As usual I’m listening to audible version.

Reviews & Links

• Best of 2008: Best of the best: intelligent, clear, filled with advice – Harvey Schachter – The Globe and Mail
• The Snowball – NYTimes.com:
• Review: Snowball – Economist
• The Snowball: Wikipedia
• Warren Buffett – Wikipedia

40,000th Hit Today!

My blog is “Small and Steady”. The most popular posts are as expected — “in areas where I have expertise and provide something of value”. I enjoy writing about books, music, marketing, career mgmt, etc. It really helps me learn about those things. But you (the readers ) definitely prefer reading posts that are about something that I actually know something about

It’s also cool that the most popular search term is my name.

Here are the most popular posts (all time):

1. My longing for Amazon MP3 in Canada
   Amazon’s New MP3 Service – Not in Canada
2. Using BackupPC on Mac OS X
   • BackupPC on Mac OS X – part 1
   • BackupPC on Mac OS X – part 2
3. My observation that the “Internet network” is becoming less about network equipment and more about network applications
   Thinking About Network Diagrams For the Internet
4. My yahoo mail plus outage and resulting rant. After ten years I abandon Yahoo mail
   • re: Yahoo to Shaw e-mail problems
   • Whats with Shaw.ca mailservers and xxx@yahoo.com e-mail addresses?
5. My trials and tribulations with iGTD and Journlr
   iGTD Mac ToDo List Manager

Thanks for reading. Merry Christmas.

My Music — A Dozen From 2008

2008 was a strange year for me. My favorite album Jukebox was purchased in January, and didn’t get a ton of play until the fall. My most listened to album was the extremely quiet Music For Airports (LIVE) by Bang On a Can. (My family felt very tortured). I picked up the pace with Jive Soweto, Santogold, and Army Navy. Jason Collett is one of those guys that didn’t grab me at first, but I’m still playing it a lot months later. M. Ward’s new gig She & Him is a lot of fun. I really like the noise of The Raveonettes. Gui Boratto’s Beautiful Life is very additive. Thievery Corp is Theivery Corp. I found Attack & Release a bit disappointing, but still played it a ton.

Finally, Sigur Rós continue to be amazing!

DD-WRT | Fixing Home Router Slowdowns

If you’re experiencing home router slow/melt downs this DD-WRT note on Router Slowdown may be helpful

• Go to the Web Interface of the DD-WRT Device and log in
• Go to ‘Administration’
• Go to ‘Management’
• Enter the following values at ‘IP Filter Settings’
  • Maximum Ports: 4096
    (For an 8MB RAM model set it no higher than 1024)
  • TCP Timeout (s): 300 is a safe choice.
    default 3600. Change to 90, up to 500. (lower if you must have many TCP connections).
  • UDP Timeout (s): 300 is a safe choice.
    default 3600. Change to 90, up to 150. (lower if you must have many UDP connections).

The source of these slowdowns should not be a surprise

Useful Mac OS X Software Dec 2008

Here’s an update wrt/ “Useful OS X Software” posts.

I’m really liking the Smultron text editor and Sleep Display. My kids are liking SketchUp 3D drawing. I had to do some work on the “Dark Side” (ie Windows) laptop this summer. I found Notepad++ text editor and Strawberry Perl very useful for editing and running perl scripts developed on mac onto a PC.

Smultron is a text editor. I’ve now fully switched from textwrangler. I like the “command and snippet” features. The one thing that I’d wish it had is ability to save searches. But I can work around this by creating & saving perl search commands. (ie perl -pe s/FIND/REPLACE/g; %%p)

Sleep Display does exactly what you think. It works great for Skype phone calls. I find the screen distracting during phone calls. Turning the screen off is very useful

My kids really like’s Google’s SketchUp 3D sketching software. They’ve been drawing all sorts of cool stuff.

Strawberry Perl was a big find for me this summer. It allows one to embed perl code into PC world .bat files.

I’m still Experimenting with CLIX and Lingon

BAEN 502 “Thank You For Your Support”

• Course Content – Steve Blank ( for his book “The Four Steps to the Epiphany“, helping me with slideware and HBR site.) and Carol Dweck ( for slideware on Mindset ).
• Guest Speakers – Barry, Geri, Ken, Greg, and Bill
• UBC Staff – Helen, Reaia, and Karminie
• Opportunity – John ( for hiring me), Perry ( for suggesting this), Greg ( for pointing me in their direction ), and Colin ( for clearing it ).
• References – Andre for getting me started a few years back.

Thank You all!

Aside

It is amazing how many people it took to support a small 6 week Customer Development” course. More than 10 people. Wow.

Perceptions | iPod’s Instant Success

I’m always fascinated by the perceived “instant” success of the iPod. It’s more like a text book case of getting thru Roger’s Technology Adoption Lifecycle, or Crossing the Chasm one step at a time.

Have a look at the iPod sales history on Wikipedia. It was in the 4th year with the 4G versions that iPod really took off.

Add in development time for the first version and that is something like 6 years to “Instant Success”.

Also note that Apple did a ton of work developing the Digital Music Eco-System to support iPod. Huge things like iTunes software, the iTunes store, the legal issue of getting songs on line, etc.

Fascinating stuff

Problem Solving With A Better Mindset

Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset is something worth cultivating. The Presentations on the Brainology site are a good introduction.

The exec summary is that our brains grow thru practice ( ie effort ). The more you exersize your brain the smarter you will get. ( It’s the 10,000 hours mentioned in Gladwell’s Outliers that count. ) The second point is that if you need be focussed on “Process” (Learning thru effort) vs “Results” (The score & talent ). It doesn’t matter how much talent you have unless you’re prepared to work hard. Sounds a lot like golf guru Bob Rotella doesn’t it.

The only bad thing about this book is that I often found myself remembering the times I’ve been stuck in a “fixed mindset”

Links

• “The Effort Effect”
  - Guy Kawasaki – where I first heard about this.
• If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow
  – NY Times
• About Growth Mindset
  – Brainology Presentation
• The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
  – Scientific American
• Carol S. Dweck Homepage