blogging displaced by that whole work thing

If any of you are still reading, apologies for going dark. Too much work, too much travel. Sitting in the United Club at Heathrow with T-Mobile's WiFi barely working. Just finished a book worth reading, Fooled by Randomness. Jonathan Seelig, of Akamai and Globespan fame, recommended it. Enjoyable, topical, and provides a delightful framework for thinking about how to measure performance against underlying trends -- particularly when the underlying trends change dramatically.

kindle 2 review

I've posted a fair amount -- and quite positively -- about my current Kindle, so it should come as no surprise that I was quick to order Kindle 2. It arrived Wednesday and I broke it in with Daemon, Daniel Suarez's impressive debut novel (more on that in a moment).

If you've seen a picture you know that the Kindle 2 is much thinner and sleeker than the original. This translates to a much more solid feel out of the box, although I've found it to be slightly less comfortable to hold, perhaps due to Kindle 1 muscle memory. To first order, it operates the same as Kindle 1. The boot time is much faster, the inward clicking buttons superior and less prone to accidental clicks, and the page flips enough quicker to be noticeable. The new screen's 16-gray levels make photos look surprisingly good, and being able to charge via USB helps me on the road. Finally, while I miss the sparkle, the multi-way stick does make highlighting a lot easier.

Downsides? Moving content over from my first Kindle was a pain, mostly because Whispernet and/or Amazon were clearly slammed Wednesday night. The leather binder doesn't have the original's elastic to hold it closed.

All-in-all, a great set of incremental improvements and an even better device for my needs.

As for Daemon, I really enjoyed it. It has all of the trappings of a first book -- uneven pacing, limited character development, some typos -- but, wow! I've never seen a book that mixes action; this level of understanding of the god complex all game developers have; the technology around robotics, virtual worlds, and the net; and, wraps it all up in book that is speculative while only leveraging real tech. Very cool and quite recommended.

robots, atari, and airports

Two friends have released books worth taking a look at.

First, Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has written "Wired for War."  I was lucky enough to read an early copy and found it an insightful and occasionally disturbing read. Robots intersect with virtual worlds in many different ways, so Pete's book raises a host of issues that also will eventually apply to virtual worlds. You can hear Pete talk about his book with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air."

Second, Ian Bogost, author, game developer, and professor at Georgia Tech has written a new book, "Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies)." Racing looks at how the VCS hardware, and the ecosystem around VCS development, shaped the games that were created for it and, ultimately, game development as a whole.

One more thing. Ian has just released an iPhone version of Jetset: a Game for Airports. Boing Boing already picked it up, so you probably already heard about it. In case you haven't, Jetset is a delightful parody of airport security and a pretty solid casual iPhone game. I've been beta testing it while Jetset managed to pass the tortuous meta-game of Apple iPhone App approval, so it's great that it is out. It's a cheap thrill, check it out!

rapunzel's revenge

At the geek formal of the year, we made several visits to Cory's favorite Toronto sci-fi bookstore, Bakkaphoenix. On our second trip, we discovered an amazing graphic novel: Rapunzel's Revenge


We grabbed it, read it when we got home, and decided to give it our 5 1/2 year-old daughter Meridian for Christmas.

Christmas morning, Meridian came down and had a moment of inspired honesty.
"Mom, I'm kind of disappointed."
"Why, honey?"
"There are a lot of really flat presents, so I think a lot of them are books."

The second present she unwrapped was Rapunzel. She opened it up and started paging through it. And kept paging. And kept paging. 45 minutes of obliviousness-to-the-world later -- we were talking to her, getting coffee, and wondering aloud when she'd want to return to her pile of still unopened presents and she just kept reading -- she closed the book and looked up.

"I didn't like that."

Trying hard not to burst out laughing we asked why not.

"More of the faces seemed angry or scared than happy."
"Would you like us to read it you so you can see what happens? It has a happy ending."
"OK"

Several sessions later -- it's a long story -- Meridian decided that she liked it after all. It has since become a regular fixture of her reading schedule, both reading it alone or with other kids and having adults read it to her. It's a great retelling of the fairy tale and lots of fun. Good to know there will be a sequel!

So, kudos, congratulations, and thank yous to Shannon and Dean Hale, and Nathan Hale (no relation). You can read all about how the book came to be on their website.

1password

I've been using Agile Web Solution's 1Password for over a month now and really, really like it. 1Password is a Mac application that manages all of your passwords, automatically fills in web forms, and generates ridiculously strong passwords on demand. Like, well, everyone, I had been using a few tiers of password. My ludicrously long pass phrase for rsa private keys, strong password for work machines, weaker passwords for silly websites, etc. 1Password lets you choose passwords like

JHZQet70y2Gwdp3gxusFyFHIzrqwP5w2LC3ue20j4GoiwUBwBz

for every site.

Even better, 1Password synchronizes between your Macs, so you have all your passwords everywhere. It uses browser plugins to detect when you enter a password and stores the form so you can easily get back into sites later. Great stuff.

A few minor quirks. First, many people -- including me -- find that Mac keychain syncing is flakey for 1Password and corrupts the saved passwords -- bad with such random sequences -- so I use their Dropbox option. Second, there is a failure mode where you update a password in 1Password but somehow the website doesn't accept it -- say your drop your web connection mid update. Suddenly 1Password has your new, random password but the site still knows your old one. Fortunately, 1Password keeps a log that you can recover the old password from. Finally, entering random 20 character passwords on iPhone for Gmail is a pain. (There is an iPhone app that allows you visit websites, but no way to easily move the password to, say, the Facebook app.)

For me those problems are offset by the convenience and additional security. Cool product, superbly executed.

outliers

Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers" demolishes universal preconceptions about success and opportunity. It argues that within broad ranges of intelligence, skills, and talents, incredibly success -- that is, becoming an outlier -- is driven by opportunity rather than the unique superiority of those skills. For example, being born in the first three months of the year is a primary indicator of whether you'll be a top hockey player in Canada. This is because age cutoffs in the earliest youth leagues result in January kids being bigger and stronger, leading to more coaching and practice. Rather than vanishing, this advantage continues all the way to the pros. Similarly, being born in the early part of the year translates into a measurable academic advantage in elementary school. Again, this advantage remains all the way through graduate school. "Outliers" contains too many stories to effectively synopsize, but suffice it to say that Gladwell describes cultural, geographic, and demographic effects that limit opportunities and that these opportunities gate success. Not that everyone is equally skilled or equally likely to succeed, but that above certain thresholds, opportunity, training, and practice are more indicative than additional intelligence. Gladwell drives the point home in the area of sports, where Canada literally ignores half of its population in building its national hockey team, but despite several examples of how transformative training can be -- Korean Airlines' dramatic reduction in accidents or the KIPP school's success teaching math and science -- stops short of stating the obvious.

Our understanding of innovation, collaboration, change, and success are sufficient for us to recognize that we our squandering the talents of many people. We prevent the majority of potential innovators in America from even trying. Only a very few ever are able to approach the 10,000 hours needed to become truly expert. For entrepreneurs, scientists, and researchers, that's years of experience and failure. And years of experience or failure you only have a chance to get if opportunities appear much earlier in life. Opportunities like learning to doggedly attack a problem until it is solved. Or properly manage power relationships in order to ask for what you want. Or to fail and try again.

We must do more.

Nota Bene: Some reviewers and pundits are attacking "Outliers" by arguing experimental science has a monopoly on The Truth. This is just silly. Every great advance in human understanding has emerged from the union of observational and experimental science. Both qualitative and quantitative research create knowledge -- my personal favorite examples are the meta-studies of the impact of funding source on experimental results. New ideas and interpretations spring both from unusual experiments and from unexpected observations. So, by all means, please challenge specific studies or stories cited in Outliers. Or craft better hypotheses and studies. But claiming the ideas are invalid simply because he's a journalist or the work is built on anecdotes demonstrates incredibly lazy thinking.

tribes

As most anyone reading my blog already knows, the Intertubesweb, with its concomitant reduction in communication, collaboration, and computing costs, has dramatically increased the ability of small groups and individuals to innovate and impact thousands or millions of other people. Even if you know all that, Seth Godin's wonderful new book "Tribes", is well worth the hour you'll spend reading it. Tribes dives deeply into the drivers and implications of these changes. Tribes, communities built around ideas and leaders, thrive on curiosity and change. For organizations dependent upon stability -- Godin lumps them together as "factories" -- tribes are a heretical threat. Rather than engaging, growing, and changing with tribes, factories tend to fight them, succumb to fear, and are swept aside as the world changes around them. Godin exhorts everyone to find their movements, their tribes, and to meaningfully lead or engage. As with all his writing, "Tribes" is passionate, persuasive, and well worth reading.