I ran across Joe Kraus’s blog, Bnoopy. I’d seen this before, but this time I actually spent a little time with it.

This is excellent. Definite read if you are or hope to be involved with a startup. Here’s an excellent post: Startups and the Stockdale Paradox . It warns of the dangers of optimism and startups. I’ve seen it firsthand – heck, I’ve experienced it firsthand.

Here’s the funny thing: most of the optimists turn into disappointed, bitter pessimists by the middle-end of the first startup, as it fails to live up to their expectations. These folks have a real hard time.

But by their second startup, you’re looking at hardened realists. Unfortunately, some have lost their zeal for working their asses off, because they already did that and didn’t get rich and famous.

If you’re starting a startup, try to grab someone who’s been through it once or twice, hopefully with at least one success, to keep your natural optimism grounded in reality.

My site was down for a week or two recently, and I worried about it. That’s odd, because for a good year or two I had completely ignored it. So why did I worry this time? Because now I have a precious blog!

The realization hit that I secretly yearn to be popular, to join the elite of the blogsphere, to be known as the important genius that I really am.

I have my ego tied into this little diary. Nice.

There’s something to this; it feeds the blogsphere, pushes people to publish. This is important: money is not motivating people to write. Personally, I can make a couple of orders of magnitude more money writing articles for regular publications than for my blog, mostly because these ads I’ve been playing with bring in no money. And the same is true for blogs infinitely more popular than mine; here’s a VC making $500 for the whole year.

Maybe the blego is a good thing. It encourages everyone to express the best they have to say, so maybe one of the things they say will get picked up and carry them to glory. And it encourages the bottom feeders such as myself to link to others’ genius so some of it will rub off on me, thereby boosting the good thoughts.

I’m using the term blego a bit differently than originally expressed, but it’s a similar concept.

I’m back! I missed myself. This site is hosted on a friend’s server, who went off to Germany for a couple of weeks. A few days into his trip the IP address of the server changed, and hence I went offline.

Well, I’m back. I can’t wait to hear what I have to say.

I looked at a lot of mp3 players before getting this one, and in fact got the Lexar MPC-231 JumpGear MP3 USB first. I ended up returning the Lexar primarily because the controls were not very good.

My primary criteria were: size and weight, price, sound quality, and openness, which I’ll define as not requiring special software, being accessible as a normal drive, and the ability to easily store things other than music.

Of lesser import were disk space (anything 4G and above works great; even 1G would likely be fine), music management software, ability to connect to online music retailers, and slickness of interface.

I had it narrowed down to the Muvo and the ipod mini. I was pretty well set on getting the mini when I ran across the deal for the Muvo. Buying from Amazon and using the $30 credit card incentive, it worked out to $200 – $30 credit card – $50 rebate = $120, which was significantly less than the mini’s $250 price tag. So I gave it a shot, particularly after hearing about its audiophile sound quality.

I’m very happy with this thing. It’s very small and very light; much smaller and lighter than a typical cell phone, so you’ll barely feel you’re carrying it. Plenty of room for music. The transfer speed is quite good, although I don’t have much to compare it to. Once you connect it via the USB cable, it shows up as a drive, so you can drag and drop songs onto it very easily.

The Zen is the other one to look at. It’s quite a bit bigger than the Muvo, and I didn’t see any features that compelled me to put up with the extra size. It may be very nice though; I haven’t really tried it.

The cons are typically said to be the interface, which is less slick than some of the others, but worked well for me immediately; and the lack of ability to create playlists on the device. I don’t care about either, so I’m very happy with this.

I would recommend you buy the Creative Labs Nomad MuVo² 4 GB MP3 Player.

Original Sidekick

I’m not typically an early gadget adopter, but I was so into the whole concept of the Sidekick I got one of the early ones. The good old black and white, nice fat ones. Surprisingly, I wasn’t disappointed.

I travel a lot, so having access to email while on the road was a great feature. The Sidekick is always connected, so no dial-up and waiting for connections. It’s just there. The data on the Sidekick is automatically backed to the Web. Create a new note, it’s automatically on the T-mobile site. Take a picture, it’s automatically on the Web. I can take notes on the Sidekick, and when I’m on the computer, I can simply access them through a Web browser. The device also has IM and Web browsing built in. Too many times I have read news headlines while stuck in traffic. Once I actually booked a ticket on Southwest while on the way to the airport via the Sidekick browser, which was silly but cool (I could’ve much more easily just dialed Southwest and booked it that way, but I’d have lost the double frequent flyer credit).

The cons for this thing are construction and reliability – I believe I had mine fixed or replaced three times, and still it was never quite right. It’s also a bit too bulky. It’s terrible as a phone – awkward to hold, and just generally too big. I used it strictly for data.

And then came: Sidekick II

My trusty black and white Sidekick eventually became crippled through lots of use and abuse, so I get the new Sidekick II. I really like this device. It has all of the benefits and features of the original, but feels a lot more solid, is more compact, and is usable as a phone. The speakerphone sounds quite good. T-mobile is also finally offering an outlook synchronization capability for a one time $10 fee, which is well worth it for me.

I purchased this from Amazon for $175 list, with $200 rebates, making it -$25 in theory. $50 of the rebate is from T-Mobile, and requires you to be on a plan of $39 or above. The problem is, there’s also a $20 per month data access fee, costing you at least $50 per month total (if you take a $30/month voice plan). The alternative is to go with an unlimited data only plan, which costs you $30 per month. I decided to forego the $50 rebate and switched to the $30 unlimited data plan as soon as I got the phone. I have a separate phone, so for me this made sense.

In practice this worked out to $25 after rebate, plus $35 activation fee, plus $30/month.

UPDATE: Here’s Adam Bosworth saying Sidekick II rocks.

Grab yourself a T-Mobile Sidekick II Phone if you have a need for email, IM, or Web browsing from anywhere, or just like cool gadgets.

I live in San Diego, work in LA (about 130 miles away). The drive is horrendous. I tried the Amtrak service quite a while back, and found it very easy. Instead of dealing with traffic, you just sit. You’re free to read, eat, sleep, whatever. I’m writing this on the train. The seats are fairly comfortable. It does get more passengers than I had expected, but you can almost always find two seats to yourself.

The view is spectacular for much of the trip, as you skim the coastline all the way up. The service does have its hiccups – it’s not unusual for it to be late. It costs about $40 round trip between Solana Beach and Los Angeles Union Station, but you can get multi-trip passes, like the “ten-ride”, that knock it down to $25 round trip. That’s pretty good, about the same as you’d spend on gas. The trip takes a little over two hours.

From Union Station there’s a pretty decent Metro system that can get you where you want to go. I happen to go to Pasadena, which has a convenient Metro line. If you’re going elsewhere, you may be out of luck, although there are taxis and car rentals at Union Station.

Somehow Southern Californians are afraid of public transportation. I’m here to tell you, don’t be afraid! It’s ok! I’d recommend you take the Amtrak train and see how you like it.

Interesting quote from Tim Bray:

Historically, it would appear that it’s more valuable to know what something is called than to know what data type it is. That’s an interesting lesson.

That is interesting. Scripting languages have been doing great without strong typing for years. Tim brings this up as a reason XML and RDF have been successful where others have not fared as well (OSI and ASN.1). Yet the RPC model for SOAP invocations proposes to send type info within the XML document, intertwined with the data, in hopes that the receiving system will dynamically figure out how to handle it. Dynamically, because if we thought it was handled beforehand, say via the type info in the WSDL, we wouldn’t need to send the types along with every message.

Let’s get rid of this type business and treat the incoming message as what it is: XML. Parse the XML, deal with the data. Relax about strongly typing your fields; it doesn’t buy you much anyway. How many systems do you know that actually XML validate the message? At scale it doesn’t make sense, because type level validation is typically not enough anyway, so you validate a second time based on your business rules…

Strong typing in XML doesn’t buy you much, so relax about it. Consider the XML as the first class citizen, not an artifact of your serialization process.

Watched Sin City. Excellent. Really much better than I had expected.

If you like stylized movies and violence, this is for you. Mickey Rourke plays the most compelling character in the performance of his life. Bruce willis is good. Elijah Wood works surprisingly well in his role.

The movie has a great aesthetic. The dialogue is hokey, very much a direct comic book translation, but works in certain situations, particularly for Rourke’s character (Marv). The ladies are not shy about displaying their talents, and there’s plenty of talent.

The Tarantino touch of splitting a story in the beginning and end of the movie works well. Other than that the story is pretty much a couple of comic books laid out one after another.

Robert Rodriguez is one of the most interesting directors out there. Looking forward to more from him.

The disk on the server died! Shahin managed to save the mysql database, as well as an old copy of my site. New disk, software re-install, and I’m back on.

I randomly picked up a collection of shorts by Vladimir Nabokov, this one. Just as randomly I selected a story, “A Russian Beauty”.

This is one the most amazing shorts I’ve ever read. It’s really quite incredible; it paints a rich, vivid picture of this lady’s life in just a few pages. It distills the salient points of a life to a few moments, all the while capturing the mood of every stage.

If at all you get a chance, read this one. Ten minutes of your life to immerse yourself in real beauty. I haven’t had as much luck with the other stories; they’re very good, but no match for A Russian Beauty.

I got some comment spam. Great.

I was about to setup a captcha, but stumbled across lr2spam. This is obnoxiously easy to install, so I’m giving it a go. Please post a comment here if you run into any problems posting comments.