Wikihow’s How To Stop Accumulating Books has been making the rounds in blogs and delicious popular. Reminds me of the ultimate book non-accumulator, a good friend of my dad’s.

This particular friend of my dad’s would always bring me books when he came to visit. I was a voracious reader, to the point where people made fun of me for it, so I always loved his visits. And he brought interesting books – not children’s books, but histories, etc. I think he brought me Animal Farm when I was 8 or 9.

As I got older I started to notice something odd about the books – they didn’t belong to him.

Eventually I found out he didn’t own any books. He’d take a book from you, read it, and give it to someone else. Usually without permission.

I was fascinated. I remember asking him about it, and he told me: books cannot be owned. Ideas are the ultimate expression of freedom, and to cage them is unnatural. Books are for reading and for passing on.

That made a big impression on me. I’ve always thought sharing books with friends is the most amazing gift.

Anyway, that’s why I’ve never returned that book you lent me

After 2 days of pain, finally a hackintosh is born. My advice to you if you’re thinking of setting up a hackintosh: don’t. Go buy a cheap mac instead.

As I was fond of saying in the old days: Linux is free if your time is worthless. Hackintosh is about the same.

Having said that, I can confirm OS X 10.5.6 runs on a Toshiba A135-S4467 with most things working, with the exception of: sleep and wifi (so far). Things that do work: wired ethernet, USB, both external keyboard/mouse (with USB) and internal laptop keyboard/mouse, sound, and dual boot with Vista.

I’ll probably post the painful details at some point. In the meanwhile, I’m back on the mac. The things one does for the sake of the iPhone…

Yet another Scoble post on a facebook accounts being closed, this time with the iFart app author.

Facebook is like Disney Land. It’s a nice and enjoyable place, but it has its own special governance. It can decide when to let you in and when to throw you out.

It’s a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to build my house there. Not when the lease can be revoked at any time.

All my data is belong to me. It makes no sense to put a third party in control of it. My photos: mine. My writings: mine. Why would I hand them over to a third party?

I can understand the appeal of easy publishing to the general public – Facebook truly makes it easy for people to establish a presence and communicate. But for the more technically savvy, Facebook should be treated as a copy, not as the source. Data should be originated and owned elsewhere and channeled into Facebook. Write in your own blog. Post photos onto Flickr, with a local and web backup strategy. Funnel them into Facebook.

That’s a bit more like FriendFeed, which may be why Scoble likes it so much.

Inaugration day, and I missed just about all the festivities. One thing did stand out for me: the text of the Oath of the Office of the President:

“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Those founding fathers were smart.

Here’s hoping the new president takes the constitution more seriously than the last one and defends it instead of trying to diminish it.

Queues are nice things. We should be using more of them.

A couple of benefits that I knew of but didn’t really appreciate until Alex started using beanstalkd in his application:

- Having a worker-pulls-jobs-from-queue model provides near optimal use of the machine and prevents overload and thrashing. Setup as many simultaneous workers as your resources can handle and let them go. You have a controlled number of workers, preventing thrashing, and your workers work continuously. You don’t have to worry about a load distribution strategy – workers pull jobs as fast as they can.

- Provisioning new workers into the system becomes trivial. Want to add another box into the mix? Just set it up and have the workers start pulling jobs. You don’t have to worry about registering the new box and getting it into the load distribution system – so long as it knows how to connect to the queue it can grab jobs. Alex commented that scaling his system is as easy as bringing up another virtual machine – as soon as it’s up it starts pulling jobs.

These are both very important operational benefits that I had largely ignored.

The power of Linkedin: I changed my profile info and got a flood of emails asking if I had left Yahoo, and I realized I hadn’t really announced it. So here it is.

A little while ago I left Yahoo! to go full time on yet another startup, Xpenser. Xpenser is expense tracking and management simplified: record and manage your expenses from any device, any time. As soon as you get out of the taxi, call and say “Taxi $27 office to San Jose airport”. Your expense is recorded and you can forget about it.

Or you can email “Lunch $35.13 with Jack”. Or SMS it. Or iPhone it. IM it (Yahoo, AIM, MSN, GTalk). Twitter it. Use the browser search box. The FireFox plugin. Or, believe it or not, the Web.

As you can imagine this was born of personal need – I travel a lot, and expense reports have been the bane of my life for as long as I’ve worked.

Xpenser is an expense management tool built by someone who hates wasting time on expense reports.

The site has been growing wonderfully, with a bit overy 20k users, and in Nov/Dec was featured in Consumerist, Mashable, Lifehacker, Stepcase Lifehack, BNet, and even briefly in the Motley fool. The users are passionate, the feedback is great, and all the metrics are off the charts. 

In short, it was an obvious move.

My 4 years at Yahoo! were fantastic – I was fortunate enough to work on make-or-break projects with a group of very smart, very dedicated people. I learned a lot, am very thankful, and continue to root for Yahoo! to make its way back to the top. Keep fighting guys!

So, back to the startup world for me, and I couldn’t be more excited. I’m also advising a few other startups and investors here and there, so I’m fully in it. This is actually a fantastic time to do a startup if you’re planning to build a real business.

Needless to say, if you see opportunities for Xpenser in your network, do let me know ( parand at xpenser dot com ). And if you’re around San Diego or LA drop me a line and we’ll grab coffee and catch up.

2009 here we come!!!

Parand says:

When attempting to do a two man job with only one man, substitute endurance for raw power.

Interesting data on impact of VC investment on startups with angel investment, based on a Kauffman Foundation study.

Couple of interesting nuggets:

• Angel investors are generating 27% Internal Rate of Return (2.6x investment in 3.5 years)
• However, average return is fairly meaningless; 52% of investments returned less than the investment amount, while 7% returned > 10x, accounting for 75% of the total investment returns.
• Startups that take VC money after taking angel money descrease their chances for a 1x to 5x exit by ~20%. They increase chances for a 5x to 10x exit by ~7%, however. 

We’re starting a San Diego Hadoop User Group. Please send me an email ( darugar at gmail ) if you’re interested or leave a comment here. Details to be worked out, but we’ll likely will have the first meeting towards the end of February.

I’m fascinated by what’s “normal” for people. Example: right now my feet are hurting from the cold. I have a fairly high tolerance for pain, so the fact that I took notice tells me that it’s actually pretty damned cold.

I could put on a pair of socks. I could put on shoes. I could grab a blanket. I could turn on the heater.

But I won’t. I’ll continue to sit here in the cold and ignore the pain. 

That’s strange. But it’s normal for me. In fact the only reason I even noticed was the contrast with last night’s dinner at my parent’s house. They had my aunts and their families over, and like normal people they had the heater on. I was burning. It was driving me nuts.

I think my “normal” with respect to cold comes from my upbringing. Rarely would we turn the heat on when growing up. My dad slept every night, even when snow was falling, with his bedroom window open. 

I don’t know why. For me, it’s something about being able to control my reaction to physical phenomena, mind over matter, and probably more importantly, habit. 

Pretty inconsequential example, but I think these little “norms” have a big impact in how we live. Do I procrastinate or tackle tasks head on? Do I read books? Do I exercise routinely? How do I react to failure? 

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to guide 2009 by tackling my norms, hopefully orienting them to a healthy, happy lifestyle.

Hell, I’m going to go grab a blanket right now.