Generating the Page

Organizing the Books

I use GoodReads to organize my books.  James Currier, proprietor of MedPedia, invests in GoodReads.  It lets me add books quickly and easily, plus I easily export the book list. I prefer it to Shelfari or LibraryThing.

Creating the HTML

I exported my book list along with which shelves (categories/tags) each book occupies on GoodReads.  I hacked up a short Python script that reorganizes the list by shelf and puts the shelves in order.  The script generates HTML which I can paste into that page.

Linking and covers

I grab the images from Amazon using some great hacks I learned about recently: how to abuse Amazon product images.  Nat Gertler does a great job clarifying all of the great things you can do using Amazon’s huge dynamic image generation system. It’s okay for me to use these images since I link you to the Amazon site.  I refer to the Amazon pages using my Amazon Associates Referral Program Account.  If you click on one of the lists and then buy something from Amazon, I get a few pennies.

The Shelves

currently-reading

Under this heading, I list the books that I, of course, currently read on a daily or weekly basis.  Most of them I downloaded to my Kindle.  I agree with myself more and more every day: the Kindle is nearly perfect.

to-read

Many people recommend different books to me.  I love to hear about books that people love.  If you want to recommend to me one of your favorite books, please tell me so that I can add it to this queue.

maybe-will-read

Sometimes I hear some second-hand recommendations of a book or an off-hand remark about the quality of a book.  Or I might want to read one of an author’s less critically-acclaimed books.  I might want to remember that book for later, in case I have extra time, so I add it to this list.  For example, I loved The Scarlet Letter, so I might also enjoy The House of Seven Gables, but I have other priorities.

unfinished

Sometimes I start a book, read a few chapters or get half-way through, and then never pick it up again.  This happened more often in high school; most of the books here come from there.  Now, I will often not finish a book when I start a book owned by someone else then fly to another city soon after.  Fooled by Randomness I will finish once I can sit down for a couple of hours in a Borders or Barnes & Noble.

favorites

I have a few favorite books that I am very happy to have been fortunate to come across.  Most have impacted me in a deep way or have given me knowledge that changed the way I acted in the world.  They make me who I am today.  The list will change with time, though, I think.  For example, I forget now but why did I put The Giver here?

worthwhile

I loathe 5-star rating systems.  I really have just 3 categories.  My favorite books.  Books which are worth the time it takes to read them, and books which are not worth the time it takes to read them.  This can happen if the book is inordinately long or, more often, barren of content.

Any book on this list, every book really, I recommend that you read.

not-worthwhile

Every book on this list, I suggest you pass on, unless you read all of my favorites and worthwhile books.

Some of these books show up here because other books describe the same ideas more succinctly or in more interesting ways.  Or more cheaply.  For example, pretty much every essay in Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters he already posts for free on his website.

Actually, looking over this list, I see that I heavily bias it toward (non-scifi) fiction and poetry.  This probably reflects more my distaste (or at least the distaste I had in high school) for fiction.  Maybe I would understand and appreciate more if I read these books today.  Probably.

At the same time, perhaps my bias will help you identify the “greatest” classic fiction books.  I really did enjoy some greatly, and put them onto my worthwhile list: The Grapes of Wrath, The Scarlet Letter, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Metamorphosis, and The Chocolate War.

avoid

At the bottom of the list are books which I wish I could erase from my memory.  Never buy these books, never look at them, never gift them to a friend.  These books sucked life from my veins.  Let me explain why I put the current 4 there:

The Magic of Thinking Big:  The book vapidly repeats the same tired aphorisms throughout its several hundred pages.  It should be 1 page long or printed on the back of a cereal box.  Summary: think big visions and you will try hard to achieve them.  I hoped, at the least, for some fun anecdotes.  No such luck.  Instead, expect some general, detail-poor descriptions of general scenarios which are often either so ridiculous or common place I sincerely doubt any are based on real events. No, read How to Win Friends and Influence People instead.

Vagabonding: This books is so forgettable.  It says nothing.  It is so forgettable, and I’m not exaggerating, that I forgot to cross it off my list of books to read.  Six months later, I bought the book from Amazon again, read through 3 chapters in agonizing pain with a slight feeling of deja vu, before finally realizing that I had already bought and “read” the book before.  I tried to salvage the situation by perhaps trying to read more carefully and figuring out the meat of the content of the book only to suffer through an agonizing 3 hours skimming over jumbles of bad puns and base allusions.  Avoid this book and find one with real details and advice, real meat, like the 4-Hour Workweek.

Go Green, Live Rich: So awfully terrible that Amazon had to give it away as a promotion on the Kindle.  I knew after 10 pages that it was terrible, but I finished anyway for some reason.  At least 60% of the book simply repeats the same thought: you should “go green”.  You should go green.  Tip #2.  You should go green.  Tip #3.  You should go green. Tip #4…..  It makes me want to tear the eyes out of the author.  This pain would be salvaged if the author picked just a handful of actually useful tips.  But he doesn’t.  He goes on for hundreds of pages with useless garbage.  Let me give you an example of a tip (one of the more “profitable” ones mind you): spend hundreds of dollars and who knows how many hours evaluating your home for tiny amounts of heat loss, then buy things to repair that yourself saving you a net dozens of dollars a year.  Or, lower your thermostat by a few degrees and shiver with fear of anticipation every time you step up to your front door so that you can save $15 a month.  The only impactful tip is to get rid of your car which is impractical for most families or working people.  No, read something else, anything else.

Good to Great: Actually, a lot of people thing this is a great book.  It’s not.  Jim Collins pretends to be very scientific with this book (also in Built to Last), but he’s not.  The methodologies are so riddled with selection bias, his sample size is so small, his comparison companies are so different.  It’s amazing this became popular.  He could come to any conclusion by simple manipulations of the data.  More likely, he and his team saw what they wanted to see.  I don’t necessarily disagree with the conclusions, but this book offers no substantive evidence of any kind toward these theories.  I recommend Stocks for the Long Run instead of this pseudo-science.

By pure chance, I happened up on David Friedman’s excellent blog called Ironic Sans where he showcases designs both illustrative and mechanical.  He recently created a funny (punny) little graphic:

It reminds me of XKCD, a beautifully simple yet intellectually esoteric webcomic.  David Friedman’s graphic above also reminded me of a typography exercise my friend Mason Simon recently created and posted on his blog:

I like these little designs so much.  In kindergarten, I never took to drawing and coloring like everyone else.  My sketches of people looked like pizzas more than faces.  I think I can do a decent job at making a font comic, however.  My attempt sits below.  It took me half an hour to figure out how to make the black rectangle border.  I ended up just making a solid black rectangle with a white rectangle on top.  I need to learn Photoshop/The Gimp.

Thank you Comic Sans MS, and the Beat My Guest font from Larabie Fonts.

BlackBerry

Today, email apathy plagues the workforce.  Whenever you send someone an email and he or she never replies to you, realize that you have been slashed by the sharp sickle of email apathy.  Recently, I have noticed an upward trend of email apathy from business colleagues and others.  After each click of the Send button, I think, “is my message going to a person or a black hole?”

The simpleton would argue that the large increase in the amount of both real email and spam makes it very difficult for someone to respond quickly even to legitimate emails.  A busy person loses even important emails among the piles of clutter in his inbox.  Certainly, the amount of email plays a factor, in the same way that stress plays a factor in exacerbating symptoms of a disease.

Blackberry Theory of Email Apathy

I hypothesize that the recent boom in handheld email devices, embodied in the Blackberry, iPhone, and other such tools, cause much email apathy.  But by what process?

Nominally, the Blackberry intends to improve efficiency of communication by instantaneously notifying you of a new email as soon as the sender clicks “Send.”  In fact, the recipient does feel the Blackberry gently vibrate with every incoming email, but he lacks increased communication.  In practice, the Blackberry owner skims the email on a tiny screen, understanding very little of the intended meaning.  If the email requires urgent action, at best the sender receives a curt reply tapped out awkwardly on a tiny keyboard by two fat thumbs.

Very often, the Blackberry user mentally notes to himself that he should reply to or act on the email at some point soon in the future, and then he forgets.  The sender receives notification that the Blackberry user even received the email.  Communication informational content quickly approaches zero.

How do we cure Email Apathy with knowledge of the Blackberry Theory?  Proper Getting Things Done process.  Perhaps non-instantaneous email triaging.  Who knows.  Just please reply to my email.

I’ve started running and walking almost daily recently.  I feel better and more energized, especially after a run.  I would like to know if my overall health improved since I started about 4-6 weeks ago.  The first days, I could barely go around the block.  I would come back into the house and gulp down a gallon of water in between deep panting heaves.  After a couple of weeks I could run/walk a mile or two without gasping for breath by the end.  Yesterday, I estimate I ran/walked 5 miles (I know that I walk 4 miles an hour) without a problems.

So, in terms of endurance, my fitness improved.  But what about my heart rate?  I check yesterday and today.  It’s down to about 63 beats per minute.  I made a graph using a short Python script, pygooglechart, and the Google Chart API.  I will be plotting more data points every day:

Lance Armstrong has a resting heart rate of 32 beats per minute!  On the other hand, some quick research online tells me that resting heart rate poorly correlates to fitness, although recovery rate would be a better measure.  I’ll start charting my recovery rate once I figure out how to measure it easily.

I applied to YCombinator two times.  The first time, when I applied with my friend Mason for the Summer 2007 round,  I arrogantly presumed that Paul would lavish on us praise and beg us to fly to California to work with him.  I spent no more than an hour on the application.  We had no passion in the idea we presented.  Our projects list hinted at nothing particularly remarkable or unique.  Our analysis of the idea and our competitors delved only into the shallowest parts of a deep lagoon.

The second time, when I applied alone in Summer 2008, in an inspired moment I sat down in Starbucks for a solid few hours to work on the application.  I strived for excellence, not perfection.  A few months prior, I had briefly glimpsed the semi-successful application of Liz Jobson and Danielle Fong.  I recalled their deep detail and thoughtful writing, so I imitated that kind of deep analysis which shows off one’s mastery of logic and breadth of experience.

I wish I had known how to write a good application the first time.  So, taking my cue from Brian Lash’s recent question on Hacker News, I helped him out.  I write here a slightly expanded version to help out anybody else who wants Paul Graham & co. to fund his or her startup.

If I were to advise myself in 2007, I would recommend that I write briefly but write a lot.  This advice seems contradictory, but I mean it in a very specific way.  My first application, I kept brief.  I did not want to swamp YC with a tome of text. I saved many of my accomplishments for the interview.  Do not do this.  Write, write, and write some more.  Write everything interesting and unique about yourself.  If you have doubts about a statement you made about a competitor, qualify it.  Don’t vacillate, but at the same time don’t seem shallow, ignorant, and inexperienced.

Of course, once you’ve written all that, you have a very long application.  Now, take out filler words.  Compress ideas that take up two sentences when you can use just one. If you waste two words in a sentence, delete the whole sentence and write it again from scratch.  If you see a phrase that you think an investment banker might use on his resume, nuke it.  Achieve a high density.  In my experience, the YC crew truly pores over these applications to understand all of the meat of it.  They do not skim your application when it has rich content.  Cut, cut, and cut some more.

Now, step back and look at your application.  If you have very little writing left, real content, then you may not be the best fit for YCombinator this year.  That’s okay.  It’s good you know now.  Take this year off and work on some interesting, hard projects that nobody has done before.  Bounce your idea off of the smartest person you know.  Hell, micro-test the idea.  Then, repeat this process.

Step back, look at your tight list of accomplishments.  If it’s long, that’s great, since reading something long but rich in content everyone loves to do.  The length indicates strength.  In my limited experience, I think this is how I made my application successful.

Here’s some of my application below (I elided some less relevant parts). I was accepted for Summer ‘08 2008 but decided to pass this time for a variety of reasons.

—————————————-

What is your company going to make?

I’m open to anything. Here’s one idea:

————–

Have you ever scanned a document before? How was that experience?

It was terrible for me, too. Everyone I have ever asked has agreed that it is physically painful. But, there is a solution, one based on understanding actual human needs. What is wrong with the scanners of today?:

* slow (takes time to heat up)

* slow (scanning at a high dpi takes a long time)

* complicated (please select the dpi, now select bla, now bal[sic]…)

* cumbersome (files generated at high dpi are huge, slow down system)

* cumbersome (OCR’ing a document is a whole other rigamarole)

What do people really need?  Simply a decent, readable scan of the document. This should be as easy as holding the paper up to face the monitor.

Imagine that.

I propose that I sell a device which is basically just a decent-resolution CCD chip with a special lens which connects to a computer (wired at first, but v2 wireless). Scanning a document is as simple as holding the camera up to a document and clicking. In my tests, scanning a whole text books takes 5-10 minutes. This is a game-changer. I’ve worked with an ip lawyer to file the provisional patent on this and a few other aspects of the designs.

[BY THE WAY, IF ONE OF YOU WANTS TO HELP ME BUILD THIS, I'M ALL EARS. I'M AN AI HACKER NOT A HARDWARE HACKER. OH, BY THE WAY, I USED A DIFFERENT IDEA IN THE INTERVIEW ROUND, NOT THIS ONE SINCE I'M SKEPTICAL OF THE MARKET FOR THIS PRODUCT AT THIS POINT. NEVERTHELESS, IT'S VERY COOL. I WANT TO BUILD THIS FOR MYSELF!]

For each founder, please list: name, age, YC username, email address, personal url (if any), and current employer and title or school and major. List the main contact first. Separate founders with blank lines. Put an asterisk before the name of anyone not able to move to Boston June through August.

….. [Be sure to put your blog here. Don't have a blog? Make one. Blog about whatever is on your mind. Blog about your hacking.

To be honest, an Ivy League pedigree probably helped.  Also, my computer science degree (as opposed to Economics or Business one) probably encouraged YC's faith in me.]

Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive that each founder has built or achieved.

Looking at some things in ~/projects folder: ……..

[Here I mention a few of my projects, with links to open source code, web pages, anything I can publicly show. I didn't spend more than one or two sentences describing any one project, but I listed many of my most interesting projects and why I worked on them. YC likes to see you working on real problems, so I talked about problems I solved for myself and for others directly

They want to see that you think creatively and that you actually finish things.

It goes without saying that you should list projects which uniquely describe you.  Building a toy language in Programming Languages class many people probably do.  Yes, it may have taken you a long time, and you may have learned a lot, but you do not necessarily stand out.  Writing a CAPTCHA solver to hack Digg few people do or can do.]

Please tell us about the time you, ljlolel, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

…… [I talked about my shotgun email to dozens of startups here in Silicon Valley which gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of cool entrepreneurs.  I'll probably blog about this at some point in the future.]

Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.

(see above) [I applied alone, so group projects inapplicable.]

How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?

n/a [Again, I was a sole founder.]

What’s new about what you’re doing? What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn’t exist yet?

(see above) Basically, nobody ever scans anything because it takes forever, doesn’t really do what you want (you just want a readable, small image and for the document to be searchable),

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don’t get?

Scanner manufacturers try to pack in the highest dpi they possibly can. They focus on resolution, when they should be focusing on the user experience. Speed is what they should optimize, but I see no scanner manufacturer doing that.

Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?

HP, Xerox, etc, also ScanR, Qipit, Evernote …… [I go on to be brutally honest about the difficulty and vulnerability of my position as a hardware startup in a crowded field. Remember, you are writing for some very, very smart people. They want to see your analytical thinking skills here. They want to see you be realistic, not delusional.]

……. more questions, answer analytically deeply, answer honestly to the best of your ability ……

If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, feel free to list them. One may be something we’ve been waiting for.

…….. [I always think of new ideas and discuss them with friends. I chose 4 and listed them here. I crisply described each in no more than 2 brief sentences.]

I truly enjoyed clarifying my thinking through writing.  So, I will write more.  Perhaps I will write something tautologically wrong or use dirty slang.  Irrespective of the quality, I will write.

Incidentally, Steve Yegge inspired me to start writing again.  If you program computers, you will love Steve’s Drunken Rants.  With his 20 years of programming experience, he cuts down to the bone of programming problems and programming triumphs.  He writes thoughtfully and completely; the rants often span several thousand words.  He wrote them, he claims, while drinking wine during the time when he worked at Amazon.

Now, he works at Google and has a more current blog: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/ .  The newer rants also require serious time commitments to read, but each one imparts to me incredible insights.  For example, I now love JIT’s.

The XKCD guy not long ago wrote about the game Ghost.  You start the two-player game Ghost by saying one letter.  Then, your opponent says another letter.  Concatenate the letters together, they should not form a word.  Continue adding letters to the concatenation of letters one by one until somebody forms a word and thus loses.

The XKCD guy uses the Ubuntu dictionary in /usr/bin/words and creates a short program to calculate the optimal strategy to play the game.  He solves Ghost and publishes the solution.  Since that game no longer yields interesting results, he asks at the end of his post for users to recommend new games that he can play just using voice and memory.  None of the offered games seemed very interesting or innovative, so I will offer my own:

My brother Mark and I have spent many hours in cars together through our lives.  To fight boredom, we have invented some open-ended games.  I will mention only the most unique one: the Doubling Game.  How about the Perla Doubling Game, yes.

Doubling Game Rules

Nobody can be confused by the simplicity of the Perla Doubling Game.  Two players play, although I can easily see any number of people playing.  One begins by saying, “2 + 2 = 4.”  The second player takes the summand and adds it to itself, thus speaking “4 + 4 = 8.”  The first player continues with “8+ 8 = 16,” and so on until a player asserts an incorrect sum and thus loses.

Importantly, the game does not encourage adversarial deceit.  Once the game reaches the hundreds of millions, the digits become more difficult to store in short-term memory. I can ask my brother what he last said as a summand.  We double-check the sums with each other cooperatively.  Minor slip-ups slide, since continuing with ever-larger numbers exercises the brain much more than starting over at “2 + 2.”

We enforce no time penalties.  When the two players match up in skill-level, they both spend all of their energy and about the same amount of time performing all of the sums.  One player sums because it’s her turn, the other sums to check the other’s answer.  And, cooperatively, you remember many digits together.

Variants

Yes, you can begin with other primes, such as “7 + 7″ or “53 + 53″ (exercise for the reader: why start with primes?).  But, once you reach a very high level, the summands become as simple (and as difficult) as the “2 + 2″ path.  Moreover, these numbers tend to repeat the same chunks of numbers no matter where you start.

Fun

The Perla Doubling Game taxes you mentally, passes the time, and inspires both a competitive and cooperative spirit (how high can you go?).  I highly recommend the game to any two smart, bored car passengers.

Sometimes, however, these newspapers and blogs manage to make something of value. A particularly hard-hitting expose in a newspaper, or a particularly helpful guide in a blog, offers to people real value. Nobody can create this kind of content every day, or probably even every week or month. A subscription subsidizing the page-filling fodder misallocates wealth. I want to pay for the value more directly, not indirectly through ads.

Or, more commonly, a blog post provides for me a little bit of value. Not $50/month in value, but perhaps 50 cents/month. No payment system can pass around payments like that easily for the user, especially without ridiculously large credit card fees. How can I tell Michael Arrington of TechCrunch that his site I find useful sometimes? Combined with the millions of others who find his site just a little bit useful, he can make some money directly from us.

Fortunately, I think TipJoy solves many of these problems. The site only launched a few months ago, so it has to grow quite a bit before it reaches a tipping point. Nevertheless, TipJoy designed their product beautifully.

Registration

First, for new users, creating an account takes a few seconds. Just click on the TipJoy button, write in your email, quickly create a password, and finish up. No credit cards required. A new user signs up by tipping, integrating the first-use with registration. Ingenious.

They follow a model that bar’s use where you can set up a tab and pay later. Readers get drunk tipping blogs here and there all around, running up a huge tab. Users only pay once the tab gets large enough to justify the credit card fees. Their model differs from the bar, of course: just like the tips themselves, paying the tab is optional. Nevertheless, through this system, TipJoy encourages people to sign up easily, and only over time pay off their tabs.

Tipping

Second, once signed in, tipping takes just one click. No annoying confirmation steps required. No complicated questions about how much you tip. You get one choice: 10 cents. Of course, you can tip more if you want. This encourages readers to tip generously around many sites across the web. The tab builds up invisibly behind the scenes.

When I first read about TipJoy, I knew that it, or a model very similar to it, would take over the web. I think it will take time. However, I will support this service by putting it up on my blog. Maybe, one day, I will write a post that many people find just a little bit useful, and I can finally monetize this blog :).

I configured OS X to create a chime, a 21-st century chime.  In the Date & Time settings, I selected it to tell me the time every hour.  At 6pm, a voice from the computer says, “It’s 6 o’clock.”  At 10pm when South Park comes on, it reminds me by saying “It’s 10 o’clock.”  The chime keeps me conscious of the time passing when I’m online.

I dual-boot Ubuntu on this Mac Mini.  Ubuntu, unfortunately, does not have this chiming feature. However, I set it up in minutes.  I installed festival, the free open-source text-to-speech synthesizer, as well as an American voice (I struggled to understand the British voice).

sudo apt-get install festival festvox-kallpc16k

Then, in crontab, I added one line:

0 * * * * echo "(SayText \\"Its`date +\%l` oclock\\")" | festival

Now I easily keep track of the time.

One of his suggestions about email spread across the blogosphere very quickly because of its simplicity and practicality.  He recommends that you check email only twice a day (or preferably less often) and strictly adhere to that rule.  I started following these guidelines a few days ago, but I easily relapse.  Nevertheless, I do a few things to try to stay on the wagon:

• Add a message to all outgoing emails:

EXPERIMENT: I will be checking email 2 times a day at 1pm and 6pm pacific time.

If you need me earlier, then please contact me below.

And of course I put my contact information below.  With this signature, I do not worry about missing out on important and urgent information or replies.

• Delete all links, shortcuts, and bookmarks to GMail

• Set up a script to automatically open up GMail at 1pm and 6pm every day.  In Ubuntu, I write just one line in crontab:

0 13,18 * * *  export DISPLAY=:0 && firefox https://mail.google.com/

Linux makes hard things easy.