February, 2008

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Feb 08

Yahoo! and Google’s future of the Internet

 

Okay, this is just so lame that I’m going to speak out on the issue of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo.  Google’s basically crying foul because Microsoft still has loads of cash lying around and they’re slowly coming to the realization that it will not be long before they no longer have a monopoly on the lucrative OS/Office Suite market.  Might as well as buy up some prominent Internet properties while the going’s good.

I’m not saying that this buyout would be a good thing.  I agree with Google that I’d rather not see Yahoo! suck even worse by getting absorbed into the Microsoft blob, especially not with the way the collectively screwed us all with the abomination that is Internet Explorer.

However, I beg to differ that Google’s looking out for our interests.  I see a lot of innovation in the search engine area but I haven’t witnessed any openness on Google’s part.  They do a lot more for the community than a lot of other companies but there’s a good reason why Google’s campus looks like a playground with free food.  They’re swimming in money that wouldn’t be there if everything was open source.  Google makes money the same way Microsoft does, by monetizing the software they developed in house.  One is deployed to an army of servers and another gets mass distribution through retail.

Microsoft’s been making some strategic plays like getting a stake in Facebook and I’m sure that Google understands full well that as far as cash cows go they’re still a one trick pony compared to other competitors that have diversified since the first crash.

So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.


Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies—and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft—despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses—to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions—and consumers deserve satisfying answers.

Official Google Blog: Yahoo! and the future of the Internet

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Feb 08

Firing on All Cylinders: Productivity Tips for the Knowledge Worker

We’ve all seen the movies and stereotypes. Maybe you read some book by a productivity guru telling you how to make the most of your life. Maybe he’s right because he’s rich or maybe these productivity gurus are rich because you believe their system works and no more. How do you know they follow their own advice? You’ll never know unless you get a fly on the wall glimpse. Maybe they have the luxury to follow the system because they also hire expensive personal assistants and have an army of lackeys to keep their hands dirty. I’ve tried my hand at a variety of schemes. I did that GTD thing and all I got done was GTD.


The cold hard truth is that you make the most of the limited time you have doing what you do to pay the rent. And how do you get things done? Just run like hell and don’t let anything get in your way. That’s really it. No philosophy or nothing. You really can’t package that into a million dollar idea but I can guarantee it’s what all the successful people do. They just shut out all the noise and do whatever it is they excel at. That’s really the secret. Find something you excel at or at least do better than anything else you do and run like hell.


The trick is not really in what you do when you’re running but what you do to relax when you’re not. Here are some tips I’ve come up with.


Set Limits


No matter how good you are at what you do or how much you enjoy it, you can only do so much. They say that good concentration doesn’t last any more than an hour. You need to find that sweet spot where you put in a 100% and take a good break without totally slacking off. Setting limits is really not just about setting limits on how hard you work but how much you take a break. If you end up playing solitaire for 5 hours a day on company time or surfing the web, looking up celebrities and posting on Facebook, I guarantee you’ll be lined up at the local homeless shelter’s soup kitchen.


Develop a Rhythm


I always wake up at the same time every day. Even on weekends. On weekends I allow myself to go back to sleep but it keeps me from sleeping in obscenely. This alone will prevent you from getting excessively fatigued and help you recover after a night’s sleep. It’s a sacrifice in a sense because it means not being able to stay up too late during the work week but it definitely pays off. Modern life is designed to screw with our natural cycles. You either need to set limits in steel or structure activities with a definite time limit.


Find a Way to Decompress Your Mind


I program for a living so sometimes I really get my mind fried up in code think of this and that. It’s really not a casual thing I can do. I’m not a super hacker or anything so I need to give it my all just to get through the day. At the end of work my brain’s had enough. I try to stay away from the computer when I leave my desk at work. Maybe I’ll take up programming as a hobby when I get more productive at it and it becomes more effortless. I doubt it.


In my experience, one of the worst things you can do to decompress is surf the web. It’s just a convenient way to keep your mind on cruise control but not enough of a change from office work to really rest your mind. It’s just my personal experience but it’s hard to really set a limit as there’s no end.


I tend to enjoy doing stuff that’s radically different from what I do at work. I’ve found my sweet spot to be movies and exercise. I watch movies during my long, dreary commute. Only it’s not so dreary any more. I’ll either watch two episodes of a show on the way and back each or watch the first half of a feature on the way and the rest on the journey home. It gives me something to look forward to on the way home rather and keeps me from becoming a zombie. The biggest benefit is when I hit the sack, I’ve completely left work behind. I let my mind escape into a different world. It’s hard to drag things from my workday into the home when I’m watching some mafia goon getting stabbed in the eye by a naked tattoo-covered tough guy in the sauna.


Sometimes it just isn’t enough during crunch time when you have to do a lot of overtime. Things start getting heavy sometime around Wednesday. This is where exercise comes in. I do it first thing in the morning. I really don’t care how busy I am. I’ll make the time to get a session in no matter what. Near the end of the week, when I’m drained I can already feel the remains of yesterday creeping into my psyche. I wake up with all the makings of a sucktastic day. By the end of exercise, there’s not a trace of it. I feel energized and ready to tackle whatever leftovers I have at work with a fresh mind.


The thing both movies and exercise have in common is that it’s radically different from work and both activities require your mind to be focused on the task at hand. It’s immersion that uses a whole different part of your mind. Exercise also releases all the pent up tension that no other activity can.


Leave it Behind


When you get off work, you need to get off work. If you find yourself thinking about work all the time when you’re away or feeling guilty about having fun away from it, maybe you’re not giving it your all or maybe you’re stuck doing something you suck at and shouldn’t be doing. You need to find a way to be guilt-free when you leave work behind. You should be confident and bold with your recreation. You need to feel like you deserve the rest 100% in order to feel refreshed. It feels better too. You put in a good day’s work, collect your reward to recharge your batteries for another day.


I don’t have any of the answers and finding the optimal combination is a continuous learning exercise but I tend to see that the super successful people also tend to be the ones having the most fun outside work, while being the most intense while working.

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3
Feb 08

So Now Your Hobby’s a Job and Other Random Thoughts

Back in the day, the web used to be my hobby. Programming started as a hobby very late in life as well. Now it pays the rent. I wont pretend and say it was purely for fun. I thought it would be not only cool to bring my web ideas to life as well as get paid to do it or even score a hit. Now that I’m fully in the heart of it, it kinda makes you think. What happens when your hobby becomes a job?


It’s really weird that I sit in an office with other people clacking away at a computer, getting toked up on gobs of coffee, while a bunch of other dudes get paid to do the same. It’s weird that the thing paying our rent isn’t much more than a popular web site. The program powering it is nothing more than a collection of words that follow a certain logical structure that can be translated into pictures and machine instructions that users can interact with and keep them coming back. I often think it’s awesome that I can do almost the exact same thing I was doing at home on my own time getting paid.


The benefit of working is that there’s a lot more at stake. When I came up against a difficult problem before, I’d lie down and think about it. Nine times out of ten I’d fall into a nap and just clack away on my own sweet time. Now, I don’t have that luxury so I just keep typing, keep experimenting, keep banging my head against the wall until I come up with a solution or get bloodied up enough to think that I have at least made some progress.


There’s a lot of opportunity for growth their but it comes at a price. I have to take better care of myself, be more aware. I suppose that’s a post for another day or maybe like an hour later. It’s definitely changed the way I look at the game. To tell you the truth I don’t see all that much excitement in the web. I think the world agrees.


Microsoft making a bid for Yahoo! just drives home how much of a solid and ultimately dead industry traditional IT is. Apple as a company is starting to scare me. They’re much more dangerous than Microsoft ever was in their prime because Microsoft was ultimately tied to the crappy products they wrote, just look at Vista. Their code base is so full of holes that there’s no way to keep the momentum save a good solid rewrite and you know what a disaster that is going to be. It took OS X a good decade before it became what it is in terms of solidity and performance but look at the mess Apple is cleaning up after Leopard (10.5.2 will finally be the release that should have been if there are no further issues).


Apple scares me because they have all the technology in place to do all the things like IBM, Sony, Microsoft, and even Yahoo at one point tried to do and fail. They’ve got the whole spectrum of consumer experience under control with everything from music, movies, to computers. They’ve got it all wrapped up in one nice package that’ll lock you in to their world and here’s the scary part, we’re all thankful for it (at least those of us that buy their stuff). It’s only a matter of time before they get over ambitious and get bashed. Jobs is not a changed man, he’s just older and still plotting his next move. He’s still the same control freak with a little more new age sprinkle and a brush with death.


It’s the only company that can really deliver a total experience that can wow the consumer while giving advanced users access to some amazing technology (at least when Apple engineers aren’t busy screwing things up with various “hot fixes” to keep prying paws out). All the other software companies were busy leveraging closed source or building third-rate software products in house that fail to deliver on any level. I hate to admit it but playing with apple products like the iPod Touch is like holding the future in my hands right now. They just kill the competition. I can watch a movie on my MacBook, grab my iPod Touch and pick up exactly where I left the movie without fiddling with a thing.


Maybe it’s paranoia but I can guarantee you that I’ll be spending more and more time at the terminal, playing with the UNIX back end for my own personal growth and as insurance for some other day. I really wish Microsoft would just give up the ghost so some kind of UNIX collective can build an operating system to at least compete with Apple at a viable level. I guess I can dream.

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Feb 08

Reign Over Me

Just got done watching Reign Over Me. I happened to love it even if it didn’t get too much of a good review among critics. I think over time it’ll prove to be a film that lasts though Adam Sandler might not get any recognition for being the great actor that he is. I guess the film studios allow him to keep making dramatic films that bomb to keep him happy as long as he cranks out great selling comedies. It’s sad how people try to stereotype actors as either comedians or serious. Even the people coming out of a more comedic background like Jamie Foxx or even Will Smith have to eventually distance themselves from too much comedy. But I digress…


The movie is about two old college roommates that run into each other by chance. They both went to dental school. One is a successful practitioner and the other a depressed recluse that lost his family in the terrorist attacks. Adam Sandler’s character basically lives in a time capsule of his own life before marriage and everything that happened, effectively erasing all the good times and bad times that followed. He’s a bit of a nut case with the heart of a kid.


Don Cheadle’s a successful dentist with loving wife and daughters. He’s happy or at least he thinks he’s happy. In the course of helping Adam, he finds himself discovering his old self, having fun and discovering the issues he’s had with not being able to assert himself more and live his own life.


Adam doesn’t have a job, doesn’t have real friends, just a whole lot of money and time on his hands spent continuously remodelling a kitchen he’ll never use, collecting records, playing drums, playing a video game, and riding around New York on a rickety scooter.


Adam really does an excellent job portraying the shell of a man that lost everything that he loves.


I can definitely see where critics and audiences find fault. I think it’s the fact that the movie really lacks any real plot. It’s a good film that covers the moment a man living in darkness starts finding the light. At the same time, the drama is low key throughout and there aren’t really any twists and turns, just a couple dramatic moments here and there. All the time he spent shutting out memories of the family he had, all the pain just comes back and the tears never stop when he remembers.


I guess one of the major flaws is that Adam is somehow rich. Multi-million dollar rich. He looks like he could be homeless but he’s richer than anyone else coming out in the film. There’s not enough of a struggle there. I guess it is what holds the film together in another sense because a successful dentist would have trouble hanging out with a homeless friend from the past. It’s hard to put a finger on it but the scenes where Adam opens up near the end are quite vivid and the dialogue is really well done if you take a good listen to what’s being said. It makes you think about grieving and depression in the first person and the film is definitely under-rated.

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