While it was previously a goal of mine to retire early and pursue my various inconsequential interests, Nintendo seems to have other plans for me:
Well, at least I know not to make any serious investments in furniture.
« Archives in May, 2006
Getting to know San Francisco
I didn’t get my act together quickly enough to plan a trip for this long weekend, so instead I’ve been doing a smattering of things. Friday night I went to see X3, which is probably the worst movie I’ve sat through in a really long time. The coolest part was seeing Storm finally bust someone with a lightning bolt.
I was slated to meet some friends for a walking tour in San Francisco at 10am the next morning, so four hours of sleep later I punched myself out of bed to catch the 7:20am Caltrain from Mountain View. And so began what was probably the most interesting day I’ve had since I got here…
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The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
When I was in my early university years, it bothered me that my pseudo-hippy ideals caused me to disdain ‘business’ in all its forms when I didn’t really have the first clue what it meant to run a business. This was especially disturbing because many people in my family, including my father, run their own successful companies.
As time went on I started to read about the subject of entrepreneurship, and I quickly realized that starting a business is really nothing more than closing the books and starting something. Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start is a concise and motivating expansion of this simple theme. I finished it in a handful of hours, and when I was done I realized that this is the sort of book that is so condensed that it defies summarization: In fact, most of the book is written in point form already.
I guess the only meaningful thing that I can give at this point is some context. Guy Kawasaki was a jewellery salesman that was recruited by Apple in the 80s to evangelize the Macintosh. Since then he’s been involved a bunch of startup endeavours, and now runs his own VC firm for Silicon Valley startups called ‘garage.com’. he wrote The Art of the Start as a guide to anyone who wants to start a new initiative, although the book does seem to have a slant towards for-profit technology startups. I was able to map many of my academic club-starting and event-planning experiences to many of his points, though, so there is enough generality to the advice he gives to make it widely useful.
I’ve never really started anything significant, so my recommendation of this book shouldn’t be worth much to you. However, I can say this: If you are planning on reading it, you might as well just buy it, because it is really intended to be used as a quick reference.
The White Man’s Burden, by William Easterly
I finished up William Easterly’s “The White Man’s Burden” almost two weeks ago, and I wanted to write down some of my impressions before my memory of it degenerated completely.
Easterly was one of the big research economists at the World Bank for over 16 years, and his experiences in that capacity frustrated him to the point that he’s written a couple of books in an attempt to change the public’s perception of how foreign aid should be managed and delivered. I believe that this is his second book on the topic, and I’m not sure how it differs from the first.
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The Da Vinci Code: A much-needed brain drain
I just got back from watching the Da Vinci Code, and it was a pleasant enough way to spend a few hours. I once tried to read the book, but I couldn’t force myself to go any farther than the first chapter given that there were so many other books that I wanted to read. I have to admit that I’m a book snoot at heart, and I don’t like getting caught reading mainstream novels, so that probably had something to do with it as well.
I was surprised that the movie focused so heavily on the exclusion of women from religion as the pagan religions were replaced with the ‘imperial’ ones. It’s nice to see the issue get some mainstream publicity, even if the medium is a little bombastic. However, it was sort of hard to believe that the Catholic church would crumble if the tale of Christ’s marriage to Mary Magdalene was to surface, or that they’d put such an obsene effort into preventing the news from leaking (after all, I just watched a movie about it) and so I didn’t really find myself in suspense at any point. On the topic of realism, it would be nice if someone could explain to me how DNA testing could prove anything conclusive about the relationship between Mary Magdalene and any of her descendents after two thousand years of divergence; my understanding of how these things work suggests that resolving similiarities or differences between two individuals of the same species after so many years would be very difficult. I could be totally wrong, of course; I know astonishingly little about the details of DNA fingerprinting, considering my educational background.
In any case, I’m not one of those people that expects to see hard science from a movie, and I’m glad that minimal effort was made to make things seem realistic. It was just sort of fun to see all the cavernous churches that they visited and shiny doodads that they got to play with. The riddles they had to solve weren’t even that hard; if they had been written by the same guy that designed David Blaine’s treasure hunt, well, the movie would have consisted of Tom Hanks and that cop girl wandering around the gallery where the movie opens, scratching their heads and muttering “what the hell” for two and a half hours.
My final comment is that the avenging angel fellow — Silas, I think his name was — seemed slightly out of place; it’s like they pulled a character out of an X-Men comic and sent him to hunt professors. I kept waiting for him to don a white tuxedo and pull out a straight-edge razor like those freako ghost twins in the second Matrix episode.
I guess that’s about it. It was a pretty mellow day, and I needed to spend some time doing something totally mindless. I think this fit the bill.
P.S. That site I linked to about Blaine’s puzzle also describes a number of other famous brainbusters that are fascinating to read about: My favorite so far discusses Masquerade.