August, 2007

funny — 6 Comments
27
Aug 07

i loves my interweb

i know i’m late on this, but holy cow this is fantastic.

Books — Comments Off on After Dark, by Haruki Murakami
17
Aug 07

After Dark, by Haruki Murakami

The newest novel from one of my top 5 favorites, Haruki Murakami, After Dark is sort of an Eyes Wide Shut, Tokyo-style. It chronicles the goings on of one evening in Tokyo — brothels & diners & random meetings. It’s got the dreamlike style that Murakami is known for, and is a quick read, but I didn’t find it as fun or compelling as most of his books. It does make me want to go back & read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, though.

nerdTech / OSX — 8 Comments
16
Aug 07

More on VMWare Fusion v Parallels

CNet’s Crave has a great writeup on performance of Fusion versus Parallels for Windows virtualization on the Mac. I’ve been excited since Parallels came out about this — especially for my work at Mozilla, it’s fantastic, as it means I can take a look at Windows builds of Firefox, other apps, etc — all with my MacBook Pro. As much as I like Parallels, though, I’ve found its performance erratic — and at times it overwhelmed my system resources. I’ve been trying Fusion lately, and my experience has been a lot better. It seems to perform better, and it’s much better behaved with respect to running other applications. Parallels has a better UI, I think, and its “coherence” mode seems to be better than Fusion’s “unity” mode. But I found using Parallels that I’d often have to restart my machine to get performance back okay — Fusion so far seems a lot better, so I’m going to stick with it for a bit.

Mozilla / nerdTech / startups — 2 Comments
14
Aug 07

Awesome opportunity mixing mission, impact & business

Nicholas Reville, executive director of one of my favorite non-profit tech companies, the Participatory Culture Foundation, has just posted on their blog that they’re hiring a West Coast business person.

This is a special opportunity, I think. I joined Mozilla 2 years ago when we were just 15 or so folks, and my title was Business Development lead — even though we didn’t really know what it meant. But in the 2 years since then, I’ve been fortunate to be part of something unique & great — the growth of Mozilla.  FWIW, I had only generic business/entrepreneurial background before joining to do BD — but was able to work with Chris Beard, Mitchell Baker and others here to build something of an ecosystem of partners, and to help make our economics more sustainable.

At PCF, there’s a similar type of opportunity — but even more at the ground floor — the opportunity is to figure out open video from the beginning, and to mix the business, open source, and non-profit angles all together.

If you’re interested in making sure that the future of video on the web stays open, I’d encourage you to take a look.

Books — Comments Off on Reading Harry Potter 7
14
Aug 07

Reading Harry Potter 7

I’ll refrain from writing a review of HP7 (I liked it quite a bit), but wanted to note a new feeling for me — as I was reading this book, I started to imagine, for the first time, what it might feel like in 7 or 8 years when Sam reads the series for the first time. It’s fun to do that — fun to think about the types of conversations we’ll have, the questions he’ll have, and the learning he’ll do. HP6 came out about a week after Sam was born — so a lot of it hadn’t really sunk in yet.

There’s the basic emotion of thinking back to when I read Tolkein for the first time — read my parents’ old editions of them, naturally — and it was fun to discover this whole new world that Mom & Dad already knew about. Same for CS Lewis.  And that stuff is awesome — I can’t really wait. Kathy & I already love helping Sam as he develops his sense of humor.

But the collateral effect is that I found myself often wondering about what it was that JK was trying to communicate — what she was trying to help her readers understand.  So I really started appreciating some of the things she was trying to do, and appreciating her craft more than I had done previously.  That’s a pretty tremendous gift that I’ve gotten from Sam already — and has applicability far beyond just Harry Potter or even books.

It’s also fun to think about the characters that we all grow up with — the people and places and ideas that become part of growing up, learning how the world works, learning who we are. I think about the persistent characters in my life — Bilbo & Frodo Baggins, Gollum, Darth Vader, Kermit the Frog, Big Bird, Animal, Aslan, Winnie the Pooh — and wonder which ones Sam will know & care about — which ones will be real for him. Maybe Elmo and Bob the Builder and SpongeBob and Harry Potter — who knows. But I’m excited to find out.

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