My review

I liked this book best of the Iain M Banks books I’ve read so far – but I’m a sucker for science fiction books where the main character enters a tournament of games. I even liked Split Infinity, for Pete’s sake. I always like books that are set up around games, and am starting to get a better sense of what Banks is aiming to do with the Culture books, so enjoyed it the most so far. Will probably wait a bit before reading the next Banks book, but will definitely read one before too long.

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My review

This is a really interesting book, given to me by my friend Peter Sims, particularly in light of the Iranian elections last week. It’s an in depth, but readable explanation of the history of the Shia/Sunni relationship, but also a very broad look at the contemporary politics across the region. I have a pretty strong sense that there’s some pro-Shia bias in the book (although as an outsider, it’s difficult to assess how much, really) — nonetheless, this was probably the single most useful book I’ve read to understand the situation and possible new developments in the region.

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My review

What can you say about Dune, really? A classic of science fiction literature; a book that many consider to be the best of the genre. I last read it probably 20 years ago in high school — I remembered a lot of sand, I remembered enjoying it, and then I have some sort of weird memory of a movie with Sting in it, but that was pretty much the extent of things.

Then the other day a friend of mine tweeting about the acquisition of Sun by Oracle as another one getting gobbled up by House Harkonnen, which triggered me to reread it.

This time around, I understood a lot more of what the book is about, of course, and enjoyed it just as much. It’s a great book, for sure — although my memory of the rest of the sequels is still good enough that I’m not going to ruin the original by re-reading those.

I think the pacing is a little on the slow side — not really contemporary speed, anyway — but the idea, and the bigness of the setting are of course amazing, as is the range that Herbert shows, going from huge imperial family intrigue & wars to personal mysticism.

Anyway, definitely worth reading again.

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(photo credit: Jay Goldman)

To tell you the truth, I didn’t know what to expect 4 summers ago when I started at Mozilla. We were in our (extremely small) space on Villa St; Firefox was taking off; I was quickly learning that the Mozilla-style of doing things did not quite match what I expected. I knew that it was an important project; I knew it had smart, unique leaders; I knew that I didn’t understand much about how it could possibly, you know, actually exist.

But it was an undeniably exciting time — tons of people were using and discovering Firefox — there were probably something like 20 million users at that time. Firefox 1.5 was nearly finished; Thunderbird 1.5 was on the way. And it just felt like there was a ton of promise and opportunity on the web that hadn’t been there a year before.

A couple of months after I started we moved into our current offices at 1981 Landings Drive (pictured above), and in the intervening 4 years, tons and tons has happened. Mozilla has grown, of course — into a network of community and contributors around the world that create a product that’s in more than 70 languages and used by more than 300 million people. But the web itself has gone through an enormous explosion of innovation. When we moved into this office in late 2005 was a time before YouTube became huge (they were just 6 months old) — and was really before video on the web was meaningful. It was before Facebook was big — would be another year until they opened up to everyone. And of course it was way before Twitter came on the scene.

And, of course, the world of the browser looks incredibly, impossibly, and wonderfully different today than it did then, with a faster-than-ever Firefox dropping soon, an improved IE8, and Safari, Opera and Chrome each competing and innovating. Oh, and the whole mobile browsing thing happened, too.

In just the four years that we’ve been here — out of the 11 since the Mozilla project started — the web has been transformed, and has itself transformed so much of the way we live our lives. It’s easy to gloss over, since we see the changes every day — and it’s easy to see the road that we’ve traveled on as being inevitable — but it really wasn’t. The reason we have a vibrant, open web today is because of millions of little decisions and contributions made by thousands of people in that timeframe — people who work on browsers, people who build web sites & applications, people who evangelize for standards, people who use the web and ask/demand that it be better.

Leaving this building for our new home at 650 Castro (which, for the eagle-eyed Netscape historian will look familiar) gives me a bit of a chance to reflect on how much our world has changed while we’ve been here, as well as the part Mozilla’s had in effecting that change.

And I have to say that looking forward, I can’t wait to see what the next 4 or 5 years brings, and what we can do from our new home & vantage point. The web continues to be the driver of an unprecedented amount of change, and I don’t see that slowing down any time soon.

So as Mitch likes to say: onward.

Anyway, I come to the end of my involvement as convinced as ever that public libraries are critically important to our lives as citizens, but also just as convinced that we’ll see a massive reinvention in many of the functions that libraries perform.

But that isn’t really what I want to write about today — what I want to talk about instead is the budget work that’s going on for the City of Sunnyvale in 2010 — the topic of our Library Board meeting tonight.

At the end of last year, Sunnyvale hired a new city manager, Gary Luebbers, who inherited, like so many other city managers around the country, a government facing massive shortfalls in revenue among other problems. The preamble to his budgetary response for the coming year is fantastic work, and let’s start with some of the context:

• Sunnyvale’s overall budget for 09/10 is something like $150M (plus the costs for the water treatment facility and the golf course)
• We’re expecting a decline in revenue of $13M, primarily due to a shortfall in sales tax — people & companies aren’t buying things like routers and cars as much as they used to — so we’re seeing dramatic drops
• Beyond that, the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) has seen equity declines of around 25% this year, which is leading to increased employer contributions — about $8.5M more in Sunnyvale personnel costs starting in 2011/12

So we’re seeing a 10% revenue shortfall and another 7-8% increase in costs — not to mention that after the ballot initiatives failed earlier this week, there’s an expectation that the State of California will borrow up to 8% of local property taxes (that they’ll repay eventually, but has an impact of nearly $4M in near term cash flow).

Any way you cut it, that’s a brutal context for any city to deal with — even a larger city of 100K+ residents like Sunnyvale — between revenue shortfall & increased expenditure, you’re looking at $15-20M a year.

But here’ the thing: Sunnyvale, while we’ll see cuts, is basically okay because of the extremely conservative and long-range planning that it’s done since reinvention in the 70s. We’ve got a $36M budget stabilization fund, for example — and we can draw down on that for a few years — and because of that, the cash flow interruption from the State doesn’t matter overmuch.

I have some concerns about the conservative nature of Sunnyvale city planning — I think in any normal times it’s over-constraining — but in this particular situation, facing such a brutal and cascading financial meltdown, it’s incredibly, incredibly helpful to have this strength, and is a reassuring bulwark against the effects of the broader economy.

I didn’t really know much about the Glass House or the event or what I was getting into when I signed up — only that Diego Rodriguez, who I think quite highly of as a design thinker & friend (go read his blog!), strongly recommended that I participate — so I did, and I’m really glad I did. It was a bit of a different world for me, but gave me much to think about in my own contexts.

I think it’s going to take me a few posts to write this up — I’ll need one for the place/context/history and what the National Trust is trying to do; will need one for the people & objectives of the Conversation Series; will probably need another for the ideas that came up. But want to capture some of my thoughts before they flit away, so will start writing. [I started writing this right away, anyway, but now am just getting around to finishing it.]

Philip Johnson was a complex guy, for sure. One of the leading architects of the Modernist movement, he’s built some of the most influential buildings of the 20th century, from his own residence, the Glass House, to the Seagram Building in NYC, to the Crystal Cathedral. What I didn’t know before is that he’s known as much for the people he influenced and mentored — many of whom were probably better architects.

Anyway, he built this house for himself called the Glass House, and it’s exactly what it sounds like — a house that he lived in for more than 50 years with walls made only of glass.

Building a house that’s completely transparent is more than just an architectural statement (and it definitely is a significant architectural statement) — it’s also a personal statement — a statement of values, of ideals. It’s made more interesting by Johnson himself — among other things, a gay man who had voiced support for Nazi Germany in the 30s (although he later clearly & obviously regretted it and couldn’t really even understand it). Think of that. To be a gay man (not openly, but more of an open secret) in mid-20th century America and deciding to build a house that anyone could see right into, and even through. There’s a lot to parse in there by people who know a lot more about the human psyche than I do, but right off the bat you can see any number of ideas: idealism, design, openness, exhibitionism, power — it’s a really complicated mix of things.

And it’s made more complicated by the fact that the Glass House isn’t really a glass house — or rather, that particular building is made of glass and transparent, but it’s situated in a much larger context — 47 acres of extremely maintained landscape, and something like 19 total buildings that make up, really, a house turned inside out. And the Glass House itself is the only building made of any significant amount of glass. (with the exception of the ceiling of the sculpture museum)

So there’s the Glass House, with a living room, kitchen (although minimal — they called it more of a martini bar), dining area, bathroom (in the brick column), plus some walnut cabinets in the middle. Made of steel & glass, with a red brick floor.

And the Brick House, made up of a small guest room, bathroom & library — purposely built to be a little uncomfortable, because he didn’t like his friends like Andy Warhol staying for more than a couple of days, as he said “guests are like fish, they should only last three days at most.” (Same basic dimensions as the Glass House opposite, same elevation & length, but half the width. (There’s definitely an optical illusion going on there — they look roughly similar.) The irony/symmetry/connection/whatever of the Brick House being opposite the Glass House is incredibly compelling.

And the art gallery, buried under a mound, as an homage to an Egyptian tomb for someone who’s name I now can’t remember. The point that Dorothy Dunn, our guide, made is that it’s a great irony for an art collector to build a house where the walls are glass — no place to hang art! So they built this underground bunker sort of thing, and it can hold a LOT of art for the space — the works are on a sort of giant rolodex system, so you can rotate in whatever art you want to look at. Mix & match. It was fun to get to look at all the things on the wheels behind the works that were showing.

The sculpture gallery, which is built sort of like a hothouse with a glass ceiling — and one of the guys who maintains it confirmed that it often feels like a hothouse — that it’s hotter than hell in the summertime. The space of the sculpture gallery is a little difficult to show with 2 dimensional pictures, so I’ll include a few, as well a bronze cast that is  outside the front door called Ozymandias. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on that particular statement.

One of my favorite buildings is his library — easily 100-200 yards away from the main house — and with a funny sort of shape. But it must have been a cozy place to read and work.

Right near the library, there’s the Ghost House — a primitive archetype of a house, really — I don’t know what it’s really for other than just, you know, looking like a house.

Out on the grounds there are a number of other things — at the front gate, there’s a place for receiving people that we didn’t spend much time near.

And there’s a little man-made lake with a sort of terrace — hard to really make sense of this, since it seems to have been built on a smaller scale, for effect — but you can see from my pictures that if you’re at all taller than me, you had to duck down a bit to be inside.

And a cinder block statue that didn’t make a ton of sense to me — except that it made sense when viewed from the Glass House itself, which I think is part of the point — a lot of the space was designed for experiencing from particular points of view, with the inside of the house being the most important one.

Even the grounds themselves were very manicured and varied, with streams, lots of different textures of foliage, etc.

Make no mistake: this is a beautiful & wondrous place. It’s not remotely like any other place I’ve been or heard of, and it’s amazing. I felt lucky to get a chance to go (tours are booked a year or so in advance, but the access that we got was more than a tour — it was total access, really). I also felt very lucky to get a chance to participate in the discussion on transparency — more on that, plus some more interior (such as it is) photos when I get a few more minutes to write.

My review (rating: 4 of 5 stars)

This is an amazing book — written in 1968 by always smart Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, it’s ostensibly a book about education reform — and it’s a very good one to read about that. But it also reads like it could have been written in the last year or so, about what we’re all experiencing with the incredible pace of change on the connected Internet. Postman’s ability to see what the future had in store — along with great minds like McLuhan — is totally astounding. The first couple of chapters of this book, in particular, are of huge relevance to everyone working on the Web today. (Thanks to Jared Kopf for the recommendation & book loan!)

A couple of quotes for today from 40 years ago:

Change occurs so rapidly that each of us in the course of our lives has continuously to work out a set of values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior that are viable, or seem viable, to each of us personally. And just when we have identified a workable system, it turns out to be irrelevant because so much has changed while we were doing it.

As the number of messages increases, the amount of information carried decreases. We have more media to communicate fewer significant ideas.

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My review

About the best thing that can be said about this book is that it’s a book about beer. The 2nd best thing about the book is that it’s mercifully short, at just over 100 pages. I’ve liked Robbins historically, and especially Skinny Legs and All and Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (his 2 books in the 1990s), but haven’t thought much of his work this decade. Avoid for sure.

[I'm going to start trying posting my reviews at Goodreads, too -- connect if you're using it, too.]

I gave a talk & had a conversation to start the week off — I wanted to talk about some of the context that we find ourselves in now and how we can think about becoming a longer term organization, now that Mozilla’s first 11 years are behind us. I focused on the tension between what I’ve come to call Poetry & Pragmatics. The pragmatics of an organization are how you do things; the poetry of an organization is why you do them.

There’s a big difference; they’re both important, and sometimes they amplify each other, sometimes they conflict. Getting the balance right, from day to day, from year to year — that’s the thing that great organizations do over time, and it’s what we need to always think about how to do better.

I also talked a bit about how we’re going to need to change going forward, adjust to new circumstances, avoid holding onto outdated ways of thinking, try new things.

In that spirit, I’ll attach my slides from that talk here — it’s a bit of an experiment for me to post what’s essentially an internal talk — lots of context missing, lots to misconstrue — but I really believe in the content and so figured I’d try sharing. See what you think.

Loved this book — it’s just a great, fun, creative SF story, of the capture-the-flag variant, set in Banks’ Culture universe. I recently finished Use of Weapons, also by Banks, and very highly recommended by friends — but I didn’t love it. I found it a little inaccessible — that was at least partly intentional by the design of the book — but since that was my first Culture novel, I kept wondering if there was some context that I was missing.

Anyhow, this is a great science fiction novel — some clever adventures that seem familiar from other space opera style books, but always with inventive twists. Highly recommended.

Next week I’m traveling to New York to participate in a conversation at the Philip Johnson Glass House — it’s a sort of design+culture+art salon where a number of leaders talk about various topics and seek to understand and act as catalysts for new sorts of action.

I was invited after an introduction from my friend Diego, who attended a John Maeda-led Conversation last year on Simplicity — Diego reports that his experience there was incredible and thought-provoking.

Our conversation will be moderated by Cliff Pearson of Architectural Record, tackling the topic of “Transparency.” Many of the participants look to be design & architectural — it looks like I’m the lone Left Coast/tech nerd representative. (Think they’ll be surprised when I tweet from our session in the spirit of transparency? )

In that spirit, wanted to blog with some links before I went, and ask you what you think is important to talk about in the context of transparency in our modern society? Transparency of organizations (like companies and governments)? Transparency of products (like open source)? Transparency of thoughts? Action? Buildings? What aspects of transparency deserve more thought & attention & discourse?

(photo credit philipjohnsonglasshouse.org)

I think this book will be of limited interest to most people — but Marsalis has always been a bit of a hero of mine, ever since I started playing trumpet in middle school. I learned to love his playing primarily through his classical music — his Hayden, Hummel & L. Mozart recordings were a revelation to me, and I can still hear them in my head now, 25 years later.

I saw his jazz ensemble play live in Dallas in the early 90s — this tiny little club, and I was at a table about 10 feet away — amazing. And then again at Stanford while I was there (and I talked with him for a bit because he had forgotten his mouthpiece — I offered to run to get mine — was the same 1C that he used — but was too far away to be useful).

Over the past decade or two his focus has been on jazz, of course, and his work at Lincoln Center has been a lot about helping Americans — kids in particular — understand the history and legacy of the music. He obviously cares deeply about both, and thinks there’s much to gain from others understanding it.

Marsalis is not known for being the best performer of jazz ever — some of what he does is not quite as interesting as a lot of performers, today and historically. But I have great respect for the man and his craft and his sense of seriousness (and fun) in teaching others to understand it.

So this was a fun book to read, because it’s a bit of a survey of jazz, filtered through Marsalis’ brain — he knew a ton of the principals, has played with many. Here are a few fun quotes:

“The blues is a vaccine: It’s the controlled dose of something bad that prepares someone to deal with the approaching uncontrollable bad.”

“Jazz teaches empathy — you create and nurture a feeling with other people — and it also teaches you to do your own thing. In our music, there are so many ways for people to find and express their individuality, no single set of rules could possibly apply.”

“In music and in life, serious listening forces you to recognize others. Empathetic listeners almost always have more friends than other people, and their counsel is more highly valued. A patient, understanding listener lives in a larger world than a nonlistening know-it-all (no matter how charismatic). Jazz sharpens your hearing because you are following musicians’ ideas and trying to hear the human depth of their sound.”

“…once the band begins to play, they know that for the next hour and fifteen minutes, everyone — musicians and waitresses, the initiated and the unsuspecting — will be united in the purest possible expression of community, having made the choice to become ‘us’ instead of ‘me’.”

And a funny story:

“I first met Dizzy [Gillespie] when I was about fifteen years old at a club called Rosie’s on Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans. My dad said, “This is my son. He plays trumpet.”

Dizzy was standing near the dressing room doorway. He handed me his horn and said, ‘Play me something, man.’ He had a real small mouthpiece. I wasn’t used to playing that — pooooot. He didn’t know what to say with my daddy standing there, so he said, ‘Yeaaaah’ — really drawn out, as if the length of it could help ease the awkwardness of the moment. And then he leaned down close to me and said, ‘Practice, motherfucker.’”

This was the first e-book on Kindle that I read where I really wanted music attached to the file so that I could listen to the music that he was talking about from Monk or Coltrain or Davis — would really have enriched the experience a lot, and no reason that can’t happen in the future.

[This is a long post, with lots of longish excerpts from the book -- these excerpts really resonated strongly with me, so quoting at length.]

I’ll be honest, I didn’t love this book — Vowell’s story of our Puritan roots, and in particular the life and impact of John Winthrop, who would become governor of Massachusetts, and creating the turn of phrase “city on a hill” that Ronald Reagan would find so useful centuries later.

But I do love Vowell’s love of American history, and her reverence of the principles and people who first built the foundations of our country. And I’m incredibly happy that her voice exists. She’s a total history nerd, making the world better by making some esoteric parts of our past a little more accessible.

While I didn’t love reading the book — found it a bit of a slog — there are passages in it that capture perfectly some of the ways that I feel about being an American in 2009, so I’ll quote a few.

First, some context:

“I will say that the theological differences between the Puritans on the Mayflower and the Puritans on the Arabella are beyond small. Try negligible to the point of nitpicky. I will also say that reads who squirm at microscopic theological differences might be unsuited to read a a book about seventeenth-century Christians. Or, for that matter, a newspaper. Secular readers who marvel every morning at the death toll in the Middle East ticking ever higher due to, say, the seemingly trifling Sunni-versus-Shia rift in Islam, might look deep into their own hearts and identify their own semantic lines in the sand. For instance, a devotion to The Godfather Part II and equally intense disdain for The Godfather Part III. Someday they might find themselves at a bar and realize they are friends with a woman who can’t tell any of the Godfather movies apart and asks if Part II was the one that had ‘that guy in the boat.’ Them’s fightin’ words, right?”

And a little personal reflection, a clear sign of the times in which the book was written:

“Honestly, I wish I weren’t so moved by this Puritan quandary. I wish I did not identify with their essential questions: What if my country is destroying itself? Could I leave? Should I? And if so, what time’s the next train to Montreal?

Well, maybe not Montreal. The first reason Winthrop’s pros-and-cons tract gives for crossing the Atlantic is to build a Protestant New England as an antidote to Catholic New France, to ‘raise a bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist, which the Jesuits labor to rear up in those parts.’ Antichrist, by the way, is another name they call the pope.”

Then she mentions a sentence from one of Winthrop’s speeches the she calls “one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language:

“We must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.”

She’s right, and that’s one of the things I really like about Vowell: she notices the noble sentiments that were so often obscured by the less noble contexts of our founding.

And now a series of quotes that are a little longish, but the central contemporary point of the book for me. It’s in the context of watching Ronald Reagan’s 2004 funeral in the National Cathedral. Many of the eulogists evoked Reagan’s “city on a hill” imagery, and quoted Winthrop at length, and in particular she notes Sandra Day O’Connor’s speech, where she quotes a line “…the eyes of all people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely…we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”

And Vowell writes:

“At that moment, there was one story known through the world, a byword on everyone’s lips: Abu Ghraib. A couple of weeks before O’Connor said that last line, I went to New York University to hear a speech given by one of the people sitting in the National Cathedral — former vice president Al Gore – demanding that another person sitting there — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — resign because of the revelation that American Military Police officers had tortured, raped, and killed Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib penitentiary.

Everyone in the cathedral, everyone watching on television, hearing O’Connor’s voice, had seen the appalling photos…

In his NYU speech, Gore…even implied that these crimes against Iraqi prisoners of war were an offense not just to us, right now, but to our Puritan forebears: ‘What a terrible irony that our country, which was founded by refugees seeking religious freedom — coming to America to escape domineering leaders who tried to get them to renounce their religion — would now be responsible for this kind of abuse.”…

Gore used the argument of American exceptionalism (first set forth by John Cotton and John Winthrop and their comrades) to bemoan this betrayal of American exceptionalism — how we as a people ‘consistently choose good over evil in our collective aspirations more than the people of any other nation,’ how Lincoln, early on in the Civil War, called for saving the Union because it was the ‘last best hope of earth.’

That was the speech in which Lincoln pointed out ‘we cannot escape history.’ Well, we can’t. I can’t really fault Gore for saying that what happened at Abu Ghraib is sickening, not only because it’s just plain sickening but because America is supposed to be better than that. No: best. I hate to admit it, but I still believe that, too. Because even though my head tells me that the idea that America was chosen by God as His righteous city on a hill is ridiculous, my heart still buys into it. And I don’t even believe in God! And I have heard the screams! Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it’s Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?

…

The eyes of all people are upon us. And all they see is a mash-up of naked prisoners and an American girl in fatigues standing there giving a thumbs-up. As I write this, the United States of America is still a city on a hill; and it’s still shining — because we never turn off the lights in our torture prisons. That’s how we carry out the sleep deprivation.

Very serious thoughts, simultaneously sophisticated, knowing the truth, and childish, wanting & needing America to set the example, to be the example that it can be. In truth, that’s where I am, too. With my head, I know that the country has come to a perilous point, wish it weren’t true, and am hopeful that we can pull ourselves together and become great again, like so many other times in our history.

Vowell ends the book with John F. Kennedy, as he contemplated the beginning of his presidency, and, wouldn’t you know it, he also invokes Winthrop’s city on a hill.

“‘I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arabella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier,’ Kennedy says.

Then he boils down the two phrases from [Winthrop's] “A Model of Christian Charity” that mean the most to him: ‘We must always consider, [Winthrop] said, that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.’

I fall for those words every time I hear them, even though they’re dangerous, even though they’re arrogant, even though they’re rude.

…

‘Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us,” Kennedy points out. He does not mention that the whole world is starting in America’s direction because we have a lot of giant scary bombs, but I am guessing that is partly what he meant. He says that he hops that all branches of government, from the top on down, are mindful of ‘their great responsibilities.’ Responsibilities that include trying not to use the giant scary bombs.

…

He does not sound entirely steady. ‘I ask for your help and your prayers, as I embark on this new and solemn journey,’ he pleads. At this grave moment, he is not a man merely talking about the Arabella. He is on the dock in Southampton, ready to board the Arabella, along with the people before him. The mood is ominous and the fear is real. But this is a new beginning and he is not alone.”

So those bits are worth the price of admission right there, and why I keep coming back to reading Sarah Vowell’s banter about somewhat humorless people who lived centuries ago. Because in her words I find hope, certainly, empathy of views for sure, and people whose actions and words we can all aspire to.

A friend, Sean White, kept telling me I should look at Human Computer Interaction — I eventually did, and got involved with the curriculum that Terry Winograd was creating at Stanford, I helped TA for Bill Verplank, read this article by Mitch Kapor, and just generally found the thing that I really, really loved to do, which was try to build computing systems that made sense to people and made them generally happier and more productive. These people are huge in my history, and in the field — they invented so much of what we think of now as software design — I feel incredibly lucky that Sean encouraged me to follow that path, and incredibly lucky to have been at Stanford at that time.

So when Professor Winograd asked if I’d like to give a talk at 547, I of course said yes. CS547 is a seminar course that has been a who’s who of people doing amazing work in design — the list of speakers over the past 15 is truly unbelievable — people who have made real and massive differences in making computing (and the Internet) more accessible, useful, and joyful for people around the world.

As we got closer to the event, I got more reflective on the path that I’ve taken from there to here; the choices that have led me to be more interested in how to help more people do design — to help more people participate and engage and change their world — and how Mozilla represents such a natural point on that path. And of course that made me more self-conscious than ever about speaking in this forum — it’s a small class, but the history and the implications are not.

I was touched that Bill Verplank came by — and happy to get a chance to talk with him, 15 years after being his teaching assistant. And I have to say that I was shocked as I heard myself talk — how many of the ideas that I use today, in 2009, I realized came out of our interactions back then.

Anyway, I was happy to get the chance to talk, in this storied forum, and extremely humbled. And very proud to give the talk with Mike Beltzner, one of my very favorite collaborators and co-thinkers on design. I’ll put the slides below, and you can see video of the talk as well (link is at the bottom of the page — sorry for the WMV!)

Great look at modern Iran life, culture & politics by an insider. A bit of cultural exposition, memoir, and travelog — but interesting to read, and reminded me of how much more time we need to spend trying to understand each other .

Now am reading The Shia Revival , sent to me by a friend.

Niall Ferguson is an undeniably smart guy — he’s written about a broad range of global topics quite convincingly (Colossus, for example, on the American empire). So I was happy to pick this history of financial systems up — I read it more or less in tandem with Krugman’s book.

The number one lesson from this book is this: financial systems collapse all the time. It happens in every era in every geography — which highlights why it shouldn’t be such a surprise that our own system is under serious strain right now.

Wonderful history of financial systems, and was great to read alongside Krugman, for a taste of contrasting (but both helpful) views.

Like everyone, I’m learning a lot about our global finance system lately. While Krugman has his critics (someone at dinner the other night said “Krugman is awesome — he’s predicted 27 out of the last 2 recessions”), and he’s a little on the gloomy side, I learned a LOT from reading this book, and from reading his blog on nytimes.com.

Among other things, he’s excellent at describing the conditions in which recessions happen (and the reason that monetary policy & stimulus is basically the way out), and a ton of situations around the world that have had massive currency and economic issues over the last few decades.

It’s hard to know who to really believe in the situation we’re in today, but I feel much, much better able to understand what’s happening and make my own sense of things having read this book — I’d encourage everyone to.

Got this sci-fi recommendation from several friends — took me a long time to read & get into, though. Finally finished it this weekend, and liked it enough to read more of his books, although not right away. This book is in an interesting context, with an unusual narrative structure that’s pretty disorienting to start with, but in hindsight makes a ton of sense. Banks’ work is mostly set in the same context — they’re all called “A Culture Novel,” where the Culture is a group of, you know, thingys. So not my favorite ever, but I enjoyed this one well enough to try to understand Banks a little bit more.