Book Review: The 4-Hour Workweek

I recently finished reading The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich and I have to say I have very mixed feelings about it.

I had the book recommended to me by a couple friends, and by the end of the first chapter it had me questioning whether those friends really had their heads on straight. Nevertheless, I pounded through it and found a few redeeming benefits in later chapters.

At it's worst, the book is all the snake oil slick of a late night get-rich-quick infomercial. The author rambles on about how he's taken the time out from motorcycle racing down the Andes and Scuba diving under the polar ice cap to bestow upon you the wisdom that let you get rich working only an hour a week, just like Bob, Sue, and other anonymous success stories.

If you can get past this, and I almost didn't, the book then has the added flaw of trying to do too much. It's a personal productivity self-improvement book, a guide to starting your own low-maintenance business, a lifestyle guide, and a travel book to boot.

I'd dismiss it entirely, but there are some redeeming gems hidden within the pages here. The personal productivity part is basic 80/20 rule and goal setting, but has some gems about outsourcing and on different ways in looking at work-life balance and measuring 'wealth'. The business how-to is basic "you too can make riches on the internet" fare, but with a very useful set of links to contract manufacturers, 3rd party support companies, etc. Similarly, there are a few gems in the last section.

Also the question of the author's ethics comes into play. For example, some parts of the business section of the book speak to developing real product, gauging market demand for it, etc. Then in other parts he outlines how to pass yourself off as an expert on anything by reading the top few books on the subject and sprinkling in a pinch of bravado. Short leap from there to fraud, in my book. (Then again, I'm a blogger, so I guess I'm a little guilty of the 'unqualified expert' sin by definition).

Do I recommend the book? No. I will say that if you looking to start your own business or if any of the other topics he covers sound interesting to you, you may find a few nuggets of wealth in here, but it's not optimal time use to scan through this book to get it. At the very least, scan quickly and read only the parts you think matter. The rest of the filler you can get of network TV at 2 AM next time you have insomnia.

Hecker gets let go, goes Indie

Kotaku and Gamasutra picked up on the news Chris broke that EA laid him off. He's now going to work on an indie game called 'SpyParty', a prototype of which was shown at the 2009 GDC EGW. I'm pretty sure this version was born out of an even earlier prototype done as part of the 2005 Indie Game Jam 3 and shown at the 2005 GDC EGW, in a barrage of 'people interacting' jam prototypes.

Anyhow, SpyParty's got a fantastic core idea, and Chris is f***ing smart and driven, so I'm excited to see the game when it eventually ships.

Good rant on the 'games as art' thing

From Damion Schubert's (Bioware designer) wonderful Zen of Design blog.

All this being said, narrative is a red herring in the discussion of games as art. Let’s put it this way: can oil paintings succeed without great cinematography? Can classical music be great without a killer screenplay? Can a Ming vase be great without compelling characters?These are very silly questions.

Each artistic medium has its own rules for what makes that particular craft capture the viewers eye and imagination. For video games, narrative is an exceptionally powerful tool – one used exceptionally well in Knights of the Old Republic and Starcraft, for example. But I posit that many games without story, games like Civilization and Minesweeper, are elegant, artful games with barely a lick of developer-provided narrative. The art found in these games is less about what you find in a movie theater, and more about what you find in an ancient Chinese puzzle box.

Go read.

Is Amazon fanning the Kindle(ing) flames?

I've been following the Kindle with some interest for a while. I *really* want one, but not as long as it's as closed a model as they are currently pursuing. I want to get e-books from other places, and I'd like an RSS reader please... which really means an open development platform so that RSS readers can compete... which quickly leads to other ebook retailers, and you see why they aren't that interested in it.

Anyhow, Amazon got themselves in a pickle when they had a licensing issue with a number of books from a publisher, which in turn led to them reaching out an disabling them on users Kindles out in the wild - something the users didn't know Amazon could do.

Kind of like coming down to your kitchen in the morning, seeing the toaster missing, and finding a note from Sears saying "Sorry, we decided we shouldn't have sold this to you, so we took it back. Here's your $20. Hope you weren't expecting toast this morning. Might we suggest oatmeal?"

A kerfuffle took place on the intertubes, and Amazon went on to issue an apology:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO, Amazon.com

Sounds really good. I beleive he think's doing the right thing. He is.

Except he's doing the right thing about the wrong problem.

One problem is that some people had their books taken from them post-purchase, and yes, it's good to apologize for that.

However, this problem is only symptomatic of the REAL problem, which is that people bought a device which comes with hidden restrictions, unclear terms of service, and the capability to change behavior and functionality at any point in the future. (Cory at BoingBoing has been on a bit of a crusade to get answers on exactly this)

So, kids, what have we learned?

1) There's a lesson here in the growing awareness of, and intolerance for, DRM in all it's forms. Every story about a consumer being burned by DRM adds to that awareness and intolerance.

2) While it was good for Bezos to publicly apologize, he's created another problem: He's shown that he's aware of the situation and therefore what was a puzzling silence on questions around the Kindle's functionality and DRM now seems like a deliberate silence.

In the meantime, I'll stick to dead trees. They tend to not disappear from the nightstand while I sleep.

Lessons from PopCap on Facebook Games

Another good presentation from James Gwertzman at Popcap. This one to the audience at ChinaJoy, about Popcap's experience launching Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook. The graphs of the adoption rates are pretty amazing in both their slope & uniformity. The graph on slide 9 was an eye opener too.

Lessons learned from SNS games at PopCap

View more presentations from gwertzman.

Security in the Cloud

Another good read: The Anatomy of the Twitter Attack. This is the first of a two-part techcrunch post about a recent Twitter hacking, where 300 confidential docs were stolen by a hacker and sent to, among other places, TechCrunch's email inbox. This article outlines how the hacker managed to get in, the next post promises to deconstruct Twitter's reaction to the theft.

The punchline is that (a) businesses increasingly relying on a mix of cloud services for hosting their documents, and that (b) each of these web services has a moderate level of security, but when viewed in aggregate, their security is seriously compromised.

It's a facinating read, in itself, but also makes me wonder what the implications are for online games and game services. If your identity games or game service becomes linked to your identity in other more significant places, will those be back doors to identity theft or other serious crimes. Will those running such games or game services safeguard my account info as well as my online bank? Will they legally be required to? Some say those games are actually banks anyway, so they may need to be.

Equality, Class, and Technology

Went through two really good reads this morning:

• President Carter's essay Losing My Religion For Equality. "The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter"
• danah boyd's lecture from the Personal Democracy Forum on The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online. "we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social division"

Read both, think about technology, game design, etc.

Rock Band Network: Marketing Tool or Moneymaker?

This...

Attention Bands, Studios, and Labels:
Create. Play. Get Paid.
The Rock Band Network is Coming.

Coming Soon - Use our tools to author playable tracks. Upload and submit your tracks for review by the Rock Band Creators community. Approved tracks become available in the Rock Band Store and on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace*, and you get a cut of every purchase

Is just awesome.

It's interesting that they took the route of offering a cut of track purchases, when they could just as easily have claimed that tracks serve as a promotional tool for sales of the tracks on iTunes, etc, which they are.

Either way, its cool to see. It will be interesting to see how this evolves. In addition to laying out tracks, if music artists could add new character choreography, awards, avatar costumes, maybe involve fans in doing different RB track layouts and picking the best ones, etc.

It'll also be interesting if one of the 'doing RB tracks as money makers' and 'doing RB tracks as marketing tools for the music' intents becomes dominant.

Playfish CEO misses the point of FB Connect

This caught my eye (via Alice): 'Playfish CEO unsure of Facebook Connect'.

Speaking in a panel at the Develop Conference 2009, Playfish CEO Kristian Segerstrale as revealed he is yet to be convinced by the prospect of the Xbox 360's forthcoming social networking service, Facebook Connect.

"I'm not too sure about social networking and Facebook integration on the Xbox 360, because not everyone has one, [snip] Social Networks do open up games to a far wider audience, but it has to be just a click away, and you don't want to have to buy a 360 just to get at it."

Hmm... has he even USED a 360?

One of the more groundbreaking elements of the 360 was that it shipped with a social network, Xbox Live. FB Connect is about building bridges between customers existing social networks, not starting a new one.

Dental Adventures, or how a little grey spot cost $20k

This has nothing to do with video games or the tech industry , but rather falls under the category of stuff I had trouble learning about and maybe my post can help someone else.

I'm about 95% of the way through a crazy bunch of dental work that started about three and a half years ago, have a little time on my hands, and figured I'd post about it. Those with a weak stomach for stories of dentistry or financial pain may not want to read on.

Five years ago or so, I noticed a small discoloration on my front tooth. Like a slight grey color beneath the surface, in one corner near the gum. It'd been there a while I'd asked dentists about it, but they'd always kind of said "hmm... not a cavity. Not sure. Just leave it."

Early in 2006 I got fed up and decided I wanted it taken care of and went to see a high end dentist (Spektor dental in Bellevue, WA, who are awesome). Dr Spektor consulted with her husband, who's a high end specialist, and they decided it was most likely root resorption. The wikipedia entry spells it out in detail, but the short version is that it's a condition where something (small defect or trauma to the tooth or such) causes your system to attack the tooth, killing it from the inside out. Unlike decay, it takes a long time to do its thing, but eventually the tooth has to come out.

So the doctor tells me that (a) it's not only in the one tooth I've noticed, but in a neighboring one as well, (b) the solution is to pull them out and put in implants, and (c) that because one of the teeth is out of line from the others, they want to put braces on me for a couple years first.

"Let me get this straight", says I, "you want to put braces on my teeth for two years, then yank them out? I'm getting a second opionion!" Turns out she was right.

To make matters worse, they break the news to me that I have a bunch of other work that needs doing (20 year old amalgum fillings that are starting to go, a crown that needs doing, a crown that needs replacing, etc), and that it'd be a good idea to do it all before I get the braces.

OK, off we go.

• March 06 through Aug 06 - Two crowns, various consults with specialists, numerous fillings replaced. Total out of pocket spend about $2500.
• August 06 - Braces on. After insurace this cost about $2500 out of pocket

Now it was a matter of waiting for the braces to do their thing, going in once in a while to get the wires replaced, etc. A major pain in the butt to floss (Waterpik's electric flosser is awesome btw), but not that bad. On the plus side, getting braces made me lose 10 pounds.

In early 08 I relocated to Oregon, so I had to find new dentist (Kaiser - meh), new orthodontist (Kaiser - Dr Ratliff - very good, but Kaiser is *ok*), new prosthedontist (Dr Halmos - awesome), new dental surgeon (Dr Henshaw - also awesome).

• Second half 08 I go see all the new guys and get various Xrays, consults, etc. Total spend about $500

With teeth almost straight, we start to coordinate all my stuff. Dental surgeon worries that my frenulum (little piece of skin attaching top lip to gum at center) is going to tug at the gum after the implant surgery, potentially pulling the gum up assymetrically. Solution: Snip it!

• March 09 - frenectomy, a 'minor surgery' that is fast, but smarts like hell for days afterward. Total out of pocket, $500 (IIRC)

Next up is the big surgery, the extractions! I was NOT looking forward to this. Again, further complications, it turns out that I have thin gums, so he's going to do a skin graft as part of it.

• March 09 - surgical stint made by prosthedontist to guide the surgeon, and temp teeth to cover implants while they heal (I forget the cost of this. $500?)

The day of the surgery was not fun. Go to prosthedontist, get stint and fake teeth. Go to Ortho, 30 min appointment to get wires removed. Go to dental surgeon, >4hrs in the chair getting skin graft from roof of mouth to gums, two teeth pulled, two 12mm titanium posts implanted in my skull, etc Maybe 25 injections in all. I lost count.

After that, mouth all bloody and numb, back to ortho for another 2 hrs, where he gave me more novocain and vasoconstrictor and then put braces back on, with fake teeth covering gaps attached to the wires.

• April 09 - Surgery, gum tissue grafts, etc. Total out of pocket, about $8700.

Now it was a matter of that healing up and the bone growing in around the implants until they were solit enough to load.

• June 09 - bottom braces off (no cost)
• July 09 - top braces off, temporary crowns on implants ($800)

I'm more or less done now. It's a matter at this point of making sure the gums settle at the right height, and then getting the permanent, porcelain crowns put on (sometime in august or september), which will cost another $3000

So, in the end it's going to cost me a total of about $19k to have my little gray spot fixed. It needed to be done though, as it would have turned into far more. I'd never heard of root resorption but have since run into a number of friends that have had it and have had more or less the same process to go through. Maybe this post will help someone else running into the same thing.

Book Review: Meatball Sundae

I picked up Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? a while back. I'm a regular reader of Seth's blog and a huge fan, but was a little put off after reading The Dip and being disappointed in it. I packed it on vacation for airplane reading, and I'm glad I got around to reading it.

Meatball Sundae is pretty straightforward, and is presented in 3 parts:

- The first part presents the premise that the rules of marketing have changed, and yet applying the new marketing (whipped cream and cherries) to old world products (meatballs), the results are less than tasty. Those wanting to make sundaes need to first get back to basics and stop making meatballs. In other words, if you beleive (as you should) that marketing is the art and science of designing products and services and distribution methods FOR markets, then the new marketing means NEW products. [e.g. For games, this might mean asking "How can Facebook change our game design?", rather than "How can we use Facebook to sell more of our generic first person shooter?"]

- The second part breaks down the fourteen trends that are shaping this change in marketing. For those well versed in the web 2.0 mechanics, there's nothing new here, though it's a nice concise list. For those unfamiliar, it's an essential guide to the new world.

- The third part presents a range of case examples to help underline the points made in the first two parts.

All presented with Seth's engaging style, and in super easy-to-consume form.

Only downside I could think of is that I'd have liked more data backing up some of his case examples.

I'll be passing this one round the office for sure. Recommended.

For lunch today: A million mile tomato

A while ago I posted something about Matt Jones presentation on The New Negroponte Switch.

Now here's a link to a presentation, entitled Scope, from another principal at Schulze and Webb, Matt Webb.

I found it inspirational, and there's a couple bits of it that sent shivers down my spine. Well worth the read.

And then go find your '100 hours'

[As an aside, I thought the ultra-conversational, realtime-esque, voicing of his speaker notes was quite infectious. Interesting how he posts a deck for offline reading and still gets the energy across. Curious if other readers feel the same]

Book Review: Racing the Beam

I just finished reading Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort's Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies). Definitely the geekiest book so far this year for me and I really liked it.

It's the first of a series called 'Platform Studies', the goal of which is to look at the games of a given platform in the context of the platform's development, technology and business context, etc. The hypothesis is that these things end up shaping the games as much as their designers intent, and that therefore platform technology and business end up shaping the medium that is gaming.

The first of the series certainly does a good job making this case. The go over detailed looks at landmark games on the platform (e.g. Yars Revenge, Pitfall, etc) and how the hardware shaped their development. They also discuss the culture at Atari and Activision at the time, and how games built upon previous game development knowledge and innovation.

It's a great idea for a series, and Racing the Beam is a great start.

Two things like to see in future books in this series (or second edition of Racing the Beam?):

• There was no discussion of the European release of the VCS. The limited memory of the VCS meant that programmers had to program the graphics by re-writing the memory for each scan line in well-timed dance following behind the electron beam's trace across the CRT. Display and game simulation were hard-coded to one another, not asyncronous systems like on today's platforms. So, I'd imagine that games that were to run on a PAL televison would have needed modification. Were these the same programmers that did it? Were there games that couldn't make it because of some limitation, etc? Anyhow, would have been nice to know.
• While mention is made of the unit sales of some of the given game titles, it would have been interesting to include some tables spanning the console's life cycle. sales vs installed base vs unit sales of game titles. Were there 'evergreen' titles for the VCS? Did the sales curve decay grow steeper as the market was flooded with content?

This minor complains aside, I highly recommend the book.

RIP: A Remix manifesto

I watched this pretty decent documentary on the Air Canada flight back from Montreal on Saturday.

A couple intesting takeaways:

- How cow. Girl Talk doesn't use a mac? Microsoft lost marketing opportunity FAIL!

- It's pretty awesome that a major airline like Air Canada airs a documentary that itself states that it is in violation of copyright.

Anyhow. Mini review:

The movie itself doesn't have a lot new to offer folks that have listened to Lawrence Lessig's lectures or read any of Cory Doctorow's (many) pieces on the subject (both of whom appear in the doc). If you haven't, then it's a good crash course. On the down side, it doesn't do much to at least try to give perspective on the other side of the argument.

Games & The New Negroponte Switch

Great presentation from Matt Jones, lead designer at Dopplr and principal at design firm Schulze & Webb. It's a mind-expanding look at the transition of services into things and things into services he calls The New Negroponte Switch. Great read.

View more PDF documents from schulzeandwebb.

And if you are wondering where the relevance to games comes in:

Xbox Live, OnLive: Products becoming services

Figureprints, (and one could argue Guitar Hero): Services becoming products.

And to his point about Thingfrastructure, and products and services that are resiliant and self sustaining, this is a challenge games are going through now. Games are increasingly being developed as services, but sold and marketed as products - as things.

When someone "buys" a downloadable game, do they always understand that they've bought *access* to it through a service, and that should that service go away, so might their game? For a parent buying a Webkinz stuffed animal with a coded tag, do they understand that they've bought a limited-time access to a service?

These are challenges we'll have to face going forward. The innovation is good, but its important that people aren't mislead along they way.

Alice and Kev

Alice and Raph both pointed to this awesome, gripping story of Alice and Kev, an experiment-slash-narrative by a game design student in the UK. She created a homeless father and daughter in The Sims 3, took away all their wealth, and then set about letting them live their lives.

Awesome on so many levels. The depth of story possible in Sims3, the depth of the engine to allow for emergent behaviors, the irrational traits & behaviors that show some of the game's design limitations...

Anyhow, go read it starting here.

Book Review: Ignore Everybody

I finished up Hugh MacLeod's book, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity the

othr day, but am only getting around to blogging about it now.

If you are a fan of MacLeod's, are a GapingVoid reader, and have read his How to Be Creative writing, then there's not a lot new here for you.

I recommend buying it anyway. The ideas are ones that are worth revisiting and reassessing from time to time. More than that though, the book is one you'll want to share with a friend or two. If his drawings are cube grenades, then the book is an Idea Bomb.

And on the subject of sharing it, the author had a nice promo going where for the first 1000 people to order the book on amazon and who sent him a copy of the receipt, he would mail a second copy, signed, free of charge. It's a great promotion, and now I have my nice signed/doodled copy to keep in ideal condition, and my Idea Bomb version to pass around to friends, blowing up their brains, hopefully. [Note: he appears to be doing another round of this]

The most significant thing at E3 2009

Well, another E3 behind us, and not just any E3. This was E3 born again. Following on the heels of the Supernova E3 and Dwarf Star E3, this was, I guess, the Phoenix E3?

As this E3 fades, we’re left with the deluge of announcements and demos to digest. It’s an interesting thought exercise to consider which are the more significant ones. Which might have the biggest long term impact, might tip the scales in the console wars, open the market to new audiences and revenue streams, etc.

There were lots of game announcements, lots of them exciting, but none so *different* as to warrant the label of ‘game changer’.

There were no wild-card disruptive entrants like we saw at GDC with OnLive’s announcement.

There were of course the keynotes from Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony.

Sony’s got a new handheld to continue to duke it out with Nintendo on that front, and Nintendo continues to add titles and some new capabilities to their handheld. Nothing really groundbreaking on that front.

Judging from the press, most people believe that the biggest news out of E3 is that MS and Sony have played their cards on the motion control front. Microsoft with some 3D camera tech to compete with Nintendo’s Wiimote, and Sony has a wand that kind of straddles both the camera and wand camps. That is big news to be sure, but not terribly surprising.

The biggest question on the motion controller front will be what it means for developers and publishers. Big budget productions necessitate cross-platform development, or at least favor it. Certainly between PS3 and Xbox360 (and PC) we see a lot of cross-platform publishing. It will be interesting to see how and if titles can map to the very different motion controls between those platforms and Nintendo’s, and whether any of them get short-changed as a result of a lowest common denominator approach.

But I don’t think that’s the most significant of the E3 announcements. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the most significant item out of E3 was this:

The announcement of Facebook and Twitter support within Xbox Live (Nintendo had a similar announcement around the DS, so they get some credit too).

Why do I believe this is such a big deal? Bear with me…

I’d posit that the fundamental promise to customers that the previous generation of consoles offered was “High quality games that Just Work”. High quality 3D games like those that were available on PC, with a console’s level of quality control and usability.

I’d also claim that for the current generation of console, at least for the 360, the promise grew to “High quality games that just work *together* within a social network”. Build your network of friends who also own 360s, and get a level of experience works *between* titles. Sony and Nintendo have both played their own version of catch-up on this front, to a point.

As 360’s installed base and capabilities have grown, so have the Network Effects. The utility of a network grows with its users (a function in this case of the installed base and the amount of time users spend on their 360s which is in turn a function of capabilities). Again, similar to what was available on PC years earlier (if you were using IM, Gamespy, etc), but with console level quality control and usability.

Fast forward to today, and one the most significant thing we see happening on the PC is with the “walled gardens” of social networks – each of which have become platforms for software development. These social networks have realized that the same network effects that grow with customer base can hold true for their platforms and their services as well. The value of a network increases if it becomes permeable to other networks.

Initially this manifests itself as the users needing to belong to both social networks, and allowing them to verify the connection between their two identies. E.g. This is my Facebook profile, this is my Flickr account and yes, you may speak to each other so that I might let my FB friends see my Flickr pics. Flickr becomes more valuable to me, and Facebook becomes more valuable to me and my friends.

But this first step is still kludgy, requiring an identity on both social networks. More recently, we are seeing some of these social networks becoming sources of trusted identity credentials. Note that I can now login to Dopplr by using OpenID. I can log in to FriendFeed using OpenID, GoogleID, or my Facebook credentials. Examples exist on the forefront of gaming too. For example, Metaplace allows login with six different identity providers.

To borrow an analogy from SXIP’s, Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 presentation, this is analogous to the drivers license in the real world. When I go home to my native Montreal, I don’t have to have a Quebec driver’s license. If pulled over, say for turning right on a red, I can show my Oregon drivers license because the government of Quebec is implicitly stating “we trust Oregon as an issuer of credentials and will accept these credentials at face value for this transaction. Now here’s your ticket, ‘sti.”

If the promise of previous generations was “games that just work”, and the current that “games work with each other”, then the promise of the NEXT generation will be this: That true next-gen game platforms will comprise services that *just work* with one another.

Cracking open these walled gardens is going to be difficult. Its one thing to allow the ‘linking of identities’ like we saw announced with Live/Facebook this week. Its quite another to have those services trust the identities issued by other services as the users sole credentials, especially for facets where financial transactions are concerned. It will happen though.

Initially, I believe we’ll see the consoles requiring *their* identity system being a user requirement, but other more open web services allowing sign-in with these credentials. E.g. “sign in to your Flickr account using your Xbox Live credentials. This might grow to add billing-type transactions (e.g. instead of today’s creation of a separate billing relationship with Netflix, why not just ‘click here to join Netflix and have it deducted from your Xbox Live points’. While the mechanics and politics of such things will take time, the appeal of providing more paths to the cash register is strong.

Most important though, will be the network effects realized. The move announced at E3 will see Xbox Live, Facebook and Twitter each becoming more valuable to customers as a result of the bridges between them.

Some developers and publishers have worried about the increased power that the ‘walled garden’ platform owners might yield as these services grow to encompass everything from development to distribution. I can’t think of a better antidote to that than a realization that tearing down the walls may increase their value. It will take a long time for this to happen, but this year’s E3 marked an important first step.

Book Review: Edison: His Life and Inventions

Edison - His Life and Inventions, was written in 1910 by Thomas Commerford Martin (with a co-author, F.L. Dyer), a long-time Edison engineer employee and all-round fanboy. Note that the book is in the public domain, so you can get it here in e-form or at the previous link for a print version. I actually consumed it in audio book form, in an 'abridged' series of 25 podcasts of about 40 minutes each, for the first 25 chapters, and remaining 4 chapters in text form online. You can find the audio version here, done as part of the excellent Story Speiler Podcast.

This is not the easiest book to get through, even in audio form. It's sixteen hour length being only one of the reasons. Being written in 1910, the style in which its written takes a little getting used to and takes a while getting to the point. At the same time, I found this entertaining as well. The hardest thing about it is that Martin & Dyer's fandom rivals that of all but the most die-hard religious zealots. It's tough to cut through the walks-on-water BS and to what the truth might be.

This aside, it's a *really* interesting read. Most people are familiar with the stories around Edison's incandescent bulb and phonograph. However, the details around these are interesting unto themselves and are lost in the high-level story. For example, the fact that over a decade elapsed between the first success with the light bulb and reaching a point of commercial viability (lowering cost, increasing life, etc, over that time).

It's also interesting in covering how many other enterprises Edison was involved in and covering some of the details around them. He had a hand at mining, cement making, housing construction, electric railways, the stock ticker, and more.

There are a lot of interesting historical lessons to get out of this read, all involving disruptive technology and business models. They are so far removed from our current time and technology that it makes for interesting contrast, and the metaphors with current day are many.

I'd recommend the audio version for someone that enjoys audio books on a regular commute, as it'll take you a while to get through.

Book Review: Longitude

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

Wow did I enjoy this little gem of a book. A friend loaned it to me *months* ago (sorry Pete!) but it got lost in a pile of books somewhere and I only found it recently and got to it. Once started I tore through it pretty quick.

It is the story of the Longitude prize, the sixteenth century equivalent of the X-Prize, a handsome award offered by the British government to whomever could solve the problem of longitudinal location for purposes of sea navigation. For years people were able to calculate their latitude by comparing the angle of the north star to the horizon, but latitude – figuring out their east-west position on the globe - was a far harder problem, and people at sea that couldn’t calculate their location tended to also to do things like run into rocks and cease floating.

Specifically, Longitude is the story of John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker that devo

ted his life – or at least 31 years of it, to the building of 4 clocks, the fourth of which would eventually win this prize, conquering the astronomers, changing the state of the art of chronometer making. In solving the problem, Harrison changed the ability of the British Navy to navigate the globe, and in doing so, its no exaggeration to say that he changed the course of history.

Despite this, it took him years to get the acknowledgement, as the book details the many years his efforts were thwarted for reasons of politics and greed.

Those looking for good business analogies will find a good metaphor for resistance to innovative approaches in the face of an assumed/established direction. (The clockmakers were regarded as 'mechanics' and the whole practice as folly by many of the astronomers, who beleived that like the north star's use for latitude, the answer lay in the clockwork of the heavens.

Amongst the coolest things I learned in this book is that of the 4 clocks he built, all four of which are located in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, three of them are still running today. Quietly ticking away, tended to only with a daily winding and occasional cleaning, almost 300 years after their construction. How awesome is that!? That museum is now on my list of must-see places.