Ultimate Voyeurism

This is addictive:

Justin TV

I'm watching live video, effectively through someone else's eyes, of a talk at YCombinator. In California. In real-time.

I went to the original YCombinator startup school, and I've been following Paul Graham and Trevor Blackwell's companies, as well as reading Jessica Livingston's book. It's surreal to see them there live.

It's funny. I used to be really interested in Steve Mann, and wearable computers. I went so far as to buy a head-mounted display, back around 1999, but I didn't build the rest of the system. It's interesting to see that this technology is now feasible, basically using Flash, and Amazon's Web Services.

I know it's lame, but I couldn't resist calling in and asking to see Anybot's robot, "Dexter".

Wow, the internet really does change things.

TiddlyWiki: Personal Notebook

For a little while now, I've been using TiddlyWiki as my personal notebook. It rocks! The nice thing is that everything is stored in just one HTML page; so, it's just one file. If you want to back it up, or transfer it, you're just copying one file. You don't need anyone's permission to install it, since it runs on your machine, not some IT-administered server.

Instead of having wiki pages linked together, it uses "tiddlers" that show up as subsections of the main page. You can edit them in place, all from within the web browser. Like all wikis, instead of editing raw HTML, you use mostly plain-text, with some formatting codes. Here's a cheat sheet on formatting.

I tend to jump around between the same dozen topics. It seems I can only work intensely on a given topic for about 2-3 days. It's nice to have a centralized, backed-up notebook so that, over time, I'm building real progress, incrementally.

I've used Subversion for a while now, to keep track of all my personal source code. I never had a good solution for notes and ideas and links, though.

The one feature I'd love to see is support for inserting mathematical formulas(ae?) using LaTeX. That would truly kick ass! Um, figuratively.

Founders At Work

Well, I'm kind of late to this party, but I finally got a copy of Founders At Work. I had a feeling it would be good, from reading the free bits on the website, and I was not disappointed. This book rocks!

It's a collection of interviews with startup founders and early employees talking about the early days of some now-famous software companies. I've been hooked on these kinds of stories ever since I read Microserfs. Of course, that was fiction, and this is the real thing. I love the interview format; it seems honest and unpretentious in a way that a narrative style wouldn't be. Jessica Livingston's done a great job in drawing out all kinds of interesting anecdotes. One draw is the entertainment value of getting a look behind the scenes at companies that I've been following for years.

Aside from entertainment value, this book is full of business experience. I say "experience", rather than "advice", because the interview format makes the book descriptive, rather than prescriptive. It's a kind of oral history -- a wisdom download, that's much more valuable than a set of guidelines or a dogma.

Okay, I can't resist distilling some advice. It's interesting to see how many founders' businesses developed out of, or were aided by their previous experience. A lot of these successes have to do with thinking along certain lines for 10-20 years, and then being in the right place at the right time. It's not so much about having the world-changing idea, as finding a way to make useful that stuff that you've been mulling over for the last decade. That and hard work. Or luck. Or both.

Finally, there's the nostalgia value. The interview with one of Adobe's founders, Charles Geschke, reminded me of what it felt like to first see a Macintosh, and a laser printer. My dad introduced me to Macs soon after they came out. I was a student, and he was a teacher at Northview Heights Secondary School at the time. They had the computer facility for the whole area, but the school had fallen on rough times. There were literally rooms full of state-of-the-art Macs, with no one using them. I still remember that first whiff of laserjet toner. 300 dpi! Wow! You just new this was going to be good.