A collection of short poems intended to encompass twelve total. These trifles were born out of a creative spurt after I left the startup world and started enjoying the City by the Bay again.
A collection of short essays on management matters. These essays focus on my personal experience in the work environment, although they try to be as general as possible.
{moszoomimglink:tete.gif}One sunny July afternoon my Bianchi Veloce had decided it was time to quit. The first thing to give way had been the clamp on the 105-s, and replacing it had been a major problem. So I started looking at alternatives.
I knew what I needed: a sturdy, yet light bike; some better components than the 105-s, whose shifting shifting had annoyed me beyond means on uphill struggles; overall, something that could withstand both the perils of a daily commute and the pleasure of a century on a weekend (and the nut-case that would do both).
Continue reading{moszoomimglink:Bianchi}All foolish things are born of love. But fortunately some fun things are, too. In this case, I was head over heels, and one of the conditions for the love to be successful was to spend a lot of money on a bike.
Some of you snobs will think that Bianchi Veloce is nothing expensive. But to me, the investment was enormous. After all, I had a perfectly functional bike (a twenty year old Nishiki of unspeakable incompetence)!
Continue readingWhen you drive on Highway 101 from San Francisco North, there is this huge mountain looming on your left. It stays with you from Sausalito to Novato, a landmark whose view makes real estate prices jump.
Someone had come back with pictures from the summit. An expansive view of the whole Bay Area from Napa to the City seemed possible. You could see the Golden Gate, and Alcatraz, and the Marin Headlands. It had to be the most spectacular vista in the whole Bay Area. And there was a road that leads all the way to the top.
Continue readingWednesday had been a horrible day for a bike ride up Haleakala. Gale force winds had been hammering the islands, accompanied by heavy rains. Power lines were down in Kihei, trees fell crashing to the ground, and the noise made it impossible to sleep.
Guess who chose that very same Wednesday for an attempt to climb Haleakala? Yours truly. Nothing discouraged me, and I even made it all the way to over 5,000′, just to be pushed back by the storm, unable to manage even one more inch against the winds. I felt betrayed by my mana, as they say here, and froze myself down the mountain, slowly trying not to slip on the drenched street.
Continue readingIf you have been riding on the San Francisco Peninsula, chances are you have heard of this ride. It’s not the most splendid setting per se (unless you happen to like your front man/woman’s derriere), but it’s a great ride, and you can join whenever you like.
The ride starts at 9 AM every Saturday, come rain of shine, at the intersection of Hollenbeck and Homestead in Mountain View. That’s where the old Spectrum bike store used to be, and if you are an old timer, you still have your Spectrum store jersey with you!
Continue readingA Novel About the History of Philosophy. Now, THAT sounds boring, doesn’t it?
A philosophy teacher falls into deep ennui out of his students’ boredom and decides to write a book that makes the history of philosophy an interesting topic. To achieve the result, the book is about a high-school student and her familial problems. And philosophy is the solution of the problem.
Sounds a bit contrived? Well, that’s the story behind Sophie’s World. Not the plot, mind you, but the raison d’etre. The story itself is even more contrived, and ends on a formulaic note of the existentialist kind. It’s like reading Michael Ende, but without any fantasy involved.
In the end, the book is just a replacement for a text book for challenged youth. The story doesn’t flow, doesn’t make any sense, and still remains predictable. Of course, all of this is not true if this book is your first encounter with philosophy, and you do care about 14 year old girls and their outlook on life. Then the distant father figure moves you; the dialogues on philosophers become interesting, and even the leaden description of the characters takes a back seat. It’s like going back in time and reading “The Name of the Rose” all over again.
Ok, so I have to admit I learned about the history of philosophy in high school. It was more fun there, when we could talk with our teacher about all those speculations and reasons. When we could follow the wacky lives of a great many philosophers: their love affairs, their mysterious escapes, their poverty, their craziness. There seemed to be no philosopher that didn’t have a serious issue in life, and we highlighted those with gusto.
Just like ‘Troy’, the movie, omitted the Greek gods and with them all the fun, this book has no relevant embarrassment in store for the philosophers. It is all very clean, as if the author was really trying to get the book approved as text book.
All in all, disappointing. Read something else, if you know about philosophy. And if you don’t, please get yourself a real history of philosophy. They are much more fun, anyway.
Ok, this one is quite a disappointment. To be short, this book is a simple treatise of elementar number theory with very apt vignettes on the major players in this field of mathematics interspersed where appropriate.
In the end, it is quite an interesting book for high-school kids that want to move on to college maths. The examples are very cogent, the flow of the logic easy to follow, the structure well-articulated and managed.
At the same time, there is no adventure or an adventurer in this book. Maybe a humbler title would have helped its cause. In any case, there are better books on elementary number theory, as well as better histories of mathematics.
I am not sure why you would want to read this book.
Geeks applying maths to lead a luxurious life in Vegas? Who could resist a book like that? “The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Miilions” sounds like too good to be true. And since you are probably used to my review spoilers by now, I will confess it isn’t.
Ben Mezrich tells the story as the first-person reporter who finds out about this group and has the unique chance to report about it. The writing is compelling, never too technical, always quite realistic, which makes the tension and suspense very believable.
Turns out the six M.I.T. students in the title are part of a group of players at the college that learned how to exploit a weakness in blackjack, the only winnable game in Vegas. They become “card counters”, that is they offset low cards with high cards and keep track of a running score. If a particular deck is particularly positiive (more low cards have been played than high cards), then game theory shows the player is likely to win against the house.This was very well known in player circles, and card counting had become a profession for a short while. Of course, once the casinos got wind of the trick, they prevented professional players from ever playing again. But of course, the weakness of the game persisted, and Vegas and the counters became embroiled in a technology war.
A team of players could easily outperform a single player, because some players could simply sit and wait at tables until the count became high. Once there was a positive signal, a different player (a Gorilla) could be called in. The gorilla would always play against a good deck, hence bet a lot. So there wouldn’t be the fluctuation in betting that gave the older pros away.
Well, we are talking about riding a multi-million dollar game. Mezrich does a really good job at portraying the kids – young, overachieving college students from one of the most prestigious universities in the world. The game has everything they could ask for: it requires smarts, it yields lots of cheap money, it involves weekends of wild parties, and of course it is a fun adventure, stacked against the odds of a mobster mentality that in the end wins the game.
Mezrich doesn’t really take sides in the story. While we sympathize with the kids, we experience them as real humans. They disagree, they betray each other, they fall out with each other and reconcile. The forces of evil are not as bad as they seem at first. The encounter with casino executives never resembles an execution, and on multiple occasions the kids are let go with their wins, with the simple admonition never to come back.
In the end, the casinos win the technology war. The six students that could have to retire and give up gambling, have to find themselves in the normalcy of a life that seems so unreal after the surreal life in Vegas and other joints around the country.
Well done. It is a book of research and portrayal, one that makes Vegas look better than it should. In the end, knowing about blackjack the way I do now, even I feel inclined to play a gamble at the blackjack table.
Isn’t it a bit scary if the heroine in a book about the Middle Ages looks airbrushed? I thought so, too. And yet, this novel is not a fake. Eleanor of Aquitaine is certainly a wonderful character to portray in a novel, and Pamela Kaufman does an outstanding job at clarifying a life that seems at odds with itself and its times.
Eleanor grows up the hier of the Duke of Aquitaine, one of the most powerful duchies in France. Intrigues and deception dominate her youth, just as courtship and love do. Just as she finds the love of her life, she is to marry the future King of France in a marriage that is to wed the riches of her duchy to the power of the king.
Alas, turns out the king is a real bore, domineered by clerics who want to evince a life of frustration from him. Eleanor is annoyed and wants out, since the king is after her land and not after her beauty.
She ends up following the fool to the Holy Land, where his ineptitude almost crushes the entire army. She’s got the love of her life with her, so he gets a chance to prove how wonderful he is. Of course, that causes the king’s ire, and everything almost comes to an abrupt end.
Later on, she gets an annullment feigning consanguineity and depravity. The king marries another woman, and just when Eleanor thinks she can get the love of her life, the King of England marches in, rapes her, gets her pregnant and carries her off to his home land.
As it were, that’s where the book starts. Eleanor has once more committed some heinous act of betrayal and is to be carted off to Wales to die in a rotting tower. She will survive and write this book as a memento.
Ok, and I started saying it was credible, why?
Maybe it’s the fact that the vast majority of successful writers certainly focus on the female sex when writing. Eleanor quite doesn’t seem credible as a warm and gentle woman. To survive in the climate of the time, she must have been ruthless and cruel, at times, but in this book, only the bad guys are.
There’s nothing wrong with a classic plot line of good vs. evil in a novel about the Middle Ages, so I can’t really fault the author. Still, I wonder how much the book would have benefited from a more balanced look.
The writing itself is very compelling, and the pace in the story quite easy to follow. Pamela Kaufman surely deserves her bestseller status, given the craft and sheer intelligence she brings to the development of the story.
