rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an inspirational book; not in that fluffy, chirpy plastic way of too many popular books but in the shear darkness of the author’s story and his attitude during it.

Part of the appeal of this book lies in the historical account from a survivor of the holocaust, told in a slightly detached, matter-of-fact, manner. It’s only 60 years ago but we quickly forget about the horrors of the concentration camp, and all the other human-inspired miseries since.

However, as the title might indicate, this book has much more to offer the reader. The author shows how even in the darkest nightmarish situations there is a way for the human psyche to come through. Though the reader might feel awkward comparing their situation to that endured by the author (I certainly did) the advice and anecdotes presented here are applicable far beyond the extreme suffering of the concentration camps (and, indeed, that is exactly the intention of the author).

Here’s a few things I’ve picked up from the book:

• It isn’t how life treats you that’s important, it’s how you approach life. Some situations might be inescapable and result in great suffering but there is little point on dwelling on the unfairness of the universe. You must look at as an opportunity to prove yourself — to show your integrity. The one choice you always have is how you to react to a situation.
• Having something to hold onto. Whether it is the thought of a loved one or the knowledge that your suffering might have saved another. For example, the loneliness of a windower had actually saved his wife from the same suffering by living longer than her.

Quotes:

• “A man who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how” (actually from Nietzsche)
• “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
• “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
• “We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”

I read this book in an attempt to understand “life” over the past 306 days since the car accident. I came away lucky, very lucky, but at the same time I have some lingering effects that are likely to remain permanent. And there’s more misery to come with (possibly very) early arthritis etc. There’s no medication to help me here, it’s just attitude that’s going to get me through and I found this book incredibly helpful in that regard. I have suffered and that suffering is likely to continue but I take some pride that I was the one in the driver’s seat, that it wasn’t Hilary with our unborn daughter. I’ve taken that suffering away from them. Of course, it wasn’t a conscious decision — just fate — but one of us was going to be driving that day and I’m happy it was me.

To most people, I appear no different than I was 307 days ago but I know differently. I feel the pain in my left foot and right knee, the stiffness in my right leg and arm and my slight limp. I might go for a walk with my colleagues at lunchtime and they wouldn’t know that our brisk walk has caused me pain. I don’t talk about it (except here, in my private diary!); I don’t yelp or groan. This is my suffering and there’s no point in constantly sharing it with others. What’s more, I’m not going to stop walking or slow down because of it. “Everyone has their cross to bear”, and this is mine.

I’m still here and I have much to work and live for, not least my daughter. That is all the motivation than I need to fully explore Viktor Frankl’s three meanings in life: to create, to experience and to suffer.

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I was actually surprised how well this worked out and how diverse and interesting the sessions were: Tax for Techies, Google SketchUp, Technology & Gealige, Twitter API integration were just some of those I attended.  A special mention must go to the Contrast lads (Eoghan & Des) who gave an impassioned talk on simplifying your webapp interfaces, which left me completely reconsidering what ShutterScouts should be and how it should function.  They preach from much the book as 37Signals but with a healthy dose of Irish wit and increduality. I wish the session had been captured on video as I’m sure a much wider audience could benefit from hearing their opinions (of which, they have plenty!).

Of course, meeting up with an old colleague really made the day and I’d really recommend you check out his recent app, TweetRush, a very nice looking Twitter analytics tool.

My review

Rating: 4 of 5 stars
First off, you’re probably not going to get to a 4 hour week and certainly not working as an employee. However, this book is a must read simply because of the way the author makes you look at things differently and turns established notions on their head. It’s a real mind-f*ck.

• Why work for the best years of your life, instead of enjoying it now? Putting off everything until you’re 65 isn’t a great plan. You’re fit and active now.
• Based on my current age, I have 400 months until retirement. How do I want to spend that? In a cubicle?
• You don’t need to be a millionaire, you just need to have enough (autonomous) income to live like one.
• Most people dream of running a company but really you want to own one, and get others to manage it whilst you pursue your real dreams. This isn’t about getting your dream job (because dreams tend to turn sour when they become ‘work’) but about income generation.
• Define your dreams (if you had no financial constraints) for the next 6/12 months and determine their costs. Add in your living expenses. Multiply by 1.3 to account for savings and safety padding. This is the income you need to achieve to realise your dreams. Divide it by days or weeks to arrive at a daily or weekly income.
• The key is generating that income for the least amount of work. Selling digital goods over the Internet is ideal as most of the process can be automated and outsourced.
• €50 x 100 people = €5000. It’s mathematically obvious but the consequences are astounding.
• Aim to have freedom of location and time (i.e., work that doesn’t take 40hours/week and require you to be in a particular place). Aim for mini-retirement breaks every few months where you travel to and live in another part of the world.

Whether you accept all of the book’s practical suggestions (like outsourcing your personal life to India) it will truly change the way that you look at life.

I’m coming to believe that although the psychological impact of the car accident for more obvious during my early recovery, the long-term effects are considerably more profound. I want to show my daughter the world. Not as I’ve have experienced it so far, as a series of short holidays, but as a extended deep understanding of our planet. And, if I’m honest, I want that myself too. I’m obsessed with ‘doing’ something with my life and sitting in a cubicle for another 400 months is at the bottom of my list. I don’t intend to go all new-age hippyish on this, and I don’t think continuous vagabonding would be good for children, but I do think that regular, extended periods of travel would a great thing.

Perhaps I won’t succeed but I feel I need to try.

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My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
A very interesting book about how an overabundance of choice creates stress and depression, particularly for a certain class of people (maximisers). Interestingly, it seems that I’m not a perfectionist but a maximiser (someone who always tries to find the absolute best course of action/choice).

As an example, I’ve recently been trying to buy a new monitor but I’ve now spent upwards of 6 hours comparing prices, spec, reviews and availability. In the end, I was getting so down about the decision because there didn’t seem to be a perfect choice that fitted my criteria. ~3 weeks later, I still haven’t bought one. It is this process that the book tries to unravel.

It is very well researched with plenty of insights into consumer behaviour. If I had one criticism it would be the self-help section at the end, which I didn’t find particularly inspiring. However, just being aware of the paradox of choice, and your own personality type, can help you avoid investing too much in your decisions.

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rating: 5 of 5 stars
A fantastic book that every PhD student should read.

The advice is obvious but presented clearly and simply, making it a very powerful message: Winners quit (the right stuff). Basically, you can either quit your project (to focus on something else more worthwhile), stick with it (til the end) or neither. The first two are winning strategies, the last is not (and the one I chose in my PhD — I should have read this book 3 years ago). The book is about making that decision.

It is very well written, in an informal style, and can easily be read in a day or weekend.

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Buying things to make me happy is the quick fix and isn’t really going to solve my problems so I’ve resolved to only buy any of these items when I can do so without guilt or regret.

Since Smugmug and Flickr provide OpenIDs, most potential users (i.e., photographers) were likely to already have one so it’d be easy for them to participate in ShutterScouts (and an ID Selector makes it really easy to use). The difference this time is that I a) needed to support multiple OpenID providers (previously I just tested with the excellent MyOpenID) and b) not all providers support the same features.

Smugmug, like many providers, doesn’t support the optional attribute exchange so you still have to ask the user for their name, email address etc. That’s just a pain in the neck because you can get these attributes from some providers and not others. So sometimes you’re left with a full user profile object and others it’s invalid (i.e., missing email address etc). On top of this, the Yahoo support for OpenID is the most complicated series of steps that I’ve ever tried. Now, I’m no Yahoo fan and I’m still confused by their range of mailing list settings, but I’m not the only one that has found it too complicated.

So, in the end I’ve dropped OpenID support from the first iteration of ShutterScouts. I probably should have done it sooner too as OpenID issues have been complicating my code, making the site hard to test and generally stressing me out. It’s also still too complicated for general users to figure out.

“Never tell a Ranger there’s something he can’t do - it’ll only make him do it bigger, better and with an ongoing sense of interest” — The Unit

At the moment I’m fairly intent on doing anything someone says not to, and especially anything that I can’t physically do. I can’t sleep because I’m thinking that I need to be climbing mountains to take photographs (which of course I can’t because my left foot is giving me too much pain so I couldn’t even drive to the mountain).  Suddenly, writing telecoms management software doesn’t add enough meaning to my life.  Now I need to accomplish everything that my injuries are preventing me from doing.  You never know what you had until you lose it, eh?

Go read this introduction to Git on Windows and install the command-line package of msysgit. Now, if you’ve got Rails 2.1 or later you should be able to do

ruby script\plugin install git://github.com/thoughtbot/shoulda.git

but it will fail with various errors, probably including “Plugin Not Found”. Instead, try:

ruby script\plugin install http://github.com/thoughtbot/shoulda.git/

It’s annoying but it works. Of course, you could just use git to clone the plugin into the directory but then you have to actually install it and I found it just got messy.

Update: I noticed that with a new Rails project I didn’t have this issue and the first method works fine.  I’d upgraded the old pre-2.1 project but obviously something didn’t stick.  So another method might be to recreate the project.

In the good ol’ days, you could just do a simple search for the page with the best keywords. Then people got wise and we had pages full of irrelevant keywords just to attract viewers. Google’s revolutionary PageRank algorithm uses the links made to a website to provide a metric for how interesting/authoritative that site is. It’s based on the idea that getting someone to link to your site was hard and therefore those links were valuable. However, these days it’s very easy to create fake blogs, leave comments on other blogs, post in forums or tweet about your sites which all provides the valuable links Google is looking for. To combat this loophole, Google suggested (and web developers implemented) the nofollow link so now any link marked as rel=”nofollow” is ignored by Google.

Here’s the weakness: Links have stopped becoming a good indicator of popularity/relevance because they are no longer rare or hard to obtain. They’ve lost their meaning. Also, most of our links are now being published (and followed) on social media sites (digg/reddit, comments, forums, social networks, etc) but are being ignored by Google due to the nofollow attribute. Google is only using a small part of the web to provide their rankings.

Yeah, I know. This is all random, untested, unverified, unproven thoughts coming hot off my brain. So I’m probably wrong. And Google is far from dumb/ignorant about this and is highly unlikely to rely soley on PageRank. But I still think there’s a 1990’s-Google-like revolution in search technology waiting to happen using something other than links