I mentioned TED to a couple people recently, and foolish me I assumed they knew what I was talking about. But really they were looking at me with WTF-eyes. So I realized they had never heard about TED, here’s my small piece of community service today. I’m telling you about TED…

They use this statement which describes it better than I could tell you:

Once a year 1000 remarkable people gather in Monterey, California to exchange something of incalculable value. Their ideas. Ideas worth spreading.

TED truly has Ideas worth spreading, big names come to the gathering and speak on a variety of topics. And when I say variety, I really mean it. The type of presentations also vary, in format. Sometimes they have a performing arts presentation. Motivational speakers sometimes take the reigns and rally the troops for world change. Rounding up the style, we have those that come to speak about what they’ve done, just to tell us their story.

Take for example David Pogue, a popular NY Times blogger that speaks on UI and general design with “Simplicity Sells”. Another famous person, Tony Robbins makes his shortest presentation and ask why we do what we do. And one of my favorite economists, Stephen Dubner’s co-author for Freakonomics, Steven Levitt. Levitt tells us, if drug dealing is so profitable why do crack dealers still live their moms.

The videos are available on their website, and you can also find them via your podcast listener like iTunes, or Juice. I highly recommend these videos; they will enrich your life.

Trivia that Matters. Some trivia I extracted from a video by Chris Jordan.
Natasha’s Story Rick Smolan tells us a captivating story.
Jennifer Lin, piano improv She is amazing at it.

I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with a particular webhost recently. They’ve been around for quite sometime. They were one of the early players of webhosting. This is the worse customer support experience I’ve dealt with in webhosting. When I asked for help, all I got was the classic response “read the documentation.” I had read the docs before I even approached them. Their documentation is lacking incomplete and generic. The requests I sent to their support help desk were very standard, something related to sftp and another issue related to .htaccess. Continue Reading “Looking for a new Webhost, skip XO.” »

I was blown away by the latest book I read. This book, much like Sam Harris’ really made me think. Overall, this book gets a thumbs up.

This book, with its seemingly simplistic title opens up with a very head-on approach. The first chapter, Putting It Midly, caught my interest because of the poignant questions; I was enticed to continue page after page. Here are some of the thoughts Hitchens presents us with.

If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness? What was so wonderful about his casting out devils, so that the devils would enter a herd of pigs instead? That seemed sinister. . .

This rings so true to me, why wouldn’t he do something to cure blidness for once and for all? Then you wonder, if it was all a perfect plan, why would there be such a thing as blindness to begin with? Almost any devout religious person would explain that it is part of our punishment, for the original sin. Christopher poignantly addresses as many of the arguments that religion gives us to keep itself in control.

When speaking of religion:

Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the “meaning” of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet –the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything.

Although reading some of the history in there made me cringe, the author points out how terrible some of the faith-based laws and regulations actually are killing us. Religion Kills is the title for another chapter and it is named appropriately. He talks about Yusra al Azami. . .

“[She] was shot dead in April 2005, for the crime of sitting unchapperoned in a car with her fiancé. The young man [the fiance] escaped with only a vicious beating.

Allabu Akbar means God is Great, and this is where the title of the book comes from God is not great, How Religion Poisons Everything. Lately books are working hard on keeping your attention with catchy subtitles, but this is not just a gimmick, it really sums up the body of the book. After Hitchens lays down the groundwork, and poses some faith shattering questions, he dives head first into the major areas of our lives and humanity. Then makes some very compelling arguments to explain How Religion Poisons Everything. Continue Reading “Completed: God Is Not Great.” »

Woot! another book read, onto the next one soon. First I thought I’d give you my take on this one.

The Year of Living Biblically. One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.

A.J. Jacobs is hilarious, this medium sized hardbound will keep you reading if not for its insights, at least for its light tone and comical nature; its hard to put down. It is a funny memoir that takes Jacobs, and sometimes his family through a year of radical changes in lifestyle. You are quickly exposed to the determination that AJ musters to bring you the results of this crazy experiment.

I must admit that the wide range of topics in this book touch on a lot of recurring themes in my life. The search for truth, the notion of spirituality, the reason behind ancient customs, to name a few all surface constantly in my life. Until I was 12 or so, I was raised Catholic, the whole shebang; kneel, sit, stand, pray, sing, eat crackers, rinse and repeat. Then after several years of freedom from religion, I chose to become a Christian. For over four years I was a firm believer in Christ. I participated in a non-denominational Christian church extensively, to the point that you could find me with some friends on the corner of Main street preaching to anyone that would listen and some that wouldn’t about Jesus. That’s all in the past now and perhaps topic for another discussion later on, but I wanted to point out that I’m not unfamiliar with religion, especially Christianity and Judaism. It is perhaps this familiarity with religion, faith and all that comes rolled up in that pacakge that sparked the desire to read this book.

The book has a strong contrast to Sam Harris’ book, The End of Faith which advises us (and I agree) to stop believing everything you are told without demanding real evidence from a source other than that which demands your faith. A.J. on the other hand must follow almost everything he is told by the Bible and his wise guy circle as I call it –a large group of experts that help him clear up some cryptic biblical stuff. Lots of times he is told to just go along with it. A.J. opens up by explaining how he’s going to do exactly what the title implies; live biblically for a year. Each chapter is a month and the whole book is narrated in journal style highlighting the most important days. Jacobs constantly is at odds with things that the Bible tells him to do and how he feels about it.

He takes us through his visit to the Holy Land, to visit his crazy uncle Gil, all the way to a meeting with Jimmy, a snake handling preacher in Knoxville, Tenessee. I love the way he enthusiastically tells a story and I lost count of how many times his narration of the ordeals made me laugh out loud. Having lived under rules from the Bible for years at one point, I can only admire Jacobs for actually completing a full year and then some of this grueling project. Julie, his wife also deserves credit if only for putting up with the lunacy of this undertaking, most of it while pregnant with twins! That’s love right there.

I don’t want to tell you much more about the book, it truly is worth reading, it all goes by quickly because of the way it is written. He begins with 72 pages and 700+ rules collected after reading the Bible from beginning to end. Towards the end of the journey, he collects over 100 books on biblical law, tradition, cooking and other relevant topics that help him discern these nutty laws. I think this is a great insight into what your life might be like if you truly tried to live in accordance to the Bible.

Here’s one of my favorite days. Simply because of the way it starts:

Day 181, afternoon. I was on the subway today, sitting a few seats down from a Buddhist monk. He looked at me, with my white raiment and bushy beard, I looked at him, with his orange robes, and we exchanged a knowing nod and smile.

It was a great moment. I felt like I’d been let through the velvet rope at a holy nightclub.

On another one of my favorite passages he actually stones –if you can call it that, an old guy in NY. It cracked me up.

I think the great sense of humor the A.J. displays is a big part of what gets him through this endeavor. Coincidentally as I found out just today when I finished this book, he is also the author of another book that has been in my sights, The Know-It-All, and the now famous article My Outsourced life. If you haven’t read that article, I recommend you take a peek, I read it a long time ago on Steve’s website, and it is definitely funny and informative. On a side note, lately have been actually testing the whole concept of outsourcing your life; mainly thanks to that article.

Two thumbs up for this book and its author, I now want to read his other book, The know-It-All.

Into the Wild was touching, sad, inspiring and mostly thrilling throughout. At the end in a couple parts I must admit that my eyes swelled up. Krakauer does a great job of explaining what Chris must have been thinking. I enjoyed th narrative of the book and how Jon mixed in his own memoirs into the story. I can’t help but feel compassion and comradeship towards Chris McCandless. He did what we all talk about around the water cooler, but very few of us ever do or even try; live your dream. Unfortunately for him his adventure as you find out in the book, was not successful. At least not by most standards. Please don’t think I’m spoiling the story, his tragic ending is revealed before the book even starts in the Author’s note in the First Anchor Books Edition, Feb 1997:

In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters.

As I read the book I kept thinking to myself “I know what he must be thinking now” or “I bet I know what he felt right then” and the truth is that Jon’s writing makes you believe this; he makes you think you can understand what was going through Chris’ head. In all reality, few of us will probably fully understand the thoughts and emotions driving Chris as he sets off in a canoe down the Colorado river, or when he embarks on his last trip into the wild.

The book is easy to read and I found myself immersed in it right away, I was almost a third of the way into it when I put it down for the first time and I completed it in a couple more sittings. Some of the chapters begin with a simple map of the area which you are about to travel through. Constantly I found myself flipping back to review the maps to see where McCandless was and this gave me a great idea of the relative distances he traveled. Sometimes he made his way through on foot, other times hitchhiking but I absolutely think that if he had the choice, he would have used his little Datsun all the way to Alaska.

Half dozen pages over 200, the book is definitely easily digested in a weekend and I definitely recommend it. Most of the books I like give me a new piece of the puzzle to the great experience of life; this was certainly not an exception. I’ll spare you the details of the emotions stirred and the dreams that it evoked in me, but I can tell you that I would recommend it to anyone. Seems like I feel that about all the books I actually finish reading. Besides the new perspective in life that it presented, I was introduced to a new author. Jon Krakauer also has written other well known books that have now been added to my list, namely Into Thin Air, and Under the Banner of Heaven.

There are a lot of pictures on flickr on the topic of Chris McCandless, and the story that became this bestseller. Here are links to some of the ones I found interesting; read some of the comments to understand more if you haven’t read the book.

by Akfirebug, Into the Wild set

by Chriso2000, Chris McCandless. Jon mentions this picture on his book, and this flickr member has several other ones on there.

There’s also a movie for the book [movie]Into the wild[/movie]

Hey, anyone want to join me on this reading adventure? If you want to read any of the books I have listed and want someone to discuss them with, shoot me an e-mail. I’ll be happy to do some talking about them with you as we read them. Or use the comments on my posts to voice out your thoughts, opinions and the like, I promise I’ll respond to each comment.

I was sick a good part of last week and earlier this week so I got plenty of time to read while the flu got the best of me.

I have now completed two more books directly off the list I posted earlier this month:

Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer and The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs.

I was initially going to post my commentary for both books all in one article but I thought that each deserved their own little post. If you’re interested on my thoughts about the books, you can read them here and here respectively.

So as you might have read, I recently went to San Francisco. I’d been there twice before but never got a chance to actually do anything as a visitor, both times I was there I simply drove through and had lunch en-route back to Socal.

This time I got to experience more of the city, with my girlfriend and family. One of the days we were there, we showed up to Kuleto’s. We had a reservation because according to my girlfriend, this place is the shit! So I was all excited. The place turned out to be one of the worse experiences I’ve had in fine dining. Here’s my experience and review of Kuleto’s. In short, don’t ever go there.

We were seated promptly, however our table was absolutely unaccommodating. We had reserved a table for 10 a couple weeks in advance, I would think this would allow the restaurant to plan accordingly and provide us with a decent table. I can’t say that the table was bad, but it was probably the most inconvenient table in the whole place. They essentially put a table near a corner area with a “bench” kind of like a booth and so we had , 4 people on chairs, 4 people on the bench, 1 person at the head of the table and one person on the bench on the other side of the table. Needless to say, the 4 people on the bench were locked in place. It was a hassle for them to leave the table and use the restroom for example. This is kind of normal I guess, but it made for an unpleasant experience.

Our table was poorly setup when we sat down. We ordered wine, and one of us placed their wine down on the table and it simply fell over and spilled everywhere. We found the reason for this wasn’t sloppiness or drunkenness as you might have guessed, it was simply that the lazy and rude waiter didn’t put the table together correctly. The tables had a few inches gap in between, and this gap was covered by the table cloth. So when the wine was placed there, it tipped over because there wasn’t an actual table there… just a gap and table cloth covering this. When we brought this to the attention of the waiter, he brushed it off as if asking “so what”? And tossed a bunch of napkins on the table for us to clean it up. We simply ended up covering the spilled wine with 3 or 4 napkins. Continue Reading “Uhm excuse me, there’s a worm in my food.” »

StumbleUpon is awesome. More than just an add-on, it is actually a service. It is what some people call channel surfing for the internet. I would have to agree with that. With StumbleUpon (SU), you define a bunch of interests, based on these interests you can “stumble - upon” really cool sites.

The way they match you up to sites is pretty nifty I think because most of the time I’m finding out really cool stuff. You can even “tune in” to a specific channel and get nothing but websites related to that topic. Every time you get a website from SU you have the chance of saying “I like it!” or “no more like this”. Using one of these two options gives the system a better idea of what you like and continues to narrow down topics that are more likely to appeal to you. You also get to see pages that your friends have voted as “I like it” or “thumbs up.” SU also offers a bunch of other social networking tools. Blogs, messaging, groups are all part of the SU offerings, but its core is serving you new pages, fresh and original content is its forte. A great combination of your preferences, your voting for “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” and a good mix of your friends’ own preferences continues to serve really cool pages time after time.

This is another extension or add-on that I must have in almost every installation of Firefox I use.