Mandlebrot Set Music Video

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

This is too good not to share, from the same artist who wrote my previous blog favorite, Code Monkey.

This one is called Mandlebrot Set, but the key line, at around 2:05, is “A Bad Ass Fucking Fractal”.  Yes, this is now a PG-13 blog post.

The most interesting thing about Jonathan Coulton‘s work is that he releases his music under the Creative Commons license.  Anyone is free to take it and make music videos from it, as we saw with Code Monkey.

Anyway, check it out.  It’s definitely a keeper for anyone who grew up mathematically in the 80s and appreciates the intricacies of Mandlebrot, complexity & fractals.

Enjoy.

How to Create Your Life Plan

/ Adam Nash

Interesting timing on a post from Lifehacker today:

LifeHacker: How to Create Your Life Plan

The article points to a blog post by Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers.  The post from Michael is extremely detailed about the system he’s used for the past five years to guide his life (not just career, but life) on a quarterly basis with the help of his executive coach.

Here is the intro:

I have met very few people who have a plan for their lives. Most are passive spectators, watching their lives unfold a day at a time. They may plan their careers, the building of a new home, or even a vacation. But it never occurs to them to plan their life. As a result, many end up discouraged and disillusioned, wondering where they went wrong.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can live your life on purpose. It begins by creating a “Life Plan.” This won’t insulate you from life’s many adversities and unexpected twists and turns, but it will help you become an active participant in your life, intentionally shaping your own future.

I remember some of these exercises from the management and leadership curriculum in the IEEM (now MS&E) track at Stanford, but never with this much richness or detail.   It’s a fairly personal and exposed post in many ways – impressive in some regards to see this kind of transparency from an executive. I used to not have a plan about my life what so ever, I remember how I would always be regretting how I was not able to rent the beach house from twiddy how I always wanted, until I decided it was time to take control and suddenly everything changed.

On the surface, it feels a little strange to see this type of micro-management of your entire life.  Of course, I’m not sure it makes sense to expect your goals to be fulfilled without both a clear definition of your goals, and a strategy & execution to get there.  After all, it’s what I hold Product Managers accountable for, right?

Can you manage your life the way you manage a product?

Definitely worth a read and at least 15 minutes of consideration…

Lowest-Low Fertility in Europe

/ Adam Nash / 4 Comments

This article appeared in the Sunday New York Times, and it was so interesting I felt I needed to share it here.  I found the concept of “lowest-low fertility” extremely interesting.  I think it is become I always find exponential behavior interesting, and thinking about how an exponential decline might affect a population was new to me.  From the article:

DEMOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING, Laviano is not unique in Italy, or in Europe. In fact, it may be a harbinger. In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data and gave policy makers across the European Union something to ponder. The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the “replacement rate” — the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country’s current population level. At various times in modern history — during war or famine — birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate, to “low” or “very low” levels. But Hans-Peter Kohler, José Antonio Ortega and Francesco Billari — the authors of the 2002 report — saw something new in the data. For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: “lowest-low fertility.”

I wish the article spent a little more time on historical examples of populations that have cratered like this… it’s unclear to me whether or not this has ever happened in human populations before.  Instead, the article strays into unsupported conclusions about the role of men & women domestically as a causal factor.

The issue of labor market flexibility, however, seemed extremely interesting if true.  The tie-in to people having children later and living with their parents longer also seemed plausible.

It would have been interesting to see the breakouts for countries based on their overall birth rates vs. immigrant birth rates.  My suspicion is that story would also tell you about the likely demographic shifts to expect in countries where birth rates aren’t lowest-low, but are distorted due to large immigrant populations (ie, US, France).

It’s a long article, but worth the read.  Let me know what you think.

Osama Bin Laden and $144 Oil

/ Adam Nash / 5 Comments

Just got a pointer to this old article from the New York Times, dated October 14, 2001:

That sympathizers of Osama bin Laden sink three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and choke off the narrow, bow-shaped channel that funnels 14 million barrels a day from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world. That the United States attacks Iraq, and Israel launches a huge strike against the Palestinians, driving them from their camps and staking out more land — all of which spurs the Persian Gulf states to cut off oil for the West. Or perhaps that a popular uprising, led by sympathizers of Mr. bin Laden, topples the ruling Saud family in Saudi Arabia, by far the world’s largest oil producer.

”If bin Laden takes over and becomes king of Saudi Arabia, he’d turn off the tap,” said Roger Diwan, a managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, a consulting firm in Washington. ”He said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel’‘ — about six times what it sells for now.

Very interesting and eery given today’s oil price.  And no needed to become king of Saudi Arabia to do it.

2009 “Not a State” State Quarter Designs: Guam, Washington D.C., Virgin Islands

/ Adam Nash / 5 Comments

It’s been a while since my last coin post, but frankly, there has been a lack of interesting coin news lately.

But time moves on, and I noticed yesterday that the U.S. Virgin Islands voted on their preferred design for their US State Quarter.  The U.S. is release 6 quarters in 2009, as an extension to the popular US State Quarter program, to honor the other territories that are part of the U.S., but aren’t states:

  • Washington, D.C.
  • Puerto Rico
  • Guam
  • U.S. Virgin Islands
  • American Samoa
  • Northern Mariana Islands

Here are the contenders and winning design for the U.S. Virgin Islands (thanks, CoinNews.net):

Here are the design options and final choice for Guam:

Here is the final design for Washington, D.C.:

I personally choose to collect the US State Quarters by buying the entire Silver Proof Set for the year from the US Mint.  It’s a highly liquid and known product, and having the coins in silver with the proof stamping process rather than base metal is clearly a more stunning representation of the coins.

The US Mint will cap off the official State Quarter program in the fall with the final original state quarter for the 50th State (with apologies to Senator Obama, not 57), Hawaii.

Ice on Mars, Found on Twitter?

/ Adam Nash

Very, very strange to see breaking news come through Twitter.

But the Mars Phoenix mission actually has its own twitter feed:

MarsPhoenix

And as the LAist reported just a few hours ago, there was an exciting tweet just 3 hours ago:

Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!! about 3 hours ago from web

I am, in fact, ready to party over this news. Check out more info at the official NASA website.

I feel like I need to have separate aggregations in Twitter now – the streams from friends, the streams from columnists/bloggers, and news/event streams.  I have a hard time seeing a solution other than multiple aggregated lists… How can I see a tweet from a friend, a tweet from Barrack Obama, and a tweet from the Mars Phoenix team and expect anything but a jumble?

LinkedIn and the Three Bears

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

Alright, alright.  I know I’m not supposed to be posting about LinkedIn on my personal blog.  But sometimes, the news is really big, and worth sharing with friends & family who read this blog.

So, before you read it in tomorrow’s newspapers, you might want to catch the blog post by Dan Nye, our CEO, on the LinkedIn official blog.  Dan did a great job with the intro:

One of our fundamental beliefs at LinkedIn is that the company you keep is one of the most credible reflections of who you are and what you have to offer.

Like individuals, successful companies are also built on strong networks of relationships, and LinkedIn continually strives to create the right partnerships to help us build a great service for our members, and advance our business.

Today I am happy to announce that LinkedIn has raised additional funding from our original investors and added another world-class investor to our team. Bain Capital Ventures joins our existing group of investors – Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures – and leads this round of investment at a total of $53 million.* (LinkedIn has previously raised $27 million).

The (*) is the footnote that the investment implicitly values the company at over $1 Billion in total.

As a result, there is a lot of press already published, and a lot more to come I expect.  Reading through comments already in the blogosphere, I’m definitely seeing a “Goldilocks” theme to the comments:

  • This bear thinks the price is too high
  • This bear thinks the price is too low
  • This bear thinks the price is *just* right

But I think Dan’s post reflects the true issue with an investment like this – we have a great new partner joining the LinkedIn team who believes in the vision and the value we are creating with the company and its products and services.  More importantly, it’s a reminder that investors are placing millions of dollars in trust with the LinkedIn team to fulfill this vision, and create a business of extraordinary value.  Our users also invest in us every single day with their time, their effort, their passion, and their careers.

So, I’m going to bow out of any debate on valuation, and focus on the real challenges ahead.  I’m hoping that our actions and efforts in the coming months and years will speak louder than words (or numbers, in this case).

Let me leave you with some thoughts on LinkedIn from our investors:

Who is the LinkedIn Gorilla?

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

The new LinkedIn Company Store is now online, with all new photos and products.

LinkedIn Company Store

I am a sucker for LinkedIn s.w.a.g. (Silicon Valley-speak for “Stuff We All Get”, typically company logo merchandise). So I love the store.

One of the cool features of the store is that all of the people in it are actual LinkedIn employees… in fact, many of the homepage stars (Kate, Chris, Steve) are actually on my team.

Buried in the FAQ, however, there is this gem of a photo. The LinkedIn Gorilla, modeling the new light blue LinkedIn T-Shirt:

LinkedIn Gorilla

With the last launch, I posted the picture of me at the Company Store. Digging through this version, however, you might be wondering where I am.

The answer can be found on Youtube…

The things I do to help support LinkedIn. Apparently everyone liked the Halloween costume so much that it deserved an encore performance.

Special thanks to Mario Sundar, chief blogger-in-residence and giggling voice in the background, for capturing this photo shoot on video.

Father’s Day 2008

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Another wonderful Father’s Day this year.  Simple pleasures.  We did manage to make it out to the mall for some updated photos of the family.  Here are some shots that capture a bit of Father’s Day 2008 for me.

Here is a particularly funny shot, that I didn’t even realize was funny until we saw the photos.  What can I say, it was a Zoolander moment…

Adam Nash: Gentleman, Internet Tactician

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

Unfortunately, I cannot take credit for that title. 🙂

My friend & resident blogger at LinkedIn, Mario Sundar, found this follow-up post to a comment I left on one of the “live-blog” write-ups on my Graphing Social Patterns East keynote yesterday.  In the write-up, Craig (the author) had left a slightly snarky response to an answer I had given during Q&A.  I posted a quick comment to help clarify the issue, and to express my honest thanks for the live-blog synopsis.  As you can tell from the title, Craig liked the response:

Worth noting here is how Adam–in a way befitting the professionally oriented nature of his enterprise–responded so perfectly to my intemperate post. He started with a compliment and shifted into a clarification that reframed [and corrected] what I’d written. He ended with another compliment.

This is a near-perfect display of best practices when responding to a negative post: Remain calm and respectful, do nothing to escalate a the exchange, clarify the point, keep it short. He comes off looking good, representing himself and his company very well.

I’m really glad Craig wrote this post, because it’s a topic I’m fairly passionate about.  (Plus, he gave me the title for this blog post.)  I honestly believe that the way employees behave and communicate with the outside world is part of the brand and part of the connection that a company has with it’s customers, followers, and even detractors.  More importantly, when you help participate and encourage friendly discussion, it helps you remember that we’re all just people – people with opinions, sure, but real human beings.

It sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget sometimes when you get caught up in theoretical and emotional arguments in email, groups, and blogs.

The truth of the matter is, I was really grateful to all the people who captured content from the conference.  I’ll be posting a more official summary of the material tomorrow on the LinkedIn official blog.  For tonight, here are some snippets that might entertain my family & friends who read this one.

First, here are the three live-blogs of the keynote I gave, called “LinkedIn: The Business Social Network“:

The last one is where I left the original comment that Craig was responding to.

Here are some Flickr images, courtesy of James Duncan Davidson:

This is from the keynote in the morning.

These three were from a really fun panel called “The NEED for FEEDS” that we did in the afternoon.

Anyway, while it’s good to be home, I had a lot of fun participating in GSP East 2008, and I learned a lot from the conversations I had with different people there.  We’re in such early stages of people figuring out the social internet, it’s wonderful to be a part of it all.

And Craig, just in case you read this, you should know that our Director of Communications at LinkedIn thinks I should add your article (and title) to my LinkedIn profile permanently. 🙂   Hopefully, we’ll get to chat live in the future sometime.

Dan Nye on Fox Business this Morning (LinkedIN)

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Catch it here if you haven’t seen it:

Dan Nye, CEO LinkedIn, on Fox Business this morning.

I’d embed the video, but I don’t think WordPress supports this video type (yet).

Of course, as the product guy, I’m one of the few who notices that they used old screenshots from last year… 🙂 But it was a great interview, and great coverage of LinkedIn.

Update: Here is the post on the official LinkedIn blog.

Keynote @ Graphing Social Patterns East 2008

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Just putting the finishing touches on my slides for the keynote tomorrow at the O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns East conference in Washington, D.C.

Blog post about the schedule is on the official LinkedIn blog.  My speaker profile is up on the conference website.

Extremely excited to be here… many thanks to Dave McClure for the arrangements.  If you are in the area, the LinkedIn blog has a code for a 20% discount.

The Last Cylon is Hungry for Redemption…

/ Adam Nash

Great comment on my original Battlestar Galactica post, from rebelsnoopy:

rebelsnoopy, on June 7th, 2008 at 1:52 am Said:

From reading peoples theories about who the last Cylon is. People always assume that whomever it is will suffer while they are seeking redemption.

Hybrid prophecy/Razor: “And the fifth, though still in the shadow yet clawing for the light, hungry for redemption, that will only come in the howl of terrible suffering”

I suggest that the last cylon wont suffer.

But that someone else in the fleet, and I really think the people in the fleet will suffer. There will be another terrible tragedy and this last Cylon will do something incredible to save the Colonial fleet. Therefore redeeming him/herself.

That is exactly right.

The last cylon isn’t hungry for redemption for something they did wrong… they are hungry for redemption for what the Cylons did by committing genocide against the 12 colonies.

My guess is that these last two episodes of the half season get us to the reveal of the fifth cylon.  I then believe that the last 10 episodes of the final season will be the story arc around Earth & resolution.

Using Time Machine to Migrate from PowerPC to Intel

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

I ran a very interesting experiment last night… and I didn’t even mean to do it.

As you probably know by now, my PowerMac G5 died last Friday.  (Apple *still* hasn’t figured out why).  In any case, the new Mac Pro arrived yesterday, and it was my first opportunity to really put Time Machine to the only test that counts – restore.

When I booted the Mac Pro for the first time, it asked if I wanted to restore the machine from a Time Machine backup.  I said yes, without thinking, because it seemed like an obvious way to get back up and running as soon as possible.

It took about 3+ hours to restore over 200GB, but after the long install, I had my computer largely working as I left it.  The last Time Machine backup was literally maybe 37 minutes before the final crash, and everything was restored.  Documents I expected.   Applications I expected.  Then I noticed it also migrated System & Library files… uh oh.

The Mac Pro is Intel-based.  The PowerMac is PowerPC-based.  I suddenly became very aware of the problems that I might have caused.

I was able to easily walk through my applications one by one to check whether they were Universal or PowerPC.  Most were already Universal, but a few were PowerPC, like older versions of Acrobat Reader, Stuffit Expander, and some video applications.  I deleted them, and downloaded new Intel versions… likely a good housecleaning anyway.  (I even found a few Mac OS Classic applications in there!)

Unfortunately, the world of extensions and bundles loaded by Mac OS X was a little mysterious to me, especially with regard to things like control panels, menu extensions, background services, etc.  I was worried I would need to do a clean install to fix everything.  Of course, the system seems fine, but I was worried nonetheless.

Well, I have good news.

It looks like there are limitations to the Mac OS X Rosetta technology that prevent Intel-based applications from loading PowerPC bundles.  As a result, most extensions, etc that are not Universal won’t load.  Harmless.

I also found a great tip on Mac OS X Hints, which I wanted to share here.  You can use the Activity Monitor application to tell which processes are running PowerPC or Intel.  Here is how you do it:

  1. Launch Activity Monitor.  It’s in your Utilities folder, which is in Applications.
  2. Right-click on the title of the table, and check off “Kind”
  3. You will now have a column that says “PowerPC” or “Intel”

The good news for me tonight is that only two processes running are PowerPC:  Quicken 2007 (which I guess I need to replace), and the Disk Warrior Hard Drive Daemon (likely an upgrade issue).

In fact, the only bad news I’ve gotten so far on the migration is that the TWAIN driver for my scanner, an Epson Perfection 1660 Photo is PowerPC only, so it requires me to set Adobe Photoshop CS3 to Rosetta-mode.  Hello, Epson, I upgraded to CS3 specifically so it could run natively on Intel…

I’ll likely be hitting people up for suggestions on either native drivers, or a new photo scanner pretty soon.