David Crow

Connector of dots. Maker of lines. Rider of slopes.

davidcrow

Kindle SF

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It has been 2 years since my Kindle arrived (September 2, 2010 to be exact). Sure not exactly an early adopter, it was more than 3 years after the initial launch of the device and part of the product and marketing blitz that allowed Kindle books to outsell print books in Q4 2010. And for the most part I have switched my consumption to digital books. Not including technical books (thank you O’Reilly), I have purchased and read 85 science fiction books on the Kindle (almost 1 book per week).

I started reading digital editions of Hugo and Nebula award winners. I started with John Scalzi’s
award winning Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, and Zoe’s Tale. These books are amazing, they are a great romp through crazy military and technology. I continued with The Evolutionary Void continuation of the Void Trilogy (which was part of Peter F Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga including Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained possibly 2 of my favorite books in the past 10 years). I was waiting for new new releases from Charles Stross, Alastair Reynolds, Richard Morgan, Cory Doctorow and Orson Scott Card. While waiting I decided to switch strategies, I would try to find books that were $0.99-$2.99 in price. My reasoning, my engagement per book was just greater than 7 days, I figured like renting a movie (approximately $5.99 for 2 hours on iTunes HD) that would be my threshold. Unless a book was part of a series I had read previously, or an author I was following my limit was $2.99/book.

There are a lot of interesting books but here are my favorite series and authors. What are you reading?

Wool by Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey Wool Omnibus

This might be the best SF I have read in a long time. The Wool series is one of the most engaging dystopian futures I have read. I starting reading based on a tweet by John Lilly. It’s just an amazing series.

Spinward Fringe by Randolph Lalonde

Another Canadian. This one living in Sudbury. Like many others I’m waiting Broadcasts 7 & 8. This incorporated a lot of future tech I have seen elsewhere but it is the characters and the story lines that make it worth the read.

Spinward Fringe - Broadcast 3: Triton

Prides of Sol by Rod Rogers

Vaughn Heppner

Invasion AlaskaVaughn Heppner is a Canadian living in California. Hoping this counts as Can-Con. The Doom Star series is a little out there – genetic engineering, cyborgs, space battles, subterranean cities. But it’s a fun read, the characters are relatable

Evan Currie


Another Canadian. Hmmm, I wonder if there is a trend. The Warrior’s Wings series is one of my recent favourites. It’s great romp of military science fiction.

BV Larson Follow @bvlarson

This is a strange series. I disliked BV Larson’s Mech series, I disliked the books so much that for the first time I did not finish the series. But I have enjoyed the expanding Star Force Series. The simplicity of programmed circuits and logic for a species is very interesting, particularly when matched against the less than binary humans.

Maker’s mode

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It has been a long time since I built anything. I was trying to think through my last set of projects where I did the “making”.

  • Influitive – I started Influitive with Mark Organ (@markorgan) in the fall of 2010. We built the first set of mockups, screen flows, wireframes and prototypes with a very small team. It was a ton of fun, it wasn’t easy, but it was fun.
  • Spadina Optometry – I have the unfortunate task of being the cobbler. It’s nothing fancy, Wordrpress on Dreamhost but it’s HTML5, CSS and some PHP to keep me engaged.
  • StartupNorth/DemoCamp/Founders & Funders – StartupNorth is a blog, written, primarily, 3 guys about Canadian startups and the issues that affect high tech, high potential growth software/SaaS/mobile/etc. companies in Canada. This was about building connections and helping to facilitate a community in Toronto (and across Canada). But StartupEmpire was in 2008, the last DemoCamp was back in 2011. But no one expects that StartupNorth is set to be a game changing media play, it’s a regional blog about high tech entrepreneurship and emerging business models and technology.

I look at my friends that are all very successful in different ways:

They are all making stuff. Whether it is communities, sensor networks, conferences, software companies, it seems to be about making. And they are not alone:

What is making?

Authors produce books. Musicians produce albums (and tours). Vinters produce wine. Master distillers produce whisky. Developers produce software. Entrepreneurs produce companies. I think I need to get my head around making.

“MAKE unites, inspires, informs, and entertains a growing community of resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages. MAKE celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your will. The MAKE audience continues to be a growing culture and community that believes in bettering ourselves, our environment, our educational system—our entire world. This is much more than an audience, it’s a worldwide movement that Make is leading—we call it the Maker Movement.” From Make Magazine

When  I look back on the projects, activities, and companies I had the most fun being a part of in the past 15 years since grad school, they all involved making. Undertaking projects in “backyards, basements and garages”. Some were successful, others were less successful but just as much, maybe more fun.

I’m starting to think rather than looking for a job, I need to start to look for what I’m going to make.

Time to undertake a new project.

Under-related Resources

 

My current tools

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I always found looking at the tools that others used a little voyeuristic, but often insightful. Check out the what Michael Arrington used in 2010. Here is my list, but I’m curious at what the indispensable tools and applications that John Lilly, Adam Nash, Mark MacLeod, Jevon MacDonald, April Dunford, Ali Asaria, Dan Martell, Dave McClure, and others. What are you using?

My List

  • Sparrow – Best GMail client for the iPhone hands down.
  • Calvetica – Great minimalist calendar replacement for the default Calendar app on iPhone.
  • Tweetbot
  • Evernote – It syncs across the iPhone, MacBook Air and Mac Mini I use regularly for notes and to do lists. Though I’m having to add more personal structure to my to do lists to make this work.
  • Dropbox – Feels like a shared file system between the different devices.
  • Rapportive – I have switched back to the GMail web interface solely because of the Rapportive integration.
  • WriteThat.Name – This is best behind the scenes application. It automatically updates your Google Contacts with changes in people’s signature lines.
  • Boomerang – Bring it back to your inbox. Need I say anymore.
  • Alfred – I switched from Quicksilver in the past year – see the LifeHacker review. I hate when I don’t have ⌘-SPACE mapped to Alfred.
  • RescueTime
  • Prismatic – This has replaced Summify for me. It is simply the best discovery application I have used.
  • SublimeText2 and TextMate though I’m very interested in Coda 2.
  • TweetDeck – I am underwhelmed with TweetDeck experience and performance. I am looking at Engag.io and Bottlenose as replacements, but neither offer exactly what I’m looking for.
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • WordPress – I have blogs hosted on EC2, VMFarms and DreamHost.
  • Hipstamatic – It posts to Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr and other sites. The lenses, films are just enough to make it look like I can be a fake photographer.
  • 1Password – I have been using the free version. I probably just need to suck it up and spend the $14.99 on the Pro version.
  • CardMunch – I try to upload every business card I receive before the end of the meeting.
  • Kindle – I seem to read 90% of my content in the Kindle app or on the Kindle.

There are a number of other tools that I’m enamored, but not currently using with including:

Blogging More

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I wrote my first blog post for DavidCrow.ca, roughly 11 years ago on the day Douglas Adams passed away from a heart attack.  It is hard to believe that I have been doing this unsuccessfully for 11 years. Strangely, I had my heart attack roughly 5 years later on May 30, 2006, maybe heart trouble is the common thread through my blog.

I need to get in the habit of blogging more. I have been woefully neglectful of my blog. Unlike Joey, who seems to have found time to blog multiple times per day. I need to follow the advice of Mark Suster and Fred Wilson (more), and just make blogging part of my daily activities. (I probably need to try to make other things like a walking desk part of my daily activities too). I’ve written a lot of posts for StartupNorth, but I haven’t been as dedicated to my own blog.

Here are some of my favorite posts:

 Back to it I guess.

UW VeloCity Evolving

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December 31, 2011 marked the end of my reign as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) at UW VeloCity. The VeloCity residence announced a new leadership team before Christmas Holiday. I’m still affiliated, I’m still an alumni and I’m still an avid supporter.

I was lucky enough to spend 6 months with the students and their companies in Waterloo. I made the trek down the 401 to Waterloo almost every Tuesday night for dinner. The dinners were modelled after the YCombinator dinners. We brought in our friends and acquaintances from the world of high tech entrepreneurship to talk to the students. To share their experiences starting companies, raising funding, working with cofounders, etc. The goal was to provide a social, educational experience for the students and hopefully teach them something about the industry and software culture.

I was an undergraduate back in the early 90s. I wrote Objective-C on NeXTSTEP boxes. But no one at Waterloo really promoted starting a software company as a career path, maybe I’m just an idiot, but I never thought that I could start a company and sell the software I was writing. There were a few startups (MKS, RIM, Maplesoft) but this wasn’t a career path that was promoted. You could argue may this was because I was in the Kinesiology department. But spent a significant portion of my time in CS and SYSDE (SYSDE142, 342, 542 and others). The closest was a class about database management in the department of Management Sciences but it definitely wasn’t about entrepreneurship (how much do I still hate Access).

It wasn’t that hadn’t been exposed to entrepreneurship. I grew up in an entrepreneurial household, my Dad had left Clarkson Gordon to start his own small business accounting and consulting firm in the early 1980s. And my first real job was with a small usability consulitng firm, but I thought that I would get a job at CIBC or IBM or maybe Delrina. I was never provided the skills, the experience or even the awareness that entrepreneurship (software entrepreneurship) was a career path. I went to CMU for graduate work, and I was exposed to founders from MIT, CMU, Stanford and other places. My first job after grad school, I did research at UIUC and was exposed to things like early Netscape. But it wasn’t until I started working at Trilogy Software with a bunch of Stanford graduates did it become clear that I could start a software company. I always wished that someone had shown me entrepreneurship (beyond consulting) as a career path.

My view about VeloCity comes back to my own experiences at UWaterloo. And the role that VeloCity needs to play in exposing and educating UW students about high-tech entrepreneurship. It will be great to see the evolution with Mike Kirkup (LinkedIn, @mikekirkup) and Brett Shellhammer (LinkedIn, @bashome). VeloCity represents something that wasn’t available to me when I was a UW student. For me, VeloCity represents the next stage of evolution for the University of Waterloo cooperative education program:

” the solution was not just classroom instruction but “the co-operative program,” which offered students alternating terms of paid work in industry to get practical experience.”

Velocity feels like a starting ground for the next set of education at Waterloo. With the launch of MITx in addition to Open Courseware, MIT is attempting to change the face of higher education. There is inspiration and direction from TED, TEDx, and SingularityU. There is also the rise of self-learning platforms like Codeacademy, Khan Academy and others. It is time that UWaterloo explored evolving the cooperative education program beyond the constraints of the existing program. For me VeloCity represents the start of a new academic experience.

I can’t wait to be a part of what is next.