spikes

Just finished The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the pullitzer prize this year. I highly recommend it. It doesn't fit a traditional fiction genre and is especially poignant if you grew up a geek.

Just finished a series of books on Winston Churchill

I just finished 3 books on Winston Churchill. They were amazing, I highly recommend the whole series especially if you have a lot of time on your hands.

The Last Lion: Visions of Glory

The Last Lion: Alone

It's hard to believe you can read over 1,000 pages and only get to the start of when he becomes PM. To finish off his whole career you can read Churchill: A life

Reality is sometimes stranger than fiction.

WSJ awards force.com a technology innovation prize

Here's what the WSJ says about force.com.

COMPUTING SYSTEMS

Salesforce.com Inc. of San Francisco was the top pick in this category. The company made its name selling software as a service -- applications that are used online instead of being installed in a corporate data center. Its winning entry takes this concept and applies it to a suite of tools that a company can use to build its own customized business applications that are developed and delivered over the Internet.

The suite, called Force.com, provides the building blocks for payroll, accounts-receivables and expense-reporting systems and other common applications, and it requires minimal programming skills. Introduced in 2007, Force.com has about 47,000 users.

Other companies are developing similar "cloud computing" services, in which companies access computing power as needed, the way they buy electricity, without the need to run their own servers and software. Along with Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc., "Salesforce is one of the leaders in this trend," says Asheem Chandna, a partner at venture-capital firm Greylock Partners and one of the Innovation Awards judges. "It's certainly a key direction where computing is heading."

Books from this summer

Here is this summer's reading list, most of it is fiction with two non-fiction books bracketing the light summer fare.

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Great story about Greg Mortenson's quest to bring education to pakistan.

The Hidden River by Kate Grenville

Page turner that cover's a convicts quest to make it in Australia.

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

Treatise on love, loss and redemption set in cape cod.

The Pleasure of My Company Steve Martin

Fun book on obsession, a little too happy ending for my taste.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

Best read in short spurts.

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

The father of public health and his story. Cholera sucks, it turns out...

Salesforce mobile for the iphone

Our new client for the iphone went live last week. It was a great effort by the entire iphone team to hit the release of Apple's appstore . It was really great that our icon was on the front page.

Just finished "The cities of the plain" by C. McCarthy

It is rare to find an author like Cormac McCarthy. He writes beautifully spare prose and makes a knife fight, roping wild dogs and lighting a cigarette on a corner all have the same descriptive depth and narrative interest. I read his border trilogy recently and believe it to be one of the best works of modern fiction I have ever read. He doesn't shy away from death and love and this trilogy is a eulogy for the eclipsed life of the cowboy in the west.

The last remodel mile

So we are pretty much done with our remodel, it only cost twice what we thought it would + 20%.

The upstairs bathroom floor was done by Sarah Myers:

Here's the upstairs with a more finished look

The kitchen with the backsplash in:

A close up of the tile in the kitchen:

So the remodel is over and we survived.

a major provider of cloud computer infrastructure

It's interesting, salesforce is finally taking a seat at the on-demand cloud computing infrastructure table.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2008/05/22/salesforcecom-a-play-on-gulp-web-30/

MacMillan contends that the company is morphing from the leader in on-demand CRM software to “a major provider of cloud computer infrastructure.” (Which is to say, Web 3.0.) “If customers keep track with the vision, management executes and keeps good terms with other disruptive players, we think the opportunity could be many times the size of the CRM market,” he writes.

MacMillan notes that CRM still generates most of the company’s sales from sales force automation. But he notes that the company has opened up its infrastructure as a platform and hopes third parties will develop more tactical applications. “While it is a big bet, nascent and not exactly unique [Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) have similar offerings] we think CRM is gaining significant mind share within customers and from the third party developer community,” he writes.

Agile management talk

Steve Greene and I will be talking in the bay area again at http://www.ieee-scv-ems.org/meetings/mtg.htm?nav_year=2007&meetingdate=2008-06-05&part=1

June 6th, 2008

Management Forum

Topic: Extraordinary Results for an Enterprise Agile Revolution
Presented by: Steve Greene & Chris Fry

After Dinner Presentation

Topic: Globalization And Why It Works
Presented by: Kevin Walsh

horizontal rule
bullet Time:
bullet 6:00 PM: Registration
bullet 6:30 PM: Management Forum
bullet 7:00 PM: Dinner (See the menu if no pop-up, click here)
bullet 7:30 PM: After Dinner Presentation
bullet Place: RAMADA INN
1217 Wildwood Ave, Sunnyvale CA 94089 (See Meeting Map)
bullet Cost: (to defray expenses for dinner)
bullet $25 for IEEE members; $30 for non-members with reservations by 12:00PM 06/03/2008
bullet Special $10 rate for IEEE Student Members (with IEEE Student Member Card)
bullet $5 additional (members or not) after 12:00PM 06/03/2008
bullet Pay at the door; cash or checks only -- no credit cards

Just got back from dreamforce Europe

I just got back from dreamforce Europe. It was a lot of fun to hang out in London and see where the European market is and what the hot topics were.

One of the best things was the salesforce colored cabs:

There was a lot of interest in mobile platforms, integration, apex code and visualforce.

Steve put our talk up

Steve Greene put up our Chicago Scrum gathering talk. We had a great time, saw Ken Schwaber and Mike Cohn, hung out in Chicago. I even got to go by the offices of 37 signals which was interesting.

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Just finished "Blood Meridian"

I just finished "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy. I'm starting on all the pretty horses. I feel that I missed something in Blood Meridian, it was a good book, but I think I missed the main metaphor. I did like the section where the Judge character explained why war was the ultimate game: because you have to wager the ultimate bet, your life.

Ipod Cake

Maddie's cake this year was an ipod cake. It was fun to make and only took a couple hours:

Just finished 'Then we came to the end'

I just finished Josh Ferris's "then we came to the end," it covers office humor with a slight edge. Another summer reading recommendation. I'm going back to Cormac McCarthy and am going to read "The Border Trilogy" and "Blood Meridian."

Finishing touches

We are getting so close, finishing touches are going in, living room is painted, downstairs is tiled and painted, lights are going in:

My favorite light (from Metro Lighting in Berkeley):

The finished sink in the downstairs bath:

The kitchen window:

The kitchen from the living room:

And finally a new washer dryer: