But in November we went to visit some family for Thanksgiving and I spent a few days working while standing up at a breakfast bar. And surprise, surprise: it was amazing! Standing up to work gives me an energy and urgency that I just don’t get when I’m sitting down. I did it for three days and was completely convinced at the end.

Once home, I gathered all the materials necessary to setup my own temporary standing desk. I wanted to at least try it for a month or two before investing in an expensive desk and getting rid of my old un-enlightened sitting desk.

That first week with the standing desk was amazing. I felt more productive, more present, more purposeful. I know that sounds stupid for such a minor change, but isn’t that what great lifehacks are all about? All was right with the world and I was zooming.

But after about two weeks, something began to shift. My heels began to hurt like crazy, especially in the morning. A Google search revealed that I might have the beginnings of plantar fasciitis, a nasty-sounding condition. Since Christmas was coming up and we were traveling around, I was able to stay off my feet for most of the next couple weeks, so that helped the pain dissipate.

So for the last couple weeks, I’ve been continuing to stand, but there’s just something not quite right. I’m no longer in pain per-se, but it’s just not comfortable anymore. It’s hard to focus and concentrate, because I just want to sit down. I find myself constantly leaning forward to take some of the weight off my feet, and spending large parts of the day working at Starbucks, “just to get out of the house”. I think it’s more a subconscious excuse to sit down.

Yesterday I finally caved and moved my whole setup back to my normal desk. I’m pretty happy about it. Ultimately, I love the idea of standing, but only part of the time. I think I would want to stand for more like 30-40%. Definitely not 100%. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it’s really healthy to be standing in one place all day like that.

My next step is to get a motorized adjustable desk so I can sit and stand without having to shift my computer, monitor, and keyboard around. Most of the adjustable desks are really expensive, but GeekDesk sells some more affordable ones that look like they’d be a great fit for my needs. Still not cheap, but with the amount of time I spend at my desk, it’s worth it to me to invest in good stuff.

I’m wondering if I’m alone: have you successfully done the standing desk thing for more than a month or two? Any pain or other issues? Am I doing something wrong? Some of my friends who have tried standing desks eventually just got a stool, which admittedly does seem like a cheaper solution than a motorized desk. Let me know what’s worked for you.

Related posts:

1. How I filled two dumpsters and went paperless with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500
2. Why I started reading more once I got rid of my books
3. 21times startup sprint wrap-up

Disclaimer: This is a review of The Personal MBA. I have no prior relationship with Josh Kaufman, the author, and I am not being compensated for this review. However, Josh did send me an unsolicited pre-release copy of the book.

I started writing a long book review of The Personal MBA , but let’s face it, you don’t really care about this book. But you do probably care about results, and whether you’re an entrepreneur, soon-to-be entrepreneur, or even just a manager at BigCo, this book can help you get 80% of the knowledge that you’d retain a couple years after getting your MBA. The book isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely a very useful guide for understanding business at a high level, so if you’re not interested in the whole review, just get the book. Otherwise, read on:

What It Covers

The Personal MBA is actually three books, in my opinion. The first third covers the major business functions like product development, marketing, finance, and overarching concepts of value creation and delivery. The second third of the book is an excellent overview of a lot of different personal and group productivity systems and theories. Finally, the last third of the book covers business systems and how to create, analyze, and optimize them. This last section is the most abstract, but the author does a good job of giving examples to help the reader from getting too confused.

Who It’s For

You should read this book if you want to have a solid grasp of the different business functions and how they interact, as well as a lot of practical ideas and knowledge on actually getting things done. A good friend of mine quit her job earlier this year to branch off on her own, but she’s also been toying with going back to school, perhaps for an MBA. She feels like she doesn’t have a solid enough foundation in business fundamentals, and that’s exactly the type of person this book was meant for (I’m giving her my copy, in fact). But even if you do have a strong background in business and read lots of books about business, you should still read this book, because it does an excellent job of tying together a lot of concepts that you’re already familiar with.

Why It’s Different

My undergrad degree is in business and getting my MBA is a long-standing interest of mine, so I assumed that The Personal MBA would be an overview of the standard business theories and fundamentals, and that i would be familiar with all of it. Well, I was familiar with most of the concepts, but the way the book covers them adds a lot of value.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, much of my undergrad classes and texts covered business from a 1950s perspective, assuming that you’d be getting a job in a large corporation and you’d have to go really deep into the subject of operations management, or international finance, for example. And now that i look back and compare the last few years since I graduated with what I learned in school, I realize that the theory was solid, but it was missing two things:

First, I never had any kind of class that looked at business from a more holistic position and really tried to weave together all the functions like operations, marketing, and finance to explain how they work together in enterprises of all sizes, especially small companies.

Second, my classes prepared students to be employees of business, not to create them. Even my classes on entrepreneurship weren’t reflective of what entrepreneurship looks like in the 21st century, particularly in a knowledge economy. I don’t think any of my classes mentioned shadow testing or dry testing, for example, and if they did, they really dropped the ball on explaining how important and valuable they can be.

The Personal MBA does a really great job at explaining business in a way that would be relevant for the majority of people starting a small business today, especially a technology or web startup. It’s chock full of recent examples of startups and small businesses that have used the principles discussed to win.

Problems

I have a few nitpicks, like it would have been nice to see a book recommendation at the end of each concept rather than all clumped together into an appendix, and I think the book could have benefited greatly by a running narrative of two or three friends each starting or purchasing different types of businesses that the trickier or more abstract concepts could have used as running examples. But these are relatively minor issues in an otherwise well-executed book.

Conclusion

Overall, I’d give the book a 4/5 and recommend it for most readers. It’s a good reference and refresher even for those who already know the concepts, and for those without a good understanding of the concepts, it’s an invaluable look at business from a holistic point of view. Order it here.

Ultimately, this is a very practical book about how we can create more value, which is something that all of use could use more of. I wish I’d had it before starting my business degree.

Related posts:

1. Why startups are better than business school
2. My assessment of the benefits of an MBA from a top school
3. A Few Favorite Personal Finance Books

What is it?

The Pomodoro Technique is a very simple time management method that breaks down tasks into timed 25-minute chunks. You start by estimating how many “pomodoros” a given task will take you. A physical or software timer is set for 25 minutes and you start working. If you finish before the 25 mins are up, you spend the rest of the time reviewing or polishing your work. After each pomodoro, you take a 5-minute break before beginning the next one. After every four pomodoros, you take a longer 15-20 minute break. Other users have found different time cycles to be helpful, but the basic concept remains similar.

For whatever reason, the technique is popular with software developers, which is how I first heard about it.

Where it came from

An Italian named Francesco Cirillo developed the technique in the late 1980s while a university student. He named it after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that he used to time his tasks (pomodoro means tomato in Italian). As with all things successful on the Internet, Cirillo has developed the technique into a brand, with books, consulting, and certification programs. However, you can benefit without any of that.

Why it works

For me, the biggest benefit is that the technique very effectively busts procrastination. I mean, come on, I can’t work on something for 25 freaking minutes?! So I spin the timer just to get it over with, and once I get into it, I usually find that the thing I was putting off isn’t that bad. I use a physical timer and I think the deliberate, tactical feel of spinning a timer also encourages focused action.

The forced taking of breaks and the discipline of estimating the amount of time needed to complete tasks are also very beneficial, but the focus and anti-procrastination benefits are the big ones for me.

Finally, I find it very helpful as a measure of the minimum amount of time needed on each of my projects every day.

Related concepts (timeboxing)

The Pomodoro Technique is related to timeboxing, iterative development, and (especially) dashes. It’s also often presented as an alternative to Getting Things Done, but I’ve used them together very effectively, by relying on GTD to keep track of what needs to be done, and using pomodoros to actually get them done.

Tools

I use a cheap kitchen timer. You could go the more traditional route and get this one, or you can use one of the software tools out there. Here are the two most popular I’ve seen and tried out. They’re both solid:

Focus Booster (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Pomodoro (Mac)

Unsurprisingly, there’s also a slew of iPhone, iPad, and Android apps as well. I haven’t used any of them, but I recommend checking them out on iTunes and the Android app store.

If you’ve created a pomodoro app, post it in the comments and I’ll update this list to include it.

Blog posts and articles

Check out the official PomodoroTechnique.com.

There’s a Wikipedia entry on the Pomodoro Technique.

Definitely check out The Pomodoro Technique for software developers.

I’ve written a few times about it.

It’s been covered in the Wall Street Journal, the Unofficial Apple Weblog, Gigaom, Lifehacker, and many more.

Conclusion

Like anything, the technique isn’t magic and will require a little work and discipline from you, but I’ve found it beneficial, especially to get over the initial hurdle of getting started. If you’ve found it useful (or not), have written about it, created an app for it, or just have an opinion, post in the comments.

Related posts:

1. The Pomodoro Technique
2. Check out the new DailyPath Trail Guide (a daily guide to moving forward)
3. I procrastinate because I care

Photo by emdot

I’ve written before about how I started reading a lot when I was pretty young, and I’ve kept reading throughout my life. Books have a very special ability to take you to new places, to open up new worlds, to introduce and explain fascinating things. It boggles my mind how few people are readers; how else do you find out about the world beyond your front door?

So I’ve been collecting books for a long time, on a wide array of topics, both fiction and non-fiction. I had between 500-1000 books in 2009 when I started getting rid of some, and that doesn’t count the many books I’ve given away, sold, or read via the library.

I’m not exactly sure what made me want to get rid of the books in the first place; I think a big part was just being tired of moving them around, and acquiring a taste for minimalism and owning less stuff. My books at the time made up the bulk of my possessions, so they were a natural place to start. The first step was just getting rid of all the books that I had no intention of reading again, which cut my collection in half. This was an improvement in terms of reducing clutter, and since I had no intention of reading those particular books again, I hadn’t lost much.

When you start to get rid of stuff, it’s very easy to get addicted. Throwing or giving things away is incredibly liberating, and after a couple days, you realize just how little you probably want or need a lot of other things that escaped the trash last time. So it was with my books; getting rid of half of them just left me dissatisfied with the huge pile that still remained.

But at the same time, I really do love books, and the books that were left on my shelf at this time represented some great memories. Each one was a little piece of me, something that had changed my life in some way, some small, some big, but they had all had an impact. How could I get rid of them?

Enter the Kindle. Ebook readers had been around for years Amazon released the Kindle in late 2007, but I kept hearing about it throughout 2008, so when they released the Kindle 2 in early 2009, I started taking a closer look. I really liked what I saw, especially since so many of my favorite books were already on the platform. This was a crucial part of the decision for me, since I do occasionally re-read books that I’ve enjoyed.

I finally got my Kindle in August 2009 and that was that. Within a few weeks, I had gotten rid of all the books that were available on Kindle (plus a bunch that weren’t). All my books now fit on one shelf in my small bookcase, and I expect to cut that in half again in the next six months. The only books I didn’t get rid of are some specific technical books that don’t work well with the Kindle format (more on this below) and some out-of-print books from my childhood.

The advantages have been numerous, but here’s the big ones:

I have much less clutter and stuff now. This is obviously a personal taste issue, but it’s so nice to have less stuff. It’s just so much more relaxing, and I highly recommend it.

I read a lot more. This is ultimately what it’s all about. I can now carry my entire library with me almost everywhere I got, and I do. This has enabled me to read whatever I feel like reading whenever I feel like reading it. I don’t have to choose between taking boots or books on vacation. I don’t have to lug heavy books on the subway. I can carry thousands of books with me everywhere I got, and access to hundreds of thousands more with just a few clicks.

Now, the transition hasn’t been without issues. Here’s a few of the disadvantages:

I miss the feel of an actual paper book. Another personal taste issue, but it is nice to be able to hold a physical book.

Not great for technical, visual, or reference books. Flipping around in the Kindle is a pain, and it doesn’t handle large diagrams or code formatting well, so I’ve still got a lot of technical and visual books. However, I expect this disadvantage to disappear somewhat quickly as the technology matures.

Can’t loan books to friends. However, this is a minor issue for me now.

Few actual books in our house. One of the things I do wonder about is the effect of a “bookless” house on my future children. Studies have shown that growing up in a house with more books has more of an effect on kids than their parents’ education level. Hopefully someone will do a study to verify if digital books have the same effect, and if not, I can go buy a few thousand books when we have kids.

Ultimately, though I think the benefits far, far outweigh the drawbacks. The purpose of books isn’t to impress friends or feel good every time you look at your bookshelf. They’re there to transfer information from one person to (many) others. Ebooks are more efficient at accomplishing that goal, and they come with some many advantages that I think they’ll own 95% of the market in ten years. Just like people still buy records, I think paper books won’t disappear completely, but our kids will have little exposure to them and will probably make fun of us for using them. At the end of the day, almost anything that can be digitized, will be. For better or worse, books are no exception.

If you love to read and you want to read more, get started today.

Related posts:

1. Why it doesn’t bother me that I can’t share Kindle books
2. A Few Favorite Personal Finance Books
3. How I filled two dumpsters and went paperless with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500

My primary motivation in reading the book was to develop discipline, so I resolved to do it as recommended; I read each scroll 3 times a day, once when I woke up, once at lunch, and once before bed. Monday through Friday, for five weeks per scroll, then on to the next. It took almost a year to get through all ten, but as of last week, I finished without missing a single reading.

Now, for full disclosure, I should point out that I tried to do this back in 2007 and failed after a few months. I was doing it seven days a week back then, which I think had a dramatic effect on my ability to keep up with it. Having a break on the weekends has been crucial to all of my daily habits, giving me a chance to relax without worrying about whether I should be doing something.

So would I read this book again? Without hesitation. The book isn’t mystical or weird or exciting. It’s basically just a simple collection of some positive reminders of ways to live, wrapped in a plan for learning self-discipline. And it gets pretty dull at times, but I didn’t mind that. It seemed like that’s what building discipline should feel like. I enjoyed the book so much that I’m still reading a scroll once per day, so I rotate through all ten every two weeks. They’re good reminders of what it means to live to the fullest. Here’s a short passage from one of the scrolls:

I will persist until I succeed.

Henceforth, I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a mighty oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today.

I will be liken to the rain drop which washes away the mountain; the ant who devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking.

I will persist until I succeed.

~Scroll III, The Greatest Secret in the World

I know what you’re thinking: “Well, duh. Why would I need to read this more than once?” No, the message isn’t complicated, but the kind of thing everyone would do well to remember. And reading that phrase more than a thousand times definitely drills it into your brain. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, I recommend the book. It’s not easy, but few good things are.

PS – The book is $8 from Amazon, and well worth it. As with all of the books I recommend, if you feel like it would improve your life but you genuinely can’t afford it, please email me and I’ll send you a copy. You can do something nice in return like telling someone about this blog, but I’d really hate for someone to miss out on a life-changing book because they couldn’t afford it.

Related posts:

1. Introducing 21times: Build and launch an app in the month of November
2. The World As I (will) See It – Ten Paradigm Changes I’ll Live to See
3. The secret to hitting the Hacker News front page (and what it’s worth)

I should also note that my paperless efforts don’t just stop at recordkeeping; I’ve gotten rid of more than 95% of my books over the last year, replacing the ones I really like with digital versions on my Kindle. My paper books now all fit on one small shelf in my office. Even then, a significant portion of those books are technical books that I need for current projects, and can be disposed of once the projects are complete.

Why go paperless?

Minimalism - I had box after box of paperwork; I rarely throw out documents, and between jobs, freelance work, moving four times in the last five years, and owning multiple real estate properties, the paperwork was really piling up. It feels so good to have an empty closet and office again, instead of having to pick my way through boxes of old paperwork I’ll never look at again (probably!).

Convenience - Organizing and trying to find things in all that paperwork was a huge pain. Additionally, it can only be accessed when I’m at home. What if we’re abroad and someone needs a document that’s only in my office? Finally, there’s the issue of never needing to think about whether I should keep something. I scan and keep everything. Why not? Storage is so cheap it’s ridiculous.

Security - Many people wouldn’t want to convert all their documents to electronic form because of security concerns but I see it just the opposite. A break-in to my house is more plausible to me than a break-in to Amazon’s S3 storage service. Not to mention the fact that there’s only a single copy of most of these paper documents, which could be destroyed by fire, flood, earthquake, etc. It’s actually a lot less risky to have multiple copies on secure servers in different parts of the country.

Isn’t scanning (and shredding) all that a huge pain?

Yes. And no. It’s not fun, but I use an amazing sheet-fed scanner called the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M (or S1500 for the PC version). It’s not cheap, but this thing is amazing. It’s very fast, does double-sided scans, detects blank pages, handles different sizes of paper, and creates PDFs that look just like the document you just scanned. But best of all, it very rarely jams. You can put in a stack of 50 pages and push the button and away it goes. Very highly recommended, but don’t just take my word for it; check out all these reviews.

For shredding, I picked up the Fellowes Powershred W-11C Cross-Cut Shredder. Also not super cheap, and pretty noisy (what shredder isn’t), but it’ll chew through a thousand pages in about 10 mins. Very gratifying to watch all your boxes of paper slowly turn into confetti after going through the scanner and then the shredder.

How I keep it all organized

Ok, so I’m scanning thousands of pages and I’m going to need to find things again later, right? So how do I keep all these many thousands of pages organized, grouped, and sorted? I don’t. One of the amazing features of the ScanSnap is that it does very high-quality Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the documents, converting all the images of text into text that can be indexed and searched by OS X. This feature works amazingly well. For example, here’s me searching for “Marc New York” in a PDF scan of the little care booklet that came with my leather jacket (yes, I scanned this).

As you can see, it works very well. This scan probably took less than 5 seconds to run through the ScanSnap and analyze for OCR. And this indexed text is available for Spotlight to search as well, so if I type “Marc New York” into Spotlight, this care booklet PDF pops up, as does the receipt from Macy’s where I bought the jacket. If I want to find my GMAT score report, I type “GMAT” and up pops my official score report from 2005, reproduced perfectly.

This focus on search over filing took some getting used to for me, but it’s been so reliable, I’m feeling good about it. Obviously, I need to know what I’m looking for, so I’ve had the occasion once or twice where I’ve had to search for something more general that’s related, then go through all the results to find what I need. To solve that, I’m keeping all the PDFs in different folders by year. And I also try to group all my scans together into related batches. So I have PDFs for utility bills that have over 100 pages, instead of 100 separate documents for each utility bill. This means that despite scanning many thousands of pages this year, I’ve got less than 500 PDF documents. Still a pain to go through manually, but much better than 10,000 documents. And the reality is that I will never, ever need to refer to 99.9% of this again.

What about backups?

Now that all my documents are safe and sound on my computer, how do I ensure that I don’t lose them? I have a two-pronged approach: Time Machine backups on an external drive, and Dropbox. Time Machine keeps a versioned of my scans folders, so I know I can always recover copies if needed. But that won’t help me if the house burns down, so I also keep all of the scans offsite in Dropbox. The extra bonus here is that I can now access them from my iPhone and iPad from anywhere. Of course, searching them from mobile doesn’t work really, but hey, it’s better than nothing. I may actually setup another form of offsite backup as well, just to be on the safe side. We’re talking less than 10 GBs here, so it’d be pretty cheap. Any recommendations?

What paper I did keep, and why

Pretty much the only things I kept were tax records and important original documents. The original documents are obvious, and the tax records thing is a couple of different factors:

1. Receipts are actually a bit of a pain to scan, IMO. There’s a carrier sheet for the scanner, but arranging all the receipts is a pain. Much easier to stick in an envelope and be done with it. I have very few receipts for tax stuff anyway.
2. My tax documents fall across a wide spectrum of types, companies, etc. Since I don’t organize everything into folders when I scan (relying on search instead), there’s no clear way to pull out all the documents related to my 2007 taxes, for example. I’d have to search for all the different types of documents that make up that set. This is the major weakness of the system I have in place, but tax documents are the only clear example that I have of this being an issue. And I solve it just by stashing everything in a small box in my office, which I’ll shred by year as I exceed the minimum length you have to keep such things.

The whole process took longer than I thought, partly because I ended up having a lot more paperwork than I thought I did, and partly because I split it up into several sessions throughout the year. But now that it’s all done, I feel a lot better. If anyone else out there has gone paperless and has tips, please do share them. And if you’re interested in going paperless but haven’t taken the plunge, let me know if you have any questions. It’s a good feeling, and I’m looking forward to keeping my office paper-free from here on out.

Related posts:

1. Six weeks with a standing desk (and why they’re overhyped)
2. Why I started reading more once I got rid of my books
3. My new office!

A few searches later, I had turned up some possibilities:

• Eclipse
• Zend Studio
• Aptana
• Netbeans
• PHPStorm

Right off the bat, every single one of these start out sucking because of the fugly mess that is Java. Ugh. They’re slow, feel bloated, mostly don’t use the standard OS controls like file browsers, and generally feel exactly like I would expect something programmed in Java to feel. Seriously, what is the deal with Java?? (and why are there no native IDEs for OS X other than Xcode?)

Enough ranting, though. I’m here to get things done, not rant (or fawn) over tools, so I installed them and gave them each a whirl. Previously, my criteria for an IDE would have revolved mostly around PHP, but as I’ve been learning Python and just recently got an Arduino, I want something that can grow a little more with me. So this rules out Zend and PHPStorm right off the bat, since they’re designed for PHP specifically. If I’ve been unfair with that assessment, let me know.

This leaves Eclipse, Aptana (which is based on Eclipse), and Netbeans. My criteria aren’t terribly complicated, I don’t think:

1. Easily themable (I can’t handle black text on a white background)
2. Good code completion and debug support
3. Support for PHP, Python, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and C
4. Can handle frameworks like CakePHP, Django, and jquery.
5. Good community support, lots of plugins, tutorials, etc.

Aptana

Aptana 3 was by far my favorite in terms of the interface, but it has no support for running or debugging PHP yet. That’s just a deal-breaker, and the fact that they’ve been saying it’s coming soon for the last four months doesn’t inspire confidence. Aptana 2 is usable, but gives up a lot of the ground that Aptana 3 gives you, and I’m not entirely sure why I wouldn’t just use Eclipse over Aptana 2. Plus, their site is really frustrating to me…feels like the docs and support are poorly organized, though that’s certainly no different than Eclipse or Netbeans.

Netbeans

The first thing I notice with Netbeans is that they have dark themes. I select one and immediately feel some of the Eclipse-provided stress start to fade. I poke around a bit, and I really do see things that I like. But something just doesn’t feel right…hard to put my finger on it. The apparent lack of a feature like Eclipse’s Perspectives is annoying. And maybe I’ve missed something with Netbeans, but it doesn’t seem like you can run and debug a single file, only an entire project? Pretty annoying if that’s the case. Let me know if that’s the case.

Eclipse

Overall, I really like Eclipse. After ten or fifteen minutes, I was able to get the layout and most other things arranged how I like, run through some programs, etc. There are plugins for everything, the community is deep, etc. However, there are some things I really don’t like. The preferences are complex and disorganized. The website is a jumble of jargon and it’s hard to find anything. If you asked ten enterprise product managers from different countries to collaboratively design a website, http://eclipse.org is probably what they’d come up with. I think someone must have also asked them to develop that logo/icon as well, or someone figured out how to build a time portal to 1982. At any rate, I can live with all of this, but the thing I absolutely can’t handle is the default black text on a white background. I feel like I’m about to have a panic attack every time I look at it. Looking at a black screen with a blinking cursor is just so soothing, so I immediately set out to fix this flaw and find a dark theme. Well, bad news: Eclipse doesn’t have themes. You also can’t import just color settings, and the default color settings are useless, so if you want dark themes, you have to go through every language you use and set all the colors for each text type (comments, selected, functions, etc). This requires probably 300 clicks for each language. I don’t have an afternoon to spend on that; what am I missing, people?! I would seriously pay $20 right now to make this problem go away.

Conclusion

So overall, I’m not quite satisfied, but I’m also not ready to give up. Since my only beef really with Eclipse is the horrible hassle of getting the colors like I want them, I might suck it up and try to get that all working. Ugh. Seriously, if you have a solution here, please offer it up.

In short, I’m frustrated. I might give emacs or vim a look, but I’m really adamant on the debugging thing, and it’s unclear to me how those would interact with something like xdebug for true php debugging.

Master programmers everywhere: if you use an IDE for multiple languages, please tell me what your solution is and whether I should continue down this road, check out emacs / vim, or just stick with Textmate.

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While accessible in the sense that it’s not aimed at the professional mathematician, I’ve found that the book is very challenging in some areas. I’m going through at a slow pace, perhaps 10-15 pages per day, and really trying to grok the concepts, but it’s tough. I took calculus, linear algebra, and statistics in college, but there’s still a lot of deep concepts here that I haven’t been exposed to. More than that, the concepts are presented from a much more theoretical basis than they were in college, which tended more towards applied math than pure math.

At any rate, if you enjoy math and you’re considering diving into some advanced study but you’re not sure where to start, I recommend The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. It’s challenging, but rewarding, and if nothing else, you’ll probably get a sense for those areas of math that you don’t enjoy.

While I’m on the subject, I would absolutely love to find books like this for other fields, like engineering, physics, biology, etc. If you know of any really comprehensive overview books for other fields of science and engineering, please share in the comments.

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1. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
2. Book review – The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy
3. Follow up to SwiMP3 review

If you haven’t checked out Signpost, it’s basically a Yelp for deals. Users can post and review deals in their neighborhood, like happy hours, special discounts at restaurants, etc. This is very close to an idea a friend and I were thinking about pursuing especially for happy hour deals at bars. It’s really annoying to try and keep up with all the happy hour specials at various bars, so a central place to check those out is much appreciated.

The site itself is simple and clean, just the way I like it. Posting a new deal is dead simple, and the site’s focus on deals in your neighborhood really shows. I’m assuming they’ll have mobile apps out soon, which will make it really easy to find deals while on the go. Obviously, site content is a little thin in the cities that just launched today, but there’s already content on there and I’m sure there will be a lot more in the next few weeks. Speaking of which, if you know a bar with a great happy hour, why not go post it?

Disclosure: my wife works for Signpost, which is how I first heard about them. However, I really do think they’re onto something. Let me know if I’m crazy in the comments.

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First, a minor annoyance: I can’t seem to get the “skip to prev track” functionality to work. It just keeps restarting the same song over and over. Very annoying, but perhaps my unit is defective in some way? I generally just put the thing on shuffle and let it play, so it’s hardly a deal-breaker. Still, would be nice to have.

The bigger issue is that I think I underestimated the degree to which the unit interferes with my goggles. Because the little speaker things are really loud, you don’t want them near your ears, so you have to slide them as far forward on your goggle straps as possible. But that means that they tend to break the seal around your eyes and your goggles leak. Additionally, having them hanging off your goggles is really cumbersome and unwieldy, and I ended up spending a lot of time just trying to fiddle them into position.

However, I discovered a useful trick. These are bone conduction headphones, and though the pictures and instructions depict a user wearing them against the cheekbones, they should theoretically work when placed against any part of the skull. So I decided to give another position a try. I tucked both of the units up under the back of my swim cap, against my skull, and swam a few laps. Victory! I can hear the music perfectly, the elastic swim cap keeps the speakers securely in place, they don’t interfere with my goggles, and I think it’s probably quite a bit less goofy-looking.

The ideal would be a swim cap or goggles with a built in MP3 player that was super slim so you couldn’t even tell it was there. Until someone creates that, though, I think just shoving your SwiMP3 up under your swim cap works quite nicely.

You can purchase the SwiMP3 player from Amazon by clicking here.

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