Bookemdano

A great book about the difference between growth and fixed mindsets and how it effects education and intelligence. Briefly, fixed mindset says “intelligence and talent are something you are born with and can’t change” and growth mindset says “everything can change with practice”. The book takes the extreme of the view that the only thing separating the successful from unsuccessful in any field is level of effort applied to it, not natural talent. As Chuck Yeager, the guy with allegedly “The Right Stuff”,  is quoted as saying “The best pilots are the ones who fly the most. That’s it.” There are also cases from business- all the CEOs interviewed for the book “From Good To Great” said that leadership is learned, not innate. And cases from art- where Betty Edwards’ book and classes “Learn to Draw” show that anyone can draw as soon as they are taught how to get out of the 4th grade rut most of us fall into.

Besides having great lessons as an adult, it is the first book I’d recommend for new parents to put their kids in the right mindset for learning. The clearest experiment is a group of kids who are given 10 IQ test questions. Afterwards, half the kids are told “you did very well, you worked very hard” and the other half are told “you did very well, you are smart”. When given 10 more IQ test questions, the second group does worse on the test. Saying “you are smart” lowers kids IQ scores! It gives kids the impression if they get anything wrong it means they are not smart, so they get frustrated and don’t try. It eventually leads to the mindset I had through grade school- if you have to work hard on it, you must not be smart.

The third think I got out of it is just general perseverance. Besides cases in many other fields a marriage consoler sums it up by saying “the most dangerous thing a couple can say when they come in here is ‘if it was meant to be it wouldn’t be so hard’”. Success in any field requires lots of hard work.

It all reminds me of when I spent 6 weeks in Germany, on and off, and never even tried to pickup any German because I thought I wasn’t “good” at languages. I am sure I could have picked up some passing language in that time if I’d spent some time on it.

By the way, The Art of Learning is a great companion read to this book and Josh Waitzkin refers to Carol Dweck’s research. He is a black belt in the growth mindset. Also, Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell, covers many of the same points but from a completely different perspective. I think Mindset does a lot to explain the results found in Outliers.

Contains some great geeky facts about lots of artists/scientist but I think the best idea was in the introduction. That science has make great strides getting down to the essence of matter and at quantum levels how things work, and art/philosophy has proved that the only thing we can know to be true is that we are conscience and thinking, and between those two spheres of knowledge there is an impenetrable wall and there is absolutely no overlap. Science has no information for use about the mind and we can only perceive scientific evidence, in a sense, second hand so we can never know it is true.

I am back in training mode again.

Eleven weeks until the Northeast Sprint Triathlon (750m swimming, 15.5 biking, and 3.5 running) and I have been running or biking for 9 straight days. Legs are constantly sore but a "good sore".

Training for an event is the only way I can really get motivated to start exercising. It is also just about the only thing that motivates me to diet so on top of the miles I have to add there are pounds to drop.

I am excited though. It is a nice milestone and the chance to do it at Elk Neck, a place I spent many happy summer nights as a kid, is great.

I'll keep twittering my progress.Twitter/bookemdano.

I have been hyper-productive lately and I attribute it to getting rid of my todo list. After a 3 day business trip to California I really reset, thanks to getting focused time to work on the plane(my favorite place to work). When I got back I ignored my Outlook todo list for a while and just put 1 or 2  notes a day on my monitor to tackle. After a week or two I went back and found I could close almost everything on my Outlook todo list.

I almost lost it last Friday when I can back from a busy business trip to Kentucky and found myself with 8 "todos" I had to catch up on. Of course, I only got to 3 of them and had a backlog that felt overwhelming. Fortunately, the kids were nice enough to let me work some over the weekend and this morning I re-prioritized. I feel I am about up to treading water again.

Flying always makes me philosophic ever sense a pilot told me it was always sunny, every day, you just have to go far enough up.

Vonnegut had a great line in an interview after an audio edition of Slaughterhouse 5. He was talking about his capture in WWII. He said his regimental commander was captured and then ordered the regiment to surrender. "But that was an illegal order. You can no more order a soldier to surrender as you can order him to commit suicide. The legal order would have been 'every man for himself'". In Timequake he talks about trying to craft a message to adolescents for graduation ceremonies and I think that makes a pretty good one. The worse that can happen to you is there might come a time where it is every man for himself.

The other quote that comes to mind is also from flying. I love flying but I would be a terrible commercial pilot. In the first episode of Friends Monica asks her roommate Phoebe why she is moving out and Phoebe says "I need to live someplace where it is alright to spill!" Being a pilot does not allow room for error. I need to be able to make mistakes. Not really a safety net- I am willing to hit the ground- but I don't want to be the last line of defense for a plane-full of people.

The best part of a trip- running barefoot down the hotel hallway to the ice machine.

The worst part- the drive from the airport home. I think it is because I think the trip is over when I land but I have another hour to get to where I want to be.

I am getting really excited about Silverlight. Versions 1 and 1.1 were more proof of concepts with only niche appeal- alot like the original Xbox- v2 brings a usable- ready for prime time- competitor to Adobe Flash and Flex. Not that I have any problem with Flash and Flex(I have seen some impressive demos lately) but I don't want to have to learn a new language and new paradigm that doesn't leverage any of my existing code. And it gives customers what they want, something with rich UI that lives inside their browser window, even if that is just a psychological box. I can't wait for my next thin-client project where I can put this to use.

I have been using an 80 GB Zune 2.0 as a Vista Media Center extender over the last few weeks and I wanted to share my experience.

How did I got here?

I got a new projector. I left our Vista Media Center as our hub and moved the Xbox 360 from our bedroom to the projector. I was left with no way to access content for the bedroom TV.  I'd heard Paul Thurrott mention in Windows Weekly the Zune 2.0's wireless sync could be used as a limited Media Center Extender. Since I was also looking to keep two two-year olds busy on a plane trip at the time so I did some research and decided to try a Zune for both purposes.

Hardware Setup

I have a Vista Media Center, upgraded from XP Media Center, with 2 analog tuners attached to DirecTV boxes and an over-the-air HD tuner. This is attached to a 42" 720p LCD in the living room. In the basement I have an Xbox 360 hooked to a 720p projector as an extender, for watching TV and movies and for playing games. In the bedroom, I have a 32" SD CRT hooked up to a DVD player. I added the Zune with its optional dock with composite RCA output.

Software Setup

I installed the Zune software on the Media Center. It is clean and modern but doesn't yet have the full functionality(or bloat, depending on your point-of-view) of iTunes or Media Player 11. It was straightforward to pair the Zune with the included USB cable. After a couple of auto-downloaded updates it was ready to start syncing. I let it sync my entire music and picture collections, about 30 GB, while I added vodcasts. It worked generally well but there are around 80 songs and pictures that for some reason it tries to sync every time but it only takes a minute or two. But of course, what I really wanted was the video syncing, so that was the next step.

Trouble with Video

I knew I couldn't sync all my Recorded TV, which is on a 750GB drive, so I looked for other options. The Zune software only allows all or selecting manually. I tried just selecting all and letting it just copy what it could be it won't even start to sync if the Zune doesn't have enough space, I had to set it to manual.

Trouble with Manual

Inside the Zune software you can select the Collections->Video tab and it shows all the video in my collections as tiles.  This is where I wish we could just go to the Windows Explorer. There are hundreds of tiles with a single shot from the recorded show and a title underneath. You can only sort by date added (not date recorded) and by title. Since I had just added all the video to the library that was useless so I sorted by title. Unfortunately, and this is something that has got to change, it is the title of the episode(?!), not the title of the file or the title of the series. So when I see you see a title like "Local Ad", you have to know from memory or right-click and get properties to find out that is an episode of The Office. Not an ideal solution. I would love to be able to just select all "The Office" episodes and tell them to sync but there is no way to do this without finding them one at a time out of the hundreds of files.

Trouble with Direct Syncing

Once you have selected the files the device will automatically sync when plugged in directly or any time it is powered and can get to the computer over wifi. Cool. Theoretically. It takes forever. The time is all spent converting, the copy is fast over USB or wifi. Remember how great it was when you could first rip a CD in real time? If it got half that fast I would be thrilled. I let it run overnight and it will sync maybe 1 or 2 hours of video! And it won't even start the slothy conversion process until you start syncing. So if anything interrupts the sync, like disconnection or trying to use the device, will start they sync over.

Workaround for Manual - 1- "Title problem"

I decided it would be easier if I just made a folder and manually copied the .dvr-ms files to the that folder. Then I could "sync all" on that folder. This made manual sync easier but didn't solve the Direct Syncing problems or say "get the newest Office episode".

Workaround for Manual - 2- "Newest problem"

To solve the manual problem with less ongoing intervention, I threw some code at it. I wrote a program for my own use called Zyncer which will let me set up filters to copy to my "sync all" directory. You can do newest, a single show, or random files, so I can have some surprises on the Zune. This works well. It keeps my "sync all" folders up to date with what I want. But there is still the "endless" converting process.

Workaround for Converting

I found the DVRMSToolbox, which you can setup to do converting from .dvr-ms to .wmv or .mpg. So I modified my Zyncer to convert the files as it copied them to the "sync all" folder. This works much better and is somewhat faster than the Zune syncing but not up to real-time. It still takes a long time but runs all the time in the background, instead of waiting for the Zune to sync. There are still a few bugs to work out, especially with trying the commercial skip, but I think I will be able to work around them.

Ideal Workaround

Ideally, the Zune software would do what my Zyncer does. It should be optimized more for time and not disk space. It could should convert in the background, or at least much faster, and should many more options on what and how to sync, similar to the choices Media Center gives you on Record Series, and it could be built right into Media Center.

More realistically, if Zune could open their SDK so third-parties (or me) could write directly to the Zune I could improve the Zyncer even more.

Conclusion- C+

I am disappointed in the syncing of video. It is rare I am able to watch what I want "tonight" on the Zune. This does not seem to be a priority for the Zune team so it is a second-class citizen on the Zune. I do appreciate their iterative approach to the Zune software but I hope video is moving up in priority in their next few iterations.

Once the video is on the Zune the output to the TV is a little jagged at points but overall very clear and regular TV quality.