As my last post makes clear, I have been getting more into biking over the past couple years, and I now want to share my goal for 2015: finishing the Leadville 100 mountain bike century. I first heard of Leadville through the bike blogger, Elden Nelson (aka Fat Cyclist) as he has finished Leadville 17 […]
Category: journal
Dan Pallotta’s TED talk “The way we think about charities is dead wrong”
A friend of mine had recommended I watch this TED talk by Dan Pallotta, titled “The way we think about charity is dead wrong”. I finally got around to watching it last night and wrote up my notes in an email to my friend and then figured I might as well post them on the […]
Stewart Brand and Paul Saffo at the Interval
A couple weeks ago, I went to see Stewart Brand and Paul Saffo give a “salon talk” at the Interval (recap and audio of the talk here). It was a packed house – the talk had sold out in less than an hour, but I was lucky enough to be checking email when the tickets […]
2014 Year in Review
After 2013 was the Year of Yes for me, I would characterize 2014 as the Year of More. I didn’t start any new activities in 2014, and instead did a lot more of what I was already doing. Job: I am still in the same job as last year (Chief of Staff to Product VP […]
Challenging oneself
In my last post, I talked about instigating unhappiness as a way to spur change at organizations. I’ve also been thinking about it in a personal context of challenging myself, and when I should be satisfied and happy with where I am vs. stretching myself for the next goal. One of the reasons for the […]
Instigating unhappiness
Michael Anton Dila, one of the cofounders of Overlap, recently gave a talk at the BIF conference. He starts with his frustration with the question “What do you do?”, as he can never answer it. He then talks about Overlap and the community that has built around it (Overlap is full of people who don’t […]
Maximizing collisionability
Last night, Tony Hsieh of zappos.com spoke at the Long Now on the topic of Helping Revitalize a City. He described Downtown Project, which is the company he designed to create a thriving community (tech, art, fashion, family) in downtown Las Vegas. As he discussed the project, he brought up a great concept that I […]
Hosting update
I should have known better than to keep pushing my luck with textdrive.com after last year’s catastrophic meltdown, but I didn’t want to deal. Unfortunately, textdrive went down without even an email to its users a couple weeks ago, and their provider deleted all their data on Friday. Oops. At least I had a backup […]
2013 review
I’m a little late to this, but a 2013 review is an easy post to kick off my theoretically renewed commitment to blogging in 2014. For the first time since joining Google in September of 2008, I wasn’t completely swamped by work, and thus had time to invest in the rest of my life as […]
Being a good teammate
As those of you who follow me on Facebook know, I have gotten back into playing volleyball this summer, specifically sand doubles volleyball. I have been playing with a variety of folks on the main Google court. We typically get 4 people together to play, and then rotate through teammates, so everybody plays with everybody […]
