Yep – thats the one. Took almost 2 months to finish this monster. Recommended reading for geeks, nerds and all the in betweens.

I first read about Neal Stephenson in a Wired article in 2006. Since then have been on the look out for his books. Every year will go to Strands book facility and will ask them about any of his books – they will draw a blank.

Anyway – found this book in JustBooks in February- the wonderful library chain that has been feeding me books for the last 2 years.

This is one big masala book – has some mathematics ( yep – equations, graphs and all that ), computer stuff of late 90s when the book was written ( Finux is the OS one of the main character uses – I do not know why he did not use the word Linux ), has an elaborate VC/lawyer, entrepreneur battle, nerd culture of late 90s – and of course the whole underlying theme – cryptography.

The book starts during World War II and the interesting stories are only here. Alan Turing and his college buddies fight it out ( one of them is a German and goes back to work for Hitler ). Each party will try to break each other’s cryptosystems and once broken they will do lot of stage managed accidents in order to keep the opposite party from knowing that they have broken the code – so they will not change it.

The present and past keep alternating – and the whole story centers around a ton of Gold buried under a man made lake by a Japanese Naval Captain who would have escaped from an air attack – escape from sharks, land on a cannibal island, escape from them, get captured by a rogue Japanese Army who are the ones secretly stashing tons of Gold. The Captain while designing the elaborate tunnel system will also plan his escape route through that without his bosses knowledge.

The location of the Gold is hidden in an encrypted message which will finally be cracked by our hero ( who uses Finux ) and the story will end with them bombing the gold out.

After reading this book I do not feel awkward to encrypt all my stuff with TrueCrypt and Keepassx – someday will blog on my paranoid setup !

I salute thee Neal Stephenson – you are the next Michael Crichton.

Imagine someone holding the above whistle and constantly whistling into one of your ears – day in and day out, month after month. That is Tinnitus for you.

Have been enjoying this since my child hood days – will get loud whenever I have cold or some fluid gets into my inner ear. Couple of days before new year some fluid entered the inner sanctum sanctorum in the middle of the night and all hell broke loose – accompanied by severe pain. I made my first visit to the doctor in 2010 – on Dec 30th – bummer.

You might be wondering – so how does this story end? Well – there is no end. Medical technology is only now figuring out slowly why this whistling happens – it seems there are 20,000 miniscule hair inside our inner ear. They respond to the tiniest of sounds and transmit it to the brain.

For some ( around 30 million Americans – no such statistics for India yet ) – some rogue hair “imagine” that they heard something and keep transmitting to the brain the sound – this is the shrill whistle noise I hear – Tinnitus. There is a famous personality who has this condition – Guy Kawasaki – he had mentioned it in Art of Start.

From my unscientific research – anti depressants are prescribed for Tinnitus – which is depressing to hear ( double pun !! ) . Best solution is to just get used to Tinnitus and enjoy the constant raaga.

If you know anyone in your network having Tinnitus – do connect me to them – would like to know how they cope with this.

1 & 2. Dune and Children of Dune by Frank Hebert

The first part – like all movies – is the best. Truly unputdownable – best science fiction I have ever read. Second part is little tiresome.

3. Flow – Psychology of Optimal Experience. How to find joy in everything you do. This book helped me in my running and car washing! Amazing book – will give a new perspective to how you view little chores to big tasks.

4. Outliers – By Malcolm Gladwell. Reasearch is boring – but reading the interpretation of such research is fun. The figure – 10,000 hours got drilled into my head.

5 & 6. Goal 1 & Goal 2 – By Dr.Eliyahu M.Goldratt. This book is a must read for everyone in any profession. It has got nothing to do with Agile or Lean – it will shake you up and make you think. I have heard multiple times about out-of-the-box thinking – this book has enough examples to trigger the out of box thinking process. Also it gives a whole different view point to dealing with constraints and inefficiencies – it is an opportunity waiting to be exploited.

7. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. I picked this book because cover said Nobel Prize winning author. And what a ride it was – Traditionalist vs Modernism. I think I missed most of the deeper philosophies ingrained in it – but what I grasped it was intriguing. Highly recommend this one.

8. Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg. We live in a an interesting social networking era. This book will be defunct in another year or two ( Ning is already on a downward spiral – and this book glorifies Ning ). With MySpace going down the drain – Facebook is not far off. This book covers the journey of all these startups.

These are the 8 books I read in 2010. Just finished reading a mind blowing book this year already – but hey – to know about it you have to wait for my 2011 Books Roundup !

This post is to brag on a mini milestone achievement – I can now complete the upcoming Whitefield Mid Night Marathon ( only the baby 4.2 Kms )!

Of the last 3 runs I have been consistently covering 4.2 kms plus.

Here are a few steps (woohoo managed to squeeze in a pun ) I took :

1. Shunned the iPod. The ear hurts after a while, the buds keep falling off, the wire keeps coming in the way – and the podcast / songs might get boring and I lose interest in running. So ditched the iPod and I can now run just with my thoughts.

2. Psyche myself on Diabetes. Genetically South Indians are programmed with this disease and shipped into the world. I sit and work 12 plus hours – almost 7 days a week. Office is just on the 1st floor. ( ahemm home is on 3rd floor but I am lazy ). Only way to beat diabetes is to exercise – no other way out.

3. Psyche myself on Personal Victory. This one is from Stephen Covey’s 7 habit book. You should first win personal victories before you can win public victories. This one statement makes me spring up from the bed and keeps me going till I reach the goal I had set – 4.2 Kms.

4. Enjoying the zone / the rhythm. It took a long time before I could find the rhythm. Now when I get over the initial few minutes of heart pounding – I start to glide – it is a beautiful feeling – and I do not notice the minutes that go by.

5. Ignore the knees will give away scare. It will be another ( hopefully ) 2 decades when my knee problem surfaces. I am betting on knee technology to improve – and there will be a magic pill very much like the Taj Mahal pill – which will rebuild the knee !

My next goal is the half marathon ( 21 Kms ) and then a full marathon ( 42 Kms ).

PS : A special thanks to @diduPublish Postknow, @nilakanta who I follow on twitter – their tweets used to make me feel guilty and now their tweets inspire me.

PSS : See Twitter is much more healthier than facebook. All I do in facebooks is view and share youtube links and talk politics. My eyes and head are getting corrupted 🙂

Bootstrapping

I installed Microsoft fonts by mistake ( msttcorefonts ) and forgot all about it. However it messed up the entire system. These fonts are not anti-aliased or smoothened and they are razor sharp.

If you have installed – just remove them sudo apt-get remove msttcorefonts and sanity will be restored.