random($foo)

Busy with pre-moving tasks, but thought I'd post a quick followup on the Kindle. I've bought 3 book so far (I'm keeping a spreadsheet, so far I've saved $33.22, or 47.43% off of buying the physical books off Amazon - one of them was also out of stock, so that was an extra bonus; When I get a chance I'll have to compare the book buying rate to the past year). I also sent out an email to kindle-feedback. Here are the points of improvement I included (specifically software, and not the industrial design, which I'm sure they've heard ad nauseum):

1. One of the first things that I did even before getting the Kindle was to queue up a bunch of samples. This is great, but even with this limited amount of titles, it's pretty hard to find the title I'm looking for. My first set of suggestions are all related to library management:
   • A smarter dashboard style listing would be nice. For example, you could have the Home screen be split in two, with a "Recently Read" and "Newly Arrived" listing. Paging to the next page would get you a traditional listing.
   • Although, while full-text indexing may be out of the question, allowing searching/filtering by limited metadata from the "Show and Sort" menu, or, if there's a dashboard, having a search/filter box accessible at the bottom of the first page would be a great way to allow a user to quickly find a title from a large (100+ volume) library.
   • Along the lines of organizing a bookshelf (the potential storage capacity, even without any additional SD storage far outstrips the current Content Lister's ability to manage), a number of improvements would make things better:
     Tagging of titles (and allow listing by tag/section, filtering by tag)
     • Archiving - for example, read books
     • Read % / Status - related to the former, but being able to filter or organize by which books you're currently reading, haven't started, and have finished - the metadata is all there, but it's not being displayed
   • Along the lines of metadata and display, the current separation of listing and managing seems unnecessary. One alternative, especially if you add a second smaller line that contains status and other metadata is to have each book have two click areas (the current 3-segment tall title, which remains the same - clicking opens the book, and a second 1-2 segment tall status line which brings up a context line -- note, this space already exists, so it wouldn't even affect the # of books that could be listed by much...)
2. A related request would be for storage of a reading journal -- this data is stored by the device (it autobookmarks and knows which books were last opened, how long, etc.) and, at least according to the Kindle TOS is being reported to Amazon.com. It seems like a big opportunity is being missed by not having a user-accessible journal (the Wii is a good example of what this might look like to the end user).
3. Although I'm not a fan of DRM, I really like what you guys are doing with the media management of purchased books. This is very compelling, although I'm disappointed that it doesn't extend to periodicals. There are some periodicals I'd be open to subscribing to (any hope of getting The Economist?), but that's definitely a sticking point to me. I like to annotate and file articles of interest - the latter functionality doesn't seem to exist at all, and the former works, although it's too bad that there's no way to better manage the annotations or get it off the device wirelessly.
4. In terms of legibility, if there were different fonts or line-height adjustment, that'd be quite welcome. This is especially noticeable w/ the experimental web browser.
5. I very much like the ability to make annotations, especially when reading technical papers, essays/articles (unfortunately, the conversion process is somewhat lackluster/tedious - when I tried sending an HTML file to the kindle.com address, it converted it as plain text (tags in the page galore), and since I'm on a Mac, I had to use a third party toolchain (Mobiperl). Err, in any case, my suggestion for annotations is fairly simple - when viewing/editing an annotation, it currently requires a second click to show it. I can (somewhat) understand a second click to edit, but wouldn't it be better to just show the note (and menu) when one clicks on a line w/ a note?
6. Along the lines of notetaking, I've taken to carrying around the Kindle when I'm out and about - there's lots of times where it'd be useful to use it to type a quick note, but there isn't any way to do that in a standalone manner. Lists are another potentially useful app, which leads me to ask...
7. Is there any particular reason there isn't an SDK available? Is there one planned? It seems like there's a lot of potential for Kindle's functionality to be extended, whether in terms of additional apps, or for things related its core capabilities. I can think of a half dozen things off the top of my head that would do a lot, I think, to help get a random person to plunk down $360 on the device. The e-book space is littered with devices that require enormous amounts of low-level effort just to get to a point where useful apps can be developed (these, of course are very different skillsets, so rarely has anything exciting to end-users ever happened). It seems like the Kindle is well positioned to be different in this regard. I know there are potential pitfalls (although, having been intimately involved in making similar design decisions [open APIs and web services], somewhat overblown since it'd be easy enough to control via dev keys or just by the fact that without easy/automatic distribution, the userbase is self-limiting), but I believe the rewards are manifold, and I hope you guys at least give it a try.

There's one additional issue that I didn't mail in that's been getting on my nerves - when buying a book, it comes down the pipe quite quickly, and it's a simple (almost one click) process that you go through once you get to the end of the sample, but it doesn't replace the sample chapters, and in fact starts you off all over again. IMO, the ideal experience would be to have some additional pages unlocked so you can continue reading, then, when the full book has finished downloading, to port your annotations, remove the sample file, and open the full book at the location where you left off from the sample. True that kind of polish is typically missing from 1.0 products, but it's usually the difference between the magical product you love and... well, everything else.

Over the weekend, I broke down and ordered a Kindle (which arrived today). There are lots of good reasons not to get one. Heck, I wrote a screed about it myself last year. (What? Speak up, I can't hear you over the cognitive dissonance.)

So, why'd I end up getting one? Ironically for a "gadget" purchase, it was the practical aspect that finally pushed me over: I'll be out of town the next few months and it'll be inconvenient and impractical for me to buy/store books, or have access to my bookshelf.

While I'm strongly against DRM, I'm also a big proponent of what Amazon is doing with their yourmedialibrary initiative. Anyone whose heard my spiel on digital media knows that I'm a big proponent of media management as a primary value-add that makes paying for digital media worthwhile. As we accrue more and more digital stuff, having a convenient service that stores, tracks, organizes, and delivers it when and where we want it is going to be increasingly important (and necessary).

I have a lot of books that I really like (and that are quite nicely formatted and probably won't be replaced anytime soon by eBooks) but looking at the couple hundred volumes on my bookshelves, I'm having a hard time finding many that have truly sentimental value. I think at the end of the day, I could cut down my shelf by at least two-thirds, maybe more. The upshot, besides much easier future moving, is that I'd probably use the books much more when the text of my library is fully searchable and easily annotable.

(Obviously, this will probably be different for everyone, but I think more and more will start thinking like this, especially as digital music and video take over. I have about 100 DVDs. None have been touched in months. And the only time I touch the albums I've bought are to rip them.)

And now for some talk about the devices. This will be somewhat more of an iRex exit review than a Kindle review (since I just got the latter), but irrespective, I think the former will give some insight into what I'm looking for and expecting of the Kindle.

In terms of the actual reading experience, having had the iLiad e-ink device since its release (Summer 2006), I knew what to expect of the screen. In comparison, the Kindle's screen is smaller (6" vs 8" diagonal), very slightly denser (167ppi vs 160ppi), and has worse grayscale (4 vs 16 shade). It is slightly faster refreshing and a little brighter (40% reflectance vs 32-35%) thanks to a newer Vizplex screen, but overall it's very similar. The serifed font on the Kindle is heavier and wider, but also better hinted than the iLiad, so while it fits even less text on the page, it may be a bit more legible. If you've never seen an e-ink screen, it's really worth doing. You don't really won't understand the fuss until you do. It's much easier on the eyes than any backlit display, and much more "solid" than any reflective LCD. It's a flat matte plastic that's hard to describe. The closest thing I can liken it to is that it looks like the fake screns on the computer stand-ins in office furniture displays.

The iLiad supports more formats, of particular interest being PDF (it runs a modified version of xpdf) and has had a fair amount of hacking done to it. It also has built-in wifi. Unfortunately, a number of issues conspire to make these advantages moot. (Actually, there's one main one which I'll get to last.)

Even though the screen is larger than the Kindle's, it's still comparatively small (about A6) so A4 PDFs aren't very legible (the zooming doesn't work well). This means that it's not very good for reading technical papers on, and that most real reading (books, etc.) need to go through a reformatting/conversion process. If you've dealt with PDFs, you know how difficult that can be, since PDFs aren't semantic, but layout based by nature. HTML files are an option, but the built in browser doesn't paginate (or remember your position, or font size for that matter), so if you're looking to read a book... well, good luck. And while the wifi sounds great in theory, in reality, there's never been any way to load documents on wirelessly.

All these (and the many other design flaws, both in the hardware and software) could be overlooked or worked around if not for the one major, MAJOR flaw that made the iLiad useless for me - it never had any working power management. That's right, no sleep, suspend, or hibernate. The lowest power screen in the world (which, come to think of it, these e-ink screens are) doesn't help one bit in that case. Despite many promises to the contrary, iRex has never been able to address that problem.

Now, granted, as an early adopter, I don't expect things to always work, but unfortunately, despite the original claims of long battery life (made in page turns, with no hint that it'd be constantly sucking juice), the device barely makes it through a few hours, not even a full day. This is a bit mystifying considering the success that OLPC and Amazon have had with instant suspends. Even worse, there's no sleep or hibernate, so a full power cycle is required before reading. Surprisingly, they've released additional products (presumably aimed at real consumers) that haven't addressed the problem at all.

To give you an idea of what this means: the iLiad took 49 seconds to boot up, and then another 14 seconds to load up the PDF. That's over a full minute just to do the equivalent of opening a book up. I don't think they mention that in the "features" section of their marketing. Considering that the average cell phone wakes up instantly, and heck, my laptop is up in 5s, this failing is really just incomprehensible to me.

This aspect of course was the Kindle's easiest sell. The reviews and reports give it an average of 4-5 days of battery-life w/ the wireless off, and 1-2 days with it on. More importantly, resuming from suspend to where you left off takes between 3-4 seconds. That's not too shabby (opening a new book from the menu also takes about 3-4 seconds). That there is basically the difference between a daily-use device vs. an over-expensive toy.

In terms of data loading, the Kindle has both the email gateway which I've tested, and is certainly convenient (after giving it some thought I'm pretty sanguine about using it since I'm pretty sure that the liability implications of keeping/tracking the files sent trump any value they might get from storing it for future data mining), and it simply mounts as an external drive when connected via mini-USB (another failing of the iLiad is its ridiculously large and awkward dongle attachment for power, USB, and network connectivity).

While there is no official Mobipocket software for the Mac, there is an alpha version of a linux tool, and more importantly, an open source set of tools called Mobiperl that seems to work well.

All in all, it's doubtful that I'll ever touch my iLiad again (well, we'll see how OpenInkpot does), but from my limited time playing around with the Kindle so far, it looks like it should do the job that the iLiad never could.

Which isn't to say it's perfect. Even with my limited usage, it's obvious there's definitely lots that could be improved (for example, the content lister is pretty impossible for organizing anything close to the storage limit - it's just a straight file listing with no ability to organize (tag, search, look up) or way to keep track of the the read/unread status). And yes, the industrial design is heinous - even ignoring the aesthetics, it's pretty much impossible to pick it up without accidentally turning the page (death by 700ms cuts?). And it'd be nice if there was a way to open up or work on the device itself (igorsk has been the only person who's done anything of note so far), but for now, I'll be happy with having a device that should be usable for what I got it for.

Friends and followers of my blog know that I've been pretty vocal and proactive in my support for Barack Obama. A couple weeks ago, a call went out for web geeks, and I threw my hat in the ring.

With the paperwork all sent in, this is just letting people know that I'll be heading out to Boston at the end of the month to work full-time on BarackObama.com and related shenanigans. I believe they're looking for more people, so if you have an interest in jumping on, drop an app. Also, I know that there are lots of friends that are enthusiastic but can't necessarily drop what they're doing... drop me a line, I have schemes¹.

1: Schemes evolving as I begin reviewing FEC regulations.

I recently started porting my spreadsheets over to Google Spreadsheets. I'd long resisted Google Docs, but I got to say that it's been pretty painless. The imports have seemed to work, although it's had limited success on fancier formatting and on charts and I've run into some annoyances (it'd be really nice if there was a "view source" mode where you could just edit formulas, or a mass replace to change a specific column in the formula, and a paste w/o formatting option). There are good things that have made it worthwhile, like easy collaboration/sharing and painless publishing.

Among those spreadsheets I've been importing are some of my financial docs. One nice function is GoogleFinance() which not only lets you get current, but also historical stock data. Random tidbit: when returning historical quotes, the GoogleFinance() function wants to dump an array into multiple cells. Here for example is how you'd return just to the price of VTSMX from January 1st:

=INDEX(GoogleFinance("VTSMX", "close", "1/1/2008"), 2, 2)

A couple years ago, it occurred to me that learning some basic finance/investing (which sadly, isn't really taught at all anywhere in the school system) might not be a bad idea. Except for the odd post or two, I haven't published too much about it, even though my interest has taken me far into "financial geek" territory (like reading the Journal of Indexes for fun). My original plan was to kick off a financial section for my blog, but since that's going to have to wait at least for a few months, I though I'd at least get the ball rolling by publishing the target asset allocation that I ended up with (and presumably, will be sticking to for a long while):

Most of it's pretty standard, with a few exceptions.

• I've sliced and diced because a decade plus after Fama and French published on the Three Factor Model, it still seems to hold up (suggesting that it's not just a matter of market inefficiency).
• I've added REITs and CCFs as major asset classes for diversification purposes. The larger than average numbers and addition of CCFs are influenced by a lot of reading. Two of the strongest articles on that are: The Benefits of Low Correlation and The Rewards of Multiple-Asset-Class Investing. This year has been a good illustration of how adding some CCFs can decrease volatility. I've added some "standard" plans at the bottom of the spreadsheet so you can see how the performance compares.
• Lastly, I'm over-weighted on international, at least by conventional wisdom (although, if you wanted a true index, you'd actually not be far off if you invested by market cap). Financial advisors usually recommend something like a 70/30 or 80/20 split of domestic investment because historically the US market has been safer, more efficient, and better performing, but I don't really think that's as true moving forward. Also, since it's as likely that I'll be living/traveling internationally, the relative buying power argument for overweighting your local market doesn't make as much sense for me either.
• There aren't really many (any?) good general purpose tools for keeping track of your investments long term (that generate personal rate of return factoring taxes, dividends, etc). That might be a neat little tool to design. I started writing a scraper for my Vanguard account, so I might have something useful sooner rather than later there.

And yes, ultimately, the exact percentages of your asset allocation aren't as important as picking something reasonable, sticking with it, and rebalancing regularly. That pretty much sums up what I've learned and the extent of my future maintenance. Although in case I don't get around to elaborating for a while, here are the main takeaways:

• Get familiar with Modern Portfolio Theory, particularly the Random Walk - Very few of the most dedicated, privileged, and informed investors consistently beat the market. You are unlikely to do much better.
• Costs - One of the few things that you can control (besides Asset Allocation) is costs (expense ratios, to some degree taxes). John Bogle is of course the most famous champion of this. Here's a more recent article of his talking about AA and costs (along w/ the standard charts showing aggregate differences)
• Losses are worse than gains - this is a simple bit of mathematics, but it's worth elaborating on as it's at the center of MPT and diversification. Basically, if you lose 50% you need to gain 100% just to get back to where you started. Cumulative losses are even worse, as compounding (Einstein's quoted "most powerful force in the universe") cuts both ways. A tool like FIRECalc will generate very pretty graphs the range of badness depending on when you start withdrawing money.
• Rebalance - Basically it's a rule that forces you to buy low and sell high. An annual or semi-annual rebalance is really the only time you really need to look at how your investments are doing. The rest is really just watching grass grow (or giving yourself ulcers) unless you're doing some crazy tactical asset allocation scheme. There are lots of different articles discussing when/how often to do this, but not much conclusive that isn't dependent on backtesting. It seems like picking one year is a good compromise between increased risk (as your AA skews) and minimizing transaction costs.

These, along w/ the notes I mentioned above, I think really cover most of the basics. The only other really big thing is to learn about the tax implications (CGT, tax efficiency, and tax loss harvesting) and why tax-deferred investing is your friend. If there's interest, I can post a spreadsheet that illustrates some of the latter.

Oh, also, listen to Warren Buffett.