My teenage daughter and I were walking home from the library the other day. She wanted to know why social skills were so important. She seemed to think she could hide in a shell for the rest of her life and not have to interact with human beings. She would like to live life with her nose in a book (or at least a Kindle 2). Unfortunately, that won’t advance her life. It won’t help her to contribute to society.

Thus, we got on the topic of what was needed to be successful in life from a purely objective perspective. We qualified success as a combination of financial and social. Financial because it is a sure measure of how much a person values your labors, and social because a life without good relationships is rather hollow.

We isolated three factors: talent, determination, and social skills. But how important was each relative to the other and to success as a whole? We thought we would try to put together a formula. She had recently read some old paper-backs stacked up on one of my bookshelves, The Foundation Novels by Isaac Asimov. In it history is quantified and forced into algebraic formulas. This effort becomes so successful that the characters end up being able to predict the future (in broad historical sense). Our attempt to formulate success was based on this model. This is what we came up with:

S = success, t = talent, d = determination, k = social skills

Success =  (t + 4k)^d

As you can see, talent forms the smallest part. Social skills are important, actually far more important than talent. A good talker can make much of very little. But then again perhaps social skills are a talent;) The most important factor is determination. A little bit of drive and incentive can take you a long way. I have known work to be counter productive in the short run, but a person usually at least learns from his or her mistakes.

So keep on working hard. It will at least move you forward.

Will Rayment

Today I put together an Ampersand Converter. I like to create useful code that everyone can use. This tool I created should be quite handy as it solves a problem I am frequently confronted with.

As I have mentioned before, a lot of code we put on our websites is not W3C compliant. This solves that problem for some of Amazon’s code which is filled with hard ampersands. It seems that W3C doesn’t like this character and it has to be entered in the form of &. Instead of having to make the changes ampersand by ampersand (there are quite a few), you can just cut and paste the code into a text-area, hit the “convert” button, and voila!

I even went the extra mile and made sure the code would not convert already converted ampersands.

Okay, Okay, after all the nasty things I said about the original Kindle and the Segway, now I am doing a one-eighty. Well, not exactly. I was talking about the old kindle. The Kindle 2 has just come out, and I am amazed at the features that are available on it.

First off, it is a slender 1/3 of an inch. It has a hugely long battery life. Two weeks! You can download books directly from the internet, subscribe to newspapers like the Wall Street Journal (right now for 99.00). It will carry around 1500 books (equivalent to every book currently on the premises).

I thought the old Kindle a bit clunky like most book readers, but now I see what an electronic book reader can be. Heck, the new Kindle 2 can even read to you!

Back in the ancient 90s at a party, I got in a discussion with a couple of programmers about ebook readers. They were telling me that they would make books obsolete. I told them that I did not think that old fashioned paper books would ever go out of style. True readers would not want to give up the feel, the ability to dog ear and make notes in margins. Until today I thought smugly how right I was and how wrong they were. After all how could an electronic device have the look of paper? At Amazon they have thought of all of that. The electronic paper technology is actually a pleasure to read. My favorite feature is that you can make annotations on the text. One added feature…the books are cheaper than if you bought them in a bookstore and you can order them from your armchair by the fire.

Cool.

p.s. (10 Mar 2009) – I am a frequent reader of Aaron Wall and his blog. He has his own enthusiastic review of the Kindle 2. He talks about having two or three for reference. I have thought it might be nice to have one each for my wife, my daughter and myself. However, with storage for 1500 books, I think one will be enough for now.