a peace of mind

"The Word" by Tony Hoagland

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between "green thread"
and "broccoli" you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning -- to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,

that also needs accomplishing
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue

but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

- to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen.


Every so often, I come back to this poem, originally posted by Betsy. Things have been very busy here, and will be for the rest of the year. But wanted to share this as it holds a lot.

best pick up line (ever)

Seen on the Palantir Tech guys' recruiting shirts...

"You had me at Hello World!"

The Winning Product for 2007: VMware Fusion

I believe the best product of 2007 (and potentially in 2008) is VMware Fusion.



If I only consider the social web space, you know what my answer will be. But VMware Fusion is the best overall because it showcased VMware's ability to put power and versatility on the OS. And make it better. Virtual machines is my buzz term, and I recently just got an OS book to understand more about this space. To understand the tech space right now (minus some social web) is to understand VMware.

VMware Fusion
- is holy matrimony of the Mac and PC paradigms (and whoever can figure the reverse.. whoa).
- will make Apple an even bigger force to deal with;
it makes Mac > PC.

A few years back, PCs dominated. But in the next few, at least in Silicon Valley, I am predicting a synchronous use of PCs and Macs, and an equal market share in SV of the two.

I stand by my belief that the most interesting problems are going to be a lot harder than LAMP-oriented (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) products. Facebook is filling the social void. There is a plethora of problems out there waiting to be solved, and VMware proves that one of them is.

Here are my tops for 2007:

- Most thought-provoking post: Do you ever say, "MySpace is sooo ugly?" by EIR Andrew Chen
- Who to keep an eye out for: Google alums, esp. the early (2003-2004) and late (2007+) joiners ;)
- Biggest surprise: Facebook (surprise in hype and scale, I have more to say here)
- Best team: FriendFeed (they've proven it once already...)
- Best big company: the Big G! :)
- Best vision of the social future: Loopt. (Privacy will be a huge value-add in the years to come. Privacy is not only privacy per se. Privacy increases relevance)
- Most awaited for release that will change your future: Google's Android
- Biggest trendsetter: iPhone (no brainer)
- (My) Biggest increase in usage: Yelp
- Where to hire the best engineers: Google
- .. and the best marketers: d.school.

summary for 2007

inspired by niniane's post about hemingway.

the 2007 consumer-facing high-tech theme can be summarized as follows:

How many ways
can you express
share.