What does it mean, “create, don’t destroy”? There are countless opportunities every day where we make decisions to add to or subtract from something. Projects at work started by an adversary that you’d rather see fail, cynical observations that don’t have any constructive benefit, favors that you could easily do for someone, but choose not to — these are all chances that we have to build on something, but instead choose to detract from it. There are all sorts of underlying roots — jealousy, political gain, personal grudges — but in each case the effort in the task is designed to undermine.

Instead, spend your time improving anything and everything you can. Even if you secretly want a project to fail, put that aside and contribute earnestly. It might feel good or be easy to criticize or be cynical, and often it is. Far more difficult is actually helping out and building. You’ll find, however, that those that build are far better rewarded and end up far happier than those that destroy. Creation itself is an additive process — the more you create, the more you’ll be able to create. Why waste effort in making something fail when you could have a hand in making it succeed?

If you’re like me, you have almost a dozen Google services — Gmail, Picasa, Voice, Reader, Checkout, Alerts, Analytics, etc. Making sure that everything is set up correctly and not inadvertently exposed to the world is an otherwise painful task that is made easy with Dashboard. By scrolling down and glancing at the summaries of your various services, you can make sure that the pictures of Grandma’s birthday party aren’t visible to the world.

So, despite some other privacy setbacks (really what were they thinking with Buzz?), I think this is a leap forward for a company to expose the data they have about you and give you choices about what they do with it. Imagine the grocery store doing this with your preferred card or your phone company with the data they collect from your wireless bill (and location data they get from your GPS). It’s great when consumers have the choice about how their information is used, and kudos to Google for getting this one right. They still have some work to do given how much info we end up giving them, but definitely a step in the right direction.

The Department of Energy says that HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) account for 40-60% of the energy use in buildings. Given that it’s expensive, inefficient, environmentally harmful and just plain uncomfortable, why not just turn the thermostat up a few degrees!

(Click to make the image bigger)

More at GoComics | Calvin and Hobbes

I graduated in 2007 from MIT with dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Management. During college, Wall Street was hitting its post-9/11 stride, with CDOs and structured financial products driving firms to record earnings and bonuses to record levels. I took an internship at a major Wall Street bank in the summer of 2006, and then signed on for a job as an equity derivatives trader for full-time. After 3 months of training, I started up in convertible bond trading in September 2007, shortly before Bear Stearns became the first big Wall Street collapse.

Like any shock of that magnitude, people didn’t know what to make of the effective failure of one of the top 5 brokerage firms. Was it the beginning of the end? Or had we hit a bottom? Other firms hadn’t taken any writedowns yet, so everyone had a different opinion of what this meant for Wall Street, for finance, and for themselves.

A year and a half later, it has gotten much worse. Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch suffered similar fates as Bear, and no investment banks remain after Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs opted to become bank holding companies. The future now looks bleak, with the once oversized bonuses now subject to congressional and societal scrutiny more than ever, and leverage looking more and more difficult to get each day.

Clearly, the last year and half was a unique time in the industry, and frankly, in the history of the United States. A few days ago, my involvement with my company came to an end. The decision was not mine, but it was also not wholly unwelcomed. Rather than be bitter about what was or what could have been, I’d rather spend time focusing on what I learned while I was there and how it will help me in the future.

Most central to my experience was my boss. This was my first job, so he defined the working world, Wall Street, trading, and professionalism for me. Let’s start with his lesser qualities — he was very demanding of his employees, tended to micromanage a bit and was generally pretty inflexible to his people taking time off. From time to time, working there felt very confining, because it was difficult to take a day off for an appointment or a long weekend.

Despite these drawbacks, as my first manager, I would rate him an 8.5/10. What does one want in a first job? While it’s great to have a flexible schedule and a boss that is more inclined to let things slide, it’s ultimately not the ideal way to learn anything. The single most valuable thing I learned from my boss is single-minded dedication. Every single one of his bad qualities comes not from laziness or apathy, but from, if anything, too much dedication to the job. At the end of the day, how can you fault someone for being too careful with their business or too involved in the components that make the business run? He was always demanding, but never once anything but completely respectful. For time off, he didn’t take much (aside from the standard week in the summer and week around Christmas), so he expected the same. From a micromanagement perspective, there are worse qualities than knowing whats going on in all parts of your businesses — like not knowing.

While I think the happy medium of dedication is a touch less than his level, it’s nonetheless good to learn from a strong case. For younger employees, working with a boss like this is certainly a challenge, but a challenge in the same way that motivates someone to choose the most difficult university or decide to run a marathon — not something you will enjoy 100% of the time, but ultimately something that will make you stronger as a person.

To a degree, this sort of dedication motivates (or used to motivate) a lot of Wall Street. The end goal — the reason why everyone got up in the morning — is to make money. If you go out every day and give 70%, you may as well be doing something else, because the pure capitalism that permeates the floor means that someone else will work harder and win the money away from you. It’s greed in the ultimate Gordon Gekko sense, and in some areas (the ones that don’t involve taking risks that could wipe out the firm and millions of shareholders) that greed is, in fact, good.

The next important lesson I learned relates to the value of personal connections. I entered with a class of about 40 people who landed in roles across nearly every area of the firm. What this meant for me was that as a new employee, I had a better network than some people who had been at the firm for years! If I needed advice on interest rates, I was never more than an instant message (or Instant Bloomberg) away from someone on the rates desk. Here, Wall Street is a microcosm of life — it’s not as in-your-face apparent in most cases how someone might help you down the road, but you never know how your freshman-year roommate might be able to help you out in the future. Connections, however, are a funny thing — without maintenance, they degrade over time. So be sure to reach out to those that you want to stay in touch with, because you can’t ignore someone for 10 years and then ask them for a job. Services like LinkedIn and Xobni have formal mechanisms for those who want some structure to their goals of keeping in touch.

The final lesson that I took away is the importance of doing something productive with every day of your life. At the peak (or was it the valley?) of my employment, I worked from 5:45am to about 7:30pm — just shy of 14 hours per day. The fewest hours I worked was about 11 per day, from 6:30 to 5:30 or so. The problem working such a hectic schedule is that it leaves little time for anything else in your life. When you get home after 7 and need to be in bed by 9:30, you have little time to devote to any other pursuits. Most days, I just wanted to sit on the couch for an hour, eat a takeout dinner, and then go to bed. It’s a horrible work-life balance and a degenerative cycle: if you do it for 5 years, you will find that you are forced to continue it, because you no longer have anything in your life outside of work. You don’t decide one day that you no longer have outside interests or hobbies — you decide it every night when you watch TV instead of reading or cooking, or pursuing a hobby.

Without a doubt, it’s a struggle — after a long day of staring at a computer screen the last thing that seems appealing is working on a personal blog or reading a few pages out of a book. However, after repeating that routine for a month or two straight, I realized that there are far too many people that fall into that cycle and wake up one day and realize that they are 40 or 50 years old and have little to show for their lives except the money that they earned at their jobs. The hobbies that they used to enjoy or the cultural knowledge that they used to pride themselves on has given way to short-term market knowledge and the info that can be gleaned from browsing the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

In the end, although there were often times where I felt like my job on Wall Street was worthless and even destructive, I feel that what I learned along the way will prove to help me in my future endeavors. It was undoubtedly a rough time to learn with all that was going on in the markets and in the company. However, what my poor timing lacked in terms of the progression of my career was more than made up for with the general lessons that it taught me instead.

However, times have changed, and they have changed quickly. Only four months ago, the Wall Street dream was still alive, albeit somewhat muffled by a poor economy. Things were bad, but everyone “knew” that we were simply in a cyclical recession that would be over in a few quarters. The landscape changed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the near failure of other major financial firms. Today, even the most golden of Wall Street firms are borrowing billions of dollars from the government to stay afloat and keep themselves from suffering a similar fate at the hands of short sellers and ratings downgrades. Mighty Wall Street, who once all-but-dictated fiscal policy for the US, is now beholden to Uncle Sam for hundreds of billions of dollars.

What does this mean? The most immediate impact that will be felt by bankers over the next few years is the evaporation of bonuses. At the end of 2007, the average employee at a major Wall Street investment bank received a bonus of $175,000, according to the New York Times. Considering that this number includes everyone from the assistants to the CEO, the payout is simply staggering. Up to that point, the firms had generated the returns to justify such compensation. However, in the last 12 months, decades of profits have been wiped out, and the government now has a hand in every bank. What this means, as news outlets have covered ad nauseum, is that bonuses are no longer being paid out of profits — instead, they come out of government subsidies. Needless to say, taxpayers will not fund such compensation. It will take years to repay the billions borrowed, and even then, regulations will undoubtedly be put in place to remedy the compensation asymmetries that led to this situation. Therefore, the days of easy money on Wall Street have passed, at least for the foreseeable future.

Contrast this with careers in the sciences and technology. Several billion worth of TARP funding is going towards research in areas like battery technology, fuel cell research and alternative energy. While all of these areas are extremely important and have a very bright future, alternative energy in particular is poised to become the next billion-dollar industry. Although the plunge in gas prices has taken the market-driven component out of ideas like fuel cell cars and biodiesel engines, the push from the government for technologies like this is bringing them closer and closer each day to the cost-effective level needed to supplant oil for much of our energy. Bloomberg News had an article yesterday titled Obama’s Billions for Energy Fuel Stanford, MIT Research Dreams where it highlighted the research labs that will benefit from TARP funding. The paragraph I found perhaps most interesting:

Balsara, a chemical engineer, has assembled a team of 15 scientists that applied for $25 million over five years from the U.S. Department of Energy to improve batteries by modifying their materials. Money for energy projects is part of an $819 billion stimulus, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, that Obama says is critical to saving the economy.

$25 million, over five years is what it takes to get research for improved batteries on track at some of the top research institutions in the world! Why not triple it and fast-track these technologies. How much will a battery that lasts twice as long as current models contribute in revenues to our economy? I guarantee that you’ll be hard pressed to find a better way to spend that money. This is one project — there are a dozen more that all are starved for cash but once funded would be tremendously valuable to our economy if we got them moving.

Ultimately, the great thing about technology is that it is by nature accretive and self-catalyzing. Discoveries that you make today are the basis for new developments tomorrow. The best example of this is microprocessors, which are created with sophisticated algorithms to lay out the circuits on the chips. More complex algorithms can create faster chips. But faster chips can run more complex algorithms! So the processor that you create today will run better software than last years model, and as a result you can keep ratching up your production because what you produce becomes an input to the system. Because of this positive-feedback, technology grows exponentially with time. Contrast this with investment banking or trading, where the deals or trades you did last year only contribute in a minor way to the trades or deals you do this year. Finance, therefore, grows linearly.

In many ways, the doldrums of Wall Street will help to put our nation back on the same playing field with our competitors. If the events of the last six months had never happened, and our brightest minds continued to choose Wall Street over careers in technology, nations like India and China would quickly outpace us because the linear growth rate of finance would soon fall behind the exponential growth rate of technology.

Therefore, although it will create much short-term pain, the current economic situation will ultimately help the USA by encouraging the smartest minds to seek out a variety of careers. By removing the short-term incentive of massive paychecks in favor of longer-term goals of progress and value creation, the recession will end up spurring a new generation of entrepreneurs who will develop the science and technologies vital to keeping the USA at the forefront of progress.

SealedMedia using nearly 100% of my processor

Finally, I gave up and chalked up the battery problems to an older (about 1.5 years) computer and the fan problems to poor heat management in my laptop. It wasn’t the perfect Apple experience that Steve Jobs maybe have liked, especially with a noisy fan running constantly, but it worked.

One day, I was poking through my process viewer, and changed the filter to show ‘All Processes’. Lo and behold, I noticed that one process was taking up 97% of my processor. Since at that time I was only browsing the web with Safari, this was entirely unexpected. After a bit of Googling, I found out that the process, titled ‘SealedMedia Righ’ belonged to some sort of DRM installed on my computer. Whether it came with the system somehow or was installed with a program remains a mystery, but what I do know is the following:

• It was started by launchd, which is a system process kicked off by the kernel
• Killing it immediately brings the processor usage back to normal, the fan almost immediately from 6000 rpm to under 2000 rpm, and the battery life moves to over 3 hours from about 1hr on a full charge
• It doesn’t come back (that I’ve noticed) after I kill it
• It does come back a short time after a reboot.  
• Killing it doesn’t seem to have any undesired effects whatsoever
• I’m running OSX 10.4, not sure if its unique to this version or not

Given that 100% processor usage generates a lot of heat, which is particularly bad for the expensive battery and hardware inside, this malware DRM app is destroying my computer. Googling for a while didn’t turn up much to solve the problem, so I’m asking users — anyone else have any more information about this program, what it does, how it got there, or how to stop it?

SealedMedia killed, CPU usage back to normal.

Unfortunately, while I’ve come to expect nasty DRM from Apple, this takes the cake because ultimately it will greatly reduce the life of my laptop.

As I’m sitting here, I’m thinking about my other options to Chicago if the flight were to be cancelled. Flight-wise, there isn’t much. A bus takes about 18 hours, so thats not really feasible. A train isn’t much better — it takes around 12 or so when you factor in all the stops. So really, its fly or nothing.

In Japan and parts of Europe, people have another viable option for quick and efficient medium-distance travel. The high-speed trains in these areas can travel 300km/hr (186mph), which would get me from NY to Chicago in under 4 hours. A flight is 2.5 hours in the air plus another 2 hours or so of security and delays, so 4 hours by train certainly gives air travel a run for its money. There are other advantages too — a train can take far more people at at time, so on really high-traffic routes (like NYC to Chicago), plenty of seats are available and they can [conceivably] be sold for a lower price. Weather isn’t nearly as much of a concern, and congestion during crowded times can be solved by simply adding more cars to the train, instead of trying to pack more planes into a finite amount of runway and airspace.

Energy efficiency is a huge upside as well. When oil was above $140/barrel, the airlines couldn’t raise fairs and cut costs enough to make money. Trains don’t have nearly the same voracious energy demands — to put it in perspective, a freight train move 1 ton of cargo 423 miles on 1 gallon of diesel fuel. Admittedly, there is a definite difference between a diesel freight train and a electric magnelev train, but the scope is similar. A story on inhabitant.com (linked below) says that these trains use 1/3 of the energy of planes and 1/5 of the energy of cars. The greenhouse gases that a network of trains would save is huge, and the benefits would go beyond just environmental.

Obviously the main concern with building such a system is the huge cost of creating such an infrastructure. The solution? Start small. California recently approved 800 miles of high-speed rail that will connect every major city in the state. How about a similar system for the east coast? Connect very high-traffic routes between DC, NY and Boston. These routes are heavily trafficked by business travelers, and airline routes such as the Delta Shuttle between New York and Boston are consistently among the most profitable routes in the industry. Replacing a 1hr plane ride subject to delays and security hassles with a 1.5 hour train ride that is essentially “hop on, hop off” will certainly be attractive to many or most of these travelers. Once these routes are established and profitable, build out capacity to other cities.

Air travel ultimately is an inefficient means of transportation for short distances. Allowing a plane to use an airport slot for a 500 mile trip is a very poor use of resources, and certainly something that could be improved upon. As the government looks for the best possible ways to productively spend money to stimulate the economy, rail improvements should be near the top of the list.

However, I was watching today, and when I clicked on a channel to watch a movie already started (Click! with Adam Sandler…so/so), I was presented with this option:

I clicked it, and sure enough, the movie started over! Pretty cool. It was a on FX, so I figured that it was just some gimmick that FX had going.

Later that night, I flipped on House on TNT. Same message! Seems like a bunch of channels are participating.

The ‘Enhanced TV’ features allow you to start from the beginning, pause or rewind the shows (no fast-forward, however, presumably to prevent you from skipping commercials). I checked out the Time Warner Enhanced TV site and it seems like there is a whole slew of features available in certain markets:

	Start Over – Missed the start of your favorite show? With Start Over™, you’ve got the power to restart and watch it from the beginning. Over 60 popular TV channels currently offer Start Over™ and it’s free with digital cable service.
	Quick Clips – Watch video clips of your favorite shows and news programs whenever you like with Quick Clips. New content is added every day and it’s free with digital cable service.
	Look Back – Ever wish you could go back in time and catch a show you missed? Now you can. Look Back lets you watch shows you missed, as many as 48 hours after the program originally aired.
	PhotoshowTV – PhotoShowTV is a new, easy, and FREE way to share your digital pictures and videos with friends and family, right through your computer and TV! It’s free when you subscribe.

Not bad. Seems like Start Over is the only feature available for me right now, but I’m particularly intrigued by the PhotoshowTV option. If they do it right (a big if — pictures are hard, since everyone already has their favorite backup and picture services, and its a pain to switch), it would be pretty neat to be able to pull up your pictures on your TV to show. Those photos from Costa Rica probably look a lot better on a 52″ plasma than on your smaller computer monitor in the den.