This movie is fantastic for the intelligent movie goers. Quality acting, good effects, and an interesting story line. Whats more, in the context of the movie it actually makes sense! I highly recommend you see it.

Still, as an experienced creator of virtual worlds, the psychology presented in this movie was quite interesting…

Many years ago I started creating my own virtual world, known then as Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz MUD (and later renamed Gundam Wing: The Awakening). MUD stands for Multi-User Dimension, and is a text based virtual world where people from around the globe can play simultaneously. Each MUD has a theme; in my case, the game was centered around the world depicted in the Gundam Wing anime. It was sci-fi, and the main draw was piloting large mech suits.

One of the interesting draws for me in this realm was the fact that, as an administrator, the world was yours for the making. You could build vast worlds. Cities, continents, and entire planets. You could create the means to travel between them. You could create the objects that players interacted with, and the non-player characters (NPCs) that gave the world its true meaning. You could implement logic within objects to make them behavior in a specific way, thus making NPCs seem more human-like.

In a very real sense, you played god. You decided what to make, how it worked, and what its purpose was. I had an even greater role as a coder. If functionality did not exist to do what I wanted, I simply created it. I could literally shape the entire game to my making. For me, it was like interactive story telling.

In the movie, the architects designed the worlds in which dreams took place. Interestingly, it is the people who then enter the world that fill it with their projections. However, for the people who go deep enough, they can play god. They can shape the world as they choose, in real time. They can create anything and everything they wish; once this goes on long enough, it can be hard to give up the power and distinguish between reality and the dream world.

This is an interesting thought to me due to the inherently addictive nature of virtual worlds. It is easy to lose yourself in a new realm with different rules. And yet, to this day, we are limited by the technology used to present this information to us. We must use keyboards to issue commands and the mouse to guide a virtual player (known as an Avatar or PC), which is presented to us on the screen. Focused people can lose track of time, but there is no doubt which world you are still in.

So I suppose my question in all of this is, what happens in the future? What happens when technology becomes better and we can blur the line between reality and a virtual world, and everything begins to look and feel real? What happens when you become the avatar, and you see the world through its eyes? This concept has been explored quite thoroughly (The Matrix, Inception, and perhaps done best in Ghost in the Shell), and it has always intrigued me. Would it be a wonderful gift to humanity? Or would it be its downfall?

Note: This is a long post because it is essentially two posts in one.

This talk was important to me on many levels. Personally I always try to rally behind the causes I find important and worthwhile. This talk is a good example of how to inspire and recruit others to those causes. From an entrepreneurship perspective, this is important information for both attracting customers and quality employees.

Recently I have been reading about and giving a lot of thought to the last statement — attracting customers and quality employees. Both are vital for any company. I realized that while I want employees with skill, their skill will matter very little if they have no drive. Startups like mine are absolutely dependent on the passion of the individuals bringing it to life. It is a way of life, not a job. I need people who will treat it as such.

As for customers, it is surprisingly hard to find information on how good companies attract good customers and maintain loyalty. Everyone seems to have their own methods. However, many web companies are quite dubious and will do anything to make a buck. While generating revenue is important, I think any venture that sets out specifically to do that will not succeed to the degree of one that does not. I don’t mean that they will fail per se, but they probably won’t have the explosive growth of a company that does it right. Customers should be the priority, not profit. If you put customers first, profit will follow.

This boils down to one great piece of advice; something Sinek repeatedly says in the talk:

People don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it.

I believe this to be quite true. Anyone can rattle off what a product do, and that fails to make me want it. But if you can tell me why you made it, and why I would want it then you have a much better chance at convincing me to overcome my frugality.

Outside of the market, I find that I always am attracted to those with passion. In fact, that is how I came by the entrepreneurship program here at UNI. While I was interested in starting a business and could see a future in it, it certainly wasn’t my current plan. However, everything changed. I got involved, and the more involved I got the more I saw that for the people at the JPEC, this was a way of life. They believed in their cause. And so, in a short time, I changed all of my plans. I took on their cause as my own, and embraced this way of life. I believe so strongly in entrepreneurship that I have spread the word of our cause to almost everyone I know, and I find they are all willing to listen because I’m not doing it out of self-interest.

This is similar to how I got into economics. I was merely interested in the subject matter, but I had no real plans of a major or minor. I took one class with Professor Hakes and was immediately sold. I was convinced that if he wasn’t being paid to teach this to us, he’d probably be out on the street corner telling this information to anyone who listened. As I took more classes I found that this wasn’t exclusive to him, but was, in fact, a strongly held belief among most of our Economics faculty. After learning much of the information, I have found that the professors were right. The information is almost universally applicable, and holds special meaning to me as an entrepreneur.

After watching the talk I went and looked up more information on Simon Sinek, and found he had a book called Start With Why. It is now the top of my “To Read” list, even above the Malcolm Gladwell books I’ve been pining to get to (though I did finish Outliers, but I’ll save that for another post).

1. Why is the best question of all time. Ask it often.
2. Time is precious and invaluable.
3. Excellence in all things.

I have often wondered what I would say if I was to give a talk to others about wisdom I have gained. Obviously this should be tailored to the specific topic at hand, but if I could pick something general and universally applicable, then those three items would be it. They are the rules I live by, often without knowing it. Let me break it down.

Why is the best question of all time. Ask it often. Along those lines, knowledge is power.

There are two primary groups in relation to observation of the world. First, there are those who are content with the world and accept it for what it is. Second, there are those who see what the world could be and challenge the status quo. People who are content often do not question the world around them, whereas people who see the possibilities never stop asking why.

Why is an important question. It helps you get to the bottom of things. It helps you understand. You asking why even helps other people understand. Asking why helps spur change. Plus, the question never gets more complex; you simply have to ask it repeatedly until you obtain the answers you need.

Asking why is often a trait of the young, especially small children. Children don’t have any performed views of the world. They don’t have a base of knowledge upon which they can make assumptions, so when they don’t know the simply ask. Their curiosity knows no bounds. Why is the sky blue? Why is the world round? Unfortunately, most parents kill this curiosity. I was fortunate that my parents indulged my early nerdiness and urged me to continue on my quest for knowledge. I have since realized that you should never stop asking questions. Curiosity should be a lifelong trait.

Now is a great time for why-askers. With the advent of broadband internet and the world wide web, the knowledge of our race is literally at your fingertips. These days, if you have a question, you can now know the answer within seconds or minutes. You can get a good, detailed summary of some topic you have never heard of before. And you can do all of this for free! Take advantage.

In an age like this where information is so readily accessible, you should obtain as much as humanly possible because when I say knowledge is power, I mean that in a literal sense. Knowledge gives you an edge in anything you do, if only because you avoid the mistakes you would make otherwise. Also, knowledge is the only thing that someone cannot take away from you. You could lose your freedom, your money, the clothes on your back, and even your life. But knowledge, it sticks with you through thick and thin. No one can steal your education, and that education may help you mend a broken life.

Time is precious and invaluable.

Time is the only resource you can never obtain more of. It is finite, and you spend it constantly. Thus, it is important to not waste time. It is the most valuable asset you have. In fact, I would submit that your time is priceless, and thus should only be spent on the most worthy of tasks.

In a purely economical sense, what follows is about maximizing productivity and minimizing cost. I actually embrace this more than almost anyone I know, and it often frustrates some people who do not see eye to eye with this concept.

A great example of this, in my case, is cooking. While I enjoy cooking (though I don’t seem to posses much skill in the craft), it is not a feasible activity with respect to time. I will inevitably spend time buying the groceries, packing them in the car, unpacking them, preparing the food, eating, and doing dishes. Since you can buy groceries for a number of meals, I’ll throw that out of this particular equation. If I just prepare the food, eat it, and then do the dishes, I’m often looking at at least an hour. Now I can ask myself, how much is that hour worth? My time is priceless. If I paid for some food, I could save myself most of that hour, even if it cost twice as much as eating at home. I could then spend that hour (or whats left after buying the prepared food) doing what is important to me.

Another example is yard work (well, for those of you who own property). In my opinion, yard work is economically nonsensical. While it is nice to be outside, maybe get some exercise while improving the state of your property, you could be paying someone to do that for you. Would it cost you less money to do it yourself? Probably. But it would cost more of your time, which is invaluable. Since the person you hire is willing to give you their time for a certain dollar amount, you are effective getting a bargain by trading money for something that is priceless.

This is a strange concept for most people, and I know the reason why: most people value money more then they value their time. Or, more correctly, they value stuff more then they value time. This is wrong. Money and goods are not finite resources. In a simplistic view, you can always obtain more money and goods if you need to. This is not the case with time. Once it is spent, it is gone. You will never have more. Thus, time is worth far, far more than money ever will be.

Obviously this is a rather spartan view of the world, and we cannot always choose to spend our time where we like. Perhaps our financial resources are constrained in such a way that we must give up our time in order to reduce our financial expenditure. This is reasonable. However, it is not how the world should be. In order to maximize happiness and productivity, I suggest spending your time doing what you consider important. Then, when you are forced into other things, you will not feel as bad. If your work is not meaningful to you and you are forced to spend your time to conserve your money, you will not lead a happy life because you will not be spending your time on things your consider important.

I should note what is important to me determines where I spend my time, and that will be the case for others. Many people enjoy cooking, and many people enjoy doing yard work. I’m sure there are many people who absolutely hate reading or spending all of their time learning new things. That is fine. I don’t mean to condone anyone’s interests or put mine up on some kind of pedestal. I merely was trying to demonstrate that paying for things you do not like to do, even if they cost more then doing it yourself, is a huge advantage and benefit to you.

I guess my overall point is to do what you want to do. Wasting time is the absolute worst thing you could do.

I’ve had a few people ask me how I can say I adhere to this principle when I may spend an entire weekend watching Stargate SG-1, or playing a video game. While these are not common occurrences, they fit in line perfectly with this principle. The question merely demonstrates a lack of understanding of this principle. Watching Stargate all weekend is not a waste of my time if it is something I want to do and consider important. Everyone needs to relax, and you cannot uphold your main cause 24/7. There is downtime required; otherwise you risk burning out. Doing nothing can be just as important as doing something, depending on the context in which it occurs.

Excellence in all things.

These four words are the summation of a plethora of inspirational quotations. However, there is one in particular I still wish to share. When I was young, maybe 9 or 10, my parents let me pick out an inspirational poster when we went to the mall once. I picked Excellence, with a quote that read:

Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings.

Proverbs 22:29

When I was younger, I figured this meant that excellence brought prestige. Now, when I look at this artifact of my past, I realize it has other meanings as well. Primarily it means that he who excels in his work will make a difference, be that in front of kings or other visionaries.

This principle, excellence in all things, has much to do with the one above. If you are spending your time, a priceless asset, on something, do it well for you have paid the highest price imaginable to do it. There is no reason to accept mediocrity. Do everything to the best of your ability, because you should only be doing what is important in the first place.

This can lead to some serious personal struggles. I believe that if you set the bar high enough, you will achieve the highest amount possible, even if you fall short of the bar. But what happens when you stumble? You fall. Hard. You miss that bar by a long, long ways.

Failure like that can be tough to deal with. If you expect excellence in all things, the inevitable misstep or serious struggle will weigh you down. It will be a serious burden, and not one you can easily shed. Thus, I would say that you should strive for your best, always. But be honest with yourself. Failure is more progress than not doing anything at all. Failure teaches you things. No one can avoid failure all the time. Failure is part of life. Sometimes the best you can do is simply not very good. Accept that fact. You cannot be everything to everyone at every moment. You need to have the power to put 100% into the most important things in your life, and that means cutting out a lot of slack most of the time. That can be tough, especially if that slack turns out to be other people.

Do not worry though; you will make it through. You must merely have the will to pursue excellence in life, for few things are more important than life itself.

A few weekends back I went to see Alice in Wonderland with my two brothers. Obviously this is an unconventional movie choice for three guys, but there were few movies playing we are Tim Burton fans. Anyways, I think there is a valuable lesson to be learned from this movie.

(It appears they disabled embedding. Just click through to YouTube to watch the trailer!)

Lewis Carroll is most famous for his works in literary nonsense. Thus, it was extremely important for this movie to be both enjoyable and positively absurd. The plot is fantastical, the characters unique, and the animation was quite superb.

All of that said, I think I took something away from this movie that most of my fellow movie goers (13 and under it seemed) did not. One of the recurring themes of the movie is to challenge what is reasonable, and that is a very valuable lesson to learn and also a very valuable skill to have.

It is only impossible if you think it is. That is the message. Imagine how quickly innovation and technological advancement would die without people who believed in this. Imagine if the founders of Google thought it was impossible to make a better search engine. Imagine if the Wright brothers believed the naysayers and gave up on flight. Humans, as a race, would not be where we are today.

Cisco has developed routers that can achieve speeds of up to 322 Terrabits per second — a number no one can really comprehend. Thats 322 trillion bits per second. To compare, must of us with broadband, also known as “fast” Internet, operate at 10 Megabits per second, or 10 million bits per second. Thus, this new technology is 32.2 million times as fast as your Internet connection, and 1200% faster then anything on the market now days. It will be available for sale this Fall! Once technology is upgraded, we could see Internet speeds that were thought to be impossible just a few years ago. This is similar to YouTube and Wikipedia revolutionizing the web once broadband took hold. These applications weren’t even in the minds of the best engineers a decade ago. Things that were technically impossible are now possible. The question is who will remove the impossibilities from their minds to take advantage of this and start the next new web empire?

Another article comes to mind on this topic. Physicists seem to think they have a good grasp on light, and for the longest time everyone knew that you could never turn light into matter, and you surely could not turn matter into light. Wrong. Lene Vestergaard Hau not only changed light into matter, she moved it and then changed it back. She challenged all of her colleagues and worked on something so many people considered impossible, only to prove them wrong and make one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time.

I firmly believe this message, and we need more people who believe it too. We need to remove the words “can’t” and “impossible” from our mindset. Just because it doesn’t exist does not mean it cannot exist. It just means that you have not created it yet! Innovation comes from people who challenge what is known and unknown, and wonder what is possible in this world of ours. We need more of them. Are you one?

I was fortunate enough to be one of the first people to jump on the flash drive bandwagon. I bought (well, my mother bought) my first flash drive, a massive 128MB for over $120. That is a joke now days of course — you can obtain giant flash drives cheaply, and people routinely hand out “small” 4GB drives for free. And, as long as you plug them in once every twenty or so years they’ll retain their data!

Here I will detail the analysis of the flash drives I currently own, from my oldest, original 128 MB PNY flash to the newest free OCZ drive I have received.

In the order they were acquired, here is make / capacity (note that my original drive is the largest physically, even compared to the 16GB drive):

- 128MB PNY Attache (bought around mid 2004 or early 2005. It came with a Windows 98/ME drivers disc that I carry in my backpack to this day)

- 128 MB UNI ROTC – Special drive received from the department when I was in high school

- 2GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro – My first flash drive in many years. 2GB seems like a lot when you are used to 128MB!

- 16GB Kingston Data Traveler – Received from Distek, my employer, as Christmas gift in 2008.

- 4GB OCZ Diesel – Received as a free addon by NewEgg for buying two video cards.

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I will test using CrystalDiskMark 2.2 using a USB 2.0 port doing sequential reads and writes:

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The conclusions are quite interesting. In comparison to similar technology, the OCZ diesel is indeed slow. There are many drives that function much faster then the ones listed here, though these are some of the more common drives.

It is interesting to me that write speeds increased dramatically, but now seem to wax and wane depending on what you buy. I also find it interesting that there was no clear winner here. The Kingston drive would be the obvious choice with good read speeds and the best write speeds, as well as superior capacity. However, the Sandisk drive has superior read speeds by a fair amount, and at 2GB will hold most anything I would want to carry around. I suppose these will be my primary drives depending on what I am trying to do.

As for the free OCZ Diesel… well, I think it is time to test ReadyBoost with all 4GB of it

After running my server for 20+ days, I shut down everything to go on Thanksgiving break. When I finally returned home, my server would not boot. Having gone through this before, I checked the RAM immediately, as it was an old high performance stick that saw heavy use in my desktop before being retired. The stick was at fault, and so my server was dead until I could buy new RAM. My graphics card was the only thing in my desktop that had not been upgraded in a while (two years or so), but I wasn’t going to bother ordering something until I actually needed parts. Now I had to order something, so I looked for new graphic cards! The desktop was running an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, and with the graphic card industry being the way it is, it had now moved into legacy status and there were much better cards to be had. So I decided that if I needed RAM for my server I would also throw in my new monitor and grab a new video card (an ATI Radeon HD 5770 from Sapphire).

Already annoyed with the RAM blown and having to gimp my desktop (took 1GB and threw it into the server for the time being) while being embroiled in coding, I eagerly awaited my parts. However, 15 minutes after placing the order for my monitor (a 22″ 5ms Acer, similar to my other two 20″ monitors), a sale on Newegg began for a similar monitor that had a better contrast ratio for ~$20 less. Thinking there was no way they could have processed my order in 20 minutes, I went to cancel. My request was denied. I tried again. Request denied. After further inquiry, it seemed that the monitor I ordered just 20 minutes earlier had hit their shipping lines! Instead of being disgruntled I merely canceled the order for the other monitor and decided I would be content with fast shipping of the pricier, slightly less capable monitor. In the mean time, my other order (video card and RAM) did NOT ship until Wednesday, the day I received the monitor I had ordered two days later than the parts. Newegg, recognizing their shipping hold up, decided to 2-day air ship the parts to me so I could get them today (12/4/2009).

Having done my research ahead of time (and thus, part of my reason for writing this blog post as that research was hard to find), I knew that my ATI Radeon X1950 Pro legacy card would very likely conflict with my new ATI Radeon HD 5770 under Windows 7, despite being workable under Windows XP. Now, after two hours of trial and error, I have found that you indeed cannot mix a legacy card with a newer card simply because it is no longer supported by Catalyst Control Center, which is needed to govern multiple ATI cards. So, it seems, ~$330 later, I simply have two more inches of screen space and an extra monitor on my desk, waiting to be used. The question now is do I buy a second graphics card or find an alternative? Having come this far, I’m inclined to say the second graphics card is the way to go. This is also after some research which led me to some interesting devices, but all for more then $160, which is about what another graphics card will cost me.

So, to recap for anyone searching:

If you want to use three monitors with your computer, the easiest and most reliable way to do so is with three DVI connections. In that regard, you will want two graphic cards, with at least one of them having two DVI/D-Sub outs. For maximum reliability and compatibility, and the ability to CrossFire or SLI later, try using two of the same card. If you have an older card that is no longer supported by ATI, you cannot mix it with a new card on Windows 7 due to driver conflicts (this has to do with the way Windows 7 pulls and uses legacy drivers). However, you should be able to use a newer card (that is, any card not in legacy status) with a brand new card (say, mixing a 4000 series and 5000 series) and have it work just fine.

Another question remains: If you have two cards and Crossfire them, can you support three monitors? I was curious about this too, but according to ATI only two monitors are supported with CrossFire at this time, although this link seems to say up to five can be supported. I should note I’m not much of a gamer or performance chaser. Instead, I chase my own productivity, and it so happens that multiple mid-range graphics cards seem to be the answer!

A word on ATI Radeon HD 5770 Performance:

While I do not have hard benchmark numbers, it is quite clear after a few minutes of use that this card is a big advance over my Radeon X1950 Pro. It had double the memory (1GB v. 512MB) and it is faster (GDDR5 v. GDDR3). It has a much higher clock speed (850Mhz v. 600 Mhz) and a much larger number of graphics pipelines (800 v 600). I was concerned about heat (which any good system builder should be), so I watched in CCC as I ran the Windows 7 benchmark program. As the test chugged away, I watched the GPU get red-lined for a bit and the fan never went above 33% (great for noise), and the temperature never went above 50C. I suppose the question now is how hot will two of them get in my case? They will be quite close to eachother, and the top one will receive little air flow, so I am concerned. However, my temperatures are something I monitor quite heavily (I’ll probably write about that eventually), so hopefully it won’t be a problem

I spent some time yesterday playing Team Fortress 2 to test out the card a bit (I don’t play many games, so it is the most intensive one I have). I jacked up all of the settings to max, including Anti-Aliasing 8x and Ansiotropic Filtering 16x. The card ran like a champ — it never really broke a sweat, leaving its fan at 33% and never going above 55C while maintaining over 60fps, usually much more (100+).

For the curious, Windows 7 rates my system thus (scale ranging from 1.0 to 7.9):

Processor (C2D Q6600) – 7.1
RAM (4GB 800Mhz 4-4-4-12 GSKILL) – 7.1
Graphics (Radeon HD 5770) – 7.3 (up from 6.0)
Gaming graphics – 7.3 (up from 6.0)
Primary hard disk (WD Caviar Black 7200 RPM 500GB): 5.9

Thus, my base score is 5.9, with my disk drives being the only item under 7. This is a little curious to me as both of the drives are quite new and feature dual processors each with access to its own 16MB buffer. That said, I run the two drives in RAID1 using my motherboards fakeraid, so it isn’t surprising there is a performance hit here. All of that said, my desktop is considered extremely high end, and thus I will not need any more updates until I build a completely new rig in a few years. Until then, I look forward to testing triple monitors and another new 5770.

In the mean time, I’ll settle for my Linux box getting it’s own monitor: