“the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has.”

“Throwing away then all things, hold to these only which are few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only this present time, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or it is uncertain.”

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains…it is in they power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere, either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble, does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquility.”

The Golden Sayings of Epictetus.

Links:

Harvard Classics, The Five Foot Bookshelf

Golden Sayings of Epictetus

Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

- Viktor Frankl

First off my wife uses a desktop software called Time & Chaos. We’ve been using it since 1995. It is fantastic, gives you a great view of contacts, appointments, and to do’s in one view. Anyway, they have an add-on that allows her to publish her calendar to google calendar. So she plugs in everything related to family activities and with 2 boys ages 14 and 12 and 1 girl age 10, we have soccer, basketball, track, tap dance, choir, physics club, cello, piano etc.

I have a mac and use ical on the mac. I subscribe to her my wife’s gcal. That way I can always see what we’ve got scheduled, and I can see it on my mac, iphone and ipad. And, just as important, since it is an additional calendar, when I want some sanity or a clean view of my work calendar, I can unclick and NOT view it.

Finally got my Hugh MacLeod artwork up in my den.

Last night I was in a Frank Sinatra mood. So I played Sinatra on my AppleTV whilst enjoying family game night. After the kids went to bed, Frank sang “One for My Baby” and I wanted to share my favorite version (Sinatra at the Sands) on Facebook. I searched on Google on found the version on LALA.com. I had heard about lala a while back but hadn’t explored it at all.

I decided to try it out. Lala.com scans your hard drive (or the specific folders you choose) for music you own. It then matches those songs to songs it has licenses to online. This process can take a while depending on your library. I have a mid-sized library, about 4,000 songs, and it took about 10 hours. When it was done, I logged back into lala.com and lo and behold it had essentially recreated my itunes online, playlists included. Now it doesn’t have all the songs I had, it ended up about 65% of the songs. I’m sure that aspect will take care of itself over time.

Now if Apple actually launches a Tablet device, it may not have enough hard drive space to house all of my media. Further, with all of ipods/iphones/computers my family of five has, I don’t want every device to have to house all the songs we own. But if my songs are housed on lala, or whatever Apple rebrands this as, and if the Tablet has either wifi or better yet, a Kindle-like built in EVDO, I can access my playlists wherever I want, on my tablet.

With the amount of music, TV, movies combined with the number of devices people own, the idea of having a storage online versus a ‘home server’ makes a lot of sense. This would make my AppleTV more compelling as well because the size limitations of the device will matter less.

But what I really loved about the book was the first section of the book that essentially introduces number theory to the reader. Mr. Petzold should be a teacher. The story of math is an intriguing one, and in the author’s hands, not only are the actors compelling, but the math itself is as well.

Every generation tends to over-emphasize the change going on as the ‘greatest ever’, but in reading this book, I had a greater appreciation for the amazing changes in math in the first half of hte 20th century.

If you are interested in Turing, computing, or looking for a great primer on math history and number theory, I strongly recommend this book.

UPDATE: thanks to a @lwcavallucci on twitter who asked a very common sense question (that I failed to supply an answer for in my post).  The question is on age appropriateness.  My first answer is that is has more to do with interest than age, but think I can go deeper than that.

1. For the actual math done in Turing’s paper, there is a high degree of difficulty and it was way over my head.  That said, this did not stop me from enjoying the book or understand the theory behind the math, and the whole point of the book is to annotate the paper.

2. For the other elements of the book, i.e. number theory, history of math especially around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, I would say a middle schooler who enjoys math will like the book.  (Editorial: I find number theory fascinating and I it is puzzling to me why the American style of teaching math puts that off for so long, when for many students, math would be far more interesting if they could take this earlier in life, and not associate Math purely with “arithmetic.”)

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