jacob news

I have a new post up at my tech blog about Product Management:  The Will to Product

I can no more mix with you than stone can mix with air. Like stone I am, and feel so low and hard and strong and rare. Were you with arms to lift me up my nature would show true. I was born to scorn the sky and seek out earthy truth. Were I made of softer stuff I too would dance days past, drifting each from place to place each moment like the last. But I find my joys in heavy things - filling soul at wisdom's feast. Come here! Feel your weight as well with me substance, knowledge, lasting peace! But rock leaves no mark on wind and soon you fly away. Chance meet, chance part, and parting goes each back to natures' place.

I started and finished �The Hunger Games� trilogy this weekend. It has the gritty teenage violence that fans of �Ender�s Game� will love and an improbable love triangle that �Twilight� fans will obsess over. It is written in a breezy style that nobody should find challenging. In other words, it was engineered to be a blockbuster. And popular it is - a big-budget movie adaptation is hitting screens less than four years after the first volume was published. From the perspective of a young male reader, the action too often halts for a rehashing of the love triangle. When we embark on yet another trip around the hamster wheel which is Katniss Everdeen�s brain running in circles over boys my eyes automatically shift into skim mode. But the author�s sense of pacing saves the day. When my patience starts to wear out, Katniss snaps out of her romantic stupor long enough to put an arrow through somebody�s throat. Suzanne Collins is mindful of serving her bimodal audience consisting of action-cr...

There is a pervasive hostility to the idea of having children among people in my peer group (urban yuppies, mostly). I blame it on the culture of short-sighted hedonism we live in. It�s true that raising young children is a chore, but having children  increases happiness in the long run , and the more children the better. More importantly, what kind of society are we building when the most educated and successful among us, people who make great parents, refrain from having children and passing on their values? When creating the next generation is left to impulsive people who are poor providers and poor sources of wisdom? What happened to the ideal of leaving the world a better place than you found it? If you're a sensible, smart person without a criminal record, please consider contributing to the next generation. It's a public good, and you'll eventually be happy you did it.