S and I are expecting a baby. The approximate due date is on August 22nd. Although during the first trimester S had terrible morning sickness (why do they call it morning when it occurs throughout the day?), she is fine now. 

"The test is positive". I heard these earth shattering words in Las Vegas at 8:25 pm on Dec 20th. Of course I did not believe it till a few days afterwards when a doctor confirmed it for us.

As you can imagine, it is a period of great excitement as well as anxiety for us. We have experienced a range of emotions that we never knew can be felt like by humans. More than once I’ve said "Oh my God, what have we done!". And when S’s mom was going back to India, I felt like shouting "You are not going to leave us alone, are you?". But every night we fall asleep to dreams of a baby and every morning brings us that much closer to the faithful day.

In my mind, an entrepreneur is like a kid playing with his first shortwave radio. He takes it home and turns it on, and what does he hear?

Nothing. Static.

This might be demoralizing. So he tries a different frequency.

Nothing. Static.

And this might be demoralizing again.

Joel says that this is where a lot of start-ups fail. People get demoralized and stop working on their business. I couldn’t agree more with him. Time and time again, I’ve just stopped trying when I did not see the results after the initial effort. In fact I should be doing just the opposite.

You have to fiddle patiently with all the dials until you get the reception you want

Say you decide to open a restaurant. You rent space, fill it with tables, stock the kitchen, and hire a bunch of waiters and a host to seat people and answer the phone and take reservations. And then, on the night of your grand opening: [imagine the sound of crickets here].

At this moment, a founder who is incapable of careful morale management will think to himself, Maybe a career in HR management isn’t so bad after all. Meanwhile, the determined founder will start playing with the dials — rethinking the menu, trying new promotions, and adjusting prices. And what he’ll find is that, just like the tuner on a radio, certain aspects of a business can be off by only a little bit and then, one tiny adjustment, and BING! The thing starts working.

Just you keep at it, continue to tweak the things that don’t work. Whether it is a new project or building a relationship with you team or anything else, continue to adjust the dials until you stumble upon the right formula.

Here’s why people liked the telegraph: It was universal, inexpensive, asynchronous and it left a paper trail.

And yet the telephone destroyed the telegraph. The reason it was able to do so despite not having any of the attributes mentioned above was because it solved a different problem (real time communication) very effectively. If you set out making something, you’ll get much more for your effort if it solves a different problem, rather than a problem for which solutions already exist.

If the telephone guys had set out to make something that did what the telegraph does, but better, they probably would have failed. Instead, they solved a different problem, in such an overwhelmingly useful way that they eliminated the feature set of the competition.

Always try to bring something unique to the table.

I’ve diversified quite a lot, but I’m still going to stay fully invested in equities. Being quite far away from retirement I’ve chosen to be aggressive. But at the same time I have a very small percentage in mid cap and small cap stocks and no growth stocks, but this is primarily due to a lack of a good choice in my 401k plan. I’ve realized that I have keep a closer look at the performance than in the past, but hopefully the new allocation strategy will produce better results.

Currently I do not own anything (such as a house or a boat, etc) that is difficult to valuate, and so my net worth figure is pretty accurate. I feel that it is the single most important financial figure. It’s how I can measure my progress in towards my short term (saving for down payment towards a house) and long term (financial independence) goals.

If I am able to track changes to my net worth with any sort of regularity for a decent amount of time, hopefully I can use it to guide my financial decisions. So I’ve decided to track my net worth going forward. Keeping in mind the huge swings in the securities market, I’ll look at it only once every month (usually around the 15th).

Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking.

Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking.

via WalkScore.com

Recently the website ranked 2508 neighborhoods across America. Not surprisingly Los Angeles scored a lowly 67 and was ranked 9th (San Francisco and New York were the top 2). However the neighborhood that I live in (Mid City West) scores a 92 and is ranked as the most walkable in Los Angeles. I live walking distance from a mall, 2 Ralphs grocery stores, move theaters, library, KMart, 3 pharmacies and a thousand restaurants.

Check out how much your neighborhood scores at WalkScore.com

It’s still a dev release, where new ideas get tested and so not as stable the production or even beta releases. Here’s how to get the new version.

1. If you don’t have Google Chrome, install it from google.com/chrome

2. Subscribe to the developer preview channel. This is required even if you’ve previously subscribed to the channel.

3. Wait until the new version is downloaded (you may force the update by opening the "About Google Chrome" dialog).

via Google Chrome 2.0 Pre-Beta.

Here’s a screen shot of NY Times without AdBlock+

And this is what it looks like with AdBlock+