Sunday, May 16, 2010

Work till you can not work

Just finished "reading" the book called "Free" by Chris Anderson who authored the famous book "Long Tale". I used "read" because I actually listened the whole book while driving and on my trip to Silicon Valley for my job interview.

It's a brilliant book. It explains the "freemium" and "googleconomy" pretty well. I gained additional insight into the Internet industry. It even helped adding information to some of my responses of the interview questions a little.

The title of this post is from an article I was reading today. I was trying to solve an issue caused by the upgrade of my older laptop's Ubuntu's version to 10.04. I managed to get a work-around so the laptop can dual-boot Ubuntu or Windows XP. I certainly missed the days with Debian when I didn't have to deal with much upgrade issues.

As I was dealing with the Linux distribution, I wanted to know what Linus Torvalds is up to. Then I started watching a tech talk he gave to Google about Git. The next person I thought about was John Carmack. Then I started reading an interview someone had done with him. In the interview he explained the beauty of programming and said something like: you don't rely on anybody else; you just use your computer and work until you can not work.

This reminded me the 10000-hour rule mentioned in Gladwell's book "outliers". I read this book briefly before. Now I loaded the audio to my Zune player (as a poor student, can't afford a ipod). I'll "read" the book the second time thoroughly.

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