Elon Musk and SpaceX - worthy of emulation

Elon Musk, the man behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and the HyperLoop concept has yet another reason to celebrate with the successful launch of the next generation Falcon 9 rocket. As a secondary goal, the SpaceX team had huge aspirations of having the booster stage safely return to earth for reuse. While this portion of the mission failed, SpaceX seems tantalizingly close to drastically reducing the cost to reach orbit with recyclable rockets. In an age of waning American dominance in innovation, Musk and SpaceX typify the bold thinking and solid engineering that needs to prevail in the years to come. Wherever I go in my career, I hope to be a part of organizations driven by ideas that truly have the possibility to transform society and not just turn a profit.

Steam Box

If you aren't a regular reader of gaming blogs, you may have missed the buzz regarding the pending announcement of Valve's first foray into gaming hardware, the Steam Box. While Valve's intentions haven't been exactly secret, the announcement of a Linux based "console" has many gamers giddy to see what exactly the Steam Box will offer. Steam has succeed in revolutionizing PC gaming, practically killing physical distribution through digital downloads, while also enabling independent developers to create and sell their creations to a large market with low overhead. The question is if they can shift the momentum of their platform to Linux (which has a poor history with games) while also challenging the console incumbents. Valve has also indicated that while they will make or spec hardware, other companies as well as individuals will be able to build their own Steam Box. As a believer in consumer choice and open-source software, I love this concept. Much as Android has carved out a market with the number of choices in hardware and software, Valve can do the same in breaking open the console ecosystem, offering more choice, more flexibility, and ultimately, more benefits to the consumer.

Coming up for air

As obsessive tech people are wont to do, I often get deep into the technical waters trying to solve some obscure problem. In this state, I am a pretty miserable person to try and associate with. Questions don't register until minutes after being asked and responses are started but never finished. My wife hates it. If there is one point of martial strife in our otherwise blissful marriage, it would be that I submerge myself and don't surface for hours. Observation tells me that I am most definitely not alone in this behavior. Whether it be Scheme, Skyrim, or Spotify, we humans generally suck at balancing our real world interactions with our digital distractions. I often brush off the opinions of those who warn of our ever more connected-yet-disconnected behavior as only applying to teens on Facebook. But when I come up for air, I see just how unrooted from the physical realm I can be.  The Singularity hasn't quite happened yet, and until that time, those of us who spend time staring at a screen all day need to swim for the surface occasionally and avoid getting completely lost.