Beat the Reaper, by Josh Bazell. Bazell introduces us to Peter Brown, an overworked doctor at a Manhattan hospital. A patient at the hospital sees Peter and believes him to be a hit man who disappeared into the witness protection program. This is a taut thriller soaked in adrenaline, especially during the second half of the book. You’ll learn more about medicine than the mob, but you won’t mind soaking up the knowledge. Plenty of action (even some gore). Beat the Reaper isn’t as shallow as some summer thrillers, but it isn’t remarkably deep either.

Gone Tomorrow, by Lee Child. If you like Jack Reacher books, this is one of the better examples. Jack Reacher is a loner, a former military policeman with a knack for stumbling across trouble. Reacher watches a woman kill herself on the subway and digs at the truth until he uncovers much more than he expected. Lee Child’s Reacher series pretty much defines the summer suspense book. In Gone Tomorrow, Child’s pacing is excellent--you may stay up until 4 a.m. to finish the book. If you’re looking for a fun way to spend time by the pool or in the airport, this book delivers.

Dog On It, by Spencer Quinn. This is a detective story told from the perspective of the detective’s dog, Chet. I think most people would like this book. I’ve enjoyed the recent spate of detective stories from unusual perspectives (The Little Sleep describes a narcoleptic detective, while The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has an autistic narrator). And books told from the perspective of an animal can be fun (I enjoyed Cats in Cyberspace, by Beth Hilgartner).

Dog On It follows Chet and his owner Bernie as they try to solve a kidnapping. Overall the book is entertaining and even pulls strongly at your heart in a couple places. The relationship between the detective and his dog is a touchstone that carries the book well. A couple minor points did mar the story for me. First, the book had coincidences that strained my suspension of disbelief three or four times. The other sticking point is that in conveying Chet’s emotional state, the author tells us any time that Chet is happy--which happens a lot. The fifth or sixth time that Chet is overjoyed by sticking his head out the window or getting a treat, it gets a little stale. Then again, dogs are happy most of the time. These issues are minor though; if you like a little bit of hardboiled detective work told with a twist, you should enjoy Dog On it.

The Unincorporated Man, by Dani and Eytan Kollin. This book started extremely strongly. The premise is that Justin Cord, a multibillionaire in his own time, is woken up from cryonic suspension after 300 years. In the future, when a person is born they are incorporated. Parents own 20% of the corporation and the government gets 5%. Many people end up owning only a minority stake in themselves and spend decades pursuing majority control of their personal corporations so that they can decide what to do with their own lives.

The Unincorporated Man is really a bit of philosophy and economics pretending to be science fiction. I love books that postulate a slightly changed world and then examine the consequences of that change in detail. For example, the book The Truth Machine asks how society would be affected by an infallible lie detector. The Truth Machine is one of my favorite books, and for a while I thought that The Unincorporated Man would be even better. But the book goes on a bit long and veers away from its beginning into standard science fiction by the end. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the ending felt like the authors were setting up a sequel instead of wrapping up all the loose ends. Would I still recommend this book? Yes. The “idea density” of this book is high, and most of the book is entertaining. But The Unincorporated Man may drag for a few people.

Emergency, by Neil Strauss. If you’ve read Strauss’ most famous book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists then you might be under the mistaken impression that Strauss is, well, a jerk. The Game was very entertaining, but it helped spawn a whole generation of wannabe pickup artists who believe that “negging” (insulting someone in the guise of a compliment to exert emotional power over them) is a good idea. Strauss’ new book makes it clear that his previous book was documenting a scene, not his identity.

Strauss’ new book is titled Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, but that’s really not an accurate title. After Y2K, 9/11, and Katrina, Strauss describes the feeling that the United States was in a downward spiral and confesses “if the system ever did break down, the only useful skill I really had was the ability to write about it.” The book doesn’t teach *you* survival skills; instead it follows Strauss as *he* learns survival skills. At times the book is scattershot: the first place Strauss talks about is a cryonic suspension facility, and some of the adventures sound like “Crazy Things I Did So I Could Write About Them.”

But the book has two especially interesting threads. One explores Strauss’ attempts to obtain dual-citizenship in case the United States goes belly-up (Strauss decides to pursue citizenship from Saint Kitts). Along the way, Strauss bumps into the Sovereign Society, which offers “experts in the world of offshore finance.” He also discovers the idea of the PT, short for permanent traveler or perpetual tourist:

The idea of PT is that, just as we shop at different stores in a mall to find various items we want, we can also shop in different countries to find the lifestyles, governments, careers, people, tax rates, and cultures that best suit us.

Strauss’ exploration into this shadowy world is fascinating. If you enjoy that sort of thing, you might also enjoy How to Be Invisible, which is another book dedicated to similar ideas.

The other thread in the book starts with Strauss deciding to game the system by joining it:

Not only would I get the experience I was looking for, not only would I get a uniform and badge that would get me past roadblocks when escaping the city, not only would I get keys to the back fire roads, not only would I be exposed to life-and-death situations, but I’d have the best, strongest network available: the system itself.

But as Strauss burrows deeper into the system for his personal gain, he finds that it burrows deeper into him as well. When before he thought of fleeing danger, he ends the book more likely to run toward it to help people. Along the way I think you’ll have a good time.

The Little Sleep, by Paul Tremblay. Tremblay writes about a Mark, a Boston private investigator. Mark suffers from narcolepsy and hallucinations, which make cracking a case much harder. I liked the book aight, but the main character isn’t especially sympathetic. If you like hard-boiled detective fiction with a twist, you’ll like this book. Otherwise, it’s probably not your best bet.

Bad Cop, by Paul Bacon. I’m a sucker for books that teach you something along the way. This non-fiction book provides solid glimpse of what it might be like to be a Manhattan cop. After reading the book, I might not want to want to hang out with Paul Bacon, but I do appreciate him describing what life is like as a police officer. Bacon discovers that moving violations provide easy “collars,” so he quickly becomes an expert on vehicle traffic law. Eventually Bacon lands in precinct 28 in South Harlem, where he suffers through several misadventures before he realizes he’s not a great cop and resigns. If you’re interested in the police, I think you will enjoy this book.

Breathers, by S.G. Browne. It’s a zombie romance. Really, what more do you need to hear after that? The book isn’t scary or a thriller, but just a quick “slice of life” tale from a zombie perspective. Andy Warner falls asleep at the wheel and wakes up dead. His wife has for-real died and zombies have no legal rights, so Andy ends up moving in with his parents and eventually meets and falls in love with Rita, a fellow zombie. I read this book all in one sitting. It has a good plot and a biting sense of humor. If you’re a Chuck Palahniuk fan, you’ll love this book. Breathers has a very Palahniuk style, right down to repeating a few key phrases (”you probably wouldn’t understand”).

Monster, by A. Lee Martinez. The idea of Monster is that strange creatures roam our world. Monster is a man who does (for lack of a better word) pest control. Then things go sideways. This book had a nice dash of whimsy (the first creature we encounter is a Yeti eating ice cream at a convenience mart) and a fair amount of humor. If you squint your eyes just right, this could almost be a Terry Pratchett book. But where Pratchett dangled the end of the world in front of readers with a smile, as if to say “don’t worry, every thing will be fine,” Martinez’s book loses its footing toward the end when it tackles such weighty matters. Despite not liking the ending quite as much as the beginning, I still enjoyed the book overall.

The suggestions for videos don’t have to be about search or SEO. I really enjoyed doing the barcode scanning video, for example. So I’d love to tackle a few more general questions like “What settings or Labs do you use in Gmail?” or “Do you have any power user tips for Twitter? What does ‘OH’ mean, anyway?” I’m happy to tackle some broad questions like “What do you think the future of search is?” So post some interesting topics and we’ll see which ones we can tackle. Thanks!

We just finished up the most recent round of videos, and now the question is whether to keep them going, or try some new way to communicate with webmasters. Tell me what you think in the poll below:

Thanks for voting! Here’s a sample webmaster video, where I discuss what effect site load times may have on your site now vs. in the future:

Added: And if you don’t like the videos, how would you want to get the information?

I doubt Google’s internal self-image as an organization has changed to reflect this new reality. “We’re not like some giant company with flashy TV ads — we’re just a bunch of geeks in Mountain View!” And while that might be true for the vast number of engineers who define the company’s internal culture, the external impression of Google being just another tech titan like Microsoft will gain footing, making the audience for Google’s messages less tolerant of ambiguity and less forgiving of mistakes.

This absolutely rings true in my opinion. One of Google’s core values is “Don’t be evil.” [Note: it's not "do no evil." Why not? Personally, I think it's because it's impossible to exist in this world without someone, somewhere perceiving some action you do as evil. As a Bloom County cartoon pointed out several years ago, even walking or breathing kills lots of organisms.] We still use “don’t be evil” as a guiding principle inside Google, but I’ve noticed fewer and fewer people outside Google mentioning the phrase. That raises the worrying possibility that people are starting to think of Google as just another big company.

“Don’t be evil” sets an incredibly high bar for Google’s conduct. It can be frustrating to get called out for not being perfect when other companies aren’t doing things as well as Google, but that high standard helps keep Google on track. Take for example the recent letter asking that Google offer HTTPS more broadly. Gmail already offers an “always use HTTPS” option, which is more than other large email providers, but the letter was sent to Google because people expect more from Google. If people stop expecting more from Google, it’s more likely that the company will go off track.

Anil goes on to say

Worse, because most of the dedicated detractors of Google have been either competing companies or nutjobs, it’s been hard for Googlers to take criticisms seriously. That makes it easy to have defensiveness or dismissal of criticisms become a default response.

Too true. I’ve already seen some people disagree with some of Anil’s points, both inside and outside Google. It’s easy to argue with the specific examples that Anil gave. But in my opinion the right reaction isn’t to argue, it’s to look for the crux of feedback that we need to hear. Remember when Danny Sullivan wrote 25 things he hated about Google? Too many Googlers take posts like that as criticism instead of constructive feedback. You’d normally pay who-knows-how-much to get the kind of feedback that Google gets from the web every day? But we’ll continue to get that impassioned feedback only if we’re willing to take it and use it to improve.

Anil concludes with

Google has made commendable steps towards communicating with those outside of its sphere of influence in the tech world. But the messages will be incomplete or insufficient as long as Google doesn’t truly internalize and accept that its public perception is about to change radically. The era of Google as a trusted, “non-evil” startup whose actions are automatically assumed to be benevolent is over. …. Google is entering the moment where it has to be over-careful not to offend, and extremely attentive to whether they are treading lightly.

And this is the heart of the argument. Many Googlers, especially old-timers, still think of Google from early days, when we were the underdogs in search. But many people outside the company perceive Google as a huge company with an outsized shadow. We can scare people, even when we’re trying not to.

After the IPO, lots of people assumed that Google would become just another big company. We need to fight that trend for as long as we can. If you’re a Googler, think back to some of the moments that made you proud to work for Google. When we decided to send all DMCA requests to Chilling Effects, I was proud to work at Google. When we decided to do an IPO that anyone could buy into, I was proud to work at Google. When Eric Schmidt said “We would never trap user data,” I was proud to work at Google.

Those are some of the biggies, but there’s been so many small moments where I’m proud too. Here are two small moments: I’ve been biking into work this month. I just found out last week that when I bike into work, I earn points that I can use to donate to charity. Google gives money to a charity when I bike into work--that’s pretty cool.

The other small moment of pride happened at the Real-Time CrunchUp this past Friday. I saw Googlers Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick present PubSubHubbub, a simple, open protocol to turn slow RSS/Atom feeds into real-time streams. That was very cool, but the moment of pride came when Brad said “Nothing in the protocol hard-codes Google as the center of the world--I hate that sort of crap, too.” (If you want to see the presentation, go here and click to 56 minutes in.)

Now: Googlers, ask yourself how you can help make another one of those moments where you’re proud to work at Google. I think those moments are a great way to keep from becoming just another large company. And if Googlers are open to posts like Anil Dash’s, the web is tell us tons of things it wants us to do, or how to do them better.

I think I’ve figured out a way to solve this issue. I’ve created a new Gmail account, siliconvalleyuser (at) gmail.com. Let’s say it belongs to John Q Public, a power user living in Silicon Valley. Feel free to send John non-Google-related emails about fictional events: “Hey John, want to come to the party on Saturday?” or “John, here are those pictures from the fireworks this past weekend.” or “Hey John, I saw in the newpaper that you won the California lottery--congratulations!” Then when I want to do a screencast or demo some power feature of a Google account, I’ll have some realistic email to show.

Just one note: please don’t email anything to John about Google. I get way too much email about Google already, and the purpose of this account is to show different features of Gmail or Calendar. To keep this email address completely separate, I created a filter that deletes any emails that mention Google or me:

Again, please don’t email about Google-related stuff, but feel free to email John about interesting fictional things at siliconvalleyuser (at) gmail.com! I’m hoping that I can do some blog posts or videos with good tips.

Is there something good for yourself that you’ve been meaning to do? Why not try it for 30 days this month? The month will end whether you try something new or not, so why not tackle something new?

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I think it’s spam about embiggening a specific body part. But the spammer clearly didn’t set up their spam template correctly. Anyone have guesses about which email spamming software package this is?

So here goes. If you get an email with a subject like “Affordable Link Building Outsourcing,” think twice. Any email that starts out

Make your links appear Natural

Link Building is one of the most significant aspect of the off page optimization process and is a major determinant…

is starting off on the wrong foot. The objective is not to “make your links appear natural”, the objective is that your links are natural. Another rule of thumb for me personally is to be wary of people that email or cold-call you out of the blue repeatedly. Checking my email, these “link building experts” email-spammed me back in April, too.

I’m just now wrapping up an effort to not watch any television for 30 days. I started on May 22nd (right after all the season finales finished). I learned that other than a few times at night, I don’t really miss the television--and I ended up reading a lot more books. I’ll still watch some TV after this experiment, but I think I’ll watch less. I also noticed when I watched TV after a month off that when a pizza commercial came on, I started to hanker for pizza. Search ads have wonderful, trackable ROI--but branding ads can be effective too.

So now the question is: what project should I attempt next? I wrote down a few ideas ranging from hard (read 15 books in 30 days) to near-impossible (no email for 30 days). I’m curious to hear what you think I should try:

If you have other suggestions, leave them in the comments!

I picked up the new iPhone 3G S this Friday and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts:

The Good:
- The iPhone 3GS is considerably faster than the iPhone 3G. Especially in the browser, you’ll notice pages render faster. JavaScript-heavy pages (such as the mobile web version of Gmail) execute much more smoothly. The iPhone 3GS feels less like an underpowered mobile phone and more like a powerful pocket computer that can keep up with its owner.
- The built-in video camera is very cool. I expect a corresponding spike in home videos. For example, here’s my cat Ozzie playing with a toy:

More seriously, within about five years, for any group of 10 or more people, at least a few will have a video camera built into their phone. That’s a very powerful trend in a lot of ways.
- I tend to agree with Michael Arrington that no one with an iPhone 3GS needs a Flip video camera now. Cisco bought Pure Digital Technologies, the makers of the Flip, for almost $600 million dollars about three months ago. That might prove to be good timing on Pure Digital’s part.
- Lots of small changes in OS 3.0 are quite nice, such as showing outgoing vs. incoming calls in the “Recents” list.

The Bad:
- Apple’s iPhone philosophy has always seemed to me to be about simplicity. The single button forced a constrained elegance on the iPhone’s interface. In providing some newer features, the iPhone 3G S feels less like an iPhone and more like someone shoveled in a lot of features. I didn’t really need copy/paste, and it seems to pop up at random inconvenient times: double-tap a word if you’re not in the browser; in the browser, hold your finger on some text. Except the copy handles don’t seem to show up on the web pages I want, and sometimes unwanted copy handles appear when I’m just scrolling with my finger.
- The iPhone 3GS is not the huge leap that the iPhone or the iPhone->iPhone 3G was. I do think that leaves some opportunities for Android, Palm, and other competitors.
- Battery life has been worse so far for me. I’ve been using the phone more and it’s only been a few days, so I’m not going to jump to conclusions on this yet. Apple also recommends that you let the phone run down completely at least once a month, and I haven’t done that yet. I expect that battery life will be better for most people.
- Not a great name; the “GS” part makes me think of Ghostscript. A few days ago, I would have said that the “iPhone Video” is a much better name, but it’s true that the speed bump is more noticeable than the video. I still think Apple could have come up with a better name than “iPhone 3G S” though. I’m sure someone who knows about Mercedes Benz cars knows the difference between the E class, the SLK class, or the GL 420 CDI, but most normal people don’t know what a bunch of letters and numbers mean.

The Ugly:
- On my previous iPhone (the 3G), the metal band around the front matched smoothly with the black plastic back. On the new iPhone 3GS, I can feel the seam where the band meets the plastic. On the front of the phone, when I flick my finger off the glass, I can feel the seam of the metal band there too.
- In my personal opinion, someone miscalculated in charging iPhone 3G owners $200 extra to upgrade. New iPhone 3G S customers pay $199 (16GB) or $299 (32GB); many early adopters would have to pay $399 (16GB) or $499 (32GB) to upgrade. The CPU speed bump and video abilities aren’t enough to counteract what many early adopters will perceive as a bit of a slap in the face. Last year, the line for the iPhone 3G at Valley Fair stretched outside the building most of the day. When I went to get my iPhone 3G S on the release day at Valley Fair this year, there was no line at all.

And remember that early adopters often give their previous phones to family members. In my case, two other relatives are taking our older iPhone 3G phones and moving from a different carrier to AT&T. By charging early adopters more, AT&T ensures that more people will hang on to their old phones instead giving them to other people, many of whom would then become AT&T/iPhone customers. By limiting the “trickle down” effect as older iPhones go to family members, AT&T is missing a chance to gain more marketshare by acquiring additional new customers.

I’ll be interested to see how Apple and AT&T react. AT&T has already allowed some (but not all) iPhone 3G owners to upgrade without paying an “early adopter penalty.” And Apple can move quickly and decisively when needed--remember the $200 iPhone price drop in 2007 just a short time after the iPhone was released? Of course, it’s possible that penalizing early adopters is all part of some four-dimensional chess game that Apple is playing. If Apple decides to terminate its exclusive U.S. deal with AT&T in a year or so, maybe it didn’t want a bunch of people signing up for two-year contracts this time around? Right now I’m puzzled by what appears to me to be a misstep, but the folks at Apple are smart, so I’d be willing to believe that Apple has good reasons for what they’re doing.

Should you upgrade? That’s something only you can answer. If you still have a non-smartphone or an original iPhone, it’s probably worth it. If you have an iPhone 3G (especially if you’re not eligible for the discounted upgrade yet), you might try OS 3.0 and see if that’s enough. I decided to get the 3G S and I’m glad that I did. I fill all sorts of idle moments with surfing, tweeting, and checking my mail. The iPhone 3G S makes all those activities much faster and more pleasurable. Overall I’m quite happy with my iPhone 3G S.