The Hollyridge Trail: Hiking the Hollywood Hills, pt. 2

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Hollyridge Trail Panorama from the top

A panorama from behind the sign: Left – Downtown Los Angeles, Center – Hollywood, Far right – Wilshire District

Earlier this year, my family and I did our first hike to the Hollywood sign. We did it via The Tree of Life Trail, which I documented here. It was a very challenging trail. When we reached the Hollywood sign at the top of the trail, we noticed a paved path that people were walking to reach the sign, which looked like a much easier path than the one we took. A little research revealed this was the Hollyridge Trail. We decided to try the hike this past weekend. Here is a look at the experience and how it compared to The Tree of Life Trail.

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Book review: Leadership Transformed

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Leadership Transformed by Dr. Peter FudaIn April of last year, a daily deal for Leadership Transformed: How Ordinary Managers Become Extraordinary Leaders by Dr. Peter Fuda showed up in my email inbox. I decided to take a chance on it as I like learning new management principles, especially those related to leadership. It also didn’t hurt that it was only $1.99.

I didn’t get around to reading the book last year. I put it in my queue for this year, even though I’ve found business stories like Hatching Twitter and The Everything Store more interesting. Here are my thoughts after reading it.

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Biking: Ventura to Ojai, round two

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Ventura to Ojai bike trail overviewIt had been over nine months since my daughter Amanda and I took a bike ride. When she approached me about getting out again, I was game. We decided to revisit one of our favorite rides from last year, the trip from Ventura to Ojai. It starts at the base of CA-33 and ends at Bryant Street in Ojai. The ride is a combination of the Ventura River Trail and Ojai Valley Trail that spans over 30 miles.

I’m not going to go into the logistics of the ride since we followed the same route from our first ride, which is documented here if you are interested. The purpose of this post is to compare the ride to our first attempt and to document the ride profile and splits.

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Book review: Influx

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Influx by Daniel SuarezOne of my first forays into hard science fiction, and one of my favorite book(s), was the Daemon/Freedom two-book series by Daniel Suarez. I was a little disappointed in his follow-up novel, Kill Decision, but not enough to keep me away from his latest work, Influx.

The premise of Influx is a little different than Suarez’s first two novels. Where his first two works were heavily based on near-term technologies, Influx takes more of a fictional, borderline fantasy approach to technology. In other words, the technologies explored in Influx aren’t as well developed as those he’s explored previously. I would venture to guess that the technologies are almost a wish list of what Suarez wishes were available to us.

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Homemade Tomato Sauce

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As part of my efforts to cut as much added and refined sugar out of my diet as possible, I’ve been reading a lot more food labels this year. I was surprised by how much added sugar was in Orange Juice and Tomato Sauce, two items that were regular staples in my diet. I cut orange juice out of my regular routine at the end of last year, but I knew tomato sauce would be more of a challenge. Spaghetti is a regular meal in our house, and we use tomato sauce for other dishes as well. The solution was simple – I had to start making the sauce from scratch.

Thanks to the power of the internet, I was able to discover a couple of recipes for tomato sauce pretty quickly, What surprised me was how simple they were. All you need is a can of crushed tomatoes, a little olive oil, a couple of cloves of garlic, some basil, oregano, pepper, and a few hours to let the sauce simmer on the stove. It literally takes about 10 minutes to prep, and then about 2-4 hours (or more) to simmer.

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Book Review: Brave New World Revisited

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Brave New World RevisitedFor most people, Brave New World is required reading while in high school. I wasn’t one of them. But after reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, I decided it was time to pick-up Aldous Huxley’s classic, almost 30 years after my high school graduation. There were just too many references to it in Postman’s book to ignore.

I was a little concerned as I ventured in given what I heard others say, including my own kids. Still, it felt like the right thing to do, and it was. I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, I was blown away by Aldous Huxley’s ability to foreshadow the homogenization of society due to the effects of mass media. It made enough of an impact, that I added Brave New World Revisited to my 2015 reading list. I wanted to get more insight into Huxley’s point of view and how it influenced the writings and concepts in Brave New World.

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The transformation is complete

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District Coffee House, Boise IDOn a recent business trip, I arrived in Boise on Monday close to midnight.  After a short shuttle trip to my hotel, I figured I should check out my breakfast options before getting into bed. Given my newly formed dependency on coffee, the usual routine would send me to Google Maps to find the nearest Starbucks where I could work while enjoying a cup of coffee and oatmeal. This time around, I wanted to do something different. I decided to try a local coffee shop in the city.

A Google search for “best coffee in Boise” turned up a few places which led to checking out reviews on Yelp. I settled on District Coffee House. It had a few things going for it – It was less than 15 minutes by foot from my hotel, had Wi-fi, plenty of seating, and their online presence exuded a good vibe. I figured it was worth a shot.

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Book review: The Image – A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

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The ImageRyan Holiday’s Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manpiulator had a profound impact on how I view and consume modern media. It’s an eye-opening account, many times from a first person point of view, of how the general public can be manipulated, coerced and deceived through clever marketing tactics. It is a book that I regularly recommend to people who are interested in understanding modern marketing. One of the books which Holiday references for additional reading is Daniel J. Boorstein’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Given how much I liked Trust Me I’m Lying, I felt The Image would be worth reading.

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Startup Lesson: Defining Team Roles

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In my earlier startup lesson posts, I wrote about team diversity and team chemistry. In this startup lesson, I am going to focus on another important team concept for startups – roles. Assigning roles can be uncomfortable, especially during the early stages of a startup. However, it’s important to make sure people know and understand what’s expected of them, as well as who is in charge. While it would appear this lesson applies only to startups with multiple founders, it is just as important for those with a single founder. As a lone founder, it’s absolutely critical that roles are defined as the company and team grows.

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Book review: Off to Be the Wizard

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Off to Be the Wizard by Scott MeyerFor months, my nemesis, the Amazon recommendation engine, kept recommending Off to Be the Wizard by Scott Meyer. Since I’m not a big fan of the fantasy genre, I resisted the urge to see what it was about. Curiosity finally got the best of me, and when I realized the book wasn’t a Harry Potter style book about sorcery, I figured it was worth adding to my reading list. It certainly didn’t hurt when it showed up on the Amazon Daily Deal list.

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