Travel, Read, Conserve

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses  by Eric Ries I will admit, this was a difficult book to stay focused on.  The subject is interesting but the presentation is a little dry. Agile being the word of the decade, all of us in the tech world are familiar with the basic concepts of the book - minimum viable product, constant iteration, and capturing the right metrics are critical for any successful product. In the first few chapters of the book , Eric Ries walks us through many examples of failed startups, and the principal reason for the failures were not understanding the customer's needs, attempting to solve a problem that does not exist or releasing a final product without iterative development to incorporate the customer's feedback.  All the anecdotes emphasize on the Build-Measure-Feedback loop to deliver a sustainable product. To persevere in the same direction or pivot to a new path ba...

Being from the Pacific Northwest , we are not new to whale-watching. We have done trips around the San Juan islands to see pods of Orca whales at a reasonable distance, even seen a gray whale resting on a shore on the Central Oregon coast. So we went in with a certain level of excitement to see the migratory humpback whales all the way down at Baja California but not with the expectation to be blown away. Boy, were we wrong about that! First things first - our captain and the two ladies-  marine biologist Barbara and photographer/guide Tania were absolutely awesome. They kept us safe, all the while regaling us with whale anecdotes and facts about the region and its geographical features. The close up views of the famous El Arco , Lovers beach and Land’s End with the colony of sea lions resting on the rocks were an added bonus.  The boat ride on the the beautiful turquoise Sea of Cortez was more or less smooth but as soon as we got onto Pacific waters, it w...