I do get up to San Francisco once a month or so, enough to have noticed a narrow bookstore building on Broadway, with serifed City Lights sign between its tall windows. I am an Estonian geek currently living in Palo Alto and go to Stanford as a Sloan Fellow. Even though I started as a self-taught coder and a web designer once upon a time, my skills have become rusty. But I do secretly maintain a Ruby environment on my Macbook. The world is better this hidden way, though, because I've had a chance to witness how much better the best software engineers on this planet really are. The ones building that video calling app with a green camera button, no less than the Google guys - I've never worked at the latter, but been visiting friends in t-shirts a few times at the Mountain View campus.

Speaking of friends, I met many interesting characters at Singularity Summit in New York, among them for example Laura who has focused her super smarts on prolonging human life. On more near-term topics, we've been brainstorming with my classmate Marc around things still to be done with big data visualisation. And while I'm nowhere near the exquisite taste in fonts my friends Priidu or Malthe have, an elegant hand-crafted typeface doesn't pass my sight quite unnoticed. What I also enjoy about books, no matter if printed or e-inked, are witty dialogues and puzzling story lines that slowly unravel (with a little help from technology, why not), but reserve some healthy sarcasm for when things were to get davincicodesquely cultish, you know, with people wearing black robes and all.

The right book exactly, at exactly the right time. As you said.

Festina lente,
Sten