Random rants and stuff to read

I don't really twitter or send facebook or buzz status updates, so here's a snippet with stuff that's not really enough material for a full post. Sorry if it's a bit short; if you prefer better thought-out posts, here are two interesting things I ran into this week. Enjoy :-)

• Lessons from Doom
• Your high IQ will kill your startup

Let's talk about the Nook from Barnes and Noble. I don't buy a lot of gadgets, but this one I own. Reason to choose it over the Kindle was its support for open formats (I love the fact that I can get books from my library online) and the lend me feature, which was advertised as the possibility to borrow e-books from other users. In fact, the recent post about gdata apis was a simplified version of a gdata booksearch, part of an app I was building to make it easier to find other Nook owners to borrow books from. However, I scrapped that effort when I learned that the lend me feature only works once per book. You heard right: if I buy an ebook from Barnes and Noble, I can lend it out once, and never again. This idea is almost as bad as making a computer game that is played offline but still relies on serves on the Internet being up.

Here's the cool part however: I was at the B&N in Santa Clara yesterday and chatted with the sales rep. Turns out that some of the Nook Developers come to the store for a Q&A once per month. Like so many other beloved software products, the Nook gets developed in the Bay area. I doubt that they will be able to give any satisfying answer to the "why" (it's probably more a legal or political than a technical restriction), but the fact that one can reach out to the devs is a pretty nice thing. I love living in the Silicon Valley :-)