Annie Choi, long time friend of Doug and I, has written a hilarious memoir about growing up Korean in the San Fernando Valley. Annie and I grew up several blocks apart and now she’s a published author living in New York.

She’s got some readings coming up in Los Angeles (I’ll be at this one so say hi if you see me), New York, and Boston. See Annie’s blog for more about the book and tour.

We added some things and fixed some things:

• Added “test driving” for new users. Now you don’t have to sign up to start using Newshutch, though you will have to sign up to make sure your account stays alive.
• Fixed the annoying Safari scrolling slowness. It turns out Safari has a hard time when there are many items with CSS semi transparency. The “mark read” buttons on each post were the problem.
• Moved the instructions for hotkeys and adding feeds to a new header link, “Tips and Hotkeys”.
• There were other fixes and backend updates too numerous to mention here.
• We will now be accepting advertising, so we’re pitching it on the “welcome” page. We promise to keep any ads we accept neat and dignified. If anyone has any comments or suggestions for how we handle advertising, let us know.

Update: I forgot to mention that under the “manage” tab you can now rename feeds and see if they are stale.

Two weeks ago Micah and I went to Palo Alto for StartupSchool (Flickr photos). I’ll spare you a detailed recap of the event since you can get links to notes, transcripts, and audio at the StartupSchool Wiki, but here are some personal observations:

• Mitch Kapor is the world’s coolest and perhaps most virtuous tech entrepreneur. He talked as cheerfully about his failures as he did his successes. The short list of his achievements: Lotus 1-2-3, co-founded the EFF, founded the Open Source Applications Foundation, chairs the Mozilla Foundation. The main point of his talk is that startups tend to believe that they are meritocracies (“we only hire smart people”) when in fact they are “mirrortocracies” (“we only hire young techies that think exactly like us”).
• Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is like a Bizarro Kapor. Zuckerberg’s message was that everyone in a startup must be young, technical, and unattached to family or friends. Tellingly, he was reluctant to talk about Facebook’s shortcomings or difficulties.
• For the first time I wanted a GPS navigator. We got lost twice: once when we took the 99 instead of the 5 north, and once on the way to SuperHappyDevHouse when I missed Sand Hill Road on El Camino. This was embarrassing since Sand Hill Road is both noteworthy and the major cross street of our hotel.
• Wikis are a great way to organize the peripheral ecosystem of a conference. This year the YCombinator Friday night meet and greet with free beer and Trevor Blackwell’s robots was invite only, so people met up by posting stuff to do on the official and non-official wikis.

After StartupSchool we rolled to SuperHappyDevHouse (Flickr photos) which was an informal gathering of many techies in a big house north of Palo Alto. People were demoing projects, coding, talking shop, and having beers. This event was so good that Micah and I resolved to start an Los Angeles sister HappyDevHouse, so if you’re interested, say so in the comments.

Thoughts on Palo Alto and Silicon Valley:

• You need a car to get around. It’s suburbia, not San Francisco.
• The Stanford Park Hotel is fantastic. Come for the bathrobes, stay for the concerige service, late night complimentary coffe with cookies, free wifi, and eggs benedict.
• Scott’s Seafood: also fantastic.
• Silicon Valley contains a fantastic amount of wealth, but it’s not overt like it is in other cities. It’s more of a “still waters run deep” kind of thing.

How to have a great road trip:

• Bring a great copilot/iPod DJ like Micah.