airport codes

Recently I came across this interesting article that explains the origin of some of the more confusing three-letter airport codes.

Some tidbits:

Some special interest groups successfully lobbied the government to obtain their own special letters. The Navy saved all the new 'N' codes. The Federal Communications Committee set aside the 'W' and 'K' codes for radio stations east and west of the Mississippi respectively. The lack of these letters puts a crimp in the logic of some codes: if the city starts with a 'N', 'W', or 'K', it's time to get creative! Norfolk, Virginia, ignored the 'N' to get ORF; Newark, New Jersey, is EWR, Newport News, Virginia, chose to use the name of the airport to get PHF -Patrick Henry Field.

Lacking both 'W' and 'N' Washington National has a code of DCA for District of Columbia Airport. The newer Dulles airport just outside D.C. was DIA (from Dulles International Airport); however, the DIA and DCA were easy to confuse, especially when hastily written in chalk on a baggage cart, scribbled on a tag or a handwritten air traffic control strip, so we are stuck with the backwards IAD.

Oh, still wondering about the world's busiest airport, O'Hare International, and its ORD code? Well once upon a time, before the editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Colonel Robert McCormick suggested a name change as tribute to pilot Lt. Cmdr. Edward "Butch" O'Hare, USN, there was an airstrip well to the northwest of Chicago with a quaint, peaceful name -- Orchard Field.

what's a dialect?

In Taiwan, the native dialect is Taiwanese, and the official language is Mandarin Chinese. (Although, there is a push to make English an official language as well.)

Taiwanese and Mandarin are similar in syntax, but very different in pronunciation and intonation. Someone who understands Mandarin will not understand Taiwanese. For the most part, words can be translated directly, and are represented by the same characters in writing, but direct translations often sound awkward and sometimes are incorrect. For example, the word for "run" in Taiwanese corresponds to the word for "walk" in Mandarin.

The other day, I was talking to someone about the distinction between dialects and languages. My argument was that Romance languages such as French, Spanish, and Italian are just as similar (perhaps more so) than different dialects of Chinese such as Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Shanghainese. Her comment was that all Chinese dialects use the approximately the same written characters to represent the same words, which sounded reasonable to me.

But, why are Spanish and Italian written differently? It comes down to the usage of a phonetic alphabet. I bet that historically, words in all Romance languages sounded almost the same. As pronunciation began to diverge, spelling would also be forced to evolve. For example, Old English is significantly different from Modern English, even in writing, to the point where it is unrecognizable by native English speakers. In Chinese, characters represent whole words or parts of words, and they aren't constructed phonetically. Thus, different "dialects" can share the same characters. (For now, I'm ignoring the difference between the "Simplified" characters used in China and the "Traditional" characters used in Taiwan.) In fact, even Japanese kanji are just a subset of Simplified Chinese characters.

So, to go back to the initial question: What's a dialect? What's a language? Where do we draw the line?

celebrity sighting

Yesterday, Jimmy Carter waved at me, but I wasn't paying attention. The person I was sitting with said "Hi!" back, just as I looked up.

9/11

I wrote this on Saturday, but wasn't sure if I wanted to post it, since it's not entirely coherent. I've decided one can't be expected to have coherent thoughts on such a world-changing event.

Random thoughts:

- I saw today that flags were at half-mast, but honestly it took me a second to realize why. Should I feel guilty about that? I wasn't affected very personally by the attacks, so perhaps it's a little snarky for me to say this, but I don't feel that we should wallow in grief. We should remember, but we should move on.

- I was reading an article about how teachers are choosing to address the cultural and political impact of 9/11 rather than the emotional aspect, now that we are several years removed. Not sure what I think about that. I hope the teachers aren't using the event to promote their own political agendas.

- I guess my second cousin must have been married almost three years ago. Her wedding, originally scheduled for mid-September, was postponed after her maid of honor went down on Flight 11, on her way to the wedding. That was my closest connection to a 9/11 victim. I remember that even at the time, it felt like there was a significant gulf between the East and West Coasts, in terms of personal loss and overall emotional impact. My sister was a freshman at Columbia that September, and for a while pretty much all she wanted was to go home.

- I was in New York last year, and it was strange seeing the subtle changes to the subway maps. Makes me feel like we're living in an alternate universe. I used to take the PATH train from Hoboken to the WTC...it sounds pretty callous, but one of the things that really makes me sad is that the big Borders bookstore, that I used to hang out in after work, is gone.

- I think "on September 11th" will be the "when Kennedy was shot" moment for our generation. On September 11th, I was still sleeping when my housemate ran into my bedroom and told me that the one of the WTC buildings had just fallen down. I did go to work that day, but I came home early, and my housemates and I watched CNN until we were sick to our stomaches, and switched to Tivo-ed episodes of Friends. One can only take so much.

- In Taiwan, significant events are often referred to by date, such as the 2-28 massacre, or the 9-21 earthquake. In this country, we tend to name events, such as the Loma Prieta earthquake or the Boston Tea Party. Why do we refer to 9-11 by date?

- Has this country become more united or more divided since 9/11? I myself have become increasingly disgusted with politicians who play the 9/11 card to try and gain votes. I am also saddened by the increased prejudice towards Arab-Americans, and even those who resemble Arab-Americans. I'm thinking specifically of a Sikh friend who, due to religious beliefs, has a beard and wears a turban. He's the most friendly, easy-going personality I've ever met, but he was removed from an airplane on the way from Boston to San Francisco because some people were uncomfortable with his presence.

- Has the world become safer or more dangerous since 9/11? As an American citizen who travels several times a year, I lean towards the latter. In particular, anti-American sentiment is at all all-time high, which was glaringly obvious watching the crowd boo the American Olympians, at the Athens Games.

- A high school friend came to visit me this weekend. He's still in college, having spent a year in Japan, a year in Paris, and a summer in Ireland. He is of Chinese ethnicity, was born and raised in California, and currently lives in DC, but is determined to move to Europe after graduation. I almost envy him. This country has too much baggage, and I have little faith in our leadership and our populace. I wish every American citizen were required to spend three months living in a foreign country (yes, even Canada), before being allowed to vote. We've gone from being dumb and happy to being dumb and angry, and as we've seen in the last few years, that's a potentially explosive situation.

basketball update

A bunch of us joined a women's basketball league in Menlo Park about a month ago. Since then, we've been slaughtered by an average of over 30 points. So, we decided to look for a new league.

I was convinced that the San Carlos women's league would be easier, so we started to look into that, but we found out last week that several of the women in the Menlo Park league are also in the San Carlos league. I guess it's a small world, when it comes to women's basketball.

We're still going to give it a shot, and if we're totally out of our depth, then I guess we will go back to playing the Campbell Novice league. Frankly, there aren't a lot of options for a group of short Asian girls who've only been playing for a little over two years. It's too bad more women don't play.

tech support

At work, we have a helpdesk that serves the whole company, from sales and marketing to engineering and operations. Sometimes the person on the other side of the line knows less about my system than I do, and sometimes he/she is really helpful in solving my problem.

While I was waiting for a helpdesk guy to debug my frozen Xsession a couple of days ago, I was thinking that a good optimization for a helpdesk/tech support system might be some kind of user categorization.

From what I hear, there are usually several "tiers" of tech support. The first tier consists of people reading from scripts and following flowcharts. If the problem doesn't fit in the flowchart or is otherwise too complex, the customer is escalated to the next tier. The frustrating thing about this is that every time I call with a new problem, I have to convince the first tier people that I know what I'm talking about, so they'll escalate me up. Ideally, I should get credit for not asking stupid questions, and get automatically escalated when I call again.

Companies store all kinds of information about users anyway, why shouldn't they store a couple extra bits of data which describe the user's level of technical expertise? Let's take DSL as an example. If a user calls up her ISP and says that she can't ping the gateway, she should get some "techie-points" and the call should probably be routed to someone who actually knows what ping is. She should get bonus points for having run traceroute and having correctly rebooted all applicable hardware, and so on. Net result: tech-savvy users have good customer support experiences, companies don't waste knowledgeable support resources on clueless users, and everybody wins.

I wonder if Speakeasy does this already. The only reason I would think not is that I've never talked to a support person there who didn't know what he/she was talking about.

discussing religion

I've vacillated between atheism and agnosticism for the last ten years or so, but I do find the practice of organized religion interesting from a cultural and sociological standpoint. The Old Testament, for instance, has lots of great, timeless stories, and beautiful writing. I love this line from L.M. Montgomery (in a WWI context):

The age-old cry--"Joseph is not and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin away." How the mothers of the Great War echoed the Patriarch's moan of so many centuries agone!

But I digress. Although I'm pretty much secular myself, in high school, I was good friends with a devout Presbyterian (daughter of a minister) and a practicing Catholic. We often had great conversations about religion; we talked about faith and logic, the spread of Christianity in Asia, the role that religion plays in communities, and other topics.

Consequently, I was rather surprised when I went to college and found that some people got very upset talking about religion at all. I didn't understand, if a person had so much faith in something, why he/she would have a problem with exploring the roots of his/her beliefs.

Recently I asked this question of a friend, and his answer rang true to me. His analogy was that asking a deeply religious person to justify his/her faith was equivalent to asking a person involved in a serious relationship to justify his/her feelings. While some might consider logical analysis of religious ideas interesting from an intellectual standpoint, those who have a very deep personal connection with their faith might see those same probing questions as attacks intended to poke holes in their cherished beliefs. I would likely feel similarly if someone took a microscope to my relationships with my friends and family.

I guess the thing to remember is that there is a strong emotional component to religious belief. However, that does rather confirm my theory that logic and religion can't easily be mixed.

digital photo prints

A year and a half ago, when I was unemployed, I managed to catch up on organizing and ordering three years worth of digital photos. Since then, I've fallen so far behind that my Costco.com photo center account expired, and all my old photos got erased. (Actually, I'm happy about that. Saved me from having to delete them by hand.)

Anyway, I was recently looking at photo sites and was amazed at the increased variety and quality. I used to order from Ofoto, Shutterfly ($0.49/print), and most recently Costco ($0.24/print). Now prices are down in the low 20 cent range all around, and there are coupons and special deals to be had all over the web.

I think I'm going to give winkflash a shot; they charge $0.18/print (no coupons required), offer free shipping, and I've found several great reviews of their photo quality, as well.

engineering productivity

What's the best way to kill engineering productivity? Two words: brain teasers.

At lunch today, we were talking about interviewing and interview questions. Although we all agreed that most brain teasers did not make good interview questions, we were nonetheless diverted into the conversational black hole of asking brain teasers.

Question 1: There is an airplane with N seats and N passengers. The first person walks in and sits in a random seat. Each following person sits in his/her own seat if possible. If not, he/she sits in a random seat. What is the probability that the last person will sit in his/her own seat?

Question 2: There are 25 racehorses, but only 5 horses can race at a time. Assuming that every horse runs every race in exactly the same time, and each horse's race time is distinct, how many races does it take to determine which 3 horses are the fastest?

We did manage to solve both problems before leaving the cafeteria. Eventually.

hero

Some people from work are going to Shoreline to see Zhang Yimou's "Hero" today. I decided not to go, since I've seen it twice already, first in Taiwan a couple years ago, and then last year at a friend's house on DVD. (Imported? Yes. Pirated? Not sure.)

I did like many aspects of the movie: the gorgeous cinematography, the casting (it's nice to see Jet Li keeping his dignity), the unhurried pace, and of course, the fight scenes.

However, I was disturbed by the "moral of the story", which seemed to imply that rebelling against authority was bad, and individuals should sacrifice to the "greater good"; in this case, a unified China under the rule of a tyrannical emperor who believed in ethnic cleansing and trapping people inside of the Great Wall.

For me, it's way too easy to draw a parallel between that ruler and the current totalitarian Communist regime, and from there, it's not difficult to see the movie as pro-China propaganda. Of course, I'm biased.

Even so, it's a little surprising to see a movie like this from Zhang Yimou, who has historically had difficulties with the Chinese government regarding the content of his movies.

mmm...chocolate

Today I went to a "chocolate tasting" event at work. The founder of Cocoa Pete's (also the founder of Pete's Wicked Ale) talked about the process of chocolate making, we sampled a variety of chocolates paired with beer/wine/soda, and finally we had a most excellent chocolate-themed dinner.

It was fun, yummy, and I learned quite a bit. Apparently, in Europe, "dark chocolate" must be 35% pure chocolate, while in the US, it only has to be 15% pure chocolate, unless it's semisweet or bittersweet, in which case it must also be 35% pure chocolate. Incidentally, there is no difference, technically speaking, between semisweet and bittersweet chocolate.

Similarly, European "milk chocolate" must be 25% pure chocolate, and American "milk chocolate" only has to be 10% pure chocolate. No wonder theirs tastes better. Also, so-called "white chocolate" has no chocolate at all, it's just cocoa butter and sugar. Mmm...fat.

the never-ending tire saga

About 3 months ago, I went to Yosemite with a bunch of friends. As I mentioned previously, I took a nail in my left front tire, and had to get it patched at the Yosemite Garage.

More recently, I noticed that my tire seemed to have sprung a slow leak. I had to fill up my tires about every two weeks, and then every week, and then every few days. At that point I started to look into getting new tires.

The Tire Rack was highly recommended by several, so I browsed around and found that Michelin was offering a $50 rebate on a set of four tires. Michelin makes a very nice Ultra High Performance All-Season tire called the Pilot Sport A/S. However, at $135 a tire, they were significantly more expensive than my other choice, Pirelli's PZero Nero M&S, at $101 a tire. I waffled for a couple of days, and managed to forget completely that the rebate was expiring at the end of the week.

The following Monday, I was all ready to buy, so I clicked rapidly through the checkout process until I discovered the rebate had expired. I sulked for about a week, not wanting to admit defeat. It's horrible when you lose money due to your own laziness. I kept thinking if I waited long enough I would discover another coupon or rebate. Finally, last Sunday, I caved to reason and bought the tires.

Monday evening, on my way home, I took a nail in my left front tire. My new tires arrived Tuesday afternoon. If I had gotten the tires with the rebate three weeks previously, I would have just been out $135. I guess the moral of the story is that procrastination pays? Maybe a better moral is that lots of times, things just work themselves out, in the end.

As an aside, it really kicks ass to live just minutes away from work. Tuesday morning, I called up a co-worker at 10am and he swung by and picked me up on his way to work. That afternoon, I convinced another co-worker to come by and talk me through putting on the spare. Last time I had a flat, a bunch of guys did all the work, so I wanted to make sure I learned how to do it this time. I figure if I know how to change a flat, maybe I won't get one.

To Say Nothing of the Dog

A few years ago, a friend recommended Doomsday Book to me as a good example of "science fiction lite". I think it was a term he made up himself, and after finishing the book I told him I didn't really think it was science fiction at all.

It was my first introduction to Connie Willis, and in the years following I read through pretty much all of her fiction. She does reuse certain character motifs, but her writing is engaging and her books fun to read.

My favorite is To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is a light, funny, clever book inspired (and named after) Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. Recently, I recommended it enthusiastically to a friend.

A few weeks later, she returned it, having been unable to finish it. I was perplexed, so I talked to another friend (also a Connie Willis fan) and we came to the conclusion that even though Willis' books are light on explicit scientific theory, they do involve a certain amount of logical reasoning, skepticism, and focus on detail. In short, they require a techy thought process.

For example, the plot of "To Say Nothing of the Dog" is based heavily on time travel, and the protagonist spends the first hundred pages or so in a time travel-induced daze. As a reader, it's difficult to remember that the main character's interpretation of events may not be entirely trustworthy. Also, like a mystery writer, Willis expects her readers to retain seemingly innocuous plot points until they become significant. One of the reasons that I enjoy her writing is that I am forced to concentrate, rather than being fed a simple, easy-to-follow plot. Others may not agree.

I still highly recommend Willis' books, especially "To Say Nothing of the Dog", "Doomsday Book", "Passage", and "Bellwether", but I will probably shy away from recommending her and other "science fiction lite" writers to less technical readers.

bagborroworsteal.com

Ran across an article about bagborroworsteal.com this morning. It's being described as "NetFlix for purses". Pretty clever idea, actually.

Marine World

I went to Marine World this weekend, for the first time since I was 12.

Marine World got bought by Six Flags a couple of years ago, so instead of just having shows, like Sea World, it now has lots of roller coasters. I went on Vertical Velocity, Zonga, Medusa, and a bunch of bitty rides, and I think that was about all my head could take. Must be getting old.

I've decided 21 is the best age to be. Everything's legal, and your body hasn't started falling apart yet. Too bad I didn't know it then.

more PRC bullying

I'll let the article speak for itself:

TAIPEI, Taiwan (Reuters) -- China is pushing for the removal of advertising posters supporting Taiwan's Olympic team from 500 baggage carts at Athens airport, a Taiwan official said on Friday.

Games organizers, under pressure from China, have asked Taiwan to withdraw the posters, said Lin Chia-lung, head of the Government Information Office.

I guess it's been a whole year since they made Miss Taiwan cry by bullying her into wearing a "Miss Chinese Taipei" sash.

what happened to Prince and Lady?

Last month my sister and I ordered a new set of "Little House" books on eBay. Like many of our books, our old copies had been literally read to bits, and we were getting sick of dropping pages and having to put them back in order.

It arrived a couple of weeks ago, but I was busy then, so I just finished rereading the books this week. Some thoughts...

- It must have really, really sucked to give up that house with the glass windows in Indian Territory. I wonder what happened to it?

- Was Mr. Edwards a real person? The whole walking forty miles in a blizzard part makes it seem like he must be made up, but wouldn't it be cool if he was real?

- "Farmer Boy" always makes me hungry. The mealtime descriptions are just delicious; I have to think really hard after reading them, to remember how plain the food really was back then.

- The two year gap in between "On the Banks of Plum Creek" and "By the Shores of Silver Lake" is still a little strange. I did some web surfing and discovered that someone has written a new book about that time; it talks about the Ingalls' living in Burr Oak (Iowa) for several years before returning to Plum Creek.

I've always liked all the books in the series except "The First Four Years", the last one. It's not written in the same style as all the other books, everything that happens is depressing, and it's somewhat disjointed. If the story had ended with "These Happy Golden Years", I could've imagined that Laura and Almanzo went on to be prosperous farmers, like the Wilders in New York. Instead, "The First Four Years" gives a glimpse of the poverty that they endured for most of their lives.

What a disappointment Almanzo's life must have been to him. In "Farmer Boy" he seemed like an especially precocious farmboy and horseman. In "The Long Winter" and "Little Town on the Prairie" he seemed courageous, dashing, and ahead of the game, with his superior team of horses and his own homestead claim. Given his promising start, it's especially disheartening to read about him ending up crippled and poor, losing his claim, and leaving De Smet for Missouri.

Speaking of horses, I've always wanted to know: What happened to the beautiful Morgan horses, Prince and Lady? At the end of "These Happy Golden Years" Almanzo uses them to drive Laura home after their wedding, and a pair of "brown horses" is mentioned a couple of times in the first few pages of "The First Four Years", but then they are never mentioned again. There's nothing anywhere on the web, either.

fat what?

A friend pointed me to fatwallet.com the other day as a good site to find discussions on credit cards and rewards information.

Since then, I've used it to find an 8% cash back offer at a sporting goods store, some informative postings comparing various digital photo sites, and several promotion codes for various online shopping sites. I'm trying to figure out it's not more popular. Are people just too lazy to do a little research to save a little money?

reading speed

According to this test, I read somewhere between 800-900 words per minute. Woo-hoo! Way too much YA fiction as a child, I suppose; I read over 250,000 pages during my fifth grade school year.

Though, there are a few flaws in the test. You have to scroll down once you're finished with the first screenful, and you can't read very fast while you're scrolling. The other problem is that the test passages are mostly fiction and fiction is way easier (and faster) to read than non-fiction, at least for me.

Paul Graham on hackers

I was reading Paul Graham's essay entitled Great Hackers this morning. He seems to have clearly and concisely enunciated several opinions that are common among techy people, although he is somewhat extreme in his views:

Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it.

I'm not sure that this is entirely true; it seems to assume no other especially interesting and/or time-consuming hobbies. A really good programmer might make a pile of money and decide to quit her job completely, because what she really wants is to only program when she wants, on things she's interested in, and no job can guarantee that all the time. Instead she gets a pilot's license and travels around the world for a couple of years. Of course, she would have to bring along her laptop.

A great programmer might be ten or a hundred times as productive as an ordinary one, but he'll consider himself lucky to get paid three times as much.

This is a fact that often seems to be completely ignored by management. All programmers are not created equal. It's not even that the best programmer is twice as good as the worst programmer. The worst programmer should actually count as a negative when it comes to calculating man-months (which are mythical anyway, as we all know), since he probably makes mistakes that waste everyone else's time. No, the best programmer is certainly orders of magnitude better than even the average programmer, and should be valued accordingly. I say this as an about average programmer, myself.

Here's another interesting quote:

When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not just making a technical decision. You're also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example, if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent choice to write it in Java. But when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python.

[...]

Business types prefer the most popular languages because they view languages as standards. They don't want to bet the company on Betamax. The thing about languages, though, is that they're not just standards. If you have to move bits over a network, by all means use TCP/IP. But a programming language isn't just a format. A programming language is a medium of expression.

This is a very good point. I code primarily in Java nowadays, and Java is awesome in that it takes care of a lot of details for me and prevents bugs like memory leaks, but it makes me lazy. I think ideally companies should hire programmers that are skilled in multiple languages, and give them the freedom to choose from a (small) set of languages when starting on new projects. Different types of projects call for different implementation languages.

His thoughts on office space are dead-on:

After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.

The cartoon strip Dilbert has a lot to say about cubicles, and with good reason. All the hackers I know despise them. The mere prospect of being interrupted is enough to prevent hackers from working on hard problems. If you want to get real work done in an office with cubicles, you have two options: work at home, or come in early or late or on a weekend, when no one else is there. Don't companies realize this is a sign that something is broken? An office environment is supposed to be something you work in, not something you work despite.

Regardless of the reason, whether it's productivity or something else, engineers usually demonstrate a clear preference for offices. We had a engineering satisfaction survey at work earlier this year, which posed the following question, "Given the exact same space (same size, desk area, window access, etc.), I would prefer to work in a... (a) Cube (b) Office (c) Don't care (d) Other." 70% of respondents answered (b) Office, 8% answered (a) Cube, and 17% answered (c) Don't care.

On managing engineers:

Hackers like to work for people with high standards. But it's not enough just to be exacting. You have to insist on the right things. Which usually means that you have to be a hacker yourself. I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.

The problem is not so much the day to day management. Really good hackers are practically self-managing. The problem is, if you're not a hacker, you can't tell who the good hackers are. A similar problem explains why American cars are so ugly. I call it the design paradox. You might think that you could make your products beautiful just by hiring a great designer to design them. But if you yourself don't have good taste, how are you going to recognize a good designer? By definition you can't tell from his portfolio. And you can't go by the awards he's won or the jobs he's had, because in design, as in most fields, those tend to be driven by fashion and schmoozing, with actual ability a distant third. There's no way around it: you can't manage a process intended to produce beautiful things without knowing what beautiful is. American cars are ugly because American car companies are run by people with bad taste.

Many people in this country think of taste as something elusive, or even frivolous. It is neither. To drive design, a manager must be the most demanding user of a company's products. And if you have really good taste, you can, as Steve Jobs does, make satisfying you the kind of problem that good people like to work on.

Lastly, here's a quote about talented people in general:

Because you can't tell a great hacker except by working with him, hackers themselves can't tell how good they are. This is true to a degree in most fields. I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.

This rings true; what appears as false modesty to others is probably just ignorance. After all, if you consider yourself the norm, why shouldn't everyone else be just as smart or fast or talented as you?

Anyway, I'm glad I took the time to read through the whole essay. Graham's ideas are original and quite discussion-worthy, and more impressively (for a technical person), they are presented in vivid and well written detail. Go read it!

LAN party

I've been invited to a Starcraft LAN party. How geeky am I?

I haven't actually played Starcraft in about 3 years, so this should be interesting...

feature request for PayPal

This insight came in an email from a friend this morning:

"PayPal is un-Chinese because it doesn't let you refuse money."

seagulls

Went to go see the A's play the Rangers today. It's the second time in a month I've seen Rich Harden pitch, and he's very impressive in some ways (pitch speed, strikeouts) and not so impressive in other ways (control, walks). Here's hoping his control improves, quickly.

There was a brilliant defensive play sometime in the middle innings, when it was still close; Mark Kotsay gloved a ball just over the fence and robbed Teixeira of a 3-run homer which would have made the score 4-3. Soon after that, Eric Byrnes hit a 2-run shot and it was pretty much a blowout from there on out.

Sometime during the bottom of the eighth, the seagulls started to circle above us. A friend and I were trying to figure out how the seagulls knew when to show up; did they just know that weekend games would end around 4pm? Did they wait until some cars started to leave the stadium? Did people start to throw their food on the floor? It must be a pretty good method, because I've been to many a baseball/football game, and the seagulls have shown up every time, without fail.

pro sports

There's been a lot of talk lately about Kobe Bryant being selfish. With both Phil Jackson and Shaq leaving, it does seem like Kobe must be making noise and forcing the team to give him what he wants.

I was discussing the whole Lakers debacle with my roommate last week, and I came to the following conclusion: Kobe is just a guy trying to advance his career.

Imagine for a second that Kobe works for a typical Fortune 500 company. He has a regular job, but he's very talented and sees a lot of potential for career growth. However, he feels that one of his co-workers (Shaq) is getting in the way of his career advancement, and he also doesn't really get along with his team lead (Jackson). It's not that he and his co-worker don't do good work together, but he feels that he could do better (and get more recognition) flying solo. If I were in that situation, I'd talk to my boss (aka the Lakers front office) about rectifying it, and I imagine most other people would too.

The problem is that with pro athletes, we (the public) don't like to think about the fact that playing ball is their job. We like to imagine that they all play purely for love of the game, loyalty to the team, and the pleasure of the fans. Career ambition isn't palatable to sports fans; it's fine in a 9-5er, but it isn't okay in a pro athlete.

As a footnote, I really wonder if this whole selfishness question would have come up if Kobe wasn't being tried for rape. Regardless of whether he's guilty and/or convicted, Kobe has lost a lot of good faith, and people are way more eager to brand him as a selfish pro athlete than they were before.

new shoes

I just got some new basketball shoes last week, and played with them this morning. They're the "And 1 Madness Mid", in black and silver. Look to the left and drool. Actually, they were pretty cheap, especially since "big kids" sizes run about $20 less than the men's (for the exact same shoes!). I've never really understood it, but I've always taken full advantage. I thought it was a justified purchase. The treads on my old pair are all flat and there are really truly holes in the lining. I didn't want to injure myself wearing ratty old shoes. That's what I told myself, anyway.

Scandinavia pictures

I finally got around to sorting through the 800+ pictures we took in Scandinavia.

Here's a sampling:

Copenhagen

Legoland

Skagen

Gothenburg

Oslo

Stockholm

it's alive!

I finally got a Gentoo installation up and running on my "new" machine, by downloading yet another version (2.6.7-gentoo-r8) and compiling pretty much the full kernel.

At first, networking was still broken, but I poked around in the Gentoo forums and read something about strange interactions with APIC (or ACPI?) neither of which I needed, so I took those out of the kernel and then everything worked beautifully.

I set the hostname as "stud-finder", which is something of an inside joke, but still goes with my theme.

Next up, a fresh installation of Windows 95 for my eight-year-old Pentium Pro 200, aka "the-wrench". RedHat 7 + Gnome turned out to be too damn slow.

campaign contributions

I just spent the last 10 minutes typing zip codes into this campaign contribution search site. I guess this kind of information has always been publicly available, but it's fascinating (and a little scary) to be able to get it so quickly and easily, thanks to the internet.

bloglines

I recently started using bloglines, a feed aggregator.

When I started this blog, I checked a box for "Publish Site Feed" but I didn't really know what it meant. After reading a bunch about the Atom-RSS war and all the ways that people were starting to use feeds, I decided I should at least try out a web-based aggregator.

After several weeks, I've gotten used to going to a single website to see all of the latest from Slashdot, Plastic, and dozens of other discussion sites and blogs. Bloglines is a great site; lightweight, easy to configure, and works great on several browsers (although I'm still getting used to the new UI, which got pushed out today). I do have one feature request: I often click on "Display" to get all the latest, and feel compelled to read through all of the new posts. I wish there was a way to say, "I've read all the posts up to here, save the rest for later."

Though I do wonder, if everyone starts reading online content through aggregators, if content providers will be able to keep relying on advertising for revenue? It would suck if ads started getting incorporated into the feeds themselves.

computers suck, yet again

I inherited a 4-year old Pentium III 500 a few weeks ago, and decided to try out a new OS: Gentoo Linux.

Since I've never installed any distribution except RedHat, I invited a friend over to help me; he'd recently installed Gentoo on a couple of systems, and had the CD lying around.

We spent awhile walking through the (pretty well documented) installation process, and finally started to compile the kernel. After we got back from dinner, we rebooted the machine, and guess what, it froze during the init sequence.

His next idea was to boot up Knoppix (an awesome "rescue" CD version of Linux) and copy over the config to feed to genkernel. Unfortunately, it was pretty big, and the subsequent kernel compilation ran until about 1:30am before we gave up and went to sleep. The next morning, I rebooted the machine, and guess what, I got a kernel panic during USB Mass Storage initialization.

I guess the next step is to download a new kernel.

doing the baby shower thing

A friend and I hosted a baby shower for a co-worker at my place last weekend. Neither of us had ever thrown a baby shower before. In fact, I'd never even thrown a bridal shower before. I felt sure that hilarity would ensue.

In retrospect, things didn't turn out too badly. The games we picked were simple but fun (I think the guests enjoyed the baby food taste test the most) and the decorations, prizes and favors were a hit, especially with the two under-5 guests. I also got a chance to make my favorite dessert, the Double Chocolate Mousse Torte (see Epicurious for details) and eat finger jello. Mmm...red jello.

Afterwards, I managed to clean up, eat, shower, and get myself to the city for a 8pm housewarming party (well, I was an hour or two late). I got there just in time for vodka shots and a fresh batch of lemon cookies.

home sweet home

We didn't get off to a great start, with 1 lost passport, 1 missed standby flight, and 2 pieces of missing luggage in the first two days. Luckily, things worked out in the end and we only lost a day of travel time.

Scandinavia was lovely, especially Norway (although we only got to see Oslo). Denmark was nice but not spectacular, probably because I'm not a big fan of old buildings. Legoland was the best thing there. Sweden was my favorite of all three; the people were helpful, friendly, and high-energy, the food was good, and the cities were a great combination of old and new.

That having been said, there's nothing like a week away to make you appreciate home. Not that I didn't have a good time, but travelling always has its disadvantages. Top 5 things I missed:

- always available high speed internet!
- Asian food, healthy food, and especially work food
- nice sheets and nice towels
- having a selection of clothes and shoes to choose from in the morning
- down time, especially Tivo time

I haven't had a chance to organize my pictures yet; if there are any especially interesting ones I'll post them.

hello from Stockholm

I'm currently sitting at a free internet terminal at City Backpackers in Stockholm. I'm visiting Scandinavia for the week, and it's been really fun and really enlightening. Every day I marvel at how I can just open my mouth, speak English, and any random person will understand me. We are obviously doing something wrong with secondary language education, in the US. I'll write more when I get back.

Vienna Teng at the Montgomery Theater

Last night I went with some friends to see Vienna Teng at the Montgomery Theater in San Jose. We had a horrible time trying to get there; the Julian Street exit off of 87 was clogged about a mile back, and was barely moving at all. Finally we called a friend who told us how to get there using the next exit (duh). It was a perfect illustration of why it's necessary to know where you're going, instead of just blindly following Mapquest directions.

Anyway, the show was really good! A couple of the pieces gave me that almost painful feeling that you get when you see or hear something really lovely (music or otherwise) and you're a little bit sad because you're not sure you're going to be able to get that loveliness back, ever.

I'd never heard Vienna in concert before, even though she's actually a friend of a friend of a friend, or something like that. I enjoyed the geek references (Vienna used to be a software engineer at Cisco) and comments about Taiwanese parents. It was also kinda cool to see Eric, who I've met once or twice, playing cello along with her regular violinist and two other band members.

Yosemite photos

Here are a few of the photos I took last weekend at Yosemite:

future WNBA player sighting?

Okay, probably not, but it was kinda cool anyway.

Some of us played some pickup this morning at Microsoft, and one of our old teammates from Campbell brought her niece and one of her niece's high school friends.

Well, as it turns out, her niece is going to play basketball for University of Washington next year, and her niece's friend currently plays for Santa Clara University. Wow.

It was nice of them to play with us, especially since it was hardly a workout for them, and the rest of us were calling for a water break after 10-15 minutes. Must start jumping rope. Must run more. Must get taller. Okay, I guess not that last one.

Yosemite has a garage

We went to Yosemite over the weekend. We hiked Yosemite Falls, which was pretty killer on the legs. I'm glad we didn't decide to hike Half Dome.

Anyway, my car took a nail at the end of the first day, but we didn't notice until we were leaving our hostel (the Yosemite Bug) on the second day. Actually, we didn't notice at all, because the roads all around the hostel were these nasty, rocky, dirt roads. I could have been driving on four flats and not noticed. Some nice people staying at the hostel flagged us down and pointed out the flat.

We were pretty worried since it was a Sunday morning and we were about 50 miles from Merced, the nearest thing resembling a real town. Finally the hostel people said there was a garage in Yosemite Valley, so we decided to just drive on the spare into the valley and hope for the best.

It turns out that the Yosemite Garage is very, very well-equipped (three lifts!), and open seven days a week. When we got there, we were told that there were four other flats in front of us, but they'd be done in about an hour. Oh yeah, and the charge was $13. Last year when I got a flat in the Bay Area, it cost me $20. Amazing.

Powell vs Bush

I used to think of Colin Powell as a good guy; honorable, worthy of respect, and genuinely trying to do the right thing. It's been a little difficult this last year to adhere strictly to that view, but this report helps quite a bit:

Colin Powell appeared on Meet the Press this weekend, and his appearance was marred by his press secretary moving the camera and attempting to end the interview early when Russert, the interviewer, started to ask a hardball question about the fictional Nigerien yellow-cake uranium that Powell used as an excuse to go to war in Iraq.

Most noteworthy about this event was that Powell, rebuked the press-secretary on air, demanded that the camera be trained on him again, and then answered the question, describing the intelligence he'd received as "deliberately misleading."

I still believe that Secretary Powell is doing the best he can. In fact, I think he is a casualty of the Bush adminstration. A Slate article from this February sums up the situation beautifully:

As George Bush's first term nears its end, Powell's tenure as top diplomat is approaching its nadir. On the high-profile issues of the day, he seems to have almost no influence within the administration. And his fateful briefing one year ago before the U.N. Security Council—where he attached his personal credibility to claims of Iraqi WMD—has destroyed his once-considerable standing with the Democrats, not to mention our European allies, most of the United Nations, and the media.

At times, Powell has taken his fate with resigned humor. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker last year of a diplomatic soiree that Powell attended on the eve of war, at which a foreign diplomat recited a news account that Bush was sleeping like a baby. Powell reportedly replied, "I'm sleeping like a baby, too. Every two hours, I wake up, screaming."

At other times, though, Powell must be frustrated beyond measure. One can imagine the scoldings he takes from liberal friends for playing "good soldier" in an administration that's treated him so shabbily and that's rejected his advice so brazenly...

The decline of Powell's fortunes is a tragic tale of politics: so much ambition derailed, so much accomplishment nullified.

Perhaps his fall is merely a sad consequence of our bitterly partisan "democratic" system. In any case, I hope that Secretary Powell will leave the Bush administration this fall, one way or another.

unlimited overtime

I just finished watching the Pistons lose to the Nets in triple overtime, in a messy, wacky, frustrating, but awesome game. Eight players fouled out, including K-Mart and both Wallaces. Crazy stuff.

After the game, we were trying to figure out if the NBA allowed for unlimited overtime, and if so, what was the longest game ever?

From NBA.com:

January 6, 1951: The Indianapolis Olympians defeated the Rochester Royals 75-73 in six overtimes--the longest game in NBA history.

I've never even heard of these teams. Rochester, with an NBA franchise? I doubt that could happen in today's TV market-driven world of pro sports.

sneakemail greylisting

I've been using sneakemail's disposable email aliases to fight spam for awhile now, but I just recently started using their "greylisting" feature. Very, very cool.

Basically, when an email comes into a greylisted address, it is initially rejected. Regular mail servers will retry at regular intervals, so real email will eventually get through (although it will be delayed for an hour or so). Spam mail servers often use the "fire and forget" method, and they don't retry when a delivery fails. Here's a better, more detailed explanation.

I have a sneakemail alias linked here on my blog, and since activating greylisting, I've had exactly zero spam emails from that address. Every so often I log into my sneakemail account just to go and look at the "greylisting giveups" page and marvel at the coolness of greylisting.

WTO says no to farm subsidies

It appears that the WTO, in considering a complaint by Brazil against the US, has ruled against domestic farm subsidies.

I'm not at all qualified to discuss theories of global economics, so I take my cue from the many well-respected economists who strongly support free trade policies. I believe that in the long run, increasing free trade will lead to a global equilibrium with net gains in productivity and economic growth. However, in the short term, workers in rich countries will suffer. I say this as a person who was laid off by her previous employer, when it decided to outsource the engineering department to India.

It's unclear (to me, at least) exactly what should be done to ease the pain, but it seems reasonable to implement some policies that slow the process of coming to that equilibrium. It would be nice to find a person or a website with some balanced discussion on this topic.

weekend in LA

Just got back from a wedding in LA...we drove down Saturday morning and got there in time for the rehearsal dinner, went to the ceremony and reception Sunday morning, and then drove back in time to grab a pearl milk tea at Tea Era before they closed. I don't suggest it as a very relaxing way to spend a weekend.

It was a gorgeous wedding, outdoors on a lawn at a resort/spa type place, facing the beach, on a beautiful summer day. More importantly, the food was awesome. The first course was a dish consisting of crab and mango salad, some fresh greens with vinaigrette, and chopped tuna sashimi salad. The last course was a trio of tiny desserts; a cheesecake, a chocolate cake, and a creme brulee. Everything in between was equally yummy. It really is all about the food.

At the reception, I discovered once again how small the world is, especially with respect to Taiwanese people living in the US. The guest sitting to my right was a friend of the bride, my second cousin. She happened to have a brother whose fiancee works at Oracle and knows some friends of mine who used to work there. I also met a "cousin" of my mother's (really her cousin's son), whose daughter happens to be a good college friend of my sister's; they currently live together in the same suite. Actually, it's a little disturbing, if you think about it hard enough.

Madeleine Albright visits, and I visit Hooters

Madeleine Albright was here yesterday, and she answered a lot of questions about her new memoir, Madam Secretary, and about her life and foreign policy in general.

One of my questions to her was whether or not she agreed with Senator Kerry's position that the US does not have an obligation to defend Taiwan, should China attack or declare war. I won't discuss her answer, since her visit was off the record.

However, it was interesting to me that several of my coworkers were surprised to learn of Kerry's opinion. I directed them to this transcript of a speech he made to the Senate, in which he clearly states:

"The Taiwan Relations Act does not commit the United States to come to the defense of Taiwan in the event of an attack."

I mentioned before that Senator Kerry's comments on this issue made me seriously reconsider voting for him. I wonder, were his position more widely known, how many people would do the same?

On a lighter note, we went to Hooters (at Fisherman's Wharf) for a birthday party yesterday night. It was amusing enough, especially when the birthday boys got decked out with strategically placed balloons and danced with the Hooters girls, but people certainly do not go there for the food. Ugh.

harder, but better

We played our last spring season game for the Campbell Rec Novice Women's Basketball League, on Monday. Last season we won the championship, mostly because of a few really good players. This season was much more frustrating, especially since we lost our team captain to a broken thumb in the second game of the season, but in the end, I think we improved more than we did the first season.

We started out losing 8 games in a row; the worst one we lost by a score of 39-9. Over the course of the season, we learned to play a 1-3-1 offense, switched to a man defense, and started to get a little better ball movement going. We won our last two games of the season and squeaked into the playoffs through a tiebreak method that I still don't understand.

Even during the last two games, I was feeling a bit frustrated; we were getting confused picking up men on defense when several subs came in together, and we were giving up a lot of fast breaks. Monday's game was a big improvement, especially since it was a playoff game versus the number one seed. In fact, I was quite happy; they beat us because they were good, not because we were bad.

Now to decide what to do about next season...

why is porn bad?

At lunch yesterday...

me:	I don't understand why porn is bad.
coworker:	Will you marry me?
me:	I mean, from a legal standpoint.
coworker:	Me too.

Seriously though, I still don't understand it. How can "regular" porn be considered illegal obscenity? I can understand it being illegal to exhibit porn in public, but what's wrong with porn being available, to be viewed in private homes? We (including John Ashcroft) shouldn't make things illegal just because we don't like them.

is wireless hazardous? plus Giants vs Marlins

I find it disturbing that after being on the phone for a long time, I get a headache. I'm not even talking cell phones, just regular cordless phones. I know there isn't any conclusive scientific evidence that anything bad is happening to my head, but still...headaches are bad, right? Thus, proof by one example!

I wonder, should I also be worried that we're increasingly living in a cloud of wireless networking? I've had a wireless router since mid-2001, so I've had three years of wireless at home and work.

Speaking of wireless, apparently Pac Bell Park was set up with free WiFi access recently, although I didn't bother to drag my laptop out to the game yesterday. I spend enough time staring at LCD monitors as it is.

Yup, I went to another Giants game, Saturday afternoon. It was great weather for just lounging, chatting, and drinking lemonade. Schmidt pitched okay (although the Marlins' pitcher hit a HR off of him!), Barry walked four times, we got to see Benitez pitch, and the Giants won. Yay. Eh, I guess I haven't been a very enthusiastic Giants fan since the '94 strike.

In more Giants news, apparently the winning pitcher for the Giants on Friday was Tyler Walker, who went to my high school and was in my chem class. I wonder if I'm going to discover a middle school classmate in the majors, next?

What Pre-1985 Video Game Character Am I?

Sent to me by a coworker: What Pre-1985 Video Game Character Am I? My result:

I am a Gauntlet Adventurer. I strive to improve my living conditions by hoarding gold, food, and sometimes keys and potions. I love adventure, fighting, and particularly winning - especially when there's a prize at stake. I occasionally get lost inside buildings and can't find the exit. I need food badly.

I don't think I hoard food. I eat it too quickly.

Orkut GeoMapper

I've seen this a couple of times now: Orkut Personal Network GeoMapper. It geographically displays links between you and your orkut friends, to the second degree (FoaF).

Here's my map:


Looks like I know mostly people on the East and West Coasts. No new news here.

Pat Tillman

Pat Tillman, former NFL strong safety for the Arizona Cardinals, was killed in Afghanistan yesterday.

I remember a couple years ago when he left the NFL, giving up $3.6 million over 3 years, to join the Army Rangers. Even then, his bio read like a storybook; small guy with intensity who made it as a linebacker in college, student athlete who refused to redshirt and graduated in 3.5 years, pro football star who quietly walked away from the game to serve his country.

It's too bad the story couldn't have had a happy ending.

everyone wants a Prius

Apparently I am an "active" blogger user. I'm almost tempted to sign up for another account, but I suppose that would be silly.

I've talked to several people recently about the new 2004 Toyota Prius. Regardless of whether people are buying them (and they are) the fact is that buying a hybrid has become an option to be discussed. One theory is that people are increasingly aware of environmental issues and sensitive to gas prices. My theory is that Toyota has done a really good job building and marketing a true hybrid car to more mainstream consumers.

The Prius is a midsize sedan, base priced at around $20K. The electric motor generates 67 hp and 295 ft/lbs of torque, and the gas motor generates 76 hp and 82 ft/lbs of torque. The combined hp results in a somewhat respectable 0-60 time of 9.8 seconds. The 2004 Camry LE is also around $20K, has a 0-60 time of 9.2 seconds, and it doesn't handle nearly as well. So, the Prius is comparable in price and performance to one of the most popular cars in the US.

But the real story is that for whatever reason, the Prius has become trendy. Hollywood is full of Priuses, even at the Academy Awards. Waiting lists are months long, and everyone wants what they can't get, right?

MIT non-geek

Yesterday I went with some friends to the Giants vs Padres game at Pac Bell Park. Our group consisted of MIT alums trying to catch a glimpse of Jason Szuminski, Padres relief pitcher, and the first MIT alum to go from MIT to the majors.

We knew from the start that probably the only way we'd see Szuminski pitch was if the Padres were getting blown out, so when the Padres quickly scored 3 runs in the first inning, we were a little bummed. In the end, we saw pretty much every other San Diego relief pitcher except Szuminski (Linebrink, Oropesa, Otsuka, Hoffman), but luckily the Giants made it a pretty good game in the middle innings, with a couple homers from Bonds and Feliz, so we weren't too disappointed. I guess we'll have to try again when the Padres come back to town.

Kill Bill Vol. 1

I watched Kill Bill Vol. 1 again yesterday, in preparation for seeing Kill Bill Vol. 2. It was still good.

That might seem like a stupid comment; one might ask how a movie could be good the first time and bad the next, but I've found that to be the case for movies like Memento, which depend heavily on a plot twist, or summer blockbuster types.

Kill Bill is a visually arresting piece, with great attention to detail and a tautness that suggests Tarantino knew what he wanted and elicited just that from his cast. There's a rhythm to the scenes, in which conversational pauses are just important as words. Throughout the movie, the music is great, and fabulously matched, from "Bang Bang" during the opening credits, to the fight sequences, several of which were choreographed to original pieces by RZA, of the Wu-Tang Clan. The entire movie plays something like an animated film (well, one part is literally anime). By that, I don't mean that it's cartoonish, but more that its story is painted with broad, exaggerated strokes. As always, Tarantino pays homage to his cinematic influences, this time with an emphasis on Japanese samurai warrior movies.

There are some great small moments, too. I love Oren's deadpan delivery when she accuses the Bride of being a silly Caucasian girl who "likes to play with samurai swords", and even before seeing this movie I was fond of calling people "silly rabbits" but now I just can't stop. Plus, GoGo rocks. I want one of those crazy ball on a chain looking things.

I was also very impressed with the actress that plays Sofie Fatale, both her Japanese and French accents were spot on, as far as I could tell (which isn't saying all that much, I suppose) and her English was unaccented as well. I'm going to venture a wild guess that she's European and not American.

A mostly unrelated thought: I was reading reviews for Vol. 2 when I found BugMeNot.com. How did I not discover it before now? I hate having to register just to read one article on a small town news site, which happens a lot nowadays since I read Google News all the time.

cure the common cold. please?

I'm so sick of being sick. I came down with a cold somewhere between one poker game (at work) and another (at Stanford) two Thursdays ago. I was miserably ill for the entire weekend, ended up taking two days off of work, and finally went back with a residual cough and some congestion. The congestion cleared up a couple of days later, but I'm still coughing.

The worst part is when it gets better, to the point where I think to myself, gee, I'll wake up tomorrow and it'll be gone! Then, I wake up, and have an uncontrollable coughing fit, and start the day with no voice.

Last weekend I tried to pretend everything was fine, but it kept getting worse, until I couldn't eat because the swallowing part was hurting my throat. This weekend I gave up and decided to just veg out. I'm hoping after two days of basically nothing but books and TV, this cold will finally decide I've offered it enough rest, bland food, and vitamin C, and leave me alone. Yes, I'm anthropomorphizing my cold. It's mean and diabolical and I hate it with a passion.

On the bright side, I've had lots of time to experiment with home remedies, and I've concluded that the best things for a cough are: my old staple of Ricola cough drops, Japanese green tea, New Zealand honey, and Pi Pa Gou, which is like a thick minty cough syrup from Taiwan that actually tastes good. Also, Nyquil and a big stack of pillows are essential on the worst nights, since something about lying down seems to trigger coughing.

gmail some more

A friend of mine wrote me regarding yesterday's Gmail-related post. His concern:

"In essence, the index can be considered a profile of the email/emails and of the user. So who has ownership of the index? If google has ownership, that sets a worrisome precedent."

I think that the user should own his/her e-mail, but Google should be granted the right to scan/index the e-mail for searching, spam filtering, spell checking, and content ad targeting purposes only. Upon deletion of an e-mail, that right is revoked for that particular e-mail. Upon deletion of an account, that right is revoked for all that user's e-mails. Google may still have residual backups of the user's data for some time, but should not have the right to use or share it with anyone.

On a related topic, here is an interesting blog entry on Google products in general. The author concludes:

"Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system? "

If nothing else, it's a well-written piece of speculation.

gmail

Wow, what a flurry of press coverage on Gmail. I wonder how much of it is because the service itself isn't available to the public yet, so reporters are stuck scrutinizing every last word in the privacy policy.

The two biggest complaints seem to be the targeted ads and the deletion policy. My thoughts...

I don't have a problem with a computer scanning my e-mail. Spam filtering and spell checking are both dependent on my e-mail being scanned. The difference is that in Gmail, the result of the scanning is the possibility of targeted ads being displayed in my mail client. I have no problem with this either; the ads are extremely unobtrusive and Gmail is very conservative about displaying ads at all. My only concern is, if I click on an ad, then does the advertiser now know something about the contents of my e-mail? Can the advertiser link my click with any identifying information, such as my IP address? This concern would be allayed by a privacy policy saying advertisers only get aggregate data on how well given keywords are performing.

As far as the deletion policy goes, I don't see how it is anything new. Yahoo! explicitly states: Please note that any information that we have copied may remain in back-up storage for some period of time after your deletion request. This may be the case even though no information about your account remains in our active user databases. I'm sure Hotmail does the same.

I think people are concerned that deleted e-mail is being used to profile users, when really what the policy is trying to say is that it's technologically difficult to support redundancy and instantaneous purging of data. Clarification that this is the case would be great.

I personally have no problem with Gmail deleting just the pointers to my e-mail, over a predefined period of time (30 days?), instead of instantaneously wiping and overwriting my e-mail on all servers and tape backups. Yes, the e-mail might still be able to be retrieved by a data-recovery specialist who has access to the Gmail hardware, but it resides on my local machine (in my browser cache, even when expunged) for an indefinite period, as well.

So yes, I'm comfortable with using Gmail...and it rocks. My favorite Gmail features:

Ultra-super-fast search (with snippets!) of course.

Keyboard shortcuts: My biggest complaint about webmail is how mouse intensive it is compared to Unix mail systems. Now I can navigate through my e-mail with almost no mouse interaction at all. (I've yet to figure out how to send a composed message without using the mouse.)

Threading: Gmail displays a message and all its subsequent replies as a "conversation". I must say, the UI for this is very well done. I hate the Outlook threading UI, and was not optimistic when I heard Gmail would use threading, but it's actually very convenient and intuitive. The logic that collapses quoted text is great. It's also nice that you can always tell if you've replied (and what you've replied) to a given message.

Labels vs Folders/Directories: I love that each message can have multiple labels. I realize that the point of Gmail is that you never have to categorize your e-mail again, but I can't kick the habit yet. Then again, it's only been a week.

under whose god?

I've been reading some more about the Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow case, concerning the "under God" phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance, now being heard by the Supreme Court.

I myself waver between agnostic and atheistic views. I do think that mentions of God on our currency, in our courts, and in the Pledge are divisive, since they exclude those who explicitly do not believe in a higher power or being. Additionally, although the argument has been made that "God" does not necessarily refer to the Judeo-Christian God, I think it is implicit. Yes, Allah is just an Arabic word for God, but if I were Muslim, I might not necessarily accept that the "God" that the US government refers to is the same as my God. If I were Hindu or Daoist, I might wonder if monotheism were being thrust upon me.

That having been said, I was a little worried about this case. Earlier media coverage seemed to portray Dr. Newdow as a fanatic, who would not be capable of arguing the case rationally. When Dr. Newdow, an ER doctor who passed the bar exam 2 years ago, decided to argue the case himself, my fears seemed justified. A Reverend Lynn, director of an organization dedicated to the separation of church and state, asked to speak before the court, because he also feared that Dr. Newdow would not do an adequate job of presenting the case. Looks like we were all wrong.

According to law.com:

Newdow showed he had mastered the case and his emotions, making a forceful presentation that could teach veterans some new argument tactics.

Newdow, in a risky maneuver, had asked Scalia to recuse because of a speech he gave last year that appeared to tip his hand on the Pledge case. Without Scalia, who usually dominates questioning during oral argument, Newdow and the other advocates spoke for unusually long stretches of time without interruption.

"She does have a right not to participate," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said. Newdow quickly replied that in the 1992 graduation prayer case Lee v. Weisman, the Court had found the atmosphere in schools "coercive" for students who might otherwise not participate.

Newdow was also quick to respond when Rehnquist tried to counter his point that the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge was divisive. What was the vote in Congress in 1954 to include the words? Rehnquist asked. It was unanimous, said Newdow. "That doesn't sound divisive," Rehnquist said, and Newdow shot back, "That's only because no atheists can be elected to office."

I was a little confused by the last exchange, until I discovered that apparently, eight states still have laws barring atheists from holding office.

Sounds like Dr. Newdow just might know what he's doing. Unfortunately for him, and for us, it probably won't matter, given the right-wing tilt that this country has taken in the past few years.

don't take my CPA away

I filed my taxes yesterday. Well, more precisely, after looking through my already-prepared returns, I sent a piece of paper to my CPA to authorize her to e-file my taxes.

Since my dad is a CPA, I've never done my own taxes. Even though he's inactive, he still takes all my random tax-related forms and organizes and annotates them so that the CPA can do her thing. I wonder if we get a discount because she doesn't have to do as much work as with her other clients.

It was a bit harder to justify the CPA expenditure when I was a college student, but my taxes were actually fairly complicated this year, what with escrow papers, property taxes, rental income, capital gains and losses, etc. I wonder how the US compares with other countries, in terms of tax law complexity?

yay, we win! but will global entropy prevail?

President Chen has won re-election in Taiwan, by the slimmest of margins (~30,000 out of about 13 million votes). Of course, a la Florida, the opposition is demanding a recount. Apparently there were over 300,000 invalidated ballots, but the hypothesis is that they were due to a campaign which advised voters to go to the polls, but vote for neither of the candidates. Nevertheless, KMT supporters have stormed the election headquarters in Taichung. I was proud to hear that the Taiwanese people had remained calm during the voting process, even with the shooting one day before. It's too bad that yesterday's composure is being overshadowed by today's chaos, in the eyes of the world.

On an unrelated, and more depressing note, I was talking to a friend today about an article about a man who tried to extort $100,000 from Google using a computer program he had written as a threat.

She brought up an interesting point. The nature of crime has changed. Crimes are much more complex, making them harder to track down. I wonder how many financial scandals didn't happen because the perpetrators of the crimes were too smart and didn't get caught? It's possible to glorify Robin Hood and stealing to feed the poor, but how can you glorify the mutual funds scandal?

In fact, lots of things have changed. War is no longer the structured type of affair in which civilians are safe watching from the sidelines, and soldiers agree to break for the night. Authors love to write about medieval knights and chivalry, but will they want to write about atomic bombs and air-to-air missiles?

I read that a terrorist once said that the object of terrorism was to kill as few people as possible, as publicly as possible, in order to draw the most attention. The object of terrorism was a concrete goal, whether it be publicity for a particular cause, or the extraction of certain concessions. It often seems nowadays that there is no object to the terrorism; terrorists kill as many as possible, and they don't seem to want anything, except to kill, out of hatred.

It's as depressing as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Is that what we're seeing, a kind of global entropy?

not cute at all

I was going to write a post about how Taiwan's President Chen has his own line of clothing and accessories, branded with a cute cartoon of his face, and how maybe that said something about the Asian take on democracy.



Then, I woke up to find this all over the AP news:

Taiwan's President, Vice President Wounded in Shooting
Both Were Released From Hospital Following Treatment

TAIPEI, Taiwan, Mar. 19 - Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian and his vice president were wounded Friday after at least one bullet was fired at them while campaigning on the eve of an election that has deeply divided the island and angered authorities in mainland China.

I'm deeply saddened. Taiwan does not have a history of gun violence, it would be a shame for one to be begun at this critical time.

Taiwan protests, too

It was pretty cool when Hong Kong staged a protest against Beijing-sponsored security legislation last year, and half a million people showed up.

It was even cooler when a few weeks ago in Taiwan, on the anniversary of the 2-28 massacre, supporters of President Chen (including my dad and my grandparents!) organized a human chain of over 1.2 million people, spanning the 500 km long island from north to south.

Events like these show the world that Asia can do democracy, in a big way. I hope the people of China are watching.

sucks to be gay, in this country at least

Blast from the past...I got an email today from a high school friend; apparently one of our classmates married his boyfriend last week at San Francisco City Hall.

I've always been in favor of gay marriage, in the abstract, but it feels really different when it involves someone you know (knew?) and you see his picture in the newspaper. Now I feel guilty, like I've been remiss, not being more vocal with my support. In the end, it really comes down to a civil rights issue, doesn't it?

Since I grew up in and around San Francisco, you'd think I wouldn't have seen many examples of injustices towards gay people. Unfortunately, even out here, we're still subject to whatever laws they decide to pass in DC.

From an outsider's perspective, things that suck for gay people, in this country:

- You can't donate blood, if you admit to being a gay man. I just don't get this one. Should the Red Cross also reject blood donations from people with multiple sex partners? If all the blood is tested anyway, it doesn't matter who's done what, right? Do we really have such wretched blood screening processes that we can't detect STDs? Doesn't that make people think twice about getting blood transfusions?

- You can't be gay and serve in the military, unless you're willing to hide your identity, and refrain from "participating in gay sexual activities." I can just imagine the government telling straight people to abstain from sexual activity while in the military. There is a reason foreign brothels staff up before US aircraft carriers dock. That aside, I understand that there homophobic people in the military, who don't want to serve with gay people. There are also racist and sexist people in this country. Are they allowed to refuse to serve with people of other races? Are they allowed to refuse to serve with members of the opposite sex? No, because we don't condone discrimination based on race or gender. Hmm...

- If you're gay and you form a "civil union" with your partner, you still can't sponsor him/her as a spouse for immigration purposes. In a country full of immigrants, this is a pretty big deal.

- If you're gay and you're dying, your partner does not have the legal right to say whether or not "heroic measures" should be taken to keep you alive as long as possible. What often happens is that a gay person's family ends up fighting with his/her life partner. Great situation for someone who's dying of a terminal illness, isn't it?

- If you're gay and you write a will that says you leave your money to your partner, you're not home free. Some states have forms that have to be filed to revoke the claims of the next-of-kin. Plus, it's always possible for your family to file a lawsuit to take your money away from your grieving partner.

I'm sure there are lots of other problems, but I can't list them off the top of my head. I'm beginning to wonder if this is why another one of my high school friends has been living in Europe for the past few years. Well, that and the hot Irish guys, of course.

"I voted touchscreen"

That's what the stickers that they're giving out at polling places say now. Frankly, as a software engineer, I'm a little skeptical about the whole touchscreen voting idea. I've never seen a software application that didn't have bugs and/or security issues; these translate to vulnerabilities for potential attackers.

Additionally, if we're going to have computers counting votes at all, the computers should run open source software, on an open source platform. I heard a rumor that a touchscreen voting machine in San Diego malfunctioned and booted to Windows (!!!) instead of loading the voting software.

I think we should keep the touchscreen voting interface, but the machine should print out a punchcard-like "receipt" for the voter to examine and verify. The receipts should then be locked up and otherwise treated like the old paper ballots, so they could potentially be used to do manual recounts.

pro-China Kerry?

I'm a little worried. From the Straits Times:

"[Senator John Kerry] supports a 'one-China' policy that sees Taiwan as a part of China and asserts that the US is not obligated to help protect Taiwan."

It looks like John Kerry is pretty much a lock for the Democratic nomination, which is troublesome for me. I would have preferred John Edwards, Howard Dean, or Wesley Clark instead. I suppose Edwards has a small chance left, but I'm not optimistic. I don't know what I'm going to do if it comes down to Kerry, the anti-Taiwan candidate, and GWB, the anti-everything-else-I-believe-in candidate.

ski Utah

I've been skiing since I was about ten or eleven years old. The sad thing is that I haven't really gotten any better since high school. This is most likely because I have too much fear.

I'm convinced that the difference between a decent skier and a really good skier is just fear and athleticism. When I try to ski moguls, or through trees, or on really narrow paths, I get freaked out and turn a lot, which makes me really tired, which makes me more afraid, because I have less control over my very tired legs. Also, I hate falling. That may sound obvious, but boarders fall a lot more often than skiers, and I'm pretty sure it's partially because it's harder to hurt yourself seriously (assuming you're wearing a helmet) so boarders don't mind falling as much. Unfortunately, you learn more when you push yourself until you fall.

That having been said, I had a lovely time skiing in Park City. The resorts there (Park City Mountain Resort, The Canyons, and Deer Valley Resort) are each several mountains wide. You can ski all weekend and never ski the same run twice, if you want (we didn't get to try Deer Valley, since it's skiers only). There are no crowds, so you can park pretty close to the lifts. As a skier with rigid front-loading boots, I appreciate every step that I don't have to walk in my ski boots. Finally, we stayed in a condo right next to The Canyons, at a very decent price. For a bunch of Californians used to Tahoe crowds, it was pure heaven.

very, very smart

My sister sent me this quote from one of her professors at Columbia:

"I had this summer school student once who worked on lex. He ended up being the CEO and Chair for Novell and then Google. He was a great summer student. He programmed like the wind." -- on Eric Schmidt

Super Bowl XXXVIII

The Super Bowl was actually worth watching, for once. I didn't really care who won, so I just wanted to see a good game, and I did. We were all laughing about betting on the over line after the first quarter; who'd have thought the Panthers and the Patriots (ranked 16th and 17th in total offense, respectively) would put together a 37-point fourth quarter? I loved the direct snap to Antowain Smith that resulted in a New England touchdown early in the fourth; that's gotta be one of TMQ's sweet plays of the week.

It's a good thing the game was so good, because the commercials sucked beyond belief. I also don't really understand the way everyone is reacting to the Janet Jackson mishap. I guess it's to be expected that all the conservatives are out there brandishing the "think of the children" card, but what child hasn't seen a breast? I guess it's possible no one breastfeeds anymore. I find it much more disturbing that her top was ripped off, and much less disturbing that she was topless. That piercing of hers is also a bit disturbing, I suppose. But seriously, we really do have ridiculous hangups about nudity in this country. If Janet really didn't expect Justin to rip off her top, then what we have is a clear case of assault. If she did expect it, then I think it's stupid of her to pretend otherwise.

To end on a brighter note...according to MMQB, the Richardson family (owners of the Carolina Panthers) sent every one of their 400 club and stadium employees, plus one guest each, to the Super Bowl. They chartered 3 planes for 800 people, bought 800 Super Bowl tickets, and paid for 400 hotel rooms. That's a lovely thing to do, plain and simple.

trust

How do you measure trust? If you trust someone with your life, does that mean you trust him/her to drive your car?...with you in it? Maybe I have that question backwards.

Personally, there are plenty of people that I trust on issues of responsibility or money, that I wouldn't let drive my car. Don't I owe it to my car to make sure the people that get in the driver's seat know what they're doing?

Lunar New Year == food

Oof...it's the Lunar New Year today, and already I can barely fit in my jeans. Why? I had hotpot with a few friends on Tuesday in Redwood City. Then, on New Year's Eve we had lots of yummy food at home (including desserts, mmm). Today at work, the chefs put together a kickass New Year's banquet, complete with roast pig, roast duck, and dim sum. Tonight, it's a dumpling party in Sunnyvale, and more desserts. I've heard that in Taiwan, people just eat and eat all week, since they're on vacation anyway...and people ask me why I think going to Taiwan is all about food.

bleah again

This has been somewhat of a Bad Day (tm).

I can think of plenty of things on which I can blame the badness, but I think it's just one of those days. I'm hoping my afternoon yoga class will fix me.

we won! but I miss Aaron Sorkin

We won our basketball championship! In an ugly defensive battle, we came out on top, 19-11. That's our lowest offensive output yet, but I guess all that matters is that we won. After the game, they gave us some puke colored t-shirts, and we went out to celebrate at Left at Albuquerque's.

Later on at home, I watched an episode of the West Wing in which the President gives a State of the Union address. Apparently it's required that someone in the line of succession not be in the Capitol during the speech, in case something really bad happens. I wonder when that became a rule. I doubt it's in the Constitution.

Speaking of the West Wing...unlike some people, I didn't immediately notice when Aaron Sorkin left the show. Last week, watching "The Stormy Present" (current season) and "Noel" (season 2) back to back, I noticed. (As an aside, I love Tivo to death!) The earlier episodes seem to flow better, have more fitting/moving endings, and involve more creative dialogue. I was especially irked that Charlie spent the entire last episode telling President Bartlet that Leo was on the phone. Dule Hill deserves better.

SARS screening and playoff basketball

When I was in Taipei, I was amazed at the amount of temperature screening being done. The first day, we went to buy movie tickets, and they took our temperature using a little gizmo that they aimed at your head. When we actually went into the movie theatre, they had a big screen that displayed the amount of heat coming from everyone's bodies; people who were over the acceptable limit would presumably show up in red or some warning color. The nest day, we went to a hotel, and the parking attendant opened the door of our minivan, and used another little gadget to shoot infrared light at everyone's foreheads, and took our temperatures that way. After a couple of days, I stopped thinking about it. We had our temperatures taken at malls, restaurants, and entering the subway. I guess it takes that kind of vigilance to prevent another outbreak; looks like there are several cases in southern China already.

On another note, we've made it to the championships of our basketball league! Tonight we play the #4 seeded team; they knocked off the #1 seed last week. I'm glad they did, because we'd lost to the #1 seed twice, and we've beaten the #4 seed twice. We'll have to be careful keep our heads in the game, and not get overconfident or otherwise off-kilter. Speaking of which, maybe I should eat something.

New Zealand photos

Here are the promised New Zealand scenery photos. These were taken by James.









The first picture was taken from Queenstown. We stayed 3 days there, and we could see most of the view from our condo. The second picture was taken on the road between Te Anau and Milford Sound, the third on the road near Glenorchy, and the last one at Lake Tekapo.

New Zealand, plus fantasy football wrapup

I'm back in Taipei, after having spent 10 days in New Zealand. What amazingly gorgeous scenery! There are no words...

It was pretty cool taking great pictures based on no photographic skill whatsoever; everything is so lovely that any random snapshot comes out looking good. I'll post a couple when I get a chance.

Having seen the first two Lord of the Rings movies, I guess I'd had an inkling of what we would see, but I'd figured everything was CG enhanced. I'm still pretty impressed with Peter Jackson and the LOTR crew, but it certainly didn't look like they would've had to do much to get those beautiful panoramic landscape shots. Speaking of LOTR, I got to see Return of the King on our last full day in Auckland. How cool is that?

Sitting on the plane today, I was trying to decide what the trip highlights were. My conclusions:
- the drive to Glenorchy (and the hike we did there), definitely the most scenic day of the whole trip
- the entire sheep farm trip: the ride over on the TSS Earnslaw, getting to feed all the animals, and the very yummy afternoon tea (especially the cheese and onion scones) in the lovely garden
- jet boating on the Shotover River
- whale watching at Kaikoura (5 whales!)
- getting to drive from Christchurch to Picton, and again from Taupo to Auckland
I bet I'll look at my pictures and come up with more, but those were the ones that were foremost in my mind.

On a completely different note, I'm the champion of our fantasy football league! Woo-hoo! I'm counting that as a birthday present, and a most excellent one. My team MVPs were Holmes, Lewis, Holt, McNair, and my free agent pickup of the year, Domanick Davis. I'm tempted to retire from fantasy football altogether, on this high note.

military powers

Someone asked me the other day if I thought the United States' armed forces could take on the rest of the world, if necessary. For some reason, I was pretty convinced we could, except then the nations with nuclear weapons would probably use them, and we would all be screwed.

Today I went looking for numbers to justify my belief. I found this site which has numbers on military spending and scores for military power, quality, etc. The only countries that come even close to the US are, in order: China, Israel, India, and maybe Russia. China has 1/3 the power score of the US, 1/3 the quality score, and 1/10 the budget, but they have more active units and a bigger population.

forced relaxation

I've decided that the best way to relax is to go to a place where you are literally unable to do any work.

Over Thanksgiving weekend I was at my parents' house. They do have high-speed Internet there, but all three of the computers of decent speed and stability were monopolized by people playing FF XI. I couldn't pay any bills, I couldn't compulsively check e-mail, and I couldn't write holiday cards or wash dishes or do laundry, so my cousins and I basically sat around all weekend. We watched some DVDs, chatted about random topics, reread old books, lounged around being backseat gamers ("What do you mean, it's not your job to heal your party??"), ate lots of yummy food...pretty much the standard definition of doing nothing. It was great fun.

old and ignorant, and creaky too

I've been having some issues with my right hip during yoga. It doesn't hurt when I'm just walking around, or even during basketball, but whenever I do a hard stretch like a right side split I'll notice. I was afraid I had a stress fracture or something, because the last time I had persistent pain it turned out I had a stress fracture in my left foot (although that healed by itself). Anyway, my doctor thinks I have early arthritis in my hip. Ugh. She thinks all that gymnastics as a kid might have contributed, because gym inflicts a lot of trauma on your joints (well duh). Now they tell me. I guess the 4-year-old me wouldn't have known what arthritis was anyway.

duh...what?

Every once in awhile I'm reminded of how some things are just way over my head.

I was doing an interview the other day, and asked the candidate to describe her current project. The first couple sentences out of her mouth involved something about "P4 structures" and "perfect graphs." I must have sounded sufficiently confused, because she spent a good five minutes explaining (pretty well, considering my ignorance) what she was talking about.

Speakeasy rocks

Wow, look what just landed in my inbox...

Speakeasy is kicking off its customer upgrade program, affectionately called Turbo Shot: Upgrading your need for speed! As part of our network and service upgrades, we're increasing your circuit's speed at absolutely NO COST to you.

Your upgrade will occur during the month of February, 2004, and we'll notify you via email 7 days in advance of your scheduled upgrade.

We will upgrade your service from 608/128 to 1.5/384 - all the same great services complemented by an increased speed for the same base monthly fee you pay now!

I've had Speakeasy DSL ($49.95/month) for six months now. My favorite features:
- no port blocking and/or server restrictions
- policies that explicitly allow wireless and other internal networks
- static IP, woohoo!
- support for non-Windows operating systems
- customer service people who understand traceroute results and tell me to run ifconfig

Me like. Why anyone would voluntarily continue to use Comcast for high-speed internet is beyond me, especially at $56.95/month ($42.95 if you subscribe to their crappy cable TV).