everyone is incompetent!

Okay, probably not. But, I've recently encountered several cases of bad customer service that give me reason to believe that the incompetent comprise the vast majority of humankind.

Case 1: Hertz and Auto Europe

Before I left for Europe, I booked car rental through Auto Europe, a travel agency. They booked me a rental with Hertz, charged me in full ($815 USD), and assured me there would be no additional payments necessary.

When I picked up the car in Paris, Hertz calculated my rate at 1100+ EUR (~$1392 USD). I objected, produced supporting documentation, and got the service rep to admit her error. It only took 40 additional minutes for her to wrestle the computer system into submission.

Then, when I dropped off the car in Madrid, the Hertz office there told me that Paris was going to charge me 316 EUR ($400 USD) as a drop fee, even though I had already paid the drop fee to Auto Europe, and in fact I had a printed receipt confirming that the drop fee had already been paid.

I called Auto Europe when I got back, and they agreed to reiumburse me the money, but said it might take a couple of weeks for the credit to appear on my credit card statement. It's only been a week and a half, so I guess I can't complain yet.

Case 2: British Airways

The first time we went to Europe, we flew British Airways, and I had a great experience. So, when I was booking our flights this time around, and I saw a cheap BA flight, I jumped on it.

Unfortunately, things did not go as smoothly this time around. Our return flight arrived on a Tuesday afternoon. At the baggage claim, we recovered one of our bags, but couldn't find the other. After about 30 minutes, we filed a lost baggage report, and went home. The agent reassured us that most luggage was returned within 36 hours, and we had no reason to believe otherwise; when Scandinavain Airlines had lost our luggage last year, it was delivered in 12 hours flat. She also gave us a reference number which could be used to check baggage status online.

Wednesday morning, I checked the website, which reported our bag as "located". I figured it would get delivered within a day.

By Thursday morning, I hadn't heard anything from either BA or SFO, so I called the BA luggage department. She said that the bag had been located. I pointed out that the bag had been "located" 24 hours ago. She agreed that was strange and put a request for the airport to call me, in our file.

By Friday morning, I still hadn't heard anything. The website still insisted the bag had been located. Friday afternoon, the airport called and said the courier would deliver the bag between 7pm and 11pm. 11pm came and went, no bag, no call.

Just after 7am on Saturday morning, the courier service called, saying they would be delivering the bag in ten minutes. Total elapsed time: 87 hours.

Case 3: Palo Alto Superior Court, Traffic Division

On June 23rd, I was cited for speeding. The officer wrote out the ticket, and told me that I would be sent a courtesy notice by mail, that would tell me how to deal with the citation. He wrote down August 16th as the date by which I would receive the courtesy notice.

By August 10th, I was getting worried, since I was leaving the country at the end of the month, and I wanted everything squared away before I left. I called the court, spent 20+ minutes on hold, and finally talked to a woman who told me that my ticket was not yet in the computer system, and I couldn't pay the fine or request traffic school until it was. She also said that I would have two months from the time that the courtesy notice was issued, to pay the fine.

On August 31th, I called again, because I was leaving at the end of the week, and I still hadn't received a courtesy notice. I spent over 30 minutes on hold before giving up and going to work.

I checked my mail again on September 22nd, after my vacation, and still hadn't received a courtesy notice. I called the court again, spent 30+ minutes on hold (I'd learned my lesson and spent most of that time folding laundry) and finally got someone on the line. She initially insisted my ticket wasn't in the system. I pointed out that I was cited on June 23rd, and that that was extremely unlikely. Finally she put me on hold, saying she would "check something else" and returned saying that the courtesy notice had been issued on June 29th, and that my payment was late.

Apparently the court had recently switched from an old system to a new system, and my citation was in the old system. I protested that (a) I had never received a notice, and (b) I had called the court six weeks after the notice had supposedly been issued, and had been informed that the notice hadn't gone out yet. The service rep actually admitted it was entirely possible that I hadn't received the notice, as several people had had similar complaints recently, but that the computer dictated due dates, so my payment was still late, and she couldn't do anything about it. I argued with her for another 20 minutes, and she finally gave me an extension until October 3rd.

I'm still a little worried, because I'm not entirely convinced that she actually was able to give me an extension, and I don't want to get hit with a late fee. I guess I'll keep one eye on my checking account, and the other on the mail.

Case 4: nameless company refacing the courtyard in my condo complex

Sometime before I returned from vacation, a notice was posted informing residents of my condo complex that the courtyard was being refaced. Half of the courtyard would be painted on September 19th, and the other half on September 20th. A few days before I returned, the dates were changed to September 26th and September 27th. I carefully noted down September 26th as the day when I would have to be out of my building by 8am, so that I wouldn't interfere with the painters.

I got home pretty late on the 26th and didn't notice the state of the courtyard, other than that my doormat had disappeared and all the plants had been moved. Imagine my surprise, when, on the morning of the 27th, I walked out of my door, only to see painters working on my half of the courtyard. Well, I had to get to work, so I walked through the wet paint, and likely pissed off the painters. Since when did it become okay to take two days to finish a job which had been scheduled for one day?

I inspected the courtyard after I got home that night, and it appeared fine, so I assume the painters cleaned up the parts that I touched.

Case 5: Delta Airlines, American Airlines, and China Airlines

I bought a flight to Taipei a few months ago, for a trip I'm taking later this year. The flight connects in Los Angeles going outbound, but not on the way back. The San Francisco-Los Angeles leg is an American Airlines flight, but both the Los Angeles-Taipei and the Taipei-San Francisco flights are on Delta, codesharing with China Airlines.

Yesterday I was buying another flight from Taipei to Hong Kong, so I looked up my first flight, just to sanity check the dates. I immediately noticed something had changed; the Los Angeles to Taipei leg, which had originally been scheduled to depart at 3:25pm, had been moved up to 2:00pm, leaving me 17 minutes to connect.

I called up Delta, who called China Airlines, and found out that the schedule had changed (duh), and there was no later flight that day. So, they called American, and successfully moved up the earlier flight. Unfortunately, since the flight was codeshared, I had been issued paper tickets, and I needed to bring the old tickets to a Delta ticket counter to get them reissued. Wanting to get everything squared away, I drove down to SJC that evening, only to spend 50 minutes with the SJC (domestic) service rep waiting for the Atlanta (international) service rep to pick up the phone. I finally did get my tickets at about 10pm, although I got charged $3 for airport parking.

It's alarming to realize that if I had never checked my reservation, I would have flown to Los Angeles, only to have been stranded there overnight. I asked the Delta phone rep how this could have been avoided, and she said that because I had booked through an agency (Orbitz), the airline companies hadn't been forwarded my contact information, but now that they had my phone number, I'd be notified of any further changes. Unfortunately, she didn't know what to do about future Orbitz/agency bookings. Scary, that. Looks like I'll be double and triple checking all my flight reservations from now on.

Don Adams

I just heard that Don Adams, best known as Maxwell Smart of Get Smart, died last Sunday, at the age of 82.

Apparently he also voiced the cartoon version of Inspector Gadget. I'm surprised I never realized that before, since his voice was so distinctive, but I've always been really bad at identifying voice actors.

Anyway, I used to watch Get Smart with my parents (in syndication, of course) and I was actually looking for a DVD version a few months ago, but none had been released yet. Maybe they'll put one out now.

Europe pictures

As promised, here are some pictures:

Château de Chenonceau, in the Loire Valley	Carcassonne, in southern France	view from the top of the Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona
view from the Olympic Park, in Barcelona	inside the Alhambra, in Granada	inside the Alhambra, in Granada
the Giralda tower, in Sevilla	eating paella, in Sevilla	view from the Moorish Castle, in Sintra (near Lisboa)

back from Europe

We just went on a 2.5 week whirlwind vacation covering parts of France, Spain, and Portugal.

I'm wading through a pile of email right now, but will post thoughts and photos sometime soon.

a city destroyed?

Over the last few days, I'd heard bits and pieces about Hurricane Katrina and the evacuation of New Orleans, but it wasn't until this morning that I realized the magnitude of the disaster.

I was skimming a blog post that made reference to "a city loved by many, likely to be completely destroyed." I thought for sure that the poster was exaggerating wildly; cities like New Orleans don't just disappear overnight. So, I started to read the news in earnest.

What I found out was that 80% of New Orleans is flooded, and that lake water is still pouring in through a broken levee, into the below-sea-level city. Tens of thousands of residents who took refuge in the Superdome and other shelters are being airlifted out of the city, while hundreds more are looting abandoned stores. Authorities are warning that electricity might not be restored for weeks, even after the flooding subsides.

Of course, there have been countless natural disasters more catastrophic than this. To contemplate one in particular: I wonder what the Romans thought (and felt) on the day that Pompeii was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

so close

I'm the "on duty" engineer until 5pm today, and I'm still swimming in a morass of unfinished duty tasks. On the bright side, I didn't get any pages all week, I have a massage scheduled for tomorrow morning, and I'm skipping the country on Friday night. Only four more hours to go...

70s night

A friend was throwing a 70s-themed birthday party on Saturday, and I actually managed to dig up an outfit that looked mostly 70s: a fringy wool poncho, flared jeans, a beaded purse, four-inch wedges, and loopy earrings. I must have too many clothes.

the RZA

There was an article in the Chronicle about an interview that RZA gave recently at Koret. Where do these events get publicized? I would have thought about going, at least for a couple of minutes.

I find RZA a thoroughly fascinating character. He's obviously a talented musician and composer, as he's demonstrated since his Wu-Tang Clan days, and more recently with his work on the Ghost Dog and Kill Bill soundtracks, as well as The World According to RZA, in which he collaborated with French and German musicians. His IMDB profile states that he's an "influential producer and hip-hip MC" and lists a half a dozen aliases. Indeed, he seems to embrace the idea of having multiple public personalities, including the more lighthearted "Bobby Digital" alter ego. Judging from various interviews, including a recent appearance on the Daily Show, the RZA also appears knowledgeable (and often philosophical) about an assortment of topics, including martial arts, Islam (although he is Christian), chess, vegetarianism, recreational drug use, and 20th century history.

Perhaps I just find it refreshing to hear a popular hip-hop artist converse intelligently and profoundly about subjects unrelated to his music.

muscle memory

This morning, I was logged into my Athena account and I was curious as to whether anyone that I knew was still online. So, I typed "znol" and got the "No such file or directory" error indicating that I wasn't running zwgc.

For a split second, I couldn't remember the way to run znol without zwgc, but then I just started typing, and I typed "znol -l", which did what I wanted.

The crazy thing was that I'm pretty sure I never thought with my mind at all; that my fingers were just typing from muscle memory. I'm not sure if that's possible, but it sure felt like it.

inspiration

The New York Liberty's Becky Hammon, in front, guards the Connecticut Sun's 7-foot-two-inch center Margo Dydek, of Poland, during the second half of their WNBA game at Madison Square Garden in New York Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2005. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

This crazy/amazing photo was sent to our women's basketball team, to motivate us on defense. I guess the message is, if the 5'6" Hammon can box out 7'2" Dydek, anyone can box out anyone.

The thing is, my problem with boxing out isn't size, it's quickness. On defense, I'm always losing people at the last minute, and then they wind up with the ball. Must do more jumping drills...

bottled water

I came across an article about bottled water entitled Bad to the Last Drop, in yesterday's New York Times. It argues that people shouldn't drink bottled water because the taste and quality are no better than tap water, and using disposable bottles pollutes the environment.

I think the author misses the point. I buy boxes of bottled water on a regular basis, and keep them in my car. I don't think that the bottled water is any better than tap water, but it's certainly more convenient. When I'm at basketball practice, or am out playing tennis, it's much easier and faster to grab a prefilled bottle (or two, or three) from my trunk than to find a water fountain. I suppose I could fill some bottles at home, but that requires that I think about water every time I'm about to leave the house, and that I take the extra few minutes to wash, fill, and pack the bottles that I need.

If I could take the money that I spend on bottled water and use it to pay someone who would make sure that I had ten full bottles of tap water on hand at all times, I would. He/she would be welcome to use reusable bottles. Unfortunately, I think that would cost significantly more than the bottled water.

short weekend

Recently, weekends have been going by in a blur. Then, when I'm asked what I did over the weekend, I can't remember, at least momentarily.

This past weekend, I spent Friday night playing board games again, Saturday morning shooting around, Saturday afternoon at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, and Saturday evening at home with friends. Sunday morning, I ran some errands, and Sunday afternoon was basketball practice as usual.

That list doesn't seem to detail an unusual amount of activity, yet I was completely exhausted on Sunday night.

Perhaps it's just that I'm due for a vacation. There's something to be said for leaving your daily and weekly routine completely behind. I guess there's only one month left until we leave for Europe...

hot weather != good weather

Why is it that when people say "good weather", they mean 70 degree weather?

Personally, my ideal temperature is about 60 degrees. Anything over 75 is uncomfortable, and 80 makes me want to hide in an air-conditioned room until the sun goes down. Playing sports in 85 degree weather is a nightmare; I'm pretty out of shape anyway, and my endurance probably goes down 5% for each degree over 75.

I guess I'm lucky that I live in the Bay Area, where I can always drive up to the city if it gets too hot. There's always some part of San Francisco that's about 60 degrees during the day. Plus, I happen to be a fan of fog.

Just another item on the list of reasons why I can never move.

taking things for granted

The bathroom right by my desk at work has automated faucets. This is great, except when I walk into a bathroom somewhere else. Often, I stand in front of the sink with my hands held out, expecting the water to start automagically. Sometimes I even stand there and wave my hands around a bit, trying to figure out what's wrong with the (non-existent) sensor mechanism.

John G. Roberts, Jr.

Like much of the country, I imagine, over the past few days, I've been trying to dig up some data on John G. Roberts, Jr. It's amazing how little information there is to be had.

But, from the little I've read, he seems like a good guy. Conservative, yes, and weak on environmental issues, but nothing like Scalia or Thomas, and it appears he may actually be able to separate his personal beliefs from his court decisions, although I do worry about the influence of his wife, who is actively involved with Feminists for Life. He's obviously very smart and seems to base his rulings on law (and the Constitution) rather than moral judgment, which is a plus to me.

My interim conclusion is that things could be worse.

yummy monitor goodness

I just got my work monitors upgraded to the latest and greatest. I am now basking in the glory of two Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW 24-inch widescreen flat panel LCDs, both mounted on monitor arms, naturally. Such goodness deserves lots of productivity, so I guess I better get cracking.

company picnic day

Today was our annual company picnic. As usual, there were a lot of fun things to do and yummy things to eat. I am apparently quite fond of violent games.

My favorites from this year:
- An American Gladiators-style jousting game, where two people stand on (wobbly!) platforms and whack at each other with padded sticks until one person falls off the platform. We actually had to sign a disclaimer for this one.
- The carnival-style machine gun game, where you shoot a star out of a piece of paper.

My favorites from the last few years:
- A water balloon slinging game, where two people get in cages and sling water balloons at each other. If you aim just right, and use most of your body weight to pull back the sling, the balloon hits the far cage such that the other person gets drenched.
- Dodgeball in a blow-up cage. Self explanatory.
- This one is not so much a game as an activity. Basically, two people get into giant plastic inflatable balls that look like hamster balls and walk/run around inside them so as to push each other in different directions.

stop making up words!

I was just reading an article that quoted some presumably important person, who praised an event as "...focused on relevant and impactful training."

Argh!!! Corporate marketing droids everywhere, please note, "impactful" is not a real word. Yes, I know, it's perfectly cromulent, but I still hate it.

glutamate

I grew up eating lots of Japanese and Chinese food, which is probably why I never really thought eating MSG was bad, except in the same way that eating salt is bad. But, I did wonder why Americans seemed to have an unreasonable fear of MSG, which is probably why I found this recent article especially interesting. I also enjoyed the historical part, about the Japanese physics professor who first isolated glutamate from konbu seaweed.

London attacks

I keep seeing headlines that refer to the "London attacks" and for a split second I read "attacks" as a verb rather than a noun, and picture Londoners attacking...what? I don't know.

There's really nothing to say, is there? We live in a world where such events are possible, and we should all know it by now. I think the hard part is not living your life accordingly.

In that vein, here is a photo taken by a London commuter on his cell phone . It's scary and real and in some bizarre way, beautiful. Because, life goes on.

middle of the road

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, is retiring.

I was too young to remember when she was appointed, but I became fascinated by her story soon after I learned to read, and devoured multiple children's biographies about her life. Later on, I admired her stances on abortion, states' rights, and affirmative action.

I hope the president appoints someone worthy of her seat.

women in combat

There was some debate in Congress recently, about whether women belong in combat. I guess this shouldn't have been a surprise to me, given the socially conservative bent of our current Congress, but honestly, I just don't get it.

If there are women in our military who prefer to serve combat roles, why shouldn't they? I've heard the argument that the men can't bear to see their female counterparts get injured, but I don't buy it. Besides, why should the women be punished because their male colleagues, due to misguided chivalry, aren't able to fulfill their job functions?

I guess there are still some would argue that women can't effectively perform the duties required. I'm sure this is true for many women (me, for one), and plenty of men as well. Regardless, there are some women that are up to the task, and they should be given the chance to prove it.

Just last week, a woman, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, was awarded a Silver Star for exceptional valor during close combat. Hers was the first Silver Star given to a woman since World War II, probably because women in the US military are prohibited from serving in units likely to see ground combat.

Now that I think about it, if we consider medals for soldiers analogous to promotions and/or bonuses for civilian jobs, then it becomes obvious, that when women in the military are excluded from roles likely to see combat, they are being unfairly denied career development opportunities.

I wonder why no one has filed a gender discrimination suit yet.

proper motivation

For the first time in two plus years, I've been feeling a sense of urgency about getting to work "on time". Why? We've grown so much that all the covered parking spots are usually gone (or very scarce) by 10:30am.

Amazon is awesome

I ordered two books and a DVD from Amazon just before midnight on June 22nd. I choose free shipping, which is supposed to take 3-5 business days just to ship, and then another 3-5 days to arrive. I was seriously prepared for the package to get here sometime in July.

It was delivered to my door at 12:36pm today (June 24th), which is about 36 hours after I placed the order, for those people who (like me) can't do basic arithmetic.

Free shipping. 36 hours. Wow.

formula 50

My roommate recently asked me to keep an eye out for the "formula 50" flavor of vitamin water, at work. She said it was a special flavor inspired by the rapper, 50 Cent. Apparently he doesn't drink alcohol, so he's a big fan of vitamin water, even using it in a Reebok commercial. Eventually, he was recruited by Glacéau to endorse the brand and oversee the design of a new flavor.

I finally remembered to look for formula 50 today at lunch, and it turns out we do stock it, so I guess I'll be taking an extra bottle home tonight.

reasons to buckle your seat belt

During halftime of yesterday's very excellent NBA Finals game, I volunteered to pick up dinner for everybody. On my way back, I accidentally put the big bag of food behind my seat in such a way that the my seat belt got stuck. Since I was only two blocks away, and I was trying to get back in time for the beginning of the second half, I decided to drive without it. Yes, bad me.

It felt horrible. I've lived in California since I was born, except during college, and we've had a seat belt law for at least half of that (definitely since I started driving), so I've literally never driven without my seat belt. It turns out that I actually use the fact that I'm strongly attached to my seat to apply extra torque to my decidedly stiff steering wheel (the power steering on my car is not the greatest), and my driving performance declines markedly when I don't wear my seat belt. Who knew?

visiting the TV graveyard

I seem to have a habit of getting attached to shows that no one else is watching. Most of the time they're pretty well-received by critics, but for some reason or another they don't do well in the ratings.

Most recently, I was hooked on the now-cancelled WB show Jack & Bobby, which focused on two brothers (not the Kennedys), one of which would grow up to the the President of the United States. Much like Everwood (also on the WB, but still running), it had many subplots not having to do with teen angst. During its one short season, the show tackled feminism, drunk driving, choosing religion, abortion, sexual harassment, and a variety of other politically-charged issues, while introducing a cast of richly imagined, flawed but compelling characters. Someone at WB should be fired for scheduling it against The West Wing, which has lost much of its lustre since Sorkin's departure, but is still mostly worth watching, and probably draws a similar audience.

I had similar experiences with Sports Night, a brilliant Aaron Sorkin comedy that only lasted two seasons, Mister Sterling, about a rookie politician learning the ways of Washington, and to some extent Futurama, which I thought was better than The Simpsons during its time.

downtime

One of the worst things about meetings is that you waste time before and after them. I have a meeting in a few minutes, which means that if I start anything new, I'll have forgetten what I was doing by the time I get back. So here I sit, checking my email and whining about meetings.

Then, when I do get back, I'll check my email to see if I missed anything while I was at the meeting.

Taiwanese food & board games

Yesterday I hosted a small dinner party and games night. The guest of honor was a friend who had just come back from China after a year of travel and study, so I didn't want to serve Chinese food, but I did want to try something new. Finally I decided to make lwun bianh (transliteration mine), a Taiwanese-style meal that consists of lots of tiny portions of different dishes, mixed together and rolled in a wrapper with peanut powder and Hoisin sauce. It's actually pretty healthy, since most of the dishes are cooked vegetables, except that the recipe calls for lacing the peanut powder with a substantial amount of sugar.

I did discover that peanut powder is pretty hard to get, even here in the Bay Area. They didn't have it at the Asian grocery store in my neighborhood, I didn't see it at Ranch 99, and when I asked my mom where to get it, her response was to ask "...in this country?" and to send me some that my dad had just brought back from Taipei.

I'm not sure if I got everything 100% right, but only two or three people had any basis for comparison, and everyone seemed to enjoy the food. Now I'm somewhat motivated to learn more Taiwanese dishes. Maybe I'll try gwa bao next, since I have leftover peanut powder.

After eating, we broke out a new game, Carcassonne, named after a city in France famous for its Roman and medieval ruins. It's basically a tile-placing game, with "follower" figures that represent control of tiles, with some points calculated during the game and some afterwards, which keeps things interesting. I liked it about as much as Puerto Rico, but less than Citadels and Ticket to Ride. I know, I'm weird.

mamemomoko love story

Courtesy of joclin and kstroke: a mamemomoko love story

The noises that the girl doll makes when she's trying to get at the beer are especially cute.

Korean soap operas

My mom recently discovered Korean soap operas, so now when my dad comes back from Taipei, he brings home a new series (on DVD) for her to watch. Lately, she's been watching All About Eve, which focuses on the stories of two Korean girls, and has (as far as I can tell) nothing to do with the American movie All About Eve. From what I hear, the Korean soap opera craze has spread all over Taiwan, and maybe Hong Kong and Japan. I wonder when the Taiwanese TV producers are finally going to realize people are sick of Chinese historical dramas.

NBA Finals

I hate the two-week gap between the AFC/NFC Championships and the Super Bowl, so I'm glad there's only a two-day break before the NBA Finals start. Looks like it's going to be a defensive showdown, with the Spurs playing the Pistons. I bet David Stern is pissed that neither is a big-market team.

On paper, it looks like a pretty close matchup; the 2004 champions vs the 2003 champions, the second seed from the East against the second seed from the West, Defensive MVP Ben Wallace and All-Defensive Second Team selections Tayshaun Prince and Chauncey Billups vs All-Defensive First Team selections Bruce Bowen and Tim Duncan.

In reality, I'm guessing the Spurs will probably win; they play in the more difficult conference, they have a much more effective offense and they're well-rested, having nearly swept the Suns. With Duncan recovered from his knee injury, they're also healthy, which wasn't the case when the teams met during the season.

Though, I'm slightly in favor of the Pistons (the Spurs are just too...bland?) so I hope I'm wrong.

A Feast for Crows

George R. R. Martin is finally done with the fourth book in his Song of Ice and Fire series. It's called A Feast for Crows, but will always be known as "Incest Fest IV" to those of us who first discovered Martin during our Europe trip in January of 2000.

When you're backpacking around Europe, you try your best to shed every bit of unnecessary luggage, so although I usually read like a maniac while on break, I took only one book with me on our three-week trip. My roommate did the same, as did the other readers in our group. As a result, by the end of the trip, everyone had read everyone else's books.

We were on a train at some point, when one of the non-readers picked up my roommate's book (A Game of Thrones), opened it to a random place, read two pages, and dropped the book with a look of disgust, "It's all about incest!", at which point the "Incest Fest" moniker was born.

No, the books are not all about incest. However, there is one incestuous brother-sister relationship between two fairly major characters.

Overall, I like the books very much; they are well-written, have excellent character development (each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character), the fantasy world is realistically and richly imagined, the subplots are many, creative, and coherent, and Martin never follows any of the plot rules that usually apply to fantasy (especially the one about not killing off multiple major characters), so even though the books aren't exactly plot-driven, we (the readers) are kept on our toes. My only fear is that Martin will die before he finishes the series. Yes, I'm morbid.

Off to put Feast on my Amazon wishlist...

NYC: weekend

The weekend was a blur of activity, so I'll just quickly list the highlights.

Friday:
The guys arrived at 7am, and we had to get up to open the door. After work, we went to dinner at Mesa Grill (Bobby Flay's restaurant), and then had dessert with friends at the Cafe Lalo, on the Upper West Side.

Saturday:
We spent the morning/afternoon with some friends who live on the Lower East Side. They took us to the Clinton Street Baking Company for brunch, which was very good, but I'm not sure if it was worth the hour and a half wait. We also stopped by Economy Candy, which stocks all the kinds of candy I forgot about, that I used to eat as a kid. I bought some Pop Rocks and Dip Sticks and resisted the bulk gummy candy. We had dinner at Gramercy Tavern (crab meat appetizer, lamb entree, and hazelnut chocolate dessert) and then wound up the evening with karaoke in Flushing.

Sunday:
Some friends from Boston were in town, so we met up with them at Grand Central, before heading over to the 2nd Avenue Deli, for pastrami, corned beef, and some really yummy kimchi-like cabbage stuff. We saw the 7pm showing of Avenue Q (very Muppets meets South Park; I would highly recommend it to anyone under thirty) and then had dinner at Spice (the University Place location this time). I watched most of Pulp Fiction on Showtime before giving in to exhaustion.

Monday:
I was actually surprised at the number of stores that were closed due to Memorial Day; I'd gotten used to everything being open all the time. Chinatown, of course, was open for business, so we had lunch at Dim Sum a Go Go (delicious duck dumplings), walked around Little Italy and parts of the Village, before deciding on Do Hwa (Korean) for dinner. Afterwards, another friend came to visit at our apartment; coincidentally she lives only two blocks away.

Tuesday:
We had to leave for the airport in the mid-afternoon, so I left work at lunch, and we hit White Castle (of Harold & Kumar fame) and Gray's Papaya before heading back to the apartment to pack. We were treated to true New York-style gridlock during our hour and fifteen minute ride to JFK, before boarding our flight home.

New York was a blast, but I am glad to be back.

NYC: Day 6

A funny thing happened when I got to New York; I ran into someone that I worked with during my summer internship at Goldman Sachs, over five years ago. Coincidentally, she started as an engineer in our New York office on Monday.

Yesterday after work, we went to a sushi place somewhere on Bleeker for dinner, and caught up a bit. The food was yummy, but I promptly forgot the name of the restaurant after leaving.

After that, a bunch of us walked around the West Village, had coffee, and checked out the Magnolia Bakery, which is supposed to have famously good cupcakes.

NYC: Day 5

Well, the plan for yesterday failed. We did cook at home, but then we got stuck watching the Spurs and the Suns, and never made it to Small's. Maybe we'll go this weekend.

Today, we got bagels at Murray's Bagels on the way to the subway. I was a little stunned by the sheer variety of bagels and spreads. I ended up getting a sun-dried tomato bagel with plain cream cheese. I'll try and be more adventurous next time.

I gave a tech talk at work, which went surprisingly well in light of my lack of preparation, even finishing exactly on time. I was pretty busy last week, so I just wrote up some slides and figured I'd wing it. Luckily, I had found a "makeslides" script floating around on our intranet. It takes in a text file and outputs an HTML slide deck, complete with "next" and "prev" links. Consequently, writing the slides took about as much time as presenting them.

Now that that's over, I can enjoy the rest of my week in peace. I have tickets for Wicked tonight, so I guess I'll be grabbing a quick dinner and then heading over to Times Square for the show.

NYC: Days 3 & 4

Yesterday was the first workday of this New York trip. It took some time for my Linux box to arrive, so I spent most of the day working off of my laptop, and was surprisingly productive doing so.

After work, we headed to Scruffy Duffy's to watch the Pistons steal one from the Heat, and then to Rocco's, an Italian bakery on Bleeker, for some excellent dessert.

Today the plan is to cook at home, and then check out Small's, a jazz club not too far from our apartment.

I find I walk a lot more in New York, but I also drink more coffee and alcohol, so I guess from a health perspective it's a wash.

NYC: Day 2

Day 2 was slightly more relaxed than Day 1. We started off the day at a cute little Thai place called Spice, on 8th and 21st. I think I paid $8 for a curry dish and a dumpling appetizer, which includes tax and tip. The food and service were both quite good.

Afterwards, we set out to see the United Nations headquarters, over by the East River. We walked around the main floor gallery and gift shop for awhile, but we were too cheap to pay for the guided tour, so we couldn't see much more.

We were planning to go to the Guggenheim next, but discovered it closed at 5:45pm, so we'd only have two hours to explore it, so we walked up Madison Avenue instead, window shopping at Barney's, Bloomingdales, and various smaller shops.

Finally, we headed out to Flushing to visit a friend, who took us to Joe's Shanghai restaurant. I've taken note of the midtown location, and will likely drop by during the week sometime for more yummy dumplings.

NYC: Day 1

My strategy for successfully completing a redeye journey includes a "no sleeping between 10am and 10pm" rule. Arriving early in the morning does you no good if you sleep until 3pm when you get to your destination.

To that end, we embarked on a whirlwind tour of lower Manhattan today, guaranteed to keep us awake. First, dim sum in Chinatown, followed by a bit of wandering around Central Park, a window shopping excursion down Fifth Avenue, coffee and dessert at the Rink Bar (Rockefeller Center) and a photo op in Times Square. Next, we took a short break in Union Square, and then had Korean BBQ for dinner in Koreatown before dodging a sudden downpour for three blocks on our way home.

Good morning, New York

I arrived in New York City bright and early this morning, and will be here for the next week and a half. It seems my sleeping-on-the-redeye skills are still intact. Now, to make a list of non-shopping things to do this week.

movies on airplanes

Why don't airlines install widescreen (16:9) monitors instead of standard (4:3) ones, nowadays? Most of the content they screen consists of movies, anyways.

gender and science

From edge.org (May 16th, 2005): a debate between Harvard psychology professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke about gender and science. It's basically a nature vs. nurture argument, but they both have some fascinating insights. Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

Pinker, addressing those who refuse to consider that there might be biological gender differences at all:
But it is crucial to distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex — which I take to be the core of feminism — and the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable.

Men and women show no differences in general intelligence or g — on average, they are exactly the same, right on the money. Also, when it comes to the basic categories of cognition — how we negotiate the world and live our lives; our concept of objects, of numbers, of people, of living things, and so on — there are no differences. [...] Indeed, in cases where there are differences, there are as many instances in which women do slightly better than men as ones in which men do slightly better than women. For example, men are better at throwing, but women are more dexterous. Men are better at mentally rotating shapes; women are better at visual memory. Men are better at mathematical problem-solving; women are better at mathematical calculation.

Spelke, going even further:
I think the big forces causing this gap are social factors. There are no differences in overall intrinsic aptitude for science and mathematics between women and men. Notice that I am not saying the genders are indistinguishable, that men and women are alike in every way, or even that men and women have identical cognitive profiles. I'm saying that when you add up all the things that men are good at, and all the things that women are good at, there is no overall advantage for men that would put them at the top of the fields of math and science.

A somewhat controversial statement about gender variability from Pinker:
One other data set meeting the gold standard is displayed in this graph, showing the entire population of Scotland, who all took an intelligence test in a single year. The X axis represents IQ, where the mean is 100, and the Yaxis represents the proportion of men versus women. As you can see these are extremely orderly data. In the middle part of the range, females predominate; at both extremes, males slightly predominate.

Spelke, on gender and perception:
...when babies do something unambiguous, reports are not affected by the baby's gender. If the baby clearly smiles, everybody says the baby is smiling or happy. Perception of children is not pure hallucination. Second, children often do things that are ambiguous, and parents face questions whose answers aren't easily readable off their child's overt behavior. In those cases, you see some interesting gender labeling effects. For example, in one study a child on a video-clip was playing with a jack-in-the-box. It suddenly popped up, and the child was startled and jumped backward. When people were asked, what's the child feeling, those who were given a female label said, "she's afraid." But the ones given a male label said, "he's angry." Same child, same reaction, different interpretation. [...] I think these perceptions matter. You, as a parent, may be completely committed to treating your male and female children equally. But no sane parents would treat a fearful child the same way they treat an angry child.

There were effects at the tenure level as well. At the tenure level, professors evaluated a very strong candidate, and almost everyone said this looked like a good case for tenure. But people were invited to express their reservations, and they came up with some very reasonable doubts. For example, "This person looks very strong, but before I agree to give her tenure I would need to know, was this her own work or the work of her adviser?" Now that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. But what ought to give us pause is that those kinds of reservations were expressed four times more often when the name was female than when the name was male.

Spelke making an important distinction:
Biological sex differences are real and important. Sex is not a cultural construction that's imposed on people. [...] But the question on the table is not, Are there biological sex differences? The question is, Why are there fewer women mathematicians and scientists?

I admit I'm especially interested because I took Intro to Psych with Pinker and Developmental Psych with Spelke, while they both were still at MIT.

Why Taiwan Matters

The May 16, 2005 edition of BusinessWeek has an article entitled Why Taiwan Matters, which discusses global IT dependence on Taiwanese technology companies.

It does a good job of illustrating three major points: the extent to which US and other Western economies depend on Taiwanese technology companies, the disastrous economic consequences of armed conflict between Taiwan and China, and the advantage that Taiwan's tech industry (currently) holds over up-and-coming rivals in other countries.

Some key observations in the article:

- Taken together, the revenues of Taiwan's 25 key tech companies should hit $122 billion this year.

- Regarding armed conflict: "It would be the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off," says a top executive at a U.S. high-tech giant. Couldn't U.S. industry develop sources of IT supply that don't involve the Taiwanese? "That's like asking, 'What's the second source for Mideast oil?' says this exec. "You might find it, but it's going to cost you." Insiders estimate that it would take a year and a half to even begin to replace the vast web of design shops and mainland factories the Taiwanese have built.

- China may threaten Taiwan as No. 1 IT supplier. But for now it's Taiwanese engineers who provide ever-more-ingenious solutions to manufacturing and design conundrums. "In Taiwan, people say the U.S. understanding of outsourcing is backward," says Victor Zue, co-director of the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. "It feels more like the Taiwanese are outsourcing marketing and branding to the rest of the world."

- The Taiwanese also play a vital role for rivals on the mainland. Liu Chuanzhi, chairman of Beijing computer company Lenovo Group Ltd. (LNVNG), which just completed its purchase of IBM's PC division, says Lenovo sources components from Taiwanese companies. According to THT Research, Lenovo even buys notebooks from Quanta, Compal, and MiTAC. Liu says that's not the case.

- Most important of all, the Taiwanese are the real developers of China's semiconductor industry. Chinese companies such as SMIC (SMI) depend on squads of Taiwanese executives for knowhow.

- In effect, Taiwan is hoping to control design and innovation while giving over much of its manufacturing to China.

It will be interesting to see if Taiwan's tech industry can maintain its edge over the next few years.

arts & crafts

I never get to do arts and crafts anymore. It's a combination of being glued to a computer many hours a day, and not having the initiative to come up with good projects.

Last week, I went to a birthday party where we made little stuffed animals. It's been awhile, and the ultrasuede fabric that I chose was awfully hard (and I had no thimble) so the results were less than spectacular, but I'll share anyway.

The green bunny on the left is mine. I stuffed it a little too full, so it doesn't sit up properly, which is why it's leaning on the yellow cat. Obviously, the animals on the right were made by more experienced craftspeople.

mistrusting distrust

A law school friend messaged me today to ask the difference between "mistrust" and "distrust". We'll ignore the irony of a lawyer asking an engineer for vocabulary advice, for today.

My first answer was that they were much the same, except for a slight difference in connotation (which I couldn't describe), but that "distrust" was worse. We both agreed that we used "distrust" more often.

My second answer, obtained using Google, was much more informative. Here it is, courtesy of the Columbia Guide to Standard American English:

Mistrust means “to doubt, to lack confidence in,” as in I mistrust his ability to persuade her. Distrust means much the same but adds suspicion to the mix: He distrusts her because he thinks she’ll cheat him.

It appears that both of us are thoroughly cynical modern women.

paper, please

The network went down today around lunchtime, so I couldn't use IM to coordinate my lunch plans. My first thought was to call around, but it turns out that I use the phone so little that I don't remember the phone numbers of any of my coworkers. I would have looked in our online directory, but the network being down, that wasn't an option. Finally I decided to just walk over to people's desks.

Unfortunately, I work at a company that is very fond of moving people around. I tried two different desks before realizing that both people had moved in the past month, and I had no idea where they sat anymore. And, again, this was information that would normally have been found in our online directory.

I did manage to find some coworkers to eat lunch with, but after I got back and found everything up and running, I copied down about ten phone numbers on a sticky note, and posted it on my monitor for future use.

estate planning

If someone does no estate planning at all, when he/she dies, a probate court supervises the distribution of his/her property according to state and federal law. The whole process usually takes several months and some non-zero amount of money is paid to the lawyers involved, so it's a good idea to try to arrange one's affairs to bypass probate if possible.

People who have kids and large estates usually establish living trusts, but that involves money and lawyers. A coworker recently sent out an informational email entitled "estate planning for the cheap/lazy/single", which I found very useful, being young, healthy, unmarried, and childless. His suggestions:

- Fill out Payable On Death, Transfer On Death, or Directed Beneficiary forms (they're all more or less the same) for all bank or brokerage accounts which allow them.
- Fill out the beneficiary information for all retirement plans (IRA, 401k, etc.)
- Fill out a DMV Transfer Without Probate form to transfer car ownership.
- Use Willmaker (or some other easy-to-use software) to create a will that handles any remaining accounts.

I've done all but the last; apparently I'm cheaper than he is.

popeyes

They just opened a new Popeyes in Sunnyvale, at the corner of El Camino and Hollenbeck. Yay! We used to drive all the way down to the Santa Clara store off of San Tomas sometimes, just for lunch.

Angels x 2

I do find it amusing the Anaheim Angels are now calling themselves "The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim". Or, as Ray Ratto puts it, "The The Angels Angels of Anaheim", if you translate from the original Spanish.

Michael Mina

Last weekend we went to try out the Restaurant Michael Mina, inside of the Westin St. Francis. The three-course prix fixe was a pricey $88, but included a lobster-themed amuse bouche in addition to three elaborate dishes and a couple of chocolate bonbons.

Each course had a central ingredient, but included three different preparations of that ingredient. I chose the crab ravioli, a veal dish, and a trio of citrus desserts:

crab	veal	citrus

All of the food was good, if occasionally a little intense in flavor, and of course the dining room was gorgeous and the service impeccable. I especially enjoyed the citrus trio, which paired tiny lime, lemon, and orange desserts with soft sorbets of matching flavors.

sailing away

Today we had a group offsite with OCSC Sailing, a sailing school that operates out of the Berkeley Marina. It was tons of fun; we sailed pretty close to Richmond, the Golden Gate Bridge, and San Mateo, we learned to "tack" and "gybe", and we raced against our co-workers. Our boat came in second out of six boats, and we were only about 15 seconds behind the leader.

At first I was a little thrown by all the terminology, and freaked out by the boat leaning way over when we were getting a good wind, but by the end I was having a blast. I think it helped that the instructor chose me to helm the boat during the race. She told us some great stories too; about sailing from San Francisco to Europe (through the Panama Canal!) with her father over a period of four years, sailing to Hawaii, and sailing in various crazy weather situations. She also said that with global warming and all, even yachts were starting to be able to sail through the once-fictional Northwest Passage. So much for global warming being a myth.

Anyway, I much enjoyed the outing, and I think I'd definitely go sailing again, especially on a nice clear day like today.

prioritization

I've been working like a crazy person for the past month or so, trying to launch my project. I've managed to stay mostly on track as far as working out goes, but I've been falling behind on stuff like email correspondence (the real kind, like you write to long-distance friends), doing my laundry, balancing my checkbook, and non-computer time, which also means much needed wrist-rest time.

We haven't launched yet, but two days ago I was sitting at my desk with a stress headache and I suddenly realized that we might be trying to launch this thing for another week, and I was in pain (head and wrist), wearing clothes I dug up from the bottom of my closet, and making stupid mistakes. So, I went home, I took a nice long shower, and I took the rest of the night off. We didn't launch, but nothing horrible happened, and I arrived at work the next morning a much happier person.

My conclusion is that crisis is a state of mind.

the Baron has arrived

I started watching the Warriors a bit in the mid to late '80s, when Jordan was ruling the league. Back then, Mullin, Hardaway, and Richmond were doing their thing, and the Warriors weren't the best, but at least they made the playoffs every couple of years.

In late '91, Richmond got traded to the Kings for Billy Owens, and although the Warriors did make the playoffs the year afterwards, I always felt like things started to go downhill from there. There was a faint glimmer of hope in '94 when Mullin, Webber and Sprewell managed to get the Warriors back into the playoffs, but then Webber got traded, and a few years later Sprewell famously tried to choke P.J. Carlesimo. After that, I basically gave up watching basketball at all; although I did read the sports section, so like most Bay Area sports fans, I could always reel off a list of former Warriors who were now stars of other teams.

A couple of years ago, when I started to play basketball, I started to watch the NBA again. I enjoyed watching the Rockets, the Kings, the Pistons, the Spurs, the Mavs, and the Heat, but I never really felt any compulsion to start watching the Warriors again, until a month ago.

On February 25th, the Warriors acquired Baron Davis for Speedy Claxton and Dale Davis. The Chronicle's Ray Ratto said it best: Chris Mullin finally found a talented player on a team so bad that going to the Warriors would seem like a fabulous career move.

A bunch of us happened to have tickets to the Pistons game on the night that Baron Davis made his debut with Golden State. Our anticipation was well rewarded, because as soon as Davis got on the court, the Warriors started to look better. It was obvious that Davis was giving the team some much needed leadership and explosiveness. And, even though the Warriors still lost, the crowd at the Coliseum showed their appreciation (and probably, surprise) throughout.

Since then, the Warriors have gone 8-7, which doesn't sound that great, except to anyone who's lived in the Bay Area in the past 15 years. Players like Richardson, Dunleavy, Cabarkapa, and Pietrus are taking better shots, and putting up significantly higher numbers. I imagine Richardson must thank his lucky stars every day; those monster dunks he's now getting wouldn't be happening with Claxton or Fisher at point.

With the addition of Davis, the Warriors are suddenly fun to watch, they play with energy and best of all, they look like they're on their way up. They've beat a succession of good teams, including Sacramento (twice!) and Phoenix. If Davis can get fully healthy next year (that's one serious worry; he's known to be injury-prone) I think the Warriors will have a real chance to make the playoffs.

that's what we like to see

Hundreds of thousands marched through Taipei on March 26th in protest of China's new "anti-secession" law, which authorizes the use of military force against Taiwan.

overwhelming force

It occurred to me the other day that the "Powell Doctrine" is basically a tight aggressive style of playing poker, applied to warfare.

consistency, please

I ask only for consistency, since logic is obviously too much to expect...

About three weeks ago, I went shopping with my sister in the city and I bought a shirt. Unfortunately, the salesperson forgot to take off the electronic tag, which I discovered later that week when I tried to wear my new shirt.

For the next two weeks, I kept trying to make time to take the shirt to a local branch of the store, but things were pretty busy, so I never got a chance. Finally, yesterday morning, I dragged myself out of bed at about 10am (early for a Sunday, at least for me) so I could go to a mall and get the tag removed.

When I got there, the salesperson refused to take the tag off unless I could produce a receipt. Since I'd been shopping with my sister, and we'd bought a couple of items using the same credit card, my sister had that particular receipt, at my parents' house in Marin. I pointed out nicely that I wasn't about to drive to Marin to get my receipt, especially since I had the "Required for Return" sticker on the paper tag, which allows the salesperson to look up the actual record of the sale in the computer system. She refused, citing "security issues".

Finally, I decided that if I couldn't wear the shirt, I might as well return it and get the money back. Ironically, this was fine, according to store policy, since I had the aforementioned return sticker. Ye gods.

At this point, a supervisor-type person stepped in and told the salesperson to remove the tag, so I kept the shirt, although I was tempted to return it due to sheer frustration and annoyance.

symphonic sound

Last Saturday, we went to Davies to see MTT's San Francisco Symphony (and a guest pianist, Vladimir Feltsman) perform Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. I'm not great with the names of orchestral pieces, so it was best described to me by my roommate as "that really famous one on the piano", accompanied by her humming of a few opening notes. It was preceded by a very short piece, Stravinsky's Scherzo à la russe and followed by Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15. I enjoyed the evening very much, although I did find the Shostakovich a little harder to follow. Of course, the fact that we went to Citizen Cake for dessert didn't hurt.

Ironically, two days later, we were in the city again, this time at the Masonic, to see the Symphony Silicon Valley play a selection of music from Final Fantasy. Yes, the games. It was a very different experience. Several audience members were dressed up as characters from FFVII, FFVIII, and FFX. I had been at the Masonic previously to watch the Barenaked Ladies, and I had thought it a pretty decent venue, but it felt lackluster when compared to the carefully calculated acoustics of Davies Symphony Hall. I felt sorry for the violinists, who were woefully under-miked. The music itself was pleasant and well-played, but I could never get the "background music" concept out of my head, and the fact that scenes from the video games were being projected on three giant screens didn't help. Afterwards we went to Korea House (in Japantown) for a late dinner. Mmm...

ageism

I was having a discussion with someone last week at dinner, about the unfairness of being a kid. Kids can't use certain websites until they're over 13, they can't drive until they're 16, they can't see R-rated movies without their parents until they're 18, they can't vote until they're 18, they can't drink until they're 21, they are subject to various parental notification laws, and are in fact almost totally at the mercy of their parents.

The ageism debate came up again this weekend when we were watching a West Wing episode which featured a group of kids who were lobbying for a reduced voting age. They argued that it was unfair that laws could be imposed on a group who had no voting power, and that if children were given the vote, long term issues like Social Security might be given more consideration. I totally agree, and I think I've discussed this in the past. The only possible reason to deny children suffrage is the "undue influence" argument, which ignores the fact that many adults are also easily swayed by their families, churches, colleagues, and other groups. If a kid actually takes the initiative to register to vote, why shouldn't he/she be allowed to cast a ballot?

Another age-related limit I've never understood is the drinking age. The US has the highest drinking age in the world (Most countries set it at 16 or 18.) Furthermore, I travelled extensively as a kid, and as long as I was with my parents, I was never refused service of alcohol, except in the US. I'm convinced that our ridiculously high drinking age is one of the reasons that our country's universities have such a problem with binge drinking (another one is that we treat our college students like kids, which I'll address later). If it weren't illegal for pledges to drink alcohol, would fraternities bother? Approaching the issue from another angle, it also seems ridiculous that our government thinks that someone who is mature enough to be sent to fight a war for his/her country is not mature enough to consume alcohol.

Similarly, I remember being in high school, and going with my sister to see an R-rated movie, which had no violence, very little bad language, and I think one scene where a woman's breasts were visible. Horror of horrors! Since my sister was 13, even though my mother bought the ticket for her, she wasn't allowed to see the movie unless my mother also bought a ticket and watched the movie with us. Several of our friends' parents got really good at the "buy a ticket, walk into the theatre, and leave out the back door" routine. I'm not sure if maybe the movie theatres were just trying to make an extra buck, or what, but it was a silly charade.

Moving on to a stickier subject, I also disagree with the idea of statutory rape, as it is defined in the US. Many states do not define as statutory rape, sex between a underage male and an adult female. What gives? Teenage girls are too immature to give consent, but teenage guys aren't? In California, if a 18-year-old male has sex with a 17-year-old female, it's a misdemeanor. If a 19-year-old male has sex with a 16-year-old female, it's a felony. I still vaguely remember high school, and I have a bunch of cousins who are in high school now, and I really don't think that 16-year-old girls are all that innocent. Over the holidays, I happened to see part of an IM conversation between two 14-year-old girls, and let's just say that they had extensive "relationship" vocabularies.

The driving age is another stupid one. There are plenty of adults who are horrible drivers, and there's nothing to say that kids can't be great drivers. I argue that people shouldn't be given driver's licenses until they've logged a certain number of miles. So basically, anyone who is tall enough to reach the gas pedals should be able to get a permit. Once you get a permit, you can drive with your parent or guardian, and log miles until you reach 10,000 (or 20,000, or whatever). At that point you can take a test (which should include both parallel parking and driving in reverse) and get your license. My mother used to drive a 40 mile roundtrip to take me (and eventually my sister and brother) to high school, and you can bet she wanted us to get our licenses more than we did. By the time I was fifteen and a half, I was an expert at the Marin to San Francisco commute, and my mom used to sleep in the front seat on the way there. I'm pretty sure I would have been a safer driver than a lot of the crazy people I saw out there on the road.

Finally, there is the whole issue of college students being treated as kids. When I was at MIT, a pledge died after some fraternity ritual during which he drank 16 beers. His parents subsequently sued the school. I had no sympathy for the parents. No one was physically forced to drink anything. If they thought their kid was mature enough to go off to college, then he was mature enough to make his own decisions, and if he was stupid enough to drink himself to death (with or without peer pressure), that was his problem, and their problem, for not teaching him better while he was still a kid.

The problem is that a lot of parents in American society don't want to let go. They're not satisfied with having complete control of their children until they're 18; they want to keep controlling them while they go through college, and after. Since they can't actually be around to do so, they expect schools to do the parenting for them, which is completely ridiculous. The solution is not to police college students, who should rightfully be considered adults, but for parents to realize that the more freedom that they give their children while in high school and middle school, the more their children will learn about time management, and regulating their own behavior.

It all comes down to expectations. If parents expect children not to be able to handle things, they won't. If kids expect their parents to clean up the mess every time they screw up, they will. We should just give kids a little bit more freedom, and teach them to deal with it.

Then again, I'm probably still speaking from the perspective of the kid. We'll see what I think in twenty years.

sports and levels of play

I'm playing in a women's rec league for basketball, where we are easily the worst team in the league. Last season, we won one game. Naturally, some of my teammates are discouraged, and aren't all that excited about returning for next season. I think the problem is that we're improving, since we play against better teams all the time, but our confidence is shot.

My tennis coach used to say that 1/3 of the time, you should play against someone worse than you, 1/3 of the time, you should play against someone at your level, and 1/3 of the time, you should play against someone better than you. The reason is that all of those situations are useful to improving your game. When you play against a weaker opponent, you learn not to play down to the level of your competition, and you raise your confidence. When you play against a stronger opponent, you improve more quickly, because it raises your level of play. And, of course, playing against people your level is the best; both sides benefit, and it's fun all around.

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of women's basketball leagues for players who just learned to play a couple of years ago.

Let's Go Europe, part 2

It seems like forever (but was only five years) ago, that six second-semester seniors decided to take three weeks of January and backpack through Europe.

It was my first backpacking/hostelling experience, and although we had some minor mishaps (two cases of food poisoning, one stolen backpack, one hostel with very cold outdoor shower stalls, an overly zealous customs agent, and many many train-chasing episodes) overall it was a good one. We saw parts of England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, and got a pretty decent idea of what we'd want to do when we went back.

Last year, I went on a week-long whirlwind trip through Scandinavia (Denmark, Finland, and Sweden), but somewhere in the back of my head I was still sorting out the logistics of a second major European backpacking vacation. Finally, last week, four of us sealed the deal by buying plane tickets for this September. We'll be flying into Paris and out of Lisbon, and we plan to see as much of France, Spain, and Portugal as we can, in two and a half weeks. I'm already counting the days.

ick

I wish I could plan being sick. It's just my luck that I always have a whole bunch of meetings on the days that I'm sick, so that I end up coughing and sneezing all over everyone and potentially making them sick too. If I knew ahead of time, I could work it into my schedule. If we can't cure the common cold, at least we should be able to detect it a few days beforehand?

Doug Christie's wife...I mean, life

So, most NBA fans are aware of the whole situation with Doug Christie and his demanding and paranoid wife, Jackie. During games, Christie signals an "I love you" to his wife after anything resembling a good play (for the longest time, I thought he was calling plays, which didn't make sense, since he's a shooting guard).

Widespread rumor has it that Christie is forbidden from speaking to female reporters, that Jackie follows the team bus everywhere in a car, and that he changes in a closet when female journalists are in the locker room. It's known for a fact that they re-enact their wedding every year (rings, vows, guests, and all), and that Jackie once smacked a female fan who touched Doug on the arm.

I've been told that among guys, a popular "you're whipped" gift is a Doug Christie jersey.

Anyway, now that Doug Christie has been traded to Orlando, I wonder if his wife is going to be able to continue with her plan to have them star in a reality TV show? It's my morbid curiousity asking.

happy new year!

Yesterday a bunch of us went out to dinner to celebrate the new year. Like most Chinese holidays, the Lunar New Year involves eating, which is fine with me.

I'm curious about how the Chinese co-opted the Lunar New Year and made it commonly known as "Chinese New Year", though. And, I wonder what the Koreans, the Vietnamese, and the Mongolians think about it.

gadgets for clothes

This came up last week in a lunchtime conversation, and was revisited when I was chatting with a friend yesterday: Why aren't there any cool gadgets designed to deal with clothes (and shoes)? My answer: not enough women engineers.

Let me start by saying that I don't think women are intrinsically more interested in clothes. Unfortunately, it seems that in our culture, it is much more acceptable for men to wear the same types of clothes every day, or even the same outfits, than it is for women. I'm reminded of this every time I get invited to yet another wedding, and I have to figure out what to wear, while I watch the guys drag out the same old suits.

But, back to my point. If there were more women engineers, I bet we would have cool closets that would optimize space but easily switch between winter and summer wardrobes. There would be an attached computer which would have a catalogue of all the clothes in the closet; once an article of clothing was selected, it would take only the push of a button to retrieve it. Shoes would be automatically machine-sorted into bins based on color and style, and be kept out of the way.

In fact, the ultimate clothes gadget would be a laundry machine, which would automatically take dirty clothes and determine whether to dry clean, "hand" wash, or machine wash, perform the appropriate action, and then fold or hang the result. Have I mentioned how much I hate laundry? I would pay a fortune for a machine like that.

fontifier

If my handwriting didn't change drastically from page to page (and sometimes from paragraph to paragraph), I might try paying $9 to Fontifier to make a font out of my handwriting.

work and play

Wow, it's been a hectic couple of weeks. Since January 20th, I've skiied Tahoe (two trips of two days each), stayed at a Napa Valley B&B, gone to two company events, hosted out-of-town guests for a weekend, gotten a smog check, paid my property taxes, and changed my auto, home, and umbrella insurance policies.

Yeah. It's amazing that I've gotten anything done at work, but I have. Unfortunately, there's this one big looming deadline, and it's made it impossible for me to get anything else done. All the little tasks have fallen by the wayside, and there's one medium-sized task that I've been meaning to finish since September, and I just can't seem to get it done. What happens is that I start working on it, get interrupted, and end up working on something else for awhile. Two weeks later, it takes me a whole day to get back in the swing of things, just to get interrupted again in a day or two. Must stick to plan and finish it this month.

paperback books

One of my pet peeves is that newly published books always come out in hardcover first, and then trade paperback, and then sometimes mass market paperback.

I understand it has to do with extracting as much money as possible from the book-reading public, but I'm impatient, cheap, and I'm sick of having to maintain a list of "books to buy when they come out in paperback". If it's about the money, I'm willing to live with a system where books are priced according to publication date (most recent being most expensive), instead of by format.

I like holding books in one hand, and hardcover books hurt me. I also like walking around the house with my books (yes, I can ascend and descend stairs while reading), which means the lighter the book is, the better. And, what's the deal with the modern, paper dust jackets? They're totally useless; all they do is rip and give me paper cuts.

I suppose one could argue that hardcover books are more durable, but in twenty years of reading and rereading books, I've only ever had to buy three books for a second time. The first one I dropped in a swimming pool, so the book split into two parts; I bought a second copy for my bookshelf, while I continued to use the original taped-together copy for reading. The second book was nearly 1400 pages long, and I read it probably a hundred times before the pages started to fall out. The last one I lent to a friend, and well...suffice to say that I haven't lent her another book since.

So what's my point? I want to buy small, light, paperback versions of books. I would prefer to buy them immediately, for the lowest possible price, but I am willing to pay more, on occasion, if necessary. What I can do, as a consumer, to convince publishers to print paperback books that are as small as practical, as soon as possible?

mortality

Early this morning, I got a call from the registrar at my old high school. I went to a private high school, with an Asian population of less than 10% (at the time), and she used to serve as kind of an unofficial mentor for a lot of the Asian kids there. We called her the "Asian fairy godmother".

She told me that my high school ex had been found dead late last week, at UC Davis, where he was a graduate student in biophysics. There was no obvious cause of death, and an autopsy didn't result in any additional findings.

I hadn't really had contact with him for a couple of years, and I hadn't seen him in person in over six years, but it was still something of a shock. We were good friends for about a year and a half, dated for about three or four months, and parted amicably when we both went off to college. He was always a bit manic, but according to a mutual friend, he seemed happy and healthy as of a few months ago.

Anyway, I sent flowers to his family, which was a little surreal as well. I never thought I'd be buying a sympathy bouquet for the parents of a 26-year-old.

time and money

Last week, I spent an hour or so looking at plane tickets on various sites (Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, etc.). Then, I spent another hour reading about digital SLR cameras on dpreview.com, and several minutes using Froogle, Amazon, and other sites to look at current prices. I also read several Epinions reviews about auto insurance, before getting some quotes.

I've found that as information has become widely available online, I've made better purchasing decisions and become better informed about consumer products. I've also spent a lot more of my precious time researching, comparing, and bargain-hunting. Now, instead of calling up my travel agent, giving her a set of parameters, and trusting her to find the best deal, I run through a standard set of at least five travel sites looking for deals that fit my schedule. I wonder if, in the long run, it's all worth it? I do get a small sense of accomplishment from doing all the research, so I guess for now, the answer is "yes".

companies that suck

As I've said before, I use sneakemail to manage my email. By creating a new, disposable email alias for every website, I can track which companies are selling my email address, and I can easily create a new, clean alias, and cut off the old one.

Among the companies that have recently sold me to spammers:

SBC - I use them for phone service. I would prefer not to, but my condo complex has a gate that's hooked up to a phone, so I need a land line. Plus, I have DSL. They sold my email address to a spammer that wanted to manage my online payments.

Chase - I use a Chase Perfect card. I like that your rebate is credited to your account about two months after you earn it. I almost didn't believe this: they sold my email address to a porn site.

DirecTV - They sent me marketing spam, about their own services. I suppose this might not qualify as spam, since we have an "existing business relationship" but their email was malformed and sent from an outside marketing agency, so it's pretty borderline, in my view.

Macy's - Macy's marketing sucks big time. Never, ever, ever use your real email address to buy anything from Macy's or any other company that uses WeddingChannel.com. They use an outside spammer company to send you spam for the rest of your life. They've somehow managed to send me several pieces of spam, through a completely unpublished email alias. I can only conclude that they've stooped to dictionary attacks.

new music in commercials

Recently I've noticed some commercials being released in conjunction with their soundtracks. For example, the new commercial for Gap came out, with Lenny Kravitz singing "Lady" (to Sarah Jessica Parker's make-me-dizzy costume changes), at the same time that he released his new album "Baptism". Similarly, U2 came out with "Vertigo" at the same time the corresponding iPod commercial started to air. I'm blanking on other examples, but I'm sure there are more.

Is this a brand-new phenomenon? Have marketers suddenly decided that musical artists are the key to selling stuff? What gives?

Iron Chef America

The first reviews are in, and apparently Food Network's new Iron Chef America is not horrible (see bugmenot.com), which is more than one could have said about UPN's version. Maybe I'll have to add it to my Tivo.

die already

I wouldn't have wished death on Laci Peterson, and I don't wish death on Scott Peterson, or Sharon Rocha, or Amber Frey. I am, however, so wretchedly sick of hearing about the Petersons, that I do wish death on the whole Peterson-related circus, also known as the media cycle that wouldn't die.

How many people die every year:
...of starvation?
...of curable diseases?
...of violent crimes that are not prosecuted?
...of violent acts that are not considered crimes?
...in this country?
...in the world?

I feel sorry for everyone involved, but really, how is this particular murder worse than any other? I reject that the death of a pregnant woman is more important than the death of a man and/or his child, and I reject that the death of a suburban housewife is more important than the death of a woman living in an inner city ghetto. Unfortunately, importance does not seem to equal newsworthiness.

smart wolf

Yesterday, I was telling the "Three Little Pigs" story to someone. It occurred to me that in reality, wolves are much smarter than pigs. So, I finished the story accordingly:

"So, the wolf said the the third little pig, 'I'll huff and puff and blow your house down!' And then, he went down the chimney."

Who says a wolf has to be stupid enough to try to blow down a brick house, before going down the chimney?

very marin

Somehow this photo (courtesy of SFGate.com) perfectly describes the Marin County that I remember.



I wonder whether I would be more or less cynical if I had grown up in the City, instead of in Marin.

random links

I don't usually like to post entries like this, but here's a bunch of random links that I found interesting recently:

- Stephen Roach is predicting an economic Armageddon for the US, due to our outrageous trade deficit.
- Federally funded abstinence-only programs are teaching students that abortion makes you sterile.
- Here's a list of Top 100 universities put together by someone other than US News & World Report. The twist is that it includes prestigious universities from across the globe.
- Check out Smoosh, a band comprised of a 12-year old and her 10-year old kid sister.
- The NYTimes reports on growing civil unrest in China (use bugmenot.com).
- Here are some horrifying "before and after" satellite pictures of the devastation caused by the tsunami.
- Finally, my rant of the day: Taiwan has been excluded from a tsunami relief summit, despite having committed $50 million USD so far, making it the world's eighth largest donor.

new year

I got back to the Bay Area at 9am on the 31st.

New Year's Eve ended up being fun but pretty low-key this year; we watched some TV, and played board games and video games at a friend's house. Perhaps it was appropriate, given the circumstances.

What's the plan for 2005? As far as resolutions go, I've boiled it down to: a more regular workout routine, a more regular cooking routine, and better productivity (both home and work). Other than that, I think it's time to start off a good ski season, there are a couple of travel plans in the works for later this year, and as always, at least a couple of weddings to attend.

It may also be time to finally splurge and buy a new computer. Yes, I know I should build, but it takes me so long to get around to doing to all the research, that by the time I've picked a case (or a motherboard, or a graphics card), all of my other choices are obsolete. I figure for $500 I can find something ready-made, that's at least five times better than what I've got.

And, it's time to order new books. I finally got a chance to read some of the books that I'd been wanting to read, over my holiday vacation (all worth a look, but the first was by far the best): The Name of the Rose, The Da Vinci Code, The Forest Lover, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and The Rule of Four, so I'll be on the lookout for some new material.

still counting...

The major news outlets were reporting a death toll of 68,000 as of three hours ago.

Honestly, the numbers were counting up so fast they were starting to become meaningless. Then, I got an email this morning from a friend who had flown home to Sri Lanka for the holidays. He was on an east coast beach with some friends, and had to run inland, climb trees to escape the waves, sleep on a "big rock", and get airlifted via helicopter, but he's now safe at home in Colombo. One of his friends is still missing.

It's a bit sad that it takes a personal connection to truly drive home the enormity and horror of such an event, but I guess that's human nature.

Here's a tidbit for the scientifically-minded:

The tremor, the biggest in 40 years, may have caused the Earth to wobble on its axis, permanently accelerating its rotation and shortening days by a fraction of a second, U.S. scientists said.

Really makes you feel small and insignificant and ephemeral, doesn't it?

tsunami animation

Yesterday I was morbidly fascinated with checking the news every hour or so; the experts finally decided the earthquake magnitude was 9.0, and the death toll just kept on growing. I believe it's at at 24,000 now; a not-at-all-subtle reminder that nature is still one of the scariest forces on the planet.

Here's an animated GIF tracing the path of the post-earthquake tsunamis, with an elapsed time counter. It took about 100 minutes for Sri Lanka and India to be hit. I guess early warning systems (like they have in the Pacific) might get more attention after this.

earth shudders

An 8.9 magnitude earthquake centered near Indonesia was reported earlier today. Wow. I didn't know they came that big. It sounds like over 6,000 people have been reported killed so far, either by the earthquake or its resulting tsunamis. Most of the casualties were in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India.

Thoughts:
- The largest earthquake I remember hearing about (ever) was the 8.3 magnitude event centered in Hokkaido last year. Then again, I don't have a great memory for these things; it's not really the kind of event you like to remember.
- The last earthquake of personal significance to me was the "9-21" Taiwan quake; magnitude 7.6. I remember cursing the jammed phone lines.
- The largest earthquake I personally experienced was the 7.0 Loma Prieta quake. I was 80 miles away from the epicenter, and it was quite enough excitement already.
- I was curious, so I looked up the devastating 1906 San Francisco quake. Its magnitude was estimated at 7.8. However, much of the damage was caused by fire.

A couple of months ago we had a 5.0 (or so) tremor in the Bay Area. I made fun of a friend who was excited about his "first earthquake", and told him that if he had to ask other people if they felt it, it wasn't a real earthquake. In retrospect, given my affinity for earthquake-prone regions, I should shut my mouth, not to mention knocking on wood, throwing some salt over my left shoulder, and crossing all my fingers and toes...

small island

There are about 22 million people in Taiwan, which is about two-thirds as many people as there are in California.

Why, then, is it that every person that I meet that is from Taiwan (or whose parents are from Taiwan) is somehow related to me, or knows someone who is related to me? And, everywhere I go, I run into Taiwanese people that are somehow connected to me. I'm tempted to blame my grandmother and her nine brothers and sisters, but that doesn't always work either.

I met a friend in summer school at Berkeley, in a Latin class. It turned out that she was the second cousin of a guy whose father plays golf with my dad. That same guy later went to MIT and lived in a frat next to my dorm.

My second cousin is now the president of the Association of Taiwanese Students at MIT. Her brother goes to Columbia with my sister, where he hangs out with a guy who I first met over ten years ago, at a dinner party with our parents. My sister also became good friends with another girl at Columbia, who we later discovered was a third or fourth cousin a couple of times removed.

My sister now has a new FFXI buddy whose family runs a pharmaceutical company in Taichung. Based on that information and their last name, my mother was able to figure out exactly who this friend was, and how we knew him (and his family).

And on it goes...every classmate or colleague who I meet, who is from Taiwan, is somehow traceable to a distant (or sometimes not-so-distant) relative or family friend. I thought about it for awhile, and decided the community of Taiwanese-Americans is much smaller and is likely to be more closely networked, and that's why everyone knows everyone.

But, that doesn't explain this: Yesterday, for my birthday dinner, we went to Alice's, which is one of my favorite Taipei restaurants; a steakhouse with super-yummy black pepper steak sauce. We ran into a guy who turned out to be my uncle's wife's cousin on my dad's side, and my great-uncle's wife's nephew on my mom's side. Scary.

GQ Taiwan

My sister, my brother, my cousin and I stopped by the new Mitsukoshi department store in Tien Mu today, and my sister bought a copy of GQ Taiwan.



Our aunt (more specifically, our uncle's wife) has a friend named Lin Chi-ling, who is a model here in Taiwan. Apparently, her career has really taken off recently, and my sister spotted her on the GQ cover in a really nice dress.

the big three, dismantled

Wow. Billy Beane better know what he's doing.

Three days ago, he traded Tim Hudson to the Braves. Just today, he traded Mark Mulder to the Cardinals. That leaves the A's with Zito, Harden, and...umm...Redman? Is he still around?

If this works out, I'll gladly admit that Beane's a genius, but I can't stop thinking about three other guys from Oakland...Mullin, Hardaway, and Richmond. Let's think for a second; how've the Warriors done in the 15+ years since Run TMC?

commercials as cultural barometers?

I arrived in Taipei yesterday, only to discover that it's over 20 degrees Celsius here, and humid. At least I was somewhat intelligent and brought layers, so only half of my clothes are useless.

Anyway, I was watching TV this afternoon and made a couple of observations about the commercials. First, more than half of them are in Taiwanese (as opposed to Mandarin Chinese). I don't remember exactly, but I'm fairly certain that this was not the case, five or ten years ago.

Also, the commercials here seem to rely a lot less on putting young, good-looking people on the air. For example, I saw several ads for cold medicines, featuring very average-looking, middle-aged women, telling some (only moderately attractive) young adults that a particular product would cure their colds. To me, it was quite a contrast, compared with American cold commercials, which typically feature impossibly young and attractive mothers ministering to their cute-as-a-button kids.

choices, choices

A tidbit I found on an internal Sales blog:

In 2003, there were more households with internet access than households with children. By the end of 2004, there will be almost as many households with broadband access as with children under 18.

Statistics courtesy of eMarketer and the US Census Bureau.

United Premier

I'm flying to Taipei on Friday, via Tokyo.

When I was buying my airlines tickets, I had the option of flying direct, for about $200 less, on a different airline (EVA). Unfortunately, EVA is not a United partner, so I wouldn't have received United miles.

I really enjoy my Premier benefits, especially the Economy Plus seats and early boarding, since I hate checking in baggage. The priority standby list also came in handy a couple of times this year, and there's the Premier reservations line, if I want to get a real person on the phone ASAP.

Anyway, I calculated and figured out that this trip would put me over and give me Premier for next year, so I caved and bought the more expensive, one-stop tickets. Yes, United, you win.

prenuptial agreements

At lunch today, we got onto the subject of prenuptial agreements. The group consensus seemed to be that they were strongly recommended, almost a necessity.

For me, the best argument is that a prenuptial agreement dictates what happens in case one party dies. While wills and trusts can be modified, prenups are binding agreements. Existing assets can be allocated to children from a previous marriage, aging parents, siblings, and/or other relatives. Besides, if a couple can't get through negotiating a prenuptial agreement, what does that say about their relationship?

But I digress. The whole discussion made me wonder about the current percentages (the number of couples who sign prenups, out of the number of total marriages), so I went back to my desk and tried to find out.

According to several sites, it is very difficult to track numbers on prenups, because they can be written at home and do not need to be filed until they are about to be enforced. However, according to anecdotal and indirect evidence (lawyers drawing up prenups, number of divorces which are settled using prenups, etc.) the numbers have been on the rise since the 1970s, and prenups are widely used in the United States.

There is more resistance abroad; for example, the Chinese are about evenly divided on whether prenups are a good thing. One reason is that according to Chinese superstition, it's unlucky to mention divorce, when a couple is about to be married. Honestly, I think it would be more unlucky not to mention it.

Tora!

I just realized it's Pearl Harbor day.

I'll have to see if I can Tivo a showing of Tora! Tora! Tora!; it's a very good Pearl Harbor movie told from both the American and Japanese viewpoints, and I haven't watched it since I was about ten.

rose bowl blues

Even more perplexing than the NFL's quarterback rating formula (max 158.3) is the BCS college football ranking system: Cal has been denied a Rose Bowl berth.

I'm not a big college football fan, but even I can see how frustrating it must be to have rules like this:

The champions of the six major conferences automatically receive six of the eight berths in the four big-money BCS games, and Cal was hoping to land one of the two BCS at-large berths, which would have put the Bears into the Rose Bowl.

Utah took one of those at-large spots because of a BCS rule instituted in 2001 that guaranteed a team -- such as Utah -- from a non-BCS conference an at-large BCS berth if it finishes in the top six of the final BCS standings. Utah (11-0) finished No. 6 and will become the first team from a non-BCS conference to play in a BCS game when it plays in the Fiesta Bowl against Big East champion Pittsburgh, which is 8-3 and ranked No. 19 in the AP poll.

Another rule added in 2001 provides that a team from one of the major conferences, such as the Big 12 or Pac-10, is guaranteed an at-large BCS berth if it finishes in the top four of the BCS standings. If either of those two selection rules had not been added, the Rose Bowl would have been free to take Cal, and Rose Bowl officials made no secret of the fact that they preferred the Bears.

So, the 10-1 Bears, whose only loss was to #1 USC on the road, by six points, will play #23 Texas Tech in the Holiday Bowl.

UTC

From the National Institute of Standards and Technology:

Why is UTC used as the acronym for Coordinated Universal Time instead of CUT?

In 1970 the Coordinated Universal Time system was devised by an international advisory group of technical experts within the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The ITU felt it was best to designate a single abbreviation for use in all languages in order to minimize confusion. Since unanimous agreement could not be achieved on using either the English word order, CUT, or the French word order, TUC, the acronym UTC was chosen as a compromise.

where is Macedonia?

I found this tidbit in an article about Oliver Stone's new Alexander:

With the world waiting and wondering where the president will start the next war, Bush chose as his first major foreign-policy decision of his second term to recognise Fyrom by its "proper" name as the Republic of Macedonia, prompting paroxysms of Greeks anger across the globe and Athens to vow to block Macedonia's entry into the EU and Nato.

In other quasi-political news, last night's West Wing focused on Taiwanese independence, and did a not-awful job of addressing the current tensions, if not the historical motivations. I'm still trying to figure out what it meant when Josh got overruled by CJ, after he was convinced by the older Congressman (Hurtt?) to give the Taiwanese some leeway.

free credit reports

How did I not hear about this earlier?

Starting today, residents of California (and 12 other states) can get a free copy of their credit report from each of the three major credit bureaus, once a year. Better yet, there's a centralized website for requests: www.annualcreditreport.com (for some reason the site requires that the URL be pasted into the browser).

I'm thinking I'll request one now, and save the other two for later.