But I'm probably wrong...

Ye Olde Compromise Bike

2012-01-23T03:46:00.000-06:00

A while ago one of my friends said he planned to ask his peeps on the Internet a question: how many bikes should one own, and what sorts? I'm writing this down now so I don't have to do it later. The answer: you should own one bike.

Why one bike? Well, aside from my general tendency to avoid accumulating stuff, I believe it's not about the bike — it's about riding the bike. If you have zero bikes, you probably won't find yourself riding very often. If you have more than one, you'll have to spend more time fussing with your bikes than if you had just one. So, optimally, if you want to spend your time riding you'll have one bike.

If you're going to have one bike you'll have to think carefully about what sort of bike it should be. I think there are a few things that hold true for any cyclist that doesn't race for money (especially those living in Seattle):

You almost certainly want a road bike of some kind. Most practical riding is done on the road. So you want a bike that rides well on roads. Despite the efforts of the American bike industry to equate road bikes with cheap imitations of racing bikes, these are not one and the same — road bikes take many forms. A few things are constants. One is tires. They should be smooth. Tread hurts your traction on pavement, especially in wet conditions. There is a special place in hell reserved for salesmen that try to sell bikes with knobby tires to urban commuters. Most people that will regularly ride more than a few miles at a time will want handlebars that allow a variety of riding positions. In Seattle we have climbs, descents, and flats; some trips are long and others are short. Flat handlebars are popular with outright beginners, but they don't give you enough choices to tackle long rides or varied terrain.
Fenders and a rack. This is Seattle; you need fenders on your bike at least nine months out of the year. Take them off in the summer if you really want to, but remember, you're not racing for money, so don't get too bent out of shape about weight or aerodynamics. Fenders make it hard to fit a bike into a car, but why would you want to drive your bike somewhere when you could ride it? Racks are pretty nice. They allow you to carry all kinds of useful things for commutes and utility rides (clothes, computers, tools, locks, etc.) without awkward backpacks. And they let you do all-day and multi-day rides without vehicle support — why make someone support your ride in a vehicle when that person could have more fun riding along with you? Even if fenders or a rack don't have a permanent place on your bike, your bike should be able to support them. This has consequences for your fork and brakes.
Carbon fiber is a stupid material choice for any part of the bike that supports your weight. Quality carbon fiber isn't, to the best of my understanding, more likely to fail than other frame materials, if treated with due care. However, due care is hard to exercise; it's really hard to tell when carbon is damaged. Supposedly a few experts can determine this, but the cost of enlisting their help is significant. Many cyclists recount carbon components failing without warning; others will say they probably should have known their parts were damaged, but let's be honest: you are probably not expert enough to know this. Finally, the failure mode of carbon fiber is shattering. This typically leaves the part unsalvageable and the rider in serious trouble. Aluminum seems a little better, but has its own disadvantages. Rather than shattering, it shears, which is less than ideal. As it's employed in typical bike frames, it's considered uncomfortably stiff, leading to aluminum frames paired with carbon forks (or seat posts, which ended badly for me). And, so I've heard, it gets stiffer and more brittle as it ages. Titanium is ludicrously expensive (though supposedly great in every way). Which leaves us mere mortals with steel. In 2012 steel is still the best material for a practical bike. Yeah, steel is heavy. If you ride carbon your bike is maybe a little less than 10% of your total weight, and if you ride a typical cheap steel frame it's maybe a little more than 10%. You're not racing for money. It just doesn't matter.

There are other things that can vary considerably.

Frame geometry. There are many right answers for frame geometry. In Seattle's hills and traffic, recumbent is probably not one (unless it's dramatically more comfortable for you). Mountain and cyclocross frames have road handling characteristics compromised by off-road capabilities (for one thing, high bottom brackets raise your center of gravity relative to your wheels); how much you care is up to you (my current bike is a cross bike; I care a little bit about this, but... more on this later...). Cargo and “Dutch” bikes are great for mostly short-haul riding, or for carrying cargo! They tend to have sweeping handlebars that have a better default position than flat bars for most road riding, and even allow a more forward position when you want it (I rode an old Schwinn cruiser in college, loved it).
Freewheel or fixie. If you can ride fixie in Seattle, more power to ya. I'm not sure I could handle steep Seattle descents on a fixie. If you ride fixie, at least have a front brake there just in case (this PSA brought to you by your mom, unless your mom is a crazy trackie/messenger).
Brakes. Whatever stops ya, as long as it doesn't get in the way of your fenders. Compared to rim brakes, trendy disc brakes are still mounted such that super-hard braking can pull the wheel out of the front fork, but I'm not sure that overwhelms their advantages: easy power and great rain performance. They require less maintenance but the maintenance is more difficult. They can still work if your rims are damaged, and don't put so much stress on the rims. This, in turn, frees you to get all kinds of crazy, lightweight, structurally dubious rims, but you're not racing for money, so you don't care. Weight and aerodynamics of brakes are negligible for all but the most serious of racers — even more so than frames. All brakes yet known can have overheating problems on mountain descents; the only solution is to use them less. Coaster brakes are pretty lousy in every way, but if you're not going fast or down mountains you might be able to get away with them.
Gearing and drivetrain. There's almost no wrong answer if you're comfortable with what you have. After initial skepticism I have come to like my cross-style gearing on Seattle's hills, though I'd certainly prefer a bigger little ring. More traditional road-style gearing works fine, too, though I'm pretty sure I wear my cogs and rings more evenly with the cross-style setup. If you hate maintenance and care even less about performance than I do try a full chain case and hub gearing — word is that there are some great hub gearing systems out there. Some riders with hub gears or single-speed bikes are going to belt drive. I have no opinion on this.
Pedals. Whatever. You. Like.
Age and price. Spending money does not make you cool.

So... you have to make some compromises to find a bike that's adequate for all your needs. I have a long commute, have to carry a lot of stuff, and like to go on long rides for the fun and challenge of it (challenge, to me, involves pushing my body pretty hard), so my ideal single bike is probably something like a touring bike. Unfortunately mainstream American bike manufacturers don't promote the stodgy, long-lasting touring bike the way they promote racing bikes (whether on-road or off-) and beach cruisers, so they're not always easy to find. And this led me to my biggest problem with my one-bike strategy. When my one bike went down in 2011 I had no spare to fall back on. To get back riding I needed a new bike quickly, and ended up (somewhat unwittingly) with something closer to a cross bike than the touring machine I really wanted.

There are good reasons to have more than one bike. Having a hot spare might be a good one, especially if you want to avoid having to buy a bike in a hurry in the event of a catastrophic failure. If you do two different sorts of riding that can't reasonably be served by one bike, that's another. If you really like to go off-road and get dirty, for example, but also have a commute too long to use an MTB, you probably want two bikes; or if you do lots of long rides where you want pretty aggressive geometry and clip-in pedals, but also quick errands where you want slab pedals (I have clip-in pedals and just push 'em with my tennis shoes for this sort of ride, but I mostly walk over those distances; if making trips like this on bike was important to me I might want a Dutch bike for them). Maybe if you regularly have to park in a high-theft area like UW it's a good idea to have a bike you don't care about. On the other hand, saving your best bike for dry weather, in Seattle, is utter nonsense.

It is time to HTFU, whiner.

2012-01-09T23:59:00.001-06:00

So I walked into the bike shop with my busted dérailleur, and the mechanic said, “Son, did you use those,” and he looked down at my quads, “with this bike?” And I said, “Um, yes?” And he said, “I'm afraid that applying such a massive, apocalyptic level of force to the bicycle voids the warranty completely. You're lucky you didn't rip the frame right in half!”

Actually the bike shop was closed and its open hours correspond almost exactly to my work schedule. Also I need to get a haircut and a bolo tie (because apparently I'm a fucking hipster) and pick up Jess' new computer, all this week, all while I should be working. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!11!1

Jane Jacobs on the oof

2012-01-07T16:55:00.000-06:00

I'm reading Jane Jacobs again, this time The Economy of Cities, which Jess gave me as a Christmas gift. And, oof! When I read The Death and Life of Great American Cities I did it on the L (as documented on this blog in the past), and now I'm doing it on the 5, with its lovely payment scheme where, as long as downtown Seattle's Ride-Free Area is in effect, you pay as you exit on buses leaving downtown. Some Seattle Transit Blog commenters call this scheme PAYPTTF, or “Pay As You Push To The Front”, and on a full bus that's about how it works out.

So in between giving and receiving body blows trying to deal with the flow of people through this bus I'm reading her account of how cities and urban work are the real sources of development and prosperity; not rural work, and not the earth, as many people have thought. And how the “impracticality” of big cities is one of the driving forces of progress. If only Seattle, not that big a city, could get over itself and make it practical to get people on and off of buses quickly. Nürnberg and Erlangen do it with no fancy smart cards or anything (my guess is at least some other cities in the German-speaking world are similar)! And their bus drivers give change!

Jacobs is largely thought of as a hero on the left, but her ideas often have something in common with Libertarianism; see this article from the Mises Institute. In The Economy of Cities she shows these stripes very strongly. She celebrates how the public good is served when people have the freedom to go off and develop their own work for their own profit. Certainly Jacobs' thought is wide-ranging. Her comments on development economics make perfect sense to someone that's read Amartya Sen; her comments here and on environmental regulations often point to the futility of common types of government action, as in Death and Life her most common targets for criticism were centrally-planned government redevelopment projects.

From where we stand today, her thoughts on environmental topics are interesting. She stressed the importance of recycling, and mining waste for usable products. Among other authors I've read, some of Paul Hawken's ideas come to mind. And, indeed, cities facing expensive waste disposal problems have made some strides in this way. She stressed the importance of chemical scrubbing of smokestack emissions, producing useful, profitable by-products. Unfortunately some of the worst chemicals we emit don't have a profitable economic use. So we're now stuck in the undesirable position where the combined actions of people working for their own good don't serve our overall good — the position where we really do need some kind of regulation.

In this sense, I might say Jacobs ended up being too optimistic on the ability of cities to solve their own environmental problems. But maybe she was actually right-on with her frequent pessimism that our cities, and our economy, is stagnating and failing to come up with practical solutions to its problems.

IT'S NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION TIME MOTHERFUCKERS

2011-12-30T19:26:00.000-06:00

In 2012 I resolve to halve my weight and double my salary. To reduce my slavery bootprint and obliterate my carbon assprint. I'm gonna bike to Tacoma, then I'm gonna bike to Olympia, then I'm gonna bike to Portland, then I'm gonna get drunk as hell, wake up on the bus mall, fight a wino, hug it out, bike back home, and run a marathon. No, fuck it, an ultramarathon. I resolve to hack the world, patch all the world's vulnerabilities, then hack the world again, just because I said it was impossible.

Other things I resolve to double:

My followers on Google Plus
Number of computers to which I have root access
Length of blog posts
Old stuff in my house (working variety)
Bench press
Lines of code hacked
Lines of code deleted
Lines of code crushed, driven before me, lamentation of the women, &c.

Other things I resolve to halve:

PRs in the mile, 5k, and 10k (this implies WRs, too, but I'm gonna rock the humility this year, so I might not even tell anyone)
Number of people I follow on Google Plus
Lane-miles of freeway in King County
All haters

Nobody can possibly stop me.

Stories I don't know (yet): the history of Phinney Way and the future of Green Lake Way

2011-12-09T21:09:00.001-06:00

A few months ago there was a fire at the corner of 46th and Phinney Way. Jess told me she saw the fire on the way home from work, and this confused me. We live near Fremont Avenue, Jess works east of where we live, and Phinney (the street) is west of where we live. Unless she stayed on the bus too long, she shouldn't have passed the fire on her way home. It turns out that Phinney Avenue is west of us, and Phinney Way is basically an onramp to Aurora, just east of where we live. Seattle is full of wacky street naming quirks, but why would we have ever named this onramp Phinney Way when there's a street with nearly the same name a few blocks away, the onramp isn't in Phinney, and in fact takes you directly away from Phinney?

More recently I was thinking about intersections near where I live that hinder pedestrian mobility. Two that came to mind were confusing multi-way intersections. First, the 5-way intersection of N 50th Street, Green Lake Way, and Stone Way; second, the 7-way (!) mess involving two separate N 46th Streets, Green Lake Way, and Whitman Avenue. In fact, these intersections aren't much fun to cross by bike, bus, or car either. What do they have in common? Green Lake Way, which is itself a nearly-uncrossable pedestrian barrier all the way from 46th to 50th. How could one street cause this many problems?

And what do these two odd streets have in common? For one thing, geographical proximity. Here's a nice Google Earth cap:

Here's another thing these streets have in common: they didn't exist 100 years ago. Here's a clipping from the 1912 Baist map of Seattle:

In Chicago, I'm told, the diagonal streets that muck up the otherwise orderly street grid were there first, at least on the north side (I could be wrong about this, but I don't feel like researching it right now). The 1912 Baist map shows that in Seattle the grid streets came first. Roads taking curvy, relatively level paths around the hills like Fauntleroy Way and Sand Point Way didn't exist yet (though railroads took these sorts of paths did); neither did most of the current crossings of the Ship Canal; neither did roads like Bridge Way, Fremont Way, nor our culprits: Green Lake Way and Phinney Way. This last set of roads had not been built because their main purpose is to quickly funnel automobile traffic to and from Highway 99, which wouldn't exist in its current form for another 20 years (per Wikipedia: Ford started mass-producing cars in 1914; the Aurora Bridge was opened in 1932, and the highway through Woodland Park was built somewhere around that time; the Alaskan Way Viaduct and Battery Street Tunnel were built in the 50s).

So the mess created by Green Lake Way comes into focus. At some point during the upswing of the automotive era the through-travel needs of motorists ran roughshod over the local-travel needs of pedestrians. Wide, fast roads were built along reasonably level paths cut through the existing urban fabric to connect drivers to what was then the major highway of the west coast. Bridge Way from Wallingford; Fremont Way from Fremont Avenue in Fremont (grumble); Green Lake Way from Green Lake (in this case the name worked out, as Green Lake Boulevard at the time didn't exist south of Woodland Park). And Phinney Way. Start at Aurora and continue its path. There must have been a plan at some point to build another diagonal road continuing along its path to Phinney Avenue, like a mirror image of Green Lake Way. But for some reason it was never completed, and Phinney Way is left as a weird stub with a weird name.

I'm sort of interested in when exactly these roads were all built, and why Phinney Way was never completed. It seems likely to me that these events predated the “freeway revolt” movement, so did some kind of proto-freeway revolt take hold (a proto-revolt for a proto-freeway), stopping the road? Or was it a more mundane reason? One reason I'm interested is that I believe we need to start reversing some of the legacies of the automotive era in our cities. One that I'd love to see go is Green Lake Way. I'm not a natural activist or leader, but I can envision a more cohesive and walkable neighborhood with more pedestrian-friendly intersections. There are plenty of other ways to get to Highway 99, and Highway 99 is no longer as important for north-south travel in the region now that I-5 exists. I don't know if anyone else is interested in this, but I'm sure interested in the history, and what we might be able to do in the future to re-shape our city.

Random transportation comments in Seattle

2011-11-20T12:58:00.001-06:00

1. I was recently discussing the 520 bridge rebuilding project with some of my co-workers. One of them commented, in the context of a discussion about workers commuting from Seattle to the eastside, that many eastside workers would never ride the bus because Seattle has such a lousy mass transit system. It's possible that they would never ride the bus, but I think the reason is false — for suburban workers, Seattle has a great mass transit system. The best city I have to compare with is Chicago. Chicago does certain things much better than Seattle does. Its suburban commuter service to downtown is much better than Seattle's. The combination of the L and the very consistent local bus grid provides generally better service around the city than Seattle does. But we were talking about people that work in the suburbs. Seattle's transit system works a lot better than Chicago's for this. Workers in Seattle's eastside suburbs of Kirkland, Redmond, and especially Bellevue have pretty good transit options from many places around Puget Sound. There's regular 15-minute bi-directional service during the day as far south as Federal Way and as far north as Everett. Similar places in Chicago, for the most part, have only commuter service downtown and skeletal local service to nearby suburbs. Compare Bellevue to Naperville; Kirkland to Oak Brook; Issaquah to Schaumburg.

Chicago, of course, has a few handicaps. One is distance. Chicago (like many eastern and midwestern cities) has suffered from a sprawl-and-abandon development pattern, and while Chicago has managed to revitalize its urban core (like New York, unlike Cleveland or Detroit), it still has a band of severe economic depression in the outskirts of the city and the inner suburbs. Seattle is hemmed in by water and mountains that limit the pure extent of sprawl, and its history and geography has been shaped less by violence and racism. To be sure, Seattle's geography as it is has been shaped by these factors, not to mention corruption and gentrification, but not to the extreme degree Chicago's has. So Seattle's "boom-burbs" are closer than Chicago's are — closer to eachother and closer to the urban core. I think Chicago's other big handicap is the success and popularity of its commuter rail system. Commuter rail is cheap to expand because it runs on existing freight tracks, and popular because it allows people to avoid stressful downtown driving and expensive downtown parking. It's also inflexible, incapable of serving "boom-burbs" that mostly are nowhere near train stations. Seattle's advantages here are twofold. First, almost all of its transit service uses buses, which are very flexible. Second, the same agencies are responsible for suburban commuter services and local services, so they have a greater incentive to cooperate than compete for funds. Agency splits and politics also probably hurt transit service in the urban core of Seattle.

2. While talking bike commuting, a friend said that cyclists with serious-looking racing gear seemed to make up a really high proportion of Seattle cyclists. That sort of serves to reason, I guess. Seattle has a lot of weather that would scare off casual riders, but very little that will deter a committed cyclist. Combine that with the US cycling industry's general disregard for serious adult cyclists that aren't racers, and you have a lot of people riding around town in racing gear, even though many of them will never race on a bike in their lives. Some sport clothing is even pretty practical for longer commutes (I wear bike shorts and a bright yellow pullover, which work great our misty rain), though I'll never understand why people buy gear with "sponsor" logos all over it.

Washington state law and taking the lane

2011-10-02T23:57:00.000-05:00

From RCW 41.61.770, emphasis mine:

(1) Every person operating a bicycle upon a roadway at a rate of speed less than the normal flow of traffic at the particular time and place shall ride as near to the right side of the right through lane as is safe except as may be appropriate while preparing to make or while making turning movements, or while overtaking and passing another bicycle or vehicle proceeding in the same direction. A person operating a bicycle upon a roadway or highway other than a limited-access highway, which roadway or highway carries traffic in one direction only and has two or more marked traffic lanes, may ride as near to the left side of the left through lane as is safe. A person operating a bicycle upon a roadway may use the shoulder of the roadway or any specially designated bicycle lane if such exists.
(2) Persons riding bicycles upon a roadway shall not ride more than two abreast except on paths or parts of roadways set aside for the exclusive use of bicycles.

So the law in the State of Washington says that people on bikes should ride as far right “as is safe”. From what I understand, this is a very common rule. In Oregon and some other states they use the word “practicable” instead of referring to safety, but the basic intent is the same. Yet I and many other cyclists routinely “take the lane” in Seattle traffic, and I at least believe that I'm operating fully within the law when I do so. Recently when riding on Market Street in Ballard the driver of a purple Prius started behind me, correctly made a lane change in order to pass me, then encroached on my position from the side, in a deliberate attempt to force me out of my position. I approached her at the next intersection and she yelled at me not to take the whole lane. As it seems to be a common driver sentiment that bicyclists shouldn't take the lane, I'm going to make the case here that in many cases such as this, the center of the lane is the farthest-right safe place I can ride.

So we'll start at the right edge of the lane. On this stretch of Market Street, as on most major streets in Seattle, there is street parking along the side. This means that at least the right-most few feet of the lane are unsafe for biking. Certainly, nobody would try to drive a car that close to the parked cars, and I won't do it either. I will almost never use this part of the lane to pass between parked cars and those stopped at a stoplight, because passing cars on the right is one of the best ways to get hit; many cyclists will, and they seem to prove me right in a steady stream of mauled frames.

But aren't most bike lanes on the right edge of a lane, squeezed in next to parked cars? They sure are! Most bike lanes are narrow enough that you can only really ride toward their left edges to be out of the door zone. Some vehicular cyclists avoid bike lanes entirely for this and other reasons, but I think riding in bike lanes works OK most of the time. Because of the proximity to parked cars, I limit my speed and ride near the left edge of the lane. Bike lanes aren't really the interesting case here, though.

Just left of the door zone, on streets like Market, is the “right-wheel path”, which is, clearly enough, the path traced by most cars' right wheels. On the typical poorly-maintained Seattle street the roadway sags around cars' average wheel paths, so they're easy to follow. I see lots of people biking near the right-wheel path. But on many roads I think it's a bad idea. The problem is that usually there's almost enough room left in the lane for a car to pass within the lane but not quite enough. This invites a number of behaviors from passing motorists. A common one is passing within the lane, too close for comfort. Another is drifting partially into an adjacent lane to make the pass. The problem with this is that drivers often don't take the proper precautions when they do this. This means you're at risk of having a driver swerve right at you after realizing he's about to hit someone in the other lane. If the driver needs to make a partial lane change, he needs to make a full lane change.

The smallest distance left you can move to avoid these pitfalls (which are very real, in my experience, and in that of many others) is into the middle of the lane. Therefore, the middle of the lane is the farthest right I can safely ride on many streets.

This might sound unsatisfactory to drivers. I'm just going to ride right down the middle and not let you pass? Well, that's exactly what I'm going to do on Market. That's because it's a four-lane road and you can easily pass me in the left lane the way you'd pass anyone else. Two-lane roads are more of a problem. In Washington there doesn't seem to be any law preventing me from doing this, but I prefer not to piss people off. So if I'm going downhill or can otherwise keep up with traffic, I'll ride down the middle, and it doesn't cause any trouble at all. Going uphill I try to choose routes with bike lanes, without street parking (many two-lane roads without street parking have wide enough lanes that I can ride the right edge safely), or side streets without much traffic. Sometimes (as on my route to work) I take the lane on a two-lane arterial, but I try not to do it for long (on my route to work, I do it for one block. Oregon has a law that slow-moving traffic (including bike traffic) on two-lane roads has to pull off and yield to faster drivers; Washington, as far as I can tell, doesn't. But if I have to be on a narrow two-lane road for a long time I'll pull off and let people pass every now and then, just like I'd let the crazy speeders by while driving on two-lane highways in Wyoming and Montana.

For what it's worth, Purple Prius Lady doesn't stand in for all drivers in her actions (very few drivers actually use their cars to threaten people). But her anger at cyclists taking the lane, even when it's legal and the safest way they can ride, is all too common (many drivers honk and yell at me). My first priority when I bike on the road is my safety, and I won't compromise it by riding in unsafe lane positions. If you didn't know that, now you do. If you do know that, and still want to get angry at me (despite that the vast share of traffic backups are in fact caused by other drivers, not cyclists, cyclists take an incredible amount of abuse on the roads), you're probably beyond help.

Computer Down!

2011-09-21T23:11:00.000-05:00

Shortly after moving to Seattle I was given a laptop, tcong by someone that didn't want it anymore. It wasn't hard to see why; the laptop was a bulky desktop replacement, and its screen had a defect, where it would intermittently show red lines across the screen. It was annoying but usable, so when I went out to Mountain View for my first week at Google I took it with me. On the way home, laden with my much nicer work laptop, I put tcong in my checked bag, surrounded by lots of nice fluffy dirty laundry.

Now its display seems to have bitten the dust completely. Not only does its own screen show no data (the backlight works, but the screen just shows white all the time), but it doesn't seem to output anything over the external VGA port either (a monitor attached to that always shows black). It also has an S-Video output, but I can't test it (I don't currently have any displays that accept S-Video). I managed to blindly turn on sshd, so I can connect to it remotely and verify that the rest of the system works fine. In fact, Xorg starts, finds the GPU, and correctly polls both the built-in display and an external monitor's EDID.

It seems weird to me that physical damage would cause video signals to fail both on the built-in display and the external VGA port without causing any other problems, but that appears to be the case. So another second-hand laptop bites the dust due to, apparently, physical failure. Assuming I deem tcong pretty much useless, it will become the fourth member of my computer graveyard (consisting of all my named computers that have died for some reason).

flytrap, used from 2004-2007, was a third-hand PIII laptop that I bought from John because he didn't like it. It ran FreeBSD and served hard duty in my backpack and bike basket around campus, where I used it to write papers and display remote X programs running on UIUC's Big Iron. Its CD drive fell out, in a bank (!), shortly after I moved to Santa Clara, and I think the power supply failed in early 2007. I stupidly bought a PC Card network adapter for it shortly before it died; now that's something with no resale value!
montana, used from 2005-2007, was a cobbled-together PIII desktop with an enormous case. I initially ran FreeBSD on it. I don't think I ever even installed X; it had a severe RAM shortage, so running anything significant meant lots o' swapping. For some reason I lugged it around campus once for a class project, which was hilarious and dumb. In Santa Clara I used it as a general-purpose Plan 9 server. It hit the recyclery before I moved back to Chicago because it was obsolete, not useful, and huge.
talkingcookie, used from 2002-2009, was my main desktop computer, running Gentoo Linux, from the start of college until its power supply died. At that point, its major components were obsolete and flaky, so I replaced it with impulse as, well, a random impulse.
tcong, used from 2010-2011, was given to me by one of Jess' friends before he moved, because it was enormous and sort-of broken. It ran Ubuntu, and its most notable use was handling audio and video for Seattle's RPM 2011 listening party.

Oh No, Street Parking Horror!

2011-09-19T22:37:00.000-05:00

While I was just in California, lots of people within a few blocks of me were hit with parking tickets for violating the Seattle law that cars can't be parked on the same block for more than 72 consecutive hours. I've heard several possible justifications for this law, but none really resonate. Some people call in 72-hour complaints about ugly junker parked on their blocks; moving them to another block for a few days doesn't really solve this “problem”. Some people think this law is a good tool to use against people storing stolen cars on their streets; in that case, there's a much larger violation going on, and a known location for stolen cars ought to be ripe for a sting (unfortunately finding stolen cars is less lucrative than ticketing them for parking illegally)! Ultimately this law is never going to be widely followed, and is impossible to enforce consistently, so it's enforced inconsistently, sometimes as a result of petty personal disputes (or, perhaps, municipal money-finding expeditions).

It really comes down to a question of whether there's a parking shortage. If there's not a parking shortage in a neighborhood, having people move their cars every three days is just a nuisance. If there is a parking shortage, well, there should never be a parking shortage! As with most goods and services, there will only be a shortage of parking if its price is set too low. Rather than forcing people to move their cars all the time, why not just have people on high-demand blocks rent specific parking spaces monthly? If there aren't enough spaces in a neighborhood there aren't enough spaces — people will find that out one way or another when they go to park. But this way, they won't have to circle the block all the time looking for spaces. The city government, owning all these roads it doesn't have the money to maintain, should be charging the users, but it should do so consistently instead of with arbitrary parking tickets.

I don't think Teh Valley has changed much...

2011-09-12T00:21:00.001-05:00

... I've changed a lot, though. Although I certainly wouldn't want to live in Teh Valley or something, being in a better place in life than I was then makes being here less weird than it was back in 2006.

I'm in Palo Alto right now, because I'm starting a new job at Google tomorrow and Googlers have orientation in Mountain View. After getting a bit lost running in Rancho Cañada del Oro I went walking around Palo Alto looking for something to eat. I came across a used bookstore called Know Knew Books holding a going-out-of-business sale, with everything half-off. I didn't have much cash on me, so I had to live behind an H. G. Wells combo and a couple old books about Seattle, but picked up a copy of Hunter S. Thompson's book about the Hell's Angels. Then some dude performed some monologues. The first was originally by a famous female monologist whose name I don't recall, and the second, I believe, was his own work. Really great stuff.

I brought ye olde guitar to work on some songs while I'm here, because I feel like I'm on the verge of getting somewhere on a few. I think I'm going to go back to my roots a bit for RPM 2012. Songs written from my own perspective or about personal concerns, more soft and acoustic sounds, harmonicas, clarinets. Maybe more piano. I'm thinking about trying to do one-word titles for all the songs.

Laurie Anderson for the win

2011-09-07T21:10:00.002-05:00

When we lived in Cody it used to drive Jessica crazy that people would give directions like: "Go down the hill, then it's over pretty close to where the old post office used to be." I was just at Golden Oldies records in Wallingford browsing for new old CDs (and maybe later LPs), and I picked up the Laurie Anderson album Big Science. One of the songs starts with Laurie giving directions somewhere by reference to things that will be built in the future. I'd quote from the song but my CD player can't go back (to make a long story short, that function can only be performed with the remote, which was lost in a hotel room in Spearfish, South Dakota; I could probably get a replacement remote, but I've generally been OK with the limitation).

I think that's it.

Another thing about biking; SPEED

2011-08-27T16:41:00.002-05:00

One other interesting conflict between the vehicular cyclists and “separationsists” is over speed. To vehicular cyclists it's important to be able to ride fast. Some of their complaints about lousy bike trails go away if you don't need to go faster than 10 MPH (I find a lot of lousy bike trails perfectly suited to running, as long as I'm going slower than 10 MPH). Many opponents criticize the importance they place on speed on separated facilities, as it doesn't really affect the majority of users.

I think this is one case where the two groups should be irrelevant to eachother. Cyclists that want to ride fast should have the right to get out in traffic in most cases; a network of well-designed pedestrianized cycle paths won't stop them. But this argument ends up getting too personal. Vehicularists tend to agitate against the very existence of any slow bike trail, while separationists discount their need for speed entirely.

I'll start with the separationists. Discounting people's desire to get places quickly is a great way to become irrelevant. Your city may be beautiful, biking may be fun, but if you're biking for utility, you're going some place, and you'd probably like to spend less time getting there. Also, riding fast is just a fun thing to do. There's a more political argument that fast travel just promotes sprawl and greater distance, so it's a zero-sum game, and some of these sorts promote deliberately slowing down cyclists. I think this misses the mark. Fast bike travel won't promote any more sprawl than we already have because cycling is not the fastest way to get most places, and not how most people travel. That's the car. So fast car travel, and occasionally fast mass transit, can promote sprawl in ways fast biking, by itself, won't.

On the other hand, vehicularists don't recognize that for lots of people a slow trail is better than no trail. The numbers don't lie on this. They may be right to choose the road for themselves (I do this regularly), or even recommend it to others and teach road skills, but wrong to claim it's the only way to ride. They're right to want to ride fast sometimes, but wrong to believe only fast roads are good roads. It's another manifestation of their tendency to ignore the benefits of having more cyclists out there.

Seattle has plenty of fast cyclists zipping around the arterial streets, and they (we) aren't going anywhere. We could use lots more cyclists on the side streets and bike boulevards, using the (sort of lousy) bike trails (with caution), and rolling slow along Broadway when the cycle track goes in. Even if I won't use the new infrastructure all the time, I support it when it's designed well for its intended users.

The Death of Vehicular Cycling!?!

2011-08-27T13:10:00.002-05:00

Apparently vehicular cycling has “been complete[ly] pummeled” or is a secret sect that's been discredited entirely. Funny, I hadn't noticed. In my daily riding, the advice of John Foerster remains as relevant as ever. But I guess some vehicular cycling advocates have really been, politically and socially, left behind by the times.

It's really a shame to see this. But it sounds like there's such a gulf between the core concepts of vehicular cycling and the social and political position of its advocates. I hope that, after the rhetoric has cooled off a bit, that we can employ the best ideas of vehicular cyclists and their adversaries within the community.

The concepts: vehicular cycling came to the US in a time when bicyclists largely rode on the wrong side of the road or on sidewalks, ducked in and out of car-park areas and inconsistent shoulders, and in many places would have been arrested for taking a lane on an arterial road. Bike trails and bike lanes were designed with little noticeable regard for their users; seemingly more to keep cyclists out of the way of motorists than to provide safe and useful places to ride.

In this atmosphere, the vehicular cyclists told us to ride on the correct side of the road, to ride a straight line, and to take a lane if it wasn't wide enough to share with a car. The core concept was that the safest and most effective way to ride was to be visible and predictable. This was good advice, it still is good advice, and it has largely been adopted. I rarely see the sorts of behavior that apparently predominated in the Bad Old Days.

Reasoning from the principles of visibility and predictability, they decried the state of bike paths and bike lanes. Bike lanes forced cyclists to do things that no driver would do, and because cyclists were rare on the road, this made their actions unusual, unpredictable to drivers. Like riding in the shoulder, riding in a bike lane could make cyclists invisible to drivers. Bike paths were often installed in disused rail rights-of-way; a train has, to understate wildly, quite different needs from a bicycle. Along these trails visibility at intersections was poor; trains had the right to stop traffic, and used flashing lights, gates, bells, and driver education campaigns to do it. Bikes get none of these advantages. The only way to safely ride a bike trail along an old railroad was to come to a stop at every intersection, even at unimportant side streets. Many of the trails were given superfluous curves, as if the landscape design was more important than cyclists' transportation needs. These criticisms of bike lane and bike trail projects remain true in many cases; there are lots of old trails and plenty of new ones being built to bad standards. In some cases, however, trail designers have started to take visibility, predictability, and real transportation needs into account when designing trails. At any rate, visibility and predictability remain a valuable rubric for evaluating infrastructure, whether you're planning a bike path of planning a route to work.

The politics: vehicular cyclists have taken lots of political stands against more “mainstream” cycling groups, policies, and ideas. Foerster attacks some policies as being improperly influenced by motives other than cyclist safety. For example, he cites the influence of bike manufacturers on safety standards that require only cheap reflectors, rather than expensive lights, for night riding (for my part, I'd love a bike with a built-in headlight). Or the influence of motorist groups on bike safety laws that run against his principles for biking. At the same time, vehicular cyclists have criticized the anti-car, pro-urbanist, environmentalist slant of many cycling groups. For the most part, vehicular cyclists in name want to keep a very narrow focus on cycling issues.

Given the wide range of issues that directly affect how cyclists get around today, keeping a narrow focus may have merit. If a cycling group takes political positions on the Deep Bore Tunnel and road tolls, how can it have time for the important stuff that affects day-to-day cycling, like good visibility at trail intersections? It seems to ignore a few things, however. Environmental, anti-car, and urbanist concerns may convince lots of people to try cycling — paying attention to these issues probably unites the biking community more than it divides it, and helps it make alliances with other sorts of groups (transit advocates, environmentalists, urbanists). Urban densities, good air quality, and slow driving speeds can really open up utility cycling to the masses. And cyclist safety, on a per-cyclist basis, seems to improve as cyclists increase in numbers. Furthermore, the specific political positions taken, such as the absolute opposition to separated bike facilities, have not been helpful. In European cities (and American college campuses!) pedestrianized cycle tracks have helped people feel safe, if at much slower speeds, and got a lot more people biking. Bike movements on cycle tracks are visible and predictable, just not fast, yet vehiculars still oppose them. That vocal vehicular cyclists have taken these positions may have more to do with their social attitudes than their principles.

The social attitudes: One thing that always stands out to me when I read vehicular cyclists is that they sound old. Their “opponents” in the cycling community tend to sound closer to my generation. The vehiculars stress personal responsibility, and the rewards of learning difficult skills. Their opponents stress the social benefits of increased cycling and insist that the government support them because they're doing so much good.

There are some conflicts that are probably specific to this particular generational divide. The older generation has settled into a suburban lifestyle, having chosen suburban homes in a time when inner-city life in America was at its nadir, while my generation is doing its best to gentrify the hell out of post-industrial inner cities. Indeed, most vehicular cyclists I read are from the suburbs or exurbs, biking in very tough traffic conditions indeed, and their opponents do tend to live in the city. In dense cities a slow or pedestrianized bike culture works because distances are shorter, high speeds are often impractical anyway, and the needed coverage area is not so great. Cycle tracks let everyone bike (as long as they live in the city). In vast American suburbs and exurbs there's no hope of good, useful, separated bike infrastructure going everywhere a cyclist might want to go. A vehicular cycling strategy, and respect for this from drivers and law enforcement, lets everyone bike (as long as they're strong enough to make the distance).

Then there are the timeless generational conflicts. The older generation (along with those that harbor socially conservative attitudes) stresses hard work and self-reliance, is skeptical of social engineering and great change, and tends to focus on the benefits of the status quo (which, after all, it built) as opposed its downsides. The younger generation tends to feel more righteous and entitled, and encourages the world to change in its image. It decries the injustices of the status quo, which it only inherits. The status quo, relevant to this conflict, is car dependence. Vehicular cyclists frequently defend cars and their drivers, and usually don't criticize cultural car dependence or vehicle emissions. Their “opponents” often engage in absolutist criticisms against drivers and self-righteously rant against car dependence and the lack of government support for their better lifestyle. Both groups will often sound completely irrelevant to eachother. Vehiculars aren't going to go to the city to ride on some slow cycle track, wait at stoplights, and dodge pedestrians and smoking hipsters. And the emerging mainstream of urban cyclists isn't going to take a lane in front of a truck doing 45 MPH.

The personal conclusion: I have to straddle these camps. Fremont, where I now live, is semi-urban; north of the ship canal but south of Green Lake, full of single-family homes, converted duplexes, and modest apartment buildings. Canyon Park, where I work, is pure exurbia. I love cycling, I'm reasonably fit, and I care about my technique in every regard (whether that's knowing how to take a lane, how to fix a flat and adjust my dérailleurs, or how to quickly get on and off of a bus bike rack) but not enough to log over 40 miles per day to get to work, so I take the bus part of the way. I ride according to the advice of John Foerster when I'm on the roads (I find I get into the most trouble when I lapse), and I believe most cyclists would do well to read Effective Cycling and practice their skills, but I also believe we'll get a lot more people riding, and reap real social benefits, if we don't make expertise a prerequisite. I like to go fast, because it's more fun and takes less time than riding slow, but if they build a good cycle track on Broadway I won't complain about having to ride slow on it.

Decisions, decisions...

2011-07-18T22:18:00.002-05:00

Jess and I are probably going to find a new place to live pretty soon, and the timing of the situation is one of these frustrating things that's forced us to make a decision affecting us for the next year based on quite temporary circumstances. We currently live right by a freeway entrance, in what's something like a small border vacuum. It's a very convenient location because it's close to one of the few bus stops useful to get to my workplace, and it's a pretty quick walk to both the U District and Wallingford commercial districts. Unfortunately it's not a very pleasant place. The freeway is loud, and there's an abandoned lot next door that, along with the large number of people passing through, make it a haven for panhandlers. Most of the panhandlers are alright (I got some gardening advice from one dude), but a few are drunk and violent, and there's a constant stream of litter coming from the bus shelter. And then there are the drug dealers, though it's not quite 3rd and Pike.

Long story short, we've been hoping to move soon, but not too far. We were hoping to make the decision where and when to move in about a month, because in a few weeks we'll know some things that could significantly open up our apartment search. But our lease is ending mid-August and we can't go month-to-month. We're near the University, where the yearly leasing cycle is very regular, and our landlord, understandably, doesn't want to try to put a unit on the market midway through September or October. So we have to seek out a year-long contract, either here or at some other place, before knowing whether we're still going to be as constrained geographically.

My last job search had some similar elements to it; I was waiting on some companies, and others were waiting to hear from me. There was one point where my parents were visiting Jessica and me in Wyoming, and I knew I'd be moving in little over a week, but I didn't know which state I'd be moving to! In these situations I feel like I'm stumbling around the country, rather than making intentional decisions about my future. I guide the stumbling steps as well as I can. And I've ended up in a city I like (despite all its flaws), married to someone I love a lot, doing things I like to do. Maybe I really have all the control anyone could expect to have, maybe more.

Transportation, Subsidy, Environment, Future, Rambling

2011-07-15T22:27:00.005-05:00

I've been following Seattle Transit Blog lately, and thinking about the constant mass transit crises going on in American cities. It's not just Seattle, with its high-powered NIMBYs preventing dense inner-city development, lack of state income tax (and resulting extremely regressive tax impacts), and tortuous geography... just for a few of the obstacles faced by transit here. Chicago and New York seem to constantly have transit funding problems, too.

The root of the problem, from an economic perspective, might be that mass transit service is offered to the public below-cost. Expanding the system to serve more users means the transit agency has greater losses instead of greater profits like most businesses. But raising fares up to the level of per-rider costs doesn't really look so good in most places either — think $6 bus fares in most of Seattle. Maybe popular commuter routes to employment centers with scarce parking could cover their costs from the farebox, because they'd still be a good deal compared to paying for parking.

The government subsidy for transit service is one of the biggest targets for transit opponents. Transit proponents hearing this will shout back that the road networks are given away to drivers, mostly for free. A tiring argument follows, filled with conjecture, over who is subsidized more, transit users or drivers. I don't think there can be an answer to this question — surely it varies considerably in different circumstances, which doesn't help much if you're trying to create cost-effective transportation strategies.

Maybe the answer is that we shouldn't subsidize transportation very much at all. All motorized transportation requires lots of energy, and subsidizing lots of energy usage is about the last thing we need to do. If all the major highways were tolled to cover road construction and maintenance costs (probably with the toll roughly tied to vehicle weight, as heavy vehicles including city buses put a lot of stress on the roads), and transit fares reflected the cost of offering the service, all the costs of traveling would be included in the price for traveling instead of being externalized onto everyone else. The incentive, then, would be to act in ways that lower everyone's total costs. If mass transit is the most cost-effective way to get around, its fares will be cheaper than the cost of driving.

Another thing that's pretty obvious and affects thinking about transportation generally is climate change. People don't really like talking about this, but greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change, the earth has a limited supply of carbon sinks, and given past and present levels of emission, rich countries like the US have something like a moral imperative to reduce emissions. Because of this, we probably need to set something like a price on pollution itself. The goal would be to set the price of polluting at a level so that we weren't taking more than our fair share of the earth's ability to take carbon emissions. The incentive then becomes to travel when necessary, but to avoid unnecessary travel that adds cost and environmental damage.

In a place like Washington state, where taxes are extremely regressive, subsidies on transportation are probably, in terms of benefit distribution by income, one of the more progressive things going. King County's proposed $20 car tab fee puts this in relief: a regressive tax to provide a progressive benefit. This might be mitigated by replacing general sales taxes with general income taxes. Another thought is that after a truly significant carbon tax is in place (which would have to be at the federal level, not the state), the government would not have to raise as much money through income tax. Per-head refunds from this extra money would be a good mitigation for regressiveness of carbon taxes. The overall problem is not one to overlook; largely removing subsidies on an area as broad as transportation without fixing wealth distribution is basically a non-starter.

Ultimately, all this stuff would be a heavy disincentive towards economic activity, compared to the status quo. We don't just use energy because it's there, we use it to do stuff. But if we're really serious about fixing our emissions problems we might have to set markets to work in slowing down the economy in the wisest possible ways...

I'm currently reading Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom, which, among other things, makes the case that it isn't always economic growth that brings development (he, as the title suggests, measures development by people's freedom to live in a way they have reason to prefer). What we'd have to do in a world with less travel and less economic activity is to thoughtfully choose the things that matter most to us. We might choose to take this action ourselves to stem climate change; we might have it thrust upon us by environmental collapse or peak oil. Either way, I really believe we'll have to consider it within my lifetime.

Awkwardness dreams

2011-07-14T01:29:00.002-05:00

I have been having social awkwardness dreams a lot lately, after not having them for a while. Old friends will enter a room and say something to me, and I'll respond by non-sequitur, as if they had said something different. Then they'll walk away and do something else.

I'm mostly posting this so I remember to fold this image into a song at some point, probably In The Morning, but maybe instead God (Abdicated), replacing weird references to Seattle urban development history...

I just joined Google+

2011-07-11T23:25:00.002-05:00

LOL.

I may quit if it annoys me, like I did with Facebook. The big G doesn't seem to give off the same predatory vibe Facebook does. I never thought of it this way before, but it might be an east coast-west coast thing. I grew up in the midwest, but with more connections to the west than the east, and I've lived on the west coast twice now. I'm probably somewhat more comfortable with west coast social cues than east coast ones.

Anyway, I'm starting to get lots of email from stuff happening on Google+, and probably that's going to get annoying fast. Iunno. Weirdly, I don't think Google+ has Blogger integration, and Facebook did back in the day. Maybe blogging is old balls now.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

2011-07-06T23:33:00.002-05:00

On the radio this morning I heard a discussion of the economic effects of environmental regulations. An economist that had studied the matter claimed that in the long run the level of environmental regulation didn't effect employment levels much either way (though it has other sorts of impacts), but of course proponents tout “green jobs” programs and opponents call any public policy that recognizes the environment at all a “job killer”. It's like this with just about every policy discussion today. Every program has to be judged solely on the merit of whether or not it creates jobs.

In our society we must sometimes act in self-interest and sometimes in civic interest. If our leaders focus only on job creation they're only serving a very narrow section of civic interest. And if we only vote on the basis of job creation we're basically voting by self-interest. Self interest isn't always easy to determine, but it's usually a lot easier to determine than civic interest. The “duh” case of voting for something that creates jobs makes it a perfect way for politicians to get a knee-jerk vote.

But, ultimately, it's a pretty big failure of imagination. We're told that we should support “green jobs“ programs because cleaner production “is the future” or something similarly vague. But environmental protection is hardly a natural law — it's only the future if we choose it. Why are we trying to become the leader in green jobs instead of choosing to protect the environment?

I feel safer...

2011-07-01T02:27:00.002-05:00

... after reading that due to post-9/11 security concerns, the sidewalk on a bridge between Detroit and Windsor was closed. Because it's so much easier to conceal terrorist materials on foot or on a bike than in a car. Yeah, that. Mentioned on this page.

Seattle is becoming normal to me

2011-06-24T00:45:00.002-05:00

On an unrelated note, we need IRV to break up the power of political parties (the undeserved sort of power derived from strategic voting, which is exactly what IRV breaks up).

Illinois needs it more, though.

Car-sharing: another thing

2011-05-16T19:56:00.002-05:00

There's this other thing with ZipCar, though. I don't know Seattle as well as I know Chicago, but I think it's about as true here as there... and I'm not quite sure how to put this... hm... how about this.

A map of ZipCar locations is basically a treasure map, if the treasure you're hunting for is yuppies.

Another thing: car-sharing

2011-05-16T13:19:00.003-05:00

Jess recently donated her truck to a charity (I believe benefiting people with developmental disabilities). We haven't needed to have two cars at the same time once since moving to Seattle, so the extra insurance and registration costs were a total waste. Actually, we don't really need a car on a daily basis, though we have some semi-regular trips that aren't convenient for us on transit (Lynnwood Skate-and-Bowl, and to some degree our church, but only because we're lazy on weekend mornings). So I'm trying to figure out whether it would be smart for me to get rid of my car and go ZipCar.

ZipCar has a page comparing car ownership costs to its own costs. Clearly it's picked a very expensive case of car ownership costs that doesn't match my situation. I have a 10 year-old car that I bought with cash, so payments and depreciation are not close to the $288/mo. listed, and I have no finance charges. My car probably depreciates at about $50/mo. at this point, which will decay exponentially over its life (unless something weird happens). I spend about $40/mo. on gas, not $100. Also their estimate of parking charges doesn't apply to me — I don't pay for residential parking, and probably won't in the near future (parking for the first car in a household is essentially free in Wallingford). Their other estimates are probably about right (the insurance estimate is about what I pay, I didn't investigate the others very closely), so I figure I spend $267/mo. on my vehicle. Most of the costs are fixed time-based costs of car ownership, which are a pretty big waste for someone that drives as little as I do. That's why ZipCar can probably save me some money.

ZipCar has some advantages over ownership of my existing car (it can be bigger or truckier if necessary, or smaller if that's more convenient) and some disadvantages (unfamiliarity with vehicles, need to plan reservations and stick to the plan). Clearly it wouldn't be economical for vacations or driving to relay races (though it might work for relay race vehicles... would have to do some math).

As it is, I won't get rid of my car and switch to a ZipCar today. Not because it doesn't make sense right now, but because my employer might move offices within the next couple years, and we don't know where. It's possible that would force me to buy a car, which would blow all those cost-savings out of the water. If a meteor fell out of the sky and destroyed my car completely, however... I'd probably do it. If I had the ability to buy and sell cars at exactly their market value, without significant additional costs, risks, or effort related to the transaction attached, the distinction wouldn't be as important, but because I don't, the status quo has an inherent advantage.

Barefoot running

2011-05-14T17:05:00.002-05:00

In my ongoing quest to become a Seattle stereotype, I've started running barefoot. Not on the roads and stuff, but in parks. I can make it around Green Lake, though there is enough pavement there that I'm about done after one loop. Extended sections of pavement really are really hard on... everything.

What's really fun when running barefoot is going up hills. Without the weight of shoes on your feet you can turn over really fast. It's a joyous thing, a celebration of running!

My quest, as you can see, is well underway.

French scarves and American drugs

2011-04-16T10:21:00.002-05:00

1. The law in France banning face coverings just went into effect a few days ago. There are a few reasons I've heard for the ban. One is to prevent men from forcing women to cover themselves; the other primary reason, following the French idea of laïcité, is to keep the public sphere free of conspicuous religious displays. I've also heard people discussing the danger of public anonymity generally, but there hasn't been a ban on ski masks in even the most security-obsessed countries.

As for protecting women, a law like this is quite flawed. In a free country like France a woman has the right to leave her husband or her church for any reason — certainly being made to wear a veil against her will qualifies. She may feel that this is a dangerous thing to do, and may choose not to do it, or she might plan to do it in the right moment. A law banning her from wearing a face covering forces her hand. Although the law provides far greater punishments for those that force her to cover, it still can provide a fine for her if she does. And it means she'll certainly be asked to remove her headscarf in public by a police officer. At that point she has to choose to defy her husband or the law. She has lost her ability to choose the timing of her defiance. I hardly think this concept would be unfamiliar to anyone seriously endeavoring to protect women, so it seems likely to me that the protection of women was added to the rationale of this bill for political reasons.

So the real reason is about keeping France secular, upholding the principle of laïcité, where religion is kept to the private sphere of life. What's weird about the law, then, is that it doesn't actually mention any religion in its description of what's banned. The law's thrust is the French ideal of secular public life, but its text displays a wariness toward specifically regulating religion that's more a part of the American idea of religious freedom. As a result, the law bans all face covering in public, even when it isn't a religious expression. The contradiction becomes even starker in the exceptions to the law: face-covering during religious processions is explicitly allowed. What could be a more public expression than a religious procession?

Of course, many Muslims would say that face covering indeed isn't intended as religious expression, it isn't intended to be an outward display of religion in the same way that wearing a large cross necklace is. It does look like an expression to westerners because it looks different from the mainstream. Well, authorial intent is dead, is it not? If the state imposes a law that bans a minority religious practice by way of understanding it as an unwelcome public expression of religion, then explicitly protects the majority religion's traditional public religious expressions, the state is clearly acting in a racist way. It's promoting xenophobia, not laïcité.

2. I heard on the radio a couple days ago the story of injectable progesterone, which is used by some pregnant women to reduce the risk of premature birth in high-risk situations. The drug company producing it had stopped in 2000, but as there was still demand compounding pharmacies continued to make it and sell it at very reasonable prices.

Then a new drug company got FDA approval to sell the drug, set the price at about a thousand times what the pharmacies charge, and announced that they'd press changes against anyone else that continued to sell it.

What's weird is that they probably would have got away with it if they'd only tried to set the price, say, ten times as high as existing sources. Apparently the FDA is perfectly willing to give companies exclusive rights to sell products that are already being adequately produced by the market at large.

That's just what happens when the state grants monopolies to private companies. The enforcement power of the state (and, specifically, a part of the state that isn't held to much public accountability) has to protect the profit interests of businesses. This story is something like a microcosm of the American health care system — if only it was this simple!

Disrepair

2011-04-09T00:57:00.003-05:00

So one of the more interesting websites to follow is The Oil Drum, because knowledgeable and smart people post there. Anyway, some sorts of peak oil discussions remind me a bit of eschatology. Are we or aren't we in the End Times, and if so, which part?

Some people place a lot of importance on their eschatological beliefs. This seems weird to me. Wouldn't one live by awfully similar principles regardless? I might say the same thing about the notion of the Trinity, something a lot of people have argued and ultimately died over, something that to a large number of people is sacred dogma, that just doesn't matter very much in how one is to live.

Anyway, I see a lot of that in peak oil discussions. When is Peak coming, what will Peak look like, how will we live after it, who are the elect?

The elect aren't the chosen ones, but the ones that choose.

(said the little glass of whisky)

Maintenance

2011-04-09T00:00:00.002-05:00

In the two months since I last blogged, my interests have been something like what follows:

1. RPM Challenge. Album is this pile of awesome. Also, hosted the RPM Seattle listening party. Which consisted of music, beer, hummus, and Luther sitting on the floor showing our guests a truly impressive display of feline sloth, even for him.

2. Transition movement. I'd describe it as an attempt to make a low-energy future for ourselves before it's foisted upon us by peak oil and climate change. Jess and I are rank beginners and, in the words of the movement, have a lot of re-skilling to do. We want to start growing something this Spring, and I'd like to learn carpentry and food preservation. We've been meeting with a group at our church to read and discuss The Transition Handbook.

It's sort of startling how dependent we are on oil — not just energy, but oil specifically, and not just oil even, but cheap oil. When people talk about Americans having to adjust to a “new normal” economically, part of that is tied up in the physical fact that oil isn't going to be had at 1990s prices again and we almost certainly won't have a substitute. The other part of it, of course, is the fact that our economy, consuming far more than it produced and practicing economic imperialism, could never be sustained for that long even with a steady input of cheap oil.

I'm not as convinced as some people that we've bought our last cars. But I'm also not convinced of the opposite. I think it's possible that middle-eastern oil booms have been slowed by government interference more than in the US, and thus that they won't show the rapid peak and decline that we had. Either way, learning new old things (as opposed to Old New things) will be good.

Tech priests and frame stories

2011-02-03T22:40:00.002-06:00

A few days ago... is what this post is. So “A few days ago”, God, welcome to the 90s Mr. Dimond.

A few days ago I followed a link from a Penny Arcade post and wound up here. One of the songs I'm working on for the RPM album connects the idea of a scientific priesthood in Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone to that in the real-life Brown Dog affair. It appears WH40k (which I'm not familiar with at all) literally has Tech-priests and a “Cult Mechanicus”. Perhaps if I have some time I should look into this game, see what its angle is.

Back around Christmas I finally listened to the “new” Arcade Fire, The Suburbs. It's my least favorite of their albums so far, but generally alright. The more laid-back style, to me, exposes their often-formulaic tunewriting and composition... that doesn't bother me when they're singing the hell out of a song, but it's more glaring when it's just sort of chugging along in Rococo. They use lots of raised 4ths to bring in a dreamy state, which is cool. Some of its social criticism is vague (that seems to be the point in some songs, like Modern Man, but Sprawl I (Flatland) really bothers me for some reason). The storytelling of Half Light II (No Celebration), seems half-baked to me, it rolls off into vague non-sequiturs. And that's a shame, because its opening lines are so promising. I'm expecting something like Springsteen (especially The River)... can the Arcade Fire do that? Could their fans hear it? Anyway, another song whose best lyric is its first is City With No Children. In one rhyme, combining Elvis Costello-like cruelty with a nostalgia unique to this album's internal logic, they neatly set up a frame story, give their observations a listener. It's pretty catchy, and the last chord of the pattern suggests a modulation to V then snatches it away. Then the next line, “... and before a world war does with us what whatever it will do”, makes me want to throw things.

Speaking of frame stories, I caught The Social Network on my flight out to Germany. It's a frame story set around some deposition that Zuckerberg is pretty bored with. As well he should be. He's being sued by a bunch of rich whiners that each already owned pretty much the portion of Facebook they deserved. Who cares about them? That's nowhere close to the story. The real story is Zuckerberg's consistent disregard for the people whose data fuels his empire, starting with his first popular “hotness” rating site. The fact that after everyone hated Beacon, he said, “OK, well I'll take it away and bring it back later, packaged differently.” Maybe he's a genius for proving that we have no principles or backbone.

One belief that I hold pretty strongly is that it should be absolutely illegal to use people as advertising spokespeople without their consent. To put words in their mouths. That includes plenty of stuff Facebook does today (have you seen the messages you get when you try to quit the site?). I always thought the Apple “Think Different” ads were pretty sketchy, coming damn close to portraying Gandhi and Einstein as computer salesmen. But at least they apparently got permission from the estates of the people whose images they used. I'm not sure that should be allowed anyway, but at least they did something.

Germany!

2011-01-29T17:59:00.003-06:00

I just got back from Germany, was there two weeks for work. For some reason I didn't blog while there; I would like to say I was too busy drinking beer, but I actually didn't drink that much beer. I did spend a ton of time just walking around Erlangen, and running in the German countryside.

The German countryside is a great place to go running. You know how when you fly into Midway it sort of feels like you're going to land in the middle of a great big rail yard (not just any rail yard, but the Clearing Yard of the Chicago Belt Railway, one of the biggest in the world)? When you fly into Nürnberg it looks like you're landing in a big evergreen forest. On Monday the 24th I took a run looping around a big chunk of this forest, took a wrong turn near the end, and ended up running 18-and-a-half miles through the snow before work. The forests, small towns, farms, all of it just had this magical feeling to it. And even in the freezing January weather I always saw lots of people out enjoying it on bikes, running, and walking. Trails for hiking, biking, and cross-country skiing are very well marked, which helps.

But what probably helps even more is that everything is just so much closer. German cities certainly have some sprawl to them, but nothing close to what American cities have. Tennenlohe (where I worked in Germany) is a lot like Canyon Park (where I work in the States). You might consider it a "small edge city". It's about 7km from Erlangen and about 11km from Nürnberg, and isn't continuously linked by sprawl to either city.

I took the train up to Bamberg on my free Saturday. Its old city has lots of old buildings still standing, and as it was once the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, there are a lot of historically important buildings in town. Coming from America, the re-use of the old buildings, cobbled streets, and plazas in the main part of the old city for a modern shopping district looks really strange to me. It is, of course, a bit of a touristy thing even in the winter. Up at the top of a hill going west out of town there's a trailhead for a walking trail going quite some distance. I also did some walking around newer parts of Bamberg, and even there a lot of the architecture is really beautiful. Somehow I forgot my camera, but I'm not sure pictures could really capture the different feeling of being there anyway.

I found being in a country where I don't speak the language very tiring. Even though a lot of people speak English there and I didn't have any serious problems resulting from not being able to communicate, it meant that every conversation took a lot of effort, even more than it usually is for me. I practiced German phrases that I thought I would need, but almost never was able to spit them out in context. I hated asking people, “Sprechen sie Englisch?” I felt like I had come to their home and forced my language on them. I obviously missed out tremendously on the culture and life of the places I visited because I couldn't understand people speaking in their native language, couldn't hear announcements or read signs.

On my way home from the airport I was waiting for a bus transfer at 3rd and Pine, and there were some guys shooting craps on the sidewalk. One of them yelled, “This is Chi-town, baby!” I'm not sure how often in Chi-town people shoot craps on the sidewalk downtown on an overcast, 50-degree, rainy day in January. That sounds about as Seattle as it gets. But just hearing the words and understanding them, and easily laughing at the irony of them, that meant a lot to me. On the bus going past an abandoned lot I thought, “I'm home — this is my home, even the stupid and ugly parts.”

Getting It

2011-01-13T00:42:00.002-06:00

I've just started reading Studs Terkel's classic Working. I'm not too far in, but it seems to be a testament to what you hear when you listen. It was written in the 70s — do we listen worse now than we did then? Do we have less hope of brotherhood than we did then? I didn't live then, and I don't know.

Then, this, on the Singularity.

I also recently finished Craig Mullaney's The Unforgiving Minute (essentially a memoir of his military education and service in Afghanistan). One striking aspect of the book, to me, is the following statement: “At West Point we'd learned that responsibility preceded privilege”. Leading up to that, he'd been describing difficulties re-adjusting to civilian life after returning, and the sorts of stupid comments he'd hear from people at parties. That they'd sign up for military service if they were “guaranteed a challenging assignment”, or that they supported the troops but not the war, when in fact they did nothing to support the troops.

His subjective response of disgust is clearly justified, and points to a more universal truth. Yes, these people are clearly putting privilege ahead of responsibility, asking for the sorts of promises they'd get in business. That's one privilege my generation has become accustomed to, instant gratification and recognition. It's never asked for and rarely acknowledged. Mullaney's early decision to go to West Point instead of an Ivy League school contained an acknowledgement of this privilege (and of his discomfort with it) and a rejection of it.

Another theme that ran through was the question of meaning. It's sort of a cliché to describe bureaucracies as Kafkaesque, and some reviewers called his descriptions of West Point life and of his experience as an adjutant by that word. I don't think that's quite right. In those things Mullaney found meaning where it wasn't initially obvious — in some (especially in frustrating training exercises) he found definite, specific meanings, and elsewhere he seemed open to the idea of a yet unknown or unknowable meaning. To really be Kafkaesque the experience ought to be meaningless. He seemed more ambiguous about the meaning of the war in Afghanistan. Obviously it had as much personal meaning as his training but an actual war demands more than that. Could he have undergone meaningful training for a meaningless mission? At least within this book, he asks the question but doesn't become consumed with it.

Dolphin rights, beyond glibness

2011-01-08T00:11:00.003-06:00

In my last post I made a cynical comment about the idea of rights for dolphins. Since I have read about, and more importantly, thought a lot about exactly what sort of rights animals deserve generally, it probably deserves something more earnest.

So, of course, the first thing that comes to my mind is Lou Reed: “There's no such thing as human rights when you walk the New York streets”. I said earnest, not idealistic. To me every being has the moral right to try to survive, but can never be guaranteed success, let alone any higher sort of dignity.

But just recognizing a dolphin's right to try is more powerful than we might think. A dolphin is not like a cat or dog, seeking a partnership with people. Surely our ability to understand animals is limited, but it speaks volumes that if you feed cats and dogs and let them generally run free (common enough in rural areas) they'll hang around for more than just the food. They'll enter something like a social contract with you pretty willingly. Dolphins won't, and it takes force and trickery to keep them in captivity. It takes constant frustration of their instincts and desires. That's true of almost every animal you see at a zoo, not just dolphins.

The question of zoos becomes more complicated in the context of widespread habitat destruction. Is zookeeping OK when it saves species from extinction? This speaks to an even bigger question. I don't want to go on endlessly about vegetarianism or something, 'cause that's not what this is about, but it's a necessary setup... it's really pretty easy to be a healthy vegetarian, as there have been a number of vegetarian food cultures in history and modern medicine believes you don't even really have to pay attention to protein mixing, just don't eat the same thing every damn day. But veganism is tougher — the current understanding is that the human body needs nutrients that can only be obtained through animal flesh, animal products, or industrial production. That is to say: we all have a need, as much a part of us as our right hands, or our abilities to reason, to either kill, exploit, or dominate. Choose wisely.

This need, which has developed with us (and our increasing ability to kill, exploit, and dominate) over many generations, is like our situation where many species are endangered by our hands. To someone that idealizes a peaceful and balanced world it's a moral burden we necessarily inherit. Satisfy our desires and frustrate those of another. Few take seriously the alternative: death.

Maybe at some point we had a choice but now we're kinda stuck with domination. I think it's true what Tolstoy said: that in his wars, Napoleon had the least free will of anyone.

Smorgasborg day

2011-01-07T22:27:00.002-06:00

1. I don't have a lot to say about this, and it's sort of technical, but this blog post goes some way toward explaining why the Internet doesn't feel all that fast, despite gaudy bandwidth capabilities.

2. Also, from Slashdot, an article about whether dolphins should be considered persons and thus have rights. Based on how human persons treat each other, I'd say that in order to secure their rights as persons dolphins will have to present proof of citizenship — or, failing that, become a corporation.

3. Is it wrong that I don't like it when spec documents are given to me in Excel format?

4. I've been following some discussions over baseball's Hall of Fame, mostly in the Sabremetric community. I've been trying to waste less time and energy on that sort of stuff, but, you know, last verse of this song and all, what am I gonna do? Anyway, entrenched positions on the Blyleven candidacy have become truly silly over the last few years, and now are finally over. So, a few days late, I'll weigh in. Maybe one reason there's such a gap between Blyleven's aggregate stats (basically anything that's summed up without regard to the start and end of games) and his W-L record has to do with the distribution of runs given up per-start? Given his ridiculous number of shutouts, he might have a different-looking distribution than most pitchers, and really might not be as good as his aggregate stats in terms of winning games. Even if that's true, Blyleven might deserve to be in the Hall anyway...

typedef structs

2011-01-06T01:28:00.003-06:00

Within the last couple years I've become a fan of Yossi Kreinin's C++ FQA, which goes a long way toward explaining the feeling I get often when coding C++: This would be easier in any other language.

Often that includes C. The superiority of some old C features and methodologies over the C++ ones meant to replace them, and the fact that they're usually still available in C++, has led to their frequent use in C++ code. The use of macros, pointer arithmetic, format strings, and the like, is to me often justified, even if they make a program look a lot different than what you see in a C++ reference book.

One C-ism I keep seeing and don't understand, however, is typedef struct. In C you had to typedef your struct types to refer to them without the struct keyword. C++ lifted this requirement, but I still see it all over the place. Of course, C++ also changed what a struct is considerably: it's the same as a class, but its members are public by default, not private. Sometimes I see structs written basically as mini-classes, with member functions and perhaps even constructors. In this case I don't see the C-ish typedef very often. Similarly, these ones are more likely to have “C++-like” member names.

C++ is a language that gives its users lots of flexibility in pointless places. Of course, it's typical for the state of software in 2010 that we aren't making intentional choices with that flexibility...

Seattle running!

2010-12-31T18:05:00.003-06:00

When I left for my run today Wunderground said it was 51° downtown and 31° in Wallingford. I figured it was an error. But then I ran down to Interbay, and it was at least 10-15° warmer there than up here. Running through the hills in Queen Anne the temperature seemed to vary 10° block to block just based on which side of a hill I was on.

Also, ships are to Seattle as trains are to Chicago.

D I A L O G S Nr.30

2010-12-31T13:32:00.002-06:00

d: What? Where am I? Have I been... sleeping?
a: No, I think we've been traveling.
a+c: Traveling... through...
a+b+c: TIME!
a: Hi, I'm Jim, from The Office (US)!
b: Hi, I'm Tim, from The Office (UK)!
c: Hi, I'm Sabine, who is imaginary.
d: Which one am I?
Tim: You're Nathan, from Al's crappy novel.
Nathan: Damn it, I wanted to be someone good.
Sabine: Well you're not going to get that by changing your clothes.

My New Favorite Website

2010-12-13T23:13:00.003-06:00

This is so awesome it actually makes me miss California a little. I love how the author notices things — that's how I want to explore and document the places I inhabit, and I usually fall short.

I remember a lot of the areas mentioned there, especially the parts around Alviso and Drawbridge. I used to run on the New Chicago Marsh occasionally, but I didn't know there was direct access to its trails, so I did the whole 14-mile loop including the whole Alviso Marina loop. The New Chicago Marsh is near the New Chicago area of Alviso, which has streets named after Chicago streets (including Grand Blvd., which in Chicago has been renamed after Martin Luther King). New Chicago was something of a real-estate swindle, thanks to which we have one of the few parts of the San Francisco Bay left mostly undeveloped. Good to know the old Chicago ways can do some good every now and then.

Seattle and the Nexus of the Universe.

2010-12-04T19:56:00.006-06:00

When my dad was here for Thanksgiving he commented on once getting lost near my brother's apartment in West Seattle because he thought that California Ave SW would intersect the numbered avenues, not being itself a numbered avenue. I had to point out to him that in Seattle there are both numbered streets running east-west and numbered avenues running north-south, like in Manhattan (technically this is true in Chicago as well, but usually it can be ignored), and that generally there are both named and numbered streets running every which way. Unlike Manhattan, there are eight “quadrants” to Seattle's address and street grid (maybe nine, more on that later, although only six of them are distinct as far as addressing is concerned, and two of them overlap). Another difference with Manhattan: Manhattan has a Nexus of the Universe at First and First, and Seattle would never be so presumptuous as to claim one of those, right?

I wondered about that while out running today. As Seattle has many quadrants, it could potentially be a Universe with several nexi. That would suit Seattle just fine. As I was out running I had no map and plenty of time on my hands. The following is how I reasoned about this.

The central quadrant has numbered avenues but no numbered streets; or if it does, they're not close to 1st avenue.

I don't think the North, East, or West grids have any numbered streets either, but I'm not totally sure about that. I called those doubtful.

The Northeast and Northwest quadrants share an origin with the East and West quadrants respectively, so though they have both numbered streets and avenues, neither extends far enough south to have a 1st Street.

I'm not all that familiar with the South quadrant; I think it has both numbered streets and avenues, and it certainly has a 1st Avenue, but I don't think it has a 1st Street, at least as far west as 1st Avenue. I called the South quadrant possible but unlikely.

The Southwest quadrant has no land far enough north to have a 1st Street.

Then there's Southeast. I thought there was no Southeast quadrant, but my brother's girlfriend's uncle Fred says there is one, and he would know better than I would. My guess is that it exists nowhere within the city limits of Seattle, perhaps only on the Eastside, and shares an origin with the South quadrant, and thus doesn't extend far enough west to have a 1st Avenue.

I checked a map after getting back, and found a few interesting things. Indeed, there are no numbered streets in the Central, North, East, or West quadrants. There is, oddly enough, an E Fir St right where you'd expect E First St to be (I did a double-take there), but the East quadrant doesn't go far enough west to have a 1st Ave, and Fir St, by virtue of its location and the twistiness of the grid in that area, never appears in the Central quadrant. The South quadrant, as far as I can see, has no numbered streets until you get quite far south.

There is a SE quadrant on the Eastside, and the Eastside also dispenses with the silliness of the E quadrant entirely, so both the NE and SE quadrants have a 1st Street over there. Neither have anything near a 1st Avenue, of course. Bellevue takes the additional rationalizing step of having a “zero street”, called Main Street. It also takes the irrationalizing step of having NE 1st St run diagonally, so it eventually intersects NE 10th St. Some towns on the Eastside have their own grids. Kirkland is an example, and it appears to have Central, West, and South quadrants. Each comes tantalizingly close to a First and First that never materializes.

As for other counties, Snohomish has a nice grid system, but its “nexus” would fall in the middle of the water. Pierce County's grid looks to be based on Tacoma, which is possibly even weirder than Seattle, and as far as I can tell doesn't have a “nexus” either.

So... I could be wrong, but I don't think there's a Nexus of the Universe anywhere near Seattle.

ADDENDUM: As for Chicago, I think the lowest numbered street is 8th, and the lowest numbered avenue on the main grid is somewhere in the 40th. There's a 1st Ave on a different grid system that runs through parts of the west suburbs, but no numbered streets on it. So there's definitely no “nexus” in or around Chicago. And Seattle, Chicago, and Manhattan notwithstanding, the real Nexus of the Universe is at Main St and Center Ave in the middle of North Dakota. Some day I want to bike there for some reason (I don't know if the roads are paved... details, details...). Also, the statewide North Dakota grid has three of the four possible 1st-and-1st intersections intact, which is cool.

I Agree with Jessica

2010-11-20T17:46:00.003-06:00

1. Guitar (and, to a lesser extent, bass) have monopolized my music practicing time. I don't think guitar is my best instrument, or even the instrument I'm best suited to, but I don't have a lot of time to play music at the moment and I'm spending almost all of it on guitar and bass.

2. Number of times someone offered to sell me drugs in Chicagoland (in all the years I lived there): 0. Number of times someone has offered to sell me drugs in Seattle in less than half a year: 3. Twice weed and once acid. Twice on the Ave, once at the bus stop outside my apartment. People at the bus stop have offered to sell Jess weed also.

3. Also, there aren't nearly as many smokers in Seattle, but they have this annoying habit of lighting up right next to me while I'm waiting for a bus when I'm in a bus shelter with posted No Smoking signs. In one instance I was at 6th and Olive, where there are 6 benches right in a row, and all of them were free but the one I was sitting at. Some woman set her coffee down on the bench next to me, lit up a cig, and started smoking right in my face. srsly wtf ppl omg srsly. w. t. f.

4. I needed a new notebook a couple days ago, and Jess needed one too, so we went down to the U-Dub bookstore to do some serious shopping. One of the notebooks there said, “Hell is other people,” on the cover, which prompted Jess to recall that when she was in library school a bunch of people started wearing shirts that said, “I agree with Paul,” on the front and then some crazy bullshit by the Apostle Paul on the back. And she said she wanted to make a shirt that said, “I agree with Jean Paul” on the front, and, “Hell is other people,” on the back. We did get married for a reason (awww).

EDIT: 5. Oh yeah, one other thing. I wonder if, as smoking has declined, caffeine has picked up in popularity as our “safe” addiction of choice. I have no evidence for or against this, just something rumbling in my head.

The horrible first chapter of my horrible novel

2010-11-17T17:18:00.002-06:00

“Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii’m a programmer, programmer is my career, I’m a programmer ‘til I die!” Nathan's full, warm bass in song cut through the noise of the 7th floor, the “basement” of Infinite World Marketing of Spokane. Nathan stepped out of the elevator and toward his work area, four small tables pushed together with a set of black roller drawers underneath.

“Or, alternately, until the Chinese eat our lunch and all of our programmers' pie?” Jim responded not in song, but in wry, rapidfire speech. In rhyme, but not nearly in rhythm. “Oh, speaking of, djaget th'email?” There his Chicago dialect came through, like the representative of some crime family (or the Governor's office) asking the mayor, Djaget the papers, boss?

“No, I haven’t checked my email, I just walked in.” Nathan sat down and powered up his computer.

“Big Chinese client has a meeting upstairs today, so, um, don’t display any Tibetan flags.”

Nathan laughed his quiet, thoughtful laugh. Every time an important client visited they had to hide any competitors’ products or logos. This had nearly come to blows last year when one of the data-entry guys had refused to cover a Budweiser t-shirt for a visit from the local Miller distributer. Anyway, there probably wasn’t a big Chinese client. The company, like its home city, had been growing, but ultimately wasn’t of more than regional significance. A spark came across Nathan’s bright blue eyes, behind the metal rims of his glasses. He slid his hand into the top drawer of his desk (bending his knees, always lift with the legs) and pulled out a stack of Post-It notes. He stuck one over the front panel of Jim’s computer. The CD drive popped out.

“'Ey, wut was that about?”

“Nvidia sticker.”

Jim pushed the CD drive back until it got the hint and receded back into the tower. “So?”

“Incorporated in Taiwan, tax purposes. I guess it’s the Delaware of the Pacific Rim.” Infinite World wasn't big enough to be a Delaware corporation, but Jim had read Cryptonomicon, so it landed. “Also, mostly fabbed in Taiwan, board-makers in Taiwan. But, to be fair, they do good business in China, too. A little nationalistic saber-rattling won't get in the way of that.”

An Outlook window popped up on Nathan's screen, then three pop-ups for meetings and tasks coming due. Nathan felt a surge of rage well up from his gut, though his neck, out through his ears. He stetched his arms out and down, extended his fingers (and toes) into wide fans. The stress flows out through your fingers and toes, he’d heard that 25 years ago in high school, and if that was the case, best to shape them like a heat-sink, maximize the surface-area to volume ratio. “I wonder who it was that coded up these alerts. I could drive my ass over to Redmond and...” Nathan's voice lightened. “I wonder if he knows he's the most hated man in the world.” A pause. “Well, the white-collar bougie world with nothing real to complain about.” A laugh. “Seriously, though, Redmond eats its own dogfood, it’s probably one of its own biggest clients, if anyone hates this shit as much as me it's probably someone at the big campus there”

“Microsoft doesn't know shit, can't do shit,” Jim snapped back. “They hire the smartest people outta school and teach 'em ta suck. Forget fucking Outlook dialogs. I got two words for ya. Two-hundred-sixty character path limit. Four words. Twohundredsixty. Character. Path. Limit.”

“Depends how you count them,” added Joe, sitting at the next clump of desks over.

“Every fucking project I run into it. Imagine the poor fucks coding real software. Like at, uh, Microsoft, fer example. Tell me they don't get sick of it. There’s gotta be thirty-thousand individual people at Microsoft that could fix that shit in a day, and working together they can't fix it in twenty fucking years of Windows. A fucking joke.” Jim normally spit out his words in a quick monotone, but when he said, "fucking," he said it deliberately, with a rise and fall, giving his fucking sentences an additional climax. A fuck-ing joke.

Nathan, who had been listening with his eyes closed and breathing deeply, put in softly, “Did you ever read Raymond Chen’s blog, The Old New Thing? That’s the sort of thing he’d write about. There’s probably some —”

“Raymond Chen!?! Fuckin'oly fucking fuck, dude, Raymond fucking Chen. Raymond Chen is smarter than you and me put together, and add in, what, another fucking pod of us code monkeys?” Fuckin', on the other hand, was mashed into the beginning of a word, like a prefix.

“If we’re in pods, aren’t we code whales?” Joe put in.

“All that power in 'is fuckinbrain, workin ferwat should be th'most importan'n' capable software company onthe planet, and whaddoes 'e do? 'E writes a fuckinapologetics blog for their fuckups!”

“I’m not sure I’d call him an apologist exactly. Perhaps an historian.”

“Plumbing the depths of bullshit code from the eighties, like it's less important that it’s bullshit, 'ere today, in two-thousandeight, than why it stinks. You know, pissin' in the street is a longstanding tradition. And, damn, wouldn’t it smell better if we used toilets? But this way his fuckingrandpa doesn’t have to learn how to piss all over again.”

Joe, by this point swiveled around and facing Nathan and Jim, said, “Heh, that sounds like more of an excuse than an apology.”

Nathan turned his chair away from his monitor, through a 270-degree arc, past Joe to face Jim. He paused for a few seconds, smiled serenely, and said softly, “Shut the fuck up, Donny. That’s V.I. Lenin. Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov.”

Math follow-up

2010-11-17T17:00:00.002-06:00

I ended up finishing this mathy stuff a bit ago. I realized I had no idea how to integrate secant, but I knew the answer had natural-log-of-tangent in it, so I derived natural-log-of-tangent and used the solution to that to connect everything. I guess I could probably use the derivative to natural-log-of-tangent to figure out the proper way to integrate secant. That might be interesting. I probably could have done all this easily back in college.

Also, at one point Jess was really considering doing NaNoWriMo, and I had some ideas that I wanted to work into a story, so I thought about trying to do it also. Then after about one and a half days I realized that I didn't enjoy writing enough to spend the four hours a day I'd need to spend to accomplish it. Still, I wrote a short chapter of stuff that was pretty OK. I realized as I was going that my three main characters were sort of like the three protagonists in The Big Lebowski, so I ended the chapter with a reference to that... and I'll put that in the next post.

Math of the Moment

2010-11-10T01:12:00.002-06:00

Every now and then I get the need to do some math... and it reminds me of all the math I used to know and have forgotten. So I try to figure out math problems without cheating and looking at Wikipedia.

Most recently, I was working with some “Mercator” map coordinates. Basically they express a position on the earth in terms of its location on a Mercator projection of the earth. I dug out a formula from our code at work, and it seemed to work, but I wasn't satisfied that the function for the Y coordinate in terms of Longitude was odd (that f(x) = -f(-x)). So I proved that, which was fun. It got me a taste for more calculus.

So then I decided I had to derive the Mercator projection. The Mercator projection is basically defined such that, if the Earth were spherical, at any point on the map the horizontal scale (relating distance along a constant-latitude circle to horizontal distance on the map) is equal to the vertical scale (relating distance along a constant-longitude circle to vertical distance on the map). That wouldn't be too hard, I guess, except that I needed to integrate a secant, and I didn't remember how to integrate a secant, or how to integrate nested functions (because then I could define secant in terms of cosine, which is easy to integrate).

So I had to figure out how to integrate nested functions... which I remembered was related to the product rule for derivatives... which I also didn't remember. I think I've managed to derive that from the definition of a derivative. And that's where I am right now. I hope I'm not down a blind alley, but deriving the product rule was fun either way.

Speaking of which, I wish software folk could use short variable names like mathematicians and physicists. ε. δ. What's so hard about that? Set out the meaning of variables in comments and write code that's readable as code instead of vainly trying to make it read like language? If a modern software engineer invented calculus it would have been independentVariableDifferentialNumeric and dependentVariableDifferentialNumeric. *puke*.

Tootsie Rolls

2010-11-04T00:24:00.002-05:00

Since moving to Seattle Jess and I have noticed that lots of cool famous Internet personalities are Seattleites. For example, the Penny Arcade guys, and the authors of Unshelved. I hear all these people are from Seattle and I wonder where they are in Seattle and what they think of the place, because they don't tend to incorporate much local flavor in their work. Anyway, I don't remember that being the case in Chicago, regularly realizing, “Hey, that guy's from my town!”

What's from Chicago? Both of my guitars, for one thing, as they were both made by Harmony. My dad's old guitar is like this one and my “new” guitar is this one. And someone brought in some extra Halloween candy to work today and I noticed that Tootsie Rolls come from Chicago.

My first thought was that maybe they were made at that big candy operation south of O'Hare. But I punched the ZIP-code from the package into Google Maps and found that they're actually made just south of Midway Airport (not far from the huge rail yard), where there used to be an old car factory (according to Wikipedia).

Tootsie Roll ingredients? Why, they're simple! Sugar, corn syrup, partially-hydrogenated soybean oil, condensed skim milk, cocoa, whey, soya lecithin, “artificial and natural flavors”. So, primarily, sugar, more sugar, and some really bad fat. A true taste of Chicago, if you ask me!

Thank you, GNU/Linux...

2010-10-18T02:12:00.002-05:00

... for not being Jolicloud, which is to say, yourself under a layer of silly hype (I only have heard of it because it was mentioned in an Audacity bug report... I had to go to its website to confirm that it was indeed just a re-packaging of some Free Unix running an X Server and wxGTK)...

... Also, for not being Windows, which accused me of pirating it when I booted to test some stuff today. It corrected itself when I clicked through some stuff, but it would have been polite, on the “ZOMG UR A PIRATE” screen to have at least had a “WTF I IZ NOT A PIRATE” button. Given the activation tool's spotty accuracy record, it seems natural that there should be some humility baked into the user-facing messages, but not really.

JUST MARRIED cans dragging behind bike

2010-10-16T20:44:00.003-05:00

Jess and I got married last week. Don't feel offended that you didn't get an announcement or invitation, it was just the two of us, my brother and his girlfriend (who served as witnesses), and the judge. Because both of our families are centered around Chicago we're planning to have a get-together in Chicago next time we're in town. She's taking my name; we talked quite a bit about this and decided we wanted our family to have a single name, and we seriously considered changing our surname to Duck, and then decided against that. So we're the Dimond family. I think there was a time when we couldn't have envisioned Jessica taking my last name in marriage — I guess we're getting communitarian in our old age.

The night after the wedding I had a dream that I cheated on Jess. And when I realized what I'd done (in the dream) I felt really awful and told her the next time I saw her. And she looked at me (still in the dream) with a sardonic look on her face and said, “So you had to wait until the day after we were married to screw around on me.” I told her about this dream a few days later and she said that's exactly how she thinks she'd react to that news. Let it never be said we don't know each other a little bit.

The day after we were married (which was 10/10/10) we saw Hitchcock's The Birds at the Grand Illusion theater, on 50th just east of the Ave. It's a hell of a film. A lot of (crappy) horror movies imply or outright state that their horrors come from Hell, and that the victims are being punished for their own morality, or the decline of society. One of the many things I loved about The Birds is that while that's one of the possible explanations for the onslaught of birds upon Bodega Bay, CA, it's only one. It's clear that this possibility gets under the skin of the protagonist, to the point that she even strikes out physically at a townsperson that suggests it. You can draw a psychological parallel to any of the trials we face in our lives, or even a philosophical parallel to the existential angst that some find endemic to the human condition. In particular, the protagonist has to live with the idea that she's brought a terrible plague onto a town of people that are, as far as we know, as innocent as anyone else, because she's conspicuous as an outsider in town and because she's conspicuous to herself simply by virtue of being herself. There are many possible explanations in her personal story that could account for the onslaught of birds (just as there are many explanations put forward by townspeople in the cafe) but none is satisfactory. The cause is unknown; perhaps it's unknowable. I haven't really read anything about The Birds, and I'm hardly breaking any ground by calling it a masterpiece or something... but it's a film I hadn't seen until then, and if you haven't seen it you should. There's a lot there.

Today we took care of some vehicular business. It turns out you can't initiate a title transfer by selling your car to someone for $5 in Washington, you have to either sell it for something resembling its market value, or give it as a gift. I think it has to do with taxation. I mention this just in case it's relevant to anyone reading this, because we didn't find that out until we were at the licensing office (meaning that Jess still doesn't own her car in the eyes of the state). The basic libertarian impulse is to ask why the state doesn't recognize any selling price agreed upon by two adults of sound mind, but I'm guessing that there are possibilities for tax fraud that create a significant state interest in enforcing this rule.

TL;DR version: WE ARE MARRIED. HEAR US ROAR.

Book Post

2010-09-26T14:54:00.003-05:00

Jess and I love to go to the Seattle Public Library's book spiral and browse her favorite parts of the Dewey spectrum. We've found some weird books (a book on gay reincarnation, a leadership manual based on the principles of our first President with an MBA). We've paged through big books with lots of big pictures (a chronicle of couples, a polemic against public-land ranching and cattle subsidies in the West). We've even checked out a few. Here are some things I've been reading and skimming:

Beyond Red and Blue by Peter S. Wenz. It covers 12 political philosophies that contribute to major American political debates. It's a survey and thus doesn't go too deeply into any of the philosophies and glosses over some things. And he makes some assumptions about what “everyone” believes that I find to be begging the question. But his way of explaining how people come to their political positions make more sense than the explanation of, say, the Political Compass, which I've thought about a bit. The compass is just a spectrum in two dimensions. People can fall in the middle of political spectra without consciously moderating their views, and explaining people's positions as the result of impulses rather than as positions on spectra makes a lot more sense. This book has given me some ideas about future reading, both on philosophies I sympathize with and those I don't, and that's certainly an important function of any survey.

War and Peace, Tolstoy. I just finished this last week. Tolstoy certainly has lots of opinions. His big interest in War and Peace is the telling of history, and its tendency to ascribe greatness to leaders. In particular he lampoons the idea of Napoleon's genius, portraying the rise and fall of the French Empire and especially the invasion of Russia, as being the product of... well, I won't spoil it. He spins a nice set of stories around all these ideas, too — through almost 1400 pages I never felt like giving it up. Nationalism and sexism abound, and he seems to find great glory in the scorched-earth warfare performed by the Russians. Of course, Tolstoy himself argued against judging historical events by the standards of later ideas. Sort of a temporal relativism.

The Transition Handbook, Rob Hopkins. I haven't got far into this one, but I've caught bits of it. Maybe the most important idea is that if we are going to have a positive future we have to make it positive.

Exogamy and dating ideals

2010-09-26T14:08:00.003-05:00

This, on the Islamic scarf controversy in France. In the US we have more libertarian impulses than they do in France, including the impulse to give people the liberty to follow their minority communitarian values. So, from the American perspective, a European sense of shared, national community values winds up working against the community values of Muslims. But that's a bit of a tangent.

Jess and I were talking about mainstream dating culture last night and we made the connection to exogamy. There's an ideal of finding people to date outside our social circles, of finding a woman, nabbing a man, fitting this person into our picture of our future lives. As we no longer live in the time of the crusades, we find people out on the town. Whenever we're out alone it's like a performance — You never know when you'll meet the man you'll marry.

We both find mainstream dating ideals pretty weird, and our story doesn't follow them at all. We met in the Allen Hall cafeteria through mutual friends and built a close friendship for almost a year before considering ourselves an “item”. As we grew closer our friends giggled behind our backs (and sometimes in front of our faces), gave us advice we ignored. When we broke up we didn't hate eachother, didn't lose our friends. Our story is more in the endogamous mold than the standard ideal, although it sprung from a circle of friends we built while out at college, a place we'd all necessarily leave.

Not everyone is like us, to be sure. But how much of who we are is the result of how we've shaped each other? How the circumstances of our lives, the communities we've been in, the people we've known, have made us who we are? The self is not so unitary. There's no shame in changing your self around your friends, and less so around lovers, and the idea that there is seems so ingrained in our dating ideals.

So I guess this post is in support of the endogamous model. To whatever degree possible in our conquistador world.

I trust...

2010-09-14T23:10:00.003-05:00

When I get an idea for a blog post at work I email my personal address from my work address so I can remember it for later and stay focused on work instead of thinking about it more just then. I hope (or, I guess, I trust) that nobody's reading those emails. Sometimes they're kind of weird. Anyway, I sent a few today. How about this...

1. I wonder whether (or, perhaps, I trust that) somehow we programmers can make something better than MS Outlook's meeting reminders. Every time I get one I'm thrown into a fit of frankly terrifying rage. I wonder how much of it is the crummy implementation (for the record, my office is still using Office 2003 and I don't know if they've improved since then) and how much of it is inherent in being reminded that one has to go to a meeting.

2 (and finally to the point I guess). We (as people) really tend to trust people, especially those in apparent positions of power or authority. I was trying to think of a way to generalize something I was thinking about earlier, about how most people don't really do the work to verify that their employers, landlords, businesses we frequent, etc., aren't out to scam/kill them, and I guess it comes down to something that we all know already. But would we all be better off if we trusted no one? Is our trust in people with some power/authority related to the fact that our society generally does an OK job of rewarding people that deal fairly (in "deal fairly" I'm not counting externalities — basically we do a good job of rewarding people that enter into exchanges beneficial to all their parties)? Is it different in places where that's not the case (Russia, with its large base of educated people and limited opportunities for them in “legitimate” enterprise, and thus its mythical abundance of computer hackers, might be an example)?

The Accelerated Web?

2010-09-13T02:53:00.004-05:00

Knowing that graphics drivers and libraries are complicated programs written in “unsafe” languages, and in light of the fact that the Web is dead, it seems to me that the main effect of adding hardware graphics acceleration to web browsers will be more security problems. It also seems likely that, in my typical use cases, I'm more likely to see meaningful performance degradation than enhancement from the addition of graphics acceleration (in the form of slower loading times, rendering bugs, etc).

(The Wired article, of course, is typical Wired bluster. The web isn't dead to anyone that doesn't equate life with world domination.)

LEDs update

2010-09-12T13:20:00.003-05:00

The color-cycling LEDs have stopped. The blue ones are still going strong. I'm impressed. Though I'm not sure where my calculations went so wrong. Maybe the current rating for the LEDs specifies how much current you can put through before they're likely to explode, not how much they draw from a cell.

But wait...

2010-08-31T23:22:00.009-05:00

I heard a couple things lately that made me think, "But wait!" And it occurred to me a few days ago that they were related, and that I should blog them, and am finally getting around to that now. Ahem.

While I was back in Wyoming for a couple days Jess and I talked with Laura and she said that “lifestyle politics” were fruitless (paraphrased a lot), that only systemic change would ultimately work. Being the self-absorbed lifestyle politician that I am, my first thought was to vegetarianism. But wait! Surely us vegetarians make a difference (the conversation wasn't about vegetarianism but that was the first thing that came to my mind)! I didn't say anything at the time; I was thinking through my thoughts and by the time I had anything worth saying the conversation had moved on.

Then I was reading Penny Arcade and saw Gabe and Tycho talk about used-game sales. Day 1, Day 2, and comic. I think the really critical statement is Tycho's from day 2: “What I have said is that the end result of that purchase from a developer perspective must be indistinguishable. Isn't it? That is the question I couldn't answer. I still can't answer it. And because I couldn't, I had to change the way I invested my leisure dollar.” But wait! Surely Tycho's stand against used game purchases can't possibly be effective against the power of free exchange, can't possibly change the market dynamics.

Well, I know a little bit about the power of consumers to change markets. Literally, a little bit, not a lot. I used to work for a market research firm that, unrelated to my own work for them, studied restaurant menus. One thing I heard about the office is that most restaurants have at least two vegetarian entrees on their menus. In my experience, this sounds about right, and I'll add that many of them point out their vegetarian items specifically. That's mostly on the shoulder of us lifestyle politicians, but what does it mean? Not much. Honestly, most restaurant chefs seem to be trained in an anti-vegetarian culture. Their token vegetarian entrees, on the whole, aren't all that appetizing and certainly aren't very nourishing. And, more to the point, conditions for animals to be eaten still suck, and we aren't eating less meat than ever as a society.

A stance to eat vegetarian, or a stance to not buy used games (not considering the merits of the causes), can only matter to a very limited degree. It's an appeal to people to act against their self interests. So Laura is right on this, and Tycho is wrong. It's systemic change that matters. Specifically regarding conditions of production for foreign-made goods, ensuring baseline labor standards as a prerequisite for trade could make a difference; boycotts can't do much. Regarding meat (I've said this before), holding the agriculture industry accountable for environmental damage, banning inhumane practices, and removing grazers from Federal lands in the West (there's a very large book in the SPL book spiral about this, it's around the 300s, can't miss it) would cause a far greater reduction in meat consumption than vegetarianism and veganism among consumers. Regarding video games (and software generally) the industry's move away from physical distribution has a far bigger effect on the used market than any action of consumers against their self-interest could.

As for the merits of the causes, I happen to think there's a clear difference. I happen to think Tycho is mistaken in his thinking about the value of the used game market. Markets for used durable goods are great for people without much money to spend. And, as the value of the right to sell or lend is typically encoded in the value of a new good, producers ultimately are compensated somewhat for the existence of a used market. Think: most people wouldn't be willing to pay as much for a new car if they had to junk it instead of trading it in when they were done with it, and most people would buy new ones less often as well. If game producers want to sell something that can't be resold effectively that's their business. They're surely aware that consumers will value it less, but not by much. The existence of a used market in most commodities, including games, benefits consumers greatly (especially low-income consumers) and hurts producers a little bit. It's probably a net benefit overall. But ultimately there's no ethical dilemma here, just a balance of power between producers and consumers, each of whom have plenty of good options in the marketplace.

Tycho has sympathy for developers and creative people in the games industry, and sees the difficult conditions they face whether working for large or small companies. For those working at large companies, they have to work against the large supply of people willing to do their jobs and their own refusal (as a group) to unionize (unionization would likely improve conditions for programmers with jobs at the expense of those without and their employers); without these conditions changing they'll always face tough conditions. And market conditions are tough for small software companies, especially those that want to innovate, but tilting the balance of power generally toward industry by eliminating the used game market doesn't really help them much — the big studios will always find ways to leverage their advantages of scale. So for the one part of the whole ecosystem that Tycho chooses to focus on, used games can't really change the situation much. It seems that at best, a refusal to buy used games might have a neutral effect overall.

Meanwhile the plight of animals and the environment in the agriculture industry is a question of externalization. The major losers are never involved in the transaction, cannot be players in the market. I don't think there's much question of the total direction of the industry. A refusal to participate in it, and publicizing the cause of its boycott, thus clearly is a positive thing, though small compared to the potential of systemic change. It's also a small step that's practical for almost anyone (especially because using animal products isn't all that much in most people's self-interest these days, if at all).

But the merits of the causes are really peripheral to the point. I just felt like arguing on the Internet there. With myself (I respond to Gabe and Tycho's ideas because I respect them, but they're rather unlikely to read and respond to me).

S-to-S Word Association

2010-08-17T02:47:00.002-05:00

The Spokane to Sandpoint Relay's website isn't quite as brilliant as that of the Headwaters Relay' or the Meeteetse-Absaroka Challenge (note the page title, sporting the name of a different race), but it gets the job done nonetheless.

Sally in Spokane. I think she said her name was Sally, but I don't remember; I'm not very good with names. She talked to a lot of us in the lobby of our hotel in Spokane Valley. She got around in a motorized wheelchair, loved talking to strangers, and had stayed up all night for fear of missing her 7:30 AM wakeup call to catch a ride to a doctor's appointment. In some pretty obvious ways she wasn't quite “normal”. It's easy to notice and dwell on that. She used to ride her motorcycle from Spokane to Sandpoint and knew there were some beautiful corridors along the way. She participates in Spokane's annual Bloomsday race every year. And she works in some capacity to facilitate the creation and availability of stylish clothing and accessories for wheelchair-bound people, so they don't have to look like hospital patients all the time. The personality traits that cause her to stay up all night to catch a ride and talk to everyone she sees in the lobby might be some of the same ones that help her overcome the many difficulties she faces and do work that improves people's lives. She does things that are hard and sometimes awkward, because that's what she has to do to get out of her home, to contribute to and live in her community. Go Sally (if that's indeed your name)!

While Spokane Valley is loosely based on Big Island from Mario 3, Spokane Airport is surrounded by the actual set of the empty castle in World 7.

Some of Joe's LEDs and batteries wound up in my car. Per Wikipedia and Wikipedia I'm guessing the multi-color ones are low-current LEDs that draw about 2mA and will discharge the batteries in about 110 hours, which will be some time Wednesday morning.

On the way back to Seattle we hit some nasty traffic delays as a result of the Meat Loaf concert at Snoqualmie. Specifically, the back-ups were all in back of Snoqualmie, and thus probably caused by backwards-propagating waves of slowdown due to lots of people entering the freeway to get away from Snoqualmie, back to Seattle, before the start of the concert... that ran dead-on into the entire population of Spokane driving into Snoqualmie to see Meat Loaf. I blame Rhea for the whole thing, as a car carrying her both drove from Spokane to Snoqualmie to drop her at the Meat Loaf concert and then immediately entered the freeway to escape to the disdainful, hipsterly safety of Seattle.

In Van 2 we saw a few shooting stars, mostly while Lauren and Neil were running their night legs.

Many people love runnnig night legs at relays, and we mostly run them really fast, but they always make me nervous. My favorite time to run relays is at dawn, even though dawn legs are typically last legs and quite painful. I should start running at dawn again in Seattle.

Randomly there were some people putting up Christian yard signs at exchange 6 that had that spirit of neener, neener, neener, we've got the real god, you've got the fake one, or maybe you don't got one, either way we're awesome. I love that stuff. Anyway I'm pretty sure I'm awesome too, real god or not.

For everyone that missed it (all of Van 1 and whoever was running at the time in Van 2), we saw someone that from behind looked like he was motoring along, but when we passed him we realized he was turning over quickly but with short strides. And I went on ripping on his short, shuffling stride for about 30 seconds. And am thus going to runner hell (unless he was from Eriksaurus Rex, but I don't think he was).

The team seems mostly in agreement about some of this at least, and we'll probably send a letter to the race organizers about it, but my personal opinion on course safety at S-to-S probably belongs here. On a road with no pedestrian facilities, especially on a road without much of a shoulder, runners and walkers should use the left side, espcially at night. People on foot can more easily get out of the way of oncoming traffic than traffic from behind. On a bike you usually want to use the right side; getting off the road is very hard to do without crashing, and cyclists travel fast enough that riding with traffic gives overtaking cars significantly more time to adjust. Cyclists and pedestrians have very different capabilities and limitations, and therefore I don't think it makes sense to allow cyclists to pace runners at night, as the S-to-S race does. I also think the organizers need to give clear direction on what side of the road to run on in road sections, that it should almost always be the left, and that therefore directional arrows should usually be on the left side of the road. I saw lots of runners at using headphones at the race, and I think that's always a bad idea running outdoors, and should never be allowed on a race course that's open to traffic (I don't like the idea of headphones in any race, but the danger is not nearly so grave when there aren't cars on the course... greater experts than me have both allowed and disallowed them in their races, and I'll certainly grant that there are many runners that get a lot more out of listening to music while running than I would).

There were a couple of accidents at the race this year. Neither would have been prevented by such rule changes (yes, one was a cyclist that wouldn't have been allowed on the course, but the driver went far enough off course to injure the runner as well, so I see that accident as similarly possible without the cyclist there), and I'm not trying to react to the accidents. I'm reacting to the general difficulty presented by runners and cyclists using both sides of the pavement, and riding double-wide, forcing cars to go very far to get around. One or both of the accidents may have been prevented by closer coordination with local police departments. I don't know enough about what this race did in this regard, nor what other races do, to do more than speculate on this subject, so I won't get any more into it here.

Overall, for an experienced runner taking the proper precautions, I don't think S-to-S is any more dangerous than any other race, or even than going out on a typical run. But there are inexperienced runners that don't know much about running in traffic. There are runners that impatiently take risks while racing. And there are those that don't prepare themselves (while briefly lost in Coeur D'Alene during my second leg I crossed paths with a runner that said, I didn't even look at the directions for this leg, I'm just trusting the signs to be right. He thought we were on the right road at the time and, as I suspected and later confirmed, we weren't). I don't at all mind events where runners are expected to take responsibility for their own preparation and safety (if I did I'd have missed some great races), and I usually try to do this in any race. Unfortunately lots of people don't.

On a lighter note, we really had a good team that worked well together, from the email threads before some of us even met through van clean-up at the end. From Captain Danielle through the relay vets (Joe, Shaun, Lauren, myself), relay n00bs (John, Scott, Maria, Neil, Maureen, Rhea) and Judy, picked up at the last minute.

And this is the glorious George Washington rap. It was made by Brad Neely, and thus it is NSFW, juvenile in a very sophisticated way, and has tons of rhythm.

Blackberry for fun?

2010-08-12T01:03:00.002-05:00

I'll admit, I'm about as far from "the loop" as one can be on the subject of smartphones... so...

What's up with this new Blackberry BBM stuff? Do people actually do social networking on their Blackberries? Could they? Or is RIM just trying to sell bobos a business tool by showing it off as a social tool (and telling them they're the hipsters they desperately want to be)? I mean, my dad sent pictures from the Tetons on his Blackberry, but he got made fun of (by me, of course, but also by Mom).

I do find it somewhat ironic that Apple's marketing focuses more on the utility of its devices than RIM's. Probably both companies are fueling the self-delusion of their target market to some degree.

FOR THE RECORD: I now carry a cell phone but it's not mine, it's work-issued because we don't have desk phones at EB; also, I still don't know how to text and if you text me I'll probably call you back and leave a really long voicemail. So there.

Regulations!

2010-08-04T01:59:00.002-05:00

Today a credit card offer came in the mail for one of my roommates. It was addressed from South Dakota, so if she applied for and received a credit card, then had a dispute with the company she'd have to settle it in a South Dakota court. South Dakota, as I understand it, has a legal system that's pretty friendly to the credit card industry — that's why so many such companies set up shop there.

From time to time there's a debate about how various state and Federal laws here in the US should affect companies offering services across state lines. In many cases a consumer is expected to settle any dispute in a court where the company is located. In other cases, like health insurance, companies aren't allowed to operate across state lines. Politicians (for example, Obama in one of his debates with McCain a few years back) say that if health insurers could operate across state lines there would be a race to the bottom for consumer protections.

And, staring at the credit card offer, I had this thought. Why not just have companies offering services across state lines settle disputes in the courts where the offer was accepted? A business-owner might complain about being bound by lots of different legal systems. But today consumers have to worry about the same thing. If I have a problem with some tech-industry product I probably have to go through courts somewhere near San José (if you read EULAs and warranties they usually list the specific venue for disputes), but it might be Austin or Boston or Redmond or Rochester. If it's with a credit card provider I might be looking at Sioux Falls... but it could be New York or Omaha.

Anyway, there are a lot more of us than them. Why not concentrate the complexity of dealing with regional regulations in big companies with lawyers on retainer instead of spreading it around to people that really have no idea how to deal with it?

I wonder how far I could go avoiding businesses that make me agree to resolve disputes in out-of-state courts. Seattle is well-situated for it; Amazon and Microsoft are in-county, even. I don't know enough about how credit cards work; I know lots of direct-mail offers come from Sioux Falls, but banks have to be incorporated in each state they operate in. So if I apply for a credit card at a local bank branch, I don't know if they would technically issue it from Washington or South Dakota.

Posh Bedbugs

2010-07-29T02:30:00.002-05:00

I heard a radio segment today (it was an NPR show, maybe All Things Considered but I might be wrong) on the big bedbug infestation in many American cities. The story made a point that bedbugs are showing up in upscale retailers, luxury hotels, and posh condo high-rises.

Possibilities:

1. Bedbugs feed exclusively on blue blood.

2. The host or producers figured it wouldn't be interesting or surprising that bedbugs are also found in non-posh areas of the city. If the problem largely didn't affect the rich it wouldn't be such a big story, and if it was largely isolated to the poor it wouldn't even warrant mention.

So... either bedbugs are elitist or the media is.

A couple famous old court cases

2010-07-25T02:18:00.002-05:00

1. So you know how the US government can claim a "State Secrets" privilege in a legal trial and either refuse to provide requested evidence or get an entire case thrown out, without even a judge seeing the evidence, if the government thinks providing the evidence could harm national security? There was a specific case that went to the Supreme Court in the 50s that established this precedent. Upon review of the documents involved after they were released many years later it became clear that they didn't in fact contain sensitive secrets, only information that would have damaged the government's case. I heard of this on This American Life, and it's mentioned on Wikipedia as well. If you're surprised by this I have some real estate and a used car you might be interested in.

I also recently heard about Hugo Chavez' moves towards nationalizing parts of a large grocery chain. Many workers, reportedly, are against the move, as they fear a government takeover would result in worse conditions. There's evidence to support this, and it seems obvious in theory, too. The government plays a large role in regulating labor conditions. Once it owns an enterprise it has a direct interest in that enterprise's success, and that conflicts with its interest in protecting workers. This could work if the regulatory and productive parts of the government were truly independent, but this seems unlikely on this planet.

This is another side of the “State Secrets” coin. It's an obvious conflict of interest for the executive branch to decide what evidence it can simply withhold in cases where it's a party. Seems like minimizing these conflicts would be a good idea. Perhaps if it's not appropriate for judges generally to see evidence that's potentially sensitive there could be a handful of judges cleared to see it. Because they'd need to be cleared by the executive their independence might be somewhat limited but without a direct interest in the executive branch the conflict would be less than it now is.

2. Leopold and Loeb. I was reading some things on the Internet about the Scopes Trial (I should find a good book or two on it... seems like an odd and fascinating spectacle) and came across a reference to one of Darrow's other cases, his defense of this pair that apparently believed themselves Nietzschean über-men and committed a murder to show that they were above the law. But they managed to get caught and their alibis fell apart completely. So much for that.

But they avoided the death penalty, perhaps partly on the strength of a Darrow argument about their psychology, nature, and motivation. Then again, the judge may have just been reluctant to sentence minors to death. One of them was murdered in prison while the other was released on parole, moved to Puerto Rico, and wrote a book.

A few of Nietzsche's ideas either influenced Hitler or were used by Hitler to manipulate people. So there's that. But this case was pre-World War II. Had this murder occurred after that it probably would have looked very different to the public. It wouldn't have been nearly as shocking, and the defendants probably couldn't have got away with showing so little remorse publicly.

As I understand it (which is not all that well) Nietzsche believed democracy would ultimately lead to mediocrity, and that we should orient society instead toward the development of über-men who could really stand above all law and judgment. The “über-man” stood in contrast to “last-man”, representing our self-limiting and, perhaps, primitivist tendencies.

You can see some of these ideas play out on a less dramatic scale in the way people carry out their careers and business, and the way they live with respect to the environment. Some people clearly are living with the idea that they're doing such great work that any of their excesses are justified. Others take a more humble tack and try to reduce their negative impacts. The trouble with the second method is clear — if our overall impact is indeed so negative, why bother to live? Of course, many people don't really consider the idea at all.

One thing I've picked up about our negative responses to things like veganism, environmentalism, etc., when it comes to really making changes in our lives, is that we believe (usually implicitly) that our desires are self-justified. This is something I've probably questioned more than most people have, but seeing as I've moved between Chicago and the Pacific coast three times, mostly in pursuit of fairly personal objectives, I'm not sure what all that pondering has done. I either believe that what I'm to find and do justifies all that burned gas, or I'm pretty inconsistent and hypocritical...

... Yeah, that would be the latter. Incidentally, that's one of the many things “Dear Mr. Burnham” is about. It's a two-minute song, and I could go on for hours and hours about any line in it. You don't want to hear me do that, but the second half of this blog post is one way I could do that regarding the final couplet.

Clickin' ass (Clickin ass!) Clickin' ass is what we do!

2010-07-21T22:19:00.002-05:00

Apologies to Fry and Laurie for the title.

So Facebook's user satisfaction rates are terrible yet it's still growing. And nobody likes social games or the companies that run them, but they're raking in the dough. At this point I might make a parallel to many trends in urban development, but it would take a lot of words to do that topic justice, so I'll keep to the point (after noting that, in this survey, airlines and cable TV providers rank at about the same level as Facebook and each continue to move lots of product, probably for very different reasons). You may recall that I quit Facebook recently and even wrote a letter about it. But although leaving Facebook very clearly felt right to me, I don't think my letter really outlined a great case against Facebook. To be honest, I never have had a case against Facebook that was suited to that kind of exposition.

Ian Bogost, on the other hand, made the case right with Cow Clicker: a work of art that brings social gaming into the light, and sheds a bit on social networking as well. His four big points against social games are enframing, compulsion, optionalism, and destroyed time, with some specific discussions about all of these.

Enframing comes from Heidegger, and I've struggled with Heidegger in the past. It's always hard for me to figure just where “enframing” happens. There have long been people that used their social and professional networks mostly as a resource for personal gain. In fact, you could probably find a lot of people that don't even find that the least bit sinister. But Facebook has really made it systematic. South Park's You Have 0 Friends includes a bit where Cartman does a Mad Money spoof on social networks that correlates with this idea. Before there was Twitter, I tweeted in my away messages. Before there was Facebook I collected my friends into the “Bloody Revolution” (the first to join was Andy U. and the last was Jessica; Joe ended it with five words) and sent lots of mass, random emails (I never did recover Episode 3a). I still have copies of all this stuff (except Episode 3a), from the letter I wrote to the DI about pressure to exaggerate to prospective employers (it didn't get published; for some reason I signed it as a Junior in Engineering but with my address from Sophomore year... suspicious...) to the secret blog I kept on my University webspace in the vain hope that someone would run a directory listing and get curious. Facebook doesn't do anything more than all this stupid stuff I used to do, but it somehow does it in a different way, changes the whole nature of it. Not least because Facebook makes money at every turn. Sort of like a hedge fund. Sign a petition to save a tree or break up with your boyfriend, it's all water rolling into the dam for Facebook.

By the way, quote from my secret blog, 15 February 2003: “but it's like i said. i base my self-worth on 3 things: my aim profile, other people's opinion of my taste in music, and being better than my peers.”

Moving on. As far as compulsion goes, again, we've all had compulsions before social networking. Any successful game creates some compulsion in its users to spend time unproductively by playing it. I think of Perl Golf and other programming challenges. They're artificially constructed problems for programmers to solve when there are plenty of real programming problems to solve out in the world. But sometimes at work I randomly think of a possible improvement to my solution and email myself a quick note so as not to waste work time on it. I'm drawn to it as an interesting problem. Bogost claims that social gaming exploits our compulsions, but I think all successful games do that. Social games do so perhaps more effectively, or in a more systematic way at least, but I think that has more to do with enframing than that they've created a different kind of compulsion. As the fourth point, Time Destruction, depends on the second, I think the same holds. To whatever extent social games as a different kind of time-waste than other kinds, it has to do with their enframing of social networks more than anything else.

As for the third point, optionalism, there's an interesting question. Is it that gameplay is so weak as to optional, or is it that something like Farmville is more of a creative space than a game space? Like The Sims or Mario Paint? As a creative space it doesn't allow much expression, but there's precedent for this sort of thing in real-life social settings. Karaoke comes to mind. You sing someone else's song, usually some meaningless top-40 drivel (although my cousin Ryan likes to do What's so Funny 'Bout Peace Love and Understanding, which is awesome), you sing it badly, you wave at your friends, your friends clap, you buy another beer. Farmville is more shallow than that, to be sure. But it's not all that much more shallow.

So to me Bogost's argument really falls to the Heidegger-based idea that social games are different from games that have come before because they enframe our social networks. As social games have laid bare the empty time-waste that games can be it's important for more traditional game designers to come up with an ethical framework that lets them differentiate themseleves, stay out of the muck. It's clear that enframing, that manipulating, social networks makes the compulsive pull of social games stronger. But as a consumer, not a producer, I don't have any interest in differentiating between social and non-social games. I just have an interest in my own time. If I waste time in a traditional game it's no different than if I waste time in a social game. The social game just might be harder to quit.

"This used to be such a great country..."

2010-07-21T00:57:00.002-05:00

The title is a line spoken by Mee-Ma in the wedding episode of The (American) Office. Jim has accidentally announced to the whole wedding party that Pam is pregnant, and Mee-Ma, Pam's very “traditional” grandmother, is dismayed.

So, the birth control pill. It allows women to take control/responsibility for birth control, and is very good at preventing pregnancy. On the other hand, it does so by messing with their hormones, which can have really complicated side effects.

I'm not a woman, so it's not a trade-off I've had to consider personally. I've heard that researchers are working on male hormonal birth control, though, and my first impulse is that I wouldn't take it. The value proposition of hormonal birth control for men and women is quite different, because the consequences of unintended pregnancy are so different. Certainly a man should share equally in the responsibility of raising a child he's fathered, but that's not enforced biologically as it is in women. So this urge on my part has a selfish side. It also can come down to a question of values and priorities. Would I risk all the possible side effects of hormonal changes, especially being somewhat physically unusual (I tend to be very sensitive to drugs generally), for the sake of more sexual freedom? It doesn't seem like the right trade-off to me. But clearly it is for a lot of people, especially for women, for whom the trade-off is quite different.

To some traditionalists this seems like a generational question. It reminds me of my parents, who were talking about some political sex scandal a few years ago, and one of them said, "I don't understand it. They risk their whole careers just for sex?" There are definitely people that see people choosing to take various risks for sexual freedom and think it's evidence of changing priorities and values, especially of a decline in morals.

The problem with that idea is that people have always taken risks to have sex. It's not a new thing. We have the technology today to have more sex more safely than in the past, and people probably have more sex as a result. But people have always taken risks for sex. They've risked their careers and they've risked their health in days when death by syphilis was common. If they had the technology to have more safe sex in those days they would have done it. Proud advocates of debauchery alongside those that claimed celibacy. I doubt improvements in sexual technology are the result of changing values. It's possible they've changed values, but more than that, I think they've just given people new ways to express values they already had.

Reasons I'm happy today

2010-07-20T00:51:00.004-05:00

1. Today's driver of Community Transit Route 120, on the run departing Canyon Park at 5:44 PM. On paper the transfer to the southbound 511 bus at Lynnwood should be a 50-50 proposition (the 120 is scheduled to arrive at 6:18, same as the 511's departure), but I have a 100% success rate with this dude driving. Also, he enunciates clearly when he calls out the stops.

2. Smyrna figs. I don't think I've ever tried fresh figs, but I like to eat dried figs. I've had Mission figs, which are pretty good and tend to be consistent in quality. I've tried Calimyrnas, which can be very good but are not so consistent. And then I just tried Smyrna figs, and they are brilliant.

3. Jess. (dawww).

4. The institution of employer-based health insurance. Or... not.

I need to make a decision...

2010-07-18T01:05:00.004-05:00

... Oh, but I'm not good at that. Maybe I'll put it off.

So... last Thanksgiving I was at my grandparents' house in Kalamazoo, and they were trying to get some of their children's things out of their house. One of those things was my dad's old guitar that he hasn't played since he was very young. My dad is not really a musician — any time he tries to lead a group in song (Christmas carols, Happy Birthday, etc.) he hums a pitch, then starts singing in a key seemingly unrelated to the pitch he hummed. I have to say "seemingly" because I think there must be some logic to it — I don't think he's the kind of person that would hum a pitch before starting to sing just because he's seen other people do it, not knowing why. My best guess is that he intends to start on the pitch he hummed, but he always hums a pitch way too high (most songs start at or near their lowest pitch, and he usually hums toward the high end of his comfortable vocal range) and naturally reverts to something more comfortable.

So anyway, my grandparents didn't want the guitar, he didn't want the guitar, and I was just starting to learn guitar, I didn't have one of my own, and I love random free stuff. So I have this guitar. It is a Stella Harmony, the classic beginner guitar of its day, made in a factory in Chicago. I also love old instruments. My clarinet is from the 60s also, but it's the classic professional clarinet of its day, a Buffet R13.

This guitar has some unusual features compared to many of the guitars I see around. It's built on a short scale (24-inch) and has a compact body, to ease handling and playing. This makes it easier for me to take it places, and also makes it quieter than most guitars, which is nice when I'm singing, because I don't have a booming voice. It has a tailpiece, which probably affects the sound in interesting ways, but I like it because it makes re-stringing easier (no push-pins... while re-stringing Jess' guitar before RPM those damn pins made me curse more than any other aspect of the job aside from my own incompetence). It has a twangy, plucky sound, but that could be for a number of reasons. It's just perfect for some songs (this one and, um, this). It also had a floating bridge until I, not knowing that it was supposed to float, glued it down. And this might sound weird, but I really like the way it looks. Which is like this:

Unfortunately the bridge came to me broken, I broke the nut trying to restring it, and I decided I didn't want to have a professional fix it because a minor repair would cost more than the value of the guitar. That's not a rational way to make economic decisions, but I felt it was part of the ethic of getting a free old guitar that I should figure out how to fix minor stuff like that. I made a new notch in the bridge with a letter opener and fixed the nut with some glue. The poor quality of one or both of these repairs may be why the low E string sounds really lousy, but the low strings generally don't sound very good on this instrument. This seriously hampers my ability to play songs like Hiding (electrified version notwithstanding, it sounds good on Jess' acoustic and terrible on mine). Apparently aside from my bad repair, the nut is also “grabby”. This means if you, say, adjust a string up using the tuning pegs, there becomes extra tension on the head-side of the nut, which slowly equalizes, causing the string to slowly get sharper over time. All the strings do this at different rates, so it's hard to keep the guitar precisely in tune. The most effective way to perform fine tuning is to stretch the string on either side of the nut, which is just weird. The tailpiece also affects tuning — any time you tune one string up the others go down slightly, and vice-versa. As far as ease of playing goes, the advantage of the short scale is eaten up by the bulky neck. It's both thicker and wider than any other neck I've seen (it's probably not as wide as a 12-string neck, but that's different), though I bet most cheap acoustic guitars in the 60s had bulky necks.

So I might want to buy a new guitar. But I'm not sure, because I hate buying stuff, and there's so much I like about the old one. It seems silly to have a professional fix and set-up my old one, given its lack of potential and flaws, but that's an option, too. Realistically I'm limited more by my lack of technique than my instrument at this point, so if I get a new guitar I'll have to commit to really learning the instrument.

As in Chicago...

2010-07-18T01:03:00.001-05:00

In Seattle the south side is the place to ride.

Rockin' the Toxo

2010-07-10T16:20:00.002-05:00

A while ago, this article about Toxoplasma Gondii was picked up by Slashdot. There's a somewhat better article at The Economist Toxo seems endlessly fascinating to the Slashdot crowd, and to myself as well. Much of the world's population carries a parasite that may affect their personality and behavior, typically with no physical effects (although, rarely, an infection causes intense physical sickness). According to studies, Toxo increases testosterone in men and correlates with high aggression, dogmatism, and rebellion against authority; women with Toxo tend to be more outgoing and men find them more attractive. Although the parasite reproduces in cat stomachs and is present in cat feces it's almost never contracted through contact with cats. Rather, humans usually pick it up by eating raw or undercooked meat. I've seen different sources quote vastly different numbers for national infection rates, but all cite relatively low rates in Japan, South Korea, the US, and the UK, relatively high rates in France and Germany, and often very high rates in countries with serious public health problems. Because infection rates vary so much among different countries (and probably among cultural groups within them, since people are typically infected through food), Toxo infection could be a simple explanation for many cultural differences.

It reminds me of the day, in my intro-level Psych class in college, that the professor explained why stimulants can be an effective prescription for hyperactivity. The underlying theory is that people's brains are always active, spinning idly, keeping themselves entertained. People that are hyperactive spin less than usual, and require more external stimulation to avoid boredom. The right stimulant makes them spin more, require less external stimulation, and function better in classrooms and offices. What fascinated me more was the other side of the coin. People that "spin" more than usual become very quickly overloaded when there's a lot going on around them. That sounds a lot like me. It could be a simple explanation for a pretty big part of my personality.

Then again, there are lots of simple explanations out there. Our personalities are the result of an unknowable number of factors, and so are national and cultural characteristics. To me, Toxo is fascinating because it raises the question not just of who we are, individually and collectively, but also of what we are. It's a reminder that I have lots of living stuff in me that doesn't carry my DNA, and that it's as much a part of me as the parts that do carry my DNA. But I have to remember that any one of these things is just a small component of the whole and probably can't, by itself, explain very much.

Omnibus Post

2010-06-30T00:06:00.002-05:00

1. I was watching some C*SPAN a couple weeks ago and a bunch of oil company execs were testifying before the House. A few of them, in their opening statements, expressed support for a carbon tax. What? How could that be? Then MIT just published a report predicting natural gas to be a winner under a carbon tax regime (see also NYT, Slashdot). And the oil companies mostly have big natural gas operations as well.

2. And natural gas is often touted as a clean fuel, so maybe that's not so bad. Except for fracking. Ah, to hell with NPOV, there's a film (and associated website) on the subject that takes a considerably bolder stance on the issue.

3. Usually when considering issues of politics and business I remind myself that it's unlikely any of the actors have evil intent. But sometimes the mining industry makes me wonder. With all the news that comes out of Appalachia about mountaintop removal and all the nasty pollution that comes from the mines there. With a giant oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, something that, we now know, will necessarily be repeated if a similar accident ever again occurs (and yet it's so important that we start deep-water drilling again! Immediately!). And now with this "fracking" stuff. And how they've infiltrated the government that's supposed to regulate them! Becoming exempt from the Clean Water Act and refusing to disclose the chemicals that are seeping into groundwater. These guys must have to shave their mustachios off every five minutes.

4. Wyoming has taken the first steps toward regulation of fracking. Way to go, Wyoming! Also, this reminds me of the story told by a friend a couple years ago about stopping for lunch in a small Wyoming town and finding the restaurant staff unable to concentrate when taking orders or remember requests... as if the whole town's water or air was bad. Maybe there's a connection.

5. I was going to write about more than just fracking, so here goes. It seems like during the peak of oil spill coverage the hot interview subjects were gulf-coast fishermen and seafood restaurateurs. It almost felt like if people wanted to report that the oil spill was indeed a big deal they had to show that it was killing the Gulf economy. But that's silly. Drilling is the Gulf economy — it dwarfs fishing, for one thing. BP is big enough and profitable enough to survive even after paying cleanup costs and damages — it would be big enough to survive even if it had to pay for the full economic impact of the spill over time, and it surely won't pay that much. But, environmentally, damage has been done that only time can heal, and lots of time at that. I think lots of people understand that part of the story, and the media seem almost afraid to mention it. That it's a tragedy, a tragedy because there's death at the end, and loss.

5a. #5 and #3. Of course, they really don't have evil intent. They can poison a few people, raise everyone else's standards of living, and make lots of money doing it. Mining execs probably care deeply for their own families, maybe even their own communities. If real decision-makers at mining companies (and also factory farms) lived and worked at the sites they designed and built, along with their families, our world would look a lot different.

6. Speaking of fishermen, I've never seen Deadliest Catch, but I've seen the ads, of course. It seems that the story could be turned around — Deadliest Swim, which follows and casts as heroes fish that find themselves in the paths of these enormous boats. But then every episode would have a sad ending. I did catch a bit of that show about loggers... don't remember what it was called... TREEFUCKERS!, perhaps? Anyway, it had this tense, evil-sounding music playing as it showed a grove of trees just standing in a swamp. You know, the music they'd play on a detective show as the prison guard announces that the murderer has escaped. Then the hero arrives on the scene, gets in his TF-9000 ULTIMATE TREE-FUCKING CONTRAPTION, and goes to town. Can he cut down every tree by nightfall? The music reaches a feverish pitch as the sun starts to set, then it climaxes as he plows through the last tree just as the sun sinks. Then a peaceful yet triumphant chord is held out across the scene of the devastated swamp. Now I feel great about using paper.

7. There is an intersection in Seattle between N. 45th St. and some side street west of I-5. It has a stoplight. But only for 45th St. The side street has stop signs. This light indeed turns red and stops the traffic on 45th, and I have no idea what cross traffic does at this point. How someone crossing knows when it's about to turn green and they should not go through. I must be missing something, right? But I've rode my bike through it twice in the last couple days, and I'm pretty sure that's what it is. WEIRD.

8. I just played at my first open mic in Seattle, at some little bar with couches on 45th in Wallingford. It was probably about the best atmosphere and crowd for my style I could have hoped for. I made lots of mistakes but didn't lose the beat, and I played with as much energy as I could fit through Dad's little old guitar. If I focus I can probably get all the energy I have through that guitar, but it will take a lot more practice. Or maybe I'll get a new guitar that's not so hard to tune and play.

Dear Seattle, you are very beautiful...

2010-06-26T02:24:00.002-05:00

... but you are full of dicks on wheels. First there was Silver Prius, who ran a stop sign and nearly hit me, then gave me the finger. I explained that there was a stop sign, and that he'd have done well to have stopped at it, and he said, "I wish I had hit you, fuck off." Classy. Then tonight, White Accord, which got me drive-by style with a paintball gun. But it took 'em two passes. The first time they were going the opposite direction, shot five times across the road, and missed. Of course, they circled around and got me from behind. So they're bad shots and cowards.

It's too bad I couldn't get plate numbers. Or too bad that I don't believe in collective punishment. If anyone that believes in collective punishment sees a white Accord or silver Prius... well... you should probably fight your own battles :-).

I heard Seattle cops are cracking down on jaywaylking...

2010-06-18T22:28:00.003-05:00

... and people are widely sympathetic to this. And here I thought I'd just moved to Seattle, not Singapore.

But, I tell you what, Seattle police. Feel free to try to ticket me for jaywalking. I hope you've been keeping up with your speedwork and hill training.

subst weirdness with Windows Explorer

2010-06-15T21:30:00.004-05:00

In my last post I mentioned that there are practical ways for users to work around the 260-character limit in many Win32 API functions that affect the operation of most Windows programs. One of them is the substr command built in to the cmd shell. I used substr to map Y: to my %USERPROFILE% (typically something like C:\Documents and Settings\username). And it all basically works.

Except for a couple things in Windows Explorer. First, the My Documents folder doesn't show up under Y: in Explorer. It shows up if I issue dir in cmd, and I can successfully browse to Y:\My Documents by typing that into the address bar in Explorer. It even auto-completes. It just doesn't show up. Second, and more seriously, Explorer treats this directory as if it's another drive when copying and moving files. So the default action dragging files between subdirectories of C: and Y: is copy, not move. And when you move the files it appears to re-write them instead of just re-writing the paths. Wack.

More mindless jerks that will be first against the wall when the revolution comes

2010-06-14T21:56:00.004-05:00

1. Any mindless jerks that don't correctly account for possible spaces in variable expansions when building commands to be executed. This mostly applies to shell scripts and makefiles. And it especially holds on Windows, where the default home directory path has spaces in it (at least through XP). And it seems to be very often violated on Windows, to the extent that people get the strange idea that environment variables like PATH should contain quotes around paths with spaces (it should be obvious why this is wrong to anyone that's spent much time with shell and batch scripts).

2. The mindless jerks that keep perpetuating the Win32 API's 260-character path name limit. There are some ways around it, but they don't help people using Visual Studio, which was developed by mindless jerks that adhere to the limit. Such a short limit would suck on Unix, but it sucks doubly on, say, WinXP, where new VS projects are created in a directory looking something like C:\Documents and Settings\aldimond\My Documents\Visual Studio 20xx\Projects. You're already 75 characters in the hole, plus whatever you need for the solution and project directories; if you have verbose naming conventions you don't need to go many levels deep from there to get over 260 characters. I usually keep my sources in $HOME/src, as I would on Unix, but with some of the projects I use at work I have to cut path names down even further. There are tricks you can use if you're really repulsed by having your dev files live outside your home directory (as you should be); most people just put them straight under the C drive. Which means that the 260-character limit perpetuates people's unwillingness to run as unprivileged users on Windows, one of its significant real-world security weaknesses.

ADDENDUM

3. The mindless jerks behind blogger.com, who don't have an option to require moderation on comments with links. As it stands I have to either subject honest commenters to moderation (which I don't want to do) or manually delete all spam comments (which is tedious and slow).

Have you ever had an Internet connection installation go smoothly?

2010-06-10T00:44:00.002-05:00

I sure haven't. In my post-dorm in college the Internet service was ordered by the building manager and we just had ethernet to our rooms. That worked OK, except that the building was behind NAT, they gouged us on price (after we'd been told it would be $30/month for the whole unit, which would have been basically fair for a NATted connection, the day we moved in we were told there had been a mistake, it was actually $30/month for each of us, and there was no way out), and there was a stupid bug that persisted for months where you couldn't connect to anything on some port... either 8080 or 8008. It happened this was the port used by some University service, and the ISP went on for months blaming the University for the problem even after I wrote them a few times with evidence that it affected any connection to that port. They had to bring in their “top tech from Virginia” to solve the problem. Fun times. But at least I didn't have any hassles with installation. I don't remember the name of the company. It was the major cable company in Champaign-Urbana. I think they've since joined the Comcast empire.

Since then... in California I had SBC either just before or just after their Oedipal merger with AT&T. Their setup process was Full of Fail. The only computer I had with me was a laptop running FreeBSD, so I couldn't run the setup disk. I was told by tech support of a web version (why not send that information with the modem?) that didn't work under Firefox or Opera because it was designed by some fancypants nincompoop that wanted to reimplement the hyperlink in Javascript but didn't want to test on anything but IE. Somehow I'm still bitter about that. I had to talk tech support through creating my account for me, which was hilarious.

I wound up having similar problems when I moved to my apartment in Uptown, but I knew what to expect and got it all taken care of pretty quickly. That apartment had no phone jack anywhere near where I wanted to put my computer, so I got a Wi-Fi card for my desktop box. It has served me well.

For some reason when I moved down to Pilsen I gave AT&T another chance. I had to completely redo my account and get a new phone number because Pilsen is 312 and Uptown is 773. This time the DSL modem couldn't connect upstream. They sent a tech out, but he couldn't access the phone box, because it was behind the neighbors' gate and they weren't home. So we had to schedule a second appointment, and coordinate with my neighbors. Since our building used to be split into two units per floor instead of one, the phone lines were wired accordingly, which was the cause of the problems (to this day AT&T's address on record for that apartment ends in “Floor 2—Front”). Also the previous tenant had been evicted after not paying his rent, or any of his bills, for half a year or so... maybe some of the lines had been disconnected because of that or something. Everyone was really good-natured about the whole thing, actually; I was sort of surprised that none of the utility companies even tried to get money out of me. They had the set-up pages fixed by this point, but for some reason I could never log in to my billing account on-line. I sent several support tickets about this that were never answered.

Unrelatedly, getting the billing switched to my roommates when I moved out was a horrible mess. Apparently AT&T's records got mixed up, and they thought they had transferred service (not just billing) on a 312 phone number to my address in Wyoming. If only — I'd love to take my 312 land-line number with me to Seattle. All I have to do is confuse AT&T enough to hook me up with an out-of-area-code number in a city they don't even service. Put that way, it sounds very possible.

In Wyoming we went with cable, not because of past DSL woes but because everyone said the DSL provider was terrible and Bresnan, the local cable company, was much better. Bresnan's connection was pretty fast, and it well should have been considering what we paid for it. As I recall, the cable modem didn't get a signal at first, and they had to send a dude out to calibrate some thinamajigger on some pole somewhere. It worked for a while, then uptime slowly deteriorated for a few months. I called and they had someone adjust some other thingy (which took a long time and a few trips back to the base for parts), and then a week later it went out again, and they had to fix their busted fix-job. So I was pretty frustrated with them. Not least because we relied on them for phone service, which didn't work at all without the Internet connection, and I was applying for jobs by phone at the time.

Now in Seattle I'm getting DSL through Qwest because cheaper than cable with Comcast (since I have no TV or land-line needs). The package with the modem arrived Monday but I didn't get it until Tuesday because the people in the building office that signed for it didn't tell me it came. I called the office Tuesday and someone found it lying around somewhere. No plan to notify me or anything. Then I plugged the modem in, and for the third straight move, got no upstream signal. A tech came out Wednesday and told my roommate (who was home at the time) that there was dust in the phone jacks. I'm a bit skeptical. He apparently didn't check the jack in my room, but when I got home it worked fine with no cleaning. And... seriously, dust caused a total lack of connection in two different jacks after several plug-unplug cycles? I'm searching the web for various permutations of dust and phone jacks and coming up with nothing. My apartment is not dusty at all. And if dust regularly causes outages, wouldn't it be more efficient for the phone company suggest that customers blow into the jacks, NES cartridge-style, as a standard troubleshooting step? At least as part of the tech support script, if not in the printed materials? You'd think they'd want to try anything that might plausibly save them an expensive tech visit. My guess is they flipped the wrong switch the first time out and didn't want to admit their error.

So, in total, since moving out of the dorms I have not once had Internet service go smoothly. Six attempts by four different companies, every time I've had to talk to tech support, in three cases I've needed physical visits from a tech, and in two I've needed multiple physical visits from a tech. This isn't a large enough sample size to draw conclusions, but if it's representative of the industry as a whole, it can't possibly be an efficient way to do business.

The Google question

2010-06-06T18:26:00.002-05:00

When I was interviewing at Google I decided to ask everyone I talked to what the point of Google's existence was, because it wasn't obvious to me, and I thought I'd get interesting answers. And it didn't work. All of them quoted from the mission statement: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

So I should have read that before coming. The real issue, and I never really was able to ask the right questions to get at this, is that Google doesn't actually make money doing that. It spends money doing that, and makes money as an ad broker; thus the Wall Street Journal doesn't refer to "information organizing giant Google" or even "search giant Google" but rather "advertising giant Google". There's a trend that's been growing for decades, that people have defined themselves more by how and what they consume and less by how and what they produce; is Google perhaps the first corporation to follow this trend?

That last question is sort of a curiosity, but I think a serious issue for Google is this: as the people of the world, those people you're making information accessible to and useful for, are your products and not your customers, how do you manage conflicts of interests between your mission and your business? Obviously there have been many companies with similar models, but few that have remained public darlings for long. Consider the media's pandering, fear-mongering, and lack of substance — how seriously can we take its claims to journalistic responsibility? How does Google avoid becoming Facebook? Is it just that it doesn't have Mark Zuckerberg?

I think ultimately that's all it is. Google's people, right now, are more moral than Facebook's, and the company makes enough money that it can afford to be. It's similar to self-imposed limits of power in government: they're as good as the people (self-)imposing them. So as with just about any entity — governmental, corporate, social — the principles just don't matter. No principle can keep Google in check. Only people.

You are what you drive, or you drive what you are

2010-06-06T18:12:00.001-05:00

WARNING: this post is kind of banal.

The other day I was talking to my brother John and a story about our dad came up. My dad has plenty of money but is notoriously frugal about some things. There's nothing wrong, or even contradictory about this. You don't get rich (as Bill Gates fictionally said to Homer Simpson) by writing big fat checks. That's a pretty straightforward statement of a the pretty common value of frugality. My dad has long admired Benjamin Franklin; like Franklin, he values frugality, pragmatism, hard work, and practical knowledge. The story was simply this: my dad recently bought a new car, and they didn't have the base model he wanted at the dealership, only one with a "Sport" package. So he waited a month for the dealership to get a base model.

John thought this was a pretty weird thing to do; it certainly doesn't seem very pragmatic at first glance. But it wasn't really anti-pragmatic either; his old car was still running. There was probably a little bit of ideology involved; I can see my dad, like me, finding the idea of a "Sport" package on a car silly (the public roads aren't there for sporting, particularly considering the risks of aggressive driving). As Dad doesn't drive all that much, and Hondas usually hold up pretty well, I wouldn't be surprised if he got 20 years out of it. As he's over 50, there's a chance it could be his last car. When you consider those time frames against a one-month wait, the picture changes considerably.

So I doubt that Dad's decision to wait a month for a cheaper car to come in had much to do with short-term economics at all. It probably had more to do with feeling comfortable with the purchase in the long run. This is the sort of thing I've thought about a lot, and talked with Jess about a bit, regarding moving to Seattle: not letting short-term considerations push us into decisions we'll be unhappy with down the road. Although just about everything feels temporary now, I have to be sure to keep the long term in mind.

A quick note on the Google magic

2010-06-01T01:13:00.002-05:00

My last post got me thinking about how much I love Google Maps, and about Google's magic. People have talked a lot about Apple's magic: its ability to execute consumer products at a really high level and get people to accept or even embrace their limitations. Google's magic seemed to me a little more mysterious.

Google didn't invent online maps, but Google Maps was a revelation. Mapquest was a specific tool. You punched in your starting and destination addresses, and it gave you pretty good directions and a pretty good map. It ushered you through a few specific processes. Google Maps was an open book. Back then the start page for Mapquest didn't have a map on it. Google Maps opened to a map of the continental USA (from the US domain). And you could drag the map around, and zoom in to your location. You could view the whole world at once, look at the individual streets in your neighborhood, or any level in between (as long as you were OK with the Mercator projection). And above that was a text box that you could type anything into. It accepted text in specific formats, and really couldn't do anything Mapquest couldn't, but that wasn't the point. You'd never lose yourself in Mapquest. I did it routinely in Google Maps.

I think Maps is really the clearest example of the Google magic. Google wasn't the first search engine, wasn't the first web mail provider, wasn't the first to provide source code hosting, wasn't the first web ad broker. It's really changed the landscape in all these areas, but Maps seems to me the purest example of the magic. Where the reason for its superiority is so clear, and clearly a result of philosophy, not execution.

"What we've got here is a failure to communicate"

2010-06-01T00:34:00.002-05:00

Google is now being sued for giving someone bad walking directions that contributed to her being hit by a car. I'll try to keep this brief, as I'm on a public computer with a QWERTY keyboard.

1. Unless there's some really extraordinary circumstance I absolutely hope she's successful in her suit against the driver. There's rarely a good excuse for hitting a pedestrian on the road.

2. Commenters on the story suggest there is a pedestrian path paralleling the roadway. Essentially functioning as a sidewalk. If that's the case, suing Google in this particular case is pretty silly. You need to have some basic situational awareness. You have to decide whether you can handle a situation, or whether you should turn back. As a runner and cyclist I've come down on both sides many times.

3. I think, as my title suggests that there's a communication problem here. I just (unsuccessfully) interviewed for a job at Google, and talked to a number of Google programmers. I think they see a world full of data, and that when they find a way to present it to people they've done the world a service. As I point out in my bike directions post, that might not always be the case. They certainly push the state of the art forward with beta-quality projects like these, but they also send people on bad routes quite often.

Among the geeks that have some understanding of the data Google's working with, the limitations of its route-finding ability are obvious. But among the general population it's not so obvious. Instead of a neat little application trying to squeeze something extra out of a data set, it's taken as authoritative. Perhaps Google needs to communicate the philosophy and spirit of how it presents data, and of the meaning of its projects, a little better.

My Oil Spill Post: Environmental Liability and Risk

2010-05-27T15:05:00.003-05:00

I've posted along these lines at Slashdot a few times, but I've been reluctant to blog about the oil spill without thinking it through a bit. Before I start I'd like to point out that I'm not a lawyer or even all that knowledgeable on environmental law or corporate law. I'm also not an environmental engineer, and I don't have any knowledge of environmental science beyond that of a layman. I'm just a computer programmer with opinions.

Generalities, and an analog with the DMCA

For starters, my understanding of current environmental law is that is basically protects companies that follow it. Establish a standard for what's safe enough, for what's clean enough, and as long as a business adheres to that standard it will be protected from governmental penalties and private lawsuits. I'm sure my understanding is incomplete, but I think it's mostly accurate. As a software guy, the first thing I think of is the DMCA, and how it affects Internet services that host user-uploaded content: if you comply with the procedure for take-down notices you won't be found liable for copyright infringement. The DMCA is a useful analog because it's been the subject of much discussion on the Internet, and because it is similar in concept.

The benefits of this type of law is obvious. In business it's very difficult to do anything without harming someone else. The oft-discussed DMCA makes it possible to operate a website with user-uploaded content without having to perform the impossible task of determining whether each of these clips violates someone's copyright, while not allowing website operators to just violate copyright with impunity. It standardizes the process, allowing businesses to put efficient processes in place to deal with it, and making it possible for them to reason about potential damages they might face. You take on risk only if you fail to follow the DMCA's outlined procedure, and that's something you can control; not the risk that some user will upload the whole Top 40 and get millions of downloads, which is harder to control. It's similar with manufacturing plants. You only have to deal with the risk that you'll violate pollution standards, which is something you have lots of control over; not who's harmed by the legal pollution, which you have less control over. As the DMCA makes “Web-2.0” possible by making copyright litigation risks more predictable, environmental regulations can make industrialization easier by doing the same for environmental litigation risk.

The downsides? Well, everyone hates the DMCA, so we can look at some of the complaints about it. Some website operators complain about time spent on take-down notices generally, and many users complain about bogus take-down notices (including cases where fair-use is ignored) and that often in these cases they lose data as a result. But without the DMCA they'd likely face the same challenges, and they'd be legal threats instead of take-down notices, which take a lot more time and money to defend. Sites like YouTube have struck deals with various rights-holders, and the existence of the DMCA strengthens their stance in negotiations. I think that bogus take-down notices can be a problem, but the website operators should easily be able to put some of the time and money they've saved on legal bills toward working through them correctly or perhaps challenging bad-faith or inaccurate automatically-generated notices legally.

The real downside is for the copyright holder. It's inevitable that infringing material will be uploaded to sites like YouTube and viewed there. And it's inevitable that the sites will make lots of money off of this activity. The rights-holders can request that material be taken down, but at a high-volume site it will surely be re-posted, and in the time between posting and removal the site will make lots of money, and rights-holders have no recourse against this (under just the DMCA — they may have more success arguing on other grounds, or they might instead form a mutually-beneficial partnership with the site, as many rights-holders have with YouTube and Hulu).

I think that in some ways there's an analog to environmental laws. I'd guess that in many cases environmental and safety regulations affect industrial practice more than the DMCA affects copyright practice on the web (at least among legitimate websites). But by protecting polluters within stated guidelines, environmental regulations prevent affected parties from being reimbursed. It's not enough, when going for damages against a polluter, to show that one has been harmed; it must also be shown that the polluter did something “wrong”. Thus businesses that used PCBs before they were banned only pay for a portion of the damage they did — they negotiate with the government from a pretty strong position. Coal-fired power plants in Pilsen and Little Village (lower West Side neighborhoods in Chicago) can operate under pollution standards in place when they were built, though they continue to pollute today at these levels (which would now be illegal), without reimbursing nearby residents for the measurable damage to air quality.

That environmental regulations are even designed with industrial convenience in mind is clear from this fact: that California is the only state allowed to regulate air pollution, and only because it started before the Federal government did. California's Air Resource Board, and its higher pollution standards, are scheduled to be phased out as Federal standards catch up with California's. I'm not intending this as a criticism of them, exactly. I'm just showing that environmental regulations are a two-way street. Polluters give up some rights and gain some conveniences and assurances.

What's the problem?

I don't have a problem with accepting some pollution as necessary for industrial development. Similarly, I don't have a problem with accepting some copyright infringement as necessary for the development of the development of the Web. I do have a problem with writing it off completely. This is about economics and incentives. On the Web there's an incentive for site operators to do as little as they can about copyright infringement, because it drives page-views and ad revenue. And there's no incentive to do any better than the letter of the law, in this case the DMCA. In industry there's an incentive to pollute more, or to behave dangerously: it's cheaper. And there's no incentive to do better than the letter of the regulations.

This is why there's an impetus for things like carbon credits and carbon taxes. We've all heard debates about these. The important idea is that you pay exactly for your impact — you save money for reducing pollution and pay for increasing it — even if you're well below the standard accepted levels. Carbon credits and taxes have to do with a global problem, and so they're proposed to be collected and enforced by national governments and international coalitions.

But carbon isn't the only important pollution. If you're going to spew particulate emissions into the air and poison the soil and the water, you should owe the people affected locally. And that's something that national regulations are quick to prevent. If carbon taxes and credits can affect a business' bottom line that business will care about carbon. But that same business won't care a bit about the people it's affecting locally unless local pollution affects its bottom line, too. People affected locally need to be directly reimbursed. The simple solution is to allow lawsuits for damages, but that's probably not fair or efficient. Not fair because of resource disparities among affected communities, not efficient because of all the different lawsuits going on. So there's probably some legislation needed there.

If you think about this in economic terms, the problem is that preventing direct payouts to people and groups affected by pollution is a distortion in the market. Exchanges tend to benefit their players, but often have negative effects for those on the outside (externalities). Often people that are negatively affected can force their way into the exchange through a lawsuit (which may prove that they, unwittingly, became creditors of one of the players, and are thus owed money). I think it would be good to bring these people into the exchange without their having to sue their way into it.

But this is all about the predictable and normal levels of pollution. What about disasters? What about the oil spill?

The Oil Spill

It appears, from what I've read, that BP may have violated some regulations in building or maintaining its failed oil rig. I'm not really concerned with that. I'm concerned with the fact that even if all the regulations are followed, there's a chance of disaster. Humans err, natural disasters occur, crime and sabotage occasionally happen, standards and regulations can be flawed (that is, our knowledge is never complete). In all these cases a plant owner must be held responsible. There may be other parties held responsible (such as the saboteur in the case of sabotage) but the plant owner must always be. I'm saying that, in the case of the oil spill, every person impacted, plus the governments of all impacted states and countries, must be able to fully recover their damages from BP. It's absolutely vital.

That's because building and operating any industrial facility inherently carries risk. In order to correctly bake the costs of the risks of any operation into the various decisions made about it, these costs must fall on the head of the decision maker. Insurance can dull this effect, but the insurer then becomes very interested in the safety of the operation as well.

I'm looking at estimates of just the economic impact of the oil spill. A number I've seen a few times is $12.5 billion. Another says we could have tens of billions in the best case, hundreds of billions in the worst case. It looks like we may avoid that worst case. Anyway, the cost should be at least in the tens of billions. Because “economic impact” figures don't count irreparable non-economic damage to the environment, which BP should be fined heavily for, and also because effects will probably go on for many years in the future, and it's hard to put a dollar value on that, these figures are probably somewhat lower than what BP should actually wind up paying out, in total.

BP's market cap sits around $142 billion now, and about $200 billion before the spill. Even in the best case, they should be paying out a significant portion of the company's total value in damages and fines. Probably over a year's worth of profits.

The total damages figure, whatever it amounts to, is huge and important. It should inform the insurance and capitalization requirements for offshore drilling. If companies are faced with that sort of risk for offshore drilling, you can bet that a lot of them will choose not to do it. And maybe they won't be so cavalier about safety. Unfortunately they won't be faced with that risk. They'll weasel out of their obligation to pay for the damage resulting from their activity. One thing we have to do in the wake of the oil spill is really try to get all that money from BP. Make sure they bear the weight of the risk they took with that rig. As they would have taken the profits had it worked, they must pay the costs as it failed. If we don't the incentive is too great for other companies to take bad risks in the future.

Apple and the Political Compass

2010-05-16T10:55:00.006-05:00

I've been a little wary of "political compass" tests, because the first one I saw was basically designed to make it look like everyone agreed with the US Libertarian Party (Big-L Libertarians). You obviously can't reduce all political thought, even all current mainstream political thought, down to two axes, but if you're going to try at that, this political compass site does a reasonably good job, and offers some insightful analysis of various positions.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs has made himself look silly yet again over the app store. There's a lot I've already said about his “freedom from porn” schtick, but what really interested me here was the beginning of the discussion. Apple has constantly associated itself with revolutionaries and anti-authoritarians (small-l libertarians) in its marketing -- notably Gandhi, and as mentioned here, Bob Dylan. But Apple's behavior is clearly authoritarian. That's the reason so many people are put off by Apple's campaign. Apple controls the app store economy; I think a significant part of their behavior is honestly aimed at improving the platform for its users and small developers. Based on this sort of analysis, they probably belong in the authoritarian left quadrant of the political compass graph. Clearly not as extreme as Stalin, perhaps somewhere near the Pope (scroll down to the “International Chart”). Compared to UK political parties (so much more interesting than US ones), depending on your reading of Apple, they probably fall somewhere along a rough line between Labour and RESPECT. But they position themselves with the Greens.

It's clear why Apple does this, from a marketing perspective. Young people often fall in the lower quadrants of the compass, and are likely to be more inspired by lower-left quadrant revolutionaries and artists than the upper-right quadrant establishment icons that Apple more closely resembles in truth. Apple wants to make money and steer its platform to lasting success for itself, which is its right as a business. But it should be clear why associating with Gandhi, Einstein, Mohammed Ali, and Bob Dylan while doing that is dissonant business.

ADDITION: The relevant Marx quotation (as Marx's writings really set out authoritarian leftism) here is from the Communist Manifesto, in the chapter Proletarians and Communists (translation by Samuel Moore): “In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeoisie, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.”. Obviously Apple is not a leftist organization within the larger context of society, but as it regulates the iPhone/iPad software ecosystem, its goal is to guarantee new types of freedoms for its users and declare the old types bunk. That makes it analogous to the economic Left, but it's really only an analogy — the Communists' “new freedoms” were revolutionary while Apple's are a bunch of banal bobo crap. Anyway, as it enforces its policy by controlling the App Store, it's analogous to an authoritarian state in the context of its own platform.

My political reading of Apple is purely based on analogy, and surely many other companies act similarly regarding anything they can control. Apple specifically invites this sort of analysis and criticism, however, by constantly invoking anti-authoritarian icons of politics and art in its marketing. It's a common trait of bobos, and Apple is one of the most bobo companies ever to bobo. As with other bobo-centric marketing (note Danielle's hilarious comment), it's annoyingly dissonant at best, and deceptive at worst.

Exercise trampoline is just too much.

2010-05-16T00:42:00.002-05:00

Jess got the idea recently of getting an exercise trampoline. I was skeptical, but hey, it's not my money.

It turns out the trampoline required some assembly. In several different places in the assembly booklet it was stressed that “TWO STRONG PEOPLE” were needed to assemble the trampoline and that some pretty simple-sounding mistakes could cause “SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH”.

When you think about it, it's a bit disturbing that they felt compelled to point this out in the instruction booklet. Had previous assemblers died putting together exercise trampolines?

So Jess did the sensible thing and returned it. There is no point risking life and limb for an exercise trampoline, even if it's a pretty remote risk.

I'll probably always be a little competitive about running

2010-05-11T14:01:00.004-05:00

On Sunday, after my flight arrived in California, I went out and ran one of my old routes at Rancho San Antonio. The PG&E Trail is just as tough as I remembered it (like this, but there's a lot of choppy up-and-down that the elevation profile doesn't show. During that mostly-downhill section in the second mile I go really fast and pass lots of people. There's a point probably halfway up the next huge climb (I lose all conception of time or distance on that climb; there are 11 power line towers along the trail, and I count them, but they aren't evenly spaced) where you hear echoes of your footsteps, and I always think one of the people I blew by down below is catching up to me, and I consider picking up the pace. This has never been the case, and if it ever is, I'll probably find that I'm already going about as fast as I can. But for some reason it matters to me that I don't get passed running up that hill.

Another LOL at Apple's app approval process...

2010-04-28T00:20:00.002-05:00

Linky.

I'm not laughing at the fact they approved this particular app. I'd probably sell it in my hypothetical independent app store (if it was actually good, and if I thought it would sell), and I've never smoked a thing in my life.

What I'm laughing at is this part at the bottom where Steve Jobs tries to make a moral stand about not wanting porn in his app store. Despite that Apple allowed all kinds of awful, degrading porn apps for years before throwing down the banhammer. And that it still allows Playboy and SI apps. Also, the iPhone still has a web browser, and last I checked the web browser was the greatest porn app of all time (of all time! — sorry, I'm pretty sure that's not funny anymore).

If Apple had made the right decision and not involved itself in every app sale it wouldn't have to worry about any of this. Steve Jobs wouldn't have to go and proclaim his moral superiority on something he pretty clearly doesn't care about. He could instead go on about things he does care about, like user interface design. Have you heard the one about how he didn't put arrow keys on the original Mac keyboard, to force programmers to create new interfaces around the mouse? Now that was taking a stand! This is just silly grandstanding.

The smell of cattle country

2010-04-27T11:19:00.003-05:00

I grabbed this article out of Jess' Twitter feed. Obviously, pretty serious stuff. It reminds me of a few things about the midwest. Now I'm not a farmer or even very knowledgeable about farming or its affect on the land. But I've been to Iowa and Wisconsin. Huge parts of Iowa just reek of manure all summer. And Wisconsin, as all Illinoisans know, smells like cow farts. And anyone that's been on the University of Illinois campus when a big wind kicks up from the south has caught a whiff of that same odor. Lynn Henning is from Michigan, and I can't personally recall any awful smells coming from Michigan, but I don't think I've ever been around her part of the state. I think I'll take her word for it.

Now I'm living in Wyoming. Cattle country. A midwesterner might be inclined to ask me about the smell. There are a few cattle ranches within running distance of my house, not much farther than the South Farms are from most of the UIUC campus. And I go on long runs and bike rides past herds of grazing cattle all the time. And there is, honestly, no smell. There is lots of public land where farmers are allowed to graze their cattle, and I run on some of that land often. Some days you have to dodge a cow-pie every couple steps. I bike through ranch country all the time, right up next to fences with cows lined up looking out across the road. There's certainly a much higher concentration of manure from one animal in those fields than you'd ever see naturally. But there's no nasty midwestern-style cow smell.

So that tells me that the cows in Wisconsin, the pigs in Iowa, and whatever they have down on the South Farms must be packed in a lot tighter than cattle in Wyoming. And, indeed, it turns out that modern CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, a term used in the above article) have giant manure pits because the land can't possibly absorb all of it (this is graphically documented in Jonathan Saffron Foer's Eating Animals). That sometimes they just spray the manure into the air when they have no place to put it. These are massive concentrations of animals. Consider the old Chicago Stock Yards, where there was once a layer of congealed blood six feet deep at the bottom of the Chicago River. That was one square mile of extremely dense slaughtering and packing facilities -- the “hog butcher to the world”. Now Lynn Henning documents a creek running red with bloodworms. She and many others have documented the diseases running rampant in factory farms. We'll destroy the countryside as thoroughly as we destroyed Chicago. In some places we already have.

And it's completely unnecessary. I've heard that cattle and sheep herds have caused their share of problems in Wyoming, that native grass species have been wiped out by grazing and that the landscape has thus been changed forever. But we aren't creating toxic waste pools. Our creeks don't run red. It seems plausible that Wyoming agriculture could go on with relatively few changes for a long time (it might require growth and sprawl to stop eventually). So maybe, just maybe, it's possible to raise lots of animals for slaughter without completely devastating everything (land, water, air, wildlife, human health... care to think of anything more?) nearby.

But there's a trade-off: we can only do it at Wyoming density. Yes, Wyoming exports beef, but it imports plenty of other things, and we'd need lots of land to produce many of those things in a minimally-destructive way. If we wanted, as a nation, to raise and eat as many animals per-person as we do today, and also wanted to avoid the massive abuses of factory farming, I'd guess our population density would have to be closer to Wyoming's than the nation's as a whole.

The other option, of course, is to cut back severely on meat production and consumption. Animals raised for slaughter eat vastly more calories in grain over their lifetimes than they provide (were this not so we'd have some explaining to do to the Thermodynamic Police). This is even true of protein, by several times (the average meat-eating American eats way too much protein anyway). Without animal agriculture we'd need far fewer fields of corn and soybeans, which are no great friends to the environment themselves.

Hi, my name is Al Dimond and I am a waver.

2010-04-26T13:08:00.003-05:00

On my run Friday morning in Seattle-land I waved and said, "Good morning," to almost everyone I passed on the Sammamish River Trail. They mostly ignored me completely. Except the old people. Old people rock it. Jess and I are the oldest twentysomethings we know, and I frequently wish people got old faster. Anyway.

I grew up in the west suburbs of Chicago (Elmhurst, IL, to be specific). On the Prairie Path and Great Western Trail in that area, if you wave at people as you go by you have a decent chance to get a response. In Champaign-Urbana, where I went to college, there weren't so many opportunities -- on campus you're mostly dodging people and off campus you don't run into too many people on foot. When you do you typically give and get a wave. Cody is sort of like that, minus the campus part; when I pass someone on foot here there's almost always an acknowledgement.

Running on Chicago's Lakefront Trail is sort of like trying to run on the Quad at UIUC on a weekday in terms of how busy it is. Maybe it's more like a human-powered highway. I'd say its users act toward eachother basically like drivers on a very busy two-lane road. So it's not a great place to run. And Chicago's sidewalks, in many places, are packed with people trying to do very different things than you are. Nobody will wave to you in those places. But if you're on some of the minor trails, or in certain parks in the city, a few people will say, "Hi."

I would have expected, based on their purpose and density, that when running the trails at Rancho San Antonio in California, people would have returned my waves, like they do on the Prairie Path. But they almost never did. And I would have expected the same on the paths in suburban Seattle, but again, they almost never did. I don't think very many people consider Chicago to be an unusually friendly place (and many people consider Seattle to be one); maybe the Prairie Path is just an unusually friendly running trail.

More on Seattle

2010-04-24T18:04:00.002-05:00

Well, at least that's what my notebook says at the top of a few pages. I ran out of reading material and just started writing. I have enough professional sense to not blog about job interviews exactly. There's probably an unintended connotation there, that were I to do so I'd have nothing nice to say. I have enough professional sense to not blog even positive things about job interviews. Similarly, I think there was an unintended connotation when I told John that I couldn't grasp Seattle. Really, I just hadn't had much time to absorb Seattle; I'd been there just over 24 hours and spent a lot of time interviewing, sleeping, eating, driving places (it's hard to absorb a place at anything more than 15 MPH or so)*. I had a long and beautiful run from the hotel in Bothell, but you know, I run for truth, not beauty.

* I rushed my excursion through Pike Place Market and downtown because I thought I had to get to the airport. And even though I had trouble finding an entrance to I-5 at first and eventually took a back surface road most of the way, I got there way too early. It's safe to say I did have time to grasp Sea-Tac, and SLC airport, too. Airports take very little time to grasp. They are mostly culturally blank, purely commercial spaces. Denver Airport, as far as places go, is only marginally interesting, but as airports go it's downright fascinating. There are places in the concourses where you can sit down surrounded by big art installations, and there are places where you can just go where there's just nothing going on at all, not even ads (fr rlz, ppl!). And then there's the terminal, which has all sorts of weird and semi-controversial art and design elements. Plus the conspiracy theories. I'm sure some day the airport will fill out its frame and it will all be ruined.

Maybe the biggest problem was that I kept trying to see Seattle through the lens of Chicago. And it just doesn't make any sense that way (despite the newspaper bringing news of a strip club scandal involving prostitution and political favors, the underground sidewalks, and a street grid that's very Cartesian in places). Memphis has bumper stickers that say Midtown Is Memphis. I don't think Seattle calls any part of itself “Midtown”, but it pretty clearly has lots of Midtown to it. Chicago has rather little Midtown. There's some in River North and River East. Maybe in the northern part of the South Loop.

Ultimately I think if I ended up in Seattle I'd love it.

Bobo marketers gone mad, parts six, seven eight, and nine.

2010-04-18T20:39:00.004-05:00

From a bag of potato chips: “We start with farm-grown potatoes, sliced nice and thick.” Emphasis theirs. Yes, really.

I'm not even sure where to go with that.

You Know You've Made a Good Decision When...

2010-04-16T23:07:00.003-05:00

You all know I'm not the biggest fan of Apple. But I had to give them some props while trying to figure out some Audacity behavior today. Audacity has some bugs and weird behavior with closing windows on Windows and Linux (Bug 151, if this sort of thing interests you at all). One problem is that it's unclear what should happen, in a multi-window application, when you use an internal program command to close the last window. You might quit the program (this is what Firefox does, for example). Or you might clear out the window so the user can start a new document (like at least some versions of Microsoft Office).

On Mac it's perfectly obvious what should happen when you close the last window. The program stays open and active, just with no windows. It retains control of the menu bar, from which you can start a now document. An application with no open windows is perfectly natural on the Mac. Some programs even start with no windows open (like XCode with the splash screen disabled). Apple's decision to conceptually separate the concepts of windows and applications has stood the test of time. Other platforms have seen the rise and fall of the MDI. On Windows the taskbar once listed open windows. With Office 2000 you sometimes had one entry for the application plus one for each document. Then windows from the same program might be combined. And now, in Windows 7, they're always combined, with the additional change that some tabbed programs treat their tabs sort of like windows (I dislike this change a lot).

The mark of Apple's great design is that it left no other decisions to be made. It hasn't changed in years, while programmers on Windows and for X11 have come up with lots of different solutions and continue to do so, never satisfied. Windows and X11 do not give programmers what they need to have a nice, clean solution, so we cycle through various different sub-optimal solutions. We have to make tricky decisions over and over again.

Why do I mention this? Because of how it contrasts with Apple's position on the iPhone development ecosystem. Apple decided in the beginning that their app store was the only place you could legally get iPhone apps. This has left them an infinite number of other decisions to be made. Every time someone writes an iPhone app Apple has to decide whether it wants to sell that app or ban it.

Now that's a hard decision, and I don't envy Apple in having to make it. Selling something is a pretty strong mark of endorsement. And refusing to allow it on a device is a very strong mark of disapproval. There will inevitably be apps where Apple should logically fall somewhere in between, but Apple has forced itself to make this tough decision every time. I imagine myself in this position. If I opened a software store I would not carry "hot babe picture collection" apps that mostly serve to titillate men and objectify women. But if I created a computer or phone I wouldn't ban them from it. Free speech and that. In an independent store I might consider carrying porn apps that I thought were basically egalitarian — according to True Porn Clerk Stories, which is apparently no longer available on the Web, gay porn tends to be much better in this regard than straight porn. At the very least I'd carry apps full of politics that could be described as radical and language that could be described as obscene. But if my store was officially associated with my device I might take a more guarded stance to avoid alienating customers of the device.

Apple wants to sell apps, so it carried lots of dumb softcore porn apps for a while, and they sold in great quantities. Then it threw down the banhammer, unfortunately citing obscenity. It wanted to avoid alienating customers, so it banned political apps, but it will back down if it doesn't want to appear an onerous censor.

If only they had decided on an open development ecosystem with multiple software sources in the first place. They could directly sell just the apps that reflected well on them, and wouldn't have to ban anything. Their constant equivocation on issues of app availability and censorship is a reflection of their initial mistake.

"Un-Mac-like" = Apple Apologetics

2010-04-11T11:33:00.004-05:00

Have you ever heard a Windows user complain that a common program is un-Windows-like? I doubt it. But you've probably heard Mac users complain about un-Mac-like programs. If you follow through to his screencaps and specific complaints you'll see that they're just general complaints about lousy UI. It would be lousy on Windows or Linux as well. But the idea that Apples have special, magical UI properties has another purpose beyond shaming programmers that didn't check their designs: an excuse for Apple's iron-fisted platform control.

Since I started working on Audacity, a GPL-licensed audio editor that uses the cross-platform WxWidgets toolkit, we've received far more complaints from Mac users about un-Mac-like behavior than from any other platform. And I get out the world's tiniest violin. For the most part, when we make UI mistakes they're mistakes everywhere. And a cross-platform toolkit is what allows us to maintain feature parity across all platforms — we just don't have the resources to write independent UIs for Mac, Windows, and GTK (though the architectural changes that would make this possible would probably benefit the project). My guess is if we did the Mac UI would fall farthest behind. At the very least, Mac users benefit a lot from the common code base in terms of functionality.

So when this blogger writes at the end of his post that iPhone users will probably benefit from Apple's restrictions on development practices, and smears the cross-platform Qt toolkit, I just can't buy it. Believe me, I'm no great fan of Flash (one of the major stake holders in the iPhone/iPad dev tools debate). But the idea that users are better served by having fewer programs available is silly to me.

Sears Catalog Victorians

2010-04-11T10:32:00.002-05:00

A week or so ago Jess told me something I never knew about Illinois' built landscape: that many of its homes were built out of plans from a Sears catalog. There's some history about this phenomenon here. Just about anything I present as a fact comes from something linked from there.

I'm just starting to read about this but I already love it. They'd give you the plans free if you ordered all the supplies from Sears, and when you did, two boxcars full of lumber, paint, varnish, nails, and shingles would arrive at the nearest train depot. Then you'd have to find local skilled laborers to perform the parts of building you were unable to do yourself.

I'm trying to think of this through the lens of Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building. These houses were largely built in the suburbs during the post-World War I housing boom, in the dawn of American car culture. It appears that in some cases a single entity built an entire neighborhood full of these houses at once, but in most cases individual families decided on and supervised construction of the designs. This autonomy could allow for a house built somewhat around the land and the needs of the builder. According to the oldhouseweb link, customization was common and encouraged by Sears, and the houses were often built largely by the homeowners themselves.

Through Alexander's lens, one of the saddest trends in modern housing development seems to be that people mostly don't build or even help design their own houses anymore. Specialized architects plan entire subdivisions and people are left with a small set of generic models. A builder of a Sears Catalog house, though choosing from a catalog, had hundreds of designs to choose from and an infinite array of possible customizations. The houses were built one-at-a-time on land owned by each home owner, allowing neighborhoods to form, and for houses to rise and decay and crumble in their own time. I don't think I'd call the Sears Catalog a "pattern language" exactly, but it seems a lot closer to that than anything being done today (also, you should not pay attention to what I call things because I don't really know anything).

So you can count me as fascinated. I think I can get this book about Sears houses through ILL here, so I'll give that a shot once I'm done with the two books I'm working through currently. Woot.

I am moving to Los Angeles...

2010-04-01T14:28:00.001-05:00

...because I've always wanted to live in the greatest, most beautiful city in the world.

April fools.

My dreams are dumb...

2010-03-26T10:47:00.004-05:00

Not long ago I had an idea that I wanted to retire to southern Illinois some day. Not the ”somewhre south of I-80” thing that most Chicagoans call “southern Illinois”. Real southern Illinois. Little Egypt, full of hills and forests and rivers, which I'd seen running the River to River Relay.

It is a great place to go running. But that wasn't the main reason I wanted to go. I was very worried about the problems of technological growth and whether it could be sustained. And I had an idealized version in my mind of Little Egypt where these problems didn't exist. Where people lived right, and were rewarded for it. In a place where people generally live right there's no need to set one's self in opposition to major trends in society. That appealed to me. Because setting one's self in opposition is tiring, and I'm not very good at it anyway.

Of course, it turns out southern Illinois is not quite so ideal; no place is. By the time I ran the Relay for the fifth time I was noticing major cracks in the vision. Boarded-up shops. A seeming decline in population and enthusiasm. Even the Old Fishskins didn't seem to play as well as they used to. And, of course, the most troubling effects of technological progress are hardly confined to the city. People everywhere use manufactured goods made of plastic shipped halfway across the world. Because somehow it's the cheapest. Even the initial form of my dream seemed to acknowledge this, in retrospect. I wanted to live my productive life some place I could be productive. I'm a computer programmer, so that's going to be an urban area. And then I wanted to go down and consume the relaxed atmosphere of this idealized rural place in my old age. I wanted to run from the reality of what I would really create. It was ultimately a dumb dream, fueled by my desire to believe that somewhere things are right.

I got thinking along these lines after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals. I've read various books about factory farming and meat production and I really recommend his because it's so different. He's a novelist and a better writer than most of the dry philosophers and non-fiction specialists that have tackled the subject in the past, so it's a fast-paced and compelling read. And rather than break new ground in ethics or expose undiscovered facts about the industry, he lays out the cases for eating meat or not that correspond to the ones people really have. He probably comes closer to expressing my views on the subject than I ever have.

One thing that becomes very clear after reading is how people want to believe that a part of their world is right. That there are powerful social and emotional forces tied in with this that compel people to eat meat. He really lays bare the difference between rhetoric and reality in modern agriculture. He may not expose any new facts, but he exposes this social truth I had never quite grasped: that while defenders of meat eating have accused vegetarians and vegans of sentimentalism for ages, the proper accusation is in the other direction.

A few years after running River to River for the fifth time I took a bike ride along the Mississippi river, on the Illinois side, from south of the St. Louis suburbs to Shawnee National Forest. I saw a totally different side of southern Illinois. Some places are growing, with exurban-style additions tacked onto little old towns. Some places are in severe decline — whole towns completely shuttered and even parks indefinitely closed. Kaskaskia, Illinois' first capitol, a near ghost town, devastated by repeated floods and cut off from the state by the new course of the river. Just across from there is a large state penitentiary; it makes its mark on the nearby town of Chester in so many ways I could see even in my brief ride-through. I had originally planned to ride all the way to Cairo but ended up not — I didn't know about a lot of what I would see on the ride, but I had read a lot about Cairo. Once its location on at the confluence of two great rivers made the town an economic powerhouse. Now, with no major employers and no exports, the town consists of those that haven't yet left. One day it may be another Kaskaskia.

There is no escape, so there can be no escapism. Every place is subject to the economic forces of the day. I live in the small-ish town of Cody, WY. It's growing like Chicago, in nostalgically-named cul-de-sacs, physically-bounded subdivisions, and continual futile escapes to the country. Sometimes things are dulled farther off the grid. But even Meeteetse, if it could not export cattle and oil, could not drive up to Cody for groceries. Which is why Wyoming has plenty of ghost towns itself. I haven't witnessed a near-ghost town like Kaskaskia or an economic ghost town like Cairo here, but I've only traveled a small part of the state.

As meat-eating goes, there is similarly no escape. Designations like “organic” and “free range”, in the context of nationally-available brands, are almost completely meaningless. The environmental damage, both local and global, caused by intensive agriculture, is real, massive in scale, several times more so for meat production, and can't be avoided by buying packages with green labels. That's no conspiracy theory. It doesn't take a conspiracy — in fact a conspiracy could never create our situation, only competition is so powerful. If you don't believe me (and why should you?) read the book.

Facebook goes after app developer; nobody surprised.

2010-03-26T10:32:00.002-05:00

The latest scummy move by Facebook involved Fluff-Buster Purity, a Greasemonkey script allowing you to block annoying apps like Farmville. I could comment more but I won't waste my words. Quit Facebook!

Google Maps now has bike directions! Yay? Maybe. Iunno.

2010-03-16T23:54:00.002-05:00

Bike directions, Google says, are in beta. Google's released a lot of stuff into the world as a beta and most of it has been pretty usable right off the bat. The bike directions have a few issues, but it's hard to blame them. It's a hard task. I'm going to focus on Chicago, as it's a city I know and Google seems only to be seriously trying in cities (probably a good decision).

The biggest challenge of generating bike routes is that there are so many different kinds of bikes and riders. I once thought a good way to do it would be to collect lots of data on the characteristics of various streets and let users set their own priorities (bike lanes/wide right lanes, traffic volume, speed, surface, etc). Someone that's not all that experienced and rides a mountain bike or hybrid or something won't mind dirt paths and weaving around through side streets but will freak out on a major road. I have a road bike with skinny high-pressure tires and regularly biked to work (and just about everywhere else) for a couple years in Chicago; I want to be going straight and fast on a road that gets favorable light timings. Since riders like me can figure out our own routes, they probably did the right thing by catering to the novices. I worry a bit that if people start thinking Google's routes are really the most efficient ways to get around on a bike they'll become pretty discouraged with urban cycling. Like John Forester points out in Effective Cycling, beginning cyclists are often advised to do suboptimal things at first and become discouraged and quit completely before they ever learn to do it right.

The worst thing Google does is set you weaving on side streets. Not just ducking off a major road for a while, but literally going block by block turning left, then right repeatedly. It's hard on your mind to remember all those turns, and it's hard on your body to repeatedly stop and accelerate. The question is whether cyclists will graduate from Google's routes to the realization that they should just get on Damen and go, or whether they'll putter around, get tired, and give up. Often the routes ask you to cross or make a left onto a major street where there's no light. This is frustrating even in a car; it's near impossible at certain times of day on a bike. A few experiences like that could be enough to really sour a novice's impression of urban cycling, where if the same rider had been on a major street in the first place he'd have had no problem. Some of the cases where Google does this are baffling. In one route I generated, you're on Chicago Ave. headed west and you eventually want to go south on Cicero Ave. So, naturally, you just go up there and turn left at the light, right? A few blocks before you get there Google diverts you south down a side street, west down an alley (in some areas alleys are mapped as if they were nameless streets, an odd quirk in the data), south down another alley, and then west out to Cicero on a side street at an intersection with no light. I don't expect Google to know where every stop light is, but it shouldn't need to know that to avoid generating that route.

Another big issue for generating bike routes is data. Some data on urban bike routes actually exists. The city has a great map that has just about never steered me wrong. The Active Transportation Alliance publishes a print map of the whole area that covers pretty much all of the 'burbs -- its map also distinguishes between paved and non-paved trails, a vital distinction for road bikers. And the Illinois Department of Transportation has maps for download, which are very useful for finding which rural routes are paved and in good condition (or were at time of publishing). If they can get the rights where applicable and incorporate all this data they could generate great routes all over the state. As it is they mostly just have bike lanes and bike paths plotted. This means there's no useful information on the south side or the suburbs; it seems when there's no data Google's algorithm is much more likely to send you weaving on side streets, trying to turn left onto major streets from minor ones.

One type of data that will mostly have to come from users is on obstacles. Unusually difficult intersections, unusually bad pavement, bridges with open metal grating. The first route I tried to map had me cross under the BNSF tracks in Pilsen on Wood. The potholes under there are filled with water older than me.

My message about leaving Facebook

2010-03-12T11:04:00.004-06:00

This is my message about leaving Facebook. I had to send it to all my Facebook friends in groups of 20 because that's the most you can send to at a time. Which I guess is supposed to prevent spam somehow.

Dear all of my Facebook friends,

I will tell you all why I am leaving Facebook, but first, a story about the mayor of Chicago.

A few years ago Mayor Daley took bulldozers to the runway at Meigs Field and created a park in its place. It's a pretty good place to go running, and supposedly a decent concert venue. Has some prairie plants on it, can't argue with that. But the act of bulldozing the runways was a bald abuse of power. It was done overnight without warning anyone and stranded several aircraft at the site. People recognized that it was wrong and ranted about it for, oh, a couple days or so. Four years later he was re-elected in a landslide. Apparently Daley does enough other things well that people are willing to overlook seriously unethical behavior and vote for him. And you just know that because there are no consequences to his bad behavior he'll do whatever he wants to maintain and excercise his power.

A few years ago Facebook created the Beacon program, which would place your name and face in advertisements targeted at your friends. People were angry. They were concerned about privacy implications, for one. And, for my part, if any company wants to use my face in an ad, implying that I endorse their product, they had better have an agreement with me first, preferably one that pays me a lot of money. Otherwise it's a false representation of my endorsement. So people ranted about it for, oh, a couple days or so. And almost none of them quit Facebook. Because it does enough things well. Because quitting Facebook means leaving their friends. And you know, because Facebook said as much in a press release, that they'll try to do the same thing again and present it differently to avoid the controversy. Because no matter how badly they mess up, no matter how mad people get, they won't leave.

I hadn't even left Facebook. Not until today. I know I don't always do a great job keeping up with my friends and I thought Facebook helped me with that. But it turns out that's not true. I have this wide network of superficial Facebook friends that I barely know. Some I honestly couldn't pick out of a police lineup. It doesn't really do me a whole lot of good. And I truly believe that there should be consequences for how Facebook has used its place in our social lives.

So I want to break the spell. I know I'm not leaving any of you by leaving Facebook. Maybe I've already left you, and you're just a name in my Friends list. It happens. Or maybe we truly have things to say to eachother, and we should do it on email or something. Leaving Facebook doesn't change that, either.

Email is the best way to get in touch with me. My email address is (redacted to prevent spam; if you post a comment to my blog I'll probably read it) .

I don't want to tell you how to live your life, but if you look it over and are tired of Facebook, send out a note like this to all your FB connections and quit the site. You can use any of my text that you like. Dump the scummy timewasting marketing trap that is social networking!

Meanwhile, it just happens that Mark Zuckerberg was caught breaking into people's email using info from Facebook in the early days. What a scumbag! Seriously, when you visit Facebook all you do is make this guy richer:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010-3

With love, from Wyoming,
Al Dimond

I am trying some layout experiments that I am not going to use

2010-03-11T10:05:00.002-06:00

So this page will look strange for a while. Just trying some CSS stuff specifically in the context of Blogger.

It is a great time to be in Al Land

2010-03-08T14:11:00.003-06:00

First, I quit Facebook. If you were my friend on Facebook you got a long message about why. Maybe I'll post it here.

Second, last week Jess and I completed our RPM Challenge album for this year. It's called City Steve and the Neon Lights. It is on Alonetone, in the RPM Challenge Jukebox, and you can grab a ZIP of MP3s here. The album is set in the distant future in Chicago (I had to pick a year when writing liner notes so I chose 2250). If you want a CD or higher-quality digital tracks let me know and tell me where to send it.

distcc, the Macintosh, the Linux box

2010-02-17T18:18:00.004-06:00

Today I decided to get distcc working between Jess' computer and mine. There went my day...

I think my situation is fairly common. I have a Linux box that's pretty fast and Jess has a Mac laptop that's not quite as fast. I sometimes have to build Audacity on Jess' computer, and it would be nice if my computer could help with the compiling. Unfortunately this is not as easy as it should be. Here are some of the problems:

1. Apple's version of distcc isn't compatible with the normal version (Apple added some stuff to the protocol). It also has client-side restrictions on the names of compilers you can use, which are configurable, but require the compiler to be in the same location on the client and server. So you should build a normal version of distcc from the source package to install at /usr/local.

2. distcc 3.1 won't build if you just ./configure && make && make install because of a tricky 3-way incompatibility involving GCC, Python, and universal binaries.

3. Xcode likes to invoke gcc with the -x option to specify language. distcc refuses to distribute tasks using -x (Apple's version accepts it, but since it uses a different protocol we can't use it).

And how I did this.

First you need to get a couple of cross-compiling tools build on the Linux side. The good news is that you don't have to have everything for distcc, just as, gcc, and g++. For as you have to find an odcctools package somewhere. There's one here that should work. Then you need Apple's GCC package, matching the one on your Mac. Use gcc --version to get the release and build numbers and find the package on Apple's site.

To build GCC and as instructions #0-4 on this page should work (adjusting for correct target, version numbers, and sources — opendarwin.org no longer exists). It lists cc1plusobj at one point instead of cc1objplus — other than that, fine. Jess has an Intel Mac with MacOS 10.5.8 and XCode 3.1.4, for which the target is i686-apple-darwin9, GCC version number 4.0.1, and GCC build number 5493. So I had with binary names like i686-apple-darwin9-gcc-4.0.1; there is a compiler with the same name on the Mac in the PATH (this must be the case for distcc to work). Heed the directions! You will probably get compile errors, and they won't matter.

Next you need to build a normal version of distcc 3.1 for Mac. To get around the universal binary weirdness you need a non-universal install of Python. Grab a Python 2.6.x source package and the standard ./configure --prefix=$HOME/foo && make && make install cycle will give you a non-universal. $HOME/foo/python2.6. So you can cd back to the distcc source and do PYTHON=$HOME/foo/python2.6 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local && make && make install. It should build and install correctly. Once that's done you don't need that extra Python binary, so you can nuke $HOME/foo.

OK. Now time to make some little connections. First, on the Linux side, you need distcc to be able to find these new compilers. On Deb/Ubuntu you can set the search path by setting PATH in /etc/default/distcc. You should also set up which network interfaces to listen on in that file.

On the Mac side, as our reference notes in step #5, it's nice to have little shell scripts to run distcc. He puts them in /usr/local/bin, you can put them anywhere... the important thing is that his scripts don't work for me; I need $@ instead of @!. Maybe he has csh and I have bash or something. Anyway, for the g++, if your /bin/sh works like mine, you'll want:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/distcc <your $TARGET>-g++-<your GCC version> -msse2 "$@"

Then, to account for XCode's use of gcc -x c++ instead of g++, you'll need to get a little fancy in the gcc script (this obviously won't cover all cases but it's been good enough for me so far):

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" = "-x" ] && [ "$2" = "c++" ]
then
  shift 2
  /usr/local/bin/g++ "$@" # this should point to your g++ script, wherever it is
  exit
fi

/usr/local/bin/distcc <your $TARGET>-gcc-<your GCC version> -msse2 "$@"

Now you're almost ready. On the Mac, put localhost your_server in ~/.distcc/hosts (reverse the order if you want to go to the server first) and give it a test run (run your gcc script on something simple). tail -f /var/log/distccd.log on the Linux box to make sure the jobs are making it over. For distcc to distribute you need to use the -c flag (i.e. /usr/local/bin/gcc -c hello.c); otherwise, because there's a linking step included in the compile, it must be done locally. You can do /usr/local/bin/gcc -c hello.c && gcc -o hello hello.o && ./hello for a nice test.

Then in your XCode projects you can set the CC variable to the location of your gcc script, and CXX to the location of your g++ script. There might be a better way to do this, I'm far from an XCode expert. Since this bypasses XCode's normal way of working with distcc, it won't know to add extra parallel build steps. Fix this with: defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXNumberOfParallelBuildSubtasks 6. Or whatever number works best for you there.

I'm pretty sure this is everything essential I did (I went down lots of dead-ends, including trying to use Apple's distcc). And now distcc works!

To be honest, some of the ways Apple modifies Free tools rub me the wrong way. I appreciate that it's a lot easier to interoperate with their tools than, say, Microsoft's, but Microsoft actually wrote their own compilers; they can do it however they want. Apple used GCC and distcc in such a way that interop takes way more work than it ought to. I guess that's why the Linux box is mine, and the Mac is not.

Not the old post office building, now...

2010-02-02T00:12:00.002-06:00

The Post Office in Cody has two doors, one for going in and the other for going out. On the “out” door, facing in there's a “Do Not Exit” sticker, and facing out there's a “Enter” sticker. That makes me very curious about our mail carriers. Do they re-enter the town in some different way when they go out on their routes? Exit it when they come back in?

Resizing QEMU images with Win7 installed under Linux

2010-01-27T11:26:00.005-06:00

Here's another Windows 7 post. I started with a 16GB virtual image for Windows and almost immediately ran out of space. It turns out that it's not that hard to resize your partition; I found a very helpful forum post on the subject written a few years ago, and a couple things have changed for Windows 7, so I'll post an updated method here.

First, I'm working from the poster's second set of instructions. He claims they're more dangerous, but they're really not. You never have to work on your only copy of your data; in fact, by the end you'll have three working copies of the drive. It's probably a good idea not to delete the extras until then, but if you are crunched for disk space that's fine. Make sure you have the following commands available: qemu-img, ntfsresize, hexedit. They all should be available in packages supplied by your distro. I'm starting from an image called win7.img, using an intermediate raw image called win7.raw, and ending with an image called win7.qcow2. Obviously, you should use whatever names you're comfortable with.

Before you start, be sure you shut down Windows normally last time you used it. Otherwise ntfsresize will refuse to touch the data.

First, your disk image is probably in qcow2 format. You need to convert it to "raw" format, which is just a flat readout of the data. Check the format:

$ qemu-img info win7.img

If necessary, convert to raw; this will take several minutes (where I have qcow2 you should put the format of your image):

$ qemu-img convert -f qcow2 win7.img -O raw win7.raw

Now expand the raw image by writing to a large offset in the file. This should run very quickly on most Linux filesystems, and not consume much extra space. The bs parameter specifies the "block size" for writes (in bytes) and the seek parameter the number of blocks to skip. So I will write 83886080 × 512 = 42949672960 bytes (40 GiB) in.

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=winb.raw bs=512 count=0 seek=83886080 0+0 records in 0+0 records out 0 bytes (0 B) copied, 1.2997e-05 s, 0.0 kB/s

Become root and use Linux's loopback device to operate on the raw image as if it were a real hard drive.

$ sudo su (enter password) # losetup /dev/loop0 win7.raw

Now you'll want to check out the fake disk geometry and edit the partition table using fdisk. You'll want to switch fdisk to display in units of sectors, print the partition table, delete the main partition, and remake a larger one in its place. Your input is in bold.

# fdisk /dev/loop0 The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 5221. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) Command (m for help): u Changing display/entry units to sectors Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/loop0: 42.9 GB, 42949672960 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5221 cylinders, total 83886080 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x23830da9

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/loop0p1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.                      
/dev/loop0p2          206848    31455231    15624192    7  HPFS/NTFS

Windows 7 has created two NTFS partitions on my disk. The second one is the one we're interested in. Also note the disk geometry: 255 heads. If it doesn't say 255 heads, and your disk is large, it should say 255 heads. Obviously the disk geometry is completely made up, and I'm not really sure why Linux's loopback device should be expected to fake the same geometry as Qemu... comments on the forum suggest this value should always be 255. Anyway, on to editing the partition table entry. The number you use for the first sector must be the same as in the original partition table; for me that's 206848.

Command (m for help): d Partition number (1-4): 2 Command (m for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 2 First sector (63-83886079, default 63): 206848 Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (206848-83886079, default 83886079): Using default value 83886079 Command (m for help): t Partition number (1-4): 2 Hex code (type L to list codes): 7 Changed system type of partition 2 to 7 (HPFS/NTFS) Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/loop0: 42.9 GB, 42949672960 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5221 cylinders, total 83886080 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x23830da9

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/loop0p1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.                      
/dev/loop0p2          206848    83886079    41839616    7  HPFS/NTFS

Command (m for help): w The partition table has been altered! Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table. WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 22: Invalid argument. The kernel still uses the old table. The new table will be used at the next reboot or after you run partprobe(8) or kpartx(8) Syncing disks.

Now re-connect the partition table and check that it worked.

# losetup -d /dev/loop0 # losetup /dev/loop0 win7.raw # fdisk -ul /dev/loop0 Disk /dev/loop0: 42.9 GB, 42949672960 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5221 cylinders, total 83886080 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x23830da9

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/loop0p1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.                      
/dev/loop0p2          206848    83886079    41839616    7  HPFS/NTFS

# losetup -d /dev/loop0

Now, especially if you're resizing from a much smaller drive, we should check that each of the NTFS partitions has the correct number of heads stored in it (the forum post has an explanation of why this is important; to make a long story short, Windows won't start if it's wrong). To find the address of each partition, take its start value from fdisk and multiply by the sector size of 512 bytes. Then convert to hex.

# bc 2048*512 1048576 (this is the start of the first partition in bytes
206848*512 105906176 (this is the start of the second partition in bytes)
quit # printf "%x %x\n" 1048576 105906176 100000 6500000 (these are the hexadecimal addresses)

Open win7.raw in hexedit; hit return to enter an address, enter the first address, hit return again. Now you're at the start of the first NTFS partition. At an offset 0x1A bytes from that is the head count. Navigate to that byte (if the original address was 0x100000 you'll be at 0x10001A). Make sure it's FF (the hex value of 255). If not, type over that byte with FF. Then do the exact same thing for the second address. Hit ctrl-x to exit, confirming changes if necessary.

Now you can use ntfsresize to actually resize the Windows partition. You have to connect the loopback device to the start of the partition you're resizing this time; this is the decimal version of the second offset you found in the last step. Before doing anything with ntfsresize we check that everything is OK using the -n flag.

# losetup -o105906176 /dev/loop0 win7.raw # ntfsresize -n /dev/loop0 ntfsresize v2.0.0 (libntfs 10:0:0) Device name : /dev/loop0 NTFS volume version: 3.1 Cluster size : 4096 bytes Current volume size: 15999169024 bytes (16000 MB) Current device size: 42843766784 bytes (42844 MB) New volume size : 42843763200 bytes (42844 MB) Checking filesystem consistency ... 100.00 percent completed Accounting clusters ... Space in use : 15875 MB (99.2%) Collecting resizing constraints ... Schedule chkdsk for NTFS consistency check at Windows boot time ... Resetting $LogFile ... (this might take a while) Updating $BadClust file ... Updating $Bitmap file ... Updating Boot record ... The read-only test run ended successfully.

If your output is something like that you're ready to go. The default action is to expand the partition to its largest size, so you only need to run:

# ntfsresize /dev/loop0 Device name : /dev/loop0 NTFS volume version: 3.1 Cluster size : 4096 bytes Current volume size: 15999169024 bytes (16000 MB) Current device size: 42843766784 bytes (42844 MB) New volume size : 42843763200 bytes (42844 MB) Checking filesystem consistency ... 100.00 percent completed Accounting clusters ... Space in use : 15875 MB (99.2%) Collecting resizing constraints ... WARNING: Every sanity check passed and only the dangerous operations left. Make sure that important data has been backed up! Power outage or computer crash may result major data loss! Are you sure you want to proceed (y/[n])? y Schedule chkdsk for NTFS consistency check at Windows boot time ... Resetting $LogFile ... (this might take a while) Updating $BadClust file ... Updating $Bitmap file ... Updating Boot record ... Syncing device ... Successfully resized NTFS on device '/dev/loop0'.

Hopefully your result is something like the above. Now you can disconnect the loopback device and end the sudo session.

# losetup -d /dev/loop0 # exit

You should try out the new image by starting Qemu/KVM the way you usually would, except substituting the name of the new image for that of the old one. Windows will check the disk (because ntfsresize told it to), and everything should come out OK. If not, you still have the original disk image. If everything works you can delete your original image and go on -- if everything is broken you should delete the raw image, figure out what went wrong, and start over.

Now you probably don't want to keep the image around as a raw; qcow2 takes up less space on the host system and has a lot of nice features. You can easily convert it to qcow2 like this:

$ qemu-img convert -f raw win7.raw -O qcow2 win7.qcow2

Make sure the new qcow2 image works. If so, delete the raw image and you're done.

Thanks to poster IntuitiveNipple on the QEMU forum for writing a nice explanation of the bit-hacking necessary on NTFS, and the overall procedure for resizing images with Windows installed.

EDIT: I edited this post to fix table formatting in fdisk output.

The Windows 7 Chronicles: GNU Patch, mt.exe, and the horror of UAC

2010-01-18T16:29:00.004-06:00

Real quick one here. patch is a nice little command-line utility. GNU provides a fine version, and there's a Windows build available through the GnuWin32 project. When you try to run it on Windows 7 you get UAC prompts. Why? It turns out that Windows guesses, based on the name of the program, that it's going to patch application files, and goes ahead and requests elevated permissions for it that it doesn't really need. This was discovered a long time ago and a bug was filed against GnuWin, because it's clearly their responsibility to code around Microsoft's incredibly stupid heuristics*.

*in·cred·i·bly stu·pid heu·ris·tics, n: Heuristics that happen to be wrong in my case.

The bug report lists a manifest that you can embed into patch.exe to fix the problem. It looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
<trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
<security>
<requestedPrivileges>
<requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false"/>
</requestedPrivileges>
</security>
</trustInfo>
</assembly>

Embedding it took me a while, but it's ultimately not that hard. First copy the manifest into a file somewhere. You have to use a tool called mt.exe, which is part of the Windows SDK. It's probably not in your path, but it's in the path of a Visual Studio Command Prompt. So open up one of those with admin permissions (under Win7: Start->All Programs->Microsoft Visual C++ 200x->Visual Studio Tools; right-click on Visual Studio 200x Command Prompt, select Run as administrator...). Then cd '\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin' (or wherever you've installed it) and mt -manifest yourfile -outputresource:patch.exe;1. Why ;1 at the end? Because Microsoft says so.

QEMU/KVM, Windows 7, blurry text

2010-01-06T20:17:00.004-06:00

My mom got me a copy of Windows 7 for Christmas so I could run it in virtualization under Linux for development purposes (Audacity, mostly). That's been somewhat successful. I'm using KVM/QEMU and none of the audio devices that QEMU emulates have 64-bit Win7 drivers. Maybe I'll look at writing an emulation layer for a more modern sound card (it might be slightly easier to write a new 64-bit Windows driver for one of the cards QEMU already emulates, but it might be easier to get an addition to QEMU distributed widely). Anyway. I'm mostly writing this because I just solved a smaller, odder problem: the text in Windows just looked horrible! I generally prefer my text on Kubuntu to text on Windows*, but I didn't remember it being bad on Windows.

* I think people come to prefer the fonts and rendering style of the systems they use every day. I mostly use Kubuntu, and I find text easier to read there than anywhere else. It could just be that I like the font shapes better. FreeType (X11) and ClearType (Windows) look pretty similar given the same fonts, although there are some things FreeType can't do with hinting information because of patents. I find Mac OS X's font rendering ugly and hard to read, but that's probably just because it's more different and I'm not used to it.

So these days QEMU's virtual VGA window can be resized. When you do this it just scales everything in the window. Unfortunately this makes anti-aliased, sub-pixel rendered text (ClearType) and deliberately sharp graphics (Diesel Sweeties) look really bad. KDE lets you set a window to an exact numerical size, which should fix the problem, but it doesn't; the size includes window decorations. Lame.

So I found a little program called xdotool that, among many other things, lets you resize windows from the command line by client size. Rad. It's in the Ubuntu repos, even. But setting the client size to exactly Windows' resolution didn't help.

So I took some screenshots, blew 'em up in the GIMP, and found that the window size was one pixel too large in each dimension. With my Windows resolution set to 1152x864 I actually need the QEMU window's client size to be 1151x863. I'm not sure if this is a weird problem with Windows, QEMU, or X11... but it's weird. And now that it's fixed, everything looks OK in virtualized Windows.

The Subjective New Year

2010-01-01T01:56:00.002-06:00

You know what, there's no need to defer to a clock to determine when the new year starts. Saying it's 2010 because the clock struck midnight is silly. I think I can say definitively: last time I woke up it was 2009, and next time I wake up it will be 2010. Somewhere in between something has changed, or will change, and I'm not really sure what that was. Or will be. And there's no reason for it to be the same thing for everyone.

For the guy that always sets his clocks 10 minutes ahead the new year starts at 11:50, because if he doesn't get going now for that 12:30 appointment he'll be late!

For the super-cute couple the new year starts when they start kissing. Or when they finish kissing. Something to do with kissing.

For the born-and-raised Chicagoan living out in the Mountain time zone the new year starts at 11.

For the programmers and admins stuck working on banal but "critical" issues, the new year doesn't start until they're done. Even if it takes until February.

On the other hand, for some accountants it's been 2010 since October.

Maybe for me it will be 2010 when I click the button to publish this silly blog post.

Cody did a ball-drop on the roof of the Irma. I was personally hoping the guy controlling the ball would decide to call the new year based on impatience with sitting out in the cold weather.

For a lot of the people out drinking too much... well... I think they go right back to the beginning. 2009 when they last woke up, 2010 when they'll next wake up, with something uncertain happening in between. If you're one of these, please don't drive anywhere. Or handle fireworks or guns.

Happy New Year!

Sandisk Pulls a Sony Rootkit. News at 11.

2009-12-24T22:23:00.002-06:00

My brother just bought a Sandisk flash drive, planning to put some sort of cute auto-run holiday greeting on it and give it as a white-elephant gift (the greeting would be a surprise to the recipient, but it would remove itself after first run so as not to be annoying). He stuck the drive into his computer and it installed some crazy junk onto his hard drive. Hoisted by his own petard, I guess. But here's the nature of what it installed:

There's a small partition that Windows recognizes as a virtual CD-ROM drive for some reason. On this partition is the autorun script that installs the junk onto your hard drive. Because it's detected as a virtual CD-ROM you can't delete or modify it easily from Windows.
If you manage to delete this partition from the drive and zero-out the whole thing, then put it in a Windows machine that already has the software installed on it, the software re-installs the partition onto the flash drive.
The software that's installed on your hard drive isn't installed as a service and isn't registered with Add/Remove Programs. So it can't be disabled un-installed through any of the standard channels. There is an un-install feature within the software itself. I'm not really sure I'd trust it.

The takeaways:

Sandisk: This is evil. And Sandisk (or whoever wrote the software) knows it. When you're writing software that you intend to be genuinely useful to users you don't install without permission, you don't make it hard to delete, you don't make it come back when the user clearly wants it gone. You do this because you want the software running and the user probably doesn't.
Microsoft: Why still autorun CDs without confirmation? Why allow flash drive partitions to show up as CDs? Why make it so ridiculously hard to disable autorun (apparently the obvious controls don't always work on Vista/7 and you have to use Group Policy Editor or Regedit).
People: If you must run Windows, disable auto-run. If Mac has an auto-run feature, disable that. If one of the Unix desktops wants to do auto-run, disable that. It's a mind-numbingly stupid idea from a security perspective.

</soapbox>

Denver Airport Concourse Comparo!

2009-12-20T15:21:00.002-06:00

Yesterday while waiting for a connecting flight in Denver Airport with Jess I realized that I've spent an unreasonably large portion of my life waiting for connecting flights in Denver Airport. When Jess suggested that we find food my first thought was, "There's no good vegetarian food in this concourse. Let's go to the United concourse." And thus the Denver Airport Concourse Comparo was born.

Concourse A

Airlines: Frontier (17 gates plus several more in the small-plane area operated by Lynx), Continental (3), JetBlue (2), AeroMexico/Air Canada/Lufthansa (sharing 2 gates), British Airways, Mexicana, Midwest, AirTran, Alaska, Frontier JetExpress, Great Lakes (several in the small-plane area)
Food (constraints: cheap-ish, fast, vegetarian): The only place to get quick vegetarian food in the A Concourse is Panda Express, and there your choice is basically lo mein and... more lo mein. Oh, yeah, there's some place called Lefty's with some vegetarian stuff, but they're on my blacklist from a previous trip for only serving breakfast food at 8 AM. THIS IS AN AIRPORT, PEOPLE! TIME HAS NO MEANING HERE! That's what pushed me to the Panda Express... I'm sure breakfast exists in China, and maybe even breakfast food, but in America Panda Express will sell you mushy lo mein all day. Um, where was I? Concourse A has Hope's Cookies, which are OK. No trendy coffee joints, but apparently there's a Quiznos with espresso and a full bar.
Centerpiece Art (There is lots of public art in Denver Airport, and much of it is in the terminal, which is outside the scope of this comparo; I'm limiting myself to the centerpieces around the tram stations and vertically above): On one side twisted train tracks through a desert; on the other a semi-flattened globe anchored by structures evoking satellite dishes or grandstands. There's some kind of museum exhibit on the mezzanine level, but it's not memorable.

Comments: Frontier is a pretty good airline but its concourse is the worst in the airport.

Concourse B

Airline: United (16 bazillion gates), United Express (7 bazillion gates in each small-plane area).
Food: There's a pretty good quick Mexican place on the second level. Lots of variety. There's a TCBY. Annoying hipsters and chipper businessdroids rejoice: B Concourse has a Coffee Beanery, a Seattle's Best, two Starbuckses, and a Caribou Coffee. There's something called Pour la France. I didn't know la France was a liquid.
Centerpiece Art: There is a sculpture of an astronaut down in the tram station. The motorized walkway continues through the center area, leaving room only for some random neon squiggles and some arches, like something out of that crazy walkway in O'Hare from the United concourse to baggage claim.

Comments: B is the biggest and busiest concourse. This last time there was an enormous Crocs stand on the upper level. It's the most mall-like of the concourses (but not even approaching DFW). The art is not so hot, the crowds are crowdy, this concourse ranks in the middle.

Concourse C

Concourse C is the concourse you're not supposed to know about. It's really a top-C-cret military base. Say it out loud: top-C-cret. And they thought they could get away with it. If you want to figure this stuff out you have to think like they think. See the patterns.

Airlines: I guess the army or whoever it was (CIA? WTO? Illuminati?) put up fake airlines and stuff there: 12 gates for "Southwest" and another 5 for "Northwest" and "Delta". Like I believe that -- worst fake airline names ever, amirite? It's rounded out by "US Airways" and "American", which are almost as obvious. We didn't see no planes take off, that's for sure. Oh, and they put the whole concourse in a TIME VORTEX.
Food: There's a TCBY in there. Not as big as the one in B. And some place that claims to have tamales, we haven't tried them.
TIME VORTEX: When you enter the TIME VORTEX you see spinning pinwheels. When you leave the TIME VORTEX you see flashing lights and a swinging sickle. A++++++ very good TIME VORTEX. Would TIME VORTEX again.
Centerpiece Art: It's this awesome decayed garden. Only the truly enlightened can see it, which is how it got so decayed: most people can't even see C Concourse at all, let alone the garden, so nobody can maintain it. Hell, I have it on good word the President's secret puppet master himself can only see the garden through a shard of a mirror once belonging to his puppetmaster. I am on to something for sure!

Comments: Jess and I just took the tram here to see what it was and it opened our eyes. They paged Jess over the intercom, so she picked up an information phone and dialed the number for "paging". Except that's for when you want to page someone else, so she hung up and dialed information. They said the page was actually for a "Jessica Mylan", not her. We got the message loud and clear: we know you're here and we're watching. So we went to a gate for a "Southwest" flight to San Francisco and sat and waited. We started talking one of the people at the gate. An agent or a dummy? We introduced ourselves as Jessica Mylan and Billy Philbert. He said, "Didn't they just page you, over the intercom?" The agent at the gate called for boarding. Nobody lined up. We got the hell out of Concourse C.

Fiiiiinally.

2009-12-18T18:36:00.003-06:00

OK, here's the recording of the concert, nicely broken into tracks and with dead spots mostly cut out: LINKY.

Some things came out better than others, but for a first time doing this sort of thing, and for a concert where I am doing most of the instrumental parts on instruments I barely know how to play, we did OK. I just need to find a band where I can play harmonica or clarinet (or bass, even, if I don't have to actually keep rhythm or do anything important).

I don't know why...

2009-12-18T14:08:00.002-06:00

...but Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, from the first time I heard it, always felt right. Like something I'd heard before, but not (which I think was sort of the point). It's one of my favorite pieces of music of all time (ZOMG I think I should update my Facebook to reflect this fact). I cleaned out one of John's old receivers a bit ago and now I can listen to it again. I can't listen to Stravinsky on headphones.

Anyway, now that I have some speakers I will get back to cutting up the library concert and try to post it before leaving for Chicago. I really lost momentum after Thanksgiving. More later.

Spam comments

2009-12-16T11:54:00.002-06:00

In case any of the spambots posting comments to my blog are sentient and understand English, I'd like to point some things out.

Nobody reads my blog (at least not at the blogspot address that the comments are posted to)
I get notified of comments to my blog by email and I delete every spammy one.

You're wasting my time and yours by posting spam to my blog. It would probably be better if you stopped.

Personally I find it hard to hate spammers. Well, a lot of them, at least. I'm currently in the middle of a frustrating and difficult job search. But I know that it's possible for me to find a job in my chosen field with a stable employer. A lot of people get involved in the spam business because that's not possible for them. Some are clever programmers that, because of where they live and their language skills, don't really have an opportunity to work for "legitimate" software companies. Many others may not even be that -- they're just people playing demanded roles in a global market with enormous wealth disparities. The entry costs for spamming are so low compared to the entry costs for other global business models that it's really no surprise people turn to spam. If we in the USA are annoyed by it we should get involved in micro-loans or something.

Really, the worst offenders are educated people from rich countries. This blog post will get mirrored on Facebook, so I'll use Facebook as an example. Get people to sign up all their friends through Facebook. Now they're a captive audience. If you quit Facebook because of its ludicrous policies on privacy and advertising you're quitting all your friends (who can't be bothered to remember your email address anymore). So nobody ever leaves, even when Facebook makes unpopular decisions -- and they can do this because they have near-total control over your data and the software you access it with. This is the best contribution Mark Zuckerberg could make to the world with his Harvard education. To me that's a lot more scummy than what 419 scammers do, and about on par with most Craigslist scams.