Review: Notes on Being a Man

 Notes on Being a Man is Scott Galloway's open letter to his two teenage sons. It falls into the same genre of self-help books as Succeeding, and since they're both written by rich white guys who won the birth lottery, have the same attitude of excessive confidence and insufficient exposure to different lifestyles and alternative approaches to life.

Nevertheless, both are highly opinionated, and not afraid to call on BS, which means that they're worth reading, and entertaining while reading. In particular, Scott Galloway is one of the few faculty members willing to berate and publicly call out Universities as completely failing to serve their mission by turning themselves into exclusive clubs and aiming for a high rejection rate rather than attempting to educate as many deserving kids as possible.

As smart, talented, and hardworking as their parents were at their age, young people can’t get into the same-quality colleges, higher education having figured out a way to extract more money by artificially constraining supply, thereby forcing these kids to attend lesser places that are—wait for it—exponentially more expensive. (kindle loc 1600)

The top twenty universities could expand their supply—seats for incoming freshmen—50 percent within the decade. But they won’t, as the prestige that stems from scarcity is the ointment for irrelevance that most academics thirst for. (kindle loc 3189)

Rich people who got rich and get to pontificate a lot get to tell their life story. Galloway tells his with an unusual amount of humility --- he got into UCLA on appeal because his mom was a single mother despite having awful grades. He got hired as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley because he was a rower and the interviewer hired anyone who was a rower. As a selfish person he divorced his first wife for no good reason other than that he wanted to move to New York, having become a wealthy successful guy. Basically, his big skill was being able to give great talks, which shows that you can be successful as long as you can talk your way into other people giving you money.

Nevetheless, the book is full of great aphorisms that are told well, and as someone who's a parent, would do well to heed:

The kid you have this summer is leaving… forever. The skinny boy with the lion’s mane who tiptoed into our room and, on first evidence of me stirring, would say, “Dad, let’s make a plan for the day,” is gone. It’s incredibly sad. A relative of his will be back next summer, but different. The compensation is that there will be new attributes you find hilarious and endearing. But still, sad. I put, mentally, a big sign above my boys’ heads: LIMITED EDITION, YOUR ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD SON, ONE SUMMER ONLY. (kindle loc 3200)

 Central to the prosperity and survival of our species is mothers and fathers who have an irrational passion for their kids’ well-being. To fill this role for people who aren’t your offspring is generosity toward the planet and species. I’ve never understood the idolatry of Steve Jobs. The world needs more engaged fathers, not a better fucking phone. (kindle loc 3764)

Of course, I'm biased. Whenever I read an author, I largely judge them by whether I agree with them. 

the United States is the best place to make money; Europe is the best place to spend it. (kindle loc 1582)

(The preceding sentences prior to my quote, however, I completely disagree with).

One of the criticisms I read of this book is that many of the issues Galloway talks about apply also to young women, or even non-white men. I agree. On the other hand, I think that criticism ignores the purpose of the book, which is for a well-intentioned father to leave notes for his son so that if they ever decide his stuff is worth reading (which seems unlikely if his sons are anything like mine), they will have something to refer to. (And they will have no excuse that their Dad didn't say anything or provide decent advice)

If there's any criticism I have about this book, it seems to me that Galloway has pretty low standards for being a father. He admits that he spent most of his kids' childhood traveling for work and focusing work rather than being there for them. He seems to think that the extent of a father's job is to show up for the kids' soccer games and providing lots of money (he flies his kids business class). I guess for a lot of people just becoming super wealthy is the big attribute that most people would want in a father.

The book  is worth reading because it's entertaining. I'm not sure I'd agree with Galloway, but hey, one person can only live one life, as as Pengtoh says, the best way to get to live multiple lives is to read a lot.

Point Reyes Coast Campground

Point Reyes has two fantastic campgrounds, one of which is Wildcat, the other is Coast Campground. (the other campgrounds are either only accessible by boat or inland) We've been to Wildcat on the way to Alameres Falls but never been to Coast Campground. I saw that someone cancelled their reservation for December 30th, and the weather forecast for the 30th was good, so I shifted my existing reservation from New Year's Day to that day.

Coast Campground is uniquely accessible by bike. It's only 3 miles from the Limantour Lodge trailhead along a mostly flat trail, so we brought our bikes: I put my gravel wheels from the Roadini onto Bowen's. Boen's Salsa Journeyman was already set up with 38mm Pacenti Pari-Moto tires, and I brought my ancient Airborne Hardtail as it already had a trailer attachment installed. Xiaoqin, of course, brought her newly acquired Ritchey Montebello. I had purchased Rhinowalk Fork bags for Xiaoqin and Boen's bike, but only 3 out of 4 bags arrived, and Boen didn't like the unbalanced feel of having only one side. We also packed our saddlebags. The Yakima bike trailer was loaded with the car camping oriented Wawona tent and a backpack with all the sleeping bags.

Driving from home, we bought lunch in San Francisco and ate lunch at a picnic table along the way. Arriving at the Limantour Lodge, we saw that it had vacancy, but since we already paid for the campground just got out the bikes and started riding. The bike ride wasn't completely flat, and with a load I actually needed to shift to the lowest gear for the final approach to the campground. You actually saw the beach pretty quick, but the trail took you to the campground where there was a bike rack. We had Site #3, and to my surprise when we pitched the tent we had an ocean view. I was disappointed when I saw we had no fire ring so our firewood was useless.

After pitching the tent, we walked down to the beach and walked around before heading up the Coast trail. It was already 2:45pm, so we didn't have time for an extended walk but we'd never been on this part of the Coast trail before so we just decided to treat it as an out and back. Along the way, we could see various bluffs, beaches, and gaps on the cliff side through which we could see the ocean. We even spotted Elk towards the 3:30pm turn around point. It was very windy. We had talked to some campers who were leaving as we were entering the area and they said that it had been very calm the night before so this was just a sign of the impending storm.

Returning to camp, we made coffee and apple cider, then started making dinner. I noticed that there was a spot near the beach which was protected from the wind, so while waiting the requisite 10 minutes for the mountain house dinners to cook we walked there and admired the gorgeous sunset and ensuing light show. I'd forgotten to bring headlights, but between the two phones and my Garmin we had light.

The night was awful. The wind kept flapping and shaking the tent making it hard to sleep. Even the kids complained. By the time it was 6:00am Xiaoqin was up and in a hurry to go. "I'm not waiting for the rain!" We packed everything up and started cycling back to the car. To be honest, it wasn't very cold and I regretted putting on long underwear and wearing my jacket as I warmed up pretty quick.

We reached the trailhead and there was Yoyo Zhou and his daughter and son, whom I'd never met. We said hi and caught up while Yoyo helped us put the bikes back on the roof. Yoyo's wife showed up --- she had spotted us while we were riding and she was running and we'd never met either! We made brief introductions but since we hadn't had breakfast we were in a bit of a hurry to head home. I would only realize later that Yoyo's birthday was New Year's Eve!

It rained quite a bit on our way home, but when I got home I realized that the bikes weren't even really wet, indicating that all the spots on the windshield were because we were driving at 65mph. Nevertheless, it started raining in earnest so we were glad we got out with a dry tent.

Review: The Escape

 The Escape won an award for the best Sports-related book of the year. It was on sale for $3 on Amazon (and the library didn't have a copy). The book is an autobiography of Robert Millar (now Philippa York), a professional cyclist in the 1980s and 1990s who transitioned to being a woman after he retired from the sport.

What makes the book unique is that rather than being ghost-written by David Walsh, it is written as a series of conversations between Walsh and York as they are journalists for two different periodicals covering the 2020 Tour de France. So the book goes from the 2020 Tour de France to older editions of the same race from Robert Millar's point of view, which sort of makes you think that the various editions of the Tour are largely similar, going over the same mountains with similar rivalries between the various participants.

This is not true, of course. Millar retired from cycling just as the EPO era was taking off. Before that, the drug of choice were steroids, which weren't actually very effective for endurance sports. So while York does admit that Millar did occasionally dope, she could claim that while cheating was rampant it didn't have much effect on the race.

Probably the best reason to read this book is to gain an understanding of how someone could grow up wanting to be a woman yet was gifted with a strong body that could reach the pinnacle of an extremely male-dominated and demanding sport, but at all points could still wish that he was a woman. Keep in mind that Millar did marry a straight woman and had 2 children!

Having said that, you get the feeling that Millar was such a completely different person from York (Walsh mentioned that no way would have wanted to drive around France with Millar!) that her perspective on Millar was maybe quite warped.

I am of two minds about this book. On the one hand, I think I would have preferred a traditional ghost-written autobiography. The way the book was written it felt constantly jarring to flip from a contemporary Tour De France to previous races. I feel like I gained a lot more understanding of what a body dysmorphic person feels. But I also got no special insight on what a professional cyclist's life was like. Millar's story was just too unique.

The book is short and a quick read so maybe you should just read it and judge for yourself.

Review: Jan Ullrich - The Best there Never Was

 I saw Jan Ullrich on the used book shelf at the library for $3, and at that price I bought it and took it home and read it.

The book is written in what I consider an odd fashion, with the author going over Jan's career coming out of East Germany's training system and then joining Deutsche Telekom as a budding pro. His successes and failures (which are well documented) were at this point in the book attributed to his upbringing and personality (the guy loved food and when he was in his off season was famous for wiping out the contents of his friends' refrigerators).

Then you get into the later half of the book before the author brings up what was common in that era of cycling, which was doping with EPO. There's no question that Jan Ullrich was an enormously talented rider (his teammates described him going from getting dropped to beating them over 3 days during a training camp), and that everyone else in that era doped with EPO because there were no tests for it and the UCI simply set a hematocrit level that was acceptable, essentially giving everyone a license to dope up to the 50% mark. What I didn't know was that when the test was finally developed you could go back to urine samples taken from those years and it would definitely prove that Ullrich had EPO markers in his urine.

I have a controversial opinion about doping, which is that it should be allowed as long as the doctors and researchers involved documented and published what it did. The sport would change from being hero worship about bike riders to something like Formula F-1, where the true heroes are the engineers and mechanics rather than the drivers. I could definitely get behind a sport where the doctors and physiologists are the heroes getting paid multiple millions of dollars in salary and getting a share of the prize money. The contribution to medical science would be significant, and people would give up on hero-worshiping athletes simply for being genetically gifted. Of course, doping does distort the field --- the prize would go towards people whose bodies respond better to doping. On the other hand, none of the sporting events I've ever bothered to watch seem particularly big on "natural" human behavior anyway.

Anyway, this part of the book was badly written, I think partly because Dan Friebe probably assumes any reader of the book is a big fan of Ullrich and would know all the sordid details of his life already. I certainly didn't, so kept wondering why some irrelevant details kept coming up until the reveal of the doping scandal that ended Ullrich's career. The story all seemed pretty sad up to that point but then once you realized everyone in the Peloton was doping you found yourself wondering what was the point.

What was interesting to me was that Friebe indicated in the book that Germany became a big cycling country only after Ullrich won the Tour de France and Deutsche Telekom (later T-Mobile) became a world famous cycling team. I'd always thought that Germany was huge on cycling because I saw so many Germans on bike tours, but of course soccer was always more popular. In any case, apparently because of this Jan Ullrich got way more attention in Germany than even Lance Armstrong did in the USA during the period, which probably affected his mental health as well.

Anyway, the story of lost potential in the book comes across, as well as a note that while Ullrich never lived up to his potential, mental fortitude and discipline must have genetic components as well (and obviously many people will tell you we're all moist robots without free wheel), so overall Ullrich probably never had a chance despite his prodigious physical talent.

Review: LG Gram 17" Intel Core Ultra 7 258V Laptop

 With my ancient Dell XPS laptop feeling super slow in 2025, I decided it was time to acquire a new laptop. The Dells are no longer my laptop of choice, after they started emulated the Apple Touchbar even though Apple has already abandoned it as a stupidly bad idea. Thinkpads are no longer priced competitively, even as much as I love their touchpoint.

In the past, I've always bought the smallest, lightest laptop with a combination of portability and good battery life. But when I saw that the 2025 LG Gram 17" laptop was on sale for  $1000 during black Friday, I took a look at the specs and bought it, reasoning that I could try it for a month and see whether I liked it despite how big it would be.

The machine arrived and it's impressive how light it is. It weighs 3.22 pounds (or less than the 15 inch Macbook Air, and less than the 14 inch MacBook Pro, though slightly more than the 13 inch MacBook Pro). The 17" screen is huge, and runs at 2560x1600 resolution, with 2 USB C ports, 2 USB-A ports, a HDMI slot, and a headphone/mic jack. Because the weight is spread over such a large surface area, it feels a lot less dense than any of the other laptops I compared it against.

The keyboard feels great, and the processor is fast, especially if you turn off power savings mode. I tried several photo editing programs on it and they definitely work through photos quite a bit faster than my old laptop did. The touchpad was also pretty good --- it was big, did a good job of palm rejection, and very responsive. I still prefer having a trackball or mouse for fine great photo work, but for editing a blog post or writing e-mail this is a great laptop. It even has a dedicated numeric keypad for working on spreadsheets.

The battery life isn't as great as I was hoping for, given the relatively large battery and how the Intel 258V processor is supposed to have power efficiency in mind. It definitely qualifies for "all day" battery life, but don't expect more than an 8 hour day, and it will go much less if you're editing videos or photos. If you're writing in Microsoft Word you'll get much more than 8 hours. (Sad to say, modern web browsers are not power efficient!)

Sleep mode is usually where windows laptops do worse than Macbooks. To my surprise this laptop does a good job in sleep mode, losing about 5% overnight. This is more than good enough.

Needless to say, this is a great laptop. You wouldn't commute with it on your bike, but if you were doing a fixed based tour or on a hiking tour where luggage delivery delivers your baggage, it's definitely something worth carrying around. Color me impressed!

Review: The Housekeeper and the Professor

 The Housekeeper and the Professor is Yoko Ogawa's novel about a housekeeper who cleans the house for a former math professor who's lost the ability to form new memories a la Memento or 50 First Dates. Like in Memento, the professor solves his problem by writing notes to himself. He still has a good fundamental grasps on Math and loves number theory, so educates the housekeeper (who doesn't have a good math background) on basics like prime numbers, perfect numbers, twin primes, and Euler's identity.

The novel is basically a literary person's idea of what would make a Math person happy with a novel. It's discussion of Math is shallow (for instance, the housekeeper never gets an explication of Euler's identity), and there are lots of little factoids but no real explication of number theory. There's even a discussion of Andrew Wiles and Fermat's Last Theorem, but again, no broader explanation of what it is.

Ultimately, the story is about the housekeeper, her son, and the professor (nobody is named in the novel), and his past history, and it's supposed to be a feel good slice of life novel. Unfortunately, it uses the same schtick as Memento, which is such a superior story that this novel feels dumb instead. Fortunately, the novel is short but despite that I found myself thinking that I wasted my time and should have rewatched Memento instead.

Review: Codex

 Codex is Lev Grossman's book about a rare book hunt in Manhattan by an investment banker who was roped into doing this prior to a transfer to London. It is full of unlikeable characters (except on very sympathetic researcher), and is chock full of interesting facts about medieval books that nevertheless fails to interest me.

I have no idea why I kept reading it despite the lack of interest. The protagonist, for instance, doesn't seem like the kind of person who would unpack books themselves rather than hire a task rabbit. While hunting for this rare book, he encounters an attractive young scholar, and they develop a relationship. Yet in the final section of the novel when he has a chance to bring Margaret along he doesn't for no reason other than for the author to finish off the novel with some sort of a moral.

Lev Grossman's novels are not generally very good --- the Magicians, for instance is a much better TV show than the books would indicate. I cannot recommend this book to anyone.