MTB Whistler: Days 4-5

 On Thursday we spit our time between technical trails and flow trails again, this time riding Call Me Maybe (too hard) and Palm Corners and Earth Circus.  I was developing callouses on my hands from the pounding I was getting from the bike. I told the bike shop I suspected my suspension was bottoming and when they checked it they said no, it's the opposite --- there was too much air in the tires! I guess the big advantage of owning your own DH bike is that you can get the bike dialed in. But there's no point owning a DH bike in the Bay Area --- there aren't any ski lifts and every ride starrts or ends with a massive climb. I've even got to the point where I'd rather ride my Roadini off pavement! 

On Friday, we got our lesson with Tommy --- he had agreed to meet us at Creekside. There was a bit of drama in the morning as Bowen had lost his goggles. I would later find the (after buying a new set!) at the top of the lift sandwiched between Bowen's back and his backpack! Bowen and I got a lesson in technical bike handling on Devil's Cup, and it was quite enlightening to see how slow you could do this.

Then we got a jump lessons. "We've been doing it all wrong." said Bowen. Apparently as you approach the lip of a jump you're supposed to push down with your arms and legs to compress the suspension and then rise up smoothly as you hit the lip and let the bike come up to you. Bowen did a couple of beautiful jumps on crank it up while I fumbled and flustered like the old uncool Dad that I was. Then I had to wait a long time at the bottom of Crank it up because Bowen had crashed. He made it down safely but he was too beaten up to ride the rest of the trip. We took the bus back to Creekside because the park was now closed because of lightning, and then returned the bikes. Bowen and I went to the Samurai Bown for dinner because our lunch was a grocery store lunch at Whistler village. 

Review: Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach

 I checked out Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach from the library on a lark, started watching the first episode and was immediately hooked. The series is a bunch of civil engineering case studies, with a view to understanding the various phases of engineering a structure and looking at where each phase can fail, with dire consequences.

What is so great about this video series is that Professor Stephen Ressler builds small, simplified models of the structures he's talking about and then directly demonstrates the failure modes. This makes everything visual and impactful, resulting in a directly intuitive approach to understanding the mechanism of failure without having to do math or go into esoteric analysis.

This would be wasted if the disasters he chose to cover were not meaningful or interesting, but he's picked excellent case studies. Even better, in some of these cases, such as the Tacoma Narrows bridge, everything you learned in school about it was probably wrong, and he carefully debunks the incorrect explanation and shows you what happened.

By far the most impressive disasters depicted in the series are the recent ones such as the Florida International University pedestrian bridge. That's because while you can tell yourself that in the old days we didn't have adequate tools, models or experience building these types of structures, there's no such excuse for more recent structures, and you learn that anything new you do (such as a new method of construction) comes with significant risks. The cost over-runs resulting in mistakes run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and there's frequently loss of life involved as well.

I love the section that get into management. For instance, the Challenger Disaster is frequently touted as an example where engineers disagree with management, and management just refused to listen. Professor Ressler points out that everyone in the chain of command was trained as an engineer as well! I enjoyed every lecture and now understand why cantilever bridges were common in the 1930s-1960s but were not as frequently used in recent years --- it turns out that they were easier to analyze with limited computational power, and with modern computer systems we're able to make more highly optimized structures because we have the compute power available.

I highly recommend this series. If you're an engineer, or work managing engineers, this series contains important material for you. Well worth the time!

Robinson: The Original and Three Covers

This is one of those posts that I write to myself for future reference. I'd been listening to Robinson (by Spitz) in the car when driving Bowen around, so he picked up on it. Then during a youtube session, we found a video performance on Youtube:

OK, so a random Japanese pop song, right? But no, Debbie Gibson (of all people) actually produced an English version cover:
That blew my mind. But my favorite cover of this song has got to be Goose House's duet, with two singers and 4 instruments. That's really worth checking out (watch the motion of the guy's right leg --- talk about multi-tasking):
If that's not to your taste you can go for the a Capella version:

Review: Africa

It is no secret that if you want to use your HDTV to the max, you attach a blu-ray player to it and then play one of BBC's nature documentaries. When I first upgraded to a HDTV in 2009, I watched Planet Earth, and it was an experience to behold and enjoy. When I upgraded to my new LG Plasma Display, I picked up Africa just to see.

What makes the BBC blu-rays so great is that they're made and formatted for the standard HDTV screen. Movies are formatted for the 1:37:1 aspect ratio rather than the 16:9 HDTV aspect ratio, and as a result when you watch a movie, you get black bars at the top and bottom of your image, which means that Baraka, for instance, while being mastered in 8K before being down-sampled to 2K, looks gorgeous, you don't quite get to make full use of your 1080p display compared to what Africa or Planet Earth provides.

Africa comes in 6 episodes, with 3 episodes per disk. Each episodes spans an hour, and covers the Kalahari, the Svannah, Congo, Cape, Sahara, and a wrap up episode that covers the bigger picture. Each episode comes with a behind the scenes section that's about 10 minutes long. The footage is nothing short of amazing, including Starlight cameras that reveal the nocturnal behavior of black rhinos, and a slow motion capture of a battle between 2 giraffes in a desert.

I'm normally very impatient with every "behind the scenes" documentary, because most of the time I'd watch them and say, yeah, you had a multi-million dollar budget, good for you. But some of the footage that the series provided were so jaw-dropping that I actually looked forward to the "behind the scenes" documentary. In one of the episodes, the crew shot silver ants in 50C heat in the Sahara desert, which looked brutal as heck.

I wasn't looking forward to he last episode, because normally these documentaries tend to be a huge downer. After all, nearly every non-insect species featured in the TV series is nearly about to go extinct (one good reason to own this Blu Ray). But the last episode was actually surprisingly optimistic, including detailing a huge multi-country plan to surround the Sahara with trees to prevent further desert incursions.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the series. Since you can't easily stream the series without losing video quality, the best way to enjoy it is to borrow it from a friend, rent it, or watch it over the air (though I'd be surprised if the presentation is better over the air than from a blu ray).

Highly recommended.

Review: Frozen Planet

I picked up Frozen Planet because there was a deal, and someone told me that his kid couldn't stop watching it. As a parent, you never get to watch anything from start to finish, unless it's Blue's Clues, Curious George, or a video of trains, so I was intrigued by the idea that I could actually watch a BBC Nature Program with Bowen.

I'd love to say that Bowen watched all the episodes from start to finish with fascination, but the reality was, he fixated quickly on polar nears, and only wanted to watch the parts about Polar Bears. There's several very cute sequences where the mommy polar bear is leading her two cubs to the frozen ice, and Bowen asked, "Where's daddy polar bear?"

Series like Frozen Planet or Planet Earth frequently get mentioned as "nature porn." This utterly demeans the people who work on these shows, because not only are these shows much much harder to shoot than porn and require a much tougher budget, but the education value and the entertainment value is much denser. As a nature photographer, I'm far more appreciative of the effort it takes to capture the footage found in these shows than most people, and on top of that, video is an order of magnitude harder to capture and edit than even photographs.

What I love about the series is that while it covers all the usual photogenic species like Killer Whales, Polar Bears, Seals, and Penguins, it also doesn't neglect the less photogenic species like the 14 year Wolly bear moths. Many of the capture is done using time lapse photography and looks beautiful. The series also doesn't shy away from predator violence, though the cuts do frequently come after the prey is taken down and before the dining. It certainly wasn't overtly distressful to my toddler to watch those.

The last two episodes of the show cover people's lifestyles on the poles of the planet, as well as the impact humanity is having on the frigid landscape. Unfortunately, the BBC succumbs to their national origins and strongly depicts the British expeditions to the South Pole while sidelining Amundsen's and Nansen's much more successful bids.

Nevertheless, for sheer breath-taking beauty and amazing footage (the footage of baby cubs in a den with the mother blew me away), this is definitely a series to buy and watch in Blu-Ray 1080p video. Do not compromise on video quality. This is what you bought a high definition set for, and there's no reason to settle for less.

Highly recommended.

Bloomreach Talk

I was invited by Bloomreach to give a variation of my talk on Startup Engineering Management. The talk was held in confidence, but after the talk, they asked me a few questions so they could share the video with the rest of the world. I enjoyed giving the talk and got lots of great, challenging questions. I hope you'll enjoy the above snippet.

Hawaii Big Island

Hawaii Big Island

XiaoQin, her parents, Bowen and I went to Hawaii from Halloween to Thanksgiving day this year. We'd arranged this through Home Exchange. We had already done a home exchange over the summer, so were familiar with the process and how things worked.

Flying into Kona airport, we picked up a rental Altima and drove it over to Hilo, unfortunately acquiring a speeding ticket on saddle road. The roads in Hawaii are designated with deliberately low speed limits in order to attract more tourist revenue. I drove like a local (very slowly) for the rest of the trip.

We spent a couple of days snorkeling and diving. I went with Nautilus Dive Center because it was the only dive shop near Hilo which was the only dive shop around. I was determined to get an advanced dive certification on this trip, so signed up for it. Unfortunately, I was to learn that the Hilo area is possibly the least satisfying diving you can find in the tropics. The highest visibility I ever got was 30 feet, and while the area had great amounts and variety of wildlife, the entry and exits were always in cold water --- the entry points usually had a freshwater well which gave you fresh water from Mauna Kea, so after just one dive I was cold and on the second dive I was freezing.

From Hawaii Big Island

Arturo and his sister was visiting Hawaii as well, so we took a day and joined them to explore the Volcano National Park. There, we got to see the crater rim, hike inside the rim itself, and go look at the old lava flows. I was sad about not bringing Bowen along until I read at the visitor center that the air was full of poisonous sulfur-derived gasses. Don't bring your baby on this trip!

From Hawaii Big Island

Unfortunately, I caught a cold right after the second set of dives. So we spent the next few days just swimming, and me watching people swim from the shore. We did take day trips to see the Lava State Park (which was all of half an hour), and Kaimu Beach Park, which was a black sand beach with a lot of views of the Lava. XiaoQin took a great photo of Bowen and I on that beach, which I love.

From Hawaii Big Island

When my cold got better, we took a trip up to the top of Mauna Kea. At 14000+ feet, this is well above the clouds, so no matter what it's doing in Hilo (usually torrential rain), the top is always clear, if cold. XiaoQin and I picked up a couple of hitch-hikers and we drove to the top just in time to see the sunset. Because it's so high, the guidebooks tell you not to bring your baby (or anyone under 16!).

From Hawaii Big Island

From Hawaii Big Island

I finished up my advanced certificate in Hilo and swore never to dive there again. I would classify the diving as "not insanely bad", but I don't consider it worth anybody's time. At least, not anyone who's done any amount of decent diving.

From Hawaii Big Island

Unfortunately, XiaoQin caught a ear infection while swimming. It was very painful, resulting in visiting a clinic once and a hospital once and having to get drugs. I bought some Ear Plugs for her to use if she ever chose to go swimming again.

We drove over to Kona where we stayed at the Wyndham Kona Hawaiian Resort. The resort was an incredible deal on Expedia, and we realized why when we arrived. It turned out that the same parent company owned Expedia and the Time Share resort. Time shares are such incredibly bad deals that they are frequently resold on eBay for $1, because the maintenance fees are so exorbitant that you couldn't possibly re-coop it unless you really only ever went to one place on vacation every year.

Arturo had highly recommended Jack Diving Locker's Manta Ray Night Dive, so I went for it.

I can say without a doubt that this is the best night dive I've ever done. You do it in 2 dives. Once in the evening as a late afternoon dive to get to know the site. We saw a Manta right away, as well as a Tiger Shark! Then you get everything lit up and sit at the bottom of a 40' well and see the rays move serenely through it all. Looking a lot like space ships from Star Trek. They come so close that you're not even a foot away. I'd be very disillusioned about diving lately given how bad the dives were in Hilo, but this dive made me remember why I went diving: to see places and things I would normally see. This dive has it in spades. It's expensive and worth every penny.

The next dive I did was with Jack's as well, their Pelagic Magic dive. You drive out in the middle of the ocean, are tethered to the dive boat, and then spend the dive staring at your flashlight's beam lighting up all sorts of little critters. It's fun, but it's not that interesting in that you're in some sense sitting in a closet looking at the dust particles your flashlight is shining at. Of course, those particles are a live, and move, but you're also slowly getting dis-oriented. It's definitely a dive worth doing, but if you do do it, just go down tot he bottom of the tether and stay there for the entire dive. The reason is if you try to move up even 20', what happens is that the bouncing waves bounce you right to the surface, and then going down again is risky.

For our last day, we snorkeled and kayaked the Cook monument. You're supposed to have a permit to do so, but apparently that's unenforced, so you could cheap out and just hire Kayaks. It wasn't that expensive to hire a guide with a permit, so we did it just to be safe. This was a great and exciting snorkel site, quite possibly the best snorkeling I'd ever done. We stayed for well over 2 hours in the water until XiaoQin got cold despite her wet-suit.

From Hawaii Big Island

My last Hawaii trip was a disappointment. This one was marginally better. My tips would be:

1. Spend all your time in Kona. Don't waste your time on the East side of the island.
2. Volcano National Park and Mauna Kea are each worth a day
3. Cook monument snorkeling is great. Do it.
4. Manta Ray Night Dive is a must do. It's worth getting certified to do this.

This is enough for a 5-7 day visit. For more than that, Hawaii's pretty much not worth it. My joke since 2005 has been to answer any question about any trip to the temperate zones with: "Yeah, it's pretty... if you haven't visited the Swiss/Austrian/Italian Alps in the summer." I think my standard response to a tropical vacation would be, "Yeah, it's decent. If you haven't sailed/dived/snorkeled in the Caribbean." To my mind any time in the Caribbean trumps an equivalent amount of time in Hawaii. The water's warmer, the water clarity's better (though Kona's not bad --- it's almost comparable to the Caribbean), and obviously, there's no sailing in Hawaii. The surfing's better in Hawaii, but overall, Hawaii's also more expensive.

I once worked for a company that tried to reward employees who did something special with trips to Las Vegas. My response was that I'd pay not to have to go to Las Vegas (which I've had to do on business too many times). While I wouldn't consider a trip to Hawaii a punishment the way a trip to Las Vegas would be, I can think of far better things to do with my limited time and money. I came back from my last trip to Hawaii needing to plan a BVI trip. I'm feeling the same way right now.

First Impressions: GoPro Helmet Hero HD

One of the daily deals site offered the GoPro Helmet Hero HD for $135, and at that price I jumped on it in the hopes that I might be able to replicate the results of my touring videos locally, without having to carry a stoker up mountains (or deal with a stoker's sway as she manhandles the camera at speed!).

At that price, the camera can double as a HD camera as well, for general use as well as if my brothers or friends want to borrow it for skiing.

The device comes with the camera, a waterproof case (with both a waterproof backing and a non-waterproof backing), several adhesive mounts for attaching it to a motor-vehicle, as well as a helmet mount. Sadly enough, the device as is does not come with a scuba unit, though a scuba case can be bought separately through eye of mine for about $100.

The camera comes with a few modes, 720p, 960p, and 1080p. The default is the 960p, which is a weird mode which produces a square picture. The reason for this is that on a bike you might look up and down often and it could be useful to get more picture of road. Having tried it once (see sample video), I'm likely to stick with 1080p.

On the helmet, the camera does weigh your head down more. I'm not sure I would want to carry it up a major mountain pass on my head, though sticking it into your saddlebag (or jersey pocket) and mounting it for the descents seems like something eminently doable. (Uphill, I have no issues with manipulating a Canon S100.

The output of the video is huge. For 1.5 hours, it'll use up 8GB, so at least a 16GB card would be recommended for any kind of extended use. The battery will run out in 2.5 hours, so getting more than 16GB would be pretty pointless unless you have a spare battery. As for the lens quality, you can see it generates a lot of flare when pointed into the sun, so I would make a note of that. This is pretty bad, because cyclists don't usually have control over the flare or not. Note that the camera is designed for what I call "point and pray". Since there's no display for the image you're getting, and the camera's mounted on your helmet, you just can't possibly know what you're shooting until you get home.

On an unsupported tour, I'm not sure I would want to have this on my head or in my saddlebag. It weighs only 213 grams (without the charger), but since it uses up video pretty quickly, you'd either have to carry a stack of SD cards, or you'd have to carry some sort of additional storage, which would be even more weight. On a supported tour, however, such as the first half of our tour of the alps, I would consider it eminently usable. I am now extremely curious to see if I can get Pardo or some other fast descender to stick it on his helmet and take it down Page Mill Road or Highway 9.

For editing the video, unlike indoor videos, where lighting frequently demands color correction (meaning you pretty much need Adobe Premiere Elements or some other such software), outdoor videos don't need much color correction, and all the editing can be done with say, Windows Live Movie Maker, which is what I used for the above sample. The output will likely be huge, but with storage essentially free on YouTube, there's no reason not to store your video there and delete it from your hard drive afterwards.

Would I recommend this? I hesitate. First of all, video editing is much tougher than photo editing. It's not clear that I want to do it, or for that matter anyone else. Secondly, I've been very happy with my compact camera photos, and I'm not sure if video would help. On the other hand, I want to attach it to some of my friends' helmets so I can see how they descend, or get their comments on my descents as well, so in that sense it's a useful tool.

Ironically, the one place that the HD Hero would be most useful is actually for Scuba. The 2.5 hour battery life is just right for a 2-tank dive, and the fact that the Scuba case comes with a wrist attachment means that it won't get in the way, unlike the Canon underwater housing I've been using. Neutral buoyancy would also be a non-issue since it would be attached to you, and the case has essentially no air, unlike the Canon cases. I'll probably give it a shot and see. In the mean time, I see no reason to regret the decision at the price I got it for.

Videos from the Tour

I never shot video on previous tours because I don't like sticking cameras on my helmet: I need to be watching the road, and good video really should have a human behind the camera dedicated to it. This year, Lisa decided to shoot several videos on tour. It takes nerves of steel to shoot video from the back of a tandem doing 30-50mph, so I hope everyone appreciates what it takes.

The first video comes from the ride up Grosse Scheidegg. If you've never ridden in the alps, you don't know how loud cowbells are. They literally echo off the hills and make up the soundtrack of certain climbs:


The second comes from Furka Pass. I'll tell the full story behind this in the write up, but it's not a fast descent, the road being narrow with several technical turns. We suffered a tire blowout, not from overheating rims (they never exceeded 71C), but because the tire was a bad manufacture. We replaced the tire and had no problems for the rest of the trip. This video had to be hosted on Vimeo, because it's too long for YouTube:

Furka Descent on tandem from Piaw Na on Vimeo.

The last cycling video comes from the descent of St. Gotthard pass. This is a fast descent requiring almost no braking. It is spectacular, however, especially for the flying hairpin at the end. Unfortunately, you really have to experience it to see it. I wanted a fast soundtrack for this, so I chose Nakajima's Lie to Me Eternally:

My signed Krugman book

Way back in December last year, before he won the Nobel prize, Paul Krugman dropped by Google to give a talk:

After the talk, there was a private session with him where some of us got to ask him question, and he was a great person to ask questions of (especially about the upcoming elections, and policy --- I'll admit to out-sourcing my policy research to him whenever I can).

While I was not smart enough to bring a camera so that I could have a picture with him, but I did manage to get my copy of The Conscience of A Liberal signed:

After Krugman won the Nobel, I remembered that I had the autograph and got my brother to scan it for me to share.

Miyuki Nakajima

People who hang out with my brothers and I know that we are musically omnivorous --- one example of that is that I enjoy Japanese music, despite not knowing enough Japanese to get out of trouble (thanks to a year of Berkeley's language lab, though, my Japanese accent is good enough that even Japanese folks think I know more than I do). Now, you might think that I got to like Japanese music in Japanese class, and you'd be wrong. Or perhaps I picked it up in Singapore, and you'd be wrong too --- we didn't get access to a lot of Japanese music until we got to the US.

What did happen once we did get access to Japanese pop music, though was that we realized how much of the Chinese pop music we heard in Singapore owed its origins to music produced by some Japanese artist. It was very disconcerting to realize that the same music (with translated lyrics, even) was being heard in multiple languages around the same time in Asia, thanks to the hegemony of music companies such as EMI.

One of the results of this mixed-mode musical sharing is that (as in this example video) music videos in Asia tend to be subtitled --- in the language that they are sung in! This is very helpful if you're trying to learn the language, but for someone who knows both Chinese and a little bit of Japanese, it's also fascinating. For instance, in this video at 2:01 (and other times --- it's part of the chorus), she sings, "私は大丈夫", meaning "I'm OK." Now, most folks know that 私 means "I" (female form) in Japanese. But in Chinese, the same character means "private" --- you can see how "private" evolves to "I". 大丈夫, however, is typically only used in Chinese in the context 男子汉大丈夫, which translates (roughly) to "A manly man." I'm always entertained by these almost, but not quite matches between Japanese and Chinese. (The last two characters by themselves, 丈夫, means husband in Chinese)

In any case, as you can tell from this song, "Maybe", the Japanese aren't shy about mixing English in, just so you can get a little triple-language action there. I'm a fan of Miyuki Nakajima, and this video shows why. She's not particularly pretty, but she's very expressive, and at the very least, her songs tell a story and she tries to tell it visually (though again in classically exaggerated Japanese fashion). Enjoy! (My favorite song of hers has an English title, "With", but I can't find a good enough video to post)

Sunrise from Mt. Hamilton

Bill Bushnell borrowed my camera to film the sunrise, and had the presence of mind to switch it to video mode. Unfortunately, as you can see, the camera does have some flaws.

I also have still pictures from the trip:

Moonlight Mt. Hamilton