Marathon Pictures!

Finally I got my pictures from the folks who took them...it wasn't cheap, about 50 bucks, but I figured its worth it since I don't know if I'll do another full marathon anytime soon!

My favourites...

Me crossing the finish line






























Me about 2 miles from the finish line
And me looking quite energetic..must have been before the halfway point =)

Review: Shen Wei Dance Arts

Last night, I saw one of the most impressive dance performances in my relatively short dance experience. The Shen Wei Dance Arts was up at my old school, Berkeley, so I took the opportunity to go up there and see this.

The short review goes like this, there are 2 sequences, with an intermission between each sequence. The first sequence went on for 40 minutes and was composed of the exploration between what seems to be random movement and how one dancer's random movement can affect another dancer's movement. A lot of it seemed like water effects and the dance moves themselves were a mix of Chinese Kung Fu katas and traditional western ballet dance moves. It was interesting, a little thought provoking, but nothing spectacular.

The second sequence however, completely blew my mind away. The curtain opened to a still painting, a moving painting if one will. Inspired by a painting that the choreographer saw years ago, he has transformed that painting into a surreal piece of dance, not too much unlike something you'll see from a Salvador Dali painting..except its motion. The entire theatre was deathly quiet and you could hear people's breathing as somehow tension was brought onto everyone. At the end of the 20 minute sequence, everyone finally started breathing regularly again, and then gave a standing ovation.

Together, the random motion of the first sequence of the dance arts coupled with the slow and deliberate second sequence of the dance painting simply serves to give me my most memorable and intense dance performance that I've ever witnessed.

To summarize, if you get the chance to see this, don't pass it up. The tickets weren't terribly expensive and it is one of the most surreal and incredibly intense dance performances that I think I'l bear witness to

The only bad thing...it has a very limited showing, and I believe there are no more shows in the Bay Area...but for those of you reading outside the Bay Area, definitely something to look forward to if it shows up in your area! Here's a schedule.

An explanation of the mortgage alphabet soup

Calculated Risk is one of the best bloggers around on the housing bubble and its effect on the economy. His posts are incisive, and he also has a great habit of picking up comments from his blog and hoisting them up to the main page. I consider the blog a must-read for those who wish to understand the housing market, how it works, and how it affects the economy.

The post I'm linking to here is a good explanation of what conforming loans are, and why they were created: to effectively homogenize and streamline loans that are easy for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy (both are quasi-government agencies whose goals are to subsidize housing for as many Americans as possible by buying up loans from banks so that fresh capital is injected into the housing market).

In recent years, however, non-conforming loans have become the norm, since rising housing prices made loans made to folks who couldn't handle the prior requirements "less risky." Of course, that created a moral hazard, which drove the risk up until today, when housing prices stopped rising. Now with Mortgage REITs going out of business, it will be interesting to see if housing prices drop since there won't be any new money coming into the market for awhile.

The high prices of plane tickets...

This year seems to be exceedingly expensive for plane travel. 3 years ago when I bought plane tickets for Zurich, I found tickets for $650 each. Last year, for the Coast to Coast, we only found tickets for $775 each. This year, tickets to Zurich are going for about $1050 each, though a few weeks ago we found some for $950 or so. Record high oil prices are definitely partly to blame, but I also think that the airlines seem to have wised up a bit and not released discount fairs so early (last October's prices were still insanely high, while October 2004 had very nice prices for June 2005). It might be that in the future, last minute tickets will end up being much cheaper than pre-booked tickets. We'll have to track prices a bit more to see.

Review: Rising Stars

This is a review of J. M. Straczynski's series, Rising Stars. It's published in 3 parts: Rising Stars , Power (Rising Stars, Book 2), and Rising Stars Volume 3: Fire And Ash.

Part one covers the origins of the Pedersen 113, the children who were in the town of Pedersen when a strange fireball appeared in the sky. The children turn out to be special. Most of them develop interesting special powers, and the story begins when one of them is murdered. It turns out that the death of one of the specials increases the powers of the survivors. A lesser writer would make the story about the mystery behind the murders, and how the narrator solves it. Instead, Straczynski solves the mystery almost immediately, and misdirects the reader into thinking that this would end in a big Highlander-style battle until there is only one.

Instead, the story turns into one of betrayal and recovery from betrayal, followed by an Authority-style exploration of what true superpowers with a humanitarian bent would really do for the Earth, and humanity in general. The stories leap forward in time, spanning decades at a time in between books, and the ending was unpredictable, leaving you guessing all the way until the end. (It does get a bit hokey at the end, but not in a bad way)

Recommended.

26.2 in 4:30

So this past sunday was the culmination of about 6 months worth of training. From the time I returned to the Bay Area in July and decided that I wanted to run a Marathon, to my first Half Marathon in October, to this Marathon in March....its been a long road. After 400 miles of running since last late october (probably closer to 600 if I add the training for my half-marathon, but I didn't keep track of mileage as meticulously as I do now...), this is an extremely satisfying culmination of all that hard work.

The blow by blow went like, this...I flew by the first 13 miles, getting a sub 2 hour time at the half marathon mark...felt good all the way to mile 17 or 18, and then just had to slow down. It felt like my heart was going to pop and decided to walk a minute or two per mile after that. Even before my body gave up, I had slowed down already, but not by too much, from a 6.6 to a 6.0 pace. But after mile 18, I think I was going at about a sub 6 pace. I maintained that pace all the way to the finish line.

I had an incredibly good kick for the last few hundred yards though, I kept telling myself, almost yelling "GO! GO! GO! GO! GO!" and I blew by about 10 or 15 folks, the cheering really kept me going and the people at the finish line was worried I was going to collapse, but did congratulate me for finishing. They were also surprised that I had such a strong finish for such a lousy time =p

This was an incredibly well organized and supported Marathon. I showed up at the finish line at 5:45, caught the bus to Calistoga that took about 45 minutes, took a leak, got some hydration and some extra Guu, and then at 7 promptly, we went. I started my clock at 7:01 because of the crowd in front of me and my official time was 4:31:44. The course was gorgeous, a little shivery in the 7 o'clock hour, warming up at 8 o'clock, got really comfy at 9 o'clock, then got uncomfortably warm at 10, but a great cloud cover came at around 10:30 and the last hour of my run was in relative shade and comfort.

I ran all the way with my Nano and could not use my Nike+ kit cause I lost the bluetooth portion that attached to my Nano. This was a race that I didn't really need it though, since I knew the start time AND the exact distance =).

Back to the marathon being organized, there was rest stops every 2 miles officially, but there were lots more in actuality, closer to 14 I counted. And yes, these were the ones that were official. At the 21 mile mark they actually had sorbet! That was great even though I'm not a sorbet person and only took one or two licks.

So although I'm 30 minutes later than my desired time, I'm still extremely happy that I finished and this 30 minutes only gives me more incentive to improve should I choose to run another one.

In retrospect, I should have done a practice run up to 23 miles a few times before the event, and I should have paced myself a lot better during the event. Towards the end of the training, I just did not have enough long runs under my belt, so that might explain why I'm just glad to have finished at the 4:30 mark (the lowest boundary of my desired time).

My stat line:
Bib Name Time Overall Place Gender Place Pace
1707 Sy Na 4:31:44 882 569 64 / Men 30 to 34 10:22/M

I also signed up for the San Jose Rock & Roll Marathon for October, right now i'm tentatively saying a time of 1:50! So at least I won't be hanging up those sneakers anytime soon!

Pics forthcoming! I want to see the pics of my incredible (for me anyway) finish! =)

gtags 1.0 released

And there's even the official blog post written by me. Most of the work, however, was done by my intern, Stephen Chen, so thanks, Stephen! I have been fortunate in finding such amazingly good interns.

The 1.5% Real Return Estimate

Last night I had dinner with folks that included a couple who worked in the financial industry. As might be expected, the dinner conversation turned to financial planning, and what strategies are involved. The folks involved did private account management and financial planning, and as you might expect were quite financially sophisticated. I asked one of my favorite financial planning questions: if you needed $X in income over the next 60 years, how much in assets in a diversified portfolio (one that's close to the efficient frontier) would you need to be able to generate that much income in inflation adjusted terms?

Long time readers of my blog, of course, are well aware that the answer can be found on the retire early safe withdrawal spreadsheet. I wanted, however, to see what a conventional financial planner would say. The answer came out to be 150% of what the retire early number was. What was very interesting to me was that the number the planner used for the return from the average portfolio was described as a conservative 1.5% over inflation.

1.5% over inflation. Think about what that means. Current I-bond rates are at 1.4%. What that would mean is that the equity risk premium is only 0.1%. Can it really be that low? Even Warren Buffett, the pessimist, has been quoted as being able to expect a 4% real rate of return from businesses. So 1.5% seemed excessively conservative. Then I thought about the numbers from the conventional planner's perspective: the average cost of a separately managed account is approximately 1.5%. So that 4% real return now is really a 2.5% real return. Taxes can easily eat up another 1% of the remaining return, so now you're down to 1.5% real return.

So from an conventional financial planning perspective, the planner was absolutely correct! The lesson here, of course, is that paying someone else conventional financial planning fees is extremely costly, quite possibly costing you your retirement!. Which means that if you aren't doing your own financial management, you're really giving up half your real returns (to your financial planner, who probably blows 1/2 million a year flying private planes!).

Phil teaches Emacs

One of my former gtags interns, Phil, went back to school at MIT and taught a class about Emacs. His slides were great (much better than the ones I did for Google), and will soon be incorporated into the GNU Emacs distributions. Awesome work, Phil!

Beautiful Aptos Beach

 

Turbo Tax 2007 Review

This is a review of TurboTax for the Mac versus TurboTax for Windows. I've been a Turbo Tax for Windows user for years. This year, as an experiment, and since I had a Mac Mini, I installed the Mac version to see what the difference was.

The first two returns were for my mom and for Lisa. Neither were very complicated, though at least one involved the earned income tax credit. In both cases, I could download W-2s through Turbo Tax. So far so good. Both taxes were done in under 2 hours total (an hour on average).

Then I got to my own taxes. I'll admit that my taxes aren't the least complicated possible, but compared to another colleague who had to spend 50 hours on her taxes last year (because of multiple state taxes), I still consider mine easy. The first sign that all was not well was the investment downloads page. The investment download from Vanguard was straightforward, but the overview screen refused to show me the details of which investments yielded which numbers (capital gains, dividends, etc). This made it quite painful to use the downloaded results, since I couldn't corroborate the sells and buys with my knowledge of what happened.

OK, I know how to type, so I wiped out the imported data and entered all the data manually. This was fine until I got to individual stock sales. I entered all the data, saved and quit the application to get reboot my Mac for an unrelated reason, and then started up Turbo Tax again. To my surprise it refused to start from the saved file!

Chalking it up to user error, I started my return all over again and did my taxes again. The same thing happened when I saved and reloaded the application, this time, without rebooting.

I opened up Turbo Tax for Windows in a Parallels Virtual Machine and proceeded to do my taxes there. To my relief, not only does the Windows version of Turbo Tax happily load and reload my saved files (though it wouldn't load the Macintosh saved files, of course), the investment downloads page on the Windows version is usable, and saved me at least 10-20 minutes of data entry.

The moral: if your finances are non-trivial, get a Windows license and run the Windows version of Turbo Tax. This is another reason my next machine will not be a Macintosh.

No, I did not cheat...

Your results:
You are Dr. Doom

Dr. Doom 68% Magneto 60% Lex Luthor 52% Green Goblin 52% The Joker 52% Apocalypse 49% Two-Face 48% Riddler 47% Mr. Freeze 43% Venom 36% Catwoman 36% Mystique 32% Kingpin 28% Juggernaut 24% Poison Ivy 23% Dark Phoenix 15%

Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity.

Click here to take the Supervillain Personality Quiz

Review: Dreaming In Code

Scott Rosenberg follows the Chandler project as a reporter, unraveling the mysteries of software development gone wrong. What's interesting for me, at a personal level, is that I know several of the principles through work at a previous life: Katie Capps Parlante, and Aparna were both with me at Escalate, ironically, a startup that failed for business reasons. (To give you an idea of the quality of the folks at Escalate, at this point, 4 of its first 20 engineers are at Google, while another 4 or 5 are at Yahoo)

The part of the narrative that sticks out to me like a sore thumb is the lack of impatience at OSAF. In fact, the general approach was so muddled that even software luminaries like Andy Hertzfeld left. When building a project, the most important thing to do right away is to build something that works as quickly as possible and get it out there. It doesn't have to be pretty, and it definitely doesn't have to have a fancy object layer. It has to work and do something useful. That gives you a user base that can drive more feedback to help you refine future versions. On top of that, once you have a significant user base among early adopters, you'll get more contributors to your open source program, and the code will snowball. The architecture astronauts approach, however, seemed to have overtaken OSAF, which led them down the garden path of building infrastructure first without an application in mind. I don't under-estimate the importance of infrastructure: I build it all the time, as does the company I work for, but infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure is wasteful, as you'll invariably build the wrong thing.

The book is well-written, and worth reading, even if you work in software on a daily basis. If you're successful, you'll say to yourself, "at least I'll never get caught in this morass." If you're unsuccessful, you'll comfort yourself by Rosenberg's repeated assertions that software is hard. Ultimately, however, there are lots and lots of ways for software projects to fail, and only a few ways for them to succeed, so this book is another reminder that unfortunately, the state of software engineering is such that you can go years without reading many new books and still be ahead of most of the field.

I met Rosenberg when he visited Google to promote the book. As he signed my copy, I quoted one of the original hackers Brian Harvey, "All the best software is written by one person." Rosenberg repeated something obviously told to him by many other practitioners, "The software systems we build now are too big, too complicated for one person." I told him that I didn't believe that for a minute. Even in his book, you could trace many programs to one person: Alan Kay and Smalltalk, Charles Simonyi and Bravo. I can name more modern examples: Paul Buchheit and Gmail, Louis Monier and AltaVista, Larry Wall and Perl, Linus Torvalds and Linux. Sure, as the programs evolved and grew, more and more people got involved and ended up building a big system. But right at the beginning you can only have a program written by one or two engineers to scratch their itch. While Rosenberg wasn't willing to write-off Chandler yet, I am. Today, Google's calendar does everything Chandler's trying to do --- by designing the program by committee instead of Mitch Kapor rolling up his sleeves and just writing code, OSAF has doomed Chandler to permanent irrelevancy.

"We've consistently overinvested in infrastructure and design, the fruits of which won't be realized in the next development cycle or even two---that is, not in the next six or twelve months. You pay a price for that in a loss of agility. The advice I would give is to do even more of what we've been doing in the last couple of years, which is to sequence the innovation, stage things, and be less ambitious..."

Review: Ex Machina

Note: My copy of The First Hundred Days was checked out from my local library, and it had pages missing.

Ex Machina is about a superhero who retires and runs for the Mayor of New York in 2001. Where his powers come from, what his past exploits were, and what the limits of his powers are is secondary to the story of his career as a politician.

The first collection (The First Hundred Days) covers his first days in political office, his origins, and a mysterious murder of snowplow men, as well as introducing the characters. The second collection, Tag covers a bit of the period before his election, gay marriage, and the a mysterious series of murders.

The plotting is tight, the art is acceptable, and the use of his abilities very well thought out. I'm considering buying up all the comics I can find.

Recommended.

Review: Whistling Past Dixie

This book is an excellent companion and counter-point to Gene Sperling's The Pro-Growth Progressive. Rather than pontificate on policy that would be good ideas if the Democrats regained control of the government, Schaller focuses on how to win.

Schaller's thesis is that the Democrats have shot themselves hard in the foot by trying in vain to appeal to the South, the most racist, backwards, and evangelical part of the country. Since that requires the party to hew harder to the right than its base wants to be, you get two problems: first of all, you get the general population thinking that there's no difference between the two parties (which is as wrong as you can get), since the Democrats try to blur the differences between them and the Republicans in the South, and secondly, the public gets the impression that the Democrats don't stand for anything by pandering to whatever the public says it wants through the polls, rather than leading the Nation.

Schaller brings plenty of evidence to the table, with charts, graphs, and statistics and numbers peppering the book. His answer is that the right thing to do is to stand strong on the Democratic progressive values by pointing out that the Republicans want to reach into America's bedroom by proscribing behavior ranging from sexual preferences to what women are allowed to do with their body. These themes resonate everywhere in America except the South, and the Democrats do not need the South's electoral votes to win (and they're not going to get them anyway, so why tarnish your brand by seeming desparate). Schaller proposes vilifying the most racist and evangelical and backwards citizens in the South the way the Republicans have turned all Democrats into latte-drinking liberals, and using that as a wedge issue to force the Republicans to defend themselves in the rest of the country.

Fortunately, I think the current Democratic candidates for the presidencywill have no choice but to follow Schaller's strategy: Hilary Clinton is too hated in the South to even have a chance there, and she knows it. Barack Obama is black, and doesn't stand a popsicle's chance in the South, and he knows it. So unless there's an unexpected entrant who beats out these two, we'll get a chance to see Schaller's theory in action. This book is highly recommended.

To build and unify themselves, and begin to drive a wedge straight through the heart of the conservative base of the Republican Party, the Democrats need to spend a little less time micro-targeting messages to this or that group based on the latest focus group results. Chasing voters only scares them away, and so Democrats ought to spend less time in pursuit and more effort luring voters by staking out firm positions and showing the resolve not to budge... No party should define itself entirely by its base, but neither should a party define itself by starting with the elements of its coalitionfarthest from that base. That said, it is time for Democrats to replace the party's passive, confused, and muddled national message with a muscular, unapologetic advocacy of an elevator pitch that will not only poll well in the swing states and regions of the country but, properly politicized, can win elections too.

Review: Nintendo Wii

I've never bought a game console in my life, though I did own an Atari Lynx once upon a time. But when a colleague brought in his Wii and I tried it, I thought that this game would be something that Lisa would love. So over the holidays, I brought her over to another friend's place to test that theory. Needless to say, she was hooked. She got so into the Tennis game that she kept hitting me by mistake. When she tried the boxing game, her palms were so sweaty that my friend had to wipe the controls dry when she was finished.

The hard part was to find a console. I was fortunate that Kekoa worked down the hall from me and had a script that scraped Amazon's Wii page, and when it was available (for all of 5 minutes) I got one. The console only comes with one controller and one nunchuk, so I immediately bought another set, and then signed up for Gamefly, the Netflix of computer games.

I've had the console for a week, and tried a couple of games with Lisa and a few friends. The choice of Wii sports as the game to bundle with the game is nothing short of inspired. Lisa would start having to remove jackets or sweaters by the second round of tennis, because she was getting such a workout. The internet features are a little disappointing, and I've crashed the console a few times, so it's not the most stable right now, but when playing the games you won't notice. (It's mostly crashed when I was running the beta Opera browser)

I also tried two games, Zelda: Twilight Princess is a fun console RPG. (Note the emphasis on console RPG. Balder's Gate or Neverwinter Nights this is not --- the story is strictly linear) The controls are very intuitive and a lot of fun, and the story is nice. But it's a little involving, and there are a few places where if you don't quite follow the story line you might have to do a lot of backtracking. Nevetheless, if the game appeals to you, it's worth buying since it's quite a long rental to finish it.

Trauma Center: Second Opinion turned out to be another winner. It's got amazingly intuitive controls (especially the defibrillator, which vibrates just enough when you activate it to feel real), and fast, short, uninvolved gameplay. You could pick this up and play for half an hour every other day, which I doubt you can do with Zelda.

In any case, the Wii has proved to be an amazingly good game, and in terms of the amount of use we'll get out of it, I think it will prove to be a fantastic purchase. My only complaint is that the SDK is extremely expensive (and not at all easy to get), as there are quite a number of games I can think of that can use this intuitive interface amazingly well. I think the Wii is the first truly original video game concept I've seen for a long while, and I am convinced that it's going to stay the runaway success it's been for the past few months.

Review: Jersey Boys

Jersey Boys is the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. If you've never heard of either one of those, I assure you that you've heard their songs before, but perhaps not by them directly.

Here's a link to one of the most famous Frankie Valli Song. Go ahead, Click on it. =)

Most people probably have heard of that song from one source or the other...at least I hope. With that background information, this story tells you the story of the group. How it came to be, the rise to stardom, the problems they faced, and the eventual split of the group into just Frankie Valli. It is a most poignant tale and the directorship of the story was simply amazing.

If you watch the link on the header, one of the talking points of the director was that they wanted to tell the story first and foremost, and then retrofit the songs in the places within the story where it best fit. This is quite different from most musicals of this sort, like say, Mama Mia, where the music is selected first, and a story written around it.

As it turns out, this style of direction gives you the best of everything. The songs are shown more or less in chronological order, the story is first rate, and the choreography and stage work is most excellent as is expected from Broadway productions nowadays.

The story is presented in seasons, with Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter representing one each of the Four Seasons. Each of the Four Seasons also represent an epoch in the timeline of the band, and their individual perspectives drives and perhaps even steals the show! This is one musical where the story actually is as good as or even better than the music!

All in all, I highly recommend this show and its well worth an Orchestra level seat as you can see the nuances of the actors even better. As I said, this is one musical where the dancing is kept to a minimum, and the emphasis is on the story and songs. Not all the songs are presented in full, as its not a concert, but its always more than enough to get you grooving to the tunes.

The Four Seasons never quite gathered the attention of the media the way the Beatles or other more glamarous bands did, and this story serves very nicely their story, and what a compelling story it is!

A must see!

Michael Pollan on Nutritionism

I frequently like to write off the New York Times (especially since their science articles are overly simplistic, and in many cases simply wrong), but Michael Pollan's book was exceptionally good, and this article is worth reading.

For those who don't have time, here's the quick summary:

1. Eat food.
   
2. Avoid food products bearing health claims
   
3. Avoid food with too many ingredients or contain high fructose corn syrup.
   
4. Get out of the supermarket
   
5. Pay more, eat less
   
6. Eat mostly plants
   
7. Eat ethnic foods
   
8. Cook
   
9. Eat like an omnivore
   

Review: Pan's Labyrinth

Run, don't walk to see this movie. There is nothing that I am going to say here that will give you a better understanding or any higher urgings than what I said in the first sentence of this review.

Billed as a fairy tale for adults, it really is the best way to describe this movie. It is a fairy tale in the mood of what fairy tales are really supposed to be, or what they were before fairy tales were disneyfied. When fairy tales were about cautionary warnings about what happens to bad children if they disobeyed, when consequences were more real, fairy tales were dark, cruel, and very often did not have a happy ending.

That in a nutshell is the best way to describe this movie. If you've ever read any of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, when he turns a fairy tale into something much more than you assume, this movie comes very close to that sentiment, and surpasses it in many ways. It has great warmth for a very dark movie, glimpses of hope in a hopeless situation, and an ending that has so many interpretations for it that no two conversations about the ending will be quite the same.

In other words, run, don't wait, to see the movie. It is gorgeous.

I'll stop here before I start gushing more praise for the movie.

Scott Burns: Americans not that badly off

There's a lot of doom and gloom usually about how little Americans save, so it's nice to see a bit of good news (especially from Scott Burns, who's usually a pessimist).

One household in four owns its home mortgage-free. An impressive 61 percent of households age 65 and over have no mortgage.

What's amusing is that he's mystified by apparel expenditure:

The survey shows that spending on apparel and services is only $1,509 a year for middle income households, rising to only $3,704 for top quintile households. I know we’ve got the most efficient distribution system in the world, but if that’s what we spend, what’s supporting all those Wal-Marts, Kmarts and Targets — not to mention a zillion other clothing retailers?

A quick search finds that there are about 100 million households in the US. If each of them spends $1500 a year, then apparel is a $150 billion market. The Gap only had 16 billion in revenues, so the US market can support 10 companies of approximately that size, plus or minus a couple to account for Wal-Mart.

$1500 a year still sounds like a lot of clothing to me, but I guess that's only 10 sets of cycling jerseys + shorts at full retail. I guess if you have to buy suits for work, that $1500 goes really quickly.