Day 7: Goldswil to Grimsel Pass Summit

 

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

The morning greeted us with beautiful sunshine and calm wind. It was still cool, but that was OK, because we were to climb Grimsel pass today, making for a very long day. But first, the approach. The road rose gently at first, and then dropped rapidly down along the Brienzersee's South side. The official bike route goes around the North side of the Brienzersee, but Jobst had always gone around the South side, and this was my chance to see why: the road while lacking bike lanes, is quiet, and unlike the North side which is frequently cluttered with vegetation and trees, granted us clear views across the lake towards the high mountains. In the cool morning air with calm winds, the lake took on a highly reflective surface, looking like a magic mirror as we rode by, fast, quiet, and smooth.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

Past Brienz, the road dropped us onto the Hauptstrasse main road towards Meiringen, but just before the entrance to the road I spied a sign for the bike path pointing in the opposite direction. I turned around and found the entrance for the Meiringen bike path. It took a lot of convincing but I eventually got the others to follow. "Who builds these bike paths?" asked Cynthia. "They're farm roads that serve a dual purpose."

The bike path was quiet and beautiful, winding around little streams, under the shelter of trees, and occasionally granting us a peek across the valley at Unterbach. At Brunigen, the bike path eventually dumped us onto Brunigstrasse, which dropped us towards Meiringen. Not wanting to ride through Meiringen again, I opted to route around the town and head once again over Kirchet pass. We got there just before 11:00am, and the Lammi restaurant had just opened. We had barely sat down, however, when the owner came out and told us that the kitchen was only open at noon. Until then they were strictly drinks only! That bummed us out so we headed on down towards Innerkirchen, which then led us up to Grimsel pass. There was no way the tandem could keep up with the singles, so I told everyone to wait for us at the grocery store at Gutanen. As everyone else pulled away into the distance, Lisa and I stopped, took off our helmets, and replaced them with cycling caps. For an entire day of climbing, helmets would have been painful and unnecessary.

Grimsel pass is the least pretty of the major Swiss passes. What that means is that it's far better looking than any of the roads in the Sierras, and probably in the continental US. In the lower regions, it winds along bucolic farms and pretty houses (no MacMansions here!), alongside a running stream and river. In the middle section, it runs along waterfalls, gorges, and places where Canyoning is allowed. Nearly every tunnel has a bikeable bypass, including one which is almost a kilometer long with hand-laid cobbles (I know it was hand-laid because when Lisa and I last came by in 2003 we saw workers hand-laying them!). In the upper section it has no less than 3 reservoirs, each cascading into the other, generating clean power for the region. This accounts for the unsightly power-lines and pylons which you see all the way up the road.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

When we got to Guttanen, we found the others waiting outside the closed grocery store. I had forgotten that the stores close for lunch! "If we had known we would have rushed here to buy food before it closed, since we were taking it very easy up the hill," said Cynthia. "Oh well. There are restaurants open. But let's fill up our water bottles first." "Where?" "At the water fountain across the street, of course!" "Wow. OK, I've got to get better at spotting these things."

After lunch, we made the slow, laborious climb up Handegg, and then up Grimsel. I always forget how painful it is to climb on the tandem, but Grimsel delivers reminders in the form of steep sections and a climb that seems to go on forever. By the way we arrived at the top it was 5pm, but I could see that there was ice on the summit lake --- I had never done the climb in weather this cold before. Cynthia and Kekoa had taken a room at the summit hotel, and after a much needed shower, it was time for dinner. We packed away so much food that the restaurant waiter just laughed and laughed as he brought out dish after dish.

At bed time, sleep came swiftly and was well deserved.

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Day 6: Hotel Zwirgi to Goldswil

 

Our hopes were raised when we got up in the morning and saw the fog lifting, granting us beautiful views near Zwirgi:

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

We had a hurried breakfast, then set off up the road towards Rosenlaui. The fog that looked to be lifting earlier settled in at a high altitude instead, giving us an overcast day.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

We quickly rode up to Kalterbrunnen and then into Rosenlaui valley, where we saw gorgeous views of the surrounds, but unfortunately Rosenlaui Glacier was shrouded by fog. At Hotel Rosenlaui where I wasn't planning to stop, I spied Andreas Kerhli, the owner, and shouted out his name. I stopped the tandem, hopped off, and we shook hands. I'd been to Hotel Rosenlaui in 2003, 2007, and 2008, each time bringing more and more people with us. Our reservations were for July 4th and 5th, and I asked if we could get them for tonight instead, and Andreas shook his head sadly. "We are so busy this summer! Hey, can I offer you tea or coffee?" "We could use some tea. It's cold!" "Yes, but the weather will change soon. It's coming. Hang on a minute." He soon brought out some tea but refused to accept payment for it.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

Kekoa rolled up with Phil, and Cynthia said, "We're having tea here because Piaw knows everyone." All warmed up from the tea, we rolled up the road, hitting the super steep section and only getting off the road whenever the post bus came by. The peaks around us were shrouded behind clouds, and with the cold temperature we would not hear the sound of ice falls that day. At the summit, we stopped for obligatory photos and then descended into Grindelwald.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

In Grindelwald, we stopped at the supermarket for a grocery store lunch, and Cynthia went into the Montbell shop to buy more clothing since she was still cold from the descent. After lunch, we descended to the junction and then headed over to Lauterbrunnen on the bike path, which was mostly rideable dirt, but was a change from the road I had used in the 2007 tour. In Lauterbrunnen we tried to get lodging but everything was full except for 2 places, one of which looked unacceptably bad, and the other had the owner telling us that it was too noisy for us to want to stay there. Neither Cynthia nor Kekoa was interested in seeing the falls, so we turned around and headed down into Interlaken, where the tourist information got us lodging at Goldswil, since I didn't want to be in town.

We got to our lodging at 5:00pm, but everyone was happy since this was the first full day of riding. Tomorrow would be a hard day, since we would ride Grimsel pass!

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Day 5: Meiringen to Hotel Zwirgi

 

The next morning saw us leaving the hotel bright and early to hop onto the train to Zurich. Unlike previous years where we managed to snag a direct train, this took us no less than 4 transfers, some of which required carrying the bike down and up a flight of stairs on 3 minute connections, which was somewhat stressful but nevertheless doable. On the leg from Sargans to Zurich, inspectors boarded the train and informed us that the tandem counted as 2 bikes in Switzerland, but they made the mistake of asking Cynthia, who shrugged her shoulders and pretended that she didn't understand either English or German, so they let us without attempting to fine us. We shouldn't have been fined anyway, since we had bought the tickets in Austria for the entire leg to Switzerland.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

At the Zurich train station, we bought train tickets to Meiringen. I asked about buying the half tax card then, but the ticket counter service person was not being very helpful, saying that I'd have to have bought the half tax cards the day before. I would later find out that there's a special tourist half-tax card for 99CHF which lasted only for a month, but did not need any of the extensive paper work needed for the regular half tax card. This is one of those cases where a more rural train station with a friendly ticket counter agent would have saved us a lot of money over the course of the trip, but we had no idea how many more train transfers we would later have.

Upon arrival in Meiringen, as we rode out of the train station, I spotted an informational "I" sign and rode over to it. Upon discovering that was a map of the train station, the last few days of frustration led me to say (quite loudly), "What the f*k is this totally useless information sign?!" A woman nearby replied to me in English, "It's a map of the train station. What do you need?" Everyone around me laughed at my embarrassment as I turned a bright red. In Switzerland, you definitely shouldn't curse in English. She turned out to be a local, and pointed us at the tourist information center, and then told me to watch my language.

We went to the tourist information center, and it took quite a long time to manage all the things that had piled up over the last few days, buying SIM cards for the phones, activating them, and then getting lodging turned out to be a problem. My hope was that it being a Monday, Rosenlaui would be available, but upon calling them it turned out that they were full up until Thursday! After searching in vain in town for lodging, I realized that Hotel Zwirgi might be available. I checked out other alternatives, and it turned out that not only was the B&B behind Restaurant Lammi not free, but restaurant itself was also closed on Mondays. The last time I checked, Hotel Zwirgi was priced too high for me, but the information center told us that they were 59CHF/person/night, and had availability.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

We rode up the Grosse Scheidegg road from the Lammi restaurant, and while the ride was short it was somewhat steep, though much less steep than I remembered. Upon arrival, we were informed that the tourist information person had transposed the numbers on our quote, and it was 95CHF/person/night. After some wrangling, we settled for what would normally be a 4 person family room by putting an extra bed (which would be at a cheaper price of 70CHF) in it. We then explored Reichenbach falls, and had a nice dinner, hoping that the weather tomorrow would be more conducive to riding.

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Days 3 and 4: Innsbruck, Bludenz

We spent the next two days in Innsbruck. Cynthia had to do more bike gear shopping, and we had to figure out how to get over the pass without the train. We could bike, but the prospect of biking in the rain over either Silvretta or Arlberg pass did not appeal to either of the women. Looking at the weather forecast, we saw that the Interlaken area was projected to get dry weather on Monday. We were going to ride in that general direction, but starting there and doing the tour backwards would work as well.

With the trains out of service, we had to explore car rental options. The one way rental option with a drop off in Switzerland proved to be extremely expensive. However, since we were looking for rental during the weekend, we found the local Avis had a mini van rental which had a special weekend rate. Kekoa (who was the only regular stick shift driver amongst us) and I (since I could read German I figured it would be useful to have me in the navigator's seat) would drive the bikes over to Bludenz on Sunday, drop the bikes off at a hotel, and then shuttle back and we could all take the train together. Then on Monday we could take the train into Zurich, and then from there hop onto a train to Meiringen. It was an expensive transfer, costing us nearly 3 days, and more money than I wanted to think about, but since it was raining anyway, those days would have been spent riding in the rain, we thought the investment would pay off in better riding weather in Switzerland.

We picked up the car on Saturday, and spent the afternoon exploring Schloss Ambras, which was a good way to spend a rainy day. The castle featured lots of armor, old baths, and lots and lots of portraits. It was time well spent.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

Lisa found a restaurant that was famous for serving Tirolian food, but the service was abysmal. Phil ordered tea and got beer, and Lisa got the wrong dish. When we pointed that out to the waiter, she got all in a huff and refused to speak to us any further, pointing out that macaroni was similar to the dish Lisa ordered! I wanted to ask her if she thought that beer was the same as tea.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

The next day, we loaded up the bikes into the van and drove over to Bludenz, where near the train station we found lodging at a reasonable price. They were willing to let us leave our bikes in a covered parking area. By the time Kekoa and I drove back to Innsbruck it was 12:00pm, and we got to the train station in time to catch the 1:50 train which would dump us into Bludenz at 3:30pm.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

In Bludenz, I bought train tickets the next day for Zurich. It turned out that there was an early 8:05 train which would drop us into Zurich around 10:00am, meaning that we had a good chance of getting to Meiringen by Noon. With that in place, I bought the train tickets.

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Kreuth to Terfens

 

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

After an unusually hearty breakfast for such a reasonably priced B&B, we left at around 9:00am. As Cynthia expressed surprise at the low cost of the accomodations, I told her that this was what happened once you got out of touristy areas, even in expensive countries like Germany. A drizzle set in as we rode out of Kreuth, forcing us to stop to put on rain gear. The map marked a 12% grade riding over Achenpass, but it turned out that the 12% grade was really on the descent, since we did not encounter any significant steep grades on the climb.

The ride towards Achensee was non-descript, though I did find a few bike paths. Cynthia was still leery of dirt paths, and after I found a particularly steep one rebelled and everyone pretty much forced me to stay on paved roads thereafter.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

At Achensee, the main road rolls right into the tunnel, but a bike path brought you down to the water, where we got to inspect and admire the lake up close and personal. The rain had seeped into everyone's waterproof clothing by that point, so as soon as we rolled past the lake I was glad to find a cafe that served Goulash soup and gave us a chance to dry off.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

After lunch, the weather magically cleared up, and we descended into Jenbach via a 12% grade on dry roads. The road was very busy, but since we were descending the bicycles weren't the cause of any road blocks. We turned right towards Innsbruck along some backroads which invited quite a bit of climbing but had very little traffic. Once we hit the actual valley floor, however, there was a headwind which just blew against us and only seemed to get stronger as we approached Innsbruck.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

It didn't take 10km of riding before the whining started, so by the time we got to Terfens I was talked into hopping onto a train for the last run into Innsbruck. At the train station, we found a hotel, and to my horror discovered that the train line from Landeck to Bludenz was completely blocked due to a broken rail line that still had not been repaired for a week! Rail passengers were being shuttled over the Arlberg pass by bus, but the bus did not take even single bicycles, let alone a tandem.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

The forecast looked miserable for the next couple of days. Alan would later explain to me that the line between Landeck and Bludenz had always been a nightmare, and with the heavy rains the rail bed could actually get washed off. Austria's rail-lines had regular inspections so there were no fatalities because of this, but apparently a few weeks later the same thing happened between Bolzano and Merano in Italy, and with Italians, the lines don't get inspected as often and people died.

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Day 1: Holzkirchen to Kreuth

 

In the morning, I bought some Weisswurst at a local butcher, and made it in the hotel room, since the rooms were equipped with a stove, pots, and full dining set. Our plan for the morning was clear: Cynthia would go shop for the remaining bike gear, and I would go visit the train station to see what our options were. The problem was the only place with good weather near the alps would be all the way in Geneva, on the other side of Switzerland. The train ticket promised to be pricey, but worse, the alps near that area was also getting snow and rain! I went to the train station anyway, hoping to meet Alan Wissenberg of Euraide, but the Euraide office was closed and the person manning the Euraide counter looked busy and did not really want to deal with bicycles. He told me Alan was supposed to be in later today, but could not say when. I made up my mind that we would just take the shortest easiest route to Austria and then figure things out from there.

By 11:00am, Cynthia was done with all her shopping, and we got everything ready and checked out of the hotel. Cynthia already had an inner city Partner tageskarte, so all we needed was an "outside the inner city partner" partner tageskarte to get all 5 of us out, but we still needed 4 bike tickets. By the time we arrived at Holzkirchen, it was 2pm, when supermarkets opened and we could have a supermarket lunch.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

After lunch, we took what was for me a familiar route, part of a 100K ride out to Tergensee, Schliersee, and Seehamersee. My thought was that we could ride over to Tergensee that day and then ride over Achenpass to Austria the next day. It was overcast, but the riding was pretty and there was very little wind. The route winds along several farm roads and little towns, and I knew it, we were almost to Tergensee and I now had to deviate from the route I laid down 2 years ago to head into Tergensee instead of Schliersee. "If this is rain give me more of it," said Phil. "Don't jinx us!"

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

We arrived at Tergensee at 4:00pm, which was too early to stop. I visited the tourist information center and they informed us that there was lodging at Kreuth, between Tergensee and the Achenpass, so I made the call to push on. The bike path to Kreuth led us past a bunch of commuting cows and then into a forested bike path. The rain which Phil had summoned started in earnest, but with the tree cover it didn't get us very wet until we got near Kreuth and then the sky really opened up. We headed to the first hotel we saw, but it turned out to be a rest day for them. While we sheltered into the awning of the hotel trying to wait out the rain, the person who told us it was closed called down to the hotel around the corner and claimed some rooms for us.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

She provided directions to us and we rolled some 200m down to the lodging, where a garage door was open waiting for our bikes. The rooms turned out to be very nice and the dinner was excellent. By the time dinner was over, the rain had stopped and we could walk around town and admire the gardens.

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A bad start

We flew into Munich to find my deraileur hanger bent and wheel out of true. That was the least of our problems. Cynthia lost her bag of cycle gear and has had to rebuy everything including helmet, shirts, shoes, bags. This was quite a blow. The weather is also crap. We might abandon the German side and train to Geneva and ride the French side instead. No point fighting mother nature.

Prologue

In a sign that this was a tour where not everything would go smoothly, Roberto Peon sent e-mail the night before that he was going to abandon the tour due to a long running hip injury that led his doctor to ban him from doing rides longer than 20 miles. Since he had a wedding coming up, I thought that his chances of participating in the tour was pretty low in the first place, but this was still the first time anyone's abandoned a tour despite having already purchased plane tickets.

There was a 6:00am traffic jam due to some careless driver dropping a piece of furniture on the freeway at 5:00am, but we all made it to the airport with time enough to checkin, and the flight was generally uneventful. We did end up in a bicycling themed lounge in Toronto for lunch though!

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

Upon arrival in Munich, it was the next day, but at 8:00am. After clearing customs, all the bikes showed up in the luggage area, but the tandem's box was in extremely bad shape, leading me to discard the box. I saw that despite my attempts to reinforce the box, the rear dérailleur hanger had been bent, and the rear wheel was out of true. We went to the S-Bahn station, where I bought a Partner Tageskarte from another traveler for a slight discount off the fare, and then 5 bike tickets. The partner day ticket lets 5 people travel on one ticket for 18.80 Euros, which is the cheapest way for this many people to travel from the airport to downtown Munich.

It was raining when we dis-embarked at the main train station (Hauptbahnof) and we walked in the general direction of the hotel. In the rain though, the hotel was harder to find than expected, putting pressure on the navigators to speed up the search. Cynthia dug up her Edge 705 and we left the luggage behind to scout for the hotel. It turned out to be right down the street, so we immediately went back to tell everyone the good news.

We proceeded to the hotel, checked in, and proceeded to put the bikes into proper riding condition. I immediately rode our tandem to one of the local bike shops to get the repairs done. While I would have been able to true the wheel myself, the bent hanger required a dedicated tool which I don't generally carry with me, and I had plenty of other things to do.

By the time I returned to the hotel, Cynthia told me that while we were scouting for the hotel, she had put down her cycle-gear bag and had not picked it up when we walked to the hotel! She searched around the train station, checked lost and found, and other locations but did not find it, and was now forced to buy all new equipment for the tour, the toughest one being shoes of the right size for her non-German feet. She had also lost her saddlebag, so Kekoa volunteered to buy a rack and panniers and let her use his saddlebag instead.

Lisa and I made a train trip down to our former apartment in Pullach, where our former landlady made excuses about why she never returned our security deposit. Our return put her in an embarrassing situation, and she promised that she would have our money when we returned from the tour.

Our other problem was the weather, which had rain forecasted for the foreseeable future. With Grossglockner's summit forecast for near freezing temperatures, my original plan to ride the Grossglockner highway first was out of the question. It took the rest of the day to get Cynthia more clothes and Kekoa panniers and racks. Cynthia wanted to try a bigger store (Karstad sports) the next morning. I hoped (but did not expect) that the forecast would change the next day.

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Tandem is boxed

Yes, that's two Amtrak bike boxes (cost: Free) stitched together, a bunch of packing tape, a leatherman, and some allen wrenches. My experience is that while the cardboard boxes look flimsy and feel flimsy, they are so bulky that airline baggage handlers have no choice but to push or hand carry them. Packing bikes into smaller packages invite them to be tossed, which is how damage happens. The cargo hold of an airplane is actually a pretty benign environment: people ship pets in them, so they're even pressurized, hence the old bugaboo about depressuring tires before putting them on an airplane does not apply!

Nothing Last Forever

On the eve of our departure, the eyelet holding the rack to the dropout broke. Good thing we have 2 (yes, that was a deliberate design decision). I'll have to have Pardo look at it to make sure I didn't install anything wrong just to make doubly sure, though!

Update: Pardo discovered that the rack was bent, so he straightened it. Then he straightened the bottom-most strut separately after a failed attempt to file away material that was causing the rack not to be square with the eyelet. Then he chased all the threads and attached a nut in addition to the bolt. Now the darn thing is extremely solid.

[Update: Pardo has a failure analysis]

Review: Catching Fire

Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games) is the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy. As with the first book, it's a quick read, taking all of 2 hours start to finish. The story continues with the same characters from the previous novel, but more focus is now placed on the world and the political ramifications and fallout from the first novel.

Then midway through the book things shift gears and we once again are plunged into action. But this time, the action feels a lot like, "Oh, we've been here before." The protagonist, however, is kept out of the loop as to what's really happening, which brings on one surprise after another for the reader. Unfortunately, this time, there are some plot-holes that I find difficult to ignore, rendering the novel less believable than the first one.

The novel ends with a cliff-hanger, but I will definitely wait for the library copy rather than buying the third book in the series. I suggest that others wait for the third book to come out before purchasing/reading this one.

Review: Wacom Bamboo Pen Tablet

It's impossible to draw with a mouse. That's the first thing you learn whenever you try to do anything delicate in Photoshop. Any circles that you draw, turn into little jerky discrete movements, and even straight lines are a challenge.

When I needed to work on Independent Cycle Touring, I knew the most difficult chapters to work on would be the chapter on mapping and routing. What I wanted to do was to build up a large database of maps in the reader's head that could pattern match and see good maps versus bad maps, as well as how to interpret certain features. I needed to be able to scan the maps, circle all the highlights, and then annotate them.

Photoshop, it turns out, is pretty good at this. I viewed a few videos about how to tweak Photoshop for the Wacom tablets, and then bought the lowest end model, the Wacom Bamboo Pen Tablet. The idea behind the tablet is that you have a pressure sensitive pen that can control various items like width, bluring, and other such variables. All I wanted to do, however, was to be able to draw a circle and make it look natural.

Natural is hard. Really hard. For my sample chapter, for instance, each circle had to be drawn at least 2-3 times. Another weird thing that I didn't realize at first was that the tablet maps itself to your entire display surface, so if you have a dual screen setup, that makes the pen really sensitive. I ended up zooming in several levels, drawing, hitting Control-Z (undo), and drawing again. While I at first had thoughts of making the pen sensitivity work for me and give me nice fades, I soon resigned myself to just being able to draw circles that didn't look like crap.

Would I recommend the Bamboo Pen Tablet? Maybe. If you need to draw, I see no other choices. Now that I've been through the InDesign tutorial, maybe I would consider using the ellipse tool instead of drawing. But ultimately, it's the reader's opinion that count, so if you look through the sample chapter and tell me what you think of the hand-drawn portions, I would very much appreciate it.

Retirement Report

When I announced my retirement, at least one person thought it was a joke. The same response happened to me at work as well. One of my favorite ones was "I can't imagine staying home to watch TV and feed the cats." Well, it's been 2 months, and I haven't been spending all that time at home watching TV, and fortunately, the cow doesn't need much feeding.

Nowdays, whenever I run into former co-workers, however, they always ask me where I ended up. So maybe I'll explain what I've been up to for the last couple of months. The first thing I did was to intensify the training program Lisa and I had for the Tour of the German-speaking Alps. This is a challenging tour, and we planned to be in shape for it enough to enjoy it. The training took about 10-15 hours a week, and while I could get Lisa out to ride 2-3 days a week, this year we added 2 hours a week of in-gym time to boost our strengths. Normally, I'd just save the gym money and spend more time cycling, but Lisa was short on time, so this was the way to do it. Besides, paying someone else to yell at Lisa is much better than yelling at her myself.

My first few weeks were spent "marketing" An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups. I use "marketing" in quotes because I actually don't know how to do it. I first tried Adwords, but to be honest, Adwords is not very good at niche books. I eventually decided that while I didn't know how to market, I knew how to write, so I wrote a lot. This actually worked up to a point, and for a while it seemed like every major blog post generated more sales, which is nice. By the way, being an author is great. I told someone that I get more fan mail and recognition from 2 months as an author than I did for 6 years at Google. The monetary compensation at Google was much better though!

I then got hit by request after request to have lunch. It took me a while to figure out why, but eventually I realized that now that I wasn't a Googler, two things happened. First, Googlers who needed objective advice considered me more objective than before (I am still very positive on Google, but no longer am directly paid by Google), and so asked me for it. Secondly, non-Googlers/startups that were afraid that I might leak something to Google were a lot less worried. So my lunch spots were literally booked up from mid April till mid May. I literally had to schedule my lunch spots a month out for a couple of weeks. Clearly, being an ex-Googler made me popular.

People came to me with different issues, and different requests, and so everything I said was different and held in confidence. By far the most satisfying help I provided was in helping engineers negotiate compensation. Let me brag a little bit. One person read my book, took my advice, and during the negotiation process bumped up his pay by about 100%. Well, that could be under-stating it, but I can't say more. Clearly, I can't take all the credit for it, since the engineer was brilliant. But you can work your ass off and still end up under-recognized. I truly believe that most engineers are under compensated for what they do, and it makes me very happy to fix that up a bit. And by the way it is true that women don't get paid more mostly because they don't negotiate. I had a couple of direct experiences with that (and I can't elaborate either), but if you're a woman and compensation is important to you, you definitely need to ignore that voice in your head telling you, "I'm not worth that much money," or "Money doesn't matter." I think that if better compensation kept more women in engineering, everyone would be better off, and money does matter a heck of a lot that way.

In addition, I wanted to work on Independent Cycle Touring. I started off with a Bamboo Pen and Tablet, annotated some maps in Photoshop, and soon realized that I had no clue how to layout a book like this. This led to an Adobe InDesign CS5 download, realizing that the application definitely needed me to spend time to learn it, and then burning 10 days learning the program. That digression paid off, however, and soon I was happily writing away.

The rental unit of my house also needed my attention, since our existing renter moved away and I had to rent out the place before the upcoming trip. That took a frenzy of activity that's still not completely died down yet.

And then there are the small jobs that I wanted to do but would never have had time to do if I had a day job. For instance, yesterday I visited Gastronaut and helped show the folks how to do their own food pictures for their catalog. It was so great to see Nate and Mirit and see how quickly they've grown from a two person shop. They have been very successful and it's really great to see.

I also planned trips. I'm visiting Seattle for a few days in August, want to take Catamaran classes, do another sailing trip in the BVIs, and do a fall photography trip in Montana/Wyoming/Alberta. I haven't visited Glacier National Park since becoming a decent photographer, and I would like to. By the way, if you're interested in any of my trips, sign up for the google group. Do let me know who you are by e-mail before hand though, since I do moderate the group against spammers. Not all trips are strenuous, but I do run qualifiers to make sure people get along first.

I learned to cook. Really simple stuff, nothing like Duck Confit or any of the elaborate multi-day recipes. I'm starting with my childhood foods like Nasi Lemak and Nasi Goreng, but it's been really satisfying. I was always a little bit intimidated by cooking, but spending time in the kitchen with Hang Zhang inspired me. Now I realize that cooking isn't hard, it just takes time, and seriously, I can afford an hour or so a day to eat my favorite foods. Let me tell you, the first time I did Beef Rendang I didn't realize it was a 3 hour recipe. It was delicious, but I was also starving by the time I got to eat!

One thing I did not succeed in doing was to finish a video game on the PS3. I started on Batman: Arkham Asylum, and I'm pretty far a long (on "easy" mode, I'm not 10 years old any more, and I was never any good at video games --- ask Jeff Rothschild or the guys over at Id), but with all these other things to do I never really had a chance to pick it back up and finish it. Yes, I am lame. Maybe this winter after the book's done and the touring/outdoor season is over.

In any case, people who've discussed retirement with me have always said that they were concern about the lack of intellectual stimulation and the lack of great food. I want to say that those concerns are over-blown. I have not been bored for even a couple of minutes since I retired, and the food is plenty fine.

And we are live over at AngryBear...

A couple of months ago, Scarlet suggested that I do a blog tour. My problem was that I had no idea how to go about doing that. I was, however, a fan of Mike Kimel (Cactus's) work over at Angry Bear, and he suggested that a report on the economics of self-publishing might be interesting to readers there. I wrote up my sales numbers in addition to an introduction to my book, and the post is now live. (It's posted by the owner of the blog, since it doesn't make sense to give me write permission to a blog for just one article)

Review: Adobe InDesign One-On-One

My name is still attached to some TeX macro packages on the internet. Yes, TeX, because LaTeX was too high level for me. Yet 21 years after I wrote that TeX macro package and wanted to layout a book with complex layout, I turned not to TeX but to Adobe InDesign. The reason? When I'm laying down text and graphics side by side and want word wrapping and other niceties, I will not put up with a compile/edit/debug cycle, especially not when my modern machine has 4 cores, 8GB of RAM, and I'm not afraid to blow it all on fancy UI just so I'm not puzzling over why this went there.

As it happened, I happened to run into this need during the regular Adobe 18-month upgrade cycle, so I downloaded InDesign CS5 and proceeded to quickly realize that this is definitely what people mean by "fat client." The UI was clearly designed for experienced users to whiz through, and anyone who's serious about needing this sort of layout tool would also have to put in some substantial committed time to learn it, just like the couple of weeks it took me to learn TeX
a couple of decades ago.

I browsed through a few InDesign books and quickly picked out Adobe InDesign CS4 One-On-One as the one that looked like it would be the most useful for a complete beginner. There wasn't a CS5 version of the book yet, and I figured that the differences wouldn't be major enough to warrant concern.

The book is laid out in 12 lessons, each covering a specific facet of InDesign. As someone who knows the basics about kerning, tracking, and ledding, many of these lessons went by really fast. Then I would hit something new to me, like tables, drawing (wow, the darn thing comes with several drawing tools --- I might not ever have to learn Illustrator), and transparency, and my learning would suddenly stutter while I picked up all the new concepts.

The book takes a task oriented approach: for every task, some starter files are provided, and then the reader is walked through a series of step-by-step exercises to execute some task. My big problem with this set-up is motivation. Very frequently, there is no motivation provided as to why you want to do a certain task. Sometimes, it's obvious during the exercise, but many times, I would be scratching my head wondering why I would want to do this. A secondary problem is that some times I would want to find out how to do something, and it's not always obvious where in the book that would be. For instance, auto-numbering figures is described in the section on style sheets. I'm sure there's a good reason for this, and I could find it in the index, but the book (and InDesign) is definitely big and complex enough that you need to do this frequently, even after you've worked through all the exercises.

As I expected, very little stuff was broken between CS4 and CS5, so I could work through almost all the exercises. Once I was done with the exercises, working on content proved to be really easy and fast: I wrote entire chapters in a matter of days in a fit of writing frenzy. It's an entirely good thing, since by the time I looked up I had almost run out of my InDesign trial license, and all I had time to do was to put up my book's kickstarter page.

All in all, it took me about 10 days or so to work through every exercise in this book, and each day was about 3 hours on average, so if you needed to you could inhale the entire book hacker-style in under a week. This included all the videos I watched, and there's about 4 hours of video in the book's DVD (along with all the data for exercises) There's not a lot of explanation as to the why of certain things (like style sheets weren't properly motivated), but since I was coming at this from about 5-6 years of pretty solid TeX and LaTeX hacking, that didn't bother me. The book is recommended as a reasonably good introduction to InDesign for someone who had never dealt with the program before. As a reference, it's serviceable, but other books might be better. That said, I'm not buying any more InDesign books until/unless I really find the need for them. So far in writing this book I really haven't found anything that I hadn't run across in One-On-One.

As for InDesign itself, you can take a look at my sample chapter. It's not complete (no page numbers, no index, no headers, no footers, no fancy per-page tabs), but even that chapter was made much easier by writing it on InDesign, rather than a word processor. I'll write a full review after I'm done writing the book (which is currently on hiatus because of the upcoming tour, and because I am awaiting the full version to ship and arrive).

Rebecca Frankel on Boston Startups

A few weeks ago, I shared something on Google Reader/Buzz about Boston Entrepreneurship. Fundamentally, during the mini-computer era, Route 128 was as much a hotbed of computer expertise and business as Silicon Valley was. If you had to bet on a region, you could easily have bet on the Boston Area rather than Silicon Valley.

Yet all through the 1980s till now, Silicon Valley has led the way in producing the companies that people talk about today. Google, Facebook, Netscape, and many others that changed the landscape basically came out of Silicon Valley. I applied to graduate school at MIT in 1992, and was accepted, but for various reasons (explained in An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups) backed out before registration, so I never truly got a good feel for the Boston area.

I met Rebecca Frankel a few years ago when she applied for a conversion from intern to full time employee at Google. At that time, I thought Google was doing something pretty nasty: they were forcing interns who wanted to convert to commit to leaving graduate school before granting an interview, which might or might not result in a full time offer. I understand why Google did this: it really wanted to make sure that the best graduate students weren't being systematically poached by Google (or some groups inside Google), thereby poisoning the well at graduate schools where professors would send us their top students. But I thought it was a pretty crummy deal.

Anyway, Rebecca has a lot to say about the Boston area, MIT, and the role of DARPA and what other sciences call "basic research" as compared to what entrepreneurship is all about, and I think whether you live in Silicon Valley or Boston (or even New York City), it's definitely worth reading what she has to say.

The next book

Many people have asked me what the next book will be. It should be no surprise to anyone that I've chosen to write about my other passion in life (outside of Software Engineering), which is bicycle touring. If you're interested, click over to the kickstarter guide or to the book's home page and check it out. Or you can just directly download the sample chapter.

This book is extremely layout heavy, and while I appreciate any feedback, while I'm waiting for my non-trial version of Adobe Indesign to arrive, I can't make any edits at all. I'm also leaving for a bicycle tour on June 15th, so if I'm not very communicative over the next few weeks please know that it's because I'm busy working on the book, not in front of the computer.

Review: The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Stieg Larsson's novel which is a part mystery, part thriller about what appears to have been a long overdue crime.

The novel begins with the protagonist, Blomkvist, a journalist and publisher for a magazine convicted of libel and false reporting against a well-known industrialist. As a result of this conviction, he is forced to depart his job. Fortuitously, another industrialist decides to hire Blomkvist to investigate a 40 year old murder: niece Harriet Vanger's mysterious disappearance. Blomkvist makes little progress at first, but then eventually makes a surprising breakthrough, and the plot's pace picks up dramatically after that.

At the same time, the novel follows the title character's story. Lisbeth Salander, computer hacker, anti-social investigator gets full development in an interspersed story segment that shows us what kind of person she is. We know that the two protagonists will eventually meet, but Larrson clearly wanted his audience to fully understand where this character comes from.

The novel is slow for the first half, picks up its pace in the middle, and towards the end jumps into triple-time action, with multiple events occupying each page. This pace seems to be deliberate, but definitely put me off for the first half or so. The mystery doesn't really seem fair: by the time the reader get to the resolution, there has been so many distractions and red herrings thrown at him that the mystery is all but forgotten! This properly puts the book into the "thriller" category rather than the usual mystery.

The writing style is stilted, and the characters stereotypes. Recommended only as an airplane novel, but as an airplane novel, it is very good.

Recognition

Google had a very cool system for allowing employees to pat each other on the back. It was called a peer bonus, and basically netted out about $100. The idea was that if you saw someone doing something above and beyond the call of duty, you would send them a peer bonus by e-mailing HR and then that person would receive a virtual certificate detailing what they had done for their peers to deserve the bonus. There were a few rules to prevent blatant gaming of the system, but by and large it was an honor system.

This was a great system, and I made it a personal goal to hand out one of these every quarter. What I loved about it was that it did two things: first of all, it gave someone a pat on the back for hard work. The average engineer made about $100/hour, so if anyone did something for me that saved me an hour of time or more, that peer bonus was well worth it. But as I handed them out, what I noticed was that people were so starved of recognition that the value of handing out these awards far exceeded any monetary gain they represented. Once I had given someone a peer bonus, the next time I asked for a favor, people would bend over backwards to get me something I needed. So handing out frequent peer bonuses made me more effective as well. I also got into the habit of writing someone an unsolicited positive peer review whenever I thought something they did was worth while. I don't know if I ever made a difference to someone's promotion, but clearly, others thought it mattered. The problem with Google was that people performed so far above their levels that folks working there took extra-ordinary performance for granted, and rarely stopped to recognize the amazing things that were getting done every day.

At one point I handed out a peer bonus to Mirit Cohen (currently at gastronauts serving the lucky folks working for twitter). Her manager got very very excited and told me, "Did you know that in the history of Google you are only the second person to hand out a peer bonus to a chef?" That blew my mind. These people worked their hearts out producing amazing food for Googlers, and yet in Google history only 2 people had ever thought to say thank you in this extremely lightweight fashion. Whenever I visit the Google campus now as a retiree, occasionally people will ask me how it was that I came to know so many chefs. My response was, "Try being one of two people who'd ever given a chef any kind of recognition for their hard work."

A year before I left, the peer bonus system got switched out. It had gone from an e-mail system to one in which you filled out a web form. The web form had all sorts of warnings on top saying, "Please do not abuse the system, make sure the bonus is really going to someone deserving!" What I saw, however, wasn't that people were abusing the system, but that people were starved for recognition, and I thought the warning should have said, "Not enough of you are thanking your peers for a job well done. You should come back here more often."

Review: The Aviator

The Aviator is Martin Scorsese's movie about Howard Hughes. I didn't know much about Howard Hughes the man, but the movie at least seemed to do a good job portraying important moments of his life, from movie-making to making aircraft, this seemed to be a man truly larger than life, able to do whatever he wanted, but subject to a dreadful mental illness that DiCarpio depicts well: at one point we see him covering his mouth to keep himself from repeatedly saying the same words that he knew he would loop into if he were not to stop himself.

Cate Blanchett won an Oscar as Katherine Hepburn, but I really did not like her in this role. Her acting seemed really contrived, and even her laughs seemed fake. It could very well be that Katherine Hepburn was really like this, but I found it really difficult to watch any segment of the film with her in it.

As far as the story goes, Scorsese avoids trying to make any editorial comments about Hughes, and I think he succeeded in this case. We learn to feel sorry for him, but we also get to see the ruthlessness and shrewdness needed to dominate an industry the way Howard Hughes did. About the only thing I dislike was that Hughes was such a penny pincher he had his aircraft company turned into a charity to avoid paying taxes, but the movie portrays him as a profligate spender, risking all in pursuit of a goal. It would have been interesting to delve into these contradictions.

It's a long movie, so it's best watched at home so you can pause it to go to the bathroom. There aren't very many action sequences, so it's not a movie where there'd be any problem pausing (or even stopping) the movie and then resuming it later. Despite the movie being on Blu-Ray, I can honestly say that this was one Blu-Ray that didn't give me the "wow, I'm watching in HD!" feeling --- the subject matter really wasn't subject to high definition, and the transfer was nothing special.

I can say I enjoyed the movie, but not enough to give it a recommended rating. I guess I'm just not enough of a Scorsese fan.