7 Hills of Saratoga

Greg & Yajie on Stevens Canyon Road 

7 Hills of Saratoga Ride

Greg Merritt, Yajie Ying, Jeff Orum, David Falconer, Bonney Ellestad 

A little about you

I turned on Google Analytics on this blog a few weeks ago when it became a publicly available service, and now that it's been running abit, I can share a few titbits with you, my readers, about you, my readers.

Over the course of a week, I get about 341 visitors, totalling about 486 page views. About 95% of you are first time visitors, and 5% of you are prior visitors (which really surprised me --- I would think that most of the visitors would be friends of mine, but maybe friends of mine only read my blog through RSS feeds).

Of the 341 visitors, 183 come from a search (google or otherwise), 133 come from a referral, and 25 directly typed http://piaw.blogspot.com or through an e-mail reader click.

The current top keyword for that hits this blog is "memoirs of a geisha controversy", which surprised the heck out of me! For a while, it was "buffy the chosen collection". This blog has posts that are ranked fairly highly by Google for those queries so I shouldn't be surprised.

9 visitors also found this site by typing "christian" into google. This is really wierd, since I'm not even in the top 100 entries returned by Google. What this suggests to me is that a lot of people search for "christian", and some small percentage of those guys are pretty darn persistent!

7 visitors found this blog via "fuji team sl". I'm one of the top results ranked on Google for this, so it's not too surprising, but for those of you who come here for that, let me assure you that my Fuji Team SL is still serving me fine, and I still love that bike and look forward to many more miles.

Most visitors to this blog (186) come from the U.S. The next category (38 visitors) don't have their geo-location set. Canada and the UK form the next big blocks of users (25 and 16 respectively), and after that we're into the noise with mostly non-English speaking countries.

Not unsurprisingly, 52% of you use Internet Explorer, but a full 36% of visitors use Firefox. I suspect that these numbers don't reflect the overall internet, and users that find my blog tend to be more sophisticated than the average internet user. 84% of you use Windows, 9% Macintosh, and 7% Linux. I wonder how many of that 7% came from internal to Google.

I'm very pleased to see that 32-bit color users comprise a full 80% of my visitors. That means effort put into scanning high resolution photos won't be wasted!

In any case, I'm very happy with the numbers I'm getting from Google analytics, and it'll be interesting to revisit this next year and see how the composition of my visitors have changed. I'm not really interested in this blog as a commercial outlet, but clearly, it seems like my audience will be mostly cyclists, not a bad thing at all!

One slightly disappointing item to me is that my book reviews see almost no traffic. But then again, I know that Larry and Scarlet both read my book reviews, so I will keep writing them.

Billionaire Investors start paying attention to peak oil

For the past few months he's been holed up in hard-core research mode—reading books, academic studies, and, yes, blogs. Every morning he rises before dawn at one of his houses in Texas or South Carolina or California (he actually owns a piece of Pebble Beach Resorts) and spends four or five hours reading sites like LifeAftertheOilCrash.net or DieOff.org, obsessively following links and sifting through data. How worried is he? He has some $500 million of his $2.5 billion fortune in cash, more than ever before.

It does seem strange that if you believe an oil-induced crash is coming you wouldn't be invested heavily in oil stocks. Then again, if I was heavily invested in oil stocks, I wouldn't tell Fortune magazine, either, unless I was looking for a quick cash out.

Yajie at Windy Hill Summit

Yajie asked me why I turn on the flash when shooting during the day, and ironically, this photograph provides an excellent example. The sun was shining from the right, which would have created dark shadows along the left side of her face in this picture. The fill flash from the camera lit up the side of her face enough to provide definition (without over-powering it), while also giving us a little bit of fill-light in her eye to liven it up a bit. This technique works well on both people and animals.

Artist's Light

Looking South from Windy Hill OSP, you can see ridge after ridge. The little bit of haze today gave it a dreamy feeling. 

View of the Pacific from Windy Hill OSP

Windy Hill Open Space Preserve is one of several spots along the coast where you can see the Ocean and the Bay at the same time. (The others being Russian Ridge and Black Mountain summit)

It wasn't as clear today as it was yesterday, but it was still beautiful. 

The Beautiful South

I've been listening a lot to Carry on Up the Charts recently. The lyrics are cynical, and not the typical love song pop that you hear, but it's coupled with very listenable, peppy music which sounds really good. They are very much worth a listen for those of you who actually pay attention to the lyrics of a song: the duet, "A little time", is worth the price of the entire album.

Strangely enough, when searching for information about the band, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy provided the best data.

View from Kings Mountain Road

I neglected to shoot a picture of this last week. The haze is probably smog from the windless days we've had recently. The Bay Area has great air quality only because the ocean wind usually blows it inland to Fresno and Sacramento valleys. With an off-shore flow the last couple of days that hasn't been happening. 

Christian Overtones in Narnia

When in the first volume he sacrifices himself in order to redeem Edmund, and in the last leads the talking animals to a beautiful afterworld, it's so easy to see Lewis ringing his Christian themes that you marvel at how you utterly missed them as a child. But miss them you most likely did, and for good reason.

Meghan O'Rourke might have missed them as a child, but I absolutely did not, steeped as I was in a mission school, The Anglo Chinese School, with its weekly preachings and daily devotionals. In fact, even as a child, the Christian allegories were so distracting that I found myself much preferring the Chronicles of Prydain by Llyold Alexander, with its Celtic myths and its sad sad stories of growing up, facing your responsibilities, and being true to yourself. The place in the books where Taran gives up magical wisdom, and later where he has to give up his true love strike a cord in me, even years later as an adult, while Narnia's Christian allegories are a pale shadow of the bible itself, which has far more interesting stories.

View of the beach from Highway 1 along the San Gregorio Coast

It was so unusually clear today. The views were gorgeous, and well worth the effort. Every so often we get these off-shore flows that sweep all traces of fog away from the coast, and when that happens, you need to take advantage of it! 

Tanya makes it to the coast.

Today, Tanya made it to the coast and back on a bicycle for the first time (and couldn't have picked a better day to do it!). Congratulations, Tanya! 

Free WiFi coming in Sunnyvale!

It's about time! Mountain View is getting it from Google, but Sunnyvale should definitely be right up there in terms of tech savvy Silicon Valley residents as well. The ads are a small price to pay for free access everywhere. I'm excited.

Cultural Controversy in "Memoirs of a Geisha"

Looks like the Japanese are mad that Chinese women play the lead characters (who are supposed to be Japanese) in the movie, and the Chinese are mad because the lead Chinese actress (Zhang Ziyi) is depicted as having sex with a Japanese man. It sounds funny to me too.

Of course, it does remind me that me and a few of my Chinese colleagues have been mistaken for each other by our non-Chinese colleagues/friends. I try not to be offended on the occasions when it happens (and some of the ones who make the mistakes do eventually become genuinely good friends), but it's still a little annoying.

In any case, when I was in Berkeley in the late 80s/early 90s more than one Japanese tourist came up to me and tried to speak Japanese to me. It was those encounters (as well as my general enjoyment of Japanese cartoons) that led me to eventually take Japanese classes and then get good enough at Japanese to get into lots of trouble.

British Walking Series: Coast to Coast Path

I bought this after perusing the original Wainwright book. It's fairly recent (2004), has color photos that made Lisa want to do the trip, and has lodging information, which was missing from Wainwright's book (and which wouldn't have been useful either, since his was written in 1974). The first 50 pages of this book pay for the cost of the book just by itself. There's a short biography of Alfred Wainright, which seems to prove Malcolm Gladwell's point that it takes an extremely unhappy person to do great works. There's multiple pre-laid-out itineraries set out by lodging type, pace, and recommendations for places where we might want to stay for more than a day.

While the original Wainwright book is worth getting because it's such an awesome book, this one is worth only getting if you're actually planning to do the trip soon. However, I suspect that this is the one that will prove more useful on the trail itself.

View from the top of the PG&E trail

It was such a clear day today that we easily saw all the way to San Francisco. 

First rain cape ride...

It's been raining a little bit recently, but I've been lucky to only see drizzle, so what I've been doing is keeping fenders on the bike and just riding in the rain (not a bad way to go, if you ask me). But today's rain started off a little harder than normal, and the forecast was for really bad weather. Nevertheless, by the time I got to work it had stopped.

With a raincape and fenders, rain riding is not bad at all, as long as there isn't a headwind. I'll happily ride in the rain, and I'll happily rind in windy conditions, but the combination sucks and is one of the few things that will make me drive to work voluntarily. Having a shower at work, of course, is essential, but I've found in the past also that it's actually warmer in winter when it rains than when it's sunny.

Richard Thompson Live

John Bayley talked me into buying Richard Thompson's latest album Front Parlor Balads, which I enjoyed quite a bit, so when I saw that he was playing in Saratoga I bought a ticket. (Lisa couldn't make it, and everyone else I spoke to said, "Richard Who?")

The concert was amazing, and he's an great performer (he did the entire thing with an acoustic guitar). He's playing again tomorrow, so if you've got tomorrow night free, there are still tickets available. I will definitely see him again, and the next time, I'll buy 2 tickets and drag a friend along.

The Coast to Coast Walk

Lisa & I are doing the coast to coast walk next year, and as part of my research I got a copy of the original book by Alfred Wainwright. And what a gorgeous book it is! You should own a copy even if you have no intention of doing the walk --- it is that pretty. The book is entirely hand-written, and the illustrations are done in ink by Wainwright himself. Wainwright hand-wraps and hand-justifies the entire book, and does it without the use of hyphens! (The book was written in the 1970s, before cheap wordprocessors but there were definitely electric typewriters that were very popular by then)

The text itself is written in an old-school style, assuming that the reader has already decided to do the route and does not need to be led by the hand or persuaded that this is a good idea.

Highly recommended.

Well, it's not too late to abandon the coast to coast idea and stay on in Patterdale. There is nothing ahead as good, admittedly --- the big fault of doing this walk in a west to east direction is that the best come first. Anyway, please yourself. Stay if you want to and I'll carry on alone, and no hard feelings. You'll think of something to tell the folks at home... Mind, you might find yourself thinking in the next few days about Shap and the limestone plateau beyond, and wondering what Swaledale is really like and whether the North York Moors are as attractive as people say. Yoou could have regrets. And (let's be clear about this) you can't expect to get your money back for the book if you prefer not to continue the walk... Coming with me? Good. I thought you would.

Fortune on Andrew Grove as a manager

But Kinnie and Carter had trained at the Grove school of management—Grove's MO as a leader has always been to depend on "helpful Cassandras" to make sure that he doesn't win an argument he ought to lose. The two were blunt. "Andy, you can't do this," Carter said. Abandoning CISC for RISC, they argued, would truncate one of the most profitable franchises in business history for ... what? Leveling the playing field for Intel's competition? When the discussion ended, Kinnie and Carter had achieved a feat of monumental difficulty. They'd won an argument with Andy Grove.

The smartest managers instinctively understand that to manage effectively they need to surround themselves not with "yes-men", but with people willing to question and honestly state the truth. People who habitually do so, however, are not people who are comfortable to be around, and it takes truly great men who can set aside their egoes and truly listen and value those people.

My favorite view of Mountain View.

 

Black Mountain Summit

Left to Right: Shyam, Me, Yajie. 

Black Mountain

At last, a clear view all the way to the Ocean from the top of Black Mountain! 

Yes, it was this cold in Tahoe.

Left to right: Mom, Dad, Me, Lisa. 

Another view of Lake Tahoe from Kings Beach

 

Lake Tahoe from Kings Beach

Sad to see the season go.
I'll miss the crackling of the air,
The loss of all I know.
Cowboy Junkies 

Fantastic Voyage: The Science Behind Radical Life Extension, Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman

I heard Ray Kurzweil when he came to talk at Google. He did seem to be an incredible optimist, predicting a Vingian Singularity within the next couple of decades. My experience with such optimists is that they are invariably excessively optimistic—for instance, it’s 2005, and we have no space vessels capable of providing manned exploration of Jupiter or Saturn. We don’t have flying cars, nor do we have sentient computers.

With that, however, I nevertheless checked out Fantastic Voyage from the library in the hope that there would be substantial work already done on current medical technology to promise radical life extension.

The major thesis that Kurzweil & Grossman provide is correct—current medicine as practiced by drug companies and many doctors is focused entirely on emergency medicine, rather than on true health maintenance. We have drugs to rescue you when you get sick, and chemotherapy when you get cancer, but the current advice on diet and exercise is both contradictory and in many cases ineffectual. (For instance, Kurzweil and both my parents control their diabetes much more effectively by diet control and exercise rather than insulin or drugs)

Nonetheless, if you wanted to take Kurzweil/Grossman’s advice seriously, you’d have to watch your diet to a degree that most non-fanatics cannot. In addition, neither Kurzweil nor Grossman are serious athletes who’d consider a 60 mile bike ride merely an easy Saturday jaunt and a 200km ride a worthy goal, so their prescriptions absolutely will not work if you’re a serious cyclist/hiker/runner.

Their secondary thesis, that we’ll see nanorobots and a general understanding of human genetics and biology so thorough that we’ll be able to reverse aging and correct lots of currently incurable diseases, I don’t believe for more than a minute. Certainly, it’s tough enough debugging legacy code written by human beings. Trying to understand and debug code that evolved through evolution and understanding all the side-effects of messing about with our genes will take a multi-decade effort. I’d love to be wrong, but I expect that level of technology not to develop within my life-time, and destroying my enjoyment of food through a calorie restricted diet (which would eliminate my ability to enjoy cycling and long distance hiking) isn’t something that I would seriously consider.

Ultimately, I guess I don’t fear death --- I do fear the deterioration of my body and mind, or long term pain. (Scarlet will happily testify to my general wussiness when it comes to pain)

I have a personal program to combat each of the degenerative disease and aging processes. Terry and I have a problem with the word supplement because it suggests something that is optional and of secondary importance. We prefer to call them “nutritionals” instead. My view is that I am reprogramming my biochemistry in the same way that I reprogram the computers in my life …

…I take about 250 pills of nutritionals a day. Once a week I go to Whole Health New England, a complementary medicine health clinic run by Dr. Glenn Rothfeld, where I spend the day… At this clinic, I have a half-dozen intravenous therapies---basically nutritionals delivered directly into my bloodstream, thereby bypassing my GI tract. I also have acupuncture treatment from Dr. Rothfeld, a master acupuncturist who helped introduce this therarpy to this country 30 years ago.

I am in awe...

Watching the Chosen Collection, I come across a segment where Joss Whedon is talking to the other writers on the show...

Writer 1: "Then Joss told me that he was writing a musical. I asked him, so who's writing the music! He said, I'm doing it! My response: yes, we know you're going to write the lyrics, but who's going to write the music? He said, I am! I'm teaching myself to play to piano, and I'm going to write the music."

Writer 2: "So he shows up after his vacation and gives us the manuscript and a CD. We grabbed it, assigned roles to each other, and read through the script. Every time we hit a song, we'd push play on the CD. After it was over I wanted to go back to my office and burn the place down. This was what he did in his down-time!"

Most of us know that the best software engineers are more than 300 times more productive than the median software engineer (in any organization). But we don't frequently stop to think that this applies across all creative/technical professions! It just boggles my mind that someone could teach himself to play the piano (in his downtime) just to write a musical, and then compose music. I am in awe. Piano lessons for me were incredibly painful, and I can't imagine being able to pick it up like that.

Slate on Cycling in LA

So, for now I'll just enjoy my secret Los Angeles secretly, feeling my blood pressure fall as I sail past all the six-cylinder, leather-upholstered pressure cookers around me.

My experience is that social pressure to not be different plays a bigger part in discouraging cycling for transportation than laziness or even lack of cycling skill. It's nice to see Slate acknowledge that even in Los Angeles, cycling is viable and a good alternative to car driving.

View from Black Mountain

I couldn't help myself. With the temperatures at 73 degrees in November, I had to climb Black Mountain on the way to work. 27 miles, and about 2800' of climb. It was actually warmer on top of the mountain than at the bottom, and descending Page Mill road Monday morning at 9:30am is a delight --- there's almost no traffic whatsoever. 

Why I'm not rich and famous

Scott Adams has gotten at least 4 days of material out of his surgery to correct a deviated septum. When I got the identical surgery 3 years ago, I got 0 days of material out of it. Clearly, he is smarter, wittier, and funnier than I am. He's probably better looking too. He gets so much more out of life than I do. Though looking back at it, I'm not sure I wanted that much more out of a septoplasty than I did. Waking up in the middle of your surgery is an interesting experience, to say the least.

Piaw & Lisa attending a wedding dinner

Yes, that's the look of a man faced with impending doom... 

The perils of wearing Google stuff in public

Last year, while waiting to ride with John and Pamela Blayley, I wore a Google jersey (so I would be distinguishable) and waited at the corner of Canada Road and Woodside Road. There, some other cyclist recognized the jersey, rolled up to me, and said, "Can I borrow a million bucks?"

Then this summer, while Touring the French Alps, Mike Samuel and I wore almost nothing but Google jerseys, but only one person even bothered to comment on it, so I thought Google-mania was over.

Then this weekend I made the mistake of wearing a Google sweatshirt to Las Vegas (to attend a wedding). The guy at the Thrifty Rental Car counter spotted it (and asked me about it --- I was quick to say that I got the sweatshirt as a result of a favor I did for someone), and my orbitz negotiated rate went up immediately. (Not by a lot, or so much that I wanted to immediately shop for car rental prices, but enough to annoy me) I don't know whether it was just standard practice for them to bait and switch customers like this, or whether it was the guy behind the counter, but...

Tossing out my dress shoes...

After the wedding (ceremony & dinner) I had to attend last night, I tossed my dress shoes into the trash. I will never willingly subject myself to shoes that uncomfortable again. Either I'll buy comfortable dress shoes (do those exist? I'm convinced they don't --- or at least, not without spending gobs and gobs of money that I don't have), or I'll attend all functions in my sneakers/trail runners. If the torture my feet were subject to last night was at all similar to what women put up with with high heels, I'm surprised that there hasn't been a revolution/movement to toss all heels into the trash.

26" wheels versus 700c wheels

> Let me say that a 26 inch bike is not the slug you might think. Equipped
> with a decent stoker, you'll be passing club riders with margin to
> discuss the weekend's touring route.

I beg to differ. We switched from a steel 26" frame to an Al 700c
frame. The 700c wheels were more comfortable, faster (time up Old La
Honda road went from 40 minutes to 31 minutes!), and just plain
handled better on smooth pavement and unpaved bike trails in Europe as
well as the San Francisco area.

Bill McCready has an old post that explains why:

http://www.gtgtandems.com/tech/700-26.html

And I agree. If you have power to spare 26" wheels will still be
faster (John & Pamela Bayley were much faster than we were up the 20%
grade that was El Toyonal road in the Berkeley Hills on their steel
26" tandem bike with lumotec lights still on their bike), but if
you're looking to squeeze every bit of performance out of the bike and
have an exciting ride, 700c is the way to go. Bigger wheels = more
comfort over bumps = more speed! The only disadvantage is durability
of the 700c wheels, but as long as you have a good wheel builder or
learn to build wheels yourself that will be no problem whatsoever.
(Oh, and don't buy DT spokes:
http://www.peterwhitecycles.com/DTspokes.htm)

I think that any difference in selection of equipment between tandems
and singles is exaggerated. If you wouldn't be happy riding a 26"
single bike with slick tires, you're not going to be happy with a 26"
tandem either, given the same conditions. I never rode a single
aluminum bike until we bought our aluminum tandem, and after that I
bought a single aluminum road bike and found that the single aluminum
bike handled just fine, compared to the steel bikes I owned.

Are you happy now, Christine?

Christine's been complaining that I don't have titles in my blog posts. So now I've turned them on. No, I'm not going to go back and edit all previous posts. Not without a bribe, anyway.

Buffy: The Chosen Collection

To quote Larry Hosken circa 1993, "Who says money can't buy happiness?"

Buffy was what changed my mind about American TV. I'd grown up watching shows like Macross and Escaflowne. Shows with long story arcs that required you to remember characters from previous episodes, and that expected you to understand that people change because of events that happen to them. In other words, TV that required that you had an attention span, attention to detail, and a good memory. When I had to watch TV shows like Starsky & Hutch, or "CHiPs", I was extremely disappointed at how characters seemed to stay static from week to week.

Joss Wheldon makes use of every narrative trick in the book. And to top it off, just when you think that he's going to run out of ideas, he pulls another rabbit out of the hat and makes you rethink your assumptions. He's done episodes where for 30 minutes nobody says anything (just when you thought that what made Buffy great was the incredibly witty dialogue). He did an entire episode of Buffy as a musical, without breaking continuity, and while making the episode a keystone in the plot development. You can't watch Buffy with your brain turned off.

I've watched every episode of Buffy through Karl Pflegler's Buffy library from work, and the Santa Clara County Library, but when the entire collection came out I knew I had to buy it for myself.

Hwy 9, Skyline, and Black Road

40 miles, 3658feet (1115m). Fantastic weather. 3.5 hours (and there I was thinking this would have been a 2.5 hour ride). The extra miles (used to start this ride from Saratotga) and the headwind at the end made it harder than expected, but I'm definitely a big fan of Black road.

At the Lexington Reservoir, around 10:00am.

Tanya enjoys the view

Another view of Big Sur from Skyline Blvd, this time at 9:30am

.

View of the Golden Gate Bridge from Alcatraz

Not a great picture, but it clearly illustrates one of the best things about the Bay Area: 70 degree weather in the middle of November!

Questions from someone looking for an engineering job @ Google

How soon I can apply for other positions at Google if am rejected for a particular position?

There's no limitation. However, Google has a long institutional memory. If you did badly for reasons of cultural fit, it is unlikely that any subsequent application will be successful. If your first set of interviewers are credible, it will take an extremely strong referral notice from an employee who was a previous colleague to give you another chance.

What's the total interview duration in general?

45 minutes each, 5-8 interviewers (including phone interviews)

I am not a spontanious person in nature and hence chances are likely that I don't do good in interviews. But am really excellent on the job. What's your advice in my situation during interview?

Practice, practice, practice. Get a few friends to do mock interviews. Or try an alternate way of getting into google, through one of the many programming contests we sponsor, for instance.

What's the good reference you recommend to get the basics of computer science(I may not know all the fundamentals that I learn thro' my job).

Two classic textbooks:

• Introduction to Algorithms
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

If you can read both books and do the exercises easily, then you are probably qualified. (If you click through and read the reviews, you'll notice that the first SICP reviewer is Peter Norvig, a Google director)

The perils of having a blog

Someone's been spamming folks advertising for jobs at Google in my name, using my e-mail address. This is annoying as heck, and I hope I don't end up on too many spam lists as a result. The perils of having an on-line identity are certainly high now compared to when I first had a web-site back in 1993.

I could certainly take down the blog instead. What do you think?

Take that, Seattle-ites

Sorry, Scarlet, your misfortune is my good weather. We had crummy weather all winter last year (ok, crummy by California standards) --- even Bike to Work day in May got rained out. Now let us Californians have the weather we pay our state taxes for! :)

One things is for sure is that the pacnw is in for a much wetter winter compared to last year as it started raining there two weeks ago and don't see any let up in sight. It will take a very strong wave over the top of this ridge to be able to bring any change in the weather this far south.

Scott Burns on Retirement

I definitely disagree with Scott Burns on politics (especially his views on Social Security), but the man does write a great financial column:

Work, Part 2: Men need to pay more attention to women. They're a lot more adaptable than we are.

My wife retired this year, kind of, and she is as happy as I've ever seen her. She works for good causes and is useful. But the money meter is no longer running.

The weaker sex (men, if there was any doubt) would live longer if we could only see life as a cooperative festival rather than a competitive struggle.

Work, play and opportunity cost: The greatest dilemma of continuing to work is fairly subtle, something you don't think about at 30: Every hour spent working is an hour lost to play.

Money: In the big picture, it is less important, not more important.

Some will criticize this statement, noting that it's easy to say money isn't important when you have plenty of it.

But one of the true blessings of being older is that objects don't mean much. Friends do. Objects cost money. Friendship is free. It comes from the unlimited currency of the heart

Investing: But 40 years of investing has taught me that rented brains seldom help us build our nest eggs. Rented brains feel a deep spiritual need to build 20,000-square-foot log cabins in Jackson Hole with the return on our money.

Headphones

Piaw's reviews of headphones for the ipod

First of all, forget the earbuds that come with the ipod. They are terrible, and not at all what I would consider either comfortable or practical. Note that despite my mention of helmet compatibility in these headphones I neither endorse nor encourage the use of headphones while riding your bicycle in traffic!!

Sennheiser PX 100 Headphones

I paid about $38 for these when they went on sale a while back on Amazon.com, and they are great! Plugged directly into the ipod, the sound is neutral, and almost as good as my Sennheiser 600s with an Airhead amplifier. They fold up neatly into a box the size of a spectacle case, and are very comfortable to wear on hikes as long as 4 hours or so. These are my favorite headphones for hiking or general walking around.

Koss KSC 75

These are the ones to get if you can't stand having a headband over your head, or have to wear a helmet while listening to your music. They fit nicely on the helmet exterior, and despite the loose feeling connection, don't fall off easily. They sound great for $14, and while not as nice as the PX 100s, are cheap enough that if you destroy them you won't feel guilty about them. The plug is also a very ipod friendly 90-degree plug, which isn't true for the Sennheiser.

Koss Sport Pro

At $22, these are disappointing. I bought them when I gave my mom my KSC 75s, and they do work under your helmet, but the headband isn't super-comfortable under the helmet. (You can tilt the headband backwards so it doesn't interfere with the helmet) They do fold up neatly into a nice compact package and clamp nicely to your head so they don't allow as much road noise as the KSC 75s, but despite that they still do not sound as nice as the KSC 75s and are a far cry from the Sennheiser PX 100s. I only recommend these if you've already tried the KSCs and found that they don't fit your ears for one reason or another.

View of the Santa Cruz pier from the Boardwalk 

View of Monterey Bay (& Big Sur) from the top of Skyline Blvd
(Photo digitally enhanced in Picasa with a graduated filter)

More riding

Up Old La Honda, down 84, up Alpine road, down Page Mill. 50 miles, and 1400m of climbing (4593 feet). It was gorgeous, of course.

Thoughts from the ride: it's hard to make friends as you get older. For one thing, everyone's incredibly busy, with kids, with work, or with their existing friends. The days of saying, "Can you come out and play?" and then spending the day hanging out and doing stuff are perhaps one of the luxuries we don't get when we're adults. But when you do get a chance to do so, it's a lot of fun, and really something to treasure.

I thought of us
So hard to talk these days
Did we change
Or were we strangers all along
Tell me what caused us to turn away
--- Wall of Silence, The October Project

My favorite Halloween picture.

Scott Burns predicts a recession

And I believe him. Together with the imminent collapse of the housing bubble, we're going to see some tough times:


... Skeptics should consider this brief list:

•The rising cost of gasoline. With the typical household consuming about 1,000 gallons a year, an increase from $1.50 a gallon to $3 meant a purchasing-power loss of $1,500.

•Rate increases for electricity and natural gas.

•Rising medical co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses for health care, plus rising employee health insurance premium costs. Premium costs were up 10 percent in 2004 alone.

Another way to see the same thing is to examine wage gains.

In 2004, the average weekly earnings of private nonagricultural workers rose only 2.2 percent. The consumer price index rose 3.3 percent over the same period.

Scott Adams starts blogging

And it is a very good blog indeed. Very much worth reading!

To the best of our knowledge interviews Margaret Atwood

They interview her about her latest book, Oryx and Crake. Scarlet should listen to this because at one point Margaret Atwood denies her existence. She says, "Girls/women don't spend hours and hours in front of the computer playing strategy games." Scarlet is much more capable of doing that than I am, though I'm sure that Evan has cut into her gaming significantly. Yet I suspect that Scarlet will not be the kind of person who would consider video games to be rotting her kids' brains.

Review: Freakonomics

Freakonomics

Yes, I'm late to the party. Levitt & Dubner actually visited Google a few months ago, but by then I already had the book on the queue at the Santa Clara County Library. It's a great read, covering everything from crime to sumo wrestling and the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan by Superman (a true story!). Highly recommended!


Recall for a moment the two boys, one white and one black, who were described in chapter 5. The white boy who grew up outside Chicago had smart, solid encouraging, loving parents who stressed education and family. The black boy from Daytona Beach was abandoned by his mother, was beaten by his father, and had become a full-fledged ganster by his teens. So what became of the two boys?

The second child, now twenty-seven years old, is Roland G. Fryer Jr., the Harvard economist studying black underachievement.

The white child also made it to Harvard. But soon after, things went badly for him. His name is Ted Kaczynski.