Review: The Big Bang Theory Season One

I first heard about The Big Bang Theory on Fresh Air, and while the interview sounded funny, I was concerned: can a mainstream TV show really depict scientists in a manner that really respects what such people do?

The first episode of the show had me thinking that this was going to be another "let's make fun of the geeks" show (and to some extent a sitcom has to make fun of its main characters). The redeeming feature of the show, though, is that it actually does respect the kind of things you might actually hear when geeks talk. For instance, from Episode 2:

Leonard: Do you wanna join us for Thai food and a Superman movie marathon?
Penny: Wow, a marathon, how many Superman movies are there?
Sheldon: You're kidding, right?
Penny: You know, I do like the one where Lois Lane falls from the helicopter and Superman swooshes down and catches her. Which one was that?
Leonard, Sheldon, Wolowitz: *One.*
[Raj holds up one finger]
Sheldon: You know that scene was rife with scientific inaccuracy?
Penny: Yes, I know men can't fly...
Sheldon: No, no, let's assume that they can... Lois Lane is falling, accelerating at an initial rate of 32 feet per second per second... Superman swoops down to save her by reaching out two arms of steel... Miss Lane, who is now traveling at approximately 120 miles an hour, hits them and is immediately sliced into three equal pieces.
Leonard: Unless Superman matches her speed and decelerates.
Sheldon: In what space, sir, in what space? She's two feet above the ground. Frankly, if he really loved her, he'd let her hit the pavement. It'd be a more merciful death.

(See: IMBD for an extended quote, or you can watch the segment on YouTube)

Yes, as a geek I can critique that dialog: no self-respecting scientist would ever use imperial measurements instead of metric: Sheldon should have said 10 meters per second squared. Superman's arms are also too broad to neatly slice Miss Lane's body into parts. But I can't make even that critique and not add to the humor the show espouses about geeks. My big non-geek complaint about the show is that it has a laugh track. I don't like shows with laugh tracks, and to be honest, I didn't think this show needed one.

Yes, these men are all stereotypes, but the dialog is well-written and interesting. In fact, the dialog is perhaps a bit too well-written. One friend of mine said he couldn't watch the show because it made him uncomfortable, and some of the jokes hit very close to home.

In any case, the show has many laugh out loud moments, and in 22 minute segments is perfectly suited for a portable video device (I watched a lot of it while waiting at airports). The show probably wouldn't get anything out of high def. I enjoyed every episode, even the ones that made me (very very slightly) uncomfortable. If you can't stand the first episode, skip it and go right to the second one. Highly recommended, and I've already checked out Season Twofrom the library.

Seattle Visit

Seattle Visit 2010

I've been in the Seattle area for the last few days, mostly to catch up with long time friends. It's been 18 years since I visited the area, and the first thing that struck me is that the climate hasn't changed: it still rained for my first 3-4 days here, only turning sunny today. Friends told me that this was the worst summer they had ever had, though it being an El Nino year they had an unusually good winter and spring.

I first met with Ashuthosh Tiwary from Doyenz, a startup I helped put together a funding round for. The business is ramping up, and they're signing up customers every week. Apparently, the last year has been very difficult even for large companies selling into the SMB market, but that delay in capital expenditure has led to a backlog of upgrades this year.

I spent the weekend with my friend Scarlet, whom I hadn't seen for a while, and we got caught up with a lot of things, including her son Evan. Scarlet introduced me to the Battlestar Galactica board game. It was definitely challenging, and very well themed.

On Monday, I met with Doyenz's engineering team, and asked a bunch of questions involving the business that interested me. As an investor, it's quite different to examine a company and then worry about business questions, rather than the technology. I did ask if there was anyway I could help leverage my social network to help them, but it turned out that the biggest benefit I provided was that in asking such a question, other engineers revealed that their social network could provide such help better than I could. It's quite clear to me that a way to expose such social networks is very useful and would unlock a lot of value.

I spent a lot of time with Przemek (also a Doyenz co-founder), who'd gotten married since our last sailing trip. We discussed some technical issues going forward, and how to approach Doyenz's potential partners in that space.

I met with Reza, whom I went to high school with. Reza was one of the co-founders of Jambool. He neither confirmed nor denied the truth of TechCrunch's story, but we discussed startups various experiences (Reza used to be at Amazon). Reza was one of the smartest guys I knew in school, and it's great to see that his startup has been quite successful. Reza's startup happened at the same time as Przemek's, but he hadn't gotten in touch with me then and so I did not get a chance to invest.

I stayed with Amy Platt, who was an intern at Google, and now at Microsoft. I hadn't seen Microsoft's campus since 1992, and the company is now so big that it's satellite office in Bellevue took up an entire city block as far as I could tell. Nice views, and posh stores I would never shop at took up most of the first floor.

I revisited Seattle and Elliot Bay Cycles (yes, I'm a geek who will visit bike shops), and found that things had changed quite a bit, including tunnels through down-town that took both buses and trains. Places that I thought were busy 18 years ago are so busy now that I had a hard time navigating!

Finally, today James (a former Mpath person) and I had lunch and he gave me a quick tour of Amazon, which has a very different feel than any other tech company I've visited. Whether this is unique or whether it's because Seattle companies grow very differently, I don't know. All in all, a great trip! Thanks for the tours and the insights, everyone!

上松秀実「時代」- One of the more powerful Greenpeace music you've never heard of. =)

This is definitely one of the strongest new songs I've heard in a while. I found it while trolling around Youtube looking for some of Nakajima Miyuki's singles, and found this song by accident. The lyrics (both untranslated and translated can be found here). This is definitely one of those Greenpeace songs in theme, and her vocals are nothing short of astonishing!

Even better, she composes her own melody and writes her own lyrics. Definitely check it out!

Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Grayis probably Oscar Wilde's best known novel. Nearly everyone has heard of it, though if you've never read it the only thing you know about is the occasional vague allusion to the events in the novel. Since this is an old novel and lots of people have read it, I won't refrain from providing sppoilers in this review. You have been warned!

Unfortunately, the events in the novel are pretty uncomplicated: Dorian Gray is a beautiful, good-looking young man. One of his artist friends was so inspired by him that he paints a portrait of Dorian Gray one day that is exquisite. Dorian, upon seeing it, says that he wishes that all the travails of life that would otherwise be visited upon his body and face would thereafter be reflected in the picture rather than upon him.

Unbeknowst to him, his wishes are granted, but only when he treats a budding actress cruelly, causing her to commit suicide, does he notice that his portrait has turned cruel, while he shows no sign of physical change. Well, the plot then predictably steers Gray, under the influence of one of his friends into decades of debauchery, all the while remaining as young and beautiful as he was when the picture was painted, as the portrait slowly gets ravaged with time and the after-effects of his actions.

The plot is linear. There's a little bit of exploration of philosophy, where Wilde goes into exposition, explaining how one should approach life. Witty aphorisms are tossed about in a tangent to the narrative, but Wilde doesn't even try to explain his the underlying premise of the book, which is that personality and actions inevitably take their toll not upon a person's soul, but also visibly on their face and bodies as well. In fact, everyone in the novel believes it as well, all of whom remarking that with Gray's beauty and obvious youth, no one could believe the rumours of all the debauchery he's committed.

In any case, as morality plays go, the novel ends conventionally. Justice is served, and cruelty is punished. But even then, the novel seems buried in a hidden assumption of determinism, that we cannot change what we are, even if we realize that we must change.

The novel is a short read, but I can't say that I like either of the assumptions it makes, and more, the apparent lack of awarenesss of these assumptions. As such, I can't recommend the book.

Review: Whit

Whitis Iain Bank's novel about religions and cults. Like all novels he wrote that do not use the "M" middle initial, this novel is not science fiction. The narrator and protagonist of the story is Isis Whit, the Elect of God from a small cult in England. She is the elect because she was born on February 29th, which makes her something special. In addition, she has a supernatural gift: the ability to heal.

When an important member of her community sends a message indicating that she has decided to breakaway, Isis is sent on a misson to find her, talk to her, and try to bring her back into the fold. The story then becomes that of a committed and religious innocent coming into the big city of London for the first time in her life.

As you might expect from such a setup, there are many comic moments. In particular, Isis is very proud of her religion, and very committed to it, and seemingly blind to all the hints and messages sent to her by the other members of the community and lapsed members of her community that she encounters. She is single-minded in her pursuit of her quarry, and completely unfazed, even when she discovers that her cousin Morag has not been what she claimed to be all along.

When she finally gets close to tracking her down, the novel suddenly takes a serious turn, and Isis is derailed both by family members as well as a strange sequence of events that indicate that the nature of her mission was not what it appears: someone within the cult has a sinister plot to remove her as Elect of God. Isis proceeds to defend herself and investigate the history and origins of the cult.

In the hands of a lesser writer, the plot hence would degenerate quickly into farce, but Iain Banks manages to keep it funny, poignant, and very realistic. My sympathy for Isis was aroused and when she does come into her own I found myself applauding for her, even though I am not normally sympathetic to religions and their members.

All in all, a quick light read with many funny moments. It doesn't try to explore deep issues about religions and cults, but does portray religious cults somewhat sympathetically, while at the same time acknowledging that the roots of and forces behind such cults are usually very suspect. Recommended as a light airplane novel.

First Impressions: Lenovo Thinkpad X201

All throughout my tenure at Google, I've been a Thinkpad user. In fact, once the ultra-portable class of Thinkpads became an option, I switched to an X30 and never looked back. This class of machines fit in a saddlebag, was light, and typically as fast as the previous generation desktop. The best feature was the full size keyboard, on which I could type almost as fast as my Kinesis attached to my desk.

When the Lenovo ThinkPad X201 showed up as a special deal on working advantage, I noticed that the Lenovo page selling the product had a bug: if you bought the fully loaded package with the 3-year warranty, you were allowed to back out the 3-year warranty at the shopping cart, thereby saving $200, and hence getting a fully loaded model at a 20% discount. This was a very good deal, so I told Phil about it and bought one for myself. One day later, SlickDeals announced it and the day after that Lenovo fixed the bug.While there are many shipping horror stories about Lenovo on the internet, my Thinkpad arrived with no incident, taking just a hair over a week between departing Shanghai and arriving in Sunnyvale.

My goals in purchasing the laptop was two fold. One: I wanted a machine to write on while traveling. I don't typically travel with a laptop on my many cycle tours, but given that I no longer am restricted to one long trip a year, things like sailing trips and photography trips should become more common. So the machine had to be powerful enough to run Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop CS5, and if possible Adobe InDesign CS5. All 3 programs are well-known CPU and memory-hogs, which rules out most netbooks. Since my primary workstation was running Windows 7 as well, and I wasn't about to re-buy all the software I had already purchased, that ruled out Macs. Well, that and buying a Mac would wipe out any profits I had made from the book, and I take a certain amount of pride in keeping the book business profitable. As a travel machine, I opted for the finger-print reader, but opted out of the blue-tooth PAN, since I had a dongle I could transfer from the desktop to the laptop if I wanted/needed blue-tooth. I hate touchpads with a passion, so I opted out of that as well. The "fully-loaded" package that Lenovo sold came with Windows 7 Professional, 4GB of RAM, a 320GB 7200rpm hard drive, SD card reader, integrated video camera, microphone, and stereo speakers. It only has a VGA output, but if you buy the Ultrabase you can get digital display output as well. The native resolution of the display is 1280x800, WiFi. There used to be an option for 1440x900 with the X201s, but for whatever reason I could not find the X201s any more on Lenovo's web-site.

As a Windows Enhanced Experience laptop, the Thinkpad comes with no crap-ware installed. This is very nice, since it meant that the machine startup was fast and clean. It does come with the usual Thinkpad utilities. The laptop boots in about 1 minute, and wakes up from sleep in about 10s. Fingerprint login was easy to setup and easy to use, and I liked it more than expected. I am very tempted to get a solid state disk so that it boots even faster.

Lightroom 3 has had a performance makeover compared to Lightroom 2, and runs very fast on the machine. The pictures from the Pixar trip were processed all on the laptop as a test, and while the screen is small you could definitely work on photos, process them, and post them without a hitch. Even stitching 10 photos into a panorama in Photoshop was fast and easy.

InDesign was a different story. I copied the files over from my desktop and discovered to my shock that the machine could not keep up with my typing! It turns out that once you've put together all the chapters into a book, InDesign tries to keep the chapters all in sync, and so the entire book has to be loaded into memory. Even after loading it all into memory, things were still slower than molasses! It turns out that InDesign's file format suffers from fragmentation if you repeatedly load and save, so a "repackage" of the entire book from my desktop solved that problem. It's still not fast, but now InDesign no longer spins when I type. By the way, this is not a machine issue: the CPU was idle, as was the disk, indicating that whatever it is InDesign is doing, it's wrong.

The machine charges relatively fast, going from 5% to 80% in about an hour. Full charges take quite a bit longer. As far as battery life is concerned, I regularly got about 4 hours out of the 6-cell battery (and that's including all the Lightroom/Photoshop work!), which does not protrude from the back of the machine, unlike the 9-cell battery. For long flights and such, I would probably buy an extra 6 or 9 cell battery. The machine weighs 3.4 pounds. I did not bother testing it with video playing, music playing, or anything else.

It's a truism that buying a new machine always costs you a day. The Thinkpad was no exception, but I'm very pleased with the laptop. It's smooth, fast, and will let me do more work while on the move. Many of the blog posts I've made over the last few days have been made with it, and it was definitely worth the $858 (including tax, recycling fee and shipping) I paid for it. Recommended.

Review: The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Played with Fire is the middle of the late Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy. Unlike other series, you know this one will actually end because the author died of a heart attack soon after turning in the manuscripts.

Unlike The Girl with the Dragon Tatto, the form of this novel is not that of a mystery or detective novel, but rather a thriller. What I like about the novel is that the characters definitely changed between the first book and the second. In particular, we learn quite a bit about Salander, the computer hacker protagonist, and she does with her skills very few other protagonists in fiction would do, but in a way that is driven by the logic of her motivations and desires. I found that exceptional, and really enjoyed the plot. Her partner from the first book, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, plays a peripheral part in the story until the second half of the book, where he suddenly joins in the frenzied hunt for Salander.

A friend of mine warned me that the novel ends in a cliff-hanger, and I'd better have the third book handy. The book also starts by spoiling itself, foreshadowing what will happen later, which I thought was a very odd decision. The book also has a very slow setup, where it takes its time getting the plot rolling for the first third. Too much of the book is written in an extremely workmanship manner, describing police procedure in a matter of fact fashion, as though describing a kitchen recipe. The climax is also relatively unbelievable, with characters that take punishing amounts of damage like in a typical Chinese Kung-Fu novel, but still come out swinging.

Nevertheless, as entertainment this relatively thick novel is a lot of fun, and hence comes recommended. It might take a 3 hour flight to get into the plot, but once you do, it relentlessly sucks you in.

Pixar Visit

Pixar

Lisa, her friend Tammy, Ellie, and an unnamed Googler and I had a wonderful visit to Pixar yesterday, hosted by former Googlers Matt and Tashana. The central exhibit outside of the main lobby was devoted to Toy Story 3, which unfortunately none of us had yet to get a chance to see except unnamed Googler.

Tashana was the production manager for Toy Story 3, so she answered all our geeky questions about the show, including:
What was the hardest part of the movie to do? It turned out to be the day care center cardboard box. We spent so many meetings discussing its attributes and spent so much time on it that the team thought we should make a T-shirt with just the cardboard box on it. I'm being a little facetious here. The garbage dump was also really hard to get right.

How many movies do you usually have in the pipeline at once? Do any of them ever get cancelled? There can be as many as up to 5 movies in the pipeline at once, and yes, some of them do get cancelled. It's rare, but it happens.

Do you ever have to redo movies because of story changes? Yes. It varies dramatically from movie to movie. Toy Story 3 was pretty stable, but Ratatouille, for instance, had a director change. The characters went from being able to walk only on two legs to being able to run on four as well, and that dictated changes everywhere.

Did you do the story first, and then try to get licensing rights for Toy Story 3, or did it go the other way around? We do the story first. For Toy Story 1, we tried to get rights to Barbie, but Matel refused. For Toy Story 2, they OK'd the scene. For Toy Story 3, they asked us to get more of Barbie in, because they realized it was good for the business. For toys that we designed, lawyers look through the design so as to avoid infringing on other company's rights. Cars, for instance was a headache because of all the stripes, logos, and other designs that showed up on the cars. We had to avoid any designs that could conceivably have started a lawsuit.

What about merchandising? Does Pixar do them in house? Disney has an entire department whose job it is to set up licensing and merchandising. That's what really pays our salary. For Cars, for instance, the merchandising revenue was $3B. John Lasseter took a personal interest in the toys produced from Cars, so for instance you can buy every character in the movie. That was a big help.

There was much much more, including character sketches, model packets, color keys, and other pieces of the process which wouldn't make sense without the exhibits. We were not allowed to shoot photographs of those, so I'm afraid you're going to have to pay a visit to Pixar yourself if you want all the details. On the drive home, Ellie, Lisa, and I resolved to watch Toy Story 3 when we got a chance, I think I definitely have to see The Incredibles again.

Experience

In a comment on my previous post, a reader wrote:

Maybe you can write another post: To work for google or not? from the perspective of experienced engineer or fresh graduate.

I felt that it was a big disadvantage to work at google of you are an experienced engineer with master degree, because you will be hired into with almost the same level as fresh PhD, and had to learn those proprietary frameworks. Your experience does not have much advantage. Numerous review process will frustrate you a lot. Those engineers who joined before or around 2004 have already took good positions, you need to contribute 500% to approve yourself. Climbing the corp ladder becomes more challenge and google stock price is flat. Joining start up seems a better choice.

I disagree that the proprietary frameworks is a big deal. As distributed computing becomes more common, I think Google's way of doing things will become more common, not less. Already, companies like Cloudera are trying to popularize (through Hadoop and other open source implementations) the way Google does development. I wish Google had open sourced more technologies, but I certainly didn't mind learning new stuff, even if I had to fix lots and lots of documentation every time I had to pick up a new framework. Google had cool frameworks, and I certainly enjoyed being able to deploy thousands of machines at once to work on a problem.

It is true that there's danger in joining a company structured like Google. A company transitioning from a startup to a big established firm tends to use experienced engineers in very different ways than new people. For instance, it was experienced engineers at Google that forced a very different approach to testing. That was a thankless job, but people did get rewarded for it, though not without a big fight. Similarly, I had to establish a release engineering team at Google from scratch, but in exchange for that I was adequately compensated. A different engineering management structure than Google's might be more likely to reward (in traditional manners) the kind of non-sexy work that kind of work entails, but pre-IPO Google was quite generous, and those of us who joined pre-2004 had nothing to complain about. Note that Facebook, for instance, is taking an entirely different approach to this type of work than Google did, and I think that's a very good thing.

A fresh graduate, by contrast, can't be put on the un-sexy projects. So almost by definition the probability of being assigned a high profile project is higher. Furthermore, Google can be a great training ground, and the degree of reviews and mentoring (depending on the luck of the draw, of course) is a big help for at least the first couple of years. I would definitely recommend Google for a fresh graduate today. Having Google on his resume is also a much bigger deal for a fresh graduate than it is for an experienced engineer, who has presumably already had several success stories on his resume. And if after a few years it's clear that you're not on the fast track (you'll know within 24 months, usually), then you can reassess your position and look for a new job with the security of Google's excellent benefits package.

Let me tell the story of two experienced engineers who did not take a Google offer.

Y was a friend of mine from graduate school who interviewed and received an offer from Google in 2005. At that time, the stock price was around $200/share, and he was interviewing at Microsoft at the same time. This was a highly experienced engineer who had already co-founded a prior startup and sold it at a number in the 8 figures. Unfortunately, Google treated him like any other fresh engineer and put him through its standard interview process. He did well, but was not impressed. Microsoft treated him like a potential software architect, and put him through an interview process where everyone on his interview panel clearly understood his previous work and could quiz him about it. Unable to trust that what looked like an insanely high stock price could go up higher, my friend took the Microsoft job. After a couple of years, he realized Microsoft was far too big and difficult to change even at a very high level, he left and started another company. I think he had minor regrets about not joining Google, as I think he would have done very well at Google, since in 2005, entrepreneurial people were still having a blast. But given the way Google interviewed him, there was no way Y could have know that!

Fast forward to 2010, and another friend of mine started a job search. She reported to me almost 10 years ago at a previous startup, and was a brilliant engineer, so I vouched for her on a mailing list to help kick-start her search. Within 2 hours of my sending out an e-mail she had 5 contacts from startups. I asked her if she would consider Google, and she replied with two words: "No upside." This was someone who had worked her way up to being a Principal Engineer at a major Silicon Valley technology company. Her reply referred to two things: Stock price (at $500+/share earlier this year, the stock had room to fall and did fall), and the slotting lottery. Nooglers go through 6 months of training and work, and at the end of it get slotted into a position on the engineering ladder. If you're fresh out of school this is no big deal: starting at the bottom is expected, and if you get slotted higher it's a pleasant surprise. A Principal Engineer getting slotted at anything below that would essentially be getting an unpleasant surprise, while getting slotted at that level (which would be exceedingly difficult, since you'd have to prove yourself in 6 months while working on your starter project) would garner a "That's but to be expected." You can see why X chose to take a position at one of the Silicon Valley startups that was profitable and growing quickly. At the very least, the pre-IPO stock would be worth something. I think X made the correct choice for her career. Incidentally, I heard a story that a senior engineering candidate objected so strongly to the slotting lottery that management made an exception for him: by making him a director with no reports. I have no way to confirm this story one way or another though.

In short, there is no simple answer to the issue as to whether an experienced engineer can do well at Google. Obviously, one can. However, I would definitely not take on the risk of starting at Google as an experienced engineer without adequate compensation (i.e., don't take a pay cut) and without considering all my options. Given that the valley today is in the unprecedented situation of having quite a few highly profitable pre-IPO startups, I would be very surprised if a smart, experienced engineer could not get better compensation elsewhere. Hence most of Google's new engineering hires come fresh out of school, through an acquisition (which is one way for Google to acquire experienced engineers at a high price), or from one of the non-Silicon Valley locations where competition for talent is lower.

Tips for Noogler Engineers

I'm surprised by the number of people inside Google who actually read my blog. I once did contemplate writing a "career guide for Googlers", but finally got off my ass when a Noogler asked me for advice on how to thrive at Google. Given that Google is once again on a hiring spree (something that I'll never agree with), I guess more people will want this advice than not. Obviously, you should take everything I say with a grain of salt, since things change rapidly at Google. With that caveat in place...

Disclaimer: Sanjeev says (and I agree) that if you internalize all this, it will make you less likely to succeed at a startup! Being able to do well at a big company and being able to do well at a startup are completely different things!

Tip #1: Never believe anything management tells you. They don't lie deliberately but frequently things change very quickly, so what's true one day is not true the next. I knew someone who gave up a tech lead position because he was told his group would have no manager, and therefore he was doing all that extra work for nothing. Within a couple of quarters after he gave it up, management made the new tech lead the manager, because things had changed.

Keep in mind that management wants things that are good for Google. You care about what's good for you. The former does not automatically lead to the latter. In particular:

• Interviewing. It absolutely does not help your career one bit, even though it's absolutely critical for Google in the long term. It's not rewarded, considered during the promotion process, and it burns a lot of time. Put it off as long as possible. And don't even bother with hiring committees. That's even more of a time sink.
  
• Mentoring other googlers. Just like interviewing, it is under-valued and not considered real work when performance reviews come up. Even worse is rescuing someone on a PIP. Unless you're a manager, don't even spend time on that. If you succeed in rescuing that person, he did it himself. If you fail, you've wasted a ton of time. Only managers can get any credit from this, so decline any requests to help.
  
• Changing projects. This helps Google by spreading knowledge around. The reward system, however does not reward this. The way to get promoted is to stay at one project for a long time, not to switch projects every 18 months, as management might sometimes tell you. (Note: if you want to switch projects, the best time is right after a promotion)
  
• 20% time. Depending on your manager, it could absolutely hurt your career. triple check to make sure your manager does not take a negative view on this. I liked my 20% time, but I was well aware of the trade-off for my career I was making.
  

Tip #2: Google's full of distractions. Take as many of those off your plate as possible while you're ramping up. In particular:

• Don't subscribe to misc. Mailing lists are a big time sink. I never felt hurt by not reading misc, misc-mv, or eng-misc.
  
• Set a limit on the number of tech talks/fun talks per week that you should go to. Try to stay under that number. I'll admit I didn't always succeed.
  

Tip #3: Nothing matters as much as getting a high performance rating. Ask your manager how this system works. Ask him how to get a high rating. Do whatever it takes. Doing so nets you:

• the best projects, and your choice of projects
  
• faster promotions and more money
  
• "secret" founder's awards (they're not very secret because people brag to me about them)
  
• respect from your peers (comes along with the promotions)
  

Tip #4: Pick a really good manager and/or tech lead. Internal studies have showed that your performance at Google is tied very strongly to who your first tech lead is/was. The best tech lead that I know personally at Google is Arup Mukherjee. A good way for you as an engineer to judge tech leads is to see how many of their reports get promoted. If they don't get their reports promoted, don't work for them. Arup was very good at getting his team members promoted. One manager I know forgot to check the "promotion" check-box for his team members during promotion time. (The poor guy should have checked it himself --- he ended up hitting the salary cap for his level) You can tell who had his priorities straight. You can also try to work for a politically powerful manager/tech lead, but some of them could be hard asses and tough to work for.
The big picture: Google rewards hard work, but much more importantly, high profile projects. Never sacrifice a chance to work on those high profile projects versus equally important but unsexy maintenance tasks that will get no respect from promotion committees. Google does not reward the maintenance work, no matter how important it is (Exception: War-room firefighting. Google loves those, and loves heroic performances from people in war-rooms). In particular, if you're stuck doing SRE work but you're a SWE, you need to negotiate your way out of that. In any organization, there are work horses, show horses, and horses' asses. Most people have no trouble figuring out how not to be the 3rd. But it's far better to be a show horse than a work horse. You get all the rewards with less effort. It is rare that the Raymond Chens of the world get rewarded for the effort they put in. (Yes, and Microsoft at its best was smart enough to do so)
Finally, if you get fed up of working for a big company, consider joining a startup.
[Update: Looks like there's actually a high quality translation of this page in Chinese]

Review: The Upside of Irrationality

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home is Dan Ariely's sequel to Predictably Irrational. While the book is subtitled "The Upside of Irrationality", the reality is, there's not actually a lot of upside to being irrational, but Ariely's found a ton of workarounds.

For instance, in the chapter on online dating, he discovers that online dating sites are a horrible way to meet people. You effectively have to spend 9 hours searching, writing, and corresponding with prospective dates for every hour you actually get to go on an actual date. He found a workaround, though, in that if you gave people an online place to chat and gave them something to chat about (even something as abstract as shapes would do), they'd have a lot more fun and be more eager to meet in person. This example is also an illustration of where Ariely's limited business experience comes into play. He never asks, "If that's the way to do it, how come nobody has done it?" It turns out that the online dating business has a conflict of interest with respect to its customers. If they're too successful, their customers leave. If their customers don't feel like there's another prospect over the horizon, they'll leave too. As a result, all the emphasis on those sites is on customer acquisition and retention, not really on helping you to date better, or get to a date faster. This kind of second-order effect analysis is completely absent from Ariely's book.

The section on bonuses affecting outcome is already covered in other books like Drive, and again, the lack of second order analysis there is glaring. What can we as a society do about this? There's no suggestions, because the true implications of understanding the effect of pay has political ramifications, and Ariely probably doesn't want to get into those.

I did enjoy the chapters on NIH-syndrome, on assortative mating, and why we over-value what we put time into making. Overall, the book is just as enjoyable as the first one, and a lot of fun to read. I'd recommend it for airplane reading. Just be wary that it's not very deep and would trigger more questions in an intelligent reader than the author is willing to answer.

Review: The Scar

The Scarwas China Mieville's second novel. After I read Perdido Street Station at the beginning of the year, I thought it would be very difficult to top that novel. I was wrong. The Scar is every bit as good, does not rehash any of the material in that first novel (nor does it assume a working knowledge of Bas-Lag's Mieville's fantasy world).

The story revolves around Bellis Coldwine, who is the narrator of the book. She's on a self-imposed exile from New Crobuzon, the setting of Perdido Street Station, due to some events disclosed in that novel which aren't of any relevance to this one. When the ship she is on gets captured by ships from The Armada, a floating city much like that envisioned by Libertarians, she's forced to work for a city she despises. The plot revolves around her plans to escape, and the machinations thereafter.

The milleu is rich, and full of fantasy all the expected twists and turns. The character of Bellis Coldwine is unsympathetic, yet Mieville writes her in such a way that the reader easily understands her motivations. The ongoing disclosure of the world she lives in is done subtly, without moments of long expositions, and the plot carries on logically to its conclusion. Yet many moments of wonder which is what draws many of us to science fiction and fantasy exist within this framework, and I treasure this book for being able to re-ignite them even in an otherwise jade science fiction fan.

In some ways, some of the original graphic-novel visions provided by the Perdido Street Station was lost. That's because Coldwine and the other characters are not perhaps as iconic. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the novel in other ways. Highly recommended. I only hope Mieville's other novels are as good.

Review: We Might As Well Win

Johan Bruyneel, if you don't already know, was Lance Armstrong's Director Sportif during his winning years, as well as during Alberto Contrador's first tour victory. We Might As Well Win, ghost-written by VeloNews's Bill Strickland, is his memoir of his winning years.

There's something about sport coaches: they always seem to have a post-retirement career lecturing business people on how to run their businesses, and their memoirs always seem to be written with this final goal in mind. Bruyneel's book has a theme, which is that if you want to win, you've got to sacrifice almost everything else to it. Whether it be denting other directors' cars while driving support during the Tour De France, planning the stage win so that it's within your abilities, or sacrificing all other races in the season in order to focus on the Tour, Bruyneel definitely did that and did that well. What he neglected to mention was that he wasn't the first to do so. Greg Lemond did so as well, and was frequently accused of being only focused on the Tour because that's what mattered to his American sponsors. This is not surprising and there's no need to apologize for it, but I felt that Bruyneel could have spelled it out.

There's quite a bit of life history in this book, from his early days of racing to his father's tragic death. One interesting thought that came through in this book is that the best coaches/director sportifs (including Chris Carmichael) aren't the top athletes. They're the middling athletes who were only able to win by being craftier, more focused, and smarter than the really strong guys who can just crank it up and power over any problems. Obviously, when you combine the smarts of someone like Bruyneel with the power of someone like Lance Armstrong, you get a track record that's unbeatable. (Note that this sort of thing could only happen with the advent of race radios!) I wonder whether or not the same applies to engineers. Maybe the best mentor you can have isn't the smartest guy in the room, but the guy who's not so smart but was only able to get where he got by applying his savviness in other areas. Or maybe in high intellect-demand professions like computer science all that matters is being smart.

In any case, the book is very well written, and the stories in it exciting and fun. It was so much fun that when I finished with it and told Cynthia about it, during the day when we had to do the car transfer she grabbed my Kindle and read it all in one go. There's no way this book would get anything less than a highly recommended rating, especially if you're a cyclist.

One final note: one of the sacrifices Bruyneel claims he made was that he never saw his kids very much while he was being a successful director sportif. Near the end of the book he talked a bit about backing off his work so he could spend more time with them. Judging from the fact that he seems to be all over the place even now, I would be very surprised if he did succeed in gaining more time to spend with his family. One problem with success is that it's very addictive.

Review: The Lost Fleet, Victorious

Victorious (The Lost Fleet, Book 6 of 6) is the last of Jack Campbell's "Lost Fleet" novels. Well, there's room for a sequel series, but the story line started in Dauntless and continued in several other novels is finally concluded, with all the sub-plots tied away very nicely.

While there are some fun naval battles, unlike previous novels those do not form the mainstay of the book. Instead, the political maneuvering, intrigue, and Captain Geary's ability to inspire his crew but inability to understand women. (Well, ok, put me into that latter category as well)

It's a short read, and an ideal airplane novel. However, do not read this without reading the other parts of the series first, or it won't make any sense. I finished it on the way to Munich, unfortunately, and was glad I had other books to entertain me.

Long Term Review: Dinotte Tail Light

I originally dismissed the Dinotte Taillight on my single for reasons of not having an appropriate mount. The tandem, however, had a rear rack which I could bungee the light to using the included O-ring, and during this past tour, I had a chance to test it more.

The light failed abysmally. First of all, it took 4 AA batteries which were heavy. Secondly even with the light off it drained the batteries! Ok, not a problem. I disconnected the light whenever it was not in use. When I did turn it on, however, the light would flash once and turn off. I tried single clicking, long presses, double clicking, anything. The best I could coax out of this light was a series of anemic flashes, and even then sometimes it would turn itself home.

I sent the light home with Phil when he went home, and borrowed his Planet Bike Blinky Super Flash instead, which nicely clipped into the pannier's compression straps, worked reliably on AAA batteries, and cost 1/10th as much.

Anybody want to buy a Dinotte Tail Light? Contact me.

Review: Mizuo Wave Ronin 2 Running Shoe

For the first time in my life, this tour included a section where I expected to do some hiking. Last year's tour included more hiking than I wanted, and I was not happy with my footwear. The Five Fingers did not do well on any kind of hard gravel or the rocky volcanic soil we saw, and the cycling shoes gave me blisters when attempting to walk fast. Those blisters really put a damper on quite a bit of my trip, so I was not looking forward to them again.

I visited Ryan's Sports Shop, which appears to be the running equivalent of Shaw's Lightweight Cycles. Opinionated, willing to say negative things about anything that doesn't stand up to their exacting standards, these guys were a lot of fun to shop at. They suggested racing flats, and brought out the Mizuno Ronin 2 Running Shoe. These shoes are butt ugly, but when I first put them on the experience was amazing: they were light! I went home and weighed them and they weigh less than the Five Fingers! I bought a pair for myself and a pair for Lisa (who managed to get the red version).

The caveats Ryan's told us about was that these shoes are not designed to last. They're meant to be used for a few races, and then they will fall apart. They did say that if all we did was walk on them, however, they would last quite a bit longer than people who ran marathons on them. The shoes were also not designed with any kind of support in mind, but during the tour we slipped the custom insoles we were wearing from the bike shoes into them with no problems and with excellent results.

In practice, the shoes are as comfortable or more as any running shoes I've worn. On 12 mile walking days, my feet never got sore, and I would have been happily hiking more if my companions were up for it. At no point did we wish that our shoes were lighter, and of course we never wished them to be heavier or more sturdy. They survived the entire tour just fine, and looked like they will survive another 2 or 3 tours of similar magnitude. I have no intention of using them for casual walking around, however! They are expensive and I have more sturdy and heavier shoes at home.

Cynthia and Kekoa were planning on using saddlebags, so Kekoa brought his Five Fingers and Cynthia bought some cycling sandals that she will undoubtedly write about over at her blog, but neither of them ended up being very happy about their choices for hiking, and we cut one of our hikes short because of that. However, when saddlebag touring, there's no way the Mizunos will fit inside a reasonably sized saddlebag. Because these shoes are not waterproof, tying them outside would not work either.

Phil's solution, which was to simply buy shoes in Grindelwald, was also sound. His Mont-Bell hiking shoes ($120) were sturdier and would have survived tougher conditions as well. On the other hand, we just got lucky and finished in Grindelwald, rather than in Rosenlaui, where there was not a shoe store in sight, certainly not one open till 9:00pm. For a trip like the one we were planning, I definitely recommend these shoes. The real problem is being able to carry them. Kekoa says he prefers panniers for cycle touring now, and if you have panniers, there's definitely no reason not to bring decent shoes, especially ones that are so light!

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Tour of the Alps 2010

Cynthia Wong, Kekoa Proudfoot, Phil Sung, Lisa and I just returned from the Tour of the German Speaking Alps. As tours go, the statistics were unusually bad: we got in 945 miles and 88,916 feet of climbing, of which 13,879 came from 4 hikes we did in Switzerland, meaning we got in only 75,037 feet of climb on the bike. We only had 2 flat tires, both of which were caused by a bad tire blowing out on descents. We did lose almost a week to rain, and another 3 days due to a number of us (myself including) getting sick on tour.

Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

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• Videos from the Tour

Kekoa's Picture Stream

• Meiringen Sunset from Zwirgi
• Reichenbach Falls
• The Wellhorn
• Grimsel pass Panorama
• Panorama from Hotel Belvedere
• Furka Pass Panorama
• Ferraris at Furka Pass
• Castelgrande at Dusk
• Round Church, San Bernardino
• Hairpin Turns Near Splugen Pass
• Maloja Pass Panorama
• Julier Pass Panorama
• San Gian Church
• Road to Susten Pass
• Triftbrucke
• Wetterhorn
• Grosse Scheidegg
• Bavarian Pork Knuckle

Cynthia's Trip Report

• Funny things we saw in Europe
• Tour of the mostly-Swiss Alps Part I
• Tour of the Mostly-Swiss Alps, Part II
• Splurgen Pass (Video)
• Tour of the Mostly-Swiss Alps, Part III
• Tour of the Mostly-Swiss Alps, Part IV
• Conclusions

Phil's Photos

Tour of the German-Speaking Alps 2010

Phil's Trip Report

Trip Report

For every day where we traveled, I've posted a small trip report (which includes photos), as well as the GPS information (which you can access by clicking on the mini map at the start of each day). For days where there were multiple activities, I've posted both GPS maps.

• June 15-16: Prologue
• Day 1: Holzkirchen to Kreuth
• Day 2: Kreuth to Terfens
• Days 3 & 4: Innsbruck to Bludenz
• Day 5: Meiringen to Hotel Zwirgi
• Day 6: Hotel Zwirgi to Goldswil
• Day 7: Goldswil to Grimsel Pass Summit
• Day 8: Grimsel Pass Summit to Airolo
• Day 9: Airolo to Bellinzona
• Day 10: Bellinzona to Pian S. Giacomo
• Day 11: Pian S. Giacomo to Andeer
• Day 12: Andeer to Vaduz
• Day 13: Vaduz to Linthal
• Day 14: Linthal to Fluelen
• Day 15: Goschenen to Meiringen
• Day 16: Hiking Kleine Scheidegg
• Day 17: Hiking to Bachalpsee
• Day 18: Grindelwald to Rosenlaui
• Day 19: Hiking to Grosse Scheidegg via the Romantic Road
• Day 20: Luzern to Rapperswil
• Day 21: Rapperswil to Rorschach
• Day 22: Rorschach to Puch im Hallein via Deutsche Bahn
• Day 23: Puch im Hallein to Radstadt
• Day 24: Radstadt to Sankt Michael im Lungau
• Day 25: Sankt Michael im Lungau to Winklern
• Day 26: Winklern to Fusch
• Day 27: Fusch to Wald
• Day 28: Wald to Rattenberg
• Day 29: Rattenberg to Kufstein
• Day 30: Kufstein to Schliersee
• Day 31: Schliersee
• Day 32: Schliersee to Munich
• Epilogue: July 19, 20, 21

Appendices

• Conclusions
• Review: Garmin Edge 705
• Long Term Review: Garmin Edge 500
• Long Term Review: Canon S90
• Review: Mizuno Ronin 2 Running Shoes
• Resources (Same as 2007 Tour)

Long Term Review: Canon S90

The Canon PowerShot S90 produced all the pictures you saw in my photo album. Lisa mostly shot the on-the-bike and food pictures using full-auto mode in JPG, while I shot most of the hiking pictures off-the-bike in RAW mode. Over the course of 5 weeks, we shot 2695 photos, which took up 4 8GB SDCards or about 22GB of storage. The photos were post-processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3, Geotagged with data from the Garmin Edge 500 using Jeffry Friedl's Lightroom Geotagging plugin using Garmin Connect to convert .fit files from the Edge 500 to GPX format.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

If you've seen the Grindelwald section of the alps photos, I think the results speak for themselves. In the hands of a competent photographer, the camera is capable of producing results that are stunning for a point and shoot. I did not have any of my usual photo gear with me, no filters, tripod, or external flash, but I was very pleased with what it could do. Being able to shoot in RAW mode meant that in cases where an ND grad. filter was necessary, I could process it in Lightroom and get more than acceptable results.

Kekoa had a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 which would take better pictures because of its much larger sensor, but because of the size of the camera, he had to stop and take it out of his handlebar bag every time he wanted to shoot, which meant that Lisa shooting from the back of the tandem would shoot more often and therefore get more shots. For a cycle tour, I think it is far better to carry a camera you can keep in your jersey pocket so you can shoot on the move. You will throw away more photos, but as the late Galen Rowell once said to me the difference between amateurs and professionals is that professionals throw away more film.

There were complaints about the S90. Lisa complained that the camera took a long time to startup and take shots. Shot to shot times were also slow in JPG mode, and in RAW mode they took even longer as the file sizes were 10X larger and took a correspondingly long time to write. I don't expect any better from any camera that fits nicely into a jersey pocket, though you should see below for alternate recommendations.

Others have complained about the camera battery. We experienced no problems. 500 shots per charge was more than acceptable, and we never ran out of charge during a day. I was very careful to charge the camera after big days like both hiking days in Grindelwald, however.

Note that this camera is only useful if you're going to shoot RAW. I think there are far better cameras if you're a casual photographer and want to shoot JPG, for instance, my brother's Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7has built in GPS tagging, 720p video, and costs less. My other brother's Sony DSC-HX5V also has GPS, 1080i video, and a burst mode that will capture a full panorama with one sweep without having to bother with shot-to-shot waits. Those are the cameras I would take if I wasn't willing to pay for Lightroom, or bother with shooting RAWs and post-processing them. That means that the S90 is for better or worse, a photography enthusiast's camera, not really a casual user's camera.

I did knock the rear adjustment dial once or twice while shooting. This was not a problem for Lisa in full auto mode. I usually caught the problem and immediately reshot or dialed it back before shooting, but in the cases where I did not, Lightroom brought back the shot very nicely. This is another reason why if you shoot in JPG on this camera you are just asking for heart-break, and possibly a waste of money.

Having said all that, the rating for this camera is highly recommended. If you're willing to put in the effort, there is no doubt that this is the camera for you.

(See the Original Review)

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Long Term Review: Garmin Edge 500

The Garmin Edge 500 GPS Bicycle Unitcame through the tour with flying colors. It was reliable, surviving wind, sweat, rain, and several hikes. The wrist band proved to be a great help for carrying the computer on hikes, and comes highly recommended. In particular, the GPS appeared to recalibrate its altimeter based on GPS information, so if you parked your bike at a summit sign, for a few minutes, you would see the altimeter magically recalibrate itself to match an accurate summit sign. I was very impressed by this feature.

The GSC10 also survived the tour, but I found several problems with it. The cadence sensor magnet would slip, and if it did not only would you not get cadence information as well, occasionally it would also not detect the wheel magnet and you wouldn't get wheel data either. In particular, the whole point of getting the wheel sensor information was so that the wheel data would over-ride the GPS sensor whenever things got out of whack (and vice-versa), but no sign of that ever happened! Sure, the sustens pass reading of 129kph could be attributed to the cadence sensor not being in operation that day, but I checked the cadence sensor on the day we rode into Munich, and the stupid computer still read a 90mph top speed, which is unbelievable if you look at the charts accompanying that ride report. As a result, I'm still having a tough time deciding whether I want to pay $36 for what's effectively just a cadence sensor.

All in all, having the Garmin 500 on this trip enabled me to geotag all our photos, since all the tracks from the Edge 705 disappeared with the boot failure.

While the Edge 500 is not a navigation unit and therefore would be considered non-essential equipment on a single bike tour, as a stoker bike computer and general bike computer it is easily the best one I have used. Recommended.

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Equipment Review: Garmin Edge 705

I borrowed a Garmin Edge 705 Bicycle GPS from Roberto for this trip. Like my 76CSx, this is a navigational unit, capable of dynamic routing, displaying maps, and rerouting even if you do turn off the designated route. The big changes are: the lack of replaceable AAs, and the smaller package and lightweight, since the 705 does not need to float, unlike the marine unit.

The internal battery posed no problems, since we could recharged every night. The charging indicator was clearly not designed for color blind people, but you could always leave it plugged in overnight. The lighter weight was nothing to complain about, but resulted in a poorer user interface. The "find" button, for instance, no longer existed, and was a pain. I was annoyed by the "Start/Stop" button as well, since the 76CSx never needed me to tell it to start recording tracks. It just did so no matter what. There were a few times when I stopped it and forgot to restart it, and would have lost data no matter what.

Daily use as a bike computer was not a problem. However, using it as a navigational unit posed several challenges. First of all, it was very slow to read the SD card. Roberto inserted a 4GB SD card into the device, and downloaded just about 500MB of maps into it, plus about 20 of my routes. Despite that small size, it still had a tough time displaying all the routes from the SD card, and would occasionally hang while trying to pick up a pre-planned route. It could be that the device cannot read SDHC cards, while my older 76CSx only accepted SD cards of 2GB or less. It seems that if that's a problem the right solution would be not to accept SDHC cards in the first place.

The navigation screen has a very nice feature, which is that in all the Find Places dialogue boxes, there was also the ability to spell out the name, rather than only select from a list of cities within 15km. I loved this feature, as it allowed for long range dynamic routing without having to stop as frequently to reprogram the unit. If I could pay $50 to upgrade my 76CSx to have this feature I would.

To make up for that nice feature, the unit appears to be much slower than my 76CSx. Rerouting could take 10-20 minutes in many cases. The 76CSx would generally not take more than about 10 minutes. The screen was also much harder to read in bright sunlight, indicating that the brightness of the screen had been dialed down, probably to avoid straining the lithium ion battery.

By far the biggest problem with the unit was that it corrupted its own boot sector while touring, and that's unacceptable. Between the unreliability, the poor user interface, lousy screen and the slowness of the computer, I cannot recommend the Edge 705 for a bicycle tourist. Needless to say, I will not be "upgrading" from my 76CSx to this unit in the near future.

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Tour 2010 Conclusions

In many ways, this was the tour where everything went wrong. Between flight damage, lost gear, poor weather, tire blowouts, my CPAP machine failing, and nearly everyone falling ill, you could imagine that we would have had a miserable time. But that's not so. Even in the midst of his illness, Phil was saying to me, "I'm having a blast!" Several things contributed:

1. Time. Everyone of us took at least 3 weeks of vacation on the trip. This gave us the opportunity to wait out bad weather. If we had anyone with only one week of vacation, he would have had a miserable time without experiencing any of the fantastic weather we later got.
2. Flexibility. We made no reservations, except for Rosenlaui. That made it easy for us to pivot and change plans and abandon the Italian alps when whether and time did not permit this. There's nothing to add stress like the feeling of helplessness. Yet even when we were stuck in Innsbruck, we always felt like we were working to solve our problems.
3. Repeat visits. This was my fourth time in the Alps. We knew how the train systems worked, we knew some hotel owners, and we had the leverage of Jobst's 40 years in the alps, the OCD guides, and past experiences. The level of predictability in Switzerland made it easy for us to plan around problems, and for Cynthia and Kekoa to break off to do their own tour.
4. Culinary Flexibility. If you're a strict vegetarian or vegan this trip is not for you. Join a Backroads Tour. At Rosenlaui, Cynthia and I made a list of people we would want to keep away from Rosenlaui, just because they would not be able to put up with the food.

I was very happy, by the way that Cynthia and Kekoa did their own tour. I think if you're going to take a first bicycle tour, Switzerland's a fantastic place. People generally speak English, the train system can bail you out of any problems, bike paths are predictable, well signed, and easy to find, and of course nothing beats the scenery. Cynthia told me that they enjoyed bike touring far more than they thought they would. One unfortunate thing about the trip was that it cost far more than originally estimated because of the large number of train transfers. Knowing what I know now, I would have planned that better, or bought a half-tax card for Switzerland.

The natural beauty of the Alps is still outstanding. I'm currently reading a book about Hedonistic Adaptation, but for me at least, I find the Alps as stunningly beautiful as the first time I visited them. I used to wonder how Jobst could do the same tour for 40 years, but at this point I'm starting to come around to his thinking: I came back from this tour wondering why I ever bother touring anywhere else in the world. People look at my pictures and ask me if it really is that pretty. My response is: it's far prettier. Those pictures were but a pale reflection of what it's like to actually be there.

Before this trip, I told Cynthia: if this trip doesn't make you want to buy your own camera for the next time, I have failed. Her response to me last night: You didn't fail.

I'll plug my upcoming book now. If you've read this far and wondered how you could make your own trip, pre-order my book:


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Videos from the Tour

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

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


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

Furka Descent on tandem from Piaw Na on Vimeo.

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

July 19, 20, 21: Epilogue

It turned out that Chris wasn't out of town, as we thought. He had moved his departure date and came back late at night after we were asleep. He was gracious about us breaking into his apartment, as it was, and I made Weisswurst breakfast for him in the morning.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

I spent the 19th at the Google Munich office chatting up former colleagues. Then Lisa and I shopped for maps, tracking down and finding a copy of the Motorrad ReiseKarten Alpen that we had first seen in Austria, and picking up a few others as well for future travel. We paid a visit to my former landlady in Pullach, reminding her that I'll be back tomorrow to collect cash. We shopped for chocolate as well, and as usual discovered after we got home that what we thought was a lot of chocolate wasn't actually enough.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

On the 20th, we moved back to Hotel Vi Vadi, and repacked for the flight home. I took the deraileur off the bike, the pedals, removed the seat post and stoker bars and stuck them in the luggage. I made yet another visit to Pullach, and this time came back with much of my security deposit. She had made huge deductions for various apartment charges, but still had given me more than half of it, my threshold for deciding whether or not I should just hand my receipt and paperwork to one of my colleagues in Munich who knew good lawyers in exchange for half of anything he could get back from her. I deposited all that cash into my German bank savings account so as to avoid paying the currency exchange fees. My bank was happy to change my address as well since I had moved.

On the way back to the hotel after buying some vacuum packed Weisswurst, I dropped by the train station and saw Alan Wissenberg. He was in the middle of dealing with customers (and had a long line waiting for him), but he interrupted his transaction to shake hands and say hi. Upon hearing that it was my last night in Munich, he said, "I'll be back at the Euraide office at 10:45pm. Join me then and we'll grab a beer."

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

Sure enough, at 10:45pm he was there. We had sat down and had a beer. We talked about our trials with bikes on trains, places we would never tell Rick Steves about (or at least, if we did tell Rick Steves we would ask him never to put in his book or show on TV), and of course, how nice the German-speaking countries were about putting bikes on trains. "I now have to distinguish between the people who are carrying a copy of Steves' book, and the people who actually read it. I had a woman who was fined several hundred Euros because she didn't read her train tickets! Her excuse: I had no idea that it was in English, since the cover letter was in German, so I didn't bother reading it!" We laughed and I was flattered when Alan told me, "I never learned as much about trains and bicycles as I did when I helped you put together that trip in 2008." Alan had been working with the Deutsche Bahn for 20 years, and was the most knowledgeable person I could nominate about European trains, but he was still learning after all these years. An hour passed rapidly and it was time for both of us to get some sleep.

On the 21st, we woke up at 4:30am, ate a quick breakfast, and tried to take the Lufthansa bus to the airport. The driver refused to take the tandem, so we reverted to our backup plan, which was to take the S-Bahn. A Partner Tageskarte and bike ticket cost nearly 22 EUR, but we offset the cost by reselling the ticket at the airport to an incoming British couple for 10EUR. It was a long wait for the Air Canada ticket counter to open, and we were charged for an extra bag because all the equipment and chocolate made our big bag overweight, causing us to have to check in one of the panniers separately. The flight delivered everything safely (including the unboxed and stripped bike), and all went well.

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Day 32: Schliersee to Munich

 

We woke up to overcast skies and still a threat of rain. As we left the bed and breakfast, it was still drizzling. I usually used an alternate route to get back to Holzkirchen/Munich, but with the threat of rain decided it was better to forgo that and find the most direct route there. Never having ever taken the direct route, I was pleased to discover that from Schliersee to Miesbach was a fast descent along a well marked bike path.

Once in Miesbach, however, we lost the bike path and circled around a few times in vain before a kindly street sweeper told us to make a left just before the railroad tracks at what appeared to be a walking trail. There was no way we would have found this without help: the "bike path" was up on a berm, without a ramp to hop the curb!

We were now following the Mangfall, the tributary of the Inn that came out of Tergensee. The bike path soon became the Wasserweg, the water way path that goes all the way to Munich. We followed signs to Holzkirchen, however, as I wanted to use the paved roads to Pullach and follow to Isar downtown instead, revisiting the commute I had for so many months while I was in Munich.

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

The climb up to Holzkirchen was steep and unpaved, though not steeper than the 20+% grades we would climb if I was on what I considered my "normal" route back from the Schliersee.

It was too cool in Holzkirchen for ice cream at my favorite place, so we elected to ride on. This section was unfamiliar with me until we made a left turn from highway 13 onto Oberhaching. At that point, things started looking familiar to me even though I had never ridden on that road before. I was puzzled until I realized that I had navigated this stretch with Phil from our 2008 trip to Rosenlaui.

We had a miserable time at first on the road to Grunwald. Traffic was somewhat heavy and the road was narrow. Upon approaching a tunnel that was closed to bikes, however, we were redirected to a parking lot where the bike path into Grunwald began, and from there on it was smooth going. In Grunwald, we took the descent to the bridge over the Isar, but just before the bridge proper turned right onto the Isar bike path. I had never commuted on this side of the river, and it was wild, undulating greatly. This was now the province of the casual biker, and we found ourselves over-taking unloaded cyclists with regularity.

At the first bridge across the Isar I was once again into familiar territory, and from then on the ride into downtown Munich was routine for a cool summer day. Lisa wanted to visit the soup kitchen at the viktualienmarkt but it was closed on Sundays, so we ate at one of the local restaurants instead.

Arriving at Chris's place, we could not gain access to his apartment because the common entry way was locked! We waited until someone exited, whereupon Lisa went in and picked up his key from the hiding spot. We rolled the bike in, parked the tandem, and sighed. The longest tour (in terms of the number of days) we had ever done was over.

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