Thira/Santorini

We flew on Swiss International Airlines to Zurich, where we stayed for a night and then flew to Athens the next day. While it would have been possible to fly on the same day to Athens, we would have arrived near midnight, and when travelling with a child I decided it was better to spend a night along the way because of baby jet-lag. The hope was that we'd be able to find some afternoon sun.

From Greece 2013

At Kloten, we were able to find a children's playground and while the sun was not very strong, we were hopeful that our sleep wouldn't be so interrupted. Unfortunately, that hope proved false, and our son woke up at midnight and stayed awake until 4am.

The flight to Athens was delayed because of a technical problem with the airplane, and as a result we ended up at Hotel Tony at 4pm. The room had been recently renovated and I was quite impressed with it. We went out to dinner at a recommended place and had great views of the Acropolis in the backdrop. After dinner, we visited the Acropolis, but it was closed to visitors after 5pm.

From Greece 2013

The next day, we went back to the airport and flew to Thira/Santorini (Santorini is the collection of islands, and Thira is the name of the one of them with an airport and sizeable population). The rental car company met us at the airport and gave us the car keys, including the drop off instructions (which involved just leaving the car unlocked at the parking lot with the keys in the obvious place!). After a bit of driving, we found the Hippocampus Hotel where we had reservations. They had plenty of room so we were able to change our rooms with minimal costs. In addition, they gave us directions to the various attractions on Santorini, and arranged for us to have a visit to the Volcano, etc. We drove up to the Ancient City they'd described, and got in the last visit before the closing.

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

After that, we went swimming on the beach and had dinner at an excellent restaurant the hotel staff recommended. So far, it'd been a good trip, despite Bowen's persistent jet lag.

From Greece 2013

The Volcano visit as a bit of a bore. Having visited lots of volcanoes in the past, this one wasn't particularly interesting except for the vistas of the surrounding, populated islands. (The white you see below isn't snow, but houses!) The visit to the hot springs was also disappointing. The hot springs was embedded in a bay off an island, and the seepage of hot water into the relatively cool Mediterranean waters led to a luke-warm spring experience. I would rate the entire day a "pass," unless you've never seen a Volcano before.

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

Our last full day on Santorini was spent visiting the Red Beach, Fira, and Oia. The Red Beach was interesting and surprisingly good swimming despite relatively high winds.

From Greece 2013

While getting to Fira, we got lost for a bit, and ended up at the highest point on Thira. The views were OK, but the winds were too strong for anything more than a photo. Fira was surprisingly pretty, and very nice. We found great ice cream and a decent lunch.

From Greece 2013

We then drove to Oia, which was even prettier!

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

We thought about staying for the sunset but the overcast weather put us off. We left a bit early --- to our regrets because the sunset as seen from the road was spectacular!

Greece 2013

We went to Greece this year for a sailing trip, bookended by days in Athens and Thira (on Santorini). I'll break up the visit thus into those 3 sections. This is the index page. I'll post links to other people's pictures as they get them up.

Photos:

• Arturo's photos

Trip Report:

• Thira/Santorini
• Sailing in the Argolic and Northern Cyclades
• Athens
• Conclusions

Review: The Best American Essays 2011

I picked up The Best American Essays 2011 during an Amazon sale for about $1.99. At that price, it was a good buy for the 3-4 good articles in it. The articles span a lot of topics, and too many of them are simple mood pieces or have too much literary flourish for me to have patience. There are a few deeply analytical ones, but even the piece on say, the slow decline of Detroit read too much like a fancy pansy literary piece rather than hard hitting journalism. At the default Kindle price of $8.99, this is a rip off.

Not recommended. I had to force myself to read about half the book.

Review: The Fine Print

The Fine Print is David Cay Johnston's book about how corporations rip off the American people. The book starts with a great science fiction story: imagine a world where after a strange event happens, some people are discovered to be immortal. They can still be killed and die through accidents, but they will not age and will not die of old age. Further, the strange event has changed them so that they are now solely motivated by money. The answer of course, is that this science fiction story is not science fiction at all, but the "people" involved are called corporations.

In chapter after chapter, Johnston takes on one aspect after another of corporate malfeasance. Whether it's AT&T/Verizon/Comcast ripping you off on your phone bill and charging you insane amounts of money for service that would cost one third what citizens of other developing countries pay, or PG&E neglecting maintenance of gas pipelines leading to massive explosions and people dead, there's even grist here to get your blood boiling and hopefully you mad enough.

Johnston knows all of these topics well, and leverages his facility with numbers and his strong sense of journalism to bring the stories to life. Some chapters are short (like the ones on Hollywood tax breaks), and some are long, but they all go a long way to debunk the myth that there is such a thing as a virtuous, successful capitalist in modern American society. Neither Google nor Warren Buffett come off as the heroes they are portrayed as in popular press.

Despite all that Johnston shrinks back from the obvious conclusion: the modern limited liability corporation is a terrible legal construct and a lousy way to run society --- there are no circumstances under which a society with such entities wouldn't end up corrupt and undemocratic. Yes, there are other developed countries that do a good job of keeping such entities under control (Western Europe, for instance), but they're also societies that come under frequent pressure to follow the Washington consensus.

This is a book that won't get read by enough people to make a difference, but you know what, you should read it anyway. Highly recommended.

Review: Redshirts

I'm  a big fan of John Scalzi's sense of humor, especially in Old Man's War. However, when I heard about Redshirts, I was less than 100% excited. While it is ridiculous that Red-shirts dropped dead all the time on away team missions, I didn't think that the joke itself could sustain an entire novel. As a result, I waited until I could check it out from the library before reading.

Unfortunately, I was right. The central premise is funny. You've got a crew that's scared to go on away missions, and you've got characters that get shot and wounded only to recover all the time on missions. You've got technical gobbledy gook with ridiculous technical solutions, how despite how advanced the ship is, nobody sends e-mail and messages are always delivered in person. It's pretty funny, but it lasted about half the book and then the rest of the novel becomes a farce, barely worth reading.

I eventually limped along to the end, but only out of a sense of masochism. I wouldn't recommend anybody put themselves through the entire novel. Read until the sense of fun is over and then abort the mission.

Not recommended.

Re-read: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteneance

I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in high school, and reading it then was an amazing discovery. I remember not being able to stop reading it, going on until well past midnight, barely able to stop when it was time to sleep, and finishing it the next day. When I saw that the Kindle edition was down to $2.99, I didn't hesitate and bought it and read it again.

Books are different beasts when you read them a second time. The first time I loved the description of the scientific method and it's application to debugging computer programs (in addition to the problems you find when you need to repair a motorcycle):

When you’ve hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, “Okay, Nature, that’s the end of the nice guy,” and you crank up the formal scientific method. For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up. (Loc 1603)

This time around, I found another part of the story, the story about a father and son, re-united after a horrifying personal disaster, and the realization that it as his son that brought him out of the psychiatric ward:

We’re related to each other in ways we never fully understand, maybe hardly understand at all. He was always the real reason for coming out of the hospital. To have let him grow up alone would have been really wrong. In the dream too he was the one who was always trying to open the door. I haven’t been carrying him at all. He’s been carrying me! (Loc 6249)

What's great about the book is that all this is interspersed with a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California. It's full of little tips about cycle touring that indicate that Pirsig did do quite a bit of motorcycle touring, though he does spend way too much time on a freeway in California instead of riding down the coast. (And much like most tourists, he makes the mistake of visiting the California coast during the summer, when it's mostly fogged in) There are also little interesting observations about people on the road:

While we wait for chocolate malteds I notice a high-schooler sitting at the counter exchanging looks with the girl next to him. She’s gorgeous, and I’m not the only other one who notices it. The girl behind the counter waiting on them is also watching with an anger she thinks no one else sees. Some kind of triangle. We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives. (Loc 4385)

Ultimately, the book's a philosophical novel, with lots of explanation of the authors' ideas about the nature of Quality, the split between the arts and the sciences, and his attempts to unify the two by keeping Quality undefined as, "You know it when you see it." For a rhetoric class at the places Pirsig has taught, I think this approach might work. For those of us working in technology, however, I'm not sure that non-definition is useful. There's a certain sense that those who care passionately enough about their work enough to have strong opinions and defend them are better engineers than those for whom engineering is "just work." On the other hand, you could argue that in many ways, the constant arguments over the quality of say, the choice of programming language is well over-blown, and people would mostly be better of getting work done than engaging in the low-Quality flame wars that you find on the internet.

Regardless of how you feel, however, the novel is thought-provoking, interesting, and never dull, despite being mostly about ideas, rather than being about characters or plot. It's a great book and well worth reading and re-reading. Highly recommended.

Review: Big Skinny World Bifold Wallet

I answer a lot of questions on Quora, but the one time I asked a question, I never got a satisfactory answer. I travel enough internationally that I find domestic wallets to be useless, since they can't handle cash that's too wide or tall, which many international currencies are. I was using a wallet I picked up in Switzerland a few years ago. That wallet was nice, especially since it had multiple pockets for cash and coins, letting you sort say, Euros and dollars, or Euros and CHF. However, it's leather, doesn't have sufficient pockets for the large number of cards I carry, and is slowly being worn out.

I found a coupon for a Big Skinny World Bifold, and ordered one. It's made out of Nylon rather than leather , so it's much lighter than my old wallet, which is nice. It's also wide enough and tall enough for non-US currency. It has an outside zipper for coins and keys, and sufficient card slots for 16 cards as well as two inner pockets for business cards and other sundries. It ended up being quite a bit slimmer than my old Swiss wallet.

Recommended.

Review: Your Child's Growing Mind

Mike Samuel recommended Your Child's Growing Mind to me, and while it was a good read, it's written in a verbose fashion, full of useless anecdotes that don't reflect research findings, with the interesting research findings almost deliberately obfuscated.

For instance, in the section on enriched environment, she notes that lab rat studies showed that a cage with lots of toys, etc would build a rat with a bigger brain, a free roaming rat that played outside the cage would have a bigger brain than even the enriched rat's brain. This demonstrates that free play and spending time outside with freedom to explore is far more important than how many toys you can buy your child, but strangely this passage received no emphasis.

The book is strangely light on early childhood development, but once it get to elementary school, starts providing tips on reading, writing, and math. Each section is full of tips on how to teach your kids the relevant skills, including sections on what play activities are great for letting the entire family participate. The tips are split by age group, and there's good explanation on what works. There's a big emphasis on trouble-shooting learning problems with adequate prescription.

Like all such books written by Americans, it has zero information about bilingual or multi-lingual households, and there's apparently been no academic research on how best to optimal the environment for multi-language learning in such households. I wonder if European books are better in this regard.

I would recommend referring to this book over the years (especially if your child has a learning disability), but you should still read John Medina's Brain Rules for Baby first.

Review: Wool

I picked up Wool because I'd read about the success of the author, Hugh Howey, in going completely independent, first selling the book as a serial on the Kindle store, culminating in selling the paperback rights to a traditional publisher while keeping the electronic rights to himself. The omnibus is frequently on sale at a good price, indicating that Howey understands how to market and price fiction in the digital/electronic era, unlike any of the dead-tree publishers he's competing against.

The book is an addictive read. The traditions of serial writing are clear, and Howey is a master of them: keep the cliffhangers coming quickly and in rapid succession, and never leave the reader in a state where he can get a breath in to get distracted by other pressing matters. The characters are wooden and there's next to no character development, but the world of an underground Silo following some sort of catastrophe (what exactly happened is never revealed, but we do learn that it's man-made) is the main focus, and the reveal happens at a pace that's compelling and fun to read.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

What the book isn't, however, is great science fiction. There are too many plot-holes and things that don't make sense. For instance, the great villain is the head of IT, and we read about the mysterious PACT and that power for servers make up for the biggest power draw on the generators. This makes no sense, since as far as I can tell, there's nothing for those servers to actually do. If all you need is for the servers to store data, they can do their job just as easily powered down as up, and there's no reason for them to draw power. Furthermore, Howey clearly has no idea of the kind of machinery and equipment needed to run modern equipment. Even the manufacture of a single hard drive or flash chip requires factories and a sequence of production steps far larger than the Silos described. Most science fiction novels have characters as wooden as what you'll find in Wool, but most science fiction novels have much better science.

If you can ignore these huge gaping plot-holes (big enough to drive a Google data-center through), however, the book is a fun read. It's the perfect airplane novel, and I can therefore recommend it as such. I expect to buy Howey's other books before my next long flight.

PSA: Do take the undergraduate compilers class

We just closed our hiring cycle for summer interns at Quark. During this period, we vetted tons of transcripts and resumes from top tier universities including CMU, Berkeley, and Stanford. Our hiring standards are demanding, and I personally did a lot of interviewing. Congratulations to Kevin and Kevin.

If you're a Cal student, I have very specific knowledge of the classes offered. Once upon a time, CS 162 (Operating Systems) and CS 164 (Compilers) were considered core classes in the CS curriculum. They were required of all CS graduates. In this day of "applications first" approach to CS, CS 162 is still required but CS 164 is now optional.

From the perspective of a hiring manager, however, taking CS164 early in your undergraduate career signals several very positive things:

1. You're not intimidated by challenging classes that require lots of coding. The ability to do well in CS 164 depends very much on your ability to utilize tools, write a lot of code, and test and debug at a meta-level that none of the other classes require.
2. You're not satisfied with understanding computers at the topmost abstraction layers. You want to dig beneath the abstraction layer of a programming language and understand how they work, down to the point of producing assembly for the machine to execute. The reason CS162 and CS164 were required in the past was that digging beneath those abstraction layers was highly prized for anyone doing any kind of work. (CS152 is very nice as well, since you now get down to the logic layer --- knowing how to do anything at the transistor level isn't necessary, but it's also useful)
3. CS164 requires full use of almost all data structures you were taught in your data structures class. You'll build parse trees. You'll use symbol tables. You'll need to walk trees and do type-checking. CS164 integrates all the knowledge you got from data structures. Getting this in early in your career will only benefit you.
4. People who take CS164 will not balk at writing a parser, or even designing a whole new programming language or DSL in order to better solve a problem. This approach of meta-programming (or Meta-Object Protocols) is very useful and the skills necessary to implement it in a non-LISP environment are only available for people who know how to write compilers and other language translators.

I know it's fashionable now to deride the traditional computer science education with its emphasis on hardcore topics. But when I interview students with the traditional computer science education versus students without, the difference is clear: the former are much better problem solvers, and write better code. Ultimately, they'll make better hires and will get more and better job offers.

So for those at Cal: take CS162 and 164 as early as you can. For those elsewhere, please don't neglect your systems classes. They'll make you stronger engineers.

Review: The Signal and The Noise

I've been a big fan of 538 and Nate Silver since the 2008 elections. The Signal and the Noise is his book about predictions, the state of the art, how they work, how they don't work, and the intersection of those concepts along with his interests. Nate Silver's a very smart guy, which means that his interests are broad and fascinating.

What comes through the book is Silver's humility --- he claims that he was extremely successful because political predictions as set by TV pundits and Fox News sets a particularly low bar that's easy to beat if you just do a pretty good job. Note that Silver's models, however, beat the so-called prediction markets like InTrade, for instance, which means that not only did Silver beat the TV pundits, but he also beat fairly size-able markets with real money sitting on the line.

What's fascinating about the book is we see how Silver sees the world through the prediction lens. He even treats Chess as a prediction problem, and his write-up of the Kasparov vs. Deep Blue matches gave me insight into the matches that I didn't know prior to reading his book.

Silver also covers epidemic modeling, weather forecasting (including hurricane forecasts), earthquakes, stock markets, economic bubbles, sports, poker, and global climate change. His explanation of Bayesian reasoning, its' history, and application in the modern world is as clear and enlightening as any I've seen, and his considered understanding of our prediction failures is profound and insightful. Fundamentally, weather forecasting has been the most successful of the disciplines examined in the book, and Silver explains why.

The biggest weakness of the book is one that a perceptive reader will see as a theme over and over again. Fundamentally market incentives skew predictions. For instance, the political pundits have incentives to make big predictions and tell stories that are wrong, because they're more entertaining to the masses than Silver's nuanced analysis. Economists, mutual fund managers, and all have incentives to be wrong conventionally than to be right unconventionally. It is because of these distortionary effects that many of our predictions fail, rather than because we do not have the tools to do the job correctly, or because Bayesian reasoning isn't widely utilized.

Having said that, the book is fascinating, interesting, and enlightening. It's the best book I've read all year, and hence comes highly recommended.

Review: Teach Your Children Well

After reviewing a book about the under-privileged kids amongst us, I had to go read a book about the very other end of the spectrum --- the over-privileged, over-scheduled, ultra-achieving kids in the San Francisco area. Teach Your Children Well covers mostly the ails of the upper-middle class and their children.

These include overly packed schedules, worrying about bullying and cyber-bullying, whether they're the best piano player and able to get into Carnegie Hall, etc., etc.

Madeline Levine advocates taking a holistic approach to the child, noting that it's far better for children to grow up to be good people rather than necessarily great mathematicians, engineers, doctors, or artists. She clearly lives in San Francisco, where most parents worry much more about their children's math classes than their ability to draw or play sports.

While Levine clearly has a good heart, I'm not sure her book can be very effective. It's one thing for her and her patients to abandon the rat race or paper chase, but unless/until society values ethics more than a big paycheck, the bankers on wall street will still command more respect than the people who did not cheat. That's what's driving society, and it has nothing to do with parents being pushy.

What's more, as I've noted over and over again on this blog, the world just simply does not need more English major journalists. Such journalists and writers actually do more harm to the topics they cover than if they did not exist, and I'm not sure a society should value such work. So to that extent I agree far more with the parents who think that their daughters should actually work hard at Math rather than say, "But I'm so much better at fashion."

I wanted to recommend this book. I certainly have no intention of pushing my son into things he doesn't like for the sake of being able to brag about piano recitals or other some such nonsense. But the entire book reeks of privilege and Levine lives in a society full of trust fund babies and people who not only have therapists but also have multiple therapists for their children. Such children will live in privilege regardless of how little Math they do and how little Science they know. But children of immigrants will have no such luxuries, and if you come from such a background you might find Levine's stories and anecdotes more than a little detached from reality. Hence: not recommended.

Wharton Business School Presentation

How to hire and keep engineers happy public from Piaw Na

I was the lunch speaker today at the Wharton Business School in San Francisco. The school runs an executive MBA program, with about 100 students a year. It's a 2 year program running mostly on Fridays and Saturdays. I gave a 40 minute talk at high intensity because I prepped for an hour with questions.

One question that came up was where can you learn to code? While I'm not a big fan of the various programming boot camps for professional programmers, for MBAs, it could very well be just the thing. The school itself had fantastic facilities, and the lecture hall was the best room I'd ever given a presentation in, with stadium-style seating and the lecturer standing in the pit subject to questions all around. Definitely an experience to be had.

As usual, the above slides are sanitized for public consumption. The presentation given to the business school students is a lot more peppered with interesting case studies from industry. Having said that, with my new full time job, my time for speaking engagements is a lot more limited and I will curtail them going forward.

Review: How Children Succeed

In this age of hyper-parenting, queuing up and applying to pre-schools, one would expect How Children Succeed to be a book full of stories about tiger-moms and their high achieving scions. Refreshingly, this is a book about the students and families struggling to get out of poverty.

We get a smattering of mention of various studies, culminating in an introduction to the Tools of the Mind program. Strangely enough, my affluent neighborhood is full of Kumion cram schools as well as Montessori specialty kindergartens, but nobody brags about their Tools of the Mind curriculum. It's very likely that the tools of self-discipline, planning, and taking action is cultivated by upper middle class households as a matter of course, though one would think that something like Tools of the Mind would be useful no matter which strata of society you come from.

We don't get any expositions of music prodigies (thank goodness!), but instead get a long chapter about one teacher's attempt to successfully teach her disadvantaged kids to play chess and beat the upper class private schools in competition. It's a mesmerizing read, and worth your time. The punchline is that she coaches one of her star chess players on academics and absolutely fails to make a dent, showing you that success in one aspect of life doesn't get you far anywhere else.

Does this book teach you something you don't already know? Not really. It's a typical English major book, lacking pointers to studies as well as deep interviews with people who explore the development of executive function in children. But it's worth reading anyway. Recommended.

Internships

The conventional wisdom on interns is that you cannot expect to get significant work done by interns: they take time to train, and by the time they leave your company, you can't possibly have trained them to the point where they're productive and pay for themselves in terms of work done.

I've led internship programs at Mpath and Google, and each time I've defied conventional wisdom. Mike Danylchuk, Alex Murkes and Carolynne Surfleet all interned for me at Mpath, and they did tremendous amounts of work. Both Alex and Mike converted to become full time employees, and were immensely productive.

At Google, Stephen Chen, Phil Sung, Matei Zaharia, and Nikola Postolov all interned for me at Google. All 4 were immensely productive, and Stephen and Phil eventually became Google employees. All these engineers made huge contributions to their projects, and more than paid for their training time.

I attribute my past successes at hiring interns and managing them to two factors:

1. I don't lower my standards when hiring interns. I interview and apply the same metrics to interns as I do to full time employees. You can do this if you focus on fundamental computer science and coding problems during your interviews.
2. I don't give interns "make work" or insignificant work. I put them on high risk projects with complete ownership of a project from end-to-end. They do the design, they code, they test, and they deploy. The sense of ownership and satisfaction with the end result gives them a hugely positive experience. This doesn't mean I just let them do their thing --- I provide design reviews and code reviews, and I provide suggestions as to which projects would be good uses of their time and talents, but providing autonomy is the key to engineering happiness.

I used to think that this modus operandi was par for the course in the tech industry, but one day I sat on a hiring committee for interns who wanted to convert into full-time employees. My jaw dropped constantly in horror at what some of my colleagues were doing to their interns:

• Putting interns on demoware, code that effectively would have to be thrown away if the data input ever had to change.
• Having interns pair program with each other, relieving the mentor of the need to code review or provide feedback to the interns. Unfortunately, this also meant the intern supervisor had no clue how his interns were doing, and whether they would be a worthy hire.
• Writing glowing reviews for an intern who did very little or next to no work (had no checkins into the source control system).

Well, here at Quark Games, we're kicking off our summer internship program next week with visits to both the Berkeley and Stanford Career fairs (we'll also consider full time applicants). I guarantee we won't' do any of the crazy things described above, and my aim is to have fully productive interns all summer. While we're only visiting these two schools because they're easily within driving distance, we'll accept applicants from any school. Feel free to send me e-mail or apply through Quark Game's site if you're interested.

Long Term Review: Republic Wireless

In my earlier review of Republic Wireless, I mentioned that I would likely give up the phone and return it and switch to Ting instead. Well, I ended up not doing that. The phone is slow, it's got wide variance in battery life --- in normal usage I'd end the day with 40% of the battery, but some times for no apparent reason I'd drain the battery by 8pm.

At my new job, however, I have no desk phone, but excellent wifi, which meant that the wifi calling feature that Republic Wireless offers is what I depend on day in day out in order to take and make phone calls from the office. While those calls aren't as often as you might expect, they still happen on a regular basis, and usually when they happen I need to take them, rather than have them go to voice mail.

The unlimited data has also come in very handy over time --- given the size of web pages nowadays, even a few minutes of surfing can run well over 100MB of data, which would pop you over to the next tier on Ting. Given that I occasionally walk to work (a 30 minute journey each way), having access to data means I can stream wireless music or use TuneIn to pick up KQED or other radio station, which has been very nice whenever I do walk to work.

Most people aren't as cheap as I am when it comes to phone plans, but $19/month unlimited voice/data/text is almost too good to be true, and I for one hope that Republic Wireless succeeds in their quest to change the way cell phones work. For most people in Silicon Valley, I'd venture to say that Republic Wireless' plan would be exactly what they want. I can't wait for them to introduce better phones and I for one am surprised that such a game changing startup is happening outside of Silicon Valley.

Highly Recommended.

Review: The Amazing Spiderman 2012

I missed the reboot of the Spiderman movies last year, so caught it on my Nexus 7 instead recently. The Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies were great, especially the second movie where the scene where the subway passengers lifted Peter Parker up over their heads and said, "it's just a kid" moved me in a way few other superhero movies did. I bought Marvel stock based on how I felt about those movies and those paid me back very well. The third of the series is not worth your time watching, but even Christopher Nolan screwed up with The Dark Knight Rises.

Unfortunately, The Amazing Spiderman just cannot live up to those standards. If the other movies didn't exist, this one might be barely acceptable. First of all, Andrew Garfield just does not pull of Peter Parker very well. He's too stylish and good looking for someone who's supposed to play an awkward nerd who's frequently bullied. Emma Stone did portray a smart and spunky Gwen Stacy, and I was pleased with the way her father, Captain Stacy was portrayed.

Gone, however, is the strong sense of morality that Spiderman always had. Gone is the motto, "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility." Gone is the closure that Peter Parker had when he caught the crook who'd killed Uncle Ben and discovered that his apathy had cost the life of a loved one. Instead we have a murky sense of betrayal that Parker was orphaned, and a villain who's transformation into one makes no sense in either plot or moral sensibility. Just as badly done: Parker's second job as a photographer is gone --- he now comes off as a freeloading high schooler with an attitude problem rather than the likable nerd with a secret.

I don't regret the time spent watching the movie, but I do regret that the stars/director who made my favorite superhero series asked for so much money that the franchise got rebooted early and we ended up with a lousy Peter Parker. I definitely would pass on watching the sequel in the theaters.

Review: Suzanne Vega @ Villa Montalvo

I'm a bigger fan of concert venues than I am of individual performance artists. My list of great venues in the Bay Area include:

• The Mountain Winery in Saratoga
• Villa Montalvo's Carriage House and Theater
• The Warfield in  San Francisco
• The Oprheum in San Francisco
• The Greek Theatre in Berkeley

All of these theaters, unlike the larger venues, offer close intimate seating where you can see the performer, rather than stadium seating where you have to see the performer on a big screen. My view on those is you might as well stay home and watch YouTube.

When I saw that Suzanne Vega was going to be live at the Carriage House in February 9th, I made it a point to bring my wife to it. I'd never seen her live before, but I liked her introverted lyrics and my wife thought she was good after watching some videos on YouTube.

Vega did not disappoint. Her second song on the set, Small  Blue Thing, blew me away. I had heard  the song on CD before, but it did not had the impact the live performance had. I said "wow, that's beautiful to my wife" and then heard someone else in the audience say loudly, "Wow!" The rest of the concert went by in a trance, with Vega playing some new songs mixed in with some old favorites.

It did not come off without a hitch. In particular, my favorite song of hers, The Queen and the Soldier was marred by her coughing in the middle and then having to regain her place with the help of the audience. I also felt the non-a capella version of Tom's Diner was too distracted by the electric guitar. Nevertheless, most arrangements were just her accompanied by an electric guitarist, so you couldn't accuse the concert of being overly elaborated or over-produced.

I had a great time, and if you get a chance to see her in an intimate venue while she's on tour, I highly recommend doing so.

First Impressions: Ting Galaxy Note 2

I bought my wife a Galaxy Note 2 from Ting.com for Christmas. The selling point of buying from Ting as opposed to say, AT&T, Verizon, T-mobile, or Sprint is that you buy a phone without a contract, and Ting charges you by usage rather than a flat $70 (and up) with a 2-year contract, which is far more expensive than paying for a phone up front and then paying per megabyte or per minute for use. It is possible to pay $30/month for unlimited T-mobile prepaid voice + data, but T-mobile coverage is so pathetic inside the Bay Area that your phone would effectively be an ornament if you were to choose the service. That works very well if you're an iPhone user, but is not very practical for anyone else.

Ting's plan charges $6/device, and then $3/month for 100 minutes and $3/month for 100MB, with a gradually decreasing cost as you consumer more data or more minutes. In the extreme, if you're fond of using uncapped data for viewing videos or streaming music, then you're likely to pay more. However, Bay Area professionals live in a wifi zone at home, and have access to wifi at work, so are very unlikely to stream large amounts of data during the course of a typical non-travel month. In practice, my wife uses $12 worth of Ting service a month.

The phone's screen is huge and a delight. It's also fast. While both Ting and Republic Wireless ostensibly resell Sprint's service, on head to head comparison there's no doubt that for whatever reason, the Galaxy Note 2's faster when loading web pages over 3G. The battery life is also incredible --- my wife usually gets at least 2 days a charge, and it's gotten to the point where she frequently forgets to charge the phone because it so rarely needs it.

The UI is wonky and strange if you're used to Nexus devices. There's all sorts of switches and sliders for controlling data usage, and we got a bit too aggressive at first with turning off background data, and then discovered that Google Navigation didn't work if you got that aggressive. Backing off that aggressiveness a bit and we ended up with very parsimonious use of data yet all the usual services worked (push e-mail, navigation, etc).

Samsung's also been very good about supporting users: soon after getting the device, there was an offer for a free Flip Cover as well as a free 5-pack of TecTiles in order to take advantage of the NFC built into the phone. I doubt very much that my wife will ever get conversant enough with phone technology in order to use it, but it still speaks volumes as to Samsung's support.

All in all, having used the phone for more than a month and getting $12/month of use out of it, I'm very impressed and can recommend the phone and service package to anyone who's lusting after a fast phone.

Review: The Best American Science & Nature Writing

Amazon had The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2012 on sale for $1.99, and when I saw Dan Ariely's name on it, I figured it was a good deal. It's a very good collection, but not nearly as good as last year's selections.

The most chilling story in the collection is the one on global atmospheric pollution --- fundamentally the scale of China's pollution into the atmosphere can only be believed by measuring it from Washington and Oregon's mountains. I also enjoyed the article about growing meat in laboratories

Perhaps one reason the articles are less interesting is because Ariely finds the geeky internet stuff interesting while perhaps I do not as much. The articles on Bitcoin and the Turing test would be interesting if you're not a computer scientist. The hero-worshiping article about Nathan Myhrvold's $400+ book on Modernist Cuisine is also not what I would have expected in this book.

Nevertheless, every article is good reading and a lot of fun. Recommended.

Startup Engineering Management visits Wharton School of Business in San Francisco

Did you know that Wharton School of Business had a San Francisco Branch? I didn't, until James Kilpatrick, affiliated with their entrepreneurship program contacted me and asked if I was willing to give a talk to the students in the program. Given the prestige of Wharton, who was I to turn them down?

The talk will happen in Wharton's San Francisco campus on Saturday, March 16th around noon. (Yes, it's a weekend MBA program) The talk will be directed towards MBA students who are mostly not technical. Hence, it will be about "attracting, recruiting, retaining, and keeping engineers happy at a startup." The school of business has about 30 free spaces available for non-MBA students who are interested in Wharton's MBA program to attend, in addition to its current students who may attend the talk.

If you're interested in going to the talk, please send e-mail to James Kilpatrick telling him you want to attend the talk, and he'll send you the details if there's enough room. Those attending the talk from outside will need to stay fora short admissions information session with Director of admissions Katherine Lilygren.

Publishing Milestone: Piracy!

Last week, a friend of mine noticed that one of my books was pirated on ScribD. In some ways this is a milestone --- I didn't expect a book whose most valuable chapter is boring tax advice to go through three editions and get as much attention as it did, let alone be worth the trouble to pirate (especially since none of the 3 editions have DRM). It is a testament to the integrity of my early and current readers that this had not happened until now. As the license to my books indicate, you are free to lend, backup, or even resell my books without any penalty. There are many countries that are famous as being "one-book" countries --- meaning that you're only able to sell one copy of the book to the country before it gets pirated wholesale. Yet I've even managed to sell multiple copies to some of those countries.

Different self-published authors have different approaches to the piracy problem. Gayle McDowell's best-selling Cracking the Coding Interview, for instance, has been so frequently pirated in India that she had no choice but to stop selling electronic copies of her book and only sell paperbacks on Amazon with a special cheaper edition for the Indian market. The externalities are clear: the pirate gains access to the book, but the rest of us lose the convenience of buying an electronic book.

For now, the indications are that my books haven't encountered runaway piracy (in India or other places), so I won't be taking any measures that drastic. However, if it does happen, I expect to have to take measures similar to what Gayle's been forced to take.

The "Science" in Computer Science

When I was an undergraduate, it was very common for many of us to view the "science" in Computer Science as an oxymoron. The proof was that all the "real" sciences had names like "Physics", "Chemistry", "Astronomy", and "Biology", while we were lumped in with "Political Science", "Social Science", and of course, "Military Science". Many took the position that Computer Science should be considered a branch of mathematics, while those of us who were liberal arts majors (I count myself and Jonathan Blow as the major advocates of this) considered Software Engineering a branch of the literary arts as the goal was ultimately to produce code that was easy for humans to read, since machines didn't care what your code looked like.

If you read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, however, there is a sense in which Computer Science is a science. Consider the construction of a program to be a sociological construction of a theory about how best to approach a problem. You start out with version 1, which solves some portion of a problem. Later on, as the problem is better understood through the lens of your theory (i.e., your users start using your program and start providing you with feedback), you tinker with your theory to make it better fit the evidence (user feedback or market feedback). As a result, your program becomes more complicated and your program's structure (theory) starts to show it's datedness. When things go to a head, however, you either refactor or rewrite all the offending crufty code, throwing it away and replacing it with a new program (theory )that accommodates all the evidence to date. This is equivalent to perhaps relativity supplanting Newtonian physics. Note that the analogy even holds here --- old versions of your program continue to work, but the newer program (better theory) is more elegant, and fits better with the problem space. If your rewrite fails, the result is less useful than the previous version and society refuses to adopt your new program. For instance, Vista was not widely adopted and most users stayed on Windows XP instead.

There's even space in there for unit tests and systems tests: those tests are the empirical experiments by which you attempt to prove that your theory (program) works. In effect, when writing tests, you're trying to prove that your theory about how the problem should be solved is wrong. If you have the resources, you might even want such experiments be run/written by a third party, so they have no cognitive biases with which to approach the problem.

Obviously, this view of software engineering as actually "doing science" can only be carried up to a limit, but I find it to be an interesting analogy, and would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Review: Odd and the Frost Giants

I somehow missed Odd and the Frost Giants when it came out. I usually check books out from the library, but since this book was $1.99 on the Kindle store for the rest of the month, I decided that it was worth the risk when I read the first chapter to my son and he didn't immediately start screaming. (It's too much to expect him to pay rapt attention --- my wife told me that he runs around at story hour even at the library)

The book's got beautiful language, and has lots of little scenes that are funny. You could imagine a Disney movie made from the book. I enjoyed the character of Odd, the little boy who kept up a great attitude no matter how tough a life fortune hands him. The story has a slow, lilting dream-like cadence, and the events unfurl smoothly and naturally.

All in all, a short book and a quick read. Recommended.

My New Job

When I announced my retirement almost 3 years ago, I got three reactions:

1. "I can't imagine staying home to feed the cats and watch TV." Those folks couldn't be more wrong. I don't have any cats, and I barely had time to finish a couple of video games, let alone watch TV. Instead, I wrote 3 books, traveled a lot, started a consulting business, got married, had a baby, and in general lived a pretty good life that never left me feeling bored or unfulfilled. My personal experience is that the kind of people who make those statements are people lacking in imagination: they can't imagine leading a self-directed life, so they imagine a life of boredom if they left work. 
2. "You're too young to retire, you'll be back at work." They were partly right. Writing books is significant work, and my consulting business was also work, as is getting married and coping with baby.
3. "Would you ever consider leaving retirement?" My response was "Of course, for an appropriate role and an opportunity that gets me excited enough."

My life has been full enough that I didn't think that there would be an opportunity big enough to get me excited. However, when I met the team at Quark Games, it was quite clear that this was a team that was something special. Passionate about games,with lots of talent (both engineering and otherwise), I was impressed by their designs and vision for what the next generation of games are going to look like.

So when the team asked me to join as the VP of Engineering for the company I was delighted to say yes and prove that yes, there are opportunities that will get me to return to the workforce. (I did discuss positions at other Silicon Valley startups, and yes, I am happy to report that Silicon Valley is as full of opportunity as ever for those of us for whom big companies are undesirable work environments)

Yes, Quark Games does have job openings, including engineering positions. All engineers will report to me, so if you've enjoyed working with me in the past or you know my management philosophy and like it, consider applying for a job!

This has implications for my negotiation business. Effective immediately, I will take on no more new customers. If you're an existing customer, don't worry, I won't abandon you. I will keep on your case until you are satisfied or give you a full refund. Existing customers who basically treat me as a sounding board for financial advice don't have to worry either --- I will keep servicing your requests as there's no conflict of interest with my new job. My books will always be available on Amazon and on-line.

Long Term Review: Resmed Swift FX Nasal Pillow System

I just replaced the nasal pillow on my Resmed Swift FX Nasal Pillow system due to wear, so I'm guessing that it's time for a long term review. I'd always used full-face masks before, but they had several problems: first, they were heavy and bulky. Secondly, they leaked. Finally, they were costly to replace and maintain. For a while, discount retailers on the internet would get them to me for a relatively cheap price, but the manufacturers recently clamped down on them so they're now very pricey.

I thought I wasn't a good candidate for a nasal pillow system because my brothers were all mouth breathers, and so I thought I was one as well. I took a loaner from SleepQuest, along with a chin strap so I could tie my mouth shut if it stayed open at night. (Yes crack all the jokes you want about my wife wanting me to use it during the day) After two days, however, I stopped using the chin strap as it would slip off at night. The nasal pillow would cause a nasty backflow through my mouth if my mouth slipped open, so obviously I wasn't a mouth-breather, since I would have woken up the minute my chin strap slipped off!

There was an initial adjustment period. Basically, my nostrils would get sore from the pillows in my nose. I guess despite the name, they're not particularly soft or comfortable, at least at the beginning. I would swap between my full-face mask and the nasal pillow every 2-3 days to give my nostrils a rest. I used vaseline as well on my nostrils so as to lubricate the pillows and not chafe my nostrils.

Then during the Hawaii trip I basically went cold-turkey and used only the nasal pillows. They worked great. Basically, my nose has gotten use to the pillows now and I can use them all the time with no problems. I was told that the pillows would last about 6 weeks or so, but in practice I got 3 months out of each pillow set. Replacements are about $21 each on Amazon, so there's no reason not to replacement whenever you notice wear. (Basically, my wear indicator was that the inside silicone wears larger and larger)

The best thing about the pillows is that they don't leak, and they feel very comfortable. On a secondary basis, the pillows are also much lighter than the full face mask and easier to pack, making future tours of the alps potentially easier on my body.

Highly recommended.

Review: The Perfect Woman

Happy New Year! And what better way to start the year on this blog with a book review.

The Perfect Woman sounds like a self-help book or some kind of romance, but is actually a police procedural. The novel revolves around two detectives, John Stalling and Tony Mazzeretti, who are rivals on the police force. When a serial killer goes on the loose, the two men are put together on the same team.

Stalling is clearly the book's protagonist, and the novel portrays a police detective's attempt to balance his life, his past, and his obsession with work and keeping killers off the street. Mazzeretti's a less well-rounded character, but as the story unfolds we begin to see the person behind the facade.

Unlike many police procedural, the novel gives you a clear idea of who the killer is right at the start, hence the novel reads more like a suspense genre book than a detective novel. The question is whether the police will catch the killer before he nabs another victim.

While a more than slightly entertaining first novel, there are moments when it feels like the author tried to cram more into the book in the name of "character development". I didn't feel my time was wasted reading the novel, but it didn't give me much that Silence of the Lambs didn't, for instance. But if you enjoyed that novel, I see no reason why you wouldn't enjoy this one. Mildly recommended  as an airplane novel.

Review: Ted the Movie

Two guys are lifelong friends and roommates, but then one of them gets a girlfriend and the other is forced to move out. This sounds like a tired, cliched plot of a romantic comedy, except in Ted's case, the roommate is a talking, walking teddy bear who's been with John Bennett since he was 8. My brother told me about the movie, and the trailer made me want to see it, even though the biggest problem with movie trailers is that they essentially show the best parts of the movie, leaving you watching the movie composed of the less interesting parts.

Well, there's some of that going on, and the movie seemed loosely edited without the feel of the tight pacing required to keep you from one laugh to another. Ted, however, looks great, and moves realistically, if such is possible for an animated Teddy bear. The plot while cliched, is a lot of fun. It's a pity the dialog doesn't live up to the plot, actors, and characters --- they almost always feel forced.

For $1.99, however, I felt like I enjoyed the movie enough to recommend it. Just don't go in expecting it to be great. But hey, if you ever grew up talking to your stuffed animals, you should watch it.

First Impressons: Scion xB

My wife's BMW was starting to need costly repairs (and it certainly wasn't cheap to begin with). The choices were to keep it and keep paying for it, or buy a new car. While XiaoQin didn't want to go car shopping, when I threatened to buy another Honda Fit, she changed her mind and decided that car shopping was less crazy than having 2 of the same car. (Given how happy I've been with my Fit, I have no idea why the objection exists)

We started with the Toyota dealer. We first tried a Prius Station Wagon, but discovered that the latch placement in that car meant that the car seat had to be on one side or another. Since we only had one kid and the safest place in the car is the middle of the back seat, we decided to keep shopping. We tried the Yaris, but discovered that the trunk was so small Bowen's stroller wouldn't fit in it. The salesman had a moment of insight and introduced us to the Scion xB. I had actually tried the xB way back in 2009, but discovered that it wouldn't fit the tandem. Since I already had a Honda Fit, that was no longer a concern. The amount of room in the car was substantial, and while it wasn't the most fuel efficient car around, we would most likely drive it around with at least 3 people inside, so that was less of a concern. The car's driving position felt higher than a regular car, but doesn't feel like an SUV: it's still easy to get in and out of it, and there's relatively little ground clearance. My bicycle will still be the primary vehicle for my solo trips.

We tried the competition. The Nissan Cube was substantially smaller though more fuel efficient. For whatever reason, the rear seat felt cramped with the car seat inside. Honda had discontinued the Element, which was its vehicle in the same class. The Mazda 5 was substantially more expensive, and suffered from the same problem as the Prius Station Wagon.

Negotiating with the dealers was a problem. The Scion brand features True Pricing, which meant that all dealers would only quote me the sticker price over e-mail, rendering my usual trick of soliciting competitive bids from all dealers within 200 miles useless. We did find two dealers who would offer about $1,000 off the sticker price, and after an afternoon of shopping, went with one of them.

Having had the car for about a week, I'm actually quite impressed. The car is stable and drives well, though it feels a bit top heavy and isn't as nimble as the Fit. The built in accessories are impressive: you get blue tooth linkage with your phone, as well as a USB port for an MP3 player. The bluetooth player handles streaming stereo audio as well. Overall, as a baby mover, I think the car has a lot to be said for it: the rear windows are tinted, for instance, so are more comfortable for Bowen when the California sun is shining. The price is also pretty amazing for what you get. The biggest criticism is the fuel efficiency, but as you can imagine, almost anything Japanese beats a BMW on that front. No car is perfect, but if you have a small family I can recommend this one.

First Impressions: Republic Wireless Defy XT (Dual Band)

My 2 year old Nexus One had started getting a flakey power button, so I was going to have to buy a new phone. While I was very happy at my extremely low cost monthly cost for my pay-as-you-go T-mobile plan, I  was also somewhat jealous of XiaoQin's always-on Virgin Mobile Optimus V with the $25/month unlimited data with 300 minutes. Having relied on her phone while traveling for navigation and other such niceties, I decided that it was time to join the 21st century and look for a phone that would get me that functionality at a reasonably low cost monthly fee.

I had signed up for the Republic Wireless beta program ages ago, but never made it to the front of the queue before the beta was over and the company went live. There were lots of people complaining on-line about how obsolete the Motorola Defy XT was, but having seen how much nicer a phone with data was over a phone without, I came to the conclusion that I'd rather have a Motorola Defy XT with a $19/month unlimited data/voice/text plan than a latest model phone with a $50 (or more)plan.

When the phone arrived, I was surprised. First of all, it's a light phone. So light that for my first day of carrying around I constantly checked that it was still in my pocket because I just couldn't feel it. The 1GHz single-core processor is slow by today's standards, but it didn't feel like a downgrade from the Nexus One, and neither did the Gingerbread OS. The phone's exterior ports are all covered by rubber grommets, and the phone is IPX7 waterproof. Whether it stays that way over the course of a year is in question, since the charging port's cover will most likely be pried on and off too many times and wear out.

The biggest penalty of buying this phone instead of a later model one is the amount of on-board storage: it comes with 512MB, and after all the preloaded software, you're left with not much more than 220MB. That's not a lot, given the penchant for modern software to hook into Android's notification and therefore requiring to be installed on the on-board storage instead of being on the microSD card slot.

Call quality is reasonable: it's not as good as our Comcast voice-over-IP phone line, it's quite usable on our home wifi, and I've successfully made and received calls over random wifi hot spots. When not connected to a wifi zone, the phone falls back into the Sprint service, and it's every bit as good as the Optimus V was.

The data connection works well as well, whether on wifi or on the fall back Sprint connection. The GPS is a bit balky, and takes a while to lock on compared to the Optimus V. By far the biggest problem, which I didn't anticipate, is that the charging port is on the left side of the phone instead of the bottom. This is problem because the wide side of the phone gives you more surface area in which to get confused and become unable to locate the charging port in the dark. The smaller screen compared to the Nexus One turned out to be a non-issue.

All in all, I can recommend the phone. However, I myself am unlikely to keep it. My wife dropped her Optimus V into some water, which meant that it's now have to be retired. Buying another Virgin Mobile phone was out of the question, as Virgin refused to grandfather her $25/month plan. She decided that the Defy XT was an ugly phone, so we ended up ordering her a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 from Ting. Ting's not as cheap as Republic Wireless for a single user, but if you switched the entire family over and use the pooled data/minutes/text plan, it's actually not that bad. So depending on whether she's happy with the Galaxy Note 2, I will likely return the Republic Wireless phone and buy a Ting phone so we can all be on one shared data plan. Note that Republic Wireless has a 30-day money back plan (now extended to 30 days from January's OTA update), so trying out Republic Wireless is relatively low risk. Recommended.

Rest in Peace Frank Spychalski

My last photo with Frank in it, taken in July 2011 (Left to right: Phil Sung, Alan Wissenberg, Dan Vogelheim, Frank Spychalski, Me)

When I was assigned to the Munich office in 2008, Frank Spychalski was the first person to take me out for a beer and asked me to join his project. As an Asian who couldn't hold his beer, I couldn't do much drinking, but Frank overlooked that, and  I gladly joined his project and tried my best to help him as well as the rest of the Munich office. We became office-mates and good friends. When I found an apartment, Frank helped me find, buy and then organized a party to move my washing machine. When I moved out, he bought that machine off me.

Frank was an outdoors enthusiast in every sense of the word. He was a runner, a hiker (he'd done the West Highland Way twice!), and cyclist. In the office, he was always up for a quick run, and was always full of energy, frequently biking to work. Others in the office sometimes called him "super-humanly strong", but I knew that he was relentless in his pursuit of fitness. While we'd rode together a few times, we never did manage to sync up on my long trips, including the Tour of the Alps. We nevertheless became good friends and we always managed to squeeze in a quick meeting at least whenever I visited the Munich office.

I was shocked when I received e-mail from a mutual friend that Frank had gone missing. I knew Frank was very experienced and participated in many challenging hiking events. While I knew he frequently did these trips solo, he'd come through every one of his treks without a scratch, which is more than I can say for myself. I was horrified therefore, to hear that his body had been recovered from the Cascade Saddle track in Mt. Aspiring National Park. (Update: Sara Adams provides more background on what happened) (Update: the news reports provide further detail)

I'm very sorry that Frank and I never got to do a substantial trip together, and that we'll never get a chance to do so. I did not expect that I would spend Christmas this year writing his obituary. It stuns me that I will never see his quick smile, laugh at his eagerness to do so much in so little time whenever he was travelling, and hear his frequently sarcastic comments again. I lost a good friend, and the world lost a great engineer, hiker, cyclist, and backpacker. I will miss you, Frank!

Long Term Review: Continental Gatorskin Tires

For the longest time, I ran only Avocet Fasgrip tires. They're grippy, and they were cheap, especially after a dealer online blew them out for $13/pop. About 2 years ago, however, my supply of them finally ran out, which meant I had to switch to a new tire brand.

For several years, I'd steered clear of Continental Tires. Between 2003-2007 in the Western Wheelers Bicycle Club, I personally witnessed more Continental tire blowouts than blowouts of any other tire brand. Granted, Continental tires were very popular but so were Michelin tires, as well as Specialized. While these blowouts were not common, I saw them about once a year, and they usually resulted in hospitalization/air evacuation.

I'd run Michelin tires for many years, especially when they were $12/pop for the excellent Michelin Hi-Lite Comps. Unfortunately, Michelin realized that after market tires were market in which selling tires at a higher price would result in a perception of increased tire quality, so the Michelin Pro tires ran for about $50 each. On top of that, Michelin abandoned the use of carbon black in its tires in order to provide colorful tires so that the urban hipsters could match their tires to their frame color. While this is not of general concern in California, I do tour in rainy places and wanted a tire that provided maximum wet traction.

The advent of the Continental Gatorskin line led many to conclude that Continental's sidewall problems are gone. Bill McCready of Santana even endorsed the 28mm tires for tandem use! I decided to give them a try. The good news is that these tires definitely wear longer than the Avocets I was using. I put them on last year in August after returning from the 2011 Tour of the Alps. (I ran Continental Gatorskin 28mm tires for that tour, but 25mm for this long term review) They recently wore through to the cords in several places. Also, the wear was more even than on the Avocets: rather than wear a penny-sized hole in one place, they wore in slices all over the tire. The tires grip fine, and I never had an issue with wet or dry traction. Furthermore, they don't flat frequently: I don't recall getting more than one flat tire or so in my entire year of riding them. (Somewhere around 3500 miles) The subjective ride quality isn't so hot: I think the Avocets I used to run feel a bit cushier, probably because the sidewall is of a different material.

The bad news? As I was removing the old tire, I noticed that the sidewall looked a little cracked, and I had threads coming off them. Examining the rear hub, I noticed a black thread from the sidewall completely wrapped around my hub axle! The sidewalls did not look like they would last another season. Now this is for just 3500 miles of use under ideal conditions --- unlike in the past, I did not go out of my way to take these tires off road this time. It was also an unusually low mileage year for me.

Last year, I found an international supplier of Michelin Pro 3 tires at a reasonable $30/tire. I stocked up and will switch to those for the foreseeable future, even if the prices for the tires go up. In the mean time, I am sad to be unable to recommend the Continental Gatorskin tires for those who ride aggressively and don't stop riding their bikes when the pavement ends. There's just too much risk of hospitalization when the sidewalls blow. Now for a short tour of 3 weeks or so I'd be willing to run the 28s, but only if you inspect the sidewalls frequently and regularly.

Frank Spychalski MIA in New Zealand

Current Googler Frank Spychalski left for New Zealand in November and was supposed to show up at a friend's place in the last 2 weeks. His last Google+ posting was on November 26th, and neither his mother nor his Google manager has heard from him. Nobody seems to know where he is.

The police in New Zealand have been contacted and have started searching for him from Wanaka, where he last posted. A backpacker there said he mentioned wanting to go to Mt. Aspiring's French Ridge hut.

Frank is a strong and careful hiker, but if there's any time to start worrying it's now. If you've heard from him or talked to him since November 26th, please let me know. Additional information could save his life, not to mention his friends, colleagues, and family a lot of worry.

Head to Head: Sonicare versus Oral-B electric toothbrushes

I've been a Philips Sonicare electric toothbrush user for years. While I've been largely satisfied with the brushes, they had several problems. First, the brush heads are expensive. A 3-pack costs $27 after taxes, and even Costco doesn't provide a decent discount. At $9/head, they would be affordable if they lasted about 6 months like Sonicare claims they would. In practice, the heads start looking shaggy after 2 months and are beyond dead after 3. Granted, I have tough to clean teeth, and I brush my teeth after every meal, so I'm tougher on my brushes than most by about 50%. The second problem is that the brush bodies are not very reliable. The batteries die after a couple of years, and I've had brush heads die on me for no reason within a year of purchase.

My dental hygienist told me that his patients with Oral-B electric brushes seemed to come in with better cleaned teeth (not that my teeth had any problems), and the brush heads seem more robust and are at the very least cheaper. Oral-B claims a more realistic 3 months for their brush head's longevity, but their brush heads are half the price of the Sonicare ones on Amazon, and you can get a Costco family-sized pack for much less than even that.

As far as I can tell, there are no peer-reviewed studies of Oral-B versus Sonicare brush-heads on the internet, so all I can go by are my subjective experiences. Sonicare's teeth brushing experience is light driving an electric car. There's a purr in your mouth, and the brush softly moves up and down on your teeth and along your gums. The noise is there, but it's not annoying. Oral-B is like sticking a machine gun in your mouth: not only do you get a massive grinding noise, you feel the bristles scrubbing against your teeth and gumline. It's definitely a very German approach to teeth brushing --- you can feel the raw brute power in your teeth.

I tried switching back and forth for a few weeks here and there, and the conclusion I can draw is that the Sonicare experience is the deluxe pampered experience (sort of like driving a BMW or Mercedes), but the Oral-B feels cleaner. Whether that's because my gums/teeth have been brutalized or because they're actually cleaner, I'll have to wait for a dental visit to see. The reality though, is that I haven't had any cavities for a decade and a half, and don't expect any change. My conclusion, buy the Sonicare if you have sensitive teeth or don't mind spending the money, the Oral-B if you prefer the "big throaty engine" sound of say, a Harley Davidson in your mouth.

Bloomreach Talk

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

Review: The Hydrogen Sonata

Any Iain Banks book automatically gets put on hold at the library. Triply so when it's a Culture novel. The Hydrogen Sonata is the latest Banks novel, and it's a romp and a fun read, but unfortunately, feels very much like an episode of American TV series pre-Buffy: status quo is reset and there's a bit of hollowness involved.

One of the biggest problems with writing a Culture novel is that the Culture is so technologically superior to most civilizations that they encounter that its ships and technology have no equal and face practically no resistance as they go about their tasks. To counter-balance that in this novel, Banks introduces the Gzilt, a civilization older than the Culture, and that was invited but declined to join the Culture during its setup phase.

As an elder race, the Gzilt has decided to Sublime, going off into hyper-dimensions (Banks clearly read quite a bit about string theory and incorporated what he learned into the novel) and saying goodbye to the Real. But before they can do so, they're contacted by a predecessor civilization which tells them of a terrible secret.

This secret was so terrible that it sparked off fratricide within the Gzilt,  Prompting Culture ships to get involved in understanding the secret. You'll notice that at no point do I mention human/humanoid protagonists. That's because in the Culture, humanoids are relatively ineffectual compared to ships and their minds.

If you enjoyed Excession, you'll enjoy this book. There's very much a similar setup, with a group of Culture minds discussing amongst themselves what to do next, how to approach the problem, and possibly kibitz amongst each other with regards as to what the right thing to do is. The primary human protagonist is uninteresting, in that all that she's good at is getting lucky. She just gets dragged along by one event after another, and when she's finally done, she doesn't seem to do anything with what she knows.

Ultimately, though, the terrible secret isn't very terrible, and in fact, you get a foreshadowing of what the secret was the entire time, and the fact that status quo is more or less retained at the end of the novel despite the reveal makes the entire novel feel empty.

Would I recommend this novel? Yes. It's a fun read, even though the ending was a let down. However, if you've never read a Culture novel before, I'd recommend that you read Use of Weapons instead. That's one novel that's great throughout and doesn't feel like a let down at the end.

Mildly recommended.

Review: Ergo Depot Adjustable Height Standing Desk

Earlier this year, I read an article about how sitting is bad for your health, especially women's health. I told my wife about this and she said, "I'd like to try a standing desk." You can actually buy mechanically adjustable height desks, but seriously, if you want to be able to adjust the height frequently, what you want is for it to be entirely motorized. That way, there's no "oh, I won't stand up because it's too painful to adjust the height of my desk" excuse.

Motorized desks vary greatly in price, but I found the ErgoDepot one to be the cheapest of them all. Most people assume that low price = low quality, but the reviews on Ergo Depot were incredible, so I took a risk and ordered one. The first desk arrived with the box torn open and with parts missing, so I rejected the shipment and made the shipper take it back to Ergo Depot. Ergo Depot kindly sent me another one. This one arrived relatively quickly.

The desk assembly was fairly straightforward: screw the base together, and then use a power drill to screw the base permanently to the table surface. It is essential to use a full power drill here. A cheapo drill won't cut it. Then wire together the power adapter to the controller, plug into a power socket, and away you go! There's one minor quirk in the control system, which is that you have to hold down both rocker switches to get the table to go up or down. I have no idea why it's not just one rocker switch instead of two. The desk is fairly sturdy: it is rated for 154 pounds, which means that any monitor (or two) you buy nowadays will fit in the weight range. However, the desk does come with all sorts of warnings saying that if you move it you must lift it by the base, not by the table surface.

There are two entry ports so you can run wires for power, etc to the connectors. They work quite well. The surface itself is pretty great, but the test is in the usability. Xiaoqin loves the desk. She uses it nearly every day, and has come home from work early because her sit-down desk at work made her uncomfortable and she longed for her stand-up desk at home. You can't get a better testimonial than that. I've used it as well and the easy adjust-ability makes it very nice when we switch between users.

What are the flaws? First of all, it seems designed for laptops, not desktops. There's no space under the desk for a desktop tower to reside. Of course, if you don't plan to move the desk, that doesn't matter, just place the desktop on the floor. But given that the desk has wheels, it just seemed like an oversight not to have some provisioning for desktop towers.

If the above sounds like a minor nit-pik, it is. This is a great desk at a great price. Recommended.

Long Term Review: Schlage Keypad Locks

It's been 3 years and a little bit since I installed the Schlage Keypad Locks in the house, and sure enough, the battery on the front door has gone out, which reminded me both to change it and that I needed to write a followup review.

Changing the batteries turned out to be fairly straightforward. You unscrew the back, and the cover pops off. The battery is located in a bracket, and is a standard 9V battery which are fairly cheap to get from Amazon. When removing the cover, make a note of the orientation and make sure that you have the handle in the correct orientation when replacing. Otherwise it just won't go back in. Obviously, I use the front door of the house a lot more than the back door, so the battery for the back door is still going strong.

As for the product, I like it so much that I replaced the rental unit's lock with a Schlage unit, my parent's house also now sports one, and my wife's house also has them. I cannot recommend them highly enough, especially if you own rental property --- no more re-keying your unit between tenants, and even better, your tenant will never call you up in the middle of the night after they've locked themselves out, because they can't. It's also great if you're in the habit of exchanging your home with someone else on HomeExchange, or renting out your home on AirBnB. You set up a code, give them to your exchangees or renters, and delete the code when you get back. You can also set up specific codes for house-cleaners, etc and other trusted personnel and delete those if you ever switch providers.

Home ownership is in general a pain, but being able to replace the standard keyed locks with one of these is definitely a bright spot. Highly recommended.