Review: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Being Mortal is Atul Gawande's book about end-of-life care. It discusses the history of end-of-life care, and how the current nursing home environment came about, not as a natural evolution of the poor houses of the past, but as an extension of the hospital. This explains the inherent conflict between providing good care leading to happier tenants, and satisfying safety requirements and reducing risk.

What's interesting by far about the book is it's criticism of nursing home care: fundamentally, eliminating risk is anthetical to happiness in a tenant/patient. By eliminating the possibility of the patient doing what he wants when he wants to, the patient is infantilized, and ironically, the result is poorer outcomes, in addition to the reduced quality of life the regimented approach ensues.

The alternatives are considerably different: various assisted-living philosophies attempt to ensure the tenant's independence while reducing risk by ensuring staff is on hand as called upon, rather than being intrusive. The problem is that all it took was a few bad apples and regulatory apparatus will then take over and ensure that safety is the highest priority, rather than patient happiness.

Gawande ties it all together with his own experience as a practitioner: he describes several patients, and touchingly, his own father's death (not even neglecting the detail of acquiring the Giardia parasite while scattering his father's ashes on the Ganges) By doing so, he reveals something important: it's critical to have the important conversations up front: how heroic do you want the interventions to be, and what's acceptable as an outcome (and by corollary, what's not!). For instance, there's an example of a patient whose father said, "As long as I can watch football on TV, I'm good." which surprised the heck out of his daughter.

The book is sadly lacking in statistics, as well as detailed cost analysis. It does, however, mention several important details: hospice care, for instance, is intended to optimize the day to day life, rather than potential recovery as opposed to the standard heroic life-extension attempts today. However, it turns out that hospice care usually also leads to as long or longer lifespan as a result: it turns out that if your day to day life isn't hell, you actually live longer even if heroic medical interventions aren't exerted:

The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives— and they lived 25 percent longer. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it.(Kindle Loc. 2504-7)

By far the biggest problem, it appears, is that medical professionals have to be able, trained, and willing to have these difficult discussions with patients. In one example, Gawande observes a physician saying, "Well, a good outcome for this patient as a result of this procedure would be an additional year or two." At the same, time, the patient was thinking in terms of getting an additional decade or two of life for the same procedure. Without a thorough and honest exploration of what each option means, it is no wonder that so many patients get railroaded into heroic interventions at the expense of quality of life and time spent with their loved ones:

People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come—and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.(Kindle Loc. 2655-57)

  In any case, despite my mild criticism of the book above, this has so far been the best book I've read all year. If you have aging parents or are yourself aging, this book is a must-read. Highly Recommended.

Review: Anova Precision Immersion Circulator

When Amazon offered the older version of the Anova Immersion Circulator for $100, I jumped on it. The latest version (which is not the one I'm reviewing) cost $180, and has bluetooth and app integration. As someone who's been doing sous vide for a while, I consider those apps superfluous and was happy to save the money.

The first thing I noticed was how huge the circulator was. You definitely need a fairly tall pot (at least 6" deep, and probably not much more than 12" deep), and it's substantial in weight, though obviously takes up much less room than my Sous Vide Supreme Demi.

Using it is fairly easy: you fill a pot with water (keeping it between the min and max line), clip in the clamp, touch the screen to turn on (not at all obvious at first), set the temperature, push the start button, and go! It's noisy enough if you've got nothing else in the kitchen turned on, but if you're doing even a little stir fry or the dish washer is on, you're not going to hear it. That said, it is quite a bit noiser than the Sous Vide Supreme Demi.

It heats up very quickly (much faster than the Demi, not surprising given the 1000W spec), but is also much less power efficient: there's a motor turned on all the time circulating the water, and because no pot you have is going to have a lid that's compatible with the immersion circulator, heat escapes from the top (as well as the sides, since most pots are conductive), and so the machine has to work quite a bit harder than the Demi.

That last bit is important, because it also means that it's not quite unattended operation the way the Demi is. Because water will evaporate from the pot, you have to drop by every so often to top off the water if you have a long running recipe (e.g, 72 hour short ribs, or 24 hour duck confit).  And because there's a motor running, if you stick creme brulee in bowls and dump it into the pot, the bowls will move around and clink clink all the time, which is actually quite noisy.

Because we live in a hard water area, I find myself being obsessive about scaling on the device. Since there's a motor in the device, you don't want scaling to get so bad that it impacts the performance of the motor. I do my darnedest to wipe off all the water before putting it away, and never let it air dry.

The advantages are: it scales much better than the Demi (you can always buy a bigger pot, or a huge laboratory tank if you're going to make food for 20-30 people), and it's significantly more portable, even in its factory packaging with foam and everything. Furthermore, the temperature is significantly better than the Demi's since the circulator maintains a nice even temperature while the Demi depends on convection. In practice, however, you're unlikely to notice the difference in food produced by either!

Regardless, I found it great having 2 sous vide devices available in the kitchen: you can now prep Duck Confit one day and have steak for dinner still, or prepare both chicken and steak for one meal. I'm also much more likely to bring the device along on trips (though unfortunately it's only rated for US voltages!).

If price is a non-issue, and you can only have one device, I'd still recommend the Sous Vide Supreme Demi as the one to get. But given the price difference between the two, I'd recommend the Anova Circulator (at almost 50% the price even at full Amazon pricing) unless you have a severe objection to noise in the kitchen for long recipes. And compared to the DIY devices I've tried, it's no contest: the time savings are well worth the price, especially if you're able to (as I did) find it at a discount to the retail price.

 Please see my Modernist Cuisine post for recommendations for other essential tools to accompany the immersion circulator.

Review: Amazon Echo

The Amazon Echo was just announced for general availability today, so it's appropriate for me to write a review for our device, which we tested for 2 weeks before somewhat reluctantly packing it up to return to Amazon.

My friend Steve Grimm raved about how it was the closest thing to a Star Trek computer experience that he'd ever had, and to some extent I agree. For me, queries like "What's today's weather" worked perfectly, as did, "Play some music", "Turn it up", "Turn it down", etc. It works way better than Google's voice query (yes, those 7 microphones actually make a huge difference). However, voice recognition didn't work so great for my wife (thick Chinese accent), and surprisingly, it didn't work for Bowen either, who enunciates correctly. This might or might not be a feature, as I can imagine you might not want your child controlling the music. But of course, if it had worked, it would have been huge, since I could off-load all the annoying toddler questions like "Why is the sky blue" to Echo.  (And yes, I tried it and Echo does have a scientifically correct and credible answer)

 I'm well aware that there's a training app you can store, but the payoff wasn't enough for my wife to even bother, and of course, a training app for a 3-year old is worthless.

In any case, other than the occasional query, it mostly got used as a music device. Amazon Prime music is rather comprehensive, but of course, it wasn't complete. You can upload 200 songs up to it, but of course, that's not nearly enough. I wasn't going to pay for online storage of music when my file server is more than adequate, as is Google music.

Ultimately, if music storage was unlimited (e.g., via integration with Google Music), or if it did a better job of voice recognition sans training, I might have kept the device, especially since we paid $99 for it due to being Prime pre-order customers. For a full $180, I'd want it to do quite a bit more.

Nevertheless, if you're not opposed to paying for music storage, or if the device works for your entire household, then it's a very nice speaker system, and decent value for money. It might take Amazon a couple of generations, but I suspect that a device like this will eventually find its way into our home.

And of course, if it takes off, both Google and Apple will have similar devices out. Which I hope it does. I do look forward to the day when interacting via mouse and keyboard would be considered "quaint."

Review: Blue Remembered Earth

After the lackluster Terminal World and Slow Bullets, I picked up Blue Remembered Earth with trepidation. Fortunately, this novel is miles better than either of his previous works, and leads me to believe that I will continue to enjoy (and seek out) more Alastair Reynolds books in the future.

Blue Remembered Earth is set in a near future. Nantechnology is common, as are space elevator trips, a moon base, and asteroid mining. The novel depicts Geoffrey and Sunday Akinya, two scions of an African matriarch (Eunice) who single-handedly built a lucrative empire based on space-exploration and exploitation. When the aforementioned matriarch dies, Geoffrey is called on by the other members of the family to investigate a safe-deposit box left on the moon by Eunice.

One thing leads to another, and Geoffrey and Sunday end up in the deep oceans (dealing with the United Aquatic Nations), on Phobos and Mars, as well as a climatic visit to the Kuiper belt. As far as a wild romp through the solar system it's a lot of fun, but the plot device is thin, and extremely tenuous. The world building is entertaining, but not vivid, and of course, Reynolds has no plausible explanation as to why the African continent rose to be an economic super-power other than "I thought it was their turn."

The science is mostly impeccable, and I enjoyed the depiction of man's near future self-created utopia. Lesser writers would have made it something to rebel against, but Reynolds goes out of his way to actually show how it eliminates many of the problems that plague humanity today.

Now, it's not up to par to his previous work such as Revelation Space or House of Suns, but it's still a boldly optimistic view of humanity's near future, something that's rare these days. Recommended.

Review: Slow Bullets

In recent years, there's been a proliferation of small press imprints. What these small press imprints try to do is to take short stories or novellas, and use giant fonts, and then publish them as books. This doesn't do very much harm, except tht they usually try to charge full price for such books. This boutique approach seems to work only for genre fiction, where the fan base for an author such as Alastair Reynolds is such that they might be persuaded to pay full price for relatively little value.

Slow Bullets unfortunately comes from just such an imprint. It's clearly experimental fiction: Reynolds strays far afield from the hard science fiction that he's well known for, and sets up the story with a few small premises: a ship has performed a jump that took it into a far future where human civilization is threatened. The ship's computer systems are malfunctioning, and the only way to salvage the situation is to copy data off the systems.

Unfortunately, if you're at all conversant with even the technology of today, you'll know that the premise is ridiculous. Even piss poor smart phones today have 4GB of storage, which is enough to store thousands of books. Sure you can't preserve videos or pictures or even live recordings of music with that little space, but in a crisis situation, you're going to be only concerned with words. As a result the story's technical premise is a shambles and pitiful.

The only redeeming feature of the story is that Reynolds is clearly experimenting with fiction, and the character study of the narrator/protagonist is somewhat interesting, and where the story goes with its (very) lame premise is reflective of his attempt to write a character-based story instead of his usual hard-science approach. Nevertheless, Reynolds isn't great at character development, and in the short space of a novella doesn't really get a chance to do a decent job.

Not recommended, not even for fans of Reynolds. In fact, fans of Reynolds perhaps should especially stay away, as it might diminish your opinion of him after reading.

Review: Terminal World

Terminal World is Alastair Reynolds' science fantasy novel set in an Edgar Rice Burroughs Pastiche World. Now, you might argue that it's science fiction, but the reality is that while Reynolds' does provide somewhat plausible explanations for how the world the story is set in came to be the way it is, there's no actual exposition that makes any scientific sense, so the proper classification is science fantasy.

The central conceit behind the novel's machinations is that the world is divided into Zones. Much like Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought novels, Reynolds provides areas of the planet (or even the same city-spire) that have strongly differing tech zones. In some areas, neon lights, flying machines, and high technology work, while in others, only steam engines work, while in some dead spots, even living organisms could not survive.

The protagonist of the novel, Quillion, is a spy sent from one of the higher zones to infiltrate a lower tech zone. He's offended some people, and now has to make a run for it. This plot device gives him motivation to traverse several zones, and of course that means we get to see the world Reynolds has imagined for us.

It's a fun romp, reminiscent of Escaflowne, for instance, with airships mixed in with machine guns, weird cyborg variants, and of course, magic that turns out not to be. If that had been all there was to it, it'd be a short novel, and fun. But Reynolds tries to explore deeper, and show us the origin of the Zones, and the explanation isn't really very convincing or complete. As a result, when the novel ends with obvious room for a sequel, you don't really care very much.

As with other Reynolds' novels, characters are fairly wooden and stereotyped, and Quillion never really develops.

This is a mediocre Reynolds' novel, but of course, that means it's probably much better than most novels you'll read from anyone else. Regardless, however, I'd only recommend it if you've read everything else he's written and are looking for more.

300 Mile Retrospective: Co-Motion Periscope Triplet

Our ride to the library on Sunday brought the odometer on the Co-Motion Triplet over 300 miles. While I rode a fair number of miles solo (mostly to school in order to pick him up on the bike), Bowen's gotten at least 250 miles or so on it. We've even had to raise the seat a little since he got an inch taller!

The bike is indeed longer, but surprisingly when riding solo it doesn't feel particularly hard or different. I can mostly do the same kind of riding I can do on the other bikes, but have to take into the extra turning radius, which got me in trouble once. The bike is heavy, at over 50 pounds, so riding into the hills won't be done for a little while. For reference, and 3% grade feels like a 6% grade, and a 6% grade feels like a 12% grade. The 24x36 drive train is not nearly over kill.

What's most surprising to me is how much of a handful the bike is to manage when you're not riding it. When parking the bike in the bike shed, I always have to man-handle it in ways I never had to when dealing with the single or tandem. I've beaten up the rear handle bars a few times because I mis-estimated the distance to the door way when maneuvering the bike in and out of the shed.

One thing that I'd read about but didn't really understand until I had one is that your kids aren't going to really get tired on a tandem. They might get bored, thirsty or hungry, but tiredness is not something on the agenda. At this point, Bowen's had 20 mile days, and he'd get home and still want me to chase him around the house. I don't know what his limits are, but 20 miles isn't even close! Others have warned me that a toddler might fall asleep on the bike, but nope. Never happened. The bike's just too much stimulation for Bowen to even consider taking a nap.

One redeeming feature of the bike being this big and heavy is that I don't care about weighing it down further with panniers. The bike always has front panniers aboard, and sometimes have rear panniers when I have to bring Bowen's blankets and sheets home from school. It truly is set up as a utility bike and we frequently drop by the supermarket or library on the way home.

I fully expected the other kids at the school to get used to the bike in short order and treat it as no big deal. But no. Every time I show up to pick Bowen up, the other kids run around and stare. Bowen's learning to develop a thick skin as a result, which can't be a bad thing at all. The bike definitely gets a ton of attention even when riding to and from the library.

The bike's ridiculously expensive, but it all seems worth it for the days when I ask Bowen whether he wants to drive to the library or bike. He says, "Bike of course! The library is so close!" Maybe one day he'll realize that most adults consider a 6 mile round trip a long way to bike. Recommended!

Review: Deep Navigation

Deep Navigation is a collection of Alastair Reynolds' short stories. His most recent novels have gotten very mixed reviews (plus are part of a trilogy that aren't complete yet), but this collection of short stories is excellent.

Many of them date from earlier in his career, which means that there's a lot of science, and there's relatively little character development. On the other hand, that's what I enjoy most about Alastair Reynold's fiction, so for me, it's a feature, not a bug. (Most of the criticism of his latest work is due to too much mucking about with characters and too little science)

Some of the greats for me include "Stroboscopic", a story about a board game based on some very alien biology. "Viper" explores the idea of using dream-like virtual reality to determine the psychological states of "reformed" criminals. "The Star Surgeon's Apprentice" is an unusual story about pirates in space, and "Fury" is an excellent robot story.

A look at the credits page explained to me why I've encountered none of these stories before: most of them are published in English (as in United Kingdom) magazines or anthologies, with only one story previously published in Asimov's Science Fiction. As a result, even if you are a big Reynolds fan and have subscription to the most popular American Science Fiction magazines you're unlikely to have encountered any in this collection.

If you've never read Reynolds before and have time for a novel, I would recommend starting with Revelation Space. But if you only have bite-sized chunks of time, this collection is a great start and will leave you hungry for more. It is priced well at $6.99.

Recommended.

Review: Robot Turtles

I was a kickstarter backer of the Robot Turtles board game way back when. I did it mostly to support a Googler, but also partly because the kickstarter promised to teach my toddler how to program. My understanding of toddler hood is that it's somewhere between 1 and 3. I'm guessing that Dan Shapiro's toddlers must have been very advanced,  because even at 2 years of age, Bowen didn't want to do much with the board game except spew the counters all over the floor. I gave up and put it away.

At age 3.5, Bowen now understands the concepts of games, and taking turns. The second time I presented it to him, he finally understood the game, and the idea that playing cards lets you move turtles. He also understands the goal is to move the turtles to a jewel. It took him a while to figure out that the turn left, turn right, and straight ahead cards are turtle-relative, rather than him relative. And he delights in crying out "BUG!".

In just a few days, he's gone from being challenged in getting the turtle to its destination on an empty board, to being able to negotiate a maze, deal with moving crates, and lasering ice walls. I don't go a day without him asking to play Robot Turtles with me, and he loves screaming "BUG!" to reverse a bad move.

I haven't managed to get him into the planning stage of the game, where you play 3 moves at once, and of course, that's necessary in order to get to the part of the game where you build subroutines. But given the amount of play Bowen's gotten out of it, suffice to say that it's been worth the $25 kickstarter price or the current $21 Amazon price.

The nit-picks are that the instructions refer to an online video to teach you how to play the game. That video is non-existent (Shapiro probably got bored trying to make it). It would be nice if the game came with sample mazes, etc. It's not a big deal that such refinements aren't there, but they're so obviously that it's disappointing that they're not.

Nevertheless, the game comes recommended.

Review: Your Body in the World: Adapting to Your next Big Adventure

I'm not much of a classroom learner, preferring workshops and independent reading rather than the traditional classroom lecture + exam format. But when I saw the promo video for Stanford's Environmental Physiology 101 class, I was hooked. It seemed targeted almost entirely towards someone like me.

The courseware is surprisingly well done (this being my first MOOC, I was blissfully unaware of all the tech that goes into these sites). For instance, after you register and login, you can watch videos (hosted on YouTube), which you can tune the speed of (I watched them all at 125% speedup, to save time). If you're interrupted in the middle of a video (e.g., browser window crashed, or your toddler comes by and asks you to play Robot Turtles), the courseware remembers where you were, and puts you back in your last visited location. Even the video gets restarted from where you left off, which is awesome.

As to the content itself, it's great. The class goes first through both cold and heat, which gives you great practical tips on how to deal with such extremes. What really hooked me, however, was the section on aging as an environmental extreme. This module covered all the aspects of aging, and what goes on but more importantly, gives you practical, actionable changes you can apply to ameliorate or even partially reverse the effect of aging. (Spoiler: it's all about diet and exercise)

It's a truism of education that the people who most need a certain class are the people least likely to attend. It's no less true of EP101. In particular, the module on aging calls out how much more likely it is that petite women are likely to succumb to the most deleterious effects. Unfortunately, the way the promo video for this class is done, it's also least likely to attract that demographic I have very little hope that my wife or any number of my friends who fall into this category will sign up and audit this class, but in the slim chance that they do, they should jump straight to the section on aging.

For me, it was very motivational. I couldn't work through that section's videos without being scared into wanting to go out and exercise (and I'm no couch potato!).

My only criticism in the class is that it doesn't cover the ultra-marathons (RAAM) or extreme sleep deprivation events (anywhere from having a baby to doing any of the solo sailing races). But hey, the class is free! My other issue with the class is that the online discussion forum doesn't seem to get the attention of the instructor and her TA. Also, the review questions and exams are too easy. But maybe that's just an indictment of grade inflation found in modern instructional program.

In any case, as an introduction to MOOCs, and a survey of topics that are both fun and interesting, I thought this class was very much worth my time. Highly recommended!

Review: Smart As (Vita)

Recently, my father's doctor told him to start doing some brain games as part of his recovery from stroke. I remember playing Smart As for a bit and that it fell into that category, so while visiting him, I let him have my Vita and play it. I had set up a Wii for him in his house prior to this, but the problem with a home console is that the effort for an older person to learn to turn it on, switch HDMI inputs, etc. was just too much. The Vita has a touch screen, and most of the games don't require any thing more complicated than touching the front or back touch pads on the device.

Well, Bowen saw the game, and immediately took to it, and now refers to Smart As as the "drawing letters game." Basically, he starts the game, switches to the language module, and then starts the spelling game! Since he hasn't actually learnt to spell, I'd tell him each letter as he needs it, and he'll draw the character. It's very cute, since every time we get to a letter that he can't draw, he'll shake his head and I'll pick up his finger and draw it for him. He's learnt how to draw a few more letters this way, with me guiding him.

The games are split into four categories: language, math, observation, and logic. Each mini game comes in multiple difficulty levels, and while the easy levels truly are easy (though some of the logic puzzles at easy difficulty are plenty hard!) as you work your way up the difficulty levels you end up
at incredibly fiendish levels, including words that I have trouble with!

The game has a "daily training" functionality, which basically tests a random game from each category and then comes up with a bogus "brain meter". It's fun, but the problem is that it's used to unlock various games in the other free play modes, so you're pretty much forced to wait before all the games get unlocked.

There's also a "street smarts" area where local (to your area) challenges are played and you can visit different places to get different challenges. I didn't explore this too much, but in my limited play the biggest problem is that the loading time is exceedingly long.

Regardless, if you have a Vita and a kid, this is one of those games you probably wouldn't mind seeing your kid play lots of. Recommended.

Garmin Live Tracking

The Vivoactive has a cool feature that I didn't realize about in my initial review.  It turns out that you can enable Live Tracking on it.

Why might you want to use Live Tracking? The most common use case is the "concerned spouse." You're going off on a solo bike ride to who knows where, and your spouse says, "What if something happens to you?" Your answer can then be, "I'll turn on Live Tracking. You'll get an e-mail with a link. That link will take you to a map showing where I am, what my progress has been, and that way you don't have to panic if I'm a little late." Another interesting use case is to stick a Live Tracking device on your free range kid while he runs off hiking/cycling/wandering the neighborhood. Of course, that means you'd have to hand him a Garmin-enabled cell phone as well, and he would still have the capability of turning it off. Note that you don't have to buy a dedicated device: you can pay for a subscription to Garmin Fit Android or iOS app instead.

Most of you who are Android users will probably remember when Google Latitude provided much of the same functionality, but nobody used it because (1) it was a massive privacy invasion (2) it was a battery suck. The fact that it requires an explicit e-mail invite and the user has to activate it eliminates (1), and that it depends mostly on your device's battery to power the GPS rather than the phone's makes it easier on (2).

Here's how it works. You go into the Garmin Connect app on your phone. Select "Live Tracking", enter the e-mail address of your concerned one, and then push the "start" button on the Vivoactive. The e-mail goes out immediately, and your progress is hence force updated via your phone's data plan.

There are a few obvious limitations to this. First, if you have no data access, the live track won't update.  That's not a big deal for cycling, since you will almost always have data in populated areas. It is a problem if you're going to go base jumping in Yosemite National Park. Secondly, it does impose a battery drain in that your phone has to update the live track. On my Xperia Z1, it looked like the drain is somewhere around 10% per hour: much less than if I was running GPS on my phone, but still significant, though it looks like my Vivoactive's 10 hour battery life will drain  in much less time than the phone's.

All in all, it's an interesting feature that I will probably make use.

Review: The Hero of Ages

The Hero of Ages is the last book in Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy. The first book was great, the second book was mediocre, and the third book never quite reaches the heights of the first book, but is significantly better than the second.

Like the other books, this novel has two intertwining narratives, and one of the games the reader is supposed to guess is to figure out who the narrator of the opening portion of each chapter is. The book also does a good job of tying up all the loose ends in the series, and also providing explanations for various events that had happened in the past. In particular, I thought the reveal about Vin's earrings was very well done --- it was fair, had clearly been plotted far in advance, and explained much.

The reveal about the nature of the mists, the mythology behind the actual creation of the world, and the use and role of religions in the world are all decent, but you can feel the gears of the authors' mind working behind the scenes. Everything fits neatly, but the exposition is a bit obvious.

Alas, the action sequences seem to have taken a big dip in this latest novel, while the character development hasn't been much better. The magic system gets developed further, but not all of its mysteries are solved, providing room for a sequel (though given how this series has developed, I'm not sure I'd pursue any sequels).

Having read the entire trilogy, do I think it's worth the effort? Barely. The whole series would make for a good summer read, but I wouldn't go out of the way to find it.

Mildly recommended.

Review: RAVPower 3200mAh external powerbank

I'd come to realize that my RAVPower 10400mAh was really overpowered for daily use. It's great on boats where I need enough power for overnight use, but for day trips, I didn't want to carry something that big. I waited for the 3200mAH pack to drop below $10, and jumped on it. What tipped the difference for me was the LED flashlight that came with it, which ads a level of usefulness when camping.

Unboxing the package, it's way bigger than I expected, about the same length as the 10400mAH battery. It's much lighter and narrower, however, so I can fit it in my pockets and it won't weigh me down. It's sufficient to recharge my Xperia Z1 from about half-full, or my Edge 800 multiple times from empty. Charging time is about two hours, which is surprisingly long but not a big deal for general use.

Recommended.

Review: OXO Tot Tub Drain Stopper

My old tub drain stopper started leaking, so I went to look for a replacement. The OXO one came highly recommended on Amazon, and I ordered one despite my skepticism. It's over-sized, and drops into the tub cover with no problems. It didn't look like it would work, but once water gets into the tub over it, even a bit of water seals the stopper and holds it tight. Much simpler than my previous mechanical spring-loaded stopper which had to be taken apart and fixed once by me before failing completely.

Recommended.

Review: Excelsteel 18/10 Stainless 4 Non Stick Egg Poacher

I love onsen eggs coming out of the sous vide machine, but unfortunately, I'm the only one in the family who does, and it does take a long time to cook. I remember Xiaoqin liking the poached eggs in the eggs benedict she ordered once, but not the sauce. I do enjoy it as an occasional treat, so I bought the specialized egg poacher on Amazon.

My first impression upon receiving it was how small it was. That's an advantage both in shelf-space, as well as in cooking. The small pan takes relatively little water and boils quickly, getting your eggs poached fast! The transparent cover is great: you get to see your eggs whiten, and then become opaque, letting you know when to remove them.

I like my egg yolks soggy, so a minute or two after they've turned opaque, I use tongs to remove one and then eat it that way. The rest of the family seems to like their yolks much more cooked (or in Bowen's case, with no yolk at all), so I then turn off the heat and let the eggs simmer some more.

Clean up is effortless because everything is non-stick, and extraction from the cups is also easy, once you've seasoned it. The manufacturers recommend non-stock spray, but I just take a stick of butter and swish it around the cups.

The bad: the tray holding the cups is super thin stainless steel. Get even a bit of egg on it and it'll discolor. No change to functionality, but if you're the type who likes their cookware pristine, this won't stay pristine for long. Fortunately, I'm not one of those.

Recommended.

Review: Garmin Vivoactive

Last year, I bought, tested, and returned the Garmin Vivofit.  While it was a reasonable device for the people who are looking to start exercising or otherwise return to fitness, it wasn't a suitable product for someone like me. When prices dropped this year, however, I bought 2 for my parents to replace the pedometers that had been very flakey for them. The Vivofit was an ideal product for them: it didn't need to be recharged, and sync'ing to their PC was a matter of pushing a button and waiting while Garmin Express picked up and uploaded to the cloud. Even better, they didn't need to sync more than once every week or so, and the product would survive being worn 24x7, so they didn't get a chance to forget to put it on. It would even survive being washed in the laundry!

While buying the Vivofits, however, I noticed that Garmin had launched the Vivoactive, a product much more suited for someone like me. Since my brother had a birthday incoming, I bought him one, despite his skepticism. (My brother is an Apple iPhone user, and a first-round Kickstarter backer of the first generation Pebble Smartwatch) Upon receiving the Vivoactive, he was so positive about it that he'd asked my other brother for a full suite of Garmin Bike Sensors for his birthday. It immediately replaced his Pebble, and got him to track his cycling and steps/day as well. (He once had an Edge 305, but never replaced it once the battery died)

With that level of enthusiasm, I bought one for myself with the help of a Best Buy coupon. If you know me, I'm as cheap as they come. When I told one of my friends that he was as cheap as I was, he said he didn't know whether he should have felt complimented or offended. To get an idea of why the Vivoactive is such a good value, consider that it converges/replaces the following products all at once:

• Garmin Swim ($150): stroke tracking, lap counting, swim timer
• Garmin Vivosmart ($150): Step tracking, sleep tracking, smartphone notifications, ant+ bike sensor and hrm pairing, VIRB action camera control, auto-sync
• Garmin Edge 200 ($130): Cycling GPS (no barometer, no sensor pairing)
• Garmin Approach S2 ($190): Golf GPS. I'm not a golfer, so no comment.
• Garmin Forerunner 220 ($200): Running GPS with foot pod pairing and accelerometer for indoor training.

No normal human will make use of all the features of the Vivoactive (I don't know anyone in the intersection of Golf+Cycling), but if you do 2 of the above activities, the Vivoactive will provide more than sufficient coverage. Since I swim twice a week, cycle 4-6 days a week, and hike about once a week or so, I'd extract quite a bit of value out of it. Against that is that I already have an Edge 800 which works pretty well. The Edge also has a barometer, which makes it much more accurate for measuring elevation and cycling worthy bragging features like elevation gained during a ride, and the current gradient, though latter bonks at grades much steeper than 16%, making it worthless for the truly brag-worthy rides.

So how does the Vivoactive work out in real life? The first feature you notice when you power it on is the always-on watch display. If you're lifelong watch-wearer, then this wouldn't seem like a big deal. But I hadn't worn a watch since I was 21, and the first time I saw someone wearing an Apple Watch I thought it was broken or the battery had run down because the screen was blank. It wasn't until the person stooped to pick up something and the display flashed on that I realized that it was a power saving feature to blank the screen. I'm happy to say that the Vivoactive serves as a watch just fine, with a white-on-black default display for time, date, and current charge status. It's not flashy and doesn't call attention to itself, but it's thin and robust, and you don't have to use an exaggerated motion of the wrist in order to tell time.

One interesting thing about sync'ing it to my PC is that my version of Garmin Express was old, and hadn't updated itself (I didn't realize that it didn't do that). When I plugged in my Vivoactive, it got confused and led me down a garden path trying to sync with it until I realized the problem and upgraded it. After that it was a snap, downloading and installing new firmware onto my Vivoactive quickly and easily.

The Vivoactive came charged to 92%, so I immediately went and took it for a ride, pairing it with my bike's sensors, heart-rate monitor and running an Edge 800 in parallel, so I could see the results. Here's the Vivoactive track, and here's the Edge 800 track. You can see that with the exception of elevation data, both tracks are essentially indistinguishable from each other. What you can't see, is that the Vivoactive was much faster at satellite lockon and booting up than the Edge 800! Brad Silverberg had raved to me on Facebook about how quickly GLONASS+GPS locked on, and I hadn't realized how quick it was until I did the back-to-back comparison against the Garmin Edge. Let's just say that while I could keep the Edge 800 confused for half a minute by cycling quickly during the boot up phase, I could not keep the Vivoactive confused for even 5 seconds. Even more importantly, because the Vivoactive is an "always on" watch, there's no boot up period! Even before you can select the "Bike" function and push the start button, the GPS function has already turned on and satellite tracking has started!

Even more importantly, the display, albeit small compared to the Edge, was crisper, brighter, and more readable in direct sunlight! It beats the Edge 800 by a mile in that regard. In fact, I'll go as far as to say that it beats my 2-year old Basic Kindle, which of course outperformed any color screen in daylight until the Vivoactive came along. I don't have a Paperwhite to compare it with, unfortunately. By the way, you'll read about how difficult to read the display is indoors on Amazon reviews. I call bollocks. It's actually far easier than any of the traditional watches I've ever seen!

If you turn on GPS+GLONASS, your battery life isn't going to be anywhere the 10 hours claimed by Garmin for GPS tracking. But overall, the Vivoactive more than holds its own against my Edge, with the exception of elevation, where it's within about 5%.

Next-up, hiking/walking. I'll note that if you have an Edge unit, you can buy a (relatively) cheap wrist-strap, stick your Edge on it, and use it to track your hikes. I've done that in the past for hikes, but it's not as satisfactory in that you don't get pace data, nor do you get the step counter functionality (which runs in the background!). Again, with GLONASS+GPS, you can even see where I cheated and cut across the parking lot at the end of the hike. The Vivoactive is also much more comfortable to wear on your wrist than any of the Garmin Edge units, which are thick, bulky, and aren't really intended to be worn so you have to tilt your head a bit to read them.

Swimming: I did a swimming workout and discovered to my disappointment that the device doesn't actually attempt to figure out what swim stroke you're using, which Garmin Swim does. What it did do a good job with, however, is to provide a stroke count, time per lap, and lap count. (The latter is useful because swimming is so boring that I swim with headphones and music, and occasionally would lose count and forget to switch to the next segment of my workout) Reviewing the data from the session, I could clearly see the kick-board laps, and it was fairly easy to see when I was using the crawl vs the backstroke, breast-stroke, etc. So while stroke detection would have been nice (which to be fair Garmin Swim does do), it's not necessary. If I was a more serious swimmer I'd try to improve my times, etc. But much like the Vivoactive, I'm a jack-of-all-trades and master of none.

Now, Open-Water Swim is explicitly not a feature of the Vivoactive, but I tried it anyway, since I was in an outdoor pool by using walking mode. The results are as you might expect: with only intermittent GPS pickup (yes, I had GLONASS on as well), the track jumps all over the place and the errors are huge. On the other hand, it's better than nothing, and you do get what seems to be a reasonable mileage reading at the end. Note that while Swim mode turns off the touch screen, walking mode doesn't, and that can cause weird things to happen due to water splashes. On the other hand, since the start/stop button is a physical one, you can't accidentally lose data due to the water splashes.

As far as smart-watch notifications are concerned, they're actually surprisingly useful, especially when cycling. I'm used to ignoring my smartphone's various noises while cycling, though I do stop to take calls when I'm not wearing a bluetooth headset. It's very nice to see e-mails/texts flow through to the watch, glance at them, and then let them disappear, knowing that it's nothing urgent. This is one feature that's surprisingly useful whether you're driving, cycling, or even in the middle of the hike. What I did not test is the music control functionality. That's because when hiking, I use a bluetooth headset which has physical buttons for controls, and that's just going to be better than any touch screen. The same applies while driving. While you can click through on a notification and read the e-mail or text message, you can't reply on the Vivosmart. For that, you'd have to pull out the phone, which I think is a perfectly acceptable approach.

As an activity tracker,  the device works as well as the Vivofit. What's nice is the automatic sync'ing via smartphone. Of course, this leaves me with a dilemna, since the Edge 800's data is definitive, but doesn't get sync'd more than once a week, while the Vivofit's data is always up to date, but has suspect elevation data. Given the convenience, however, I am very tempted to use the Vivofit's data and just not ever sync my Edge 800, using it as an on-board display, and an odometer for each bike, which is something the Vivoactive doesn't do. (Neither does the follow-on Edge 810, for that matter!) The Vivoactive (like the Vivofit, Vivofit 2, and the Vivosmart), nags you every hour to walk about 100 steps or so in order to stay active. The vibration is subtle and not aggressive, but it's there and the red-bar is very much guilt-inducing, so if you tend to sit a lot (and what Software Engineer doesn't), that's a good feature. I was previously using Moves, and running both the Vivosmart and the app confirms what I've long suspected: Moves systematically under-counts steps and miles cycled. Since Moves got bought by Facebook, the app has not been updated and I suspect the server-side applications will probably be killed before long, just like Friendfeed was. The competing app Google Fit gets crappy reviews even from ex-Googlers, explaining why FitBit, for instance has been so successful that it will soon file for an IPO.

As a sleep tracker, the data is nice, but I'm not sure what to do with it. In combination with my CPAP machine, however, I now have more data than I know what to do with. The only thing I'm missing now is an oxymeter, which has already been proven to be remarkably worthless for someone like me.

The battery life is acceptable. With 3 hours of hiking, 2 hours of cycling (all with GLONASS+GPS on), an hour of swimming, and 2 days of sleep tracking and activity tracking, the battery was down to 40% after 2 days. I expect the battery life to be better with GLONASS off. The battery charges from 40% to 99% in about 90 minutes from a computer's USB port.

As far as comparison with other devices are concerned, the obvious one is the Garmin Fenix 3. This offers most of the features of the Vivoactive, plus Openwater Swim, Triathlon mode, a real barometer, a compass, climbing mode, and a skiing/snowboarding mode. Of course, at twice the price ($500, $600 for the super-tough sapphire version), you literally pay for it. It's also much thicker, heavier, and bulkier. While the barometer is nice, elevation data isn't very accurate if the unit's thermometer is next to your skin, since to get correct elevation you need accurate air temperature. So if you want a reliable temperature you need to also pick up the Tempe sensor, which is also compatible with the Vivoactive. From my perspective, I think Garmin lost an opportunity by not selling an external barometer/temperature sensor for the Vivoactive.

The inevitable comparison  is with the Apple Watch. Here in Silicon Valley, I've already seen many people walking around with those blank screens attached to their wrists. But that's a function of Apple marketing much more than anything else. If the two products had their parent companies swapped, I'm pretty sure the features of the Vivoactive would be touted as revolutionary (week-long battery life, thinner, swim tracking, 50m water resistance, GPS+GLONASS that doesn't depend on your phone) while folks would be making fun of the Apple Watch (wearing a thicker blank screen? Having to charge every day so it can't even do sleep tracking?). But that is what it is. Despite next to zero marketing from Garmin, my local REI (in Silicon Valley!) reports that their black Vivoactives (sans heart rate monitors) sell out as soon as they come in, and that they only have the white ones in stock. So it does seem that the outdoors people do understand and value the product, even while the tech press (and the outdoor press, as far as I can tell!) has basically ignored the Vivoactive.

Regardless, the Vivoactive comes highly recommended. The value and functionality this product represents are pretty much unbeatable. Even if you're not a watch wearer (I wasn't), you might consider this product as worthy of possibly changing your mind. As mentioned above, if you use any 2 of the functions the Vivoactive supports regularly, you'll get your money's worth (and then some --- there's significant value to convergence into a package that's smaller than every one of the products the Vivoactive replaces). The only folks I can think of who would be unhappy with the product are the ones who use Windows Phones and hence lose out on the smartwatch features, but even for those folks, having to sync the device manually through a PC might be worth the trouble if they're regular swimmers.

Further reading: DC Rainmaker's In-Depth Review

Review: Fables 21: Happily Ever After

After 13 years of story, Fables is finally drawing to an end. Unfortunately, the series jumped the shark a while back, with Fables #13. The recent issues have seen a pick up in quality, but I'm afraid not enough to redeem itself completely.

This collection covers the return of Bigby (though in a form unrecognizable from who he's been in the past), the failed attempts to stop him and who's behind him. It then quickly morphs into a "doomed conflict" scenario between Rose Red and Snow White, with a reveal involving who their mother is, and why there's inevitable conflict between the two sisters.

Along the way, we get many digressions (it seems as though Willingham had to feed each issue with a mini story to keep stringing us along), but those are minor, with only a few pleasant ones. Fables is at its best when the reveals are of the "of course, that's how it would work" variety, but the story is getting so very meta that sometimes it feels like more of a cliche than an epiphany.

I'll pick up the last collection, of course, but go read Fables #1-12 instead.

Review: Monument Valley (Android)

It is rare that I play games on smartphones, let alone get to the point where I review them. That's mostly because most games on smartphones are cash grabs that are disrespectful of the consumer and have neither aesthetics or sense of art about what games are about. Rather, they're mostly micro-transaction driven attempts to cater to the addictive behavior of humans at a primitive level. I even find such games offensive when they target children.

Monument Valley is a welcome exception. It's a puzzle game that makes use of touch to control just one or two objects, plus the main character (the protagonist) of the game. It adheres to several rules: first, no move or attempt to solve the puzzle can put you in an irrecoverable position. Hence, there are no "game over" situations. Secondly, each chapter (the game is divided into 10 of them) introduces just a few concepts, gives them a work-over, and then is over in a matter of at most 20 minutes. This prevents the concepts from being over-worked and the game never feels repetitive, while not being so context-driven that you can't finish a chapter in a session, which would lead to the game overstaying its welcome in a mobile environment.

The puzzles are not difficult: many of the perspective driven puzzle have its roots in rotational and illusions first seen in Fez, but while Fez is epic and occasionally frustratingly hard, Monument Valley never became frustrating for me, and felt breezingly easy, so much so that I got started on a bus trip and was done by the end of the day. The developers are part of a firm specializing in UI design, and so excel at making clear what it is that you need to do with a minimum of clues.

As with Murasaki Baby, the game is short, with a play time of just about 3 hours, but for $4 full price, it's well worth the time and money. By the way, I tend to buy games like this on the Amazon App Store, not only because I have a bunch of Amazon coins (which essentially means that the game's free), but also because I can share the app with my wife simply by using the Amazon app store login.

The Forgotten Shores Add-in (purchased via in-app purchase) adds another 8 levels to the 10 that are in the default game. The cost is $1.99, and it nearly doubles the length of the game. The add-on's levels are just a little bit harder, enough to stump me for a few minutes at the end, but the quality is every bit as high as in the original. I do not usually pay for in-app purchases (and granted, I paid with coins this time as well), but this was well worth the money and time and clearly not a cash grab.  In fact, you can see that the ROI on the expansion wasn't nearly as high as on the game. In fact, analyzing their finances, it doesn't seem that even having a hit game with tons of awards on the app store isn't going to net you very much money without being evil and pushing micro-transactions every which way.

Monument Valley and Forgotten Shores come highly recommended.

Review: Vivere Double Hammock with Steel Stand

I've long enjoyed the idea of having a hammock around in the home, but never had any place around to hang it, either in the form of trees, columns. And I'm too lazy (or chicken) to drill holes in the walls or support beams.

When Amazon had a sale on the Vivere Hammock with Stand, I jumped on it. I figured worse comes to worse, I'd return it.

Unpacked, the hammock came with a carrying case, 5 pieces of metal, and a hammock with metal reinforcements on the eyelets. The stand was fairly easy to assemble, and tool-free. Once the hammock was set up, there was no question of returning it, as Bowen immediately decided that it was his! He fell off the hammock a couple of times despite us teaching him how to get in and out of it properly, but after that had no problems whatsoever.

It's unusual nowadays for a toy to hold Bowen's attention for more than a few days, but it's been a couple of weeks and he still guards it jealously, though he occasionally will share it with friends. It's been a great buy and I have no regrets.

Recommended!

Review: Up the Down Staircase

Up the Down Staircase is a novel about a teacher stuck in what I'm convinced must be the ninth level of hell: teaching English to the "slow readers" in high school of the under-privileged in New York City. Written in the 60s, the novel describes an attempt to teach indifferent students from varying backgrounds and affectations that range from the would-be career politician to the cool dropout wanna be.

The novel is written in the form of intra-school memos, handed in notes (through a suggestion box), various forms and bureaucratic memos and circulars, and letters (written frantically) to friends for emotional and moral support. (It would be fun to think of a modern version of this book, with e-mail replacing memos, twitter messages replacing the suggestion box, and of course, Facebook likes instead of messages passed between students)

What does come through is the strength of the bureaucracy in preventing positive change, the dire lack of materials and facilities facing underfunded school systems, and of course, the crazy idea that one adult in a classroom of 40+ teenagers with raging hormones might be able to control the class long enough to teach. (Caveat: I've never been an American high school. I went to school in a much more regimented, polite, and well-behaved Asian school, where the most defiant posture struck by a student would be one of refusing to hand in homework --- Kaufman might actually have been able to teach under those conditions, but would have a field day with the public canings!)

In any case, the novel's a fun read, complete with the misspellings and grammatical errors provided by the students, and it's short and quick, so not a waste of time.

I picked this book up through the Kindle Unlimited program, and discovered that the black and white Kindle is not the ideal way to read the book: the blackboard facsimile pages are pretty much undecipherable, so pick up the paper copy if you can.

Recommended.

PSA: How to Resolve Your Lollipop Slowness

A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded my Xperia Z1 to Lollipop. Other than it being good policy in general to stay on the latest release for security reasons, the major reason for the upgrade was that Lollipop enables the use of SD Card storage for apps. That's a particularly nice feature to have, since the Z1 comes with only about 16GB of storage, and after all is said and done only 10GB is really available to the user. 64GB microSD cards can now be had for under $30, a good deal by almost any measure. (In reality, I tend to buy these things only when they go on sale, and have netted them at an average price well under $25)

The Lollipop upgrade for the Xperia phones comes via Sony software tethered to a PC. The process went smoothly, but a day or two after the upgrade, however, I noticed that the phone was getting slower and started running like molasses. Facebook would take half a minute to load. At one point, I even missed a phone call because the UI was so slow that the counter-party had hung up before the swipe-to-answer operation completed.

Worse, battery life had deteriorated! Not only was my phone so slow I was rebooting it once a day, my battery life (despite turning on Stamina mode) was miserable. I started charging the phone at every opportunity, like a Nexus 4/5 user. The phone's bluetooth connection to my car was also spotty, dropping music. Even turning off Moves didn't help. Not that Moves was doing much at this point: the slowness and lagginess of the phone meant that movement tracking was so laughably off that the data was worthless.

I got so frustrated that I researched ways to rollback the Xperia Z1. Heck, I started contemplating replacing my Z1 with the Lumia 635. While doing the above research, I came across a post noting that slowness after upgrade from Kitkat to Lollipop was common, and that the solution was actually straightforward: factory reset!

Painful as it was to lose about 4 months of state, I figured I'd give this a try before downgrading to KitKat for real. And indeed, my phone is now fast again! Bluetooth connections no longer suck. Battery life is now more than acceptable. Moves is now fairly accurate once more. I don't even lose phone calls! I can now contemplate that my Z1 will have acceptable performance for at least another year or two! I no longer wondered how Lollipop could have made it past QA/Sony's certification process without being labeled a piece of crap.

So, if your phone got upgraded from Kitkat to Lollipop and performance and battery life sucks. It's not necessarily Lollipop's fault. Try a factory reset and you might get a new lease on life. It's silly than neither Sony nor Google actually resolved this problem before releasing software. But at least there's a workaround. I just wonder how Google expects Android NOT to lose market share to the competition if they keep ignoring the upgrade scenario.

Review: Murasaki Baby (PS Vita)

I will say that the Playstation Vita and its library of unique games has continued to be a delight in the year and a half since I bought it. In combination with a Playstation Plus subscription, you end up with a collection of games that are delightful, exciting, fun, and some of them exclusive to the platform with experiences you can't get anywhere else.

Murasaki Baby was on this month's PS Plus subscription, and I picked it up not expecting to have it just sit on my Vita for an almost continual playthrough. It's billed as a puzzle/platformer, and I do extremely poorly on puzzle games, but this one is so good and exceptional in design, atmosphere, and playability.

You play a child's going through her nightmare searching for her mommy. She's holding on to a purple balloon, which if lost or burst, ends the sequence and restarts you at a checkpoint. The game eschews conventional game controls, relying only on the front and rear touchscreen. It also ignores the game conventions of having a tutorial, dumping you into the game and expecting you to figure out the very simple controls. Tugging on the child or the balloon on the touchscreen moves them. Swiping on the rear touchscreen swipes between backgrounds on the playfield, and tapping on the rear touchscreen activates the play mode. On occasion you might have to turn the Vita physically, and in one stage you use the joystick controls.

Each puzzle inside the game is extremely logical: you usually pick a background, and then tap on it to activate, and then swipe to a different background to proceed. Each mode does something interesting, and the puzzles aren't repetitious, though they do build up, so by the end of each "level", you're swiping between 3-4 different backgrounds, activating them in a particular sequence, while also moving the character and/or the balloon to overcome the challenge. Some puzzles are time/action oriented, but the time pressure is never so prevalent as to be frantic. This is a good thing, as touch controls aren't either precise or super-responsive, so frantic time pressure is likely to lead to frustration.

The art and music are also quirkly, befitting the game. The music, in particular, is so atmospheric that the game begs to be played with headphones on.

The negatives of the game include the rather floaty and occasionally unresponsive controls (which sometimes lead to a cheap death). I also encountered a bug halfway through the game where it suddenly failed to save. It turned out that I hadn't installed the latest version of the game. Doing that fixed the problem. Some might consider the game a bit short (how long to beat estimates game play time at 2.5 hours, which sounds about right), but I'd much rather have an excellent short game than a long game padded with repetition and frustration.

All in all, an excellent game that fully justifies its play time. Recommended!

Review: The Well of Ascension

The Well of Ascension is the sequel to Mistborn, and is the middle book of the Mistborn trilogy. Middle books are typically the weakest volume of any trilogy, and unfortunately, Sanderson's trilogy is no exception.

While the action sequences are still well-written, the book suffers from fantasy-level-up-escalation, carried to the extremes, as the main character, Vin grows in power, and as a result, the rest of the threats have to scale up as well. This would be OK if the other characters on her team grows in power as well, but they don't, so you're treated to increasingly lopsided situations that could be mistaken for the typical Mary Sue fantasy.

The unfortunate thing is that Sanderson's ability to do character development seems to be limited to depicting characters agonizing about dilemmas that in no way feel real (i.e., the reader has so much information that he knows what the right choices are, and in no way feels like the characters will do anything but). Worse, some long running supporting characters are killed off in cheap fashion that do not serve the plot in any way.

Finally, the ultimate reveal sucks: not only was the reader misled in every way, the entire state of the world is left dangling and obviously hanging for the final book in the trilogy. In some ways, this is some of the worst sins of writing a fantasy series: an entire book in which nothing substantial happens, and you could easily have skipped an entire book and gone on with the series without missing much. While this book isn't as abusive of readers as A Dance With Dragons or A Feast For Crows, Sanderson's not doing anyone any favors with this novel. I'm debating between plowing ahead and finishing the series for the sake of completion or abandoning Sanderson permanently altogether.

Not recommended.

RIP Jobst Brandt (1935/1/14 - 2015/5/5)

My first encounter with Jobst Brandt was on USENET in 1992, right after buying  a bike. He was one of the designers of the Avocet tires, and recommended their use. I had bad luck with those tires, and so switched to Michelin Hi-lite tires which were cheaper.

It wasn't until years later that I discovered what changed my life: his Tour of the Alps trip reports. I thought to myself, how can one guy ride pretty much the same roads year after year, and not get bored? In fact, some of his trip reports looked like they'd been copy/pasted from year to year with minor variations. I saw for myself in 2003, and met him in person just before the trip. Off the cuff, he gave me directions to the Inn river bike path from Imst. I found the bike path precisely as described from his directions. (Those directions are now obsolete)

From then, I was hooked, not just because of the beauty and bicycle-friendliness of the countries I cycled through, but also because I noticed that every time I stayed in a hotel that he'd visited multiple times, the quality of the food went up while the price of the lodging went down. Soon, I was studying multiple years of his trip reports, trying to ferret out which places of note to visit with the excellent food and great prices. To this day, it's always exciting to me to get a chance to visit a "Jobst Hotel" that's new to me. (And yes, beloved Rosenlaui is a Jobst hotel) This forced me to read every one of his trip reports, some of which were amazing. He'd overcome so many early obstacles (some of which required rebuilding wheels using wooden rims in the middle of a tour) that you can still find a poster-sized photo of him climbing the Gavia at the refuge at the top of that pass today.

One of my favorite excerpts from his trip reports went as follow:

After descending the Costalunga (1753m) to Canazei, I ran into a group of Berkeley riders with Gary Erickson of Cliff Bars. He was having a great time but his recruits, who had never seen so many mountains, were pretty long in the face. He sent them on to Canazei, out of the steady rain that we hardly noticed as we exchanged adventures of our rides.

By 2007, I'd become a Jobst-disciple of sorts, teaching Wheel Building classes at Google, and leading Tours in the Alps that were nowhere as tough as the ones he did. In 2005, in fact, I ran into Jobst while at the foot of Grosse Scheidegg, and we chatted for a bit while I ate at his favorite restaurant, the Lammi.

Unlike him, I didn't tour the Alps every year, and I would venture to new territory every so often. Most of these experiences taught me something that Jobst had always known: it's nearly impossible to find better cycling than in the European mountains. But I had to see for myself.

Jobst wasn't easy to communicate with. Sometimes he would answer the question he wished you had asked, rather than the question you asked him. I once sent him e-mail asking him if Lauterbrunnen valley was worth visiting. Rather than answer the question, he replied as though I'd ask him for train trip recommendations in Switzerland, and gave me a list of mountain trains to ride. I filed away that e-mail never intending to read the details, but then in 2013 with Xiaoqin and Bowen in tow, I dug up that e-mail and we rode every train he recommended, and they were indeed amazingly beautiful.

So even my failed communications with him turned out to have stunning results. We have seen a passing of a legendary cyclist, and an inspiration to all and any who would explore the world by bicycle.

Review: Mistborn

Mistborn is Brandon Sanderson's novel about a rebellion in a fantasy world against an empire ruled by a god. It's part of a trilogy, but can be read alone with a satisfying conclusion and non cliff-hangers, an unusual and notable attribute in this day and age.

The novel starts slowly, introducing the characters and rules of the magic system in the novel (and presumably the series). The main viewpoint character is Vin, a street urchin who's been abandoned by her brother and eventually grows to become a powerful allomancer, a person who can extract magical powers from metals and alloys and then use it to effect the world.

The milieu isn't as detailed as those provided by the traditional classics of the genre: entire civilizations and even the primary political system is barely sketched out. Sanderson's clear emphasis here is on the magic systems made available in the world. The other viewpoint characters are mostly there to mentor Vin, educate her on how the world works, and turn her from a suspicious street urchin into a human being who can trust other people and become loyal to them.

That means, unfortunately, that the characters are also barely sketched out. Even the love interest gets relatively little exposure, while Vin's primary mentor (her steward Sazed) is better described, but you never get the sense that the relationships are real.

Nevertheless, the final quarter of the novel makes everything pay off. The reveals are smartly done, and the villains, unlike the cookie-cutter villains of the old are actually smart and operate intelligently, foiling the protagonists' plans over and over again. The eventual overthrow of the Final Empire is well done and doesn't have major plot holes. And of course, there's lots of action, and the Sanderson might not be able to write a romance to save his life but is definitely great at action.

Recommended.