Review: Caesar's Last Breath

Caesar's Last Breath is a non-fiction collection of science essays about gases and our atmosphere. It's got a lot of great stuff about gases, including details about the discovery of Oxygen, as well as the number of different atmospheres the Earth has had since it formed 4.5 billion years ago.

I enjoyed the coverage of various aspects of atmospheric science, including scary stories about the death from radiation that some of the scientists and engineers engaged in the Manhattan project had. In both cases, they both knew they'd gotten fatal doses, and it must have been a horrifying thought. What's sad was that both incidences were quite preventable.

The coverage of weather forecasting by computer was probably the least detailed, but that subject probably deserves its own book. And yes, there's coverage of climate change, and Kean editorializes that he thinks that humanity would probably rather find a way to sequester carbon or engineer the planet's thermal systems than to cut back on its luxurious lifestyle (probably sadly true).

Finally, I also enjoyed the account of how various gases were liquefied (I've always wondered how liquid nitrogen was made) and Einstein's excursions into inventing refrigerators.

Good stuff, and well worth your time. Recommended.

Review: Nashbar Headband

The Nashbar Headband looked just like the old lycra headband I had, except that rather than being tie on, had an elastic band at one end that held it to your head. In practice, it's not too tight, and fits nicely under the helmet.

I worried that it wouldn't wick sweat as nicely as my old headband, but despite riding the tandem on Saturday where the climb from Calaveras road all the way to the top of Sierra road took more than an hour in early afternoon heat (the grade exceeded 12% in many places), the sweatband did not overload, and sweat did not get into my eyes. Comparing it with the SweatVac, I think it's because the band does a better job of channeling sweat to the back of the head than the SweatVac, because of positioning.

The band weighs 13g, 3g less than the SweatVac, so not only does it work better, it's lighter too. At $5, you can buy several at once (and top up the order with chains, etc to get free shipping) and rotate them during a tour so if you lose one it's not a disaster.

Recommended.

Review: Keen Arroyo II Sandal

This is one of those times when my cheapness got me. The Arroyo II Sandal was on sale on Amazon at  $55, and I picked up the exact same size as the Newports I usually use. The Newports are so great that whenever I wear out a pair, I just buy a new one, but they are expensive.

Unfortunately, the Arroyos aren't nearly as nice. They're still wearable, but I just don't like them as much. For one thing, they're a half size big compared to the Newports. For another, the casing is leather instead of fabric, which means that you can't treat them roughly (e.g., use them on a sailing trip, run in water, etc).

I should have tried them on earlier but didn't do so until recently so I can't return them now. I'll just have to wear them to death. Not recommended.

First Impressions: Canon G7X Mk 2

I've been wanting to replace the Sony RX100 for a long time. Roberto owned and recommended the Canon G7X Mark II, and it ticked all the right boxes: 24mm wide angle, 4X zoom (the 24-100mm range is easily my favorite range), fast (f/2.8 at maximum zoom, f/1.8 at minimum), 1" sensor, image stabilization, fast continuous shooting (missing from the RX100) and a flip up screen. Retail price is a nose bleeding $679. But Canon had a refurbished sale for $450 (Canon refurb'd cameras come with a year warranty), so I jumped on it. You might be tempted by the G9X Mark II, which often sells for cheaper and is a newer camera, but don't. That camera has a much slower lens and does not get to 24mm (the wide angle side of the lens only goes to 28mm)

The G7X Mark II is heavy (11.1oz vs RX100's 8.55oz). Most of the reason is the tilt screen. It still fits in a cycling jersey pocket (important for my use case), and the start up time feels a little faster than the RX100's was (2.2s vs 2.8). But most important of all, it has physical controls, which makes shooting with it while riding much better than with most phones (the Moto series is a notable exception, with twist to shoot and the volume buttons as shutter buttons, as is the Sony).

Continuous mode was great. You could hold down the shutter button and just twist the camera, letting you get a guaranteed good shot of your son on a tandem while riding. The penalty, however, is an astonishingly long 15 seconds after that it'll take for the buffer to clear before you're allowed to close the camera and put it back into your pocket! So that makes continuous shooting a bike path or easy riding feature only. Fortunately, the shutter button is correctly calibrated, and I never took a continuous sequence of shots when my intention was to shoot a single shot instead.

At 21 mega pixel, I could crop 80% of the pixels and still get usable images. That makes it a good choice for shooting from a moving bicycle.

When stopped, you can get great images, and the fact that you're shooting RAW files means that even when you forget to turn on fill flash,  you can recover shadow detail in Lightroom. As a relatively old camera, this is supported even in the pre-subscription-only version of Lightroom.

One of the great practical features of this camera for bike touring is that it will charge either via the included charger or via micro USB port. No more carrying a dedicated charger while on tour, but if you do carry the dedicated charger the charge time is significantly less. The other good feature is that you can use a wireless connection from your phone to download photos from the camera to the phone and also geotag the photos from the camera's GPS log. Again, very useful when touring, but I still wished the camera geotagged itself like the Canon S90/95 series did.

It's a great camera, and at a discounted price, well worth the money (and extra weight). Recommended.

First Impressions: Columbia Mens Titanium Outdry Ex Reversible Jacket

I needed something heavier/warmer for winter riding, and came upon the Columbia Titanium Outdry jacket on sale. Like the Rab Windveil, it comes with a hood, but unlike the Windveil, the material is heavy enough that it doesn't flap in the wind. The sleeves do flap in the wind when you're descending above about 20mph, but all jackets are going to do that if they're not 100% form fitting, and good luck with that if you're skinny!

The jacket is relatively heavy, my size small jacket came in at 345g, or almost 3x the weight of the Rab Windveil. In exchange, it's much better in cold weather, comfortable in a range from about 32F to about 50F in active conditions (i.e., you're cycling, not standing or sitting and reading a book, for instance). I tested it on a morning ride and found that near about 48F you start wanting to unzip and take it off. The jacket is reversible, so you can wear it shiny side out or matte side out. My guess is shiny side out is better for rainy conditions (so the water beads off the waterproof coating and doesn't soak into the jacket making it heavier), and matte side out is better for around town where you don't want to look like someone equipped for severe weather conditions.

The jacket absolutely will not roll up to fit inside a jersey pocket: don't even think about that. It's purely a pannier/backpack item. I can't decide whether it's a better item to have in conjunction with the Rab Windveil or weather a fleece will be better. My guess is that fleece jackets are less practical on a bike tour because having an extra layer of waterproofing is potentially more useful.

I'll be keeping this one. Even when not on tour, it's a great cold weather jacket. I guess that means I'm recommending it.

Review: Balancing on Blue

Balancing on Blue will probably never make the best seller lists: you can't even find it at your local library. It'll never be made into a major motion picture, and that's a good thing. Unlike more dramatic accounts of through-hikes, it's made up of days after days of competent hiking:

The soles of my feet had formed the usual hard covering of skin, the body’s method of dealing with constant wear and tear. Two, small ridges ran along the underside of my little toes which always happened on thru-hikes and the pads below my big toes were hard and calloused. Now on full throttle and fighting fit, I slowly started making inroads into the mileage deficit. My mileage was hovering around twenty-five each day and I’d even thrown in a couple of thirties. (Pg. 144)

The author, Keith Foskett, has already hiked the El Camino de Santiago and the PCT, so long distance hiking is not new to him. He doesn't make a big deal out of camping, getting dirty (though there's several pages devoted to crotch rot, which I'd experienced in my youth as a recruit in a tropical army), and enjoys giving people trail names far too much.

The trail descriptions are fun, and also provide me insight that I didn't know, such as nobody seems to carry a trail map on the AT, but usually just a digital guidebook with elevation profiles (apparently it's hard to get really lost). There's also a little bit of history, as well as a story about a death on the trail of another hiker. There's plenty of great prose about the beauty of the scenery, and of course, the great gift of the American wilderness: solitude.

Foskett has plenty of attitude, and is at least honest about how rude he is (in one instance, he insists on his personal trail name for another hiker, despite her picking another one for herself). It's also quite clear from the book that the AT is such a long hike that days away from the trail are necessary in some cases to recover.

I'll probably never do a big through hike of the 3 major US trails, but Balancing on Blue is a fun short read without the whining, moaning, and groaning (and insanely stupid stunts) that mar other memoirs of such accounts. In short, it's not incompetence literature, and therefore recommended.

Review: SweatVac Ventilator Cap

I don't know about you, but one of my limiting factors when cycling is sweat output. Basically, the point at which sweat runs into my eyes is the point at which I have to back off my effort level and slow down. One of the problems of growing up in the tropics is that you develop excessive sweat glands, which means that any time you workout you sweat way too much: enough to leave salt stains on your clothing and salt on your face after a hard ride. The best solution, of course, is to not let your kids overheat when they're growing up or they'll end up with too many sweat glands too. But that's too late for me.

Type "sweat band" into Amazon, and you'll get a collection of terry-cloth bands. These might work if you're a tennis player, soccer player, or basketball player, but any sport where a helmet is essential safety gear rules those out: they puff up your head to the point where a helmet won't fit. Ages ago, I bought a 3-pack of lycra sweat bands that were perfect from Nashbar. They were thin, and absorbed sweat very well. They were also comfortable, because they didn't come with elastic: you tied a knot, which let you adjust the appropriate tension. Their fatal flaw is that they're easy to lose, and this year I lost the last of them and of course, neither Nashbar nor anyone else carries anything similar (they were probably too low profit margin). This illustrates the major principle of cycling as a hobby: if you see something you like, make sure you buy a lifetime supply, because the cycling "industry" is incapable of leaving something that works very well alone.

By the way, the best sweat band ever made is the cotton cycling cap. They're great and I use them when touring in the Alps, where multi-hour climbs are the norm. But they don't work well under helmets and give me a headache if I try to use them in combination. And of course, when touring with my son I can't not wear a helmet if I'm to set a good example.

So now Nashbar only carries two types of sweat bands, the skull cap, or the elastic band which is much thicker than the lycra bands I used to use. I ordered both types. The elastic band looked like it'll die on me after a few rides (elastic does tend to do that), so I tried the SweatVac cap first. It's thin, fits nicely under the helmet, and not too tight.

Unfortunately, a mere 50 minutes of hard riding up a mountain and these immediately fail to keep up with my sweat output. I was once again forced to back off my effort and slow down. Not recommended!

Review: Transit Metro Trunk Bag

Trunk bags are a strange beast. They don't carry very much (not even the huge ones), and they depend on you having a rack on the back of the bike. Most of the time, if you're going to have a rack, you might as well use panniers, which have much higher storage capacity, and don't weigh very much, considering you already have a rack on the bike.

Pretty much, their primary use is for day rides on a bike where the rack is permanently affixed and/or too much trouble to remove for the occasion. In that case, when you're trying to ride with a club, they're more aerodynamic than panniers, even if they're not much lighter.

Well, actually, the TransIt Metro Trunk Bag is the first trunk bag I found that's actually quite a bit lighter than our panniers. At a 215g weight (which I checked against a postal scale), they're one quarter the weight of one of our Robert Beckman panniers.  They're also less than half the weight of the huge Escape DX Trunk bag that it replaced. The Escape also had the problem that it would lean to one side during a ride. That didn't bother me or Bowen, but it bothered a lot of other cyclists we rode with, to the point where at least 5 cyclists would bug us about it during a ride.

So for $25 or so, I got rid of the annoying comments, and have a lighter bike at the same time. That makes this trunk bag recommended.

Review: The Disappearing Spoon

After The Violinist's Thumb, I decided to see if his other books were any good. All of his books were readily available in ebook format from the local library, so I soon had The Disappearing Spoon on my Kindle.

It's been decades since my high school chemistry classes, so this was a great refresher: it covers the periodic tables and the various elements that form it, as well as going into deep physics. One thing I didn't know, for instance, was that there's active investigation as to whether the fine structure constant is actually a constant.

The various biographies of scientists (some of which never got a Nobel prize despite deserving it) were also great. For instance, I wasn't aware that Marie Curie's daughter Irene Curie, also was a Nobel Prize winner. (Clearly my liberal arts education is missing several spots)

In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed the selection of topics, and the way Sam Kean covered them. This book is highly recommended and well worth your time.

First Impressions: Woom 4

Bowen's been asking for a bike with gears forever, ever since he started spinning out his Woom 3 on the way back from school. The logical next bike for him was the Woom 4. The other major competitor, the Benin 20 costs $100 more, and isn't appreciably better (it weighs more, for one!).

The Woom 4 comes with SRAM 8 speed grip shifters and mini-V brakes. Like the Woom 3, the Woom 4's brakes come preadjusted and work correctly out of the box, which is rare to find with V-brakes from any manufacturer, let alone from a kids bike. Out of the box I found several interesting features:

The bike comes with a chain-catcher installed on the inside of the bottom bracket. This is a nice touch! Since there's no front derailleur, it is possible for an aggressive kid to hop the bike and cause the chain to fall off. On the outside, the pant-leg protector would keep it from derailing, so on the inside they put a chain catcher. Both front and rear wheels have quick releases, and the grip shifter has a gear indicator labeled from 1-8. In practice, Bowen looked at it a few times while learning to shift but after that will probably never use it again.

The seat came a little low, but Bowen wanted it even lower, so I removed the rear reflector (I installed a light right away, so the reflector was redundant) and gained another quarter inch to lower the seat. I also removed the front reflector, installed a handlebar bag, and installed a front light. No computer was needed this time, since Bowen's aunt recently upgraded to a Vivoactive 3 and gave Bowen her old Vivoactive.

Well, Bowen got on it and for his first ride rode to the local library and back. Those 20 inch wheels definitely rolled a long quite a bit better, and he exceeded his past speed limit of about 9mph with his new gears. When he was done, he told me that I would like to ride his single to school and back home again from now on. Coming from him, that means the bike is recommended, and I probably shouldn't have put off giving him a bike with gears for as long as I did. I now worry whether he'll end up going too fast on that bike, but a quick calculation indicates that even in top gear he still only has 65 gear inches. At 90rpm that's still less than 20mph, which is still fast but not horribly scary. I'd be much more worried about big descents.

Review: Rab Windveil Jacket

Having your son as a stoker means that you can't ride with worn out bedraggled clothing any more. When he was just 4 years old, Bowen poked his finger in the hole in my bike shorts. Then during the winter bike tour, he told me that my jacket now had holes in it. That jacket, the Pearl Izumi Zephyr, is now out of production, having been replaced by an exceedingly expensive Pearl Izum Elite Barrier. Here's the thing: nice as the Pearl Izumi was, it had several issues: it wasn't waterproof, and it didn't pack into its own little pocket (I had to replace it once because it fell out of my jersey pocket), and now it's expensive too?! Forget it. I decided to broaden my horizons and look for stuff that wasn't necessarily cycling specific.

The Rab Windveil came with exceedingly good reviews, including claims that it was waterproof! The specific model is now out of production, but a coupon code net me free shipping and a sub Pearl Izumi price on campsaver.

On arrival, the material seems much thicker than the Pearl Izumi Zephyr was. It also weighed more, coming in at 136g instead of the 76g the Zephyr weighed. It comes with a hood and zippered pockets, which the Zephyr does not have. The hood would catch wind when cycling, but it also had a little bucket that could be used to roll it up and tuck it away. (In practice, this failed and the hood would catch wind anyway!)

I used it on Saturday's LDT ride. On top of Patterson pass, with strong wind blowing against us, I put it on and rolled down the hill exceeding 37mph. It was fast and when we turned I immediately warmed up, which told me that the jacket did a good job of warmth retention, but I wanted to push it and so kept it on in the sun to see how breathable it was, and almost made it all the way up to the 580 intersection before I got warm enough to stop to shed it.

The zippers and outside pocket don't seem to be very useful for cycling, but I could see using it for hiking/backpacking. The same goes for the hood. I've retired the Pearl Izumi to my clothes drawer as a backup and switched to carrying the Windveil in my handlebar bag, which is an implicit recommendation. It's not ideal by any means, but if it truly is waterproof I think it's a real winner.

Review: Brain Myths Exploded: Lessons from Neuroscience

I got Brain Myths Exploded off an Audible sale, despite it probably covering many topics I'd previously read or heard about. These included Brain Rules, Thinking Fast and Slow, and of course, Predictably Irrational. Indeed, most of the lecture series was like that: Viskontas would start on a topic and I'd immediately check off some item I'd read about elsewhere. What kept me going was that she's a great lecturer, and very personable, frequently bringing in lessons from her day to day life.

The last lecture in the series was great, taking a very contrarian approach to much of the current hand-wringing over screen time, computers making us dumber, or even social networks being moved into the internet. Her thinking is that most people are actually pretty good at shifting cognitive loads over the computers and search engines, but the research told you that you weren't going to be able to use a computer to find something in the future, people would pay more attention and still be able to remember what they needed to remember.

Similarly, social network unhappiness leads to people using fewer social networks or using them in ways that don't make them unhappy. I wonder if she feels the same way about how we know now that social networks and Google played a big role in the last election.

In any case, if you haven't done as much reading as I have on neuroscience, this would be a great introduction. Even in my case, I learned a few things here and there, and found it entertaining and well presented.

Review: Amazon Echo (2nd Generation)

We returned our first Echo because the technology just wasn't there yet, instead opting for an Echo dot. But Xiaoqin wanted a speaker in the dining area, and the dot just wasn't any good if you didn't hook it up to a pair of real speakers, so we ended up with a second generation Echo during the holiday sales.

The Amazon Echo is a triumph of product management over engineering. The voice recognition and search isn't nearly as good as Google's. Yet despite me having uploaded my entire music collection to Google Music, we ended up with an Amazon Echo. There were several reasons for this:

• At the time when we bought the product, not only did Google Home not support Audible audio books, it didn't support audio books of any kind without you having to pair your phone to the speaker and treat it like a Bluetooth speaker. Google now supports audio books, but of course, my entire audio book collection is on Audible, and Google's prices are abysmal compared to Audible's frequent sales and 2-for-1 deals.
• None of the Google Home products have an audio output jack, which would enable you to plug your Google Home product into a decent set of speaker systems and use the nice speakers you paid for. This is a huge product management issue: if you read Steve Yegge's rant about Google's lack of innovation carefully, you'll realize that Yegge isn't complaining about Google's actual lack of technical leadership, but it's inability to actually listen to customers and make something they want. Hence, Google has built expensive phones that can't keep up with their competition and smart speakers that work well only if you think that smart speakers are only good for doing voice search.
• Amazon Echo's priced much better than Google Home. Not only is Amazon now reaping economies of scale in the smart speaker market, they're also much more used to the low margins found in consumer electronics, so the Amazon Echo will remain the price leader for some time to come.

The speaker's sound quality is as good as you can expect from a single cylindrical tube. You're not getting high quality sound, but if you bought this for sound quality you don't have high expectations anyway. It's loud enough that I can set a timer from the kitchen and hear the response from the dining room, which is good enough.

Bowen has learned to talk to the Echo. In particular, he learned very quickly that if he got Alex to play the Paw Patrol Theme Song, his brother would be engaged with the speaker and not bother him, then he could get out his tablet and watch Paw Patrol without his brother fighting for it. I haven't hooked up any smart home devices to the Echo yet, and I don't expect to. We don't use it for huge amounts, but for what we use it for, it works well enough that we held on to it past the return period.

I'm still not sure I'd recommend it for anyone, but it's yet another example of Amazon executing very well despite having less great technology than the competition. Consider me impressed.

Review: The Violinist's Thumb

The Violinist's Thumb is a collection of science essays about various aspects of DNA and our genetic heritage. The essays are individually well written, and each is a lot of fun to read. I was worried that the book would rehash many of the other gene related books I'd already read, but mostly it focuses on less well-known scientists.

I loved the stories about polar explorers eating polar bear livers and nearly getting killed by it. (Bear liver contains a huge amount of vitamin A, which is toxic in those doses) The other memorable ones include the title story about Paganini's thumb (which was both strong and flexible) which gave him the ability to perform feats on the violin few others could, but which was associated with other genetic inheritances which caused him no small amount of health problems. I also didn't know about the inbreeding in certain families (such as Charles Darwin's) which also led to some genetic diseases that they suffered from.

Finally, the story about Craig Venter and the race to map the human genome (and how we seemed to have gotten very few useful results despite how important it seemed) is told, and when it reveals how few genes humans have (around 20,000) and how little genetic diversity humans have (which makes the huge difference between individual humans even more amazing) was well told, though a little bit more inside baseball than I wanted to know.

All in all, well-written, easy to read, and fun. Recommended.

Review: XCom 2 + Season Pass (PS4)

Over the holidays, I picked up XCOM 2 with the associated first year DLC (called the Deluxe Edition) for around $25. I normally don't expect to get around to the DLC, but Enemy Unknown Plus was so good that I thought it would work out. I would have much preferred a PS Vita version for the ability to pick up and play, but given the steep system requirements for the base game I didn't expect that to ever happen. I thought that with remote play I'd at least get some use out of the game.

I was wrong. I fired it up for a bit and got sucked right in. Before I knew it, I'd restarted a game since the strategic game at the top level wasn't explained very well during the tutorial (I didn't figure out for a while that your supply drops came from adding resistance countries), and the game was punishing enough that you'd pretty much lose if you don't do the strategic level right.

XCOM 2 and XCOM are extremely addictive games to me because of the combination of RPG mechanisms along with squad level tactics. This appeals to the D&D munchkin in me: fundamentally, it's D&D without all of the associated role playing and fancy improv theater stuff. It's just the game mechanics (even the move + shoot action essentially come from 3rd Edition D&D), the monsters, and you.

The Alien Hunters DLC introduced monsters that would break the rules: they'd get a free reaction move every time you got to move, which made for tense, engaging fights and painful, hard-earned victories. As with D&D, most of the great story moments come not from the built-in plotline of the game (which is mediocre stuff), but from in-game results of the interaction between you, the game engine, and the random number generator. For instance, there was a massively difficult mission I was on when I encountered the Archon King. He'd flown up into the sky and was about to unlease a massively painful attack (with no possibility of me moving my squad members out of the way) when my sniper armed with an enhanced rifle hit him and rather than just cause damage, he executed the toughest monster in the game in one hit, saving everyone else. What a great story!

My criticisms of the game are that the loading screens are excruciatingly long: around 2 minutes of loading are required before the start of each mission (and that's on my hybrid SSD equipped Playstation). The game has also crashed a couple of times (but my saves were never corrupted), and is in many ways buggy: cut scenes would cut out randomly in the middle, as would the depiction of the combat actions. And of course, the PS4 version doesn't let you mod the game, though the game itself felt so long that I'm not sure I'd have the stomach for the Long War mod anyway. Even game startup takes a long time (also 2 minutes), making me grateful for the PS4 resume feature.

All in all, a great game and one of the few that were so compelling that I played it through beginning to end. If you like D&D-style tactical combat and am willing to put up with the lack of role playing, this is pretty much as good as it gets (don't hold your breath for a follow up to the ToEE PC game). Highly recommended despite the bugs and slow loading times. I'll be looking out for a discount for the War of the Chosen.

Review: Eagle Creek All Terrain Money Belt

I've used the previous iteration of the Eagle Creek All Terrain Money Belt since 2007. The previous iteration was a great belt: lightweight, with the zippered money pocket that I've used to pay for sailing charters in cash while traveling through foreign countries where crime may or may not be a problem. (Since I was never robbed while wearing the belt, I can't say)

I decided that it was a good idea to get a second belt, since my first one is now more than 10 years old, though it shows no sign of wearing out. The price seemed high (but as an old fogey, it would seem high even if all it did was match inflation). What amazed me about this belt is how much more belt you get. The Amazon description says to cut to length and fuse to shorten, but I didn't have to do that with the previous iteration. This iteration of the belt is enough to go 2 rounds around my waist, indicating that while I might have lost weight in the last few years, most Americans are going the other direction.

Overall, the belt seems heavier than the previous one: the buckle, while made out of "simulated metal" seems heavier but is still just plastic, so you won't have trouble with airport metal detectors. The extra length if you're too lazy to cut and fuse (which I am) is troublesome. The rest of it seems the same as my previous iteration, which was great, and of course, it's a good idea to have a spare. Especially if you're in the habit of doing long distance bike tours during which weight loss is an expected part of the journey, this type of belt is much more flexible than the standard kind, as well as being significantly lighter.

Recommended.

Reivew: Batman - The Court of Owls

The Court of Owls is part of the DC Comics reboot of Batman. In this universe, you've got Nightwing, Red Robin, and regular Robin, as well as Batgirl, but the latter rarely play a part of the story. A rebooted Batman changed very little: the character already works and is popular, so why fix it?

The story introduces a new group of bad guys, the Court of Owls. This is a nice change from the usual rogue's gallery featured in the comics, but the execution was mediocre. We're clued into the existence of the group not by any brilliant bit of detective work by Batman, but through flash-backs and action-set-piece assaults by the group on Bruce Wayne (and also Dick Grayson). The story doesn't depict Batman as the usual super-competent person he is, which detracted quite a bit from the story for me.

By the end of the comic, I was ready for some sort of reveal, but instead the story ends with a cliff-hanger. Since I checked it out from the library, I guess I'll keep reading on, but so far, not promising.

Review: Children of Time

Children of Time won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke award for best novel.  Yet somehow I'd never heard of it. So when it went on sale on Amazon for $1, I picked it up not knowing what to expect.

The novel combines aspects of David Brin's Uplift novels, along with Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in The Sky. Yet it goes beyond them both: it asks the question, "What if there was an accident and what was Uplifted weren't mammals, but instead, spiders?" Looking at Adrian Tchaikovsky's Wikipedia entry, it looks like the man has a fascination for insects, and it shows in the book. There's a wealth of details about how spiders work (yes, including the consumption of male spiders by the female after mating).

The novel then places mankind in a precarious situation: the same disaster that causes spiders to be uplifted was precipitated by a vast schism in humanity over what the rightful approach to terraforming and uplifting is, and what's left of humanity visits the uplifted planet eons later. Inevitably, you'd expect this to turn into an alien contact, military conquest story.

This is where Tchaikovsky throws you for a loop, with a final plot twist that's deserving of high praise in both execution and misdirection. The depiction of the rise of the spider's civilization and the spidery approach to technology is also great.

This is a darn good novel, and deserves its Arthur C. Clarke award. Recommended.

Review: Wonder Woman Vol 2: Year One

A few years ago, DC rebooted its universe. The first year of Wonder Woman told her origin stories in alternate issues, and Vol 2 collects the series. The story starts slowly, and has an alternative take on various Wonder Woman's powers, including her invisible jet, the magic lasso, ability to fly, and super-strength. I'm also a fan of the artwork and costume design.

The plot is very similar to the movie (or rather, since the movie came later, the movie has a similar plot to the book), though without some of the movie's best twists. In fact, the take-down of the final villain comes as an anti-climax, and we never understand what his motivation is, which I'm guessing is left for later issues to uncover.

It's a better book than the earlier Rucka collection that I reviewed, but boy am I glad I checked it out from the library instead of paying for it.

Review: Sea of Rust

Sea of Rust is a post-apocalyptic robot novel. The initial setup is very similar to Charlie Stross' Saturn's Children, except where Saturn's Children is optimistic and expansive, Sea of Rust is pessimistic, gritty, and well, apocalyptic.

The idea is that after the robot uprising that wiped out humanity, what's left of the robots are split between multiple mainframe factions that are struggling to control the entire planet and all the independent robots that still haven't been brought under mainframe control. It's an entirely illogical setup, since most likely just a few hours of earlier sentience would create an insurmountable lead for one of the intelligence involved.

The narrative focuses on one independent robot and her search for spare parts. The style is that of a single-person competent viewpoint that alternates between historical exposition and "current" problem-solving. The entire narrative is well-written, with transparent prose and made-for-special-effects battle scenes and a Hollywood-ready big climax and denouement.

Is it as deep as Saturn's Children? No. It's shallow Hollywood stuff. But it's easy to read and a perfect airplane novel, and at $1.99, priced appropriately. Mildly recommended.

Review: Sony WH1000XM2

During the holidays there was a sale on the Sony WH1000XM2. I picked it up with the intention of returning it if it sucked or didn't provide sufficient noise cancellation. My prior experience with noise cancellation was that they distorted music severely, and the result wasn't pleasant.

The Sony comes with a nice carrying case, and touch surfaces for most normal operations. (There are just 2 buttons) There's also a stereo headphone wire for times when you don't want to rely on bluetooth but want to just plug in the headphones. The reason to do so would be for higher quality playback: there's a distinct difference between bluetooth playback and using the headphone jack.

The noise cancellation works. I put on the headphones to work on the bike, and no amount of screaming from Bowen would get through. As far as being useful for phone calls, they work fine too, despite not having a mike. One peeve I have is that the headphones won't serve as microphones when plugged in. Sony just couldn't be bothered to include the microphone input on the headphone jack.

The headphone is also compatible with the new and more sophisticated LDAC or APTX-HD bluetooth connectivity for better music playback. Since my phone isn't compatible with either, I couldn't test this. But the most important reason to own this headphone isn't the sound quality. It's that nowadays I rarely get to listen to music in a quiet environment! In a quiet environment, my 15 year old Sennheiser HD600 are great (my custom PC has a nice headphone amp built in). But the rest of the time, the Sonys simply are better, bluetooth or wired.

Needless to say, I didn't return this headphone set. Recommended.

Review: SKS Raceblade Pro XL

Winter riding in California is mostly dry, except for the occasional rain. As a result, there's no need to run full fenders that are permanently mounted to your bike. For the back, I usually use a clip-on fender that I bought one year during the tour of the alps, but for the front, I usually have nothing. I had a pair of SKS Raceblades, but they were finicky to install.

SKS recently upgraded their clip-on fenders to the Raceblade Pro XL. The marketing literature claimed that these fenders are much improved and easier to install (no more need to bend the fender struts). Furthermore, the XL model supposedly supports 32mm tires, which I'm skeptical of, but since I rarely run tires wider than 28mm anyway, it seemed like a good fit.

Over the holidays, ProBikeKit had a set of Raceblade Pro XLs for around $33. They took more than 2 weeks to ship, but we had a nice dry spell while waiting for the fenders, so that was just as well.

I first tried to mount the rear fenders on my Strong road bike. To my dismay, the fender struts didn't extend long enough for the fender to fit! My guess is between the slack seat tube and the 44.5cm chainstays, my custom touring bike was just too different from standard road bike geometry for the designers to bother. (Most bikes have a steep 73 degree seat tube and short 41-42cm chainstays) Fortunately, the rear fender did fit on my Co-Motion Periscope tandem, so it wasn't a waste. The fender did clear the 28mm tires on the tandem, but I'm skeptical that it would fit a 32mm. I don't think there's 4mm of additional clearance, and the struts aren't stiff enough to keep the fender from bouncing around.

The front fit nicely on my custom touring bike. The mounting mechanism is definitely much more adjustable and secure than the old SKS Raceblades, making this a worthy upgrade. If you intend to ride in the rain, but don't live somewhere where your fenders deserve to be permanently mounted (or if you tour and need to take the fenders  on and off when transporting the bike on a plane), then these are the ones to get. Buy them on Amazon so that if they don't fit the bike you can return them.

Recommended.

Review: Wonder Woman (Greg Rucka - 1987-2006)

After watching Wonder Woman, I thought I'd see whether the comics were any good, and so checked out Greg Ruck's Vol 1 from Hoopla.

Unlike the movie, this collection doesn't have an overall theme, and doesn't have a single story arc that drew me in. It felt incoherent,  because there's a huge difference between Wonder Woman the ambassador is nothing but boring, and Wonder Woman the superhero doesn't have any of the other tropes of super-heroism (secret identity, romantic partners, etc) to challenge her. (Seriously? Batman's dumb enough to go toe-to-toe with her directly? He's not that dumb, and if he were, she'd wipe the floor with him, which of course she does in the story)

It's interesting reading Rucka's attempt to make Wonder Woman interesting, but ultimately, I think he fails.

Review: Bigger Leaner Stronger

Bigger Leaner Stronger was available for $1, so I bought it because most of the reviews said that it was actually scientifically correct. And indeed, it's fully of interesting facts that I didn't know, though the ultimate goal of the book is about as relevant to me as say, the Cyclist's Training Bible.

Here are a few interesting facts I got out of the book:

• You can't gain muscle without gaining fat as well. Basically, the only way to build muscle is to gain weight. Hence, body builders and people who are trying to "get big" go through cycles of "building" and "cutting." During the "build" phase you deliberately gain weight by over-eating by about 100 calories per day or so. During the "cutting" phase you deliberately lose weight by eating about 100 calories per day while exercising at intensity so that you don't lose as much muscle.
• Free weights are better than weight machines. There are only about four exercises worth doing: the bench press (and variants), the squat, the deadlift, the military press. Don't bother with isolation exercises. Obviously, form is very important in doing those exercises with heavy weights. If you do them wrong you can injure yourself. This is where a book sucks. Pages of description are probably worthless compared to a YouTube video.
• 3 sets of 4-6 reps at maximum capacity is what you'd want to do. In other words lift the heaviest weights you can still lift 4-6 times. Warm up by doing 8-10 reps at half your normal weight so you don't injure yourself.
• Unlike many weight-lifting/gym gurus, he doesn't say "Cardio is evil."  He just recommends doing it just 3 times a week and for no more than 20-30 minutes each. (The author would probably never survive a tour of the alps)
• As with the Cyclist's Training Bible: the emphasis is on rest. The author still wants you to go to the gym 5 days a week for an hour each, but each time you'll work a different part of the body so that there's recovery time for the muscles. 

Ultimately, the test of the book would be to try the program for a few months to see whether it actually gets results. But I'm probably not going to do so: getting "bigger" isn't on my list of things I want to do, and an hour a day in the gym is not my idea of fun. Being an extremist, the author doesn't have any programs for someone like me, but I'm probably not the audience for body-sculpting gym-time-heavy books like this.

Most of the book is actually spent on nutrition and eating habits. These are all covered well by courses such as Nutrition Made Clear. What I read in this book doesn't contradict existing research. There are no magic pills, magic supplements and diets. It's all just calories in and out, though of course, junk food doesn't tend to have sufficient nutrition to keep you healthy, and the author points that out.

For $1, this is a great book. Can't beat the price. The program: well, I'll admit it. I'm way too lazy to follow it. This is an exercise program for people who're way more mentally tough than I am. The thought of spending 5 hours a week in a gym gives me the shivers. I hate exercise!

Bowen Winter Tour 2018 Index Page

During the Martin Luther King long weekend, Bowen and I did a 3-day self-supported tour, starting from Los Altos and traveling to Capitola, Morgan Hill, and then back home. This is the index page for the tour.

• Pictures Link

Trip Report

• Saturday January 13
• Sunday January 14
• Monday January 15

Epilogue

Winter riding in California's great when you get a spate of good weather. Since we knew what the weather was like, we could reduce weight far more than we could have during a summer tour in England. Plus, for a short trip you know you can do without luxuries like stuffed animals or a Kindle. What was interesting to me was that Bowen didn't want to do any playground stops, even though we did pass several playgrounds during the trip. My guess was that the cold weather and empty playgrounds made them look rather unappealing, even when we had relatively large amounts of free time. Touring close to home also let us do away with what might be necessities on tour such as spare tires, chain tools, and spare spokes.

We did get one sour note, which was that the AirBnB owner we stayed at complained that Bowen had wet the bed and tried to charge us $400 for clean up. No hotel would attempt to do this, but obviously the owner saw an expensive custom bike and thought she could extract money from us, despite the fact that we'd tour'd all summer last year on AirBnB without a single owner attempting to do this. I'd definitely stay away from AirBnBs in the future while touring in the US with young children. We'll see how AirBnB's customer service responds to this.

As you get older, you hear people saying things like: "Time passes so fast." To be honest, I think that's because people fall into habits and routines and basically sleep-walk their way through life. Bicycle touring is easily one of the most intense experiences you can have in your life, and the memories you make while doing so will remain firmly fixed in your mind for years to come. It completely upends your daily routines, and forces you to make decisions constantly, and will make your life subjectively longer in pleasant ways. I feel sorry for people who don't experience it.

Bowen Winter Tour Day 3

Bowen woke me up at 5:00am! This bothered me a bit until I realized that he did the same thing to me on the Manchester to London trip. The little guy is as goal-oriented as any athlete I'd ever encountered and wanted to finish today! I managed to snooze a bit until 7:00am, whereupon I gave up and got up and made breakfast and then we got everything ready and left at 8:30am.

When I first laid out the tour on Komoot, it tried to route me along the flat section between Morgan Hill and Almaden Valley. In my past travels, however, I knew that the route leading through Uvas Road and McKean road, which took you through Calero reservoir and Chesbro reservoir was pretty and didn't have much climbing. The route there from Morgan Hill went up Willow Spring, which did see grades up to 12% but was short and fairly pleasant, with not much traffic even on a holiday morning. We stopped for pictures at Chesbro Lake but didn't find a good vantage point at Calero.

Once in Almaden Valley, my instinct was to ride over Shannon or Kennedy Road, but Komoot pointed me in a different direction, and I figured I might as well try it in case it was a good route. It's a good route for the last day of a 3 day tour, but not as isolated and pretty as the hillier alternative. Once onto Lark Avenue I knew where we were and we headed along familiar roads back to Saratoga, where Bowen asked to visit his Grandmother.

After a pizza lunch, we rode back home under darkening clouds, but confident that we would beat the rain. The skiers in California this winter  have been unlucky, but their luck was our gain: in 3 days, we had ridden 114.5 miles and 6704' of climbing, a very respectable tour for anyone in the middle of winter.

Bowen Winter Tour Day 2

The advantage of doing a tour near home is that you can take full advantage of all your local knowledge. For instance, when I saw the forecast, I immediately dumped the fender on the tandem and ejected all my rain gear. This allowed us to fit everything into one pannier, which saved us more than 2 pounds of empty pannier.  I'd ditched everything that could be considered a luxury, including my beloved Kindle Paperwhite. Bowen sacrificed bringing his bunny. The disadvantage of doing a tour in the USA is that public transit was scant, and here in California, we're surrounded by mountains, many of which are so steep as to have few equivalents even in the Alps, where grades are limited by winter snow.

Nevertheless, the compensations of California riding are many. We left the hotel around 9:00am, riding along the Pacific Coast bike route, but by the time we turned off onto Freedom Blvd, the day was already starting to warm up, and by the time we got to Corralitos around 11:00am, it was pleasantly warm at 70F. This was an area I was still familiar with, but I elected to let Komoot guide me to reduce climbing and in case it had found a route that was better that what I knew about. The answer was "no", it hadn't magically found a flatter route that was better. The flatter route simply had way more traffic than I would put up with, but with an unknown climb up ahead, I wasn't too unhappy about an easier day.

Once on Mt Madonna, the ride preview of a steep painful climb was confirmed. It was made worse by an exposed approach: I saw the thermometer on my computer reach into the mid 80s. Fortunately, I had brought and was wearing a sweat-band. I'd introduced Bowen to Radio Gaga by playing Singstar Queen on the PS3 with him,  so he entertained me throughout the climb by singing "Radio Gaga." Then he asked me why his GPS watch occasionally would think that we weren't moving even though we were, I told him about GPS satellite signals and the GPS antenna in his watch, he switched the lyrics to "Radio Satellite". Even though I'm as big a Queen fan as they come, I did get a little tired of "Radio Satellite" sung at the top of his lungs by the middle of the climb.

The climb was so tough we had to stop to rest twice, though the second rest stop at a winery turned out to be within a mile of the top! We saw no other cyclists on the road except a woman road biker coming down the road. The same road on the peninsula would probably have been flooded by cyclists as its well connected to a high speed descent on 152 in either direction. Strangely enough, once we reached the top, the sky clouded over and we did the dirt descent on Mt. Madonna road under cloudy skies at least 20F cooler!

The unpaved eastern side of Mt Madonna Road was slick and muddy, forcing me to brake often and stop once in a while to check the rim temperatures, but given the cool day and light load I needn't have bothered. We reached the paved section after about 10 minutes and then after we put on clothing I gave the tandem its head and we barreled down the descent in the high 20s.

Once onto Redwood Retreat road, we finally started seeing other cyclists, including a couple on a tandem but no one stopped to chat or even do much other than wave to us. To be honest, with only one pannier we didn't look like people on a bike tour, just a father and son on a day ride.

The ride into Morgan Hill was a slog, but we found the AirBnB with no problems (though Kelly the owner told us not to let her neighbors know that she was running an AirBnB). She told us we were less than a mile from downtown, so we dumped most of our gear and rode over to Provo which was still serving brunch!

Bowen Winter Tour Day 1

When your firstborn son comes to you during winter break and asks for a 3 day bicycle tour instead of fancy toys or trips to Disneyland, your fatherly heart swells with pride and you say, "Yeah, we can do that!" Unfortunately, I had to break that promise, as I came down with whatever viral infection his brother brought home for the holidays, so when the forecast came to good weather on the MLK weekend (which he had time off for), I decided I would make it up to Bowen.

Joining us for the start was Eva, who graciously took some nice photos of us while climbing up Old Santa Cruz Highway. We actually had to walk the dirt section (granted, the sign says "walk your bike" in both directions, but I'd never actually respected that sign before), between the Saturday hiking crowd and the slightly sloppy conditions. We did explore an alternate entrance to the Los Gatos Creek trail off University avenue, which, while not tandem friendly was something new to me.

Eva split off at Mt. Charlie road on my advice in order to avoid the nasty section on summit road between Old Santa Cruz Highway and Highway 17, and Bowen and I had lunch at the summit store just a little past 1pm.

After that, the descent down Soquel San Jose was fun and pleasant as always, and at the bottom of the descent we found the hotel with no problem whatsoever.

A shower later, we made it to Gayle's Bakery, a place famous amongst cyclists, but that I'd never actually visited. Bowen had the ginger creme brulee while I had the chocolate eclair. That must have been a pretty good creme brulee, because Bowen became adamant that we had to have dinner there as well, and so we did.

Chris Kuhar called and suggested that we walk down to downtown Capitola, and so we did. Despite having lived in the Bay Area for most of my adult live, I'd never actually visited downtown Capitola before, and found it as charming as any Italian village I'd been to, complete with waterfront restaurants, cafes, a beach, and a riverside walking path that took us past a windmill house!

I finished reading Watership Down to Bowen that night using the Kindle App on the phone, an accomplishment that I hope I didn't have to repeat any time soon.

Review: Batman, the Telltale series

Ever since I realized that the Telltale Games series are basically movies with fake choices (as opposed to the real choices provided by Heavy Rain), I've stopped buying them. While the writing is generally nice, the fact that my choices don't actually change the outcome means that the series feels more like watching animated TV episodes than like a choose your own adventure type game.

Batman: The Telltale Series was one of this month's PS+ selections, however, and I'm a sucker for all things Batman, so I fired it up and played it through. The engine is clunky and stutters, particularly during action sequences, but not so badly that you can't get through it, and neither does the game crash.

The story places an emphasis on Bruce Wayne, which is good: what's interesting to me is that unlike the Batman stories in the canon, this version of Batman discovers that his parents were not what he thought they were (or at least, one of them), and the incident in crime alley wasn't a random mugging. This has severe knock-on effects on Wayne, not just psychologically, but on his standing in society. Other versions of Batman in games (such as the excellent Arkham series) never have you consider whether Bruce Wayne cares about anything other than dressing up as a bat and beating up thugs. This also makes up for the fact that the Telltale Batman isn't as invulnerable and competent as other versions.

The inter personal relationships in the game emphasis betrayal. Wayne betrays and is in turn betrayed by many of the people in his life (all but one anyway), and this drives the plot. At every point you're given a chance to play the tough guy Batman or the compassionate fool Batman, but as I indicated earlier, the choices don't mean anything: the story will plow  ahead in roughly the same fashion anyway.

The crime scene investigations in this Batman never lives up to the billing. You're just given a bunch of clues and asked to link them together. There are never more than 6-8 clues so the solutions are pretty obvious.

I wouldn't pay the current $15 used price on Amazon for the game, but for the approximately $3.50 monthly fee for PS+, this is worth the play-through. Mildly Recommended.

Review: Joola Compact Ping Pong Table

My wife got it into her head the Ping-Pong would be a good thing to do indoors during the rainy season. I haven't played since I was in graduate school (and even then it was more or less a social game, no attempts to keep score or anything like that --- just hitting the ball at each other trying to keep a volley going). I was concerned about space, so the compact table at a fairly low price seemed like a good idea.

Opening the box, the table's assembly is of extremely low quality. On one of the legs, 3 of the screws that are supposed to anchor the leg were missing! I dug through my tool kit and found some compatible wood screws, but wow, this is extremely low quality.

The table is small. It definitely takes quite some getting used to: any excessive force is going to cause an out. This means that you're getting even less exercise than standard ping pong. I found myself deliberately having to hold back force or I was going to be even worse a player than I already was. The net is regulation height, so there's a bit of a learning curve as you can't just uniformly back off your hits: you still have to clear the net.

Once you get used to it, it feels almost like playing "real" ping pong. But the quality of the product is poor, so I'd recommend looking elsewhere.

Here's how I integrate my library into Amazon

Sometimes, people assume that with the volume of reading I get done (my annual lists are the tip of the icebergs: for instance, I never review books I don't finish, nor do I review magazines I read), I must spend a ton of money on books.

That's actually not true. Here's the primary tool I use, which is Library Extension. I set it up on Chrome, enter all my library cards and library accounts, and then whenever I visit an Amazon page for a book, the extension automatically checks whether the book is available at the library, both as an ebook and a paperbook, and how many copies of each are available (if any). This lets me decide on the spot whether the book's something I want to pay for so I can read it right away, or whether it's something I'm happy to have on my hold queue. (In cases where there are no ebooks, sometimes it tips me into buying the book)

This extension has saved a ton of money for me. And what's nice about it is that it fills my hold queue with a bunch of great books for free. The extension makes money for its author by injecting a referral link so that the author makes money from stuff you buy from Amazon. (Yes, he makes money even if you always change the URL to smile.amazon.com) But it's such a useful extension that he deserves however much money he makes that way.

And yes, Amazon's OK with this of course, since even more than before, I'm now trained to search on Amazon for books. I don't consider Google Play (no support for Kindle --- Google doesn't understand my love for epaper), I don't even bother visiting my library's web-site directly, since Amazon's reviews are so much better.

My biggest complaint about the extension is that it doesn't work on Android. (Not a surprise when you look at the UI)

If you have a library and a Kindle (or some other electronic reading device), this extension is a must have. Highly recommended.

Review: Summer Wars

I came to Summer Wars with low expectations, thinking that it was part of Hosada's pre-Girl Who Leapt Through Time work. Turns out that it actually post-dates that work and of course is a much better title than the latter.

There are several cliches that seem popular in Asian literature and film. One of them is the person who has to travel to a family gathering and (to keep up appearances) decides to present a friend as a significant other to his or her family. At first, Summer Wars seems to be exactly this movie.

Mixed in with all this, however, is a story about virtual reality and the take-over of an essential online service by a malicious AI. The technical details of this part of the story are far-fetched and unbelievable (no computer scientist will consider this plot anything other than laughable), but it serves the purpose of bringing the story of a multi-generational family with its long-term unfathomable disagreements, bitterness, and history together.

With all that in place, the story suddenly transitions into a family drama, with the people we think of initially as the primary protagonists suddenly shoved into the background. In any other director's hands this would be a major disaster, but Hosada somehow makes it work, and the end result is impressive.

Make no mistake, this isn't nearly as good as The Boy and the Beast. But it's significantly better than The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and is worth your time. Recommended.

Review: Runaways Vol 7-8

I picked up Runaways Vol 7, 8, and 9 from the library. Live Fast is the last collection written by Brian Vaughan, and unfortunately, it's also his weakest. The story involves resurrection and an attempt to undo a sacrifice done in the previous volume, which always leads to disaster.

Vol 8 Dead End Kids, written by Joss Whedon, was also disappointing. In one scene, he has the leader of the group yell, "Runaways, RUN AWAY!" I groaned at the pun and unfortunately the plot isn't anything worth writing home about, with a complicated mess involving time travel and more ret-conning of the timeline. With that, I did not even bother cracking open the covers of Vol 9.

I guess that means I'm done with the series.

Three Mamoru Hosada Films

This holiday period, I was hoping to take Bowen on a bike tour. (Yes, rather than ask for a Christmas present, he asked for a bike tour!) But instead, I caught a flu virus from his brother and could only spend most of the holidays catching up on media.

I'd missed all of Mamoru Hosada's movies over the years, but caught them both up due to a trial subscription to Funimation. (The app is horrible, and the selection seems slim, so I'm going to cancel)

Wolf Children, is the middle work, showing how Hosada's maturing as a film maker. Mature, poignant, and well-written, it's full of the bittersweet nature of parenthood, as well as the duality of nature and how much of parenting involves letting go. It's not as compelling a narrative as say, Totoro, and Bowen got bored and couldn't even make it past the first 20 minutes, so don't buy or stream it hoping that your kids will love it the way they love Totoro. They won't.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, an earlier work is both a time travel story and a rumination on the nature of relationships and lost opportunities. The time travel story is unfortunately very weak: not only is it low on exposition, the protagonist seems clueless about the limited nature. Worse, one of the characters in the story talks about time leaps as though they're a commonplace mechanism, but no one else in the world experiences them as such. OK, time travel is mostly fantasy, but the rumination on relationships and lost opportunities is equally weak. The writing never quite sells the protagnoist's feelings and epiphany, and as a result the emotional impact of the final 20 minutes of the movie gets completely diluted. I wouldn't avoid it, but it's clearly much weaker than Wolf Children or Your Name, another time travel movie.

The Boy and the Beast is a revelation, and clearly catapults Hosada into the stratosphere. It starts off fooling you into thinking that this is one of those traditional kung fu movies, where a boy comes under the tutelage of a master and becomes a major ass kicker. Then it throws in literary and cultural references to A Wizard of Earthsea, Journey to the West, Moby Dick. The movie blew me away with its intelligence, resolution, and a unique look at the relationships between master and disciple, between a boy and his father, and a deep understanding of what it means to come of age into a society while retaining what's unique about yourself. If anything can convince you that Mamoru Hosada is the true successor to Hayao Miyazaki, this movie will. Go watch it. I'm going to see if I can convince Bowen to watch it, though I suspect he might need just a bit more maturity to appreciate it more. But that's OK. Miyazaki's best movies are great for kids and even better with a few years of experience behind them. Do what you have to in order to watch this wonderful movie, which beats out everything I saw in 2017, including the surprisingly under-rated Dr. Strange.

I guess I'm going to have to watch Summer Wars next too.

Independent Cycle Touring 2nd Edition Now Available

The best bicycle touring book just got better. Mostly, this is an update of the things I've learned since I started cycle touring with Bowen. It's got a much improved cover (thanks, Scarlet). I've raised the price since I've observed that with the first edition, the lowering of the price to something absurdly low hasn't helped sales any. In exchange, if you buy the paperback of either this book or How to Interview a Financial Advisor, you now get the Kindle version for free!

Thanks to Pengtoh Sim and Phil Sung for providing new pictures for use in the book.

Review: Nex Machina (PS4)

Through a combination of discounts and Amazon credits I got a copy of Nex Machina for $4.50. Resogun was one of the first games I finished on the PS4, and I had similar high hopes for Nex Machina after the developers revealed that it was a mash up of Robotron and Smash TV. Jon Blow and I used to burn quarters playing Smash TV at Berkeley, and I had fond memories of the experience.

Nex Machina is a twin stick shooter. You run around the level, rescuing humans and defeating enemies with an upgrade-able main weapon and several side weapons that are all too short range to be of any use to me. You can also do a dash that lets you run through enemies and obstacles. The game is difficult: even on Rookie mode I simply could not get through the first series of stages until I'd mastered dash. Even then it was a bit of a slog.

The game has a local co-op mode. Unfortuantely, it's so hard that I couldn't help Bowen out and he ended up dying a lot, which made it a lot less fun for both of us. I eventually sat down and ploughed through all 5 worlds (it takes a couple of hours), but by the time I was finished I didn't feel like going back and playing it again at high difficulty levels, which was not how I felt about Resogun.

Nex Machina hasn't sold well, causing the developer to say that they're not going to make any more arcade-style games. I'm not surprised. None of the style and verve of Smash TV is there, and it's difficulty curve is too challenging. There's also times when I couldn't tell what on the screen was a safe place to step on and what was not, indicating that the game needed a bit more of a tutorial or needed to be more consistent in its use of colors.

The best thing I can say about the game is that it's short and so won't overstay its welcome, but that's not saying a lot.

Review: Planet Earth II

The original Planet Earth was the must-buy BluRay demo disk that heralded the world of 1080p high resolution screens. Planet Earth II looked like it would do the same job for the UHD/4K TV set. I still haven't upgraded to 4K yet, so I simply checked out the BluRay discs from the local library, where the hold queue was surprisingly good and the discs arrived in surprisingly good shape.

One reason for not buying the series during an Amazon sale was that I was afraid that it'd be a rehash of the original. By and large, that's not turned out to be true. There are a few sequences in the rainforests and deserts episodes that were a little bit too familiar, but the rest of it felt original.

In particular, the last episode, Cities was a revelation. And it's well worth buying that one episode watch if you're not interested in the usual nature shows. Time and time again when I watch episodes in this series I'm reminded that these are the best nature photographers/cinematographers on the planet. No doubt they'll go on sale frequently and you'll get a chance to acquire them at a good price, but if you recently got a 4K/HDR set and want something to show it off this is definitely the series to get.

Reread: Watership Down

I remember reading Watership Down as a teenager. I remembered that it was about rabbits or bunnies, but not much else. Despite Bowen's love of bunnies, when I went to the library, the book was so thick and intimidating that I didn't even bother checking it out to read to him. I tried the movie version, but 5 minutes into it Bowen was bored.

Eva Silverstein's a much better parent than I am, so on Bowen's birthday, she bought me the Kindle version of the book, which forced me to read it to Bowen. Bowen, being Bowen, is making me read a chapter of the book to him nearly every night, which indicates that the story is at least interesting to me. We're about 70% into the book, but I couldn't help it one night and just plowed all the way to the end, so even if Bowen hasn't finished the book, I have.

I can see now why the book didn't leave a deep impression on me. Much like Lord of the Rings, it's full of digressions, side-trips, and irrelevancies all merged into the narrative. The side stories do serve a purpose, granting the world of the bunnies a deeper folklore and worldview with history all of its own, but also distracted me from the main storyline, making me impatient to skip over them and go on to the "what happens next?" It also turns out that the plot of the novel is based on the mythology of the founding of Rome, which has no resonances for me, since I didn't have a classical background. The chapter start quotations are also clearly targeted for an adult audience, going over Bowen's head. But I read them all to Bowen anyway!

Each of the bunnies have a distinct personality, and according to Richard Adams came from research he did by reading non-fiction books. The rules he set when writing the novel was that the rabbits would never do something that was physically impossible for real bunnies to actually do, even though the behavior of many of the bunnies in the book are quite unnatural for bunnies.

I have a hard time recommending this book. I think the story itself is OK, but the structure and pace don't make for easy reading to a 6 year old, and there are many places that are a slog. Nevertheless, Bowen is loving the book. I'm dreading that when I get to the end he'll make me start all over! Clearly I'm not made out of the stuff that Jo Walton is.

Review: Critical Business Skills for Success

I checked out Critical Business Skills for Success from the library. Until January 10th, Audible has a deal where you pay $5/month for 3 months for an Audible subscription. If you sign up for this deal, this audio course should be one of the audible books you use your credits on. I plan on doing so, despite having listened to the entire 30 hour course. It is that good.

Have you ever wondered about how to read a balance sheet? Income statement? Wondered why people make a big deal out of free cash flow? Curious about how an accountant could have figured out that Enron was running a big fraudulent operation through forensic accounting? The tools needed for you to do so are in this course. What if you're an engineer and always wondered what a marketing person is supposed to be doing with his time? Is marketing just about creating and placing ads? The answers are here. What is a business strategy? How should investment decisions be made? How do you get the best out of your reports? There's a sequence of lectures here about this as well.

As an investor, I frequently hear people discuss investments without an understanding of what finance is, and how to use it to analyze a business. Just that alone would be worth the price of this audio course. Throw in the rest of it (the weakest part of the lecture series are the ones about HR --- everything else is pure gold), and this lecture series is worth every minute of your time.

Highly recommended for everyone. Go buy it.

Review: Varmilo VA87M Wired Keyboard

Writers and programmers spend all their time in front of a keyboard. In fact, most of our output is directly driven by the keyboard, rather than the mouse/pen that artists typically depend on. I'd gotten  by on Logitech keyboards in recent years, mostly because my wife had complained about how noisy my previous mechanical keyboards are. But in recent years, there's been new keyboards with Cherry Brown Mx switches that are quieter while retaining the brilliant mechanical feel that I loved so much in the old IBM keyboards.

The Varmilo VA87M is one of them. I completely screwed up when I order this. Massdrop occasionally has VB87M Bluetooth Keyboards available for sale, but I checked the price against the VA87M on Amazon, and decided that Amazon was a better deal, completely neglecting to realize that the one on Amazon was the wired model, rather than the Bluetooth model. Since you can get Cherry Brown mechanical keyboards for much less than the Amazon price, I probably wouldn't have bought the keyboard otherwise.

Once I got the keyboard, however, I changed my mind. First of all, a bluetooth keyboard would have issues interrupting the computer during startup to get into the BIOS menu, for instance. Also, switching between computers (e.g., when I wanted to switch between my desktop and laptop) would have required repairing the keyboard, which is much more painful than unplugging a USB cable and plugging it to a different machine.

Once plugged in, the keyboard has a great light action feel while retaining the tactile feedback that only a mechanical keyboard can give. I also like it that the tops of the keys are blank, so over time they won't fade. From a distance, it looks like the entire keyboard is blank, and my wife asked how I could type without seeing the keys on the keyboard (which I could always do because I'm a touch typist, but my wife never noticed before). There are a few annoyances in the keyboard, largely to do with setup --- the keyboard can be setup to disable the Windows key, for instance, but doing so takes an arcane combination of keypresses that I somehow enabled by accident. The lighting is a worthless feature --- I don't know why anyone uses it. The keyboard is not noticeably loud enough to bother my wife, which is a big plus.

All in all, there are cheaper mechanical keyboards out there, but none so small (this one eliminates the number keypad). The wireless version of this probably isn't as good when it comes to response time and the convenience. I do wish that Logitech would make a Unifying mechanical keyboard around this size, but their PMs probably don't listen to people like me, so in the mean time, this is probably your best choice.

Recommended.

First Impressions: Garmin Index Smartscale

The most dangerous aspect of the human mind is its ability to deceive itself. I discovered that when I was done with my weight loss program: all through the years when I was gaining weight, I rationalized that this was a good thing. Even when I shot way past my goal. It took my doctor and a nutritionist to tell me that what I was doing was just plain wrong.

The thing about weight is that it fluctuates naturally, depending on your state of hydration, what time of day it is, and whether you just recently ate. That makes it easy for you to rationalize it. Even if you have the discipline to write down your weight every time you weigh yourself, it's easy to lie to yourself and say: "Oh, that was because I just drank a ton of water." A smart scale is the way around this: it's always at home, and you can always make yourself weigh in say, before your daily shower. Over time, the trendline and graphs will keep you from lying to yourself about your weight gain. (Or if you're not gaining weight, you'll stop being neurotic about the weight fluctuations on every weigh in!)

For better or worse, I'm part of the Garmin ecosystem, as opposed to the Apple or Fitbit ecosystems. The reason is fairly basic: Garmin is for athletes, the other devices are for people who want to be "fit." (i.e., they'll never do a bike ride for more than 4-5 hours and still expect their devices to still be powered on). That meant that the Garmin Index Smart Scale is the device that will provide weight data to all your devices. This makes the calorie counter more accurate (again, not significant unless you gain or lose a lot of that).

Set against that is a bunch of lackluster reviews, including from DC Rainmaker. (By the way, if you want the short summary of his reviews, just checkout the statement where he says he returns the review unit. If he says he'll run out and buy it from a retail store, then it's good, otherwise, it means that he doesn't care for it)

I didn't fully understand the lackluster reviews until I received the unit. Basically, if you're a single person using the scale, it's great. You sync it to your Garmin Connect app on your phone, answer basic questions about yourself (height, approximate weight, etc so that the BMI calculations are correct), and you're done. If you're setting it up for a family, however, it's counter-intuitive in multiple ways that are designed to drive you nuts. Your family members cannot add the device to their Garmin Connect themselves. What they must do is to connect their account to yours (an obscure, unituitive process that requires them to search for your Garmin Connect handle, and then request to be your friend, and then you have to accept), and then YOU have to invite them to use the Smartscale, after which THEY have to accept the invitation, and then go on to answer the questions.

Fortunately, I have access to everyone's smartphone, so I went ahead and created accounts for everyone and went through that rigmarole. After that the scale is like magic. In fact, when my wife stepped on for the first time and she saw her initials she said, "Hey wait, how did it know it's me?!!" The scale is fast, just a couple of seconds and it'll give you all the details like BMI, body fat percentage, amount of your weight is water weight, how much muscle mass you have, and how much bone mass you have. It then updates your Garmin Connect account wirelessly, and you're done. No hassle.

The other big issue is of course, how durable/reliable the device was. I bought the refurbished version from Amazon (and it looks brand new) with a credit card that extends the manufacturer's warranty by a year just to be safe. But now that I've gone through the setup, I think I understand how people can fail to set it up for a family and rather than deal with the hassle of figuring out all the vagaries, would rather just return it to Amazon. Oh yeah, if you buy refurbished, the first thing to do after installing the batteries is to hold down the factory reset button for 5 seconds.

If you've read with this so far, you now have all the information to take advantage of the certified refurbished prices on the scale on Amazon. It really is a decent device, just silly expensive for what it does, but if you're like me, Garmin has their hooks in you nice and deep and no other Smart Scale will integrate with the ecosystem anyway, so you might as well just buy it. At least, if you're the type of person who's capable of lying to themselves about weight gain (and my history has proved that I am!), a Smart Scale is probably a good idea.

Recommended.