Review: The Power Broker

 After reading Robert Caro's series on Lyndon Johnson, I bought (through audible) the audiobook version of The Power Broker, which is his biography of Robert Moses, who essentially built most of the infrastructure and parks of the city of New York. The book took me 18 months to listen to the finish.

The biography centers around Robert Moses control of various transportation agencies and authorities, generating revenue from bridges, toll highways, and maybe even parks. It's astonishing how he managed to get the laws written such that no elected official could stop him, and he could build with impunity. There are lots of places where he abused his power, and one of the reasons he got away with it for so long was that he never abused his power in order to enrich himself, but rather, to get more power. So he could always legitimately claim that he didn't personally benefit from holding all those posts that generated revenue, he could hand out largesse to an army of contractors, concessionaires, engineering firms, and even restaurant owners.

The book is even handed. When you give someone like Robert Moses the power to ignore voters and elected officials, you get stuff done. Parks were built quickly, as were roads and highways. Unfortunately, Moses was not a fan of public transit or affordable housing, or poor people, or non-whites. So the cost of getting all the done was that neighborhoods full of vulnerable people were bulldozed, and those people became more impoverished. What's interesting was that Moses was politically savvy enough to ensure that the various mayors, etc got invited to the ribbon cuttings of various openings so they could share in the credit for the infrastructure improvements, so there was never any incentive for even the elected officials to oust him.

This book explains why housing and infrastructure built in the USA today is so bad. The backlash to the existence of someone like Robert Moses all but ensured that nothing can get done without tons of oversight. The book is a valuable counterpoint to Abundance, but I hope that the country can get to a point where it can build again.

I enjoyed the book but probably should have gotten it in electronic format so I could read it rather than endure 50 hours worth of listening to it.

Reread: Exhalation

 

I recently got a chance to see Ted Chiang in person at SJSU. He was great, and it triggered me to re-read Exhalation. One of the big themes of the book now that I've heard Ted Chiang in person is the debate over whether we have free will. Interestingly enough, I feel like Chiang's stories actually strongly imply that we do not have free will, while at the talk he gave, he claimed that he's strongly on the side of having free will! The explanation for the apparent contradiction, he said, was that "You actually want to have your entire experience (your upbringing, what you've read, learned, etc) to come to bear on your decisions. Free will cannot exist in an environment where you're just randomly picking between choices." In one of the stories, a character states that you're the result of all your previous choices, so by making a decision to be a kind person, you make it easier for yourself to become kinder in the future. I thought that was a great insight.

Another aspect of the stories that jumps out now that I've seen Ted Chiang in person is that the stories all have some uplifting aspect or even optimism built into the endings. He explained it as being the kind of person for whom it's easy to take the negative view of life, and when he works on a story, he spends a ton of time immersed in it, so he consciously chooses stories where there's some redemption, because it's not good for himself to be immersed in negativity.

The book is great. Every story is worth reading, and not a single one is a dud. It's also a short quick read. I highly recommend it.

Review: The Shape of a Life

 The Shape of a Life is the autobiography of Shing-Tung Yau, ghost-written by Steven Nadis, since Yau is not a native English speaker and probably speaks Math better than he speaks English. You come to expect a certain trope when immigrants talk about their stories, like the incredible poverty they grew up with, and the struggle to get an education good enough to qualify for a transplantation to the West.

Yau lives up to this expectation. He's perhaps a little too modest about his achievements, since he portrayed his admissions into the UC Berkeley PhD Math program as being luckily selected by a visiting Math professor at his high school who advocated on his behalf. He astonishingly gets his PhD in a record 2 years, having written a publishable formal proof during the break in between semesters during his first year in graduate school!

Yau, of course, is famous for being part of the Calabi-Yau manifold description, and definitely someone who's made major contributions to the advancement of mathematics. The guy definitely worked hard and he and his wife frequently lived on opposite coasts during their marriage before finally getting to live together at Harvard University.

Yau will disabuse you of the notion that academic mathematics has no politics. The amount of politics he had to deal with as an accomplished and famous mathematician is quite astounding, and the factionalism he encountered in particular as being part of the Chinese mathematical community is even more astonishing, since in that culture, you're supposed to support your mentor and they expect you to be grateful. I couldn't help but think that his problems there was self-inflicted. A lot of his collaborators weren't Chinese, and he didn't have to go out of his way to get involved in Chinese politics.

Another cliche in Chinese American literature is the feeling that you don't belong in either the West or in Asia. Yau does his best to live up to this cliche, including declaring in several places in the book that his heart was in China and he would do his best to bring Chinese academics up to the standards of the West, even though many of the problems of the Chinese mathematical communities are self-inflicted:

the academic system in China is more complicated because major universities are under the control of the government through the Ministry of Education. Leadership changes at universities, which happen periodically, can result in significant upheaval. When new people come in, they don’t want to do what their predecessors agreed to because in that case the successors won’t get much credit. They want to have something new to show their superiors, which means doing something different, even if that means curtailing a successful program and replacing it with an ineffectual one. This introduces an element of uncertainty to operations in Chinese universities that does not exist in their U.S. counterparts. Every university in the United States, to be sure, has its own internal politics—the inevitable squabbles within departments, between departments, and between the faculty and administration. But when the country as a whole elects a new president, that doesn’t usually affect anything at the campus level—unless, of course, major funding cuts or policy shifts are instituted as a result of a change at the top. (page 263)

(Yes, I am very well aware of the irony that the USA is trying to emulate this aspect of the Chinese academic community!) 

I will say that as an Asian immigrant who's extremely grateful that the USA invested in him at a time when no private banker would have, I'm astounded at the lack of gratefulness Yau displays in this autobiography. At one point Yau was stateless (no passport since the British consulate took back his right to a British passport after he got a green card), yet the USA continually worked with him to grant him opportunities to travel and return. And obviously in 2024 Yau gave up his job at Harvard to move back to China to join Tsinghua university, which clearly tells you where his loyalties lie. Being politically oblivious, he probably doesn't see this as potentially making things much worse for the Chinese American communities who may not wish to move, but I'm flabbergasted that someone whose material well-being and ability to achieve his potential was only enabled by Western largesse being so entitled about it!

I enjoyed the book, and probably learned a lot less math than I thought I would have (it's written at a layman's level), but I certainly learned a lot more about the old school Chinese immigrant and their attitudes than I expected. 

Review: The King's Peace

 All the reviews of The King's Peace mentioned that it was an Arthurian retelling. It's also Jo Walton's first novel, and it shows. The writing, while workmanlike and readable, isn't as compelling as others, and the use of place names in an imaginary Britain populated with Celtic names doesn't work to give you a sense of place.

The narrator, Sulien, is a large woman trained as a warrior, and at the start of the novel is raped by raiders who also kill her brother. Making a pact to escape, she discovers the rest of her village was also pillaged, and is assigned to ride for help. Finding King Urdo, the Arthur of the story, she joins his military as an armiger, and devotes herself to his forging a kingdom and fighting his battles until he unites the island as a high king and enforces the peace.

This may be an Arthurian-style story, but it's one with a light touch. You'd have a hard time figuring who's the Merlin analogue, though the Guinevere analog wasn't hard. I kept trying to figure out whether Sulien was Lancelot, and it might be she is, but there's no love triangle, though her powress at arms are quite apparent.

There's magic in the book, as well as the well-understood struggle between the new Christian-analog religion and the old Celtic-analog gods. But gods are real, and magic is real, though not the showy type. I enjoyed that aspect but again, it doesn't play a big part in the story.

Ultimately, the biggest weakness of the book is that it drags quite a bit. It certainly doesn't make me want to go out and read further books in the series.

Review: The Thinking Machine

 The Thinking Machine is a biography of Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, and a chronicle of the company he led through founding to becoming the megacap stock it is today.

As a biography, it's perhaps not as complete as those of Steve Jobs as you might wish, but on the other hand, it taught me several things that I didn't know about Nvida, not that I knew a lot about them in the first place. For instance, Nvidia didn't have a mission statement, because Huang didn't believe in them. (Kindle loc 1010). This is completely anamolous, and contrary to the hordes of business books touting the value of missions.

Secondly, Jensen has a reputation for yelling at people when they screw up. That's normal, but on the other hand, he values that experience that you were taught and doesn't fire people for screwing up:

“Very rarely does Jensen make significant changes as a result of execution issues,” Halepete said. “He’s very conscious of having an even slightly chilling effect on people’s willingness to take risks and innovate. As a result, his level of forgiveness for even the largest screw-ups is extremely high.” Halepete surmised that the tirades were what Jensen did instead of showing you the door. “He will berate you, he will yell at you, he will insult you—whatever,” Halepete said. “He’s never going to fire you.” (kindle loc 1745)

That sort of thing generates loyalty and breeds a willingness to take risk, so it's not a surprise that Nvidia employees venerate him. The other thing that's special about Nvidia is the span of control Huang has. I've said in Startup Engineering Management that there's no reason the span of control of a good manager should be as small as 6 people, other than that Silicon Valley has an unusually bad management training program (as in, "What management training program?") and so most engineering managers are so bad that they would flail at having to manage more than 6 people. In Nvidia's case, he has 30 direct reports:

As Nvidia grew, Huang maintained an agile corporate structure, with no fixed divisions or hierarchy. The C-Suite was essentially just him, with no COO, no CTO, no CMO, and no obvious second-in-command. Huang didn’t even have a chief of staff. Instead, he had more than thirty people reporting to him directly, most of them given fluid responsibilities under the all-encompassing title of “vice president.”  (kindle loc 2261)

Management professors theorized that a chief executive should ideally have between eight and twelve direct reports. Huang now had fifty-five. (kindle loc 3376)

 Think about how hard someone like that has to work. He'd have to process information from all 55 direct reports, and then make decisions and possibly direct the work of all of them. It's impressive then that he had time to pivot the company from graphics and CUDA into AI, and the company was able to consistently undervalue the crypto market and consciously downplay it!

Of course, the example that sets on Huang's kids is significant:

Horstmann also observed that neither Huang’s nor his own kids had initially gone into technical fields. “I think they tried to get out of this crazy work environment,” he said. “I think they looked at us, and said, ‘There’s got to be more to life than this.’ ” (kindle loc 1924)

Later in the book, the author reveals that Huang eventually got his kids to work in Nvidia, though not necessarily in technical fields. There's a claim that no nepotism is involve but I wonder how much the author investigated.

All in all, the book was worth reading, though again Nvidia seems to be an extreme outlier amongst even Silicon Valley companies, so I'm not sure you can generalize that you should emulate Huang in not having a mission statement. The real test for Nvida is if Huang steps down and to see if the company collapses without having such a singular person at the helm.

 

Pigeon Point Overnight 2025

• Day 1 GPS Track
• Day 2 GPS Track
• Mark Brody's Pictures
• Arturo's Pictures

We tried to visit Pigeon Point earlier this year, but a bout of rain with 20+mph winds came in and we moved the date back. The forecast for our new date was that it was going to rain as well, but with much milder weather and brisk but not howling winds we decided to go for it. Indeed, it rained overnight on Saturday, but by breakfast time it was sunny and mild!

Mark Brody had showed up the night before so he could borrow my Revelate saddlebag. He'd not managed to get a spot at Pigeon Point but had found room at Costanoa just 4 miles away. A last minute cancellation freed up room for Arturo, so he could join as well. I unpacked the REI Link Saddlebags for Bowen and Xiaoqin, and we loaded it all on their bikes. I broke out the Ortleib panniers, and Stephan and Otto had gotten a rack installed on their bike as well, and were also using Ortleib panniers which were a wedding gift that they'd been using all these years. Eva would join us for the ride up Page Mill Road.

The climb up Page Mill Road was straightforward though a little on the steep side. We'd given Bowen a 30 minute headstart but saw him right after the Los Trancos entrance at which point he gave himself a boost. I would find out later that he'd pre-bribed his brother to deliberately slow down so he could beat us to the summit. At the summit we saw views of the ocean, took a few photos, and proceeded to barrel down West Alpine road. Stephan and Otto, loaded down with an extra laptop were taking it easy so we decided not to wait for them.

The descent on West Alpine road in Spring is as pretty as anything you'll do anywhere in the world. The corners are broad and the hillsides are lush and green and filled with lupines, poppies, and other flowers. If you're not riding this on a bicycle you'll miss most of it.

At the junction with Pescadero road we made a left turn and proceeded to climb up Haskins Hill, which was very pleasant in the cool air. At the summit there was a team in training support vehicle that offered us a refill, but it was so cool I thought I'd make it till lunch at least on my single water bottle, which had been refilled at the water fountain before the Montebello parking lot. 

The descent to Pescadero was a delight, and screamingly fast on the tandem. There were gentle rollers but none of them demanding high effort. Mark Brody caught up to us once we were past much of the descent and we rode along. The Revelate bag was going very well, and he was in high spirits, given that he hadn't done a lot of riding so far this year.

At the Pescadero city limit sign we waited for everyone and then went to the goat farm to see the baby goats and buy some goat cheese. The kids were pretty hungry, so we headed over to Arcangeli's grocery for their famous garlic artichoke bread, buying 3 of those to go with the cheese and prosciutto we'd brought from home. Surprisingly, we polished off all the garlic artichoke bread and went in to buy dinner and breakfast. We ended up with. Sphagetti and sausages, as well as an entire peach pie, and then a loaf of banana bread for breakfast. Stephan and Otto showed up just as we were about to pay for the groceries, but we wanted to go reserve space at the hot tub so we left after letting them know that we'd put in a reservation for them.

Bean Hollow road was surprisingly pretty with more flowers to entertain us on the mild and gentle climb. Soon enough we were descending to the intersection with Highway 1, and then proceeding down the coast with views of the Pacific Ocean on the right. Arriving at Pigeon Point, we went through the checkin process, unpacked, locked up the bikes, made our beds, and then went for a walk.

Pigeon Point Lighthouse is a minor state park, and this year's flowers were nothing short of amazing. We walked around in awe, framing pictures of the flowers with a combination of the Pacific, the lighthouse, and ourselves. I'd never seen it this flowerful before, since Pigeon Point was usually for us an earlier visit.

We made dinner and ate it before our hot tub spot. As we walked towards the hot tub we felt a few sprinkles here and there, but it never turned into rain, not even getting our clothes more than slightly damp. Of course, in the hot tub we didn't even notice. Boen saw a seal bathing on the rock, but it was too overcast for us to care about missing the sunset time --- there wasn't going to be a sunset that evening.

After everyone was done with the hot tub we ate pie. Bowen amazed everyone by reciting 30 digits of Pi in order to win a second piece of pie. Kids amaze you when they do things like this and you never even noticed them practicing or saying that they wanted to do this.

We had an early bed time as the weather forecast had shifted. Rather than the weather improving as the day went, the forecast was that it was more likely to rain later in the day.

Waking up around 6:30am, I made coffee and sliced the Banana cake. Arturo had found ants in the pastry he had bought the day before, but he cleaned it off and ate it anyway. We got everyone cleaned up and ready to go by around 8:30am, and took off against the headwind, pacelining up Highway 1. Once we turned off onto Bean Hollow Road the headwind became much less of a problem.

Arturo discovered he'd left his sunglasses behind so he'd had to turn around to fetch it. But he would catch up on Stage Road. Mark Brody hadn't gotten up early, and so he was far behind. At the Stage Road/84 intersection the San Gregorio store was closed, so we couldn't get refreshments. The kids all voted to go up 84 instead of Tunitas Creek. To my surprise Arturo voted with the kids. "Kings Mountain Road is treacherous in the rain if it's wet!" he declaimed. The traffic on 84 didn't seem too bad, so I was OK with the decision.

Riding up 84 with a tailwind was easy in the light morning traffic. We regrouped at Applejack's in La Honda, where we took a snack break. Arturo warned us about poison oak going up. From there, it was a 3 mile uphill run with much more annoying traffic, including a group of sports cars hell bent on showing cyclists how much more power you get when you're willing to burn fossil fuels. At the Old La Honda road intersection we waited for everyone and put on a jacket, because the sky had turned much more cloudy.

We started climbing after Xiaoqin took off. Boen knew that this was the last big climb so he pulled out all stops, and we slowly reeled her in. As we approached the redwoods near the summit Boen put in another big effort and we put a gap into her. We would later discover that she had had a slow flat on her front. Riding through the redwoods in the fog was gorgeous, and we made it to the intersection with Skyline blvd. After Xiaoqin arrived, we replaced her inner tube, not having found whatever foreign matter had punctured her tube.

We finished the repair just when everyone else rolled up. We split into 2 groups: Stephan and I opting for the longer route going down 84, while everyone else rolled down Old La Honda road. The tandems can go really fast on 84, and with light traffic we were not concerned about impatient drivers. Skyline Blvd was wet, but 84 itself was nice and dry. By the time we got back to Old La Honda road the others were already waiting for us.

From there it was a short ride to downtown Los Altos, but Arturo had neglected to eat so we had to feed him before resuming the ride. Silicon Valley was completely dry, looking like it hadn't rained at all during the time. The ride was uneventful and we had a big lunch after which we went home via our separate ways. It was a great trip!

Review: Stronger

Stronger is a badly written book about an important topic. The book's subtitle promises to tell you everything about muscles and strength training, but then immediately spends an absurd number of pages explaining what the Greeks thought about the human body and what muscles were. Not only were the Greeks absurdly wrong, it has no relevant to the topic of the book. A decent editor would have slashed a good 30% of this book and it would have been a much better book.

The book spends an inordinate amount of time on two characters, Jan Todd (at one point the strongest woman in the world), and Charles Stocking, another record-setting powerlifter. Their stories are perhaps interesting, but to be honest, anecdotal data is worthless for the typical rank and file athlete or normal person trying to live their life.

The book is clearly biased towards considering strength training to be much more important than regular doctors believe. What's surprising to me is how little research there actually is on strength training, and how recent the studies are (the earliest appear to date from the 1990s). There are interesting studies described in the book, including one study that focused on geriatric residents at a nursing home, some of whom could barely raise their hands at the start of the program. The study showed that even at that age it's possible to build muscle, and the effects are awesome --- some residents went from being in a wheel chair to being able to walk around with a walker. Others went from walkers to just a cane, and some went from needing a cane to not needing one. Clearly, strength training is useful at any age and can help folks.

Where the book falls over is that there's no study of injury rates. My experience with weight training (progressive resistance training is the new medical term that the book taught me) is that as you get older, there becomes a very thin line between sufficient stimulus to get stronger, and too much stimulus which leads to injury. The book doesn't talk about it, there are no studies, and pretty much I think you'd have to hire a professional personal trainer to calibrate you properly and walk you through increasing resistance. That's great if you're rich. Not so great if your schedule can't fit in appointments and stuff like that.

The book is convincing in terms of telling you that you need strength training, and that the importance of it increases as you get older, and that it's never too late to do more strength training. It definitely debunks the regular doctor's advice that "walking is sufficient exercise for anyone." It clearly isn't, and the book isn't shy about telling you. But beyond that, the book kinda just fails.

There must be a good book about strength training and how to do it properly at lowest risk of injury, but this one isn't it.

Review: Abundance

 Abundance is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book about what they called supply-side liberalism. It's an indictment of the systems built in the 1960s and 70s to prevent government abuse that no longer works in today's environments. While the old 1960s liberalism is about being able to sue government in order to stop it from building a freeway through your neighborhood, that same set of rules is now blocking the need to build sufficient housing for people to live in in our most vibrant cities, or green energy projects in order to power the green energy transition:

the story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening. We say that we want to save the planet from climate change. But in practice, many Americans are dead set against the clean energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar power projects. We say that housing is a human right. But our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new homes (kindle loc 67)

Worse, the inability of government to deliver needed housing, energy, or transportation projects creates an opening for the right wing to claim that government doesn't work, or that the problem is immigrants coming into the country, or to take an axe to the NIH and NSF in the name of cutting taxes.

political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe write that “populists don’t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government—and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective through their own autocratic power.”23 In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won by shifting almost every part of America to the right. But the signal Democrats should fear most is that the shift was largest in blue states and blue cities—the places where voters were most exposed to the day-to-day realities of liberal governance. Nearly every county in California moved toward Trump,24 with Los Angeles County shifting eleven points toward the GOP. In and around the “Blue Wall” states, Philadelphia County shifted four points right, Wayne County (Detroit) shifted nine points right, and Cook County (Chicago) shifted eight points right. In the New York City metro area, New York County (Manhattan) shifted nine points right, Kings County (Brooklyn) shifted twelve points right, Queens County shifted twenty-one points right, and Bronx County shifted twenty-two points right.25 Voting is a cheap way to express anger. Moving is expensive. But residents of blue states and cities are doing that, too. In 2023, California lost 342,000 more residents than it gained; in Illinois, the net loss was 115,000; in New York, 284,000.26 In the American political system, to lose people is to lose political power. If current trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right; even adding Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to the states Harris won won’t be enough for Democrats to win future presidential elections. (kindle loc 261)

The book explores housing, energy, our science funding process, and manufacturing. Much of this is driven by the federal government, which obviously the Democrats can do nothing about as long as they're out of power. But local issues like housing and energy can and should be done by blue states, and the authors point out that they need to be done by blue states.

The book has lots of ideas, and is interesting as well as a quick read. The Democrats cannot keep selling pro-illegal immigration, DEI, anti-Asian discrimination, and antisemitic messages as the voters have showed in the last election that they're not buying it. This book provides a playbook for the Democrats for a compelling, non-zero sum vision of the future, if a brave politician would listen. You should read it.

How to buy digital editions of my books

 I finally noticed that the website hosting the purchase links for digital editions of my books went dead. (No thanks to Google)

I've temporarily resurrected them here:

Buy An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups $24.95:
Buy Startup Engineering Management: $24.95:
Buy Independent Cycle Touring $9.99:

Review: Normal People

 I don't know how Normal People made it into my borrow list from the library, but when it showed up I read it and found it easily readable and short, so just read it in a few nights.

A combination of a romance and coming of age story, it traces Connell and Marianne, who start the novel as high schoolers and finish the novel having graduated from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. The story of their on-again/off-again relationship is super-cringe, with you wanting to reach into the page and shake the characters for poor decision making or self-awareness over and over again. For instance, Connell likes Marianne so much that when she suggests that he apply to Trinity College as an English major instead of Galway for Law, he does so. Yet when it comes to the equivalent of the prom he asks some other girl out and is puzzled that Marianne treats this as a rejection, even when his own mother (who cleans the house for Marianne's family) storms out of his car after learning what he did!

Anyway, both characters do incredibly silly things, though Marianne's mistakes are much less dumb than Connell's (though her choice in men other than Connell is very much suspect). The book does a good job of exposing readers to the Irish college system.  For instance, the merit-based scholarship in Trinity is given through a series of exams, and there's no means testing, so even though Marianne is rich she still gets it. This is a far cry from what you see in American universities.

I read the book to the end, but as with much mainstream fiction, scratch my head as to why people think this is particularly good reading. Young people will make mistakes, and care too much about what other people think, and lack self-awareness. At the end of the novel, the characters still lack self-awareness though at least they've realized that they love each other. The whole thing makes me think of mainstream fiction as a dumb genre. It doesn't even have the insights that Ender's Game or A Fire Upon the Deep engenders.

Review: Careless People

 Careless People is Sarah Wynn-Williams' memoir of her time at Facebook as Manager of Global Policy, a position she herself created and pitched at Facebook before becoming an employee. In some ways, it's predictable --- anyone joining an American corporation during these times of end stage capitalism as an idealist is bound to be disappointed. Anyone who read Lean In and not realize it was a propaganda piece written from a place of extreme wealth probably deserved to be disappointed.

One of the lobbyists, a woman in her forties, pulls me aside to say, “Don’t take the book seriously. It’s just a way to make you feel bad about yourself. Which is what Sheryl does.” She thinks I have stars in my eyes. I’m embarrassed to admit that maybe I do, so I just nod.  (kindle loc 1262)

They don’t discuss the real secret behind maintaining their work-life balance, mothering as if they don’t have children: it’s undergirded by their multimillion-dollar paychecks.  (kindle loc 1519)

 Of course top corporate bosses are hypocritical. Of course those people have multiple nannies. And of course, Facebook enabled and embetted extremist politicians getting into power in both the USA and elsewhere. None of this should surprise you. There's a huge section in the book about Facebook's willingness to break all rules of decency to get into China (it failed), but that's consistent with all the lying people inside Google did in order to get Google to invest in China. (And it wouldn't surprise you that most such people would justify it by saying if they didn't lie, someone else would lie and get paid the ginormous amounts of money to do so)

Ultimately, one of the worst things about entering into a free trade agreement with China was that rather than introducing democracy and encouraging public dissent in China like the neo-liberals thought, the Chinese seized on the opportunity to corrupt American public institutions and used them to serve their political purposes. It was definitely not a good trade.

The book has a ton of juicy stuff, including Sandberg's attempts to get the author in bed (literally, not metaphorically) on a transatlantic flight. It included all the crazy events leading to the author's poor performance review at the end that justified her firing (though she must have signed a nondisclosure agreement given that there's no mention of a severance package).

On the one hand, you read this and nod, knowing that Facebook had always been awful. On the other hand, you can't help thinking: "You pitched your dream job. You got it, and you probably were paid extremely well. What made you think you got to be a do gooder at the end as well?" In the end, the book fully justifies the statement I made once that Remains of the Day is still the ultimate silicon valley story. Kill yourself to work for a boss, never take a day off, and then find out in the end that you were working for a Nazi all along. Sounds familiar? It should. The difference is that in 2025, the Careless People won and you have no choice.

Review: Why Your Bike Is Made in Asia

 Why Your Bike Is Made in Asia is Bill McGann's memoir of his career first as a bike shop owner, then as a wholesale distributor (Torelli) importing bicycles from both Asia and Europe. Just like in the auto industry, the bike manufacturing industry in Japan, Taiwan, and China simply out-competed the European manufacturers on price, quality, and sheer industry. (By the way, I only remember the name Torelli because they'd imported some rims that were the worst rims ever made, breaking steel core tire levers trying to get tires off and on rims that were just a little too big)

Overall, the book is easy to read --- I'd bought it and finished it in the same day, starting with the invention of the bicycle and explaining that one reason cycling never took off in the USA was that the tire industry in the US was dominated by a company that refused to manufacture clinchers, ensuring that bicycles in the US were unreliable to the point where people preferred to walk than to ride a bicycle.

The first thing that struck me was that most of the US bike industry was really badly managed. Schwinn, for instance, was in its 3rd generation of being managed by a family member, and of course, its incompetence ensured that it never produced lightweight bicycles to compete with European (and later Asian) imports. The manager suffered severely from Dunning Krueger, and blamed everyone (including his employees who voted to unionized after being treated badly) for his failure. What I wish the book covered was actually the American success stories like Trek and SRAM:

Despite that hiccup, as a result of superb management and a good instinct for what Americans wanted to buy, the Wisconsin company went bravely on without me. Trek went from strength to strength and by the 1990s had far surpassed Schwinn in sales. Trek showed that the failure of American and European producers to compete with Asian factories was not the fault of location or workforce. As is nearly always true, the suits in the upstairs offices were to blame. (kindle lopc 1335)

The American manufacturers that succeeded had to compete against Asians who were cheaper, and Europeans who had a local market where cycling was much more popular, and Bill McGann had no insights to give us as to how they did so. Names were dropped like Jobst Brandt (curiously referred to as a bike historian!) and John Neugent. We read about the invention of Mountain Bikes by Tom Ritchey, Charlie Cunningham, and Joe Breeze, and the rise of Specialized taking over the mountain bike industry. The founder of Specialized, Mike Sinyard, was described as possibly the best businessman in the industry but we also do not get any special insight about why he was so great. Bear in mind the Specialized never manufactured in the US and so his wheelings and dealings to get his bikes imported and sold is a big deal. We also never get into how Quality Bicycle Products (QBP) became so dominant in part supply. We do get a treatise in indexing (which Shimano invented) and praise of it as being super reliable whereas in my personal experience, indexing works for precisely 3 months after which it never works again.

It's clear from reading the book that it has several limitations and gaps that need to be filled in if it's to be more than just a memoir of some bike guy who had next to no influence in the industry but nevertheless managed to acquire quite a bit of wealth doing so.  Nevertheless, it's a short read, and cheap at $4, and if you don't know most of this (which I didn't) is well worth reading.

Review: Rethinking Diabetes

 Rethinking Diabetes is about the history of diabetic treatment, and the various back-and-forths about diet for diabetic patients over the years, pre-insulin and post-insulin.  Pre-insulin type 1 diabetes was pretty much a death sentence, with children not living much past single digit years if at all. Type 1 was mostly unresolved except through a diet that pretty much excludes carbohydrates.

The history of how insulin was invented, and how it effected survival of patients with type 1 diabetes was described. For type-2 diabetics this enabled diabetics to eat carbohydrates. The author spends a lot of time complaining about how this switch was not accompanied by evidence, and how the promulgators of this approach basically used their standing within the medical community to shut down dissent.

In many ways this is a book with an agenda about how the medical community basically ignored the possibility of using a high fat diet to reverse diabetics and reduce insulin needs. To some extent this book is about the history of the keto-style diets and how they eventually came to be embraced despite the opposition of the medical community.

To some extent I think you have to take the book with a grain of salt. Science isn't easy, and if there's anything I've learned from Outlive, it's that the evidence for one diet over another is really slim and not as obvious as say, the dangers from smoking. So it's not through ill intention that the medical community was making high carbohydrate diet the default, but just that nobody really actually knows anything about nutrition.

In any case, I enjoyed the book. It got a bit repetitive at times, and the author seems to believe that the keto diet is the ultimate cure for diabetes. But that might still be a bit too optimistic as variation in human responses to diet seem to swamp our ability to do good studies on nutrition.

Reread: Outlive

 Outlive was onsale for $2 on the Kindle so I bought it and read it again. I keep being surprised at how detailed this book is, with a deep emphasis on long term prevention rather than trying to reverse chronic disease after it happened.

This time, I took action. As recommended, I got my doctor to prescribe me a continous glucose monitor. I'm surprised by how unreliable these devices are, which makes me even more determined to prevent diabetes. If I had to depend on these things to keep myself alive I might not last long!

Needless to say, the book's worth reading a second time. Recommended.

Review: Silca SuperPista Digital Floor Pump

 There was a sale on the SuperPista Digital Floor Pump. While I had a perfectly operational pump, the idea of a pump with a gauge that was accurate and had a reliable pump head was attractive. I bought one since I have multiple bikes in the garage and with the new wider tires and lower pressures in use having an accurate gauge was a good idea and could save time.

The Hiro chuck was a disappointment. It's actually just as finicky or maybe even more so than my older pump heads on the cheap pumps. Here's the deal, when you press it onto a presta head, you have to get it precisely correct. Push it down too far, and the lock won't activate, leading to frustration. Push it down not far enough, and you will get leaks just as with any other pump.

The digital gauge works, and while it reads a consistent 3psi lower than my trusty Topeak Smart Gauge, I can deal with systematic errors, and of course have no way to tell which one is off by 3psi. (I just opt for the higher number, since under inflation has worse consequences than slight over inflation)

So now my inflation trials can go either way. I'll start by grabbing the SuperPista, and if I get frustrated I switch to one of the older pumps. Not the end of the world, but I don't think it's worth full price, or even sale price to get this nice pump unless you have so little room at the spokes that you have to have the Hiro chuck.

Review: Soldier Son Trilogy

Soldier Son Trilogy was on sale for a low price, so I bought it since Robin Hobb had a good reputation Narrated from a first person point of view, the protagonist isn't very likeable, and you frequently want to yell at him to stop ignoring the obvious. 

The worldbuilding is simple: you've got a kingdom that just lost the war and decided to increase the size of its empire by prosecuting a war against nomadic people. They won this war and subjugated the nomads, and Nevare Burvelle is the second son of one of the successful soldiers who got elevated to nobility by the King. Having finished conquering the nomads, the kingdom decides to extend its empire into the forest dominated by the Specks, a hunter-gatherer culture. If all this sounds familiar, it's because the plot is very similar to that of the movie Avatar, with the Western-dominated culture represented by a monarchy rather than by a greedy corporation.

The society is patriarchal, with second sons expected to become soldiers and the narrator buys into all that, never questioning his father, his religion, or his role in life. Then his father has him trained by a one of the subjugated people who introduces him into a shadow world where he gains magical powers but refuses to acknowledge that they exist.

The writing is transparent and easy to read, and the story of Nevare making it to the capital and then getting embroiled in the politics of his world while being in the officer's academy somehow manages to avoid all the cliches. When the climax of the story arrives you're not surprised but the handling of it is great, and maybe even prescient. Neveare even changes his opinions at the end of the book. The series rewards careful reading as casual one liners can take on momentous consequences later on.

The second part of the trilogy is the worst section, as Burvelle's life goes from bad to worse, and he seems even more dense. But at the end of that section he goes natives and joins the Specks to fulfill his destiny as a forest mage destined to save them from the Western agricultural domination-based culture. 

The last book resolves all the issues while giving us a glance at the hunter-gatherer culture. I thought this part was very nicely done, with Burvelle trying to organize the culture and realizing the limits of the egalitarian hunter-gatherer culture and explaining why historically the agricultural patriarchies have always won out over the hunter-gatherers. The magic is never really explained, but the theme here is that you cannot have a partitioned self and expect to fulfill the destiny. The ending is all tied up nicely and a bit pat, but you cannot expect American authors to give you a bittersweet ending.

I enjoyed the series enough to plow through it all within a week, so I can recommend it. It's long and a bit draggy in parts but all in all the transparency made for good reading.

Review: Zatanna

 Zatana was billed as being written by Paul Dini, and she was one of the surviving members of DC universe's magic community after Alan Moore did in her father in Swamp Thing. Paul Dini had a good reputation and more importantly, the book was free on Amazon Prime reads, so I checked it out and read it.

Unfortunately, Zatana's magic lets her get out of many sticky situations without much effort. There's one scene where she gets injured in such a way where she can't speak, and that's about it. I was disappointing that there's really nothing very insightful about any of the stories. They're all light and easy reading, but you never get a deep insight into Zatanna, or even if there are any limits to her magic.

Review: Worlds

 I remember being at a Worldcon where a group of writers talked about fiction vs non-fiction. They asserted that since they wrote fiction, their works would never be obsolete and would sell year after year. Worlds shows how untrue that point of view is.

Worlds is set in a future where artificial satellites ("Worlds") orbit the earth, each a colony of hundreds of thousands. Yet these Worlds are still dependent on the Earth for hydrocarbons for which they exchange power from solar panels in space.

The protagonist, Marianne O'Hara, is a political science student who does a year on Earth in New York. The novel is written in the form of letters from her or entries in her diary. The point of view of the novel is as obsolete as you can get. For instance, the USSR is still in one piece, with several satellite countries and completely intact. Haldeman has his protagonist have to pay to send letters to her friends and lovers in space. She even buys the New York Times for $5 a copy to read on a transatlantic visit.

Similarly, New York City is just as dangerous in the far future as it was in the 1970s, with rape and murder a common occurrence. Haldeman couldn't imagine a future in which New York City was actually a safe place to visit.

As the plot unfolds, we finish the book with the Earth embroiled in a nuclear war, with plague weapons unleashed, while the remaining Worlds remain mostly intact despite sustaining damage. The writing is classic Haldeman, transparent and easy to read, but it's quite clear that science fiction becomes just as obsolete as any work of science writing or other non fiction.

Review: Batman/Catwoman

 Batman/Catwoman was on sale at a reasonable price, and I bought it hoping that it would be a great graphic novel. (Tom King's gotten many accolades for his handling of Batman)

The story flips between multiple timestreams. You have a future timestream when Batman/Bruce Wayne is dead, and his daughter Helena is Batwoman. You never really see Batwoman catching criminals or fighting criminals. She obviously has a beef with her mother, Selina Kyle, and spends a lot of time fighting with her.

Then there's the timeline of the past, when Catwoman/Selina has met Batman/Bruce Wayne, but they're not married yet. We get to see multiple pursuits, some sex, and a wedding ceremony, and even a bit about Helena's upbringing. Yet there's something missing --- we never see why Selina holds out on the Joker. We never even see what her motivation is for helping the Joker.

Finally, we get to see Selina's origins. Again, there's a shallowness there. We never see why she becomes a burglar. And given that she's actually good at her job, we don't see why she's still a burglar after all these years. Even more important, there's a central event in the story (one where Robin chases her down for) and we never get to see it. It's forever alluded to, never revealed, and never shown.

I'm glad I paid very little for this book. It's a lot of teasing, not a lot of showing.

Review: Navaris Long Handle Ti Spork

 My go-to freeze-dried backpacking meals are the Mountain House pouches. The flavors are usually decent, and the cooking easy. The pouches also double as eating bowls so you can reduce the amount of silverware you have to carry.

The biggest problem with the pouches is that regular length silverware can't reach deep into the pouch. So you end up with greasy, dirty hands at the end of the meal. When I saw the Navaris Long Handle Ti Spork, I knew this was what I'd wanted. At $10/spork, it's cheap enough to outfit a family of 4. They're light (hey, it's Ti), and come with a pouch so that you can keep the spork away from other dirty stuff in your backpack. The long handle ensures you can get every last calorie out of those expensive Mountain House pouches without getting your hands dirty.

There's nothing else I want out of sporks. Get these.

Review: GTYOPR Collapsible Cups and Bowls

 I've long been a fan of the snapfold cups, bowls, and dishes that Arturo was using on camping trips. They were really light, easy to clean, and seemed to work very well. But I was not a fan of the prices. At $17 a set, that was a lot of money for something that Arturo told me wasn't going to last.

I found an equivalent on AliExpress, but (1) the shipping took forever, and (2) what arrived wasn't what was described. Instead of a set, I got 4 of the same type. That's what you get for trusting AliExpress.  Luckily, it was the holidays and for $16 I ordered a dozen of the items I was missing from Amazon, a brand called GTYOPR. With Amazon shipping, it was fast and even better, I was protected if they didn't ship me what I wanted. It's no longer the holidays and that maker is no longer selling, but there are equivalent still available like ChenShuo.

During the Kepler track hike, at the various huts, once in a while someone would ask me about them, because they looked so light, so easy to use, and easily flattened, taking no space in your backpack. Fozzils (the guys who invented the Snapfold concept) needs to stop being greedy and just realize that a product that's not made to last (and has plenty of Chinese competitors) isn't going to sell. I would have been willing to pay a premium to support the inventors, but a 4x premium is ridiculous.

Review: Justice (DC Graphic Novel)

 DC put a bunch of graphic novels on sale, and I noted that I'd never read Justice before, and the artist was Alex Ross, which made it a buy for me.

The opening of the novel is fantastic. The villains of the world got together and announced that while the superheroes have focused on fighting super-villains and preserving status quo, they'd never done anything to improve things that matter to ordinary people, like cure diseases or build housing for the homeless. And they proceed to do that, creating a miracle cure and offering the poorest the opportunity to move into newly built cities.

Of course, this being a graphic novel, the superheroes soon discover that it's a scam (how could it be otherwise?). The plot is convoluted, and we get a few interesting fights (far fewer than you would expect), but in the end our heroes prevail and we discover who the master villain is, as the various super-villains in the DC universe could never expect to cooperate with each other.

Unfortunately, the novel never grants our heroes the epiphany that they could make the world a much better place than just by preserving the status quo. In fact, at the end of the story we return to status quo, which makes it quite unsatisfying.

Re-read: Kingdom Come

 Kingdom Come is Alex Ross's beautifully painted story set in the future of the DC Universe that's non-canon. In this world, public opinion turned against the superhumans, forcing Superman to retreat to his farm and Batman's secret identity to be exposed.

Years later, we see that the effect of that superhuman ban is that the non-law-abiding superhumans have effectively created havok. Wonder Woman persuades Superman to come out of retirement, and he embarks on a war to bring those unruly humans back into prison.

Things go wrong, of course, as Lex Luthor and Bruce Wayne team up to keep Superman from becoming a dictator for the world. Of course, things don't go as they might seem, and we get a big fight in the end. We get apocalyptic visions, and of course the supernatural parts of the DC universe (Specter and Deadman) come into play.

You cannot beat Alex Ross's art. It is fantastic and a feast for the eyes. The plot is so-so, but as a result of the story not being canon, it gets to play games with the ending that you wouldn't expect. If only Wonder Woman could talk Alan Moore into coming out of retirement to work in comics again. Then we'd get great stories along with great art. But as a book, this one was decent fun. I even liked the ending.

Review: Jellyfish Age Backwards

 Jellyfish Age Backwards is a survey about the various state of our understanding about longevity and methods about preventing aging. It probably doesn't descibe anything you don't already know: eat less, eat more vegetables, exercise more, and supplements may have side effects that are actually deleterious to your health.

One thing that I did learn is that it might be a good thing to give blood on a frequent basis. That drains iron from your body and apparently excess iron is a bad thing.  It turns out that like everything else, the human body was designed to withstand minor injury and build back better, so this counter-intuitive action helps more than it hurts.

By and large, progress in various drugs, etc to improve lifespan have not panned out and has not worked. Progress is slow despite huge amounts of money being put into it. This book is a reminder of how hard won even those meagre gains are. Treasure your health while you have it, because history suggests once you lose it we don't really know how to get it back.

Review: Twitter and Tear Gas - The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

 All through the COVID19 pandemic, Zeynep Tufekci was one of the smartest voices in the various places she was published in. Her article in the Atlantic was one of the first to recognize that unlike conventional wisdom, COVID19 was spread through aerosols. Despite her book, Twitter and Tear Gas, being only available in legacy format as a hardcover at the library, I placed a hold on it, checked it out, and read it.

I've long had a low opinion of Twitter (even before Elon Musk bought it), and I maintain that having one social network is all anyone ever really needs. I've tried and bounced off instagram, threads, and various others, and my BlueSky account is sadly neglected.

Tufekci explicates the reason that Twitter was used during the Arab Spring and had the ability to topple dictators. Unlike Facebook, which required consent on both sides before one person could read posts by the other, the default on Twitter was world readable. This allowed activists to @mention people who could reshare their point of view. She describes in great detail how 4 remote activists (who weren't activists before the event) worked on logistics to supply a field hospital during one of the Arab Spring protests that occupied a city square. The logistics were conducted using Google Sheets, while they managed to get everyone to tweet at them what they needed or what they could supply. It was amazing to watch.

I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion of how social media like Twitter and Facebook enabled information cascades that made people willing to go to a protest. There's a great exploration of why people join in person protest --- it's an entrance into the kind of world that people dream about. She describes a world in which kindness is the norm, where transactional relationships don't happen. One woman describes falling asleep at a park bench, and waking up to discover not only was her phone sitting next to her not stolen, someone had wrapped a blanket around her.

There's the dark side of social organization over the internet through Twitter, etc. Tufekci contrasts the civil rights movement with the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street movements. By the time the bus boycotts in Montgomery or the Civil Rights Marches had happened, the organizations involved had spent years building up their organizations, negotiating on directions, agreeing on leaders, and setting up trust between the rank and file and the representatives. That gave them the ability to pivot and make decisions quickly when things were going their way, and also gave them obvious representatives for the establishment to work with in order to get what they wanted, both politically and socially.

By contrast, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements were essentially flash mobs organized through consensus. Their marches and occupations were huge, but they entered what Tufekci calls Tactical Freeze, where they had nowhere to go when the establishment tried to negotiate and try to give them what they want, because they didn't know what they wanted, and they couldn't agree on a process to come to any agreement. In fact, the Occupy Wall Street movement explicitly didn't want any leaders or representation. Tufekci points out that this isn't completely irrational. Not having leaders meant that the government/opposition couldn't just murder somebody and stop the movement cold. Nor could the leaders be bought off or corrupted if there wasn't any leadership. But in the case of the Arab Spring many of those movements succeeded in toppling a regime only to find them replaced by an equally brutal one because there was no organization in place to put in a better regime. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Tufekci descibes an incident in which John Lewis (of the Civil Rights Movement) wanted to come and give a speech to support them, and mendacious facilitator manipulated the crowd into disallowing him, even though only one person objected to Lewis giving a speech. That kind of behavior led to the Occupy Wall Street movement not having any friends.

The modern successful movement that organized via social media turned out to be the Tea Party. Following the protests, they had an organization (probably funded by the rich people who stand to benefit from this) that worked within the political system to get lower taxes.

The book ends with the modern reaction to social media generated protest movements. The status quo establishment learned that attempting to censor the internet (unless you're China) doesn't work. Instead, however, you can (in Steve Bannon's words) "flood the zone with shit." Misinformation, distraction, and cries of "Fake News", it turns out is a very effective way to dilute the credibility of activists or people working against a dictator or corrupt regime. Tufekci points out that even China doesn't censor criticism of the government. Instead, their army of propagandists simply flood the internet with unrelated stories to drown out the criticism.

I'm usually proud of myself for saving money by checking a book out of the library instead of paying for it. In this case I feel like a dummy lamb. I should have bought it for the kindle because I would have highlighted so much of this book and been able to quote it on this review. Next time I want to read this book I won't be so dumb. I'll just go out and buy it.

Review: EOS EF-M 55-200 4.5-6.3 IS STM

 The thing with the Pixel Pro 8 and 9 is that the phone cameras are now so good that pulling out a bigger mirrorless camera is more cumbersome while hiking. On top of that, the dumb camera makers took out what I consider essential features like GPS-tagging, so I felt punished every time I took a picture, got home, and then wanted to know where that photo came from. For an experiment I tried using the Canon Connect app to log a hike and map it back to the photos using a plugin, and it ate up a good 50% of the phone's battery for a 5 hour hike!

For anything beyond the 5X optical zoom on the Pixel 8 Pro, however, the EOS M5 still had a purpose, but I wasn't enjoying carrying the bulk of my EF-S 55-250 plus the EF-M adapter! I thought about buying a whole new camera and setup, but of course, newer cameras aren't supported by my Lightroom 6 perpetual license, and nothing is easily available for less than $2000, which is quite expensive for something that gets used only for special occasion.

So I bit the bullet and bought an EF-M 55-200 from eBay. It cost $255, which felt expensive for a used lens, but after selling the EF-S 55-250 for $100 on eBay, it didn't feel too bad. I ended up saving 240g for about $155, and the reduced bulk also made the camera far easier to carry on a Peak Design Camera Clip. 

The lens is sharp and the resulting photos are very impressive. Some day I may upgrade my camera gear, but as one of my friends pointed out, the EOS-M setup is probably the most bang for the buck today in photography gear, mainly because it's been orphaned! 

2025 New Zealand: January 5th - Epilogue & Conclusions

 It was raining by the time we put everything in the car and drove up to refuel it. Arriving at the airport, we found the New Zealand checkin counter. We got our bags checked all the way into San Francisco and then bought some more chocolate and ate breakfast before going through the very understated and uncrowded security line for the flight to Auckaland.

In Auckland, however, things were super confusing—the international terminal necessitated that we walk out of the domestic terminal we were in and then redo our checkin. Fortunately, Xiaoqin found someone who whisked us right to the front of the Fiji Airways domestic counter who re-issued our boarding passes after the passport check, and then told us that since we were frequent flyers we could board immediately after the first class passengers.

The flight to Nadi was easy, but then there was awful long wait at the Nadi airport. It was 10:00pm and late before we were boarded. I must have slept a bit during the flight home because it didn’t seem that long. We picked up our baggage from the carousel with no problems, zipped through customs and border patrol because of the MPC app (even faster than the folks who were waiting in line for their global entry interview) and were soon at home. Our trip was over.

Conclusions

A lot of Americans like New Zealand. My conclusion is that much like Australia and the USA, it’s a country where there’s no public transit and you have to drive everywhere, so that makes Americans feel comfortable. The scenery is gorgeous, as expected, and I wish we’d had more time to visit places like Abel Tasman National Park, and obviously the system for getting Great Walks definitely makes planning a New Zealand trip a factor in how good you are at getting through their DOC system.

2025 New Zealand: January 4th: Hokitki to Christchurch

 The sun came out again as we left Hokitika in the morning after breakfast, which was bought by walking to the supermarket in the morning. The drive up to Arthur’s pass was dramatic after the initial flat section, with a 16% grade near the summit and even a gallery. We found the parking lot for the hike up to the Arthur’s Pass Lookout after crossing over Arthur’s pass.

The hike was nice, but a little bit undramatic after the previous hikes we’d had this trip. We did the Bealey Valley Track as well to the viewpoint, but it too didn’t feel as spectacular as all the hikes we’d done before. Both hikes took 2 hours altogether, without a lot of visitors. As we left the parking lot we saw that more cars had shown up, indicating that we were just early.

At Arthur’s Pass village, we stopped by the DOC visitor center to discover that the Bealey Valley Track was designated “The Hike of the Day.” There were two more water fall hikes, but each would take about 2 hours round trip, so we bagged it and drove to Christchurch instead.

The drive to Christchurch was spectacular, a microcosm of New Zealand all in the space of 2 hours. We saw what looked like Texas, California, England, all in the space of several minutes. I was quite impressed. We got into Christchurch and our motel around 2pm, checked in and saw a couple of cyclists prepping their bikes in the parking lot. They were from Canada and were planning a ride around the island while mostly camping. Their plan was to first take the train over to the West Coast and then start riding.

We went out to the Korean fried chicken place for lunch. It was as fried as anything you saw in the US, and we couldn’t quite finish. After that, we walked downtown through the botanical gardens. The gardens were quite pretty but not even as spectacular as what we saw in San Jose.

Downtown Christchurch looked dead on a Saturday. I was nowhere prepared for that. It looked like the family in Wanaka that told us about the depressed economy was true. The church for instance was still under repair. The shopping malls looked surprisingly empty. It was disappointing. We bought some ice cream and walked back to the hotel for a quick break.

We saw that there was a large Costco sized supermarket nearby and decided to walk there to buy chocolate and honey to bring home. The walk there took us past a huge diversity of restaurants, many of which looked really attractive. I realized that New Zealand is a lot like the USA. The downtown has been hollowed out because everyone just drives everywhere. When we got to the supermarket it was in a huge American-style mall, and it looked like Costco inside. We bought some honey, and what seemed like a large amount of chocolate (though in practice within 2 weeks of coming home we’d ate it all, so it clearly wasn’t enough!).

We ate at a Vietnamese noodle shop on the way back for dinner and then went back to pack everything up. The wind blew and it started raining. I successfully checked into the Fiji Flight from Auckland back to Nadi and then San Francisco but couldn’t check into the Christchurch to Auckland leg because that was ran by Air New Zealand.

Review: Platypus Quickdraw Filter

 Our Katadyn BeFree water filter was getting old, to the point where on a recent hiking trip it was an intense amount of work to get water through it. I asked Arturo if there was a better alternative nowadays and he mentioned the Platypus Quickdraw. There was an Amazon sale on the filter just before the New Zealand trip, so I bought one.

The device is light, fairly intuitive to use, and most importantly, fast when used with clean water like what we had at the various Kepler Track huts. Because it never got that hot, we never needed to use the filter on other days. On the one day it got really hot, we got tired long before we ran out of water.

I had a couple of accidents with the bottle, each time it was due to not screwing in the water bottle properly. When I remembered to do that, the filter was absolutely fool-proof. It was light, fitting into the small titanium pot I'd brought along for the trip. That it actually did do filtering was noticed at the Manapouri hut, where the tannins in the water did get filtered out.

Can't complain about something this easy to use and waterproof, other than the price.

2025 New Zealand: January 3rd - Alpine Junction to Hokitiki

 

We woke up to cloudy skies and a hint of rain. As we put the luggage into the car it started drizzling on us but the roads were still dry. By the time we drove past Lake Hawea, it had started raining in earnest, though we could still step out of the car to take a picture or two. By the time we got to the Lake Wanaka Lookout, the wind was so strong that being out of the car was unpleasant.

Past Lake Wanaka, the road went uphill towards Haast Pass, but strangely enough the rain actually stopped. Past Haast Pass, we stopped Fantail Falls and Thunder Creek Falls, both falls being interesting to look at, but ran out of patience and skipped Roaring Billy Falls as we drove at full speed towards the West Coast. Once on the West Coast we stopped at Ship Creek to stare at the Tasman sea once more. There were walks but we started getting bitten by sandflies and decided to bail out and keep driving.

The big attractions on the West Coast are the Fox Glacier and the Frans Josef Glacier. However, the roads/trails to both glaciers were closed and the only option was taking a helicopter assisted hike. That was expensive and we’d already touched glacial ice on this trip (and walked on the Athabasca Glacier in 2023), so we altered our plans to take the Lake Matheson Walk instead.

Arriving at the town of Fox Glacier, we refilled with gas and then went to the Lake Matheson Cafe for lunch. The walk was of course disappointing. All the pictures you see of Lake Matheson are taken in the early morning or evening when the wind dies down. In the afternoon during a storm with the wind blowing the lake has no reflections to speak of. It was just a much needed excuse to stretch our legs.

After the walk, we drove to the Fox Glacier lookout for a grand view of the Fox Glacier. Xiaoqin and I were impressed but the kids weren’t. It started raining as we left the lookout, and in fact, just before the Waikukupa River, the rain came down in sheets, driving visibility down to less than 30 feet and forcing me to slow down despite the windshield wipers going off at maximum speed. It was a short thunder burst, however, and after that harrowing section things went back to normal. We drove past the Frans Josef glacier, once again eschewing all those ads for helicopter tours on a day when it didn’t look like helicopters were going to leave the landing pads.

Arriving at Hokitika at 4:30pm, we checked into a very strange hotel where the reception was a bar. They showed us our two rooms, which were tiny with no AC, with shared bathrooms. The place was cheap and we paid cash. We walked out to dinner at the Hokitika Club, which looked like a bar with a dinner attached to it off to one side. We sat down and ordered the food, which came in generous portions but weren’t anything special to my taste.

By the time we were done, it was 6pm, which was still enough time to drive to the Hokitika Gorge for an after dinner walk. The drive there took 40 minutes, getting us there at a time when the parking lot was pretty empty. We started the walk and it felt nice and deserted though there were still a few other walkers about. The color of the gorge water was remarkable, being blue due to the glacial flour in the water.

The walk was normally a loop but the bridge on one side was broken so it was an out and back. The water looked inviting but it was in fact quite cold being recent glacial melt. We opted not to swim and hiked back to the parking lot where a Buff Weka was walking around looking for leftover hiking food. We visited the other side of the broken bridge and then went back to the hotel to shower and go to bed.

Review: Hydrapak Flux Collapsible Water Bottles

 Having given up on Hydration Packs, I'd been carrying reusable water bottles for hiking, usually insulated ones. However, those are heavy, and the forecast for temperatures in New Zealand when we were going indicated that they would never get that hot. In addition, on a 4 day backpacking trip, you're not going to get a chance to put ice in the water bottle anyway, so insulation is just extra weight for no good reason.

There was a sale on the HydraPak Flux over the holiday period, so I bought two of the 750ml bottles. They weigh 94g each, or about a quarter the weight of a Hydraflask of the same capacity. The cap was surprisingly well designed. You give it a half turn, flip open the cap, and then you can drink like from a water bottle. There's the usual plasticky flavor at the start, but bottle cleaning tablets got rid of the taste right away.

The biggest concern with such light bottles is that they could tear a hole easily and then you're out a water bottle. (That's why I bought 2!) But I dropped them multiple times and not once did they develop holes. The cap design also ensured that it never spilled. Surprisingly, the bottle did not change shape when not full --- there's enough air and the bottle is air tight that the bottle retains its shape, so it kept fitting nicely in the water bottle pockets of my backpack.

For a day hike on a hot summer day in California, you're not going to beat the insulated metal bottles. But for winter hiking or a multi-day trip where every ounce you're carrying matters, these are the ones to get!