First day in Hokkaido

20 minutes out from the airport, I find a dead-end, and we end up climbing over the fence to get to the road we actually wanted to ride on. That means we actually are having an adventure!

It was kind of rainy, though, and tomorrow's going to be really bad, so we'll be in Sapporo for 2 nights to wait out the rain and do our touristy things, before heading towards Yubari and Furano.

The food is amazing. I knew I liked Japanese food, but the quality and price has blown me away (yes, cheap!). If you want good food cheap, forget France. Tour Japan!

Prologue

The flight from San Francisco to Narita was the easiest flight with a bicycle I had for years. Not only was I charged only $25 for my bike box being over the 23kg limit, Mark and Yana's cardboard boxes were so unscratched that I could only attribute that to ANA's careful handling. Upon arrival, we had to pick up all our luggage and check it in onto the domestic airline. Since there was no X-ray machine big enough to inspect the bike boxes, we had to open up the boxes at the airport for inspection --- yet ANA's representatives (all beautiful Japanese women) were so polite and apologetic that we did not mind.

The second check in took quite some time, but we had plenty of time to go pick up our free rental phones, and then head out to the sun to try to get enough light to reset our body clocks:

From Hokkaido

Japanese domestic security was a breeze, and once inside we got access to some surprisingly good airport food (though rather ungenerous in portions --- I had to order 2 meals to feel decently full), and met a bunch of mathematicians who were going to Sapporo for a conference.

Arriving in Chitose at 8:10pm, we were glad that we had opted to stay at Chitose airport's Hotel Com. Not only did it save a 45 minute ride to the Sapporo while wrestling bike boxes (not to mention searching for our hotel), the staff spoke English, and was happy to store our bike boxes and other luggage while we were away on tour.

I looked at the weather forecast for the next couple of days, and saw that it called for rain, with a 50% chance of thunderstorm on the 28th. I thus made the executive decision to scrap our original plans and spend a day exploring Sapporo instead, shifting the city exploration to the start of the trip rather than to the end.

Why all the moaning about Kindle DRM is a crock

Much like the inane obsession over security, I consider the endless moaning over Kindle DRM to be a crock.

In June, my Kindle broke. Since I already had 6 Kindles locked to my account, this was the DRM-fear-mongering person's nightmare. All my old books which I had bought had become unusable. I wasn't using the Kindle much at that time (when I'm at home, I rely on the library, rather than spending money on books), so I wasn't motivated to even call Amazon about it.

Now, on the eve of my Japan trip, I finally was motivated enough to call Amazon's customer support. I explained my problem, and in 3 minutes, Amazon's customer service rep released all my licenses and I could download all my books again. Now I have to leave the Kindle plugged into the wall charger while it re-indexes the universe.

Seriously, I don't understand the hyper-ventilating over DRM. If Amazon goes out of business or de-supports the business (very unlikely --- I expect Google to give up on books first), the DRM is so insecure that it's probably crackable. If not, I'm happy to keep giving them money for such a useful device.

Pre-Japan Shakedown Cruise

I normally manage to ride my bike in touring configuration for 2 weeks before a tour, but between the house move, my touring wheel being out on loan, and random other things, I just didn't get it together until today. Since I now have to carry a CPAP machine, I can no longer rely on the Nelson Longflap I've had over the years, and ended up with a Camper Longflap, which is a huge bag!

Yana and Mark joined me on their unloaded bikes, and we proceeded to take local roads to Piece. On Pierce, I felt the rear wheel rubbing, and at a local crest discovered that my rear tire was getting ready to blow. I quickly deflated the tire, reseated it, and then pumped it up again. At the top of Skyline, Mark observed that my rear wheel was out of true. I checked it out, and indeed, it looked pretty bad, but not enough to justify abandoning the ride --- we intended to drop by the Cupertino Bike Shop on the way home anyway!

The day was really warm, and by the time we got to Los Gatos, it was 1:15pm. We ate Pizza at the local place, then rode up to Cupertino, where one block before the shop, Yana snapped her deraileur cable! Luckily, we were right at the bike shop, so I borrowed the truing stand from the shop, and proceeded to tension up the wheel, adding a full turn on the right and a half turn on the left side. The only reason I stopped was because the nipples started binding --- I'd have to wipe dirt off, add oil, and then try to turn the nipples. Ah well. Nothing lasts forever, I guess. I think it'll survive the Japan tour.

Mark replaced Yana's brake cable, I bought some spare spokes, and we both bought rim tape, and now we're all ready for the tour!

Review: Squeezebox Duet

Short summary: DO NOT BUY. STAY AWAY

When I first bought a nice stereo system, someone recommended that I try a Squeezebox. I didn't bother because in the apartment, my computer was so close to the stereo I could just plug it in, so why bother.

Well, now I have a house, and the office with the equipment closet (NAS, wireless router, cable modem, and the EEE PC running Skype) is far away from the living room, so something like the Squeezebox makes sense. I ordered one and got it on Thursday, hoping that if it worked out, Lisa wouldn't have to deal with CDs while I was in Japan.

The box contains 3 items: a charging cradle for the controller, the receiver, and the controller. The first sign that the product was sub-par in quality was that the cradle was too big for the controller. What this meant was that when you put the controller in the cradle, the controller wouldn't charge! I had to resort to tearing up little pieces of paper and wedging them into the cradle so that the controller would have a good contact with the cradle's charging posts. This felt very silly, since if Logitech couldn't get their manufacturing act together, they should have used a simple, mini-USB port on the thing, skip the cradle, and everyone would be happier.

OK, then I had to install the SqueezeCenter software on either the EEE PC or my NAS. I installed it on both just to see which one would give me a good experience. Both installations went very smoothly --- products that rely on servers are usually nightmares, but this phase of the install went really well and I started looking forward to it.

I then connected the controller (which runs over WiFi, not infra-red) to my WPA network, started playing music, and all was well. Well, all was well for about 15 minutes. I showed the controller to Lisa and she loved it. Then midway through one of the songs on our playlist, the controller said, "Music stopped." That's it. An attempt to play got us nothing. The SqueezeCenter also would do the same thing. I rebooted the controller, and it got stuck at "connecting to Music source". I let it sit overnight, and woke up the next day to find all was well again.

For all of 15 minutes, then the controller started dropping out of WiFi. This time, though, controlling the receiver from the SqueezeCenter software worked. But the whole point of the deal was to be able to run music from the controller! My guess is that Logitech cheaped out on the Wifi Antenna for the controller (which is insane, given the price, but companies have been known to do insane things). I did a quick web-search and discovered that indeed, this was a common problem, and not isolated to just my house (which has great WiFi coverage everywhere, as you might expect --- it's just not that big!).

Well, at that point, I quickly packed everything backed into the box, printed an Amazon return label, and shipped it back. Logitech made way too many poor decisions in this product.

The standard system for this kind of stuff, according to people who would know, is Sonos. But at $1000 for a basic system, that's insane! I could buy another EEE PC, have it connect to the Firefly server, and dedicate to playing music, and still have enough money to buy a round trip ticket to Zurich for that! (Sure, the EEE PC won't have a remote, but I think I can write code to allow anyone to control the EEE PC from another PC)

I think my next step (to be done after I get back from Japan) is to try the Roku Soundbridge. It won't have as nice a remote controller, but it also won't break the bank either. If anyone has experience with this, let me know.

Review: Wireless

Wireless is a short story collection by Charles Stross. I had missed many of his earlier short stories so when it came out I immediately bought it.

The first story, Missile Gap made me think I had made a mistake --- it's about all of humanity being transplanted to a flat earth. There wasn't much resolution, and I didn't get any sense of the story going anywhere. I then discovered that I had read two of his previous stories, Rogue Farm and Down on the Farm. Despite their names they're not related. Down on the Farm is a lot of fun, but only if you've already read one of his earlier laundry novels, such as The Atrocity Archives.

Unwirer was written with Cory Doctorow. I've learned that I don't like Doctorow's work, so it wasn't surprising that I didn't like this one, either. Trunk and Disorderly was very reminiscent of Saturn's Children. It's a lot of fun, so I picked up at that point.

The kicker, however, was Palimpsest, easily the best novella I've read all year. This is a truly unique take on the typical time-travel story, and it was worth the $9.99 Kindle price all by itself, and boosted the book from mediocre to highly recommended all by itself. Buy this book just for that novella.

The Joys of Homeownership

I'm going to start a series of blog posts about owning a house. I'm learning about this homeownership stuff as I go along, and it's amazing how much there is to learn. Most of it, unfortunately, has to do with the house being a financial burden in unexpected ways.

Here's an example: we had the house remodeled (put in central heating/AC, a laminate floor, and double paned windows everywhere) before moving in. When I got the first water bill on Saturday after moving in, I was stunned by how much it was. It turned out that the previous owner had put in a new lawn, and new lawns have to be watered frequently while they establish themselves. Well, they don't have to be watered that frequently after a month, which was when we bought the house, but of course, I didn't know to turn down the water frequency. Sigh.

Then there's the Radon problem. Turns out that the ground under many parts of California is radioactive. Not in a directly harmful way, but enough so that irradiated air can come up into your home, since your home has a lower pressure than the outside. Well, breathing that air can be pretty bad for you, so we have to do some radon testing. The state of California subsidizes the test, so it's only $5 for a self-test kit. But it's one of those things that nobody seems to know about (about 12% of homes are affected, so it's worth your while to get tested!) Mitigation is relatively cheap, but it's non-trivial.

On the plus side, when it was 90 degrees on Saturday and Sunday, I really enjoyed having a well-insulated and air conditioned home! Boy, it was worth every penny. And it turns out that you can sign up for the smart AC program and get regulation of your AC system at peak demand times, which is pretty cool. And of course, not being in a carpeted environment is expected to do good things for my allergies as well.

I'll get into other housing annoyances as I find them, and I'll try to keep in mind that I really do enjoy living in a house as well.

Yellowjacket Sting OWOWOW

 

I got stung by a stinging insect on Saturday while riding my bike. I didn't even see it, since I was descending Stevens Canyon road at well over 30mph. First I felt a burning, and then I felt my glove feel extra tight and a burning sensation. Fortunately I was headed home anyway and got home within 15 minutes. By that time, my hand had become incredibly swollen! I had been stung many times before by insects, but never had such a reaction!

What really scared me, however, was that old sting sites started popping out of my skin as my body remembered every sting, every insult inflicted upon my body by insects previously. It was scary. I went to a doctor and he didn't seemed terribly worried, but prescribed me an epipen and prednisone "just in case I wanted to take a more aggressive approach." I did take Claritin right away, since my research on the web told me I should take an anti-histamine and I had it handy.

The next day, the swelling still wasn't down, so I took Prednisone and Benadryl. It took until Monday for the swelling to come down a little, and I stopped taking prednisone then, but kept taking claritin. By Tuesday I could ride and now I'm almost perfectly normal.

I did see my allergist today, however, and she told me what I should have done. First of all, epipen is nothing more than adrenaline, and your body knows how to produce it. So the first thing I should have done was to immediately turn around and hammer up a hill at maximum heart rate to induce my body to generate adrenaline. That works for at least 15 minutes, and apparently there are stories about folks who produced enough adrenaline to eliminate any reaction whatsoever (usually those were folks running from angry beehives!). Then, I should have immediately popped benadryl and then prednisone. Apparently, the sequence of events goes like this: sting -> epipen (works within a minute, lasts about 15 minutes --- long enough to get you to a hospital) -> benadryl (works within an hour) -> prednisone (takes about 6 hours to be fully effective, but starts working after a first hour). The epipen is just to get you to a hospital where the doctors will make you pop benadryl and prednisone. Claritin works too slowly to be of use in insect sting situations. Apparently, if the doctor I saw knew what he was doing, I could have saved myself a lot of grief, and might even have averted a severe reaction. This is not the first time that made me realize that the same huge difference between programmers also leads to a huge difference between doctors.

I asked, "So why don't I just do that and not go to a hospital?" "Because you're not a doctor," came the reply.

In any case, I was warned not to get stung again within the next month (I wasn't planning on it, thank you!), and then to submit to a skin test and then start insect venom immunotherapy sessions. She also gave me a prescription for 2 more epipens, along with instructions to carry benadryl and prednisone while I'm traveling in Japan.

Followup: I'm now on allergy immunotherapy shots

Review:Schlage Keypad Locks

We've had contractors in and out of the house to remodel it before moving in on Saturday. One of the last things to do would have been to change the locks. Then on Sunday I saw Amazon advertise a fingerprint door lock, and thought, hey, that's not a bad idea --- I can go key-less, and then authorize or de-authorize users as I please.

I quickly ruled out fingerprint readers, however, since all it would take is one flat tire on the way home from work and I would not be able to get into the house on account of dirty fingers. A keypad system, however, seemed to be the ideal compromise. For the front door, I chose the dead-bolt, because I wanted locking to be an explicit decision --- I didn't want to walk out to fetch mail and then end up having to press four buttons to get back into the house. For the back, I had no choice but to go with a self-locking handled setup, since the back door didn't have a dead bolt.

Incidentally, the place to order from is factory locks. They charge a bit more, but if you order more than one lock, they'll automagically key all the locks to the same key, which is very nice. Furthermore, if you order more locks in the future from them, you can give them your order number, and they'll key the new lock to the same keys! That's worth the extra cost in my opinion. They also ship extremely fast --- I got mine in 3 days.

I got the locks today and they were installed immediately by one of our contractors. The system works as described by the manual, though programming it is a little tricky because you really have to wait for the interface feedback before proceeding --- since there's no LCD display, you have to wait for the buttons to flash or change color before you start the data entry. But the results are very slick! It's amazing how freeing it is to not have to worry about keys when I leave the house any more. It's also nice to give each contractor and/or cleaning person an individualized pin that you can then enable just for the day of their visit and delete after they're done.

One potential flaw that someone pointed out to me was that the keypad itself could become worn down after a while, and if you stick to using the same pin over and over again, it suddenly becomes apparently which keys are frequently used, so you should switch pins every so often. And then there's the problem that there's a manual key override. What this means is that the lock system combines the security flaws of both the physical keys as well as the security flaws of the keypad system. You could disable the physical key system, but then now you have no backup override if you went for a vacation and the battery on the system drained while you were gone! My take on the whole thing is that security is a massive boondoggle anyway, and the real security you have is to buy in a neighborhood with low crime, because if a really determined person wanted to take your stuff, they'd just break a window and climb in. So I'll just not worry about it.

The big flaw I can see in the system so far is that the batteries will have to be changed, and it's not an easy battery change. You basically have to unscrew the whole door knob or dead bolt to put in a new 9-V battery. If the batteries last for the specified 3 years that's not too annoying, but it does mean that you should leave a manual override key with a relative just in case you go on vacation and come back to find yourself locked out.

Despite all these flaws, this is an incredibly slick system. I really like it, and it's the first thing about buying a house that hasn't been incredibly costly and a major pain in the neck. That makes it highly recommended.

Management

Reed Hastings and I had a conversation in April to catch up. I was reminded of it again when his presentation on corporate culture came to circulate around various social networks. One of the questions Reed asked me at the time we had the discussion was whether I had any thoughts about management in the valley, having worked at more startups than he had (and also being in the less enviable position of not being the CEO at any of the startups).

One thing that conversation did was to get me thinking about the academic model of management that Google espouses. When I say management, I'm really talking about promotions, because that's how company culture reinforces its values (slide 7 in Reed's presentation). In 2004, I was an enthusiastic supporter of the academic peer-driven model. It felt much better than having a manager evaluate an individual contributor --- that model, I felt, always risked the problem of having a manager that was susceptible to brown-nosing. By the end of last year, however, I was seeing weaknesses in the academic model, many of which are articulated better than I ever could in The Trouble with Physics. In particular, what I saw was that certain types of problem-solvers and approaches were systematically under-valued --- and in many ways it's better to be someone who puts out fires than someone who prevents them from happening in the first place (note that it's not just the academic model that has this problem --- the top down model also does this --- in many large organizations, it's far better to quietly prepare a fire-fighting scheme if you see a fire happening than to try to prevent fires). The problem was that I couldn't see a better model, despite all the weaknesses of the peer-driven model. Like Democracy, I thought, the peer-driven model was the worst one in the world, except for all the others.

Reed told me he was a big fan of the traditional top-down model well done. The problem was that at startups (or even most big companies), I had yet to see the traditional top-down model well done. I frequently saw yes-men type middle management who couldn't say no to senior management, and all too frequently talent ignored in favor of hiring yet another manager from outside (something that startups do all too frequently). So I started asking around. I was struck by an insider's explanation of how Silos were broken down at Microsoft: the top 50 or so managers were called "partners", and their compensation was not at all related to their areas of influence, control, expertise, or title. Their compensation was tied completely to how the company performed, which basically made it so that all partners would help each other out if it was important to the company. That's a fascinating approach to solving the Silo problem, and to me, anyway, it provides an alternative to the academic peer-driven model that I saw as being imperfect. The problem is that the top down model still depends very much on having good managers. Even having had the luck to have exceptionally good managers at Google and elsewhere, I still run into enough poor managers at otherwise high quality places to believe that management hiring is anything but a crap-shoot at best --- no amount of interviewing will tell you that this guy who's a super-star on his resume is actually going to lead all your good people to leave over the next 5 years because of the way he plays favorites amongst his reports. This is why I believe that startups should grow managers from inside if at all possible. As Andy Grove once wrote: "People often complain that when you turn a great engineer into a manager, you get a mediocre manager and lose a great engineer. But think about the alternative? What message do you send if you pass over the smartest folks on your team in favor of someone from outside?"

In any case, I see the Netflix culture document as Reed's expression of his ideal approach to management --- it's another data-point in how to approach the fundamental problem of how a company organizes itself. There're also many ways of doing it wrong --- the worst of which is to pick a model that doesn't fit your management style and then coming across as hypocritical to all employees.

Ultimately, however, one must bear in mind that these discussions are moot if the business is unsuccessful --- that Google, Netflix, and Microsoft have to contend with these organizational headaches is a good sign --- failed businesses never have to worry about scale.

Gazos Creek Loop

Only Brooks Sizemore was interested in this ride, so I meet him at the corner of Homestead & Foothill at 9:35am. He was joined by 3 other friends, and we rode together up Redwood Gulch on what turned out to be a surprisingly warm day. At the top of Highway 9, the others said goodbye to us and we proceeded down 9. Traffic was unusually heavy down 9 and 236, and indeed when we arrived at Big Basin State Park HQ there was a massive traffic jam.

We filled up our water bottles, ate some bars, and then proceeded down to Gazos Creek road, the highlight of the ride. It's a wide double-track fire road, and in the summer it gets quite loose and dusty, but it's a nice shaded easy grade with no traffic --- until we got past the second gate and ran into the first of two BMWs driving up the road. I guess it can't be too steep if BMWs can drive up it!

The road then got a little steep and gravelly, and in places my bike fish-tailed around a bit as I hit gravel and sand together --- the toughest part was how rough it was, and there were moments when I started seeing triple because I was being bounced around quite a bit.

I kept waiting for the steep and tough part that I remember from many years ago --- dust that came up to ankle deep so I was forced to walk, but it looks like the road had been regraded and we made it all the way down to the pavement without any need to walk whatsoever. The paved part of Gazos Creek road was really pretty, which surprised me --- I had no recollection of doing it before, having done it last about 10 years ago.

Brooks was hungry and had brought no food, so we headed to Pescadero where there was again another traffic jam and we proceeded to wolf down a loaf of that Garlic-Artichoke bread. After that we headed over to North road, and made an easy climb out of Haskins hill and West Alpine before descending Page Mill road. From the top of West Alpine, we could tell it was getting late in the afternoon as we could see fog coming in from the coast, slowly covering up the coastal hills.

I got home around 5:30pm, making it an elapsed 8 hours. A challenging ride with 82 miles, 8091' of climb, 7 hours saddle time, and interesting scenery. Recommended for those who have decent enough bike handling skills for the 11 miles of unpaved fire road portion of Gazos Creek Road. Folks will tell you that 28mm tires are required, but Brooks had 23mm tires and I only had 25mm tires.

Comments Vampirism and the Segregation of Communities

The last few days have been interesting experiments in the nature of social networking and social networking sites. I mostly write my mid-length articles on my blog, which gets syndicated to FriendFeed and Facebook. The problem is, the two communities are mostly disjoint, and each has their own comments mechanism and database, so the two never meet.

Take for instance, my recent blog post on Politics. It has 1 comment on the blog proper, two comments over at friendfeed, and two comments on Facebook. And none of them talk to each other. Might we have had a more interesting discussion if somehow everything went into one comment database? I'll never know, but I know for sure I'm irritated at having comments split between my blog and 2 social networking sites with no ability to consolidate them or having them indexed by Google, unlike the comments on this blog!

What's good about comments on the social networking sites is that I never have to moderate them (or at least, I haven't had to do so yet), since they only get written to by my friends. The blog itself does get semi-frequent bouts of link-spamming, which is why I have moderation turned on, but what I really want is a service that will consolidate all the comments together in one place and allow a true conversation to take place, regardless of whether you're coming through a social network or through a Google search. Let's think a bit about what features such a service would have:

1. Multiple moderation modes: I'd be happy to leave Facebook comments unmoderated, and moderate Friendfeed entries after the fact, but the blog has to have comments vetted since it frequently gets spam.
   
2. Comment mirroring: all the comments from one social network or the blog would get mirrored to all the other social networks. That way, a conversation can happen between folks who aren't signed onto the same social networks, with my blog as the common link. Conversely, if I delete a spam entry, I want all the networks to mirror that deletion as well.
   
3. Identification: I would like to be able to see, "Hey, so and so replied to me from Facebook --- he must have a Facebook account, and I forgot to add him to my friend list, so I'll go do it now."
   

I'm sure there are other nice things to have such as threading, direct messages, etc., but since I don't run a high traffic blog, just those 4 features would make my blog more useful to my friends, and go a long way towards having real conversations on the web be interesting. Of course, with Facebook's policy of running a walled garden, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for someone to implement this.

Review: Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream - A Day in the Life of Your Body

Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream is Jennifer Ackerman's science book about your body over a 24 hour period. Amongst the many topics, it discusses the circadian rhythm, how brains, stomach, muscles, and sleep works, all in a very general but literate way (you can tell Ackerman was an English major).

The unfortunate side effect of all that literacy is that Ackerman frequently digresses into personal details, so much of the book talks about her family, her memories, and everything else.

As far as the scientific details are concerned, this book reminds me very much of I am Joe's Body, an extremely high level introduction to the biology of the human body, though clearly Ackerman writes for a much higher level of reading skill than Reader's Digest.

Unfortunately, the result of such broad coverage is shallow-ness. You certainly don't get the in-depth study of sleep seen in The Promise of Sleep, and the section on multi-tasking is no better than what I read in Traffic. This is very unfortunate, since every new fact she came up with I feel like I'd read already in some New York Times article (like the one about exercise actually improving your ability to think) or some other book.

I guess if you're not a science junkie like me, this book might give you something new. Otherwise, give it a pass.

Hubs

Recently, Pardo and I found a click-click-click noise in my 3.5 year Shimano DuraAce 7700 freehub. While it was well past the warranty period, this wheel had only about 10000 miles on it, and was never ridden in the rain, so while we took it apart, overhauled it, immersed the freehub driver in bio-diesel, and re-lubricated everything, we discussed what other hubs would have lower maintenance but still remain relatively light.

The lowest maintenance hubs out there are probably the Phil Wood FSA hubs. As Pardo says, "Cheap, durable, light, pick any two. Oh wait, the Phils are just durable. They're expensive and heavy." But nothing beats Phils for durability --- I bought a pair in 1993, rode them for 10 years or so, and sold them in 2005 for $10 less than what I paid for them. Yes, there's inflation, etc., involved, but still, that's pretty darn good.

Then we looked at another important factor, which is the rear hub flange spacing. To check out the numbers, download Spocalc, and try playing with wR on the rear hub. Then observe how the difference between left and right spoke tensions change as you increase or decrease the distance the right flange is from the center of the axle. A decrease from 20mm to 16mm (just 4mm) results in the right side tension dropping from about 75% of the left side tension to 50%. That's almost 30% loss in strength, which is directly related to the total tension in the spokes on the wheel. (You have less overall tension in the wheel when you can't tighten up the right side spokes)

So we took a survey of various hubs using information we could find online (these are all 130mm cassette hubs):

Hub	wR (mm)
Shimano 7700	21.1
Shimano 7800	20.55
Phil Wood Touring	18
Chris King	18.5
White Industries H2	18
DT Swiss 240s	17
Campy Record 2007	15.2

Yes, for wheel strength, Shimano rules, and Campagnolo sucks. This is by design --- Campagnolo designed their cassettes to require more space on the right side of the hub, which meant that for any given model of hub, the Campy version of the hub is weaker than the Shimano version. But you can see when it comes to actual hub implementation, nobody can touch Shimano. A wheel built using the Campagnolo hub is weaker than one using the same hub and spokes and built using either of the Shimano hubs listed here. (Note that there's quite a bit of variation among Shimano hubs, so it's not enough to just use a Shimano hub, you have to use a good one)

No, this doesn't mean that non-Shimano hubs completely suck. If you build with off-center rims (OC), they help you regain some of that lost strength, which means that it doesn't matter as much that your hubs' right flange isn't optimal (in fact, if you're running Campy wheels, you have to run OC rims to have any wheel strength at all). On the other hand, you can build with a Shimano hub and an OC rim, and that'll be even stronger! In exchange, however, you do have to overhaul Shimano hubs every 5000 miles or so, and until the 7900 debut, you have to deal with cone wrenches and hub pre-load adjustment, which I consider a major pain in the neck! I haven't seen the 7900s yet, so I don't know how much of the "you no longer need cone wrenches" part is marketing.

On the plus side, Shimano hubs do look pretty good, roll nice and smoothly when properly maintained, and have a very quiet ratchet (I'm do like how quiet the freehub is --- you can barely hear it if you're rolling along in a quiet neighborhood).

Obviously, even Shimano hubs can be badly built into wheels, so ultimately good wheel-building technique still trumps all, but given how much time it takes to build a good wheel, you might as well start with the hub that gives you the best results given your effort.

More Right Wing Stupidity

Ben Stein suggests that providing healthcare is the province of charity and the states:
I am bound to say I feel queasy even writing this, because I do sincerely feel it is wrong for the poor not to have good medical care. But maybe this is the province of the states or of charity. Maybe it is something that can be worked out without the federal government dictating terms to the affluent. Maybe as important as health care is, individual freedom and private property are indispensable, too. The whole subject is almost terrifying.

Just as one person, I would give a lot to charity to save my family and the future from this kind of redistribution that could mean eliminating freedom and devastating the financial plans of the most productive among us.
The states are pretty much tapped out. Total charitable contributions in 2007 was $307 billion (and it's gone down since). The Medicare budget for 2007 was $394 billion. And that leaves the 40+ million Americans uninsured!

That's right, you could direct all the charitable contributions into healthcare, and not come close to even being able to sustain Medicare. That's right wing ideology for you --- ignorance of facts, and inability to look at numbers --- jingoism and free-market ideology will get us through!

Review: ProBar High Performance Nutrition Bar

Cynthia Wong recommended this bar to me, despite it being extremely expensive. Since she's almost as much of a cheap-skate as I am, I bought an entire box, figuring that if I didn't like it I could sell it to her. (Plus, I'm a sucker for Banana flavored anything --- I love bananas!)

I tried it yesterday on a short ride with 42 miles and 5300' of climb. The bar is small and compact, which is great if you're trying to carry a lot of calories in a small package (each bar is 380 calories) The first impression you get when you bite and chew is that wow, this thing has great flavor. The next impression is, "wow, it's kinda dry, good thing I'm next to a water fountain." It does have honey in it, so it's not completely dry, but there's enough food that you have to down it with a significant amount of water, so it's not a good choice on a really hot day if water supplies are far and few between. Lisa liked the flavor, but found that she couldn't finish it all in one go during a short hike, because of the amount of chewing required, and the dryness.

All in all, the bar is not terribly cost effective --- most food bars a $1/200 calories, and this one is more like $1/165 calories. On the other hand, it tastes pretty good and is nice and compact (3oz/bar) for high calorie density, so I expect that I'll be using it on tours when energy density is a prime requirement and water is plentiful.

Politics

I once dated a lady who told me that politics is for young people. "Older people," she said, "have no time for it." Yet I've found for myself that as I get older, I become more concerned about it, and not just because Healthcare and Health Insurance Policy affects me deeply and personally.

A colleague and I were having dinner the other day, and he complained to me that his significant other wasn't taking her impending job loss seriously, either by searching for another job, or starting her own business. My response, "Well, I used to puzzle over that, and then I realized that I went to school working two jobs rather than taking on debt, while others were happy to go to school full time, and I take vacations that are ambitious and difficult. The number of people in the world willing to work as hard or hustle as much as you and I are is very limited, which is why when I meet them I am willing to invest in them."

When Pengtoh and I were roommates in college, he was on a scholarship while I was working my way through school. He and I started doing system administration in Silicon Valley as a side-job --- we would drive down in the evenings around 7pm, and work till 6am setting up workstations for Crescendo Communications, which would pay us $20/hour. I would then stagger into the class I was the TA for (I was an undergraduate TA) at 8am with bloodshot eyes and graded papers, scaring the heck out of my students.

With that kind of background, you would think that I would grow up to be one of those wild-eyed libertarians, and to be honest, I've had one date accuse me of being a Republican during our first date (needless to say, we didn't have a second). But the truth is, what I've noticed is that it's usually the white, over-privileged types that become Libertarians, not those of us who struggled and hustled like mad when we were younger.

The reason is that most of us who were under-privileged were grateful to our lucky breaks. In my case, the Pell grant paid for my first year's tution, and the work-study program paid for my second year's, whereupon I had built up enough credit and reputation (together with a half year's paid internship) to land both the gigs I discussed above, and then a career in Silicon Valley. Without those breaks, my life would have been even tougher.

The federal government and the state of California invested in my brothers and I in terms of our education (Berkeley's tuition is an incredible bargain). At this point, that investment has paid off hundreds of times, maybe even thousands, in terms of taxes we've paid back to the state and to the federal government. That's one reason why when several folks I knew were fleeing for lower-tax regimes, I didn't feel like I had to join them (the other reason was --- if I'm rich enough to retire, I'm going to do it some place where the weather is actually decent --- you're not rich if you can't afford good weather so you can go cycling/sailing/hiking year round).

What amazes me, though, is that the Libertarian party line seems to be that investing in smart, under-privileged people (in other words, people who are under-valued by the market) is considered robbing the deservedly wealthy to giveaway to the undeserving poor, rather than investing in under-valued properties that has potentially high returns (sure, not all such investments make back the money --- but just like with startups, you only need one such good investment per hundred to pay off all the non-performing ones). No wonder Libertarians have given up on Democracy! With that kind of anti-social attitudes, no wonder so many of them dream of building their own country --- they have to, because if they moved to a tax-haven, their own body guards would be tempted to murder them. I'm going to be very entertained to see if such Libertarian paradises work out (I suspect they won't, unless they're simply monarchies owned by the "libertarian").

What amuses me more is that many Libertarians try to hide their anti-social attitudes (which is really more like, "I've made my millions, screw you!") by posing as defenders of freedom. I grew up in Singapore --- I've seen what it's like in a totalitarian society --- the people who defend freedom are the ones going to jail there, not these posers, who're really only out to cut taxes on themselves. They certainly aren't the ones speaking out on behalf of civil liberties, and are in fact, frequently complain that giving women the vote was a bad idea.

I had a conversation with Brad Delong a few years ago when he visited Google. I asked him if he had any hypothesis on the number of libertarian programmers out there. He had what I think was a very plausible theory: "There is a need for a 23-year old to justify his sudden wealth. It's against his ego and self-image to imagine that he had been lucky, somehow he must deserve it." Hence, I call Libertarianism a religion --- it makes you feel good about yourself, gives you justification to consider outsiders worthless, and makes you think that democracy is a terrible idea and theocracy is a better one. Too bad the recent financial crisis has given the lie to the free market ideology.

Review: The Language of Power

The Language of Power is the latest in Rosemary Kirstein's imaginary future Earth. As with the previous books, it advances the overall plot only by a little bit, which seems to be Kirstein's modus operandi. I guess she's hoping to milk this series all the way to retirement age (and maybe beyond, if that's Robert Jordan's is what the trend is with novels).

This time, Rowan, the scientist/adventurer/protagonist heroine of the series settles in a city to do research on who the leader of the wizards is. While doing so, she encounters an old friend, and finally gets exposure to what she thinks of as magic, but the reader realizes is just technology too advanced for a world of fantasy.

What annoys me about this series is that every book reveals more questions than it answers, and the reveals are rather parsimonious with respect to the overall plot. A few more books like this and I'm going to start pining for the days when books weren't trilogies.

Review: After the Software Wars

After the Software Wars is Keith Curtis' book (with free download) about the future of software. In this case, you pretty much get what you pay for.

The first section of the book is interesting --- Curtis believes that the the software field will only progress when software is open-sourced and GPL'd. His argument is that today's software industry is a lot like alchemists in the middle-ages: all sorts of software techniques are considered secrets, and so very little information occurs --- that means improvements don't accumulate from company to company, and one discovery doesn't benefit the next engineer since it's either buried and embedded in a product that you don't have source code to, or it's documented but the source code is not available.

I definitely believe in this theory, since one reason gtags was open sourced was so that I would never have to re-create the code again, if I were ever to work for another company with a huge source base. I don't believe that this means that GPL software is destined to takeover, however --- we've had Linux for well over 15 years, and Linux still isn't something I could give my mom to use, and printing is still a disaster for me in the office.

If he stopped there, I think it would have made a great web article or blog entry. But like many newly converted, he gets carried away with grand visions and soon goes into irrelevancies like Space Elevators and Carbon Nanotubes. He then proceeds to destroy all his credibility by pontificating on his favorite subject, the religion of Libertarianism (which some day I'll write more about).

All in all, this book is not worth paying money for, and I've summarized the most important part of the book so you can skip it. But since the download is free, if you have a Kindle, go ahead and download it and skim the relevant parts. Not recommended.

Review: Virtuality

Virtuality was Ron Moore's post-Battlestar pilot. It provides an interesting view of space travel, and characteristically enough, uses known technology to portray an exploration of the universe --- no obvious laws of physics were broken in the movie, which by itself makes it almost unique!

As with Battlestar Galactica, the use of negative spaces in the movie is prevalent --- reality-tv like filming techniques are used throughout the entire movie, which lends the movie a very immediate experience. What's fascinating to me is that the traditional movie-making approach is only used inside the virtual reality-experiences, heightening the viewer's dislocation and discomfort with distinguishing what is real and what is not --- which is probably one of the points Ron Moore is getting at.

I think this movie's very much worth watching, though it does (like any good TV pilot would) leave you wanting more.