Port Elizabeth to Wallilabou Bay

We woke up this morning and got our dive gear ready. For me, this meant my mask and snorkel, but for Lisa, this meant her BCD, wet suit, and regulator/octopus as well: she had recently (and tragically) inherited that gear from a friend with identical height and build who passed away from breast cancer without fulfilling her dream of diving in the Caribbean. Lisa would fulfill that dream for her.

Along with Noah and Josh, we were dropped off at the Gingerbread House ferry dock, just a short walk away from Bequia Dive Adventures, a dive outfit that Norman recommended. They were prepared to take us diving right away, but Noah and Josh had to do some serious pool work first, so Ron told Norman not to expect us back until 1pm. This was fine with the rest of the crew, since they wanted to go shopping for food anyway.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Our first dive in the area was to be the Moon Homes. These were a set of homes built out of flotsam and jetsam off the coast of Bequia, and were used as artists' retreats (albeit rich artists, as the rent is quite high). When we dropped down into the water, it became obvious that Lisa's new dive gear was very good stuff: while in rented equipment she frequently had a hard time achieving neutral buoyancy, with this gear, she had no problem keeping a consistent depth, and achieving whatever she wanted under water. I attribute this to the integrated weight belt and the closer fit of the wet suit.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

While I had lots of complaints about the visibility from the beaches on Bequia, the diving bore no such complaints. Here, we got the classic 70 foot visibility that I associate with the Caribbean. The water was calm, and the fish and coral plentiful. I was very pleased with the dive, and made a note to return for more diving since we were scheduled to be in Bequia for the New Year.
When we were done with our dives, it was Noah and Josh's turn, since they had completed their dive training, so we went to town to get some snacks for the sailing trip, since we knew we would not be stopping for lunch. Alena and Sarang went to the Princess Margaret Beach, while Sue and Ron walked all around town.

We got back to the Illusion around 1:00pm, and immediately got ready to set sail. From Bequia to St. Vincent was a short sail, but we were going all the way to Wallibou Bay. Norman decided to give Noah and Josh lessons on navigation, while Sue was given the helm. Sailing into Wallilabou Bay around sunset, we had views of the Arch made famous by The Pirates of the Caribbean.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Anchoring was an involved process, because Norman wanted to park the boat with the stern facing Tony's, a bar right on the beach. Right in front of Tony's was the left-over facade from filming the movie, including a declaration of the Pirate's retreat. A man with a rowboat rowed out to greet the Illusion, picked up a mooring buoy, and then a line from the bow was run through the mooring buoy. Then a line was carried off the stern by rowboat and tied to anchor points on the shore., and then tied off. This arrangement made sense after Norman wired up the skiff with two lines: one line would be pulled to move the skiff to shore, and another would be pulled to bring the skiff to the Illusion. This allowed us to get on and off the Illusion without using engine power, and independent of each other.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

We went ashore to get some drinks. Just like everywhere else in the Caribbean, the Coca-Cola served in St. Vincent is made with real sugar, rather than high fructose corn syrup, and was a real treat. The others tried various drinks including Tony's Rum Punch.
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From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

After dinner, Sarang asked Norman about his time in jail for manufacturing amphetamines. This was a long and involved story, including descriptions of suitcases of cash, how the drug as cut, and how many people were involved. It was all a lot of fun, but left me scratching my head over a few details. We were going to have an early morning the next day, since the hike up the Volcano was to start at 6:00am, so we turned in early.

Bequia

I woke up at 6am today, which was my indication that my cold was mostly over. Yet when the opportunity came up to dive, I declined it, partly because Lisa didn't want to go, but because of fear that any lingering congestion would make equalization difficult.

We were dropped off at the main jetty in town, where there was a fruit and vegetable market, a T-shirt/souvenier market, a collection of restaurants, super markets, and many such services. We had heard that Friendship Bay had a great beach with good swimming and snorkeling, so all of us piled into a taxi and rode it over to Friendship Bay, where there was a resort with a diner and restaurants. We arrived there at 10:00am, promptly changed into our bathing gear, got out our snorkels and fins, and jumped into the water. Lisa didn't feel like swimming that day, so she went for a massage instead.

Unfortunately, the water was disappointing. Visibility was about 5 feet at most, not at all what I expected from a Caribbean snorkeling spot. There wasn't much wild-life, but Alena claimed that there was another spot a bit aways out of the way. After a brief break, I swam over to the area, and it was better, but still not spectacular. With that disappointment, we had lunch and then walked over to the other side of the island. Along the way, we saw many local tropical fruits such as papayas, but nothing that was ripe and easily picked. The weather was warm, and by the time we reached the saddle between Friendship Bay and Port Elizabeth, I was ready for another swim. We saw a sign that pointed to Lower Bay Beach, and decided to explore and take a look.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Lower Bay Beach turned out to be a beautiful beach, but had a very strange shelf just before the beach so there was a lot of breakers. After a short snacker, Ron and Sue decided to keep walking, but the rest of us decided to try the swimming. I took a couple of long swims after a snorkel revealed that there was really nothing to see in the area (again). I then discovered the big disadvantage of the Vibram Five Finger: once sand gets into them, it's pretty darn impossible to get sand out again without a washing machine. It was getting to be 4:30pm anyway, so we took a taxi ride back to Port Elizabeth where the only place with showers was the Bistro. We took turns taking showers, and then walked over to the jetty dock, which took far longer than we expected, rendering us about 10 minutes late.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

By the time we took a water taxi back to the Illusion, Norman was hopping mad. "When I say 5:30, I mean 5:30, not 5:40. And if you don't call us before 6:00pm telling us that you're late, we'll assume that you're staying ashore and having dinner on your own."

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Despite that bit of a downer, we agreed over dinner that it was quite a nice day. Lisa thought she'd be up for diving tomorrow, so along with Josh and Noah we agreed that we would try to get to do a dive tomorrow morning before the Illusion left for Wallilabou Bay. Sarang wanted to hike up a volcano before he left on the 23rd, and Wallilabou Bay would be a good place to stage such an assault.

Review: Transition

Review: Transition

Transition is Iain M. Banks' latest science fiction novel. It's about world hopping, multiple dimensions, and a cross-world organization that calls itself “The Concern”. While an ostensibly benevolent organization, The Concern still has the need to perform assassinations and other unsavory tasks, which means that they have to hire, train, and then deploy such individuals.

The novel is written from three perspectives: a patient in a hospital in an unknown world, who immediately identifies himself as an unreliable narrator, Adrian, a drug-dealer/hedge fund manager who's incredibly self-centered, and Temudjin Oh, an assassin for the concern. The three threads interweave, though not along the same time-line and definitely not all on the same world.

However, recurring characters flit between the narratives, representing opposing forces within the Concern. The conflict, however, seems far too black and white for a typical Banks novel, and the theatrics and special effects seem calculated for a science fiction summer extravaganza rather than for a cerebral novel that somehow makes comments about our society (one of the alternate worlds visited is one in which the Christian religion is the terrorist prone organization). Unfortunately, these side trips and diversions never get developed into full fruition, and the finale seems at most mildly satisfying.

While this was an entertaining novel, I can't say that it is one of Banks' best. Good for an airplane, though, but paying the $9.99 Kindle price seemed a bit much.

Rodney Bay to Bequia

The morning started out with introductions to the last two of our outstanding crew, Ron and Sue, both experienced sailors from Michigan. They were neighbors, and Ron owned a Catamaran over at St. Vincent as part of the Moorings charter for many years, while Sue had raced sailboats. They were both retired, and Ron in particular had spent quite a bit of time researching cheap ways to sail and dive. Ron was formerly worked as a fund raiser, retired from that and ended up being a real-estate developer, and finally retired from that just as the market peaked.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

The furler had been fixed the day before, but there was a bit of last minute shopping to do, and Norman had to register the crew before leaving St. Lucia, so everyone went ashore for long enough to do some shopping. We were planning a long sail today, so the awning came down, and Norman directed everyone on how to take down the awning.

We once again set sail with the motor on, but this time went past Marigot bay and kept going towards the Southern end of St. Lucia, with the beautiful Pitons in the background. The wind was light, since we were well in St. Lucia's wind-shadow, so we had to keep the engine going. However, that also meant that the boat wasn't heeled over, so it made a stable platform for photographs, and for everyone to get to know each other.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Once out of St. Lucia's wind shadow, Norman had us raise the stay sail, and with the persistent winds, we got enough speed that the engine could be turned off for some true sailing. The boat heeled over nicely enough, but it was a long crossing to St. Vincent. Our destination was to be Bequia, which was the island past St. Vincent, with its tall volcano which would generate its own weather system and shield us from the wind.

In the midst of the crossing, the sun set behind some pink and red clouds, giving us a glorious view, and of course, forecasting good weather for the next day. "Red sky at night, sailor's delight." When night fell, we saw the stars in their full glory, since it was a new moon night. In addition to unfamiliar constellations (I had forgotten to install a star map application onto Lisa's android phone), we also saw the huge band of the milky way, all lit up to make the dark end of St. Vincent ahead of us more prominent.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

As we approached St. Vincent, I became very happy that I was not the skipper on this boat: being unfamiliar with the waters, it was very difficult to see what signs Norman was looking for before he started to steer us around the leeward side of St. Vincent. Finally, at 8pm we entered St. Vincent's wind-shadow, and the boat stopped heeling. In the quiet zone, Allison could finally prepare dinner, and we ate a late dinner at 9pm. Norman started up the engine again, and then told everyone who wanted to sleep to go to bed.

I didn't think I could sleep with the engine running, but between ear plugs, my cold, and general weariness, I fell into a deep sleep and did not wake until the next day.

Rodney Bay

Lisa and I decided to stay aboard this morning, which meant that we got assigned dish washing duties out of sequence! Well, this was fine by me, since it meant that I got some extra reading time while Norman and Allison were out shopping, and Sarang went swimming again at the beach.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

The afternoon was spent picking up snacks, getting more coconut water (which Lisa had become addicted to), and then having a relaxing walk back to the marina for a shower and to meet the new sailors who were coming aboard that day.

Noah and Josh were from Los Angeles, where Noah was a film producer for Warner brothers, and Josh was a sports promoter. Though they were a couple of years apart, they looked so similar that Lisa and I thought they were twins! Noah had worked on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, among other films, and Josh had just come back from a long stint in Spain, where he became fluent with the language, had a Spanish girlfriend, and hoped to return there to start a restaurant chain.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Alena was from New York, where she worked as a commercial real estate manager for Cushman, Inc. Born in Belarus, she had won a green card lottery when she was 18, and worked her way up from the accounting department at her firm after a few promotions. She spoke English with a charming European accent. Unfortunately, American Airlines had lost her lugguage, so she was stuck with whatever she carried on with her on the plane.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

We had drinks at the bar, and then returned to the Illusion for dinner. Our next two sailors would arrive from a later flight, but I was still under the weather from the cold, and so did not stay up to meet them.

Marigot Bay to Rodney Bay

Norman had threatened to get up at 7am to run the boat down to Rodney Bay this morning, since Zach had to be discharged as crew so he could leave us and go back home to New York. However, by the time I got out of bed at 8am, the boat was still not moving. It turned out that everyone else had gone ashore last night and had a roaring old time.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Since we were running short on time, breakfast was quick, and dishes were abandoned until we got to Rodney Bay. The furler on the genoa had broken the day before while sailing into Marigot bay, so we could not put up the genoa, but other than that, the sailing was uneventful, and once we got there, Zach was rushed ashore. Since we hadn't been to Pigeon Island yet, Lisa and I decided to pay a visit. Sarang wanted to go there with his snorkel gear, so he agreed to go with us.

Pigeon island, it turns out, is not really an island, but is a penninsula with a national park in it. As we got off the marina to start our walk there, it started raining, so the three of us chipped in for a Taxi, and got to there and ordered a Roti lunch. As is usual in the Caribbean, lunch took a long time, but by 2pm we were ready to snorkel. The snorkeling wasn't fantastic, there being not a lot of fishes in the area, and the ones that were there were small. Unfortunately, this would turn out to be the best snorkeling for the entire trip!

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

After the snorkel, Lisa and I walked up to the top of the park for some great views of Rodney Bay, and then we walked back to the marina along the beach, which surprisingly included a free ferry ride across a river between two resorts. It was fascinating for me to see the huge differences between the resorts and the public beaches: the resorts were lily-white, with lots of Europeans sunbathing, while the public beaches were entirely populated by local St. Lucia residents, who would swim, BBQ, or picnic, but not be terribly interested in sun-bathing. On the way back we saw a mango tree with some low hanging fruit, and I decided to pick one. Unfortunately, it wasn't ripe even by the end of our trip, so I have no idea how it would have tasted.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

We returned to the Illusion after taking a shower at the marina to see that the genoa had been taken down. Norman had wanted to get someone to weld in a new ring to anchor the furling line, but Sarang convinced him that a better solution would be to just apply some steel bands to the broken part to strengthen it, since welding aluminum isn't terribly reliable.

Rodney Bay to Marigot Bay

Breakfast on the Illusion is composed of Bran Flakes, powdered milk, fruit juice, fruit, and Wheetabix, an odd looking cereal that I had never seen before. Apparently, Norman and Allison found a good deal and bought up a life-time supply, as Wheetabix was the one item in the pantry the Illusion never ran out of.

After breakfast was done, we were introduced by Norman to the joys of washing dishes on the boat. Since the Illusion only carries about 200 gallons of water, all of which is to be used for drinking or washing hands, all dishes were to be washed with sea-water. This is something you can only get away with in the Caribbean, with its crystal clear water. Getting water out of the sea with a bucket is a bit non-intuitive: you have to tie the rope to your wrist, turn the bucket upside down, and then drop the bucket into the water so it would fill. Naively tossing the bucket into the water generally means that the bucket will land upright and net you no water.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

We did the dishes, then headed ashore to buy some sandals for Lisa (who still couldn't get used to her Vibram Five Fingers), some cough drops for my cough, and snacks. We also found a coconut stand where Lisa filled her water bottle up with coconut water for 2EC. Upon our return, Zach as first mate showed us how to set up the boat for sailing to Marigot Bay. "It doesn't matter how I do it," he said, "Norman's not going to be happy with me anyway." As a schooner (a sailboat with 2 masts of identical height), the Illusion has 3 sails: the genoa (large foresail), the stay sail (middle sail), and main sail (back sail). However, it was also set up with an awning, which Norman intended to have stay up for this sail, so we could ignore the stay sail.. The genoa sheets had to run outside 3 of the shrouds, inboard through a block, and then the side where the sail was going to be on had to be run through the winch. The furling line from the forward furler (which furled and unfurled the genoa) had to be run all the way back to the main deck. The main sail had to be untied to get ready for unfurling. Then, a bucket of water and a boat hook had to be moved to the anchor to get ready for weighing anchor.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

We weighed anchor at 1pm, and I was made the helms person. The cockpit of the schooner had a large wheel, and a seat in front of it. I soon learned, however, that one did not sit on the seat, as you couldn't see the forward of the boat otherwise. Instead, one stood on the seat, sticking his head through the hatch much like a tank commander would, and steered with his feet on the wheel. It was definitely a very different experience than the much smaller boats I had sailed with.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

The skiff was moved from the side of the boat to dangling off the aft transom, and we were off. I discovered, however, that the Illusion was not a fast sail boat, despite its complement of sails. Norman kept the engine on for the entire duration of the sail. It was quite disappointing that most of our "sailing" would really be "motor-sailing."

Upon arrival at Marigot bay, we dropped anchor and were run ashore on the skiff. It was warm and beautiful, but the swimming and snorkeling was not very good: there was nothing to see, and the water was a bit churned up from the surge. After the swim, we took a shower at the resort, ate some fruits we bought from the store, and then went back to the Illusion for dinner.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

I was still tired from my cold, so Lisa & I elected to stay ashore while the others went back on land to buy drinks.

Prologue

Lisa and I flew from San Francisco to Miami, then to St. Lucia for a sailing trip in the Carribean islands. We originally had wanted to run a trip in the British Virgin Islands like we did several years ago, but could not drum up enough interest to run a catamaran there. When I read the New York Times article about the SV Illusion, I did a quick computation and realized that the cost of the trip was lower than if I were to charter a boat myself and sail it myself. So on the spur of the moment, I signed Lisa and I up with the Illusion from December 15th to January 2nd.

The flights were uneventful, and we were met at the St. Lucia airport by Peter, a taxi driver sent by the Illusion to pick us up from the airport and deliver us to Rodney Bay where the Illusion was anchored. The weather was a balmy 80 degrees and sunny, but despite the small size of St. Lucia, it took an incredibly long time to drive from the airport to Rodney Bay. Peter was quite garrulous, happy to explain the country and our ship-mates to be, Sarang, who had apparently already made a name for himself.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Upon arrival at Rodney Bay, our driver called Norman and Allison, and we were asked to wait at the H20 bar. There, we ran into Sarang and Zach, who were already on the crew. Zach was near the end of his stay, but Sarang had a few more days with us yet. A little later, Norman and Allison showed up and took us out to a local bar for a drink. Then there was a debate as to whether we would eat on the boat or eat out. Since the crew wanted to eat out, we obliged, but first made a detour to the Illusion to drop off our lugguage.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Stepping onto the Illusion for the first time, I could see that this was truly a working boat: the deck looked well worn, despite being made out of metal, and the interior cabins were tiny, even smaller than the Rya Jen, which I had sailed two years ago. As a treasure hunting boat, the Illusion had hot-bunked a crew of 20, which included divers to dig up treasure from the Atocha off the coast of Florida.

We got ourselves squared away, and headed out to dinner, docking the skiff at the Happy Day bar. Dinner was at a local grill, which served reasonably good food, but did not have prices that kept Norman happy—he had shown up a year ago during their opening sale, and apparently prices were much better. At dinner, Sarang demonstrated himself to be a hard drinking, chain smoking, kleptomaniac professor, by not only ordering drinks and smoking, but also trying to talk us into bringing some extra silverware back to the boat. After dinner, Lisa and I were so tired that we went to the lounge and dozed off, and were awakened to return to the boat after everyone else was done with a round of drinks.

On the way back to the Illusion, however, the skiff ran over some fishing line left by some fisherman, and the propellor ground to a halt. Norman, while trying to unwrap the line, fell into the water, and had to climb back up to the skiff before finally un-fouling the propeller. Fortunately the water was warm and the moon was bright. I had caught a bit of a bug on the plane flights, and upon reaching the Illusion, fell asleep quickly.

2009 Books of the Year

I'm 2 days away from going on vacation, and don't expect to get much reading done, if only because the PS3 is turning out to be quite addictive. So I'm going to take the time now to call out what I consider to be the books of the year.

As usual, even though I read far less non-fiction than fiction, the leading titles I can think of this year fall into the Non-fiction category. Two obvious leaders spring to mind: FDR and Connected. Of the two, I think FDR has to get the nod. That's because while most intelligent, connected people use social networks of one sort of another, very few otherwise intelligent people I know have actually gone back and studied the history of how today's American society was built, and how one man almost single-handedly built up many of today's institutions (Social Security, the Securities Exchange Commission, etc) that Republicans are still trying to tear down (and have no real success dismantling). I think it behooves us to understand history, not just because it has a tendency to repeat itself (or rhyme, as others say), but to realize how different the world would have been if FDR had not existed. If you consider yourself a serious thinker (or are even vaguely interested in how institutions such as Social Security get built), I think you owe it to yourself to read this book. Even worse, some even believe the right-wing propaganda about how FDR caused the great depression, or how he knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor and kept quiet about it. Honorable mentions go to: The Promise of Sleep, Your Money & Your Brain, and the previously mentioned Connected.

Update: I recently read Hyman P. Minsky's Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, and now I consider it the book of the year for 2009, no question. Very much worth reading!

On the fiction side, this has certainly been the year of Alastair Reynolds for me, just as last year was the year of Richard K. Morgan. Of the lot, House of Suns really stands out, but the Revelation Space series is also definitely worth reading. Honorable mention goes to Stross' Wireless, where the novella Palimpsest by itself is worth the price of the entire book.

I didn't read many comics this year, but once again, I want to point everyone to Bill Willingham's Fables. It's still the best running comic book series that exists, has no men (or women) in tights, and as far as I can tell, Willingham has never run out of good ideas.

Unlike last year's mammoth 95 book record, this year, I only read 57 books. Of course, the year's not over yet, and maybe I'll stumble onto something so amazing that it'll kick one of the above books out of ranking by the end of the year, but I don't think anyone will come away from reading any of the above books feeling disappointed.

Review: Better

Better had a promising start: it starts of by discussing the causes of infection in hospitals, and the history of attempts to control it. All the industrial engineering in the world, for instance, didn't seem to solve the problem, but it turned out that if you got everyone in the hospital involved, and they felt like they were being heard, you could actually improve the situation dramatically.

3 chapters later, in the middle of a section on doctors in the prison system, I realized that this book did not have a coherent theme: it was basically a collection of essays by the author previously published in The New Yorker or elsewhere, which explained the lack of coherence. While it's all very exciting to hear about such disparate places in the world where medicine in practice, there's no central idea tying it together. The result: by the time I finished the book, I felt as though I had tried to eat dinner by ordering 12 appetizers. Each one tasted fine, but the whole experience left me feeling vaguely unsatisfied.

Check it out from your library instead of buying it, even at Kindle price.

Review: Connected

When Google rolled out the Orkut social network, a bunch of us scratched our heads and wondered what the heck we would ever use it for. Now in 2009, social networks from Facebook to Twitter have become big news, even if nobody knows how profitable they are, and it's become far more important to understand the way social networks operate than ever.

Connected is a book about human networks. Ruchira Datta first pointed me at it through the New York Times article about how friends can cause each other to gain (or lose) weight, even across a thousand miles. If you think about it, this is a very surprising result, because it's not like you're going to see your friends that far away frequently enough to copy their weight gain or loss.

Each chapter of this book presents at least one such interesting revelation. The one that really surprised me was the well-known fact that married men live about 5 years longer than single men, but married women live only about 2 years longer. The book answers how the mechanism works, and why it is that women seem to benefit less than men from marriage. The answer turns out to be very surprising and relevant to traditional views about marriage. Then there's a romp through human organizations, Dunbar's number, and a presentation of the "3 levels of indirection" influence rule.

The subsequent chapters concern themselves with epidemics, politics, wealth, and the internet, and the future of our connected lives. Of all the topics, the ones on wealth and epidemics are the most enlightening, and the one on politics least surprising, while the chapter on the internet space the weakest, since this space is still very much in its infancy, though the value provided there is immense.

The writing is clear, the topics selected fascinating, and I found the entire book really enjoyable. Highly recommended, at the $9.99 Kindle price, or even at the full hardback price. Yes it is that good. I won't be surprised if I ended up nominating this book for the book of the year.

Review: PlayStation 3 + Accessories

So I succumbed to Amazon's Black Friday sale and bought a Sony Playstation 3 with 2 games for $290. The way things work out, this meant upgrading the TV as well, and my mom's company was blowing out LG's 42LH300C for $575, so I opted for one. This in turned drove the purchase of a HDMI cable and a Wii Component cable as well. This kind of spending cascades is why BestBuy and Amazon have such high revenues.

It took a bit of wiring to set up. The nice thing is that my system is now actually simpler, since the TV comes with its own digital tuner, so the old Tivax and CRT TV got sold. Unfortunately, the Wii component cable did not come in splittable form, so I had to plug the Wii into the TV and then route audio from the TV back into the receiver, resulting in my audio latency being much worse than my visual latency (35ms versus 22ms). Unfortunately, despite the component cables, the Wii doesn't look all that great!

The Playstation 3, however, is a different story. Watching Veronica Mars on DVD looked great, since the PS3 upscales the visual. Plugging the PS3 into my receiver was a cinch as well, and to my relief, I could use both analog audio out and digital TV out (through HDMI), which enabled the sound to go directly into my amp. It sounds as good as you might expect. Stick in a Blu-Ray disc, and the picture quality is nothing short of amazing. It's not quite 70mm quality, but seriously, when was the last time you saw 70mm film projected in a movie theater?

But that's only the tip of the ice-berg. You can rent HD videos for $4.99 on the PS3 (it's hooked up to the internet, either through a wired connection or over Wi-Fi), and even better, I had a PlayOn license for $10 from a Halloween special that enabled me to stream YouTube, Hulu, and any other media sitting on my PC's hard drive to the TV. I guess I will never have to pay for cable TV again. Apparently, you can stream Netflix movies to the PS3 as well, but I'm too cheap to pay for Netflix too, so I'll probably wait until I get a free trial to play with it.

And then there's games. The Black Friday special included inFamous, which is so far quite interesting. I have to set it to easy so I can actually play it --- yes, I'm a lame gamer --- but I've known that ever since John Carmack gave me every weapon in Quake and came after me with an axe and axe-murdered me. When my Dad first heard my system through the PS3 he thought the simulated earthquake on the PS3 was real! The bundle also included Killzone 2, which seems like a game too hard for an oldster like me. Valkryia Chronicles is more my speed. Roberto loaned me a few games (and blu-ray movies) and I'll check them out as well.

The PS3 even supports my bluetooth headset, though I haven't had the occasion to try it out yet in a group game. The one complaint I have is that both the Wii and the PS3 are blue-tooth devices, while the TV, receiver, and soundbridge are infra-red controlled devices. So now my universal remote isn't universal any more (now the PS3 controller has to sit next to it). This is hardly a deal killer, and there are solutions, but I'm done spending money for now.

Which makes me wonder: who the heck is buying the Apple TV? For $70 more, you get a fantastic game machine, a blu-ray player, an upscaling DVD player, and access to pretty much the same movies, plus Hulu and YouTube (for a $30 PlayOn license if you didn't get the $10 license that everyone else gets), and whatever other media you can download to your PC's hard drive. I guess Mac owners can't run PlayOn (though it does run on VMWare) and are made of money anyway.

Review: How The Mighty Fall

Recently, someone asked the question of a general mailing list, "How do you know when a company is failing, or on the verge of failing?" At that time, there were several interesting answers, but none of them really satisfying, since no one really had any data to back it up. How the Mighty Fall, written by Jim Collins of Built to Last fame, takes on that question, and to a certain degree of success.

The thesis of the book is that explanations such as "failure to innovate" are rarely the case. In fact, on the contrary, most of the companies who failed innovated at a rapid and ferocious pace. They brought in change leaders from the outside, a frenetically introduced new products, new innovations, and reorganized themselves at a ferocious pace. What that served to do instead of rescuing them from failure was to plunge them into a death spiral from which they could not recover. By contrast, the companies that did succeed in pulling out of death spirals hired CEOs from within, focused on core values while iterating on success, and took big bets only after ideas had first proven themselves in the marketplace.

The first part of the book focused on the process of failure. The first phase is hubris, led by an aura of invincibility and a feeling that "we could do no wrong." At this point, pride overcomes any humility that might have been in place. It is very telling at this point that at this point the role of luck in past success is completely dismissed, and all past success is attributed to skill.

This is followed by over-reach, either through acquisition, entering a new market where there was no reason to believe the company could succeed or compete effectively, and undisciplined growth through hiring too quickly. The key here is that the wrong people are put in key positions, and there is no plan to fix this problem. What this means is that added bureaucracy is required to manage having wrong people all over the place, and that causes good people to leave.

At the height of apparent success, there is then denial of risk: those in power become surrounded by people afraid to tell them the truth or criticize them. Leaders make statements instead of asking questions, and politics take on a life of its own --- what's good for the individual becomes the most important metric, rather than what's good for the company as a whole. (Someone once told me that my biggest failure in managing my career was never asking, "What's in it for me?")

In the stage four of failure, companies grasp at straws for a silver bullet: CEOs from outside, hoping for discontinuous leaps into new technologies and new markets, and one series after another of desperate moves bring the company further and further to the brink. It is very telling that the counter examples do precisely the opposite: they tend to hire CEOs from inside, immediately make changes that ensure survival rather than investing in big acquisitions and new technologies, and refocus the company on the strengths.

In the final stage, the company enters a death spiral as reduction in cash reduces options until the company fails. At this point, the chance for renewal is rare, but it can be done if a sufficiently persistent, humble leader is found to lead.

Overall, the book is great, full of case studies for every stage of the process, and counter examples. What it is lacking is that the first 2 or 3 stages seem particularly tough to distinguish between a company in full steam ahead mode, and a company that's really starting to get too arrogant for its own good. I would definitely have liked Collins to go out on a limb and name a few companies that are in stage 1 and 2 to see what he really means. I would also really like more counter examples, as to how companies can recover and avoid the kind of Hubris he talks about. The reality seems to be the picking the right people to be in the right position from the CEO down. But there's no framework for how to do this, and I consider it an impossible to solve problem --- I'd like to have a few interview questions that bring out whether or not a leader has humility deep in his bones, or whether he's faking it, but I just can't think of a way to do so.

Regardless, this book is highly recommended, and I think that every executive or investor should have a copy in his library to remind himself of how great things look before a big fall.

End of Year Financial Advice

I'm reminded that it's the end of the year by the number of financial planning questions I get. Despite having written on the topic many times, I'm having to dig up old articles for the sake of my friends who aren't subscribed to my blog (tsk tsk).

Q: What is Tax Loss Harvesting?

Previous post on tax-loss harvesting One thing to note is that if you own one of Vanguard's funds, tax-loss harvesting is an all or nothing affair, because Vanguard only tracks your shares on an average basis. This is a good reason to switch to Vanguard's VIPER ETFs. Unfortunately, not all Vanguard funds have an equivalent VIPER, and vice-versa. The most notable one is the Vanguard Energy Fund, where the ETF and the fund are not related.

Q: I'm a Fidelity user, and I've noticed that the Vanguard funds are actually more expensive than the Fidelity equivalents. Why do people have such brand loyalty to Vanguard?

It turns out that index management is not at all easy or obvious. There have been several articles and analyses on Vanguard funds. For instance, William Bernstein has written about transactional skill on the part of Gus Sauter, the positive tracking error that Vanguard funds frequently exhibit, and how Vanguard funds frequently outperform what ought to be equivalent ETFs. No equivalent analysis of Fidelity funds have been made. There is also some evidence that transactional skill is persistent, unlike skill in say, picking stocks.

Q: I noticed that you bought a house recently. How does that relate to your portfolio, and are there any books equivalent to Random Walk Down Wall Street for real estate investing?

I view my purchase of a house as a consumption decision, not an investment decision. In other words, I don't expect my house to appreciate any more than my big screen TV (though perhaps it wouldn't depreciate like one), and moving into a house actually cost me money.

I did look into real estate investing several years ago, and it sounded like a massive hassle. However, it is possible to make money at it, and there are several people who do. (There are just as many people who don't) If you wish to hear the truth about real-estate investing, the no-nonsense guides by John T. Reed are the ones I recommend. You might decide (as I did) that this stuff is not for you, but at least you won't be suckered into thinking that real estate is a "get rich quick" scheme, unlike many others.

As far as valuing an individual house is concerned, I like to tell folks that as long time renters, they are expert at rentals. So estimate how much you would pay in rent to live in a particular house, and divide the purchase price by the annual price of renting that house. In the US, the long term price/rent ratio calculated this way is around 19. For the Bay Area, it's around 21. In 2007, the average price/rent ratio in the area was an astounding 50. At that price, it definitely made more sense to rent. Now, you can easily get 21, or even 19. There's good reason to believe that prices will decline further (remember, the average means that there are times when prices are far below average), so keep those ratios in mind when making your buy/rent decision.

Review: The Six Directions of Space

The Six Directions of Space is a novella, just over 80 pages long. I don't normally review short stories, but since Amazon has this selling at $75, or at almost $1/page, and I checked it out of the library for no charge, I feel obliged to talk about it.

The story revolves around an alternate history, a space faring empire in a timeline where the Mongols succeeded in taking over the world, and establishing itself as the premiere human civilization. They explore the universe through wormholes left behind by some ancient civilization. The story opens when Yellow Dog, and agent of the empire, is sent to investigate a far flung province. She enters deep cover, and uncovers a startling observation about the Infrastructure used to united the empire...

The story isn't long enough to really get more than a bare-bones plot and story line, and in many ways I feel like the setup was mostly performed as a misdirection. While it's a reasonably good story, it's not one of Reynolds' best. I would definitely not pay the $75 price.

Review: Your Money and Your Brain

Bernstein's latest book spends a bit of time talking about how the emotional aspect of investing is an important one, one that many smart people fall down on. In particular, he mentioned Jason Zweig's book, Your Money and Your Brain as being worthwhile reading on this topic.

The book starts off by discussing the difference between your visceral gut reactions and your thinking, reflective system. This comes into play during the current market turmoil, where many people, despite having had the "buy low" mantra drilled into them, were paralyzed by fear instead, or sold in a panic. Zweig then goes on to discuss various foibles of the human brain.

He starts off with our tendency to remember when we were correct, and forget when we are wrong. Even worse, studies show that we have a tendency to revise our past predictions in retrospect, so our understanding of our own accuracy is suspect. He then goes on to describe how everyone lives in a world where he's better looking, and above average in intelligence. Furthermore, nearly everyone thinks he has a larger amount of risk tolerance than he says he has. He then discusses anchoring and framing, two common short cuts that people use to make decisions---including investment decisions, where they can be particularly dangerous.

This is followed up by chapters on Fear, Surprise, Regret, and finally, Happiness, where the common discussions of happiness are touted (e.g., having a bad commute is one of the worst thing you can do for your peace of mind, and the hedonistic treadmill keeps you from achieving happiness through buying more stuff). None of these will come as a surprise to anyone who's done any reading in recent years, but it's all packaged up very nicely and clearly for an investment audience. What's particularly good are the suggestions on what you can do to overcome your brain's natural tendency to do the wrong thing as far as investing is concerned. (One particularly striking section of the book interviews money managers who have trained themselves to buy whenever they feel like throwing up because of stock market gyrations)

Recommended.

My Book Project

I heard about kickstarter yesterday, and immediately decided that this is a good way to collect beta-testers, people who want advanced reader copies, pre-orders, etc. The current intention is to use Amazon's self-publication service, and of course, Kindle editions.

However, for pre-ordering folks, I'm offering a DRM-free digital copy of the book if you pledge to support the project. My goal would be to get about 20 beta-testers out of this (hence the $1000 project goal). As with other kickstarter projects, if not enough people demonstrate interest, you're not on the hook for the costs.

I consider this an interesting experiment, and look forward to seeing how it will turn out.

Review: Mercury Falls

When Robert Kroese, who also works at Google, offered his comic novel Mercury Falls on the Kindle for $1.99, I bought it, to support another Googler, if nothing else.

The novel revolves around the apocalypse --- Christine, a reporter for the evangelical newspaper The Banner has seen so many cults proclaim the end of the world that she's now jaded, but after returning from yet another apparently fruitless such prediction, she discovers that her house has been broken into by a Demon, and the apocalypse ensues.

The style is evocative of Douglas Adams' classic, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, complete with several digressions into tangents, an omniscient narrator who explains what's going on behind the scenes to the reader, and self-referential jokes.

Unfortunately, I found the book merely mildly amusing, rather than being funny the way Adams' series was. There are moments of amusing word play every chapter or so, and every once in a while a funny moment deserves a chortle. But while Adams' works frequently make subtle references to the human condition, I found that Mercury Falls frequently made cheap shots --- like having a flaming pillar of fire from heaven coming down and striking down hapless characters.

The book finishes in self-referential fashion, by constructing a rationale for its existence, tying up everything in a nice little knot, but ultimately, I found myself unsatisfied in the quest for laughs. Nevertheless, humor is an unpredictable thing, so if you have a Kindle you might as well download the sample and see if it sucks you in. But I found Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys funnier and less obviously forced.

Honda Fit first impressions

Now that we've had a few weeks with the Honda, I can write up my first impressions. I've already mentioned that the main reason we bought the car was that the tandem can fit inside. You can see Pamela Blayley's write up for all the gory details, but as far as the 2009 Fit is concerned, the tandem fits very nicely with no problems, and plenty of room for camping gear, water bottles (this thing has 10 cup holders, 4 of which are ideal for cycling water bottles, so it's clearly designed to haul cyclists and the bike). I bought the Hollywood Fork Mount, went to Orchard Supply Hardware and bought a block of wood --- they even cut it for you if you ask nicely and some wood screws, screwed the fork mount into the wood to make a glider board, and I was all ready.

It's definitely no more than a 2 person job to load the bike into the car, since one of you has to hold the bike upright while the other runs back to the front of the car and lifts the rear wheel over the hump that the front seat makes. Nevertheless, it's just as fast as mounting a hitch-mounted bike rack and then lifting the bike onto the rack, along with all the the rigamarole I needed to do to get the fork of the tandem mounted onto the vertical bike rack.

Needless to say, all this running around means that the rear bumper of the car could get scratched, so after a couple of near misses, i bought the Rear Bumper Applique and installed it. We also needed bungee cords to secure the tandem so it wouldn't sway side to side while in the car, but the large number of anchor points inside the car made that easy. I was impressed by how many of those they were. Removing the bike from the car is far easier, and the first time we did it at a parking lot, other cyclists had to stop and stare, since they could not believe how a big bike like this could come out of a tiny car.

OK, enough bike talk. How does the car drive? It drives just fine. Some people refer to it as a sporty suspension, and it does feel a bit less of a boat than my Chrysler, but it's also a smaller car, so that's to be expected. The Fit is quieter than the convertible, but then, I would have been surprised if it wasn't. I love the reduced turning radius --- it certainly feels very agile when maneuvering in the parking lot.

I opted for the "Sport" trim, which came with alloy wheels, auto-stick paddle shifters, fog lights (useful for San Francisco), and a sound system that could take as input a USB port, and supposedly an ipod. To my disappointment, the ipod dock would not recognize my ancient 20GB ipod classic. Looking through the manual, it looked like it would only recognize the latest ipod classic or ipod nanos. Oh well, I plugged in a USB flash drive instead, and that worked just fine. The big shocker, though, was that it wouldn't display unicode characters (Chinese or Japanese!). A look through my document's paperwork showed that the car was indeed assembled and manufactured in Japan, which makes me wonder what the heck Honda was thinking! (Sure, the car was destined for California, but California has plenty of Chinese/Japanese/Korean speakers)

The sound system in the car is great --- nothing fancy, it just works. I also like it that the sound system also takes MP3 CDs, not just regular audio CDs. My guess, though, is that I'll buy a 16GB USB drive and just be done with it.

As previously mentioned, the car comes with sports paddle shifters, similar to the auto-stick that was on my Chrysler. It works, but has one flaw --- it doesn't display the current selected gear continuously, only when you first click the paddle. This is nasty, since the car seems to have the habit of down-shifting and up-shifting without telling you even though you've used the manual mode, so you could easily think you're already in one gear when the car's already shifted to another. Not a big problem, but makes the feature less attractive than you might imagine. (Why would you use auto-stick? Mostly to force the car into 3rd gear when descending a big mountain --- not a big deal to most people, but California is mountainous)

Sitting in the car, you get the impression that the car is pretty big. That's because even though it's a small car, the design of it is such that there's a lot of headroom. This is good, because it lets us get the tandem into the car without lowering the stoker seat, but it also contributes to giving the car's interior an airy feel, which I like.

All in all, it seems like a pretty nice car so far, and I'll report some more after we've had a chance to take a few long trips with it.

Programming Tools

Every time I think about programming tools, I get really annoyed. If you've been programming for a while, you probably started off with the basic PRINT statement as your debugging tool way back when micro-computers were too small and insufficiently powerful to run anything as sophisticated as a debugger.

When Turbo Pascal 3.0 came out for the PC, it was a revelation, at least for me. You could have a programming environment that could not only compile at lightning fast speeds, but it too, was restricted to debugging via print statements --- debuggers only became available starting from Turbo Pascal 4.0.

When I got to college and had access to UNIX machines, having a debugger was a revelation. You could single-step through code, print variables, set break points (and even conditional break points), walk up and down the stack, and if you recompiled the code, you could restart the program and the debugging would automatically pick up the new binary. I got out of the habit of writing print statements.

As an intern at Geoworks, I became even more spoiled. Geoworks had an in-house debugger called swat, and the basic development environment was a SUN workstation connected to a PC via a serial cable. You would then cross-compile on your SUN (using a distributed compiling environment), download the code via the serial cable to the PC, and swat would run on your workstation while talking to a debugging stub on the PC. Swat was ridiculously sophisticated --- to this day, I still have not used a debugger that works as well. (The author, Adam de Boor, like most of the smart people I've ever met, now works at Google) First of all, it had an extension language built into it (tcl). But secondly, the programmers working on GEOS had a very tool-oriented ethic: every time a new data structure was added, they would also write a swat extension that understood how the data structure was laid out in memory. This enabled you to type "heapwalk" at the swat prompt, and the debugger would then walk through memory and dump out all the data structures in human-readable, human-formatted form! If you had a linked list, you could tell it to walk the linked list and dump every element in it. If it was a linked list of a certain object, you could tell it to dump out the actual objects while walking through the list, rather than just dumping the pointer. Even though GEOS was written entirely in assembly (yes, even the applications --- how do you think everything fit into 512KB?), it felt more sophisticated than any high level language except Lisp.

When I graduated school and worked at Pure Software, we took a lot of pains to make sure the purify would work with debuggers. Stack traces, etc., would work with whatever debugger you used, and variable names always remained intact. This was despite incremental linkers and other techniques that Purify applied to binaries under inspection. To this day, no other UNIX vendor or free software tool has deployed an incremental linker.

When I started having to do Windows development again, the IDEs such as Visual C++ felt like a step backwards --- they had a lot of pretty visuals, but none of them were extensible, so you couldn't teach it about your new data structure, or get it to walk a list. Nevertheless, I still didn't need to write PRINT statements. When I ended up writing VxDs for a living in 1995, I had a much more primitive environment, and it was painful, but I quickly learned to abstract away most of the issues and not rewrite VxDs as much as possible.

Enter the internet server age, and I feel like it's 1986 again, and I might as well be programming on a PDP-11 using RSTS/E BASIC. Today, any kind of cloud programming that requires harnessing multiple machines essentially relies on RPCs. One would think that with all the knowledge we have from building old debuggers and such systems, we would be able to do things like single-step through a procedure from one machine to a remote machine, and still be able to do stack dumps, walk stack traces, and print data structures. The sad truth is, we can't. In fact, in many environments, you can barely attach a debugger to a remote process, and in some cases if you do attach a debugger and then detach it, the process immediately exits. Symbolic variable names? Thanks to C++ name mangling, I can barely decipher error messages from the compiler, let alone use a symbolic name in a debugger. Combine that with threads, remote systems, and other such setups, and pretty soon you're back to debugging using PRINT statements. You might dress it up and call it "logging" (and I know I've been guilty of doing that myself), but really, it's debugging via PRINTs, and as someone who calls himself a software engineer, whenever I put in yet another LOG statement I feel ashamed, both for myself and for my profession --- we had such beautiful tools in the 80s and 90s, but they are all wasted in the internet era. Yes, I'm well aware that people have written RPC analyzers --- but again, they're all after-the-fact analysis tools --- not nearly as useful as being able to "stop the state of the world and examine the state at leisure", which was what swat and the other tools were capable of doing.

What's responsible for this state of affairs? I think the big one is the decline of the market for programming tools. After Borland died, there was no longer an effective programming tools company that had the kind of end-to-end reach that could provide a development environment that was sophisticated. Microsoft all but stopped evolving its programming tools. Since it was impossible to compete against the free gdb/gcc/g++ tools (and now the free Eclipse), it became a case of "don't beat them, join them." Without end-to-end control of a development environment, it's hard to build a debugger that would do the right thing --- Microsoft could probably do that for its environment, as can Apple, but neither are power-houses in client/server/distributed computing. Google and Yahoo could invest in their distributed debugging infrastructure, but have chosen to invest resources elsewhere. The net result: I don't feel like our programming tools have done anything but gone backwards, despite all the progress we've made in other areas.