A bad start

We flew into Munich to find my deraileur hanger bent and wheel out of true. That was the least of our problems. Cynthia lost her bag of cycle gear and has had to rebuy everything including helmet, shirts, shoes, bags. This was quite a blow. The weather is also crap. We might abandon the German side and train to Geneva and ride the French side instead. No point fighting mother nature.

Prologue

In a sign that this was a tour where not everything would go smoothly, Roberto Peon sent e-mail the night before that he was going to abandon the tour due to a long running hip injury that led his doctor to ban him from doing rides longer than 20 miles. Since he had a wedding coming up, I thought that his chances of participating in the tour was pretty low in the first place, but this was still the first time anyone's abandoned a tour despite having already purchased plane tickets.

There was a 6:00am traffic jam due to some careless driver dropping a piece of furniture on the freeway at 5:00am, but we all made it to the airport with time enough to checkin, and the flight was generally uneventful. We did end up in a bicycling themed lounge in Toronto for lunch though!

From Tour of the German Speaking Alps 2010

Upon arrival in Munich, it was the next day, but at 8:00am. After clearing customs, all the bikes showed up in the luggage area, but the tandem's box was in extremely bad shape, leading me to discard the box. I saw that despite my attempts to reinforce the box, the rear dérailleur hanger had been bent, and the rear wheel was out of true. We went to the S-Bahn station, where I bought a Partner Tageskarte from another traveler for a slight discount off the fare, and then 5 bike tickets. The partner day ticket lets 5 people travel on one ticket for 18.80 Euros, which is the cheapest way for this many people to travel from the airport to downtown Munich.

It was raining when we dis-embarked at the main train station (Hauptbahnof) and we walked in the general direction of the hotel. In the rain though, the hotel was harder to find than expected, putting pressure on the navigators to speed up the search. Cynthia dug up her Edge 705 and we left the luggage behind to scout for the hotel. It turned out to be right down the street, so we immediately went back to tell everyone the good news.

We proceeded to the hotel, checked in, and proceeded to put the bikes into proper riding condition. I immediately rode our tandem to one of the local bike shops to get the repairs done. While I would have been able to true the wheel myself, the bent hanger required a dedicated tool which I don't generally carry with me, and I had plenty of other things to do.

By the time I returned to the hotel, Cynthia told me that while we were scouting for the hotel, she had put down her cycle-gear bag and had not picked it up when we walked to the hotel! She searched around the train station, checked lost and found, and other locations but did not find it, and was now forced to buy all new equipment for the tour, the toughest one being shoes of the right size for her non-German feet. She had also lost her saddlebag, so Kekoa volunteered to buy a rack and panniers and let her use his saddlebag instead.

Lisa and I made a train trip down to our former apartment in Pullach, where our former landlady made excuses about why she never returned our security deposit. Our return put her in an embarrassing situation, and she promised that she would have our money when we returned from the tour.

Our other problem was the weather, which had rain forecasted for the foreseeable future. With Grossglockner's summit forecast for near freezing temperatures, my original plan to ride the Grossglockner highway first was out of the question. It took the rest of the day to get Cynthia more clothes and Kekoa panniers and racks. Cynthia wanted to try a bigger store (Karstad sports) the next morning. I hoped (but did not expect) that the forecast would change the next day.

Next

Tandem is boxed

Yes, that's two Amtrak bike boxes (cost: Free) stitched together, a bunch of packing tape, a leatherman, and some allen wrenches. My experience is that while the cardboard boxes look flimsy and feel flimsy, they are so bulky that airline baggage handlers have no choice but to push or hand carry them. Packing bikes into smaller packages invite them to be tossed, which is how damage happens. The cargo hold of an airplane is actually a pretty benign environment: people ship pets in them, so they're even pressurized, hence the old bugaboo about depressuring tires before putting them on an airplane does not apply!

Nothing Last Forever

On the eve of our departure, the eyelet holding the rack to the dropout broke. Good thing we have 2 (yes, that was a deliberate design decision). I'll have to have Pardo look at it to make sure I didn't install anything wrong just to make doubly sure, though!

Update: Pardo discovered that the rack was bent, so he straightened it. Then he straightened the bottom-most strut separately after a failed attempt to file away material that was causing the rack not to be square with the eyelet. Then he chased all the threads and attached a nut in addition to the bolt. Now the darn thing is extremely solid.

[Update: Pardo has a failure analysis]

Review: Catching Fire

Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games) is the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy. As with the first book, it's a quick read, taking all of 2 hours start to finish. The story continues with the same characters from the previous novel, but more focus is now placed on the world and the political ramifications and fallout from the first novel.

Then midway through the book things shift gears and we once again are plunged into action. But this time, the action feels a lot like, "Oh, we've been here before." The protagonist, however, is kept out of the loop as to what's really happening, which brings on one surprise after another for the reader. Unfortunately, this time, there are some plot-holes that I find difficult to ignore, rendering the novel less believable than the first one.

The novel ends with a cliff-hanger, but I will definitely wait for the library copy rather than buying the third book in the series. I suggest that others wait for the third book to come out before purchasing/reading this one.

Review: Wacom Bamboo Pen Tablet

It's impossible to draw with a mouse. That's the first thing you learn whenever you try to do anything delicate in Photoshop. Any circles that you draw, turn into little jerky discrete movements, and even straight lines are a challenge.

When I needed to work on Independent Cycle Touring, I knew the most difficult chapters to work on would be the chapter on mapping and routing. What I wanted to do was to build up a large database of maps in the reader's head that could pattern match and see good maps versus bad maps, as well as how to interpret certain features. I needed to be able to scan the maps, circle all the highlights, and then annotate them.

Photoshop, it turns out, is pretty good at this. I viewed a few videos about how to tweak Photoshop for the Wacom tablets, and then bought the lowest end model, the Wacom Bamboo Pen Tablet. The idea behind the tablet is that you have a pressure sensitive pen that can control various items like width, bluring, and other such variables. All I wanted to do, however, was to be able to draw a circle and make it look natural.

Natural is hard. Really hard. For my sample chapter, for instance, each circle had to be drawn at least 2-3 times. Another weird thing that I didn't realize at first was that the tablet maps itself to your entire display surface, so if you have a dual screen setup, that makes the pen really sensitive. I ended up zooming in several levels, drawing, hitting Control-Z (undo), and drawing again. While I at first had thoughts of making the pen sensitivity work for me and give me nice fades, I soon resigned myself to just being able to draw circles that didn't look like crap.

Would I recommend the Bamboo Pen Tablet? Maybe. If you need to draw, I see no other choices. Now that I've been through the InDesign tutorial, maybe I would consider using the ellipse tool instead of drawing. But ultimately, it's the reader's opinion that count, so if you look through the sample chapter and tell me what you think of the hand-drawn portions, I would very much appreciate it.

Retirement Report

When I announced my retirement, at least one person thought it was a joke. The same response happened to me at work as well. One of my favorite ones was "I can't imagine staying home to watch TV and feed the cats." Well, it's been 2 months, and I haven't been spending all that time at home watching TV, and fortunately, the cow doesn't need much feeding.

Nowdays, whenever I run into former co-workers, however, they always ask me where I ended up. So maybe I'll explain what I've been up to for the last couple of months. The first thing I did was to intensify the training program Lisa and I had for the Tour of the German-speaking Alps. This is a challenging tour, and we planned to be in shape for it enough to enjoy it. The training took about 10-15 hours a week, and while I could get Lisa out to ride 2-3 days a week, this year we added 2 hours a week of in-gym time to boost our strengths. Normally, I'd just save the gym money and spend more time cycling, but Lisa was short on time, so this was the way to do it. Besides, paying someone else to yell at Lisa is much better than yelling at her myself.

My first few weeks were spent "marketing" An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups. I use "marketing" in quotes because I actually don't know how to do it. I first tried Adwords, but to be honest, Adwords is not very good at niche books. I eventually decided that while I didn't know how to market, I knew how to write, so I wrote a lot. This actually worked up to a point, and for a while it seemed like every major blog post generated more sales, which is nice. By the way, being an author is great. I told someone that I get more fan mail and recognition from 2 months as an author than I did for 6 years at Google. The monetary compensation at Google was much better though!

I then got hit by request after request to have lunch. It took me a while to figure out why, but eventually I realized that now that I wasn't a Googler, two things happened. First, Googlers who needed objective advice considered me more objective than before (I am still very positive on Google, but no longer am directly paid by Google), and so asked me for it. Secondly, non-Googlers/startups that were afraid that I might leak something to Google were a lot less worried. So my lunch spots were literally booked up from mid April till mid May. I literally had to schedule my lunch spots a month out for a couple of weeks. Clearly, being an ex-Googler made me popular.

People came to me with different issues, and different requests, and so everything I said was different and held in confidence. By far the most satisfying help I provided was in helping engineers negotiate compensation. Let me brag a little bit. One person read my book, took my advice, and during the negotiation process bumped up his pay by about 100%. Well, that could be under-stating it, but I can't say more. Clearly, I can't take all the credit for it, since the engineer was brilliant. But you can work your ass off and still end up under-recognized. I truly believe that most engineers are under compensated for what they do, and it makes me very happy to fix that up a bit. And by the way it is true that women don't get paid more mostly because they don't negotiate. I had a couple of direct experiences with that (and I can't elaborate either), but if you're a woman and compensation is important to you, you definitely need to ignore that voice in your head telling you, "I'm not worth that much money," or "Money doesn't matter." I think that if better compensation kept more women in engineering, everyone would be better off, and money does matter a heck of a lot that way.

In addition, I wanted to work on Independent Cycle Touring. I started off with a Bamboo Pen and Tablet, annotated some maps in Photoshop, and soon realized that I had no clue how to layout a book like this. This led to an Adobe InDesign CS5 download, realizing that the application definitely needed me to spend time to learn it, and then burning 10 days learning the program. That digression paid off, however, and soon I was happily writing away.

The rental unit of my house also needed my attention, since our existing renter moved away and I had to rent out the place before the upcoming trip. That took a frenzy of activity that's still not completely died down yet.

And then there are the small jobs that I wanted to do but would never have had time to do if I had a day job. For instance, yesterday I visited Gastronaut and helped show the folks how to do their own food pictures for their catalog. It was so great to see Nate and Mirit and see how quickly they've grown from a two person shop. They have been very successful and it's really great to see.

I also planned trips. I'm visiting Seattle for a few days in August, want to take Catamaran classes, do another sailing trip in the BVIs, and do a fall photography trip in Montana/Wyoming/Alberta. I haven't visited Glacier National Park since becoming a decent photographer, and I would like to. By the way, if you're interested in any of my trips, sign up for the google group. Do let me know who you are by e-mail before hand though, since I do moderate the group against spammers. Not all trips are strenuous, but I do run qualifiers to make sure people get along first.

I learned to cook. Really simple stuff, nothing like Duck Confit or any of the elaborate multi-day recipes. I'm starting with my childhood foods like Nasi Lemak and Nasi Goreng, but it's been really satisfying. I was always a little bit intimidated by cooking, but spending time in the kitchen with Hang Zhang inspired me. Now I realize that cooking isn't hard, it just takes time, and seriously, I can afford an hour or so a day to eat my favorite foods. Let me tell you, the first time I did Beef Rendang I didn't realize it was a 3 hour recipe. It was delicious, but I was also starving by the time I got to eat!

One thing I did not succeed in doing was to finish a video game on the PS3. I started on Batman: Arkham Asylum, and I'm pretty far a long (on "easy" mode, I'm not 10 years old any more, and I was never any good at video games --- ask Jeff Rothschild or the guys over at Id), but with all these other things to do I never really had a chance to pick it back up and finish it. Yes, I am lame. Maybe this winter after the book's done and the touring/outdoor season is over.

In any case, people who've discussed retirement with me have always said that they were concern about the lack of intellectual stimulation and the lack of great food. I want to say that those concerns are over-blown. I have not been bored for even a couple of minutes since I retired, and the food is plenty fine.

And we are live over at AngryBear...

A couple of months ago, Scarlet suggested that I do a blog tour. My problem was that I had no idea how to go about doing that. I was, however, a fan of Mike Kimel (Cactus's) work over at Angry Bear, and he suggested that a report on the economics of self-publishing might be interesting to readers there. I wrote up my sales numbers in addition to an introduction to my book, and the post is now live. (It's posted by the owner of the blog, since it doesn't make sense to give me write permission to a blog for just one article)

Review: Adobe InDesign One-On-One

My name is still attached to some TeX macro packages on the internet. Yes, TeX, because LaTeX was too high level for me. Yet 21 years after I wrote that TeX macro package and wanted to layout a book with complex layout, I turned not to TeX but to Adobe InDesign. The reason? When I'm laying down text and graphics side by side and want word wrapping and other niceties, I will not put up with a compile/edit/debug cycle, especially not when my modern machine has 4 cores, 8GB of RAM, and I'm not afraid to blow it all on fancy UI just so I'm not puzzling over why this went there.

As it happened, I happened to run into this need during the regular Adobe 18-month upgrade cycle, so I downloaded InDesign CS5 and proceeded to quickly realize that this is definitely what people mean by "fat client." The UI was clearly designed for experienced users to whiz through, and anyone who's serious about needing this sort of layout tool would also have to put in some substantial committed time to learn it, just like the couple of weeks it took me to learn TeX
a couple of decades ago.

I browsed through a few InDesign books and quickly picked out Adobe InDesign CS4 One-On-One as the one that looked like it would be the most useful for a complete beginner. There wasn't a CS5 version of the book yet, and I figured that the differences wouldn't be major enough to warrant concern.

The book is laid out in 12 lessons, each covering a specific facet of InDesign. As someone who knows the basics about kerning, tracking, and ledding, many of these lessons went by really fast. Then I would hit something new to me, like tables, drawing (wow, the darn thing comes with several drawing tools --- I might not ever have to learn Illustrator), and transparency, and my learning would suddenly stutter while I picked up all the new concepts.

The book takes a task oriented approach: for every task, some starter files are provided, and then the reader is walked through a series of step-by-step exercises to execute some task. My big problem with this set-up is motivation. Very frequently, there is no motivation provided as to why you want to do a certain task. Sometimes, it's obvious during the exercise, but many times, I would be scratching my head wondering why I would want to do this. A secondary problem is that some times I would want to find out how to do something, and it's not always obvious where in the book that would be. For instance, auto-numbering figures is described in the section on style sheets. I'm sure there's a good reason for this, and I could find it in the index, but the book (and InDesign) is definitely big and complex enough that you need to do this frequently, even after you've worked through all the exercises.

As I expected, very little stuff was broken between CS4 and CS5, so I could work through almost all the exercises. Once I was done with the exercises, working on content proved to be really easy and fast: I wrote entire chapters in a matter of days in a fit of writing frenzy. It's an entirely good thing, since by the time I looked up I had almost run out of my InDesign trial license, and all I had time to do was to put up my book's kickstarter page.

All in all, it took me about 10 days or so to work through every exercise in this book, and each day was about 3 hours on average, so if you needed to you could inhale the entire book hacker-style in under a week. This included all the videos I watched, and there's about 4 hours of video in the book's DVD (along with all the data for exercises) There's not a lot of explanation as to the why of certain things (like style sheets weren't properly motivated), but since I was coming at this from about 5-6 years of pretty solid TeX and LaTeX hacking, that didn't bother me. The book is recommended as a reasonably good introduction to InDesign for someone who had never dealt with the program before. As a reference, it's serviceable, but other books might be better. That said, I'm not buying any more InDesign books until/unless I really find the need for them. So far in writing this book I really haven't found anything that I hadn't run across in One-On-One.

As for InDesign itself, you can take a look at my sample chapter. It's not complete (no page numbers, no index, no headers, no footers, no fancy per-page tabs), but even that chapter was made much easier by writing it on InDesign, rather than a word processor. I'll write a full review after I'm done writing the book (which is currently on hiatus because of the upcoming tour, and because I am awaiting the full version to ship and arrive).

Rebecca Frankel on Boston Startups

A few weeks ago, I shared something on Google Reader/Buzz about Boston Entrepreneurship. Fundamentally, during the mini-computer era, Route 128 was as much a hotbed of computer expertise and business as Silicon Valley was. If you had to bet on a region, you could easily have bet on the Boston Area rather than Silicon Valley.

Yet all through the 1980s till now, Silicon Valley has led the way in producing the companies that people talk about today. Google, Facebook, Netscape, and many others that changed the landscape basically came out of Silicon Valley. I applied to graduate school at MIT in 1992, and was accepted, but for various reasons (explained in An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups) backed out before registration, so I never truly got a good feel for the Boston area.

I met Rebecca Frankel a few years ago when she applied for a conversion from intern to full time employee at Google. At that time, I thought Google was doing something pretty nasty: they were forcing interns who wanted to convert to commit to leaving graduate school before granting an interview, which might or might not result in a full time offer. I understand why Google did this: it really wanted to make sure that the best graduate students weren't being systematically poached by Google (or some groups inside Google), thereby poisoning the well at graduate schools where professors would send us their top students. But I thought it was a pretty crummy deal.

Anyway, Rebecca has a lot to say about the Boston area, MIT, and the role of DARPA and what other sciences call "basic research" as compared to what entrepreneurship is all about, and I think whether you live in Silicon Valley or Boston (or even New York City), it's definitely worth reading what she has to say.

The next book

Many people have asked me what the next book will be. It should be no surprise to anyone that I've chosen to write about my other passion in life (outside of Software Engineering), which is bicycle touring. If you're interested, click over to the kickstarter guide or to the book's home page and check it out. Or you can just directly download the sample chapter.

This book is extremely layout heavy, and while I appreciate any feedback, while I'm waiting for my non-trial version of Adobe Indesign to arrive, I can't make any edits at all. I'm also leaving for a bicycle tour on June 15th, so if I'm not very communicative over the next few weeks please know that it's because I'm busy working on the book, not in front of the computer.

Review: The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Stieg Larsson's novel which is a part mystery, part thriller about what appears to have been a long overdue crime.

The novel begins with the protagonist, Blomkvist, a journalist and publisher for a magazine convicted of libel and false reporting against a well-known industrialist. As a result of this conviction, he is forced to depart his job. Fortuitously, another industrialist decides to hire Blomkvist to investigate a 40 year old murder: niece Harriet Vanger's mysterious disappearance. Blomkvist makes little progress at first, but then eventually makes a surprising breakthrough, and the plot's pace picks up dramatically after that.

At the same time, the novel follows the title character's story. Lisbeth Salander, computer hacker, anti-social investigator gets full development in an interspersed story segment that shows us what kind of person she is. We know that the two protagonists will eventually meet, but Larrson clearly wanted his audience to fully understand where this character comes from.

The novel is slow for the first half, picks up its pace in the middle, and towards the end jumps into triple-time action, with multiple events occupying each page. This pace seems to be deliberate, but definitely put me off for the first half or so. The mystery doesn't really seem fair: by the time the reader get to the resolution, there has been so many distractions and red herrings thrown at him that the mystery is all but forgotten! This properly puts the book into the "thriller" category rather than the usual mystery.

The writing style is stilted, and the characters stereotypes. Recommended only as an airplane novel, but as an airplane novel, it is very good.

Recognition

Google had a very cool system for allowing employees to pat each other on the back. It was called a peer bonus, and basically netted out about $100. The idea was that if you saw someone doing something above and beyond the call of duty, you would send them a peer bonus by e-mailing HR and then that person would receive a virtual certificate detailing what they had done for their peers to deserve the bonus. There were a few rules to prevent blatant gaming of the system, but by and large it was an honor system.

This was a great system, and I made it a personal goal to hand out one of these every quarter. What I loved about it was that it did two things: first of all, it gave someone a pat on the back for hard work. The average engineer made about $100/hour, so if anyone did something for me that saved me an hour of time or more, that peer bonus was well worth it. But as I handed them out, what I noticed was that people were so starved of recognition that the value of handing out these awards far exceeded any monetary gain they represented. Once I had given someone a peer bonus, the next time I asked for a favor, people would bend over backwards to get me something I needed. So handing out frequent peer bonuses made me more effective as well. I also got into the habit of writing someone an unsolicited positive peer review whenever I thought something they did was worth while. I don't know if I ever made a difference to someone's promotion, but clearly, others thought it mattered. The problem with Google was that people performed so far above their levels that folks working there took extra-ordinary performance for granted, and rarely stopped to recognize the amazing things that were getting done every day.

At one point I handed out a peer bonus to Mirit Cohen (currently at gastronauts serving the lucky folks working for twitter). Her manager got very very excited and told me, "Did you know that in the history of Google you are only the second person to hand out a peer bonus to a chef?" That blew my mind. These people worked their hearts out producing amazing food for Googlers, and yet in Google history only 2 people had ever thought to say thank you in this extremely lightweight fashion. Whenever I visit the Google campus now as a retiree, occasionally people will ask me how it was that I came to know so many chefs. My response was, "Try being one of two people who'd ever given a chef any kind of recognition for their hard work."

A year before I left, the peer bonus system got switched out. It had gone from an e-mail system to one in which you filled out a web form. The web form had all sorts of warnings on top saying, "Please do not abuse the system, make sure the bonus is really going to someone deserving!" What I saw, however, wasn't that people were abusing the system, but that people were starved for recognition, and I thought the warning should have said, "Not enough of you are thanking your peers for a job well done. You should come back here more often."

Review: The Aviator

The Aviator is Martin Scorsese's movie about Howard Hughes. I didn't know much about Howard Hughes the man, but the movie at least seemed to do a good job portraying important moments of his life, from movie-making to making aircraft, this seemed to be a man truly larger than life, able to do whatever he wanted, but subject to a dreadful mental illness that DiCarpio depicts well: at one point we see him covering his mouth to keep himself from repeatedly saying the same words that he knew he would loop into if he were not to stop himself.

Cate Blanchett won an Oscar as Katherine Hepburn, but I really did not like her in this role. Her acting seemed really contrived, and even her laughs seemed fake. It could very well be that Katherine Hepburn was really like this, but I found it really difficult to watch any segment of the film with her in it.

As far as the story goes, Scorsese avoids trying to make any editorial comments about Hughes, and I think he succeeded in this case. We learn to feel sorry for him, but we also get to see the ruthlessness and shrewdness needed to dominate an industry the way Howard Hughes did. About the only thing I dislike was that Hughes was such a penny pincher he had his aircraft company turned into a charity to avoid paying taxes, but the movie portrays him as a profligate spender, risking all in pursuit of a goal. It would have been interesting to delve into these contradictions.

It's a long movie, so it's best watched at home so you can pause it to go to the bathroom. There aren't very many action sequences, so it's not a movie where there'd be any problem pausing (or even stopping) the movie and then resuming it later. Despite the movie being on Blu-Ray, I can honestly say that this was one Blu-Ray that didn't give me the "wow, I'm watching in HD!" feeling --- the subject matter really wasn't subject to high definition, and the transfer was nothing special.

I can say I enjoyed the movie, but not enough to give it a recommended rating. I guess I'm just not enough of a Scorsese fan.

Review: Battle Royale

My review of The Hunger Games drew comments from both Hang and my brother about its similarity in plot to Battle Royale, a Japanese movie from 2000. My understanding is that works in the television industry, and so might well have had exposure to Battle Royale since it was such a well-known movie. But there are significant differences between The Hunger Games and Battle Royale:

• Battle Royale's backstory and plot is pretty unbelievable. The title sequence doesn't even provide any attempt to rationalize what the "game" was about.
  
• Battle Royale had no elements of a reality-TV show whatsoever. The opening sequence hints at it, but nowhere in the movie is there even mention of an audience, and there is not even the hint that audience participation could affect the outcome.
  
• The game setup is extremely unfair. I don't see any reason why the first guy with a ranged weapon wouldn't immediately camp out and snipe everyone else.
  
• The reactions were extremely unrealistic. At one point a bunch of girls are camped out together but they suddenly turn against each other. The lone survivor commits suicide.
  
• The one group that was smart enough to try to meta-game the situation and get everyone off the island alive was ignominiously killed off without even being allowed to execute their plan. So all that set up was wasted?!!
  

The movie wasn't a complete waste of time, but the Hunger Games is definitely a far better plot and character study than this movie.

Not recommended.

Review: Astro City Vol 1-5

Someone borrowed my entire Fables collection, and asked me if there was more. I thought of Astro City, but didn't think she'd be terribly interested in it. Then I read the first book again and got sucked in all over again. The series volume are:

1. Life in the Big City (Astro City, Vol. 1)
   
2. Astro City Vol. 2: Confession
   
3. Astro City Vol. 3: Family Album
   
4. Astro City Vol. 4: The Tarnished Angel
   
5. Astro City Vol. 5: Local Heroes
   
6. Astro City: The Dark Age Book One SC (Kurt Busiek's Astro City)
   
7. Astro City: The Dark Age Book Two
   

I've only read Volumes #1 to 5. The conceit behind Astro-City is subtle but a lot of fun: rather than tell stories directly about men (and women) in tights using them as the protagonists, let's look at them a little sideways: we'll tell the stories either from the point of view of the common man who lives in the city, or we'll tell the little side stories that you've always wondered about, like why the heck does a super-villain keep doing the same thing over and over if he keeps getting caught by the super-heroes? What's really great is that Kurt Busiek creates all the heroes in Astro-City out of whole cloth, but he taps into the knowledge of super-heroes that nearly everyone has had, built up into mythology by comic books over the last 60 years or so. That lends all his "super" characters some familiarity, but keeps them somewhat interesting still by not over-explaining everything about them, which is what tends to happen with the regular comics industry. Book 1 is exuberant, introducing the city to everyone and asking you to take nothing at face value, not the history, not even the heroes themselves. Book 2 is probably one of my favorite takes on the Batman character I've read, and even reading it today is still fresh. What I love is the layered approach. In many ways, the Batman has always been about overcoming your past, and this version takes that to an extreme. The next two volumes are weaker, but still work through the concepts well. In particular, The Tarnished Angel spends almost the entire volume on villainy, and manages to be tongue-in-cheek about it.

Having read all of these in a couple of nights, I have to say I still recommend the books highly. I still don't know whether to lend them to my friend. Maybe I'll just drop in the first couple of volumes and see if she gets hooked...

Under-estimating the impact of incentives

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. As far as organizational structures are concerned, I'm a man with a hammer. That hammer is none other than #1 on Charlie Munger's list of causes of human misjudgment : Under-recognition of the power of incentives.

Take for instance, Jean Louis Gassee's criticism of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Setting aside that Gassee failed to sell to Apple at a good price, and BeOS never did very well in the market, it's not clear that any of the things Gassee would have Ballmer do was really actionable.

Microsoft is a 60,000 person company. There's a very strict limit to how much one man, even a CEO can do to move a 60,000 person company. The reality is, when you're at the stratosphere at such a company, the only thing you can do is to really set up incentives so that people do what's good for the company by doing what's good for them.

Take Vista, for example. Vista broke one of the most important rules of Microsoft Windows development: it broke backwards compatibility. Now you can rationalize that Windows' code base is better as a result. But the whole rationale behind Windows was that you can buy any $25 piece of hardware at Fry's and it would work. Windows XP, for instance did that marvelously, and I still have Windows XP boxes attached to various pieces of hardware that won't work on any other operating system. The minute Vista broke that compatibility, a customer would have to buy all new hardware for his new computer. At which point, Apple could (and did!) come along and say, "Hey, why don't you buy my shiny machine? It looks cool, it scores points with members of the opposite sex, and it can also run Windows if you have to."

But presumably Microsoft knew all that! Why despite knowing that Vista's lack of compatibility would screw with Microsoft's revenue and dominance, did it do so? I asked a current Googler who was an ex-Microsoftie this question in 2006. His response was: "The new driver model? The one that broke all your devices? Well, you don't get your promotion to Staff Engineer for being someone who keeps it compatible with the old cruft. You get your promotion for designing a whole new piece of infrastructure that has huge impact on the world. Well, whoever did that got his promotion, and who cares if it tanked the company!" Ouch. People have argued that the new model is indeed more stable, but other techniques such as MicroReboots were also available. There really was no reason for Microsoft to take the risk of defection of customers to other operating systems.

One would think that such perverse incentive systems that can cause companies billions would be fixed, but my guess is that these incentive systems lie deep in the heart of the corporate culture: inventing new things will always be better rewarded than either making existing things run faster, or keeping things compatible, despite the latter two jobs usually being far harder than inventing a new subsystem out of whole cloth. And executives, even C level executives frequently still under-estimate the power of such incentive systems. As an example in late 2008, I had a conversation with a top executive at a well-known Silicon Valley company about what these perverse incentives were doing to his company. His response? "I don't believe it all comes down to incentives. After all, if you do good work and do good things, when you leave and work for other companies or when your friends leave and work for other companies, they'll remember you and bring you new opportunities, so you always have an incentive to do good work." When I heard that response I did not know what to say.

Months later, the company unveiled a "good citizenship award" internally. It was driven by the same popularity-contest-based incentive system that had already failed to promote good behavior. Not surprisingly, things have not changed as a result. When you see repeated examples of such behavior, it becomes much less of a surprise that startups without an incentive system other than handing out stock to everyone will continue to outperform the large organizations. Which again begs the question: Why the rush to get big?

Review: Keen Cycling Sandals

One of my fellow bike club members, Harvey Wong rode around in cycling sandals all the time. The shoes looked very cool (well, Harvey's a pretty cool looking dude anyway), and so I was very excited a few years ago when the local bike shop had a sale on Shimano Men's Cycling Sandal - SH-SD66 (45-46). When I went to the store, however, I was disappointed. I found the sandals too uncomfortable for me to contemplate even wearing. Lisa found that the sandals fit her much better (no, we didn't try the same size sandals), however, so she got a pair.

When Lisa sent her cycling shoes in to get fitted for some orthotics, she rode the sandals full time. At first she raved about how nice her sandals were, and she clearly thought they were cooler and more comfortable, which was the point. But the sandal was so flexy that she had trouble clipping out, which meant that she wouldn't even contemplate riding her single, and it definitely made her decide that she did not want to wear them on the upcoming tour. She first had to flex her ankle to the point where the shoe itself would move, then she'd have to flex the sole to the point where the cleat would dis-engage.

When I saw the REI had a sale on the Keen cycling sandals, I got very excited. We went to the store and I tried on the various different sizes (they come in half size variants, which makes it critical to go to a store to try things on to get a perfect fit). They were very comfortable in the store, but since the store didn't let me stick on SPD cleats to find out how they would engage or dis-engage from the pedal, I had no way to find out except to buy a pair. Except that we were one day too early for the sale. Nevermind, I'll just bring the coupon with me and show the cashier, and maybe she'd let me have it at the sale price anyway. No dice. Well, an IM to a savvy-shopper friend brought me an on-line link (now expired, so here's the shoe with Amazon pricing) that was even cheaper than the REI sale, so there was no way I'd make a special trip just to pick up the sandals. I would have been willing to pay the REI sale price in exchange for the privilege of trying out the shoe in the store, but not full price.

The shoe arrived yesterday, and the first thing I did was to weigh it. It came in at 436g per shoe (with cleats), which is 20g heavier than my SIDI Giau Cycling Shoes! But they are incredibly comfortable, with the straps guaranteeing that I wouldn't have any hot spots on the uppers (I have a couple of bunions that make regular cycling shoes chafe a bit there).

I took them out for a longer test ride today, and the shoes are just about perfect. There's no problem engaging or dis-engaging cleats, and when I get off the bike they are perfectly walkable (though the cleat does still click on pavement). One interesting problem is that the little grooves in the sole actually grab rocks and trap them, so they're not very good for walking on gravel --- after walking through gravel, you'll have a bunch of tiny stones in your sole that you'd have to work off. There's just the barest hint of flex (much less than expected from a sandal, though now that I know the weight I'm just the slightest bit disappointed), though on the upstroke unless you cinch down the sandals really tight you'll get a bit of loose bounce, which should go away as the weather gets warmer. The sandals are easy on and easy off, but by choosing to use a draw-cord as the closure rather than velcro, you still need care: you must tuck the draw cord back into the laces or your chainrings will chew up your draw-cord like nobody's business.

I'll still wear my SIDIs for touring the alps (open toes in cold rain is no fun!), but for casual riding to the store, library, or the occasional ride to the doctor's office will be all done with these. In fact, maybe as I get used to them, I'll be encouraged to ride all over the place and even do long rides with them like Harvey does with his sandals. They certainly aren't losing much in the stiffness department. Recommended.

Review: Insomnia

I am slowly working through Christopher Nolan's movies. Insomnia [Blu-ray] was his first major film after Memento. It is so far my favorite Christopher Nolan movie.

The movie is a remake of a 1998 Norwegian film of the same name. However, the plot and characters were apparently substantially changed, so I feel justified in treating it as a completely original movie. The film features an all-star cast, with Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hillary Swank headlining the film.

The plot revolves around a girl who was beaten to death in the small Alaskan town of Nightmute. Two policemen are sent up to town from Los Angeles to assist in the investigation: Dormer (Pacino) and Eckhart. Swank plays Ellie Burr, who is the bright-eyed young cop who hero-worships Dormer.

I love the way the cops are portrayed: these aren't incompetent bumbling cops who blow the investigation and have a hard time figuring out who did it. They figure it out, and they figure it out fast. However, Dormer and Eckhart come with a history of their own, and there's definitely tension between them. In a particularly intense moment, things start to go wrong and it feels like Dormer starts to fall apart, not just from the tensions carried over from LA, but also from Insomnia from the midnight sun. I won't spoil the plot for you here, but yes, Robin Williams does play a very important role, and it is played completely against type for him, which I quite enjoyed.

The DVD by the way has a short feature about insomnia featuring William C. Dement, who wrote The Promise of Sleep. It's good to be able to attach a face to a name. Dement says that the movie is accurate in its portrayal of insomnia and its effects.

Needless to say, this movie comes highly recommended. It is rated R (mostly for language), however, so parents take note.

Review: Ash

Ash is Malinda Lo's re-telling of the Cinderella. Re-telling is too weak to describe what Lo does with the story. Eviscerated re-imagination might be about right.

This Cinderella did go to a couple of balls, did dance with a prince, and did have a wicked step-mother as well as horrible step-sisters, and there are some fairies and fairy-tales involved, but that's about all she shares with the fairy-tale you probably remember. The faeries are also the darker sort, coming out of stories like Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer., rather than Enid Blyton

The plot is fine, the story is fine, and even the characters are fine. Unfortunately, the writing doesn't line up. There's no soul there, no lyricism. Everything is written in a matter-of-fact post-modern fashion, which isn't what fairy tales should be about. Part of it is that Malinda Lo is probably trying to distance the reader from the traditional story, but another part is almost certainly because Lo just can't write that well, and is perhaps relying on a crutch of the Gay and Lesbian culture's almost certain support of this book.

Not recommended.