Day 4: Rosenlaui to Realp

We awoke to beautiful clear skies. That made waiting for the train something enjoyable, with glorious views around us, and the sun finally lighting up the valley with sights of the peaks around us!

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We drove back to Rosenlaui eager to get going on the bicycles again, and found to our delight the classic views leading to Rosenlaui waiting for us.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Since XiaoQin had the car today, she could afford to walk around and enjoy the scenery while we got onto our bikes and rode down the mountain and headed towards Grimsel pass, agreeing to meet at Guttannen where the grocery store might be closed by the time we got there. We rode up the pass quickly, and upon reaching Guttannen discovered that the grocery store was open, so we got ice cream and waited. After a bit I called XiaoQin and she had turned off onto Sustens pass instead. I told her not to worry since Phil and I had plenty of food, so we'd see her at the top of Grimsel after she had lunch. She drove back to Lammi and had lunch there instead.

The ride up to Grimsel was great, done under beautiful skies, but at the Grimsel parking lot I didn't quite feel like myself, having lost quite a bit of appetite. I chalked it up to a lack of salt and started downing salt pills, as well as eating the meat that XiaoQin had brought in the car. (She arrived just a couple of minutes after we summit-ted) Only much later did I realize that I probably had altitude sickness, which was strange since the hike up to a higher location the day before, done at high intensity, did not affect me at all.

From Grimsel Pass, you get a nice view of Furka pass, which is 200m taller, but comes with quite a bit of descent! Since I wasn't feeling all that well, I decided to take it easy on the climb.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At the Hotel Belvedere I started feeling like my deraileur was stuck. Since I was tired I didn't stop to diagnose the problem but after the steep part I tried to shift and the deraileur locked up. A forced stop made me look at the problem and I found that the chain had gone off the pulley wheels. This wasn't hard to fix. All I had to do was to remove the rear derailleur, pull the chain back around the pulley wheels, and then replace the deraileur and ride up to the top.

With that delay, I made it to the summit ten minutes after Phil, and then after that we started the descent into Realp. Our original goal was Hospental. Since a massive headwind was expected, we agreed to all regroup in Realp and then we could put the bikes onto the car and drive into Hospental.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

As we rode through Realp, however, I spied a sign for lodging at 35CHF a night! That was too cheap to pass up, and when we inspected the lodging, we decided that it was more than acceptable and so stayed in Realp. I was really worn out and tired, and felt a strange lack of appetite. I forced myself to eat dinner anyway, and hoped that I would feel better the next morning.

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Day 3: A Hike to Kleine Scheidegg

The plan for the day was for Phil and I to hike up to Mannlichen, where XiaoQin would join us via cable car. Then hopefully, we'd do the mountain view walk together to Kleine Scheidegg and maybe back to Wengen, depending on how much walking we were willing to do. After a short quarter mile walk through Wengen, the trail led steeply up along the hillside. One look up the mountain and it was obvious why---the trail went alongside what was practically a cliff! It didn't take us long before we got to the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy memorial. I suspected but didn't know that he was the Mendelssohn, so I took a picture and moved on.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Going higher up, the views opened up but because of overcast skies, we could not see far. We had been warned that this hike would be harder than usual because of constructions on the avalanche protection near the top, but were not prepared for signs like this:

From Tour of the Alps 2011

In the USA, these signs would be cause for a lawsuit were anyone to be injured by rock fall, and hence the entire trail would be closed, despite the fact that I did not see any possibility of rock fall.

Once we got higher, we saw some wildflowers and the pace slowed a little bit. I wasn't happy about the overcast, though, as it promised that our views of the mountains would be occluded.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Sure enough, the panorama trail granted us only views of the base of the Eiger, the Jungfrau, and the Monch, and the best view of the mountains we got was further down, past the Kleine Scheidegg train station.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We finished the hike one station down, got onto the train and then had a pizza dinner, hoping for some nice weather tomorrow before the serious riding began.

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Day 2: Rosenlaui to Wengen

We woke up in the morning without any jet-lag, and to dry roads but overcast skies. I had previously booked Hotel Bernerhof in Wengen, the one part of Lauterbrunnen valley that I had not explored. With permission from Andreas, we left our bikes in Rosenlaui: there was no point carting the bikes around to Wengen where we would have no need for them.

The first stop of the day, however, was Reichenbach Falls, just above Meiringen. The falls is well known amongst Sherlock Holmes fans for being the site of "His Last Bow", where he struggled with Moriarty and fell to his "death." Holmes, of course, was far too popular with his readers for Doyle to keep him dead for long, and returned by popular demand.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We drove over to Lauterbrunnen Valley for a good look at the Staubbach Falls. This is the fall that greets you upon entering Lauterbrunnen Valley, and it has a hiking trail that goes up behind the fall. Due to strong wind that day, however, the falls were pulled away from behind the hiking trails so we got a view of Lauterbrunnen instead.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

This being XiaoQin's first time in Lauterbrunnen, we had to see the Trummelbach falls, so after buying a picnic lunch at the supermarket, we drove to the Trummelbach parking lot and ate. Phil chose to stay with the car and read while we paid the admission fees to look inside the mountain at the falls, which included a ride up the Funicular railway.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We then parked the car at the parking structure in Lauterbrunnen and hopped onto the next train up to Wengen. Even though it was overcast, the view down the valley with all its attendant waterfalls put Yosemite valley to shame.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Arriving at Wengen, we followed the arrows towards Hotel Bernerhof. After a few minutes of walking we came to an intersection where there were pointers to other hotels, but not to Bernerhof. A look around and we realized that we were standing right in front of it!

By the time we were settled, it was around 4pm, which wasn't much time for a long walk, but the visitor's center helpfully pointed us at the St. Mary's Cafe walk, which granted us nice views of the valley from where Wengen was at 4000 feet.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We had dinner at a nearby restaurant and prepared ourselves for a more intense hike the next day.

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Startup Engineering Management Beta Program Closed

Next up: Pre-orders! Watch this space for more details.

Reflections on Social Networks and How People Use Them

People keep asking me about my opinion on Google plus (G+). In the days since launching, I've accumulated well over 700 followers on plus, far more than my meager 400 odd followers on Buzz. The service has signed up 20 million users, which is remarkable for a social network. So has Google proven Paul Buchheit wrong? Will it indeed beat Facebook before it lands on the moon?

Google has placed privacy front-and-center on G+. To many, especially the early adopters that have populated G+, this is the holy grail, being able to segregate your friends into tiny tiny groups, including some groups of one. It serves as filtering, grouping, and no doubt some other features I haven't thought about all at once.

In practice, however, Circles are clumsy. You make a decision every time you add a person into one of your circles. I can't even keep the default "Friends" and "Following" straight. And maybe I want to think that people who are in my "Family" should also get to see everything that "Friends" see. Talking to a few people I know, the reaction seems to be: "In practice, most people can only cope with one or two groups." Great, but the default is 4: "Friends," "Following", "Family", and "Acquaintances." The result is sometimes I find myself wanting to add someone but faced with the Paradox of Choice, I end up not adding that person. This seems to be a fairly small matter, a mere resetting of defaults should fix it, right?

The reality is, that's not where the value of social networks lie. Let's take the typical use case. You meet someone while traveling, and wanting to stay in touch, she says, "Add me on Facebook." You say, "No, add me to G+ instead!" She dutifully visits G+ and adds you. But wait, not only does she add you, she adds you to the "Smucks I met while traveling" circle. Now you only get her public posts + anything that she remembers to add to the circle while posting, which is never. The purpose of staying in touch with someone you just met randomly just went poof. Even worse, when she went to add you on G+, she was reminded that she barely knows you, rather than you being that guy who was interesting enough that she wanted to use one of her precious 5,000 slots on Facebook on. I don't see the travel crowd being eager to switch to G+ for that reason any time soon. "Friend me on Facebook" has a very specific meaning, while "Add me to one of your many circles on G+" will forever leave the two of you guessing whether one of you slotted the other into an irrelevant circle, never to be heard from again.

You might think that this is of no consequence, but my argument is that these casual contacts are probably your most valuable ones on social networking sites! When I was single and dating, the act of changing my relationship status on Facebook announced to all my friends and casual acquaintances that I was single. On G+, you would default to announcing this to just your friends (or more likely, not announcing it at all). Now, on Facebook, there's apparently a way to make such changes not so public, but since few people know how to do that, nobody does, so the norm is that relationship statuses change publicly, and everyone makes these announcements. By making such announcements private by default on G+, anyone on G+ who actually does say, "Hi, I'm single now." is actually saying, "Hi, I'm single and desperate." No one's going to actually signal that. As a result of my relationship status, people started to set me up with dates. The thing is, these set-ups did not come from my closest friends! They came from the periphery of my social networks, in some cases from people I had completely forgotten adding to my social network! The book Connected explains why this happens. Basically, your friends who are close are usually exposed to all the opportunities that you already have, so you rarely find new opportunities from your close friends. It's your casual acquaintances that provide you with new opportunities. So by forcing all your friends into one "Circle", Facebook will actually provide you with more utility, which in my opinion is why even though Facebook long had groups, nobody actually used it --- you actually lose value when you segregate your contacts in this fashion. By placing it front and center, G+ is making a mistake and doing its users a disservice.

What about the digital detritus that people love to complain about, such as baby pictures that clearly no one cares about to even click "like" on them? Well, those are most useful to your loose contacts! Someone calling you up or sending you e-mail to catch up (either socially or for business reasons) but who isn't close to you would find the fact that you just got married or just had kids or just celebrated their birthdays very useful, whereas your close friends/family already know this stuff.

I think blindly implementing what users say they want in the context of social networks without considering how defaults are setup and how users tend to use social networks makes the resulting network less useful to its users. To a large extent I don't even think Facebook fully understands what it is about their current setup that makes them so successful (though at least one ex-Facebooker has it right). Ultimately, while G+ might prove to be useful (as a substitute for say, Friendfeed/Buzz/Twitter when RSS input is finally implemented), I consider it no threat to Facebook in terms of overall effectiveness and usefulness as long as G+ chooses to put Circles front and center.

Day 1: Sarnen to Rosenlaui

We installed our chintzy $60 bike rack on the A180 with no problems whatsoever. Not only did it fit well, the bikes did not stick out far enough to block our exit from the tiny garage entrance. Prior to the trip, we had calculated that the savings from train tickets would justify carrying the bike rack onto the plane.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

I was not surprised that the drive out to Sarnen along the freeway was faster than taking the train, but was surprised to discover how much faster it was! The drive was an hour while the train (including transfers but not including waiting for the first train) was more than 2 hours long! That meant that we could wake up later (not that we would be able to do so given our jet-lag), and still get to Sarnen with plenty of time. The cloudy skies looked like they would bring rain at higher elevations and block out any views we could get on the Melchsee-Frutt adventure, so we opted for a traverse over the Brunig to the Lammi restaurant. After setting XiaoQin's Phone to navigate to the Lammi, Phil and I got our bikes out, and began the ride after synchronizing our cameras to the GPS unit.

To my surprise, my GPS unit routed us around the Sarnensee on the West side rather than the East side that I was familiar with. I didn't complain much, because it gave us nice beautiful views of the Sarnensee as we approached Giswil. After the intersection with Highway 4, we found a bike path signed for the Brunig with a 12% grade. That sounded like fun, so we immediately rode up it to get beautiful views of the area.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The bike path flattened out and turned into dirt soon enough, as bike paths are wont to do, and then dropped us off into Lugern where a steep climb took us along the railroad tracks on a dirt path. The climbing got fairly hefty as the train tracks went into a tunnel and the bike path went over the tunnel, but we soon got high enough for some decent views at Chappeli.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From there, it was a hop skip and a jump over to Brunig pass, where we abandoned the bike path in favor of a fast road descent into Meiringen. The consequence of going fast when it starts raining is that rain drops at 55kph hurt! Nonetheless, we soon arrived at Meiringen and rode up the Kirchet pass to the Lammi restaurant, where XiaoQin had been waiting. The rain had turned into just occasional drops, so we opted to eat lunch outside under the umbrella. Lammi produces what I consider to be the platonic ideal for sausages, and this time was no exception. The onion sauce is a must have.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

After lunch, XiaoQin drove off after I gave her the very simple directions to Rosenlaui followed by instructions to pull aside for the post bus. The climb started dry, but by the time we got to Zwirgi it had started raining and was getting heavier. I abandoned taking pictures, put on my jacket and just hammered at the pedals trying to get to the hotel.

I arrived at the Hotel in due time to find that XiaoQin had already checked in and was taking pictures. Christine, assessing her condition, had immediately gotten someone to help her with the luggage and so we were all moved in! I parked the bike at the usual place and then XiaoQin and I took a walk after I gave Christine a copy of the touring book so they could see the picture of Andreas and I on one of the early pages.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Rosenlaui in the fog is no less pretty than in the sun, and while the rain was annoying, it's still a magical place. Upon returning, Andreas greeted us and said he really loved the book, asking if I had plans to get it translated into German. "There are plenty of cycling books in German," I said. "Ah, but no how-to books. They're all region guides!" I haven't the faintest idea as to how to crack the German book market, but if that's true I'd be willing to sell my German rights.

Dinner was the usual four course meal: soup, a salad, lamb, and panna cotta, all cooked to their usual high standards. Andreas said that the weather was due to change by the weekend, so we hoped for less rain for the next two days.

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Prologue: June 21st-22nd

For the first time, we used AirBerlin to fly from San Francisco to Dusseldorf, then a quick transfer to Zurich. I was warned against them previously by friends in Munich who said they were a small airline that nobody used. However, their bike policy was more than reasonable: pay an annual fee of 79EUR for the topbonus service card, and you get to bring your bike of up to 32kg for no charge. I was struck by the general competence of the customer service agent. We needed a ticket change for XiaoQin because she needed to return to work unexpectedly early, and he would get on the phone to Frankfurt and get information for us. Unfortunately, we had ordered the ticket using Orbitz, and Orbitz's customer service was much worse. Given the price difference ($50), we would have been better off ordering the tickets directly from AirBerlin.

The checkin process went smoothly and the flight transfer went with typical German efficiency. We were through the customs and transfer process within 20 minutes, and what I thought was a ridiculously short transfer time turned out to be enough. Arriving at the airport, we quickly found the airport shuttle for Hotel Flyaway, but it was too small to carry two giant bike cases, our carry on, and additional checked baggage. No problem, the shuttle drive negotiated with another shuttle bus driver who had a trailer attached to his bus and he drove us to our hotel immediately and with no hassle, even delivering our luggage for us.

While XiaoQin took a nap, Phil and I started putting together the bikes under the awning of the hotel restaurant while it rained ominously. If it kept going like this, our first day's plan would be wrecked. The bikes came together quickly enough, and soon we had empty bike cases and fully assembled bikes. While we were putting together the bikes, Phil observed that there was a bike shop across the street from the hotel, so even if we had any missing parts we were conveniently located as far as replacements were concerned!

We had a quick dinner, we took the airport shuttle to the airport for to acquire Swisscom SIM cards for our phones. Phil and Xiaoqin had N1s, which meant they could use the Easy BeFree plan with 4CHF per day of surfing, and unlimited calls for 3CHF. My blackberry, however, was not supported by Easy BeFree, so I ended up with the easy liberty uno. In retrospect, we weren't making too many phone calls with the phones, and we should have put everyone on the easy liberty uno plan, since one phone call a day cost 3CHF on the Easy BeFree plan, which was usually all the phone calls we would make that day on one phone.

We shopped for some groceries, including breakfast, because the Hotel Flyaway's breakfast was priced for Kings. Then we went to pick up the car. We had booked a Ford Focus, but Hertz was out of them so we ended up with a Mercedes A180, a small that that felt like an upscale version of my Honda Fit. XiaoQin was freaked out by how small the roads and parking spaces were, but we managed to get the car into Hotel FlyAway's garage.

Because of XiaoQin's flight plan changes, we had to rebook our return to Hotel Flyaway and change the return date of the car, all of which was accomplished with only minor hassles. We slept well that night, hoping for the rain to stop.
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Tour of the Alps 2011

In June and July, XiaoQin, Phil Sung, and I visited Europe to do a cycling and hiking tour of the Alps. The cycling portion of the trip went over 862 miles with 94,957 feet of climb. The hiking portion was 27.9 miles with 7,963' of climb. We had one flat tire, one derailleur mechanical, and a strange dust cap melt-down. We had several days of rain, but only a couple of days where rain stopped us or forced us to cut a ride short.

This is the index page for the trip report, and collects all the photos.

My photo collection:

Tour of the Alps 2011

Phil's photos
Phil's Highlights
Phil's Trip Report

Trip Report

• Prologue
  
• June 23rd, Sarnen to Rosenlaui
  
• June 24th, Rosenlaui to Wengen
  
• June 25th, Wengen
  
• June 26th, Rosenlaui to Realp
  
• June 27th, Realp to All'Acqua
  
• June 28th, All'Acqua to Brig-Reid
  
• June 29th, Brig-Reid to Vinadio
  
• June 30th, Vinadio to Barcelonnette
  
• July 1st, Cime de la Bonette
  
• July 2nd, Col du Parpaillon
  
• July 3rd, Barcelonette to Briancon
  
• July 4th, Briancon to St. Michel Maurienne
  
• July 5th, Saint Michel Maurienne to Beaufort
  
• July 6th, Beaufort to Carouge
  
• July 7th, Carouge to Zurich
  
• July 8th, Zurich to St. Moritz Bad
  
• July 9th, Engadin Hike
  
• July 10th, Corvatsch
  
• July 11th, St Moritz Bad to Glorenza
  
• July 12th, Glorenza to Bormio
  
• July 13th, Bormio to St. Caterina
  
• July 14th, St. Caterina to Fondo
  
• July 15th, Fondo to Moos
  
• July 16th, Moos to Mils
  
• July 17th, Mils to Bludenz
  
• July 18th, Bludenz to Rorschach
  
• July 19th, Rorschach to Munich
  
• July 20th, Rest Day in Munich
  
• July 21st, Munich to Neuhausen
  
• July 22nd, Neuhausen to Kloten
  
• July 23rd, 24th, Epilogue
  

Appendices

• Conclusion and Thoughts
  
• Review: Olympus EPL-1
  
• Long Term Review: Garmin Edge 800
  
• Review: Air Berlin
  

Review: Queen of Arlin

Queen of Arlin is TC Southwell's novel about a post-apocalyptic world that initially looks like a fantasy novel. The story revolves around the Queen of Arlin, who would be forced into marriage by her suitors if she did not go to war and die. Since she didn't like any of her suitors she went to war hoping to die a warrior queen. But part of her inheritance was a super-soldier, a cyborg illegally imported into her planet, and he rescues her.

The premise is initially interesting but the main character is willfully ignorant, and worse, does not try to actually learn what she does not understand. The resulting interaction is repetitious, predictable, and one reads it hoping the queen gets an ugly and untimely death. Imagine my sadness and annoyance that instead this is the first novel of a long series.

If you're stuck in a hotel room in the rain this is barely readable. Not recommended.

Review: Throne of Jade

It would have been easy for the follow up to His Majesty's Dragon to be another conventional story about the Napoleonic Wars with Dragons with tactical set-pieces, but Novik cleverly declines and takes us into a completely different direction. We visit the China of that region, but of course, a China completely infused with dragons and with dragons as part of the society.

Throne of Jade starts of with what seems to be a really contrived plot, with the Chinese demanding one of the stars of the first book to return to China. For all sorts of political reasons, our protagonists are bundled onto a boat and shipped off to China. There are some minor adventures on the way, but what's great is upon arrival, we get a view of a society that's completely integrated another sentient species into its society, as opposed to our view from the first novel, which treated dragons effectively as replacements for fighters and bombers.

I thought this was a very clever twist, and wondered how Novik would draw the plot to its conclusion, having written herself into a corner as far as the characters were concerned. Unfortunately, her solution's not very novel, with palace intrigues and betrayals being par for the course, but with some not very believable situations (even given the presence of dragons).

Nonetheless, the book had me engaged all the way to the end. While I don't find myself in a hurry to read Novik's follow on novels in this series, I'd be happy to read them in the future. Mildly recommended.

Review: His Majesty's Dragon

His Majesty's Dragon is Naomi Novik's novel about the Napoleanic Wars on an alternate world where dragons co-evolved with men. This co-evolution is obvious because dragons apparently learn human languages while still inside the egg, and easily adopt human companions/riders on a one-on-one basis.

Once you put aside that bit of suspension of disbelief, the novel works very well. We're given a run down of how squadrons are organized, how aerial warfare is conducted in an age where sailboats still rule the waters, and what the social organization and hierarchy of the aviators would be in relation to the rest of the armed services.

The novel is entirely readable and a lot of fun, though one cannot help but think about how much more interesting it would have been to read about the domestication of dragons in that universe, for instance. Recommended, especially for airplane reading or while resting during a bike tour.

Review: Assassin's Apprentice

Assassin's Apprentice is the first in Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy. It starts with a boy abandoned by his family at the Kingdom's keep, with the grandfather noting that the boy's the King-in-Waiting's bastard son.

The story starts slowly, with the story being told in first person from Fitz's point of view. He is seemingly abandoned at first, left to the care of the stable-master. But we observe the repercussion of his appearance on the political scene shortly after in the abdication of the Prince and the political intrigues begin.

The world itself is fairly non-descript, though as a fantasy world there's magic in the form of telepathy and ability to communicate with animals, magic is not a major force in the world. The story moves along at a good clip; Hobb's a good enough writer that you're never left wondering why a scene is in place but are simply carried along by the narrative. Ultimately, Fitz becomes initiated in the ways of stealth and poison, and is sent on missions for his king.

The narrative speeds up in the last 10% of the book as Fitz is sent to help bring about a closer union with a potential ally by poisoning a prince, and everything comes together at once. Hobb is not afraid to pour hell on her characters, and the ending of the novel leaves us with some long running loose ends but with a satisfactory climax. I'm going to keep reading other books in this series. Recommended.

Startup Engineering Management Beta Program Reopened

I've just finished a substantial revision of Startup Engineering Management and am about to start the print proof process. To get some fresh eyes on the book, I'm reopening the program. Since the book's much further along, the price is set at $14.95. I'll close the program as soon as I get enough beta readers.

To buy, click through.

Review: The Last Wish

I started playing The Witcher, and found myself really like the world and the cynical main character, Geralt of Riva. So on my recent tour I found myself grabbing The Last Wish off the Kindle store and reading it one rainy day.

There's a coherent plot, which revolves around the opening sequence from the game, and Geralt's subsequent recovery. We don't find out how he loses his memory at the beginning of the game, but plenty of characters in the game make references to the events described in this book, which makes reading the book while playing the game very satisfying.

The story is told in little vignettes, short stories that provide some insight into the world Geralt lives in, or into Geralt himself. Though the game would have you believe there's a lot of sex, the book is much more restrained, and everything happens off the camera. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks later, I find myself without much recollection of the details of the book. Nevertheless, the writing is good enough that I'd be happy to read it again, either as an airplane novel or otherwise.

Mildly recommended.

Review: The Story of the Giro D'Italia

Bill McGann is at it again, this time documenting the history of the Tour of Italy. As with the story of the Tour De France, this history is mostly a year by year accounting of the various Giri, each with its dominating rider, scandals, and rampant cheating, both by riders and fans.

There are a few interesting titbits, like how Northern Italy speaks German (it used to be part of Austria and was given to Italy for picking the right side during World War 1), but by and large the history isn't as interesting, though McGann makes the very good point that the Giro is a far more contested race and therefore more interesting to watch than the Tour de France.

It's fun reading, especially if you're touring or planning to tour in the area. It does give you a good idea of why doping is so hard to stamp out in cycling though! It's been in there since the beginning!

Recommended.

More Photos, and a plug for Photosynth

I lied: I wasn't completely done with photos. I have a bunch of panoramic stitches, and they're still uploading to PicasaWeb (very slowly). But the reality is, PicasaWeb (and Facebook) are designed to be social network tools: low resolution pictures posted by drunk teenagers taken by lousy camera phones. Neither of them are designed to show off high resolution photos stitched together by people who care using powerful desktop computers.

The alternative, however, is Microsft's Photosynth.

Here's an embed of my Moos stitch:


And another from the Engadin:


For the entire collection, please view my Photosynth stream.

Tour of the Alps 2011 Photos

Tour of the Alps 2011

Between XiaoQin, Phil, and I, we exposed about 4200 frames over a month of touring and cycling in this year's tour of the alps, which included 5 days of hiking, and a week of almost daily rain. Those of you who remember past tour patterns will probably expect a tour report to come soon. This year, however, I've got a series of talks at REI coming up, so I'd be preparing a presentation for that, featuring some of the photos here in this album, so things will be delayed a little bit.

Nevertheless, I do intend to write a trip report eventually. In the mean time, enjoy the photos!

Review: In The Plex

In The Plex is Steven Levy's book about Google. After Levy's last book, The Perfect Thing, I was really unimpressed and expected a typical English major assessment of Google. Fortunately, Levy's mostly redeemed himself with this book.

Levy had unprecedented access to top level executives for this book. This meant that you got all the details about Google's funding, it's approach to top secret projects (including the Android acquisition as well as Book search), and what really happened with the Analytics acquisition. Well, not quite. You could take Levy's book at face value, but it's peppered with all sorts of little inaccuracies that point to the fact that Levy was painted a very nice picture, and as an outsider and not someone who lives Silicon Valley culture, the most he could do was to be a little bit skeptical about it.

For instance, there's a little bit about how Google Docs killed Gdrive in a brilliant play of executive politics. But Levy leaves out the context: Dropbox has made a billion dollar business out of that lack of vision by the Google executive. Then there's minor little details like a remark about Jia being famous for Sushi. Uh, no. The big sushi cafes at Google at the time were Pacific and 5IVE. It's very clear that Levy regurgitated whatever line he was fed very well and entertainingly, but obviously his fact-checking was limited or he's clearly preserving future access to Google executives by being as uncritical as possible. The only place in the book where he takes a skeptical look at Google's actions was in relation to China. Even then, there's careful avoidance of the internal craziness at that time (seriously, "blame the intern" didn't go over well with the rank and file at that time, and sticking to that line is definitely something Google's executives should hang their heads in shame about).

On the other hand, there's plenty to like about this book. There are places where he foreshadows the tension between Schmidt and the founders. There's an excellent exposition of Eric Veach's re-invention of the Vickrey auction, and the sun-setting of early versions of Adwords (known at the time as Adwords Premium). There's even a somewhat extensive coda about Google's failure to copy and the consequences thereof.

If you're an old Google hand, you'll get a few kicks out of all the names mentioned in this book that you're familiar with. If you're not familiar at all with Google's story, this is a great book and is recommended. After all, if you wait for a definitive account, you could be waiting a long time.

Review: American Born Chinese

I read that American Born Chinese is so far the only graphic novel to have been nominated for the National Book Award. That blew my mind, since graphic novels rarely get that kind of recognition.

The book is short and a quick read (30 minutes or so). It starts off with 3 separate threads, the first of which I realized (with a groan) that was a mere retelling of the opening of the classic Journey to the West. The second tells the story of Jin Wang, who starts elementary school at an American school and despite having been in San Francisco all his life, is treated like a foreigner. My impression of American schools from popular media is that it's a traumatic experience, especially if you're a nerd, but being a short graphic novel means that Gene Yang only really touches on this at the most shallow of levels (like "I hear that Chinese people eat dogs."). The final thread tells of an American, Danny, whose Chinese cousin Chin-Kee visits and embarrasses him by being extremely Chinese.

The threads all tie together at the end, and we get a neat little resolution that turns the entire book into a nice little parable ("Learn to accept who you are"), but left me wondering why it became a National Book Award finalist. While it wasn't a waste of time, I'm not sure I gained any more insight to how the American Born Chinese experience is all that different. Mildly recommended.

Review: Norton Ghost

Windows Image backup does the right thing in the majority of cases --- if your replacement hard drive is as big or bigger than your old hard drive. Unfortunately, if you own an SSD and it dies, what you'll usually do is to drop in a HDD that's bigger, RMA that SSD, and then try to restore from backup from the Windows Image backup and then discover that it doesn't work.

The solution, according to my brother, is Symantec Norton Ghost 15.0 (1 PC). The price is fairly cheap, and it was easy to setup and test. Now that I have the SSD back from OCZ, I had a chance to test drive it.

The verdict: it works, mostly. What it does is to restore your drive from the image, but for whatever reason, it refused to restore the boot sector. Fortunately, I had the Windows Recovery Disk sitting around, and when I inserted that and told it to fix the boot sector it did so without any fuss. Result: one fast PC with SSD.

I hate recommending products like this (partially working products are lame), but there's really nothing else out there that will do the trick, so there you go. And yes, one more SSD RMA, and I'm just going to sell my SSD on Craigslist.