Review: Kinivo Bluetooth Headset

My Ericsson MW600 died from the inevitable: it was so small that when it was left in my pocket for a laundry run it was put through the washing machine and didn't survive. Sony promised to honor the warranty, but for whatever reason my MW600 didn't make it to them so I never got a replacement. So it's back to the drawing board and looking for a bigger bluetooth headset that I won't accidentally leave in my pockets.

The Kinivo BTH220 looked a lot like my old beloved SBH-500, so I ordered it. While it looked like the SBH-500, it's actually quite a bit more compact, with swivels built into the earpieces so the whole device collapses down to a small package. The battery life is pretty good --- I have yet to have to charge it more often than once a week (or even every two weeks), and it gets used often enough that I never think about it.

The biggest problem is that it can' pair with more than one device at a time, but in practice, that's not as big a deal as you might imagine, since I pretty much pair it with my phone and leave it that way. Sound quality is decent, but the big problem is with voice. The microphone pickup isn't as well designed as the SBH-500, so if there's any noise at all the other side has a hard time hearing you. I've used the headset a lot for hour long interviews in quiet rooms, and it works great. But outside of those situations don't expect it to perform.

I managed to snag a deal on one of the deal-a-day sites for $20. But even at the full Amazon price of $30, this won't break the bank and so far has lasted long enough that I'd buy another if this one died tomorrow.

Recommended.

Review: Every Day

Every Day is a young adult romance. If there's ever a transparent voice, David Levithan has achieved it in this novel. The book reads effortlessly, transparently, and the pace is such that you'll turn the page hurriedly, breathlessly, in search of what happens next.

The premise of the book is straightforward: the protagonist, A, wakes up every day in a different body. He can access the body's memories, but has no connection to the emotions. He's always woken up in a body that's appropriate for him chronologically (at the start of the novel he is 16). He's learned to deal with this daily switch and has (surprisingly) evolved rules to live by. This changes when he wakes up in Justin's body and meets Justin's girlfriend, Rhiannon. He doesn't believe that Justin treats Rhiannon very well, and so for his one day in Justin's body he treats Rhiannon nicely. Unfortunately, the result is that A falls in love with Rhiannon, and this knocks his previous equilibrium off-kilter.

One of the best things about this novel is that Levithan explores lots of different situations that A wakes up in. A is alternatively male, female, straight, gay, Black, White, Asian, nerdy, athletic, drug-addicted, suicidal, etc. Levithan spans the gamut of the teen experience. While some of A's statements seem heavy-handedly politically correct, I've met my fair share of teens who sound like that so it's not jarring.

If the book does hit a false not, it's in the ending. For me, the ending is either a blatantly obvious setup for a sequel, or the author screwed up and makes A's character deliberately weaker by introducing a subplot that is left unresolved and yet drives his decision to resolve the situation. While the book does clearly standalone, without a sequel I feel that Levithan diluted the strength of the ending for no good reason.

Nevertheless, this is one of the better novels I've read in a while and a relentlessly compelling read.  Recommended.

Review: The Corpse Reader

The Corpse Reader is a strange novel as far as origin, subject matter, and story is concerned. Originally written in Spanish and translated/distributed/published by Amazon, the story is set in ancient China and his historical fiction about Song Ci, regarded by many as the father of forensic medicine.

In many ways, Song Ci is almost a perfect person for such a treatment. While he has written a massive treatise which serves as much of his legacy, little is actually known about the person. The author, Antonio Garrido, writes an afterwards where he reveals what his own research has said about Song Ci, and the life that he appears to have led does not seem to be particularly drama-filled. Nevertheless, Song Ci appeared to be much more politically inept as a person, in contrast to his pioneering competence in forensic science. In that regards, Garrido's portrayal of Song Ci in the novel is fairly accurate.

The story revolves around Song Ci, who like many heroes is deprived of his family early in the story and begins a journey to maturity. He makes many many stupid decisions very early on, but does show some great qualities as well. Some of the stupid decisions are ridiculously stupid (Ci basically gets taken in by every woman he's ever met who wants to fool him), but the rest of the plot isn't terribly bad. Well, the motivation of one of the major villains makes no sense to me, but the plot moves fast enough that even that realization doesn't come until after you've zipped through the book.

What's the most disappointing to me about the book is that there's no sense of progression for our protagonist. There isn't a series of challenging investigations where Ci is stretched to learn new things about Forensics. In some ways, the book focuses on his journey rather than his investigative challenges, so at the end you're left with very little impression of how he came to understand forensics.

All in all, this is a decent summer read. Very mildly recommended.

Review Kindle Basic

My Kindle Keyboard 3G died on the flight back from Zurich to San Francisco, and Amazon offered me a replacement refurbished Basic Kindle for $50. The alternatives were the Kindle Touch and the Touch 3G, but the discount on those were not as good, and I felt that I might as well buy a Paperwhite rather than take those deals.

What impressed me upon unboxing the Basic Kindle is how light it is. I measured it at 190g even though Amazon claims 170g. Regardless, it's light, and small enough to almost fit in a pocket. It truly is a carry everywhere device. I expected to miss the keyboard but the reality is that I haven't really. The hardware buttons for turning the page work, and the nice thing about not having a touch screen is that your screen never gets smudged with fingerprints, etc. I tested it side by side against a Kindle Keyboard and the page turns are definitely faster on the Basic Kindle than the Kindle Keyboard 3G (3rd generation).

The price of the lighted cover accessory is ridiculous: new, it is almost the same price as the Basic Kindle as well. Fortunately, Amazon's warehouse occasionally sell refurbished covers for $13.50, which is a good price. The cover + Kindle weighs 310g, which is very good. The Kindle Keyboard with an SFBags Slipcase, for instance, weighs 340g, and that doesn't come with a light!

All in all, I've enjoyed reading on the Kindle Basic and can recommend it. As previously mentioned, I might not bring it on the next bike tour as the Nexus 7 is too useful for photo processing and can also be used as a reader, but for home use this is just as perfect as they come. Recommended.

Using the Nexus 7 as an on-the-go photo editing device

On the Greece Trip, I decided to be radical and leave the laptop at home. Part of it was just that traveling with a child mean you had too much to carry anyway. Part of it was just to see if it could be done. I'm very pleased to say that the Nexus 7 came through with flying colors as far as casual photo-editing and posting is concerned.

To begin with, you need a 32-GB Nexus 7, which would have the required storage to off-load photos (in the form of 20MB raw files) from the Sony RX-100. If you're traveling in Europe where data SIMs are cheap, you might want to consider the HSPA version of the Nexus 7.

In addition, you'll need the following pieces of hardware and software:

• OTG Cable
• Memory Card Reader (this one does CF cards so you can use it for your DSLR as well!)
• Nexus Media Importer
• PhotoMate Pro
• PhotoMate Pro Raw extension

I'm assuming of course, that you're using a high end camera like the RX-100 or the S100 and shooting in RAW. If you're not, you can skip the last 2 pieces of software and just use any of the free photo-editing applications out there. Though if you're shooting JPG why not just shoot with your phone and by pass the need for all this?

Overall, I've been very impressed with the results. Imports are relatively fast, even for hundreds of RAW 20MB shots. PhotoMate does a great job with RAW, and has a built in JPG converter that lets you post to your favorite social network (Facebook, etc) using the built-in Gallery App after the JPG conversion. (For whatever reason, PhotoMate's direct sharing feature is broken and doesn't work)

Adjusting the exposure, cropping, tweaking the white balance are all easy and usable on the Nexus 7 with its quad-core processor. My biggest complaint is that displaying the results of your adjustments is slow, but these are on RX-100 raw files. With a lesser camera you shouldn't have any problems. The only major feature that's available in Lightroom but not PhotoMate is ND grad filters. I basically relegated features that needed such work to the desktop with Lightroom for when I got home after the trip.

The availability of these apps and these features have turned the Nexus 7 from an unnecessary luxury on trips to an absolute necessity. Not only is the Nexus 7 now a suitable posting tool for my non-wifi enabled cameras, the Nexus 7 is also a reasonable backup for the photos in case the camera got stolen or something bad happens to SD Card! Add in the ability to run a data SIM and the Nexus 7 would be even more useful.

I never thought I'd say this, but for my next Europe trip I can see myself ditching the Kindle and just bringing a HSPA+ enabled Nexus 7 along with the above kit. Needless to say, that means I'll look forward to the next iteration of the Nexus 7.

Highly recommended.

Review: Happy Money

I wanted to like Happy Money. As Meng once said to me, "Those who say that money can't buy happiness don't know where to shop." And indeed, the premise of the book is sound: there are many things that most people do with their money that buys a lot of frustration instead of happiness, and they're well documented in literature:

• Buying a bigger house doesn't buy you happiness, but buying a shorter commute (one you can walk to or bike to) does.
• Buying experiences like great vacations is far better than buying the latest Apple/Android/Lenovo product. You get used to your faster computer quickly, but you'll always remember the great experiences you had on your vacation.
• Whenever possible trade money for time, so that you can have more time for yourself. This is hard because if you're paid more, you value your free time even more, so it's difficult to buy enough free time. House-cleaning services and yard work services are examples of such valuable money/time trade-offs.
• Spending money on other people is better than spending money on yourself.

There. I've probably given you the gist of the book. My wife asked me if I learned anything new in the book that I didn't already know from reading other happiness studies.

• The book claims that interacting with children is the highlight of many people's days. This contradicts many other studies I've read where interacting with their children usually leaves parents unhappy. In fact, most studies I've read indicate that having children is a surefire way to destroy your happiness.
• The book claims that paying for something first and then enjoying it later gives you the feeling that what you're enjoying is "free", which is nice. I personally find myself skeptical of this experience.
• Apparently, even bad vacations are better expenditures than buying a bigger house. But there are no studies on how small a house you can have before having a bigger house makes you happier just because you're not hitting something every time you turn around.

The book is extremely short. If you're not careful you'll blow through it in a few hours. I do recommend the content in the book if you've not been exposed to it before, but I'd hesitate to spend full price on the book: check it out from the library instead.

Recommended.

Review: Sony RX-100

My Canon S100 was out for a (free) repair due to the dreaded lens error, and I wasn't sure it would make it back from Canon in time for the Greece trip, so I went out and bought a Sony RX-100. Others have raved about the image quality on this camera, and indeed the photos are outstanding. It was the only camera I relied on in Greece, and it delivered!

The photos are outstanding, and even my wife noticed the difference. There's no question that the RX-100 beats the pants off any other compact camera that's even remotely pocketable. It's bigger than the S100, and doesn't have GPS, but it's a great enough camera that I can recommend it for everyone, even non-photography enthusiasts.

There are, however, a few glitches, which would cause me to tell you to wait until the next version, which is surely due out soon:

• Startup and shut down time is slow. It's on the order of 1.5s, and I don't know what it's doing because there's a significant pause between pushing the power button and the lens moving. It gets to the point where when you first use the camera, you push the power button, wait and see nothing is happening, then push it again, which of course results in the camera immediately powering up and shutting down. Once the camera is up, however, all annoyances are gone. The shot-to-shot time is outstanding (on the order of 300ms), and you can fire off a burst mode very quickly. This is a delightful camera to use.
• You must shoot in RAW. Exposure compensation is a pain to use in this camera. Just do it in Lightroom or Photomate afterwards and you won't be unhappy. And there's no point shooting JPG if you're going to blow $650 on a camera.
• There's no cheap underwater housing. The Ikelite housing for the camera is $400, and is incredibly big and bulky. Just for that alone, I'm still going to retain the Canon S100 for underwater photography. Fortunately, there was nothing worth shooting underwater in Greece that I saw.
• There's no GPS. No Wifi. The lack of wifi doesn't bother me, but the lack of GPS does.
• The panoramic mode is impressive, firing off lots of shots in rapid succession. But having had a chance to see the results afterwards, I'm concluding that the best way to shoot a panorama in this camera is the traditional way: shoot in RAW in burst mode (hold down the shutter), and then stitch it all in ICE afterwards.

Despite these relatively minor flaws, I'm very pleased with the camera. I'm not impressed by Sony's customer service, so if Canon ever sees fit to compete with Sony in this premium camera line, I'd switch vendors in a heart-beat, but until then, I'm going to keep shooting with the RX-100.

Highly recommended.

Greece Conclusions

As far as I could tell, the sailing in Greece is not very good. You either get no wind, or too much wind. If the snorkeling/diving/hiking or other outdoor activities made up for it, I'd be inclined to recommend it. Unfortunately, the snorkeling was mediocre, and the swimming frequently took you to polluted waters. The sailing might be decent if you got luckier than we did, but the unpleasant experience of pulling up at a berth only to have your power/water snatched away left me with a nasty feeling. Compared to the BVIs where people were much more relaxed and you weren't fighting with people over scarce resources, it made Greece feel much less like a vacation and more like a stressful battle every day. The big difference between the BVIs and Greece is that Greece docks in towns are very pretty. With a small boat, it is conceivable you could dock every night in town and experience the Tavernas, if that was your thing. But if you just wanted to see the pretty towns (and there are admittedly a lot of them), you don't need to charter a sailboat. Just use the ferry to go island hopping instead. All in all, sailing in Greece (and the Mediterranean) has been a big disappointment. I would not do so again, and wouldn't recommend it to anyone when there are better destinations. It is indeed dawning upon me that the Caribbean is to sailing what the Alps are to cycling.

Athens

We were so tired upon returning to Athens that we spent the rest of the day sleeping and dealing with the unpleasant base manager as well as all the sundries required in returning the boat. So it wasn't until the next morning when we moved back to Hotel Tony's that we could explore the city in earnest. We first visited the Acropolis museum, which was interesting. The heat was turned up pretty high so we were pretty glad to return to the hotel at 3pm to rest and then leave for the Funky Gourmet.

From Greece 2013

The Funky Gourmet was my first one-star Michelin restaurant experience. Set in an interesting neighborhood in a house with no bill-board, you would only find it after making reservations at the restaurants. Even taxi drivers won't necessarily know how to find it! Bowen was very good, spending an hour in his seat before demanding to walk around and explore the restaurant. The 13-course meal took almost 3 hours to serve, but it was excellent, providing some of the best pesto I'd ever had and some interesting desserts where flavor literally explodes in your mouth. The introduction to each meal also theatrically done, and I was impressed. Definitely one of the highlights of the trip.

From Greece 2013

For our last day, we visited the Acropolis proper, as well as the Agora. The lines were long, the place was exceedingly crowded, and it was too warm for me. In the evening, we explored Filopauppou Hill near Hotel Tony, and were rewarded with a beautiful glimpse of the sun setting over the area near Athens.

From Greece 2013

Nevertheless, I was quite relieved to leave Greece and Athens after the biggest fiasco of a trip that I'd had in years.

Sailing in the Argolic and Northen Cyclades

We flew back to Athens and then Taxi's to Alimos Marina, where the checkin process had to be delayed until the boat was cleaned. That gave us plenty of time to sign the liability waivers and get lunch. The checkin process was relatively straight-forward, and light. Our first sign that there was something less than dreamy about Dream Yacht Charters was that the marina did not actually have enough power to run our AC unit and our house lights with the water heater on, and the marina didn't have hot showers! Our boat had a glitch that I did not expect, which was that the V-berth was not connected to the main cabin, which meant that my original plan of having my son sleep in the V-berth wasn't going to work. So I ended up in the V-berth, as did Arturo.

From Greece 2013

The very next day we left the dock at 8am. We dropped all the lines into the water and motor'd out. The wind was too calm to sail, though we managed to try for a little bit in the middle of the day. We eventually got to Epidavros at 4pm, which was much too late to get a berth. We motor'd around to another bay, and proceeded to set up both front anchor with a line tied to the shore to prevent any swinging. This was Arturo and my first time doing it, so it took far longer than expected, and in the hot afternoon sun, was definitely wearing. We did finally get it done, and with that we could swim ashore or take the dinghy to town. Later, we would observe another boat tying up with the dinghy used as a shuttle without having to mount the motor onto the dinghy, and this made us realize why most boats we saw simply did not have the dinghy mounted with its outboard motor permanently, unlike in the BVIs --- most folks would spend their evenings tied up to a berth or use the dinghy as a shuttle this way.

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

What with everything going on, it was just easier to have dinner on the boat and swim around and then plan a visit to the ancient theater the next morning. The theater was amazing. More than 2400 years old, you really could hear a pin drop from the middle of the stage to anywhere in the seats. Arturo had been there before and gave us a detailed explanation of the soundbox under the theater and the design features, as well as explaining that the limestone that made up the theater was what saved it from destruction compared to the rest of the site. We managed to get to the theater before the bus crowds showed up, and hence had the place to ourselves.

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

It was noon by the time we pulled up our anchor and were on our way to Poros, which was listed in the Pilot's guide as being a pretty town. Once again, the winds were disappointing and we got in at most 15 minutes of sailing before we had to turn on the engine again near Poros. In Poros, we had plenty of room for a berth, but the Mediterranean moor proved easier to execute in Sausalito than in Poros, especially since on the 3rd try we hooked the anchor on an existing chain underneath the piers, meaning that we needed a diver to free us up. There was no warning of this either from the chart briefing or from the pilot's book, but the local diver we engaged to free us indicated that one in 10 boats would find themselves in this predicament. Fortunately, while engaging the diver, we made the acquaintance of the owner of the Oasis Taverna in Poros, and he offered us a spot in front of his Tavern as well as all the power we would ever need and water hookups. We moved the boat and found everything to be as he promised (except we had to run a power cable extra long through the Salon), and we gratefully had dinner at the taverna, which proved to have great food and was excellently priced. If you find yourself in Poros, don't miss this great place.

From Greece 2013

We spent the next morning exploring Poros, and then left for a short drive to N. Soupia. Once again we had enough wind for all of 10 minutes of sailing. We actually scouted another destination prior to this one, but it looked too bleak and desolate with little to recommend it. N. Soupia had 2 beaches, an island which we nick-named "Frog Island", and a bay with water clear enough we could see whether or not our anchor was dug properly into it. It wasn't perfect, though --- there was plenty of trash in the water, including plastic bags and crap near the shores. But it was interesting in some sense: the water temperatures varied throughout the Bay, ranging from cold in the North to positively balmy near the dinghy pier, which was built near what looked like a vacation home. We spent a good day swimming and snorkeling the area, but as Arturo would later say, "The snorkeling went from poor to mediocre."

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

The next morning we got an early start to head for Sounion. The fear was that weather would make that an untenable place to stay for the night, but we checked windfinder.com and the winds would be 18 knots the next day, which would make for good sailing! It was a long passage to Sounion pretty much over flat water, and we made it to Sounion by 11:30am with only one other Catamaran in the bay. We made the journey to Sounion, and then decided that we weren't going to sit around and wait for the sunset. We did take advantage of the wonderfully deserted bay to swim and explore and have lunch, however. We made the decision to sail for Kea. The passage along flat water was un-noteworthy, and we noted that we had turned our sailing trip into a motoring holiday. We berthed successfully along the town of Vourkari, only to be told that the post that delivered power wouldn't actually deliver power or water. We then re-berthed ourselves at the other end of the pier, only to discover that just as we berth'd one of the other boats plugged themselves in, apparently because they'd heard that we wanted use of shore power. I'd never experienced such behavior before, and while they were within their rights, it seemed in awfully poor taste to wait until someone else had docked before taking the last power plug.

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

Kea was pretty and we had a good dinner. Somehow my son found himself a girlfriend during dinner (the daughter of the restaurant owner), taking advantage of his status as a sailor, no doubt. I awoke at 2am with rain on my face. I looked at the boat and it looked like the wind had picked up and was well over 18 knots. After putting in more fenders between the boat and the dock, I decided that it was not safe to stay at harbor. The Mediterranean moor puts you at risk because if one boat drags anchor, the boats will cascade. It was an ordeal but we managed to undock without hitting any other boats. Rather than weigh anchor and leave, however, I made the mistake of staying in the harbor. While we had a watch going, we did not hear the hails from the next boat to leave and they entangled their anchor with ours. What followed was the most harrowing hour of my years of sailing.

From Greece 2013

In their attempts to untangle the anchors, the other boat, the Anna II, repeatedly hit the Phoenix. Their boat was old and heavy, hence caused damage to our hull while taking no damage. We had all hands on deck with fenders to keep the damage reduced, but nevertheless suffered a dent to the port forward bow and a scratch along the port pontoon. My crew proved themselves to be the best crew I'd ever had that night, fending off repeated attempts by the Anna II to sink us. Nevertheless, the boat was sea worthy. We eventually untangled the boats by using lines to lift their anchors off of ours, and the boats parted ways. In retrospect, we could have lifted their anchor off ours without allowing the Anna II to put us in that dangerous situation by having them leave their anchor down while we raised ours. What I should have done was to immediately leave Kea and head for the Argolic, before the sea rose. We left and anchored near Korissa instead, however, and by the next morning the seas were heavy and our attempts to leave made nearly everyone sea-sick. (We also dragged anchor while trying to raise sails, indicating that the winds were well over 30 knots)

From Greece 2013

We spent the day anchored at Korissa, and left the next morning at 3am, motoring back to the Alimos Marina. While the experience was harrowing, nothing made me as sick as watching Bowen throw up his milk in rough seas. At that point I understood why other parents ended up going to Disneyland year-after-year. While the highlights might never be as good as one of my trips, the lows would never be as low and they'd never have to experience what I did. What made things worse was that the base manager of Dream Yacht Charters was extremely hostile. Despite our bringing back the boat in a sea-worthy condition and mitigating all the damage. He charged us obscene amounts of money (400 EUR for a broken plastic bit off the boat's lock, which he tried to blame on us not closing the door in heavy weather --- which was false. The lock was broken already when we arrived at Kea, 300 EUR for a plastic bag that found itself into the propellor, 200 EUR for a lost cushion, and another 200 EUR for the hull damage). Fortunately we had paid for the damage liability insurance, or he would have found a way to charge us more money. It was quite clear that Dream Yacht Charters doesn't rely on repeat customers.

Thira/Santorini

We flew on Swiss International Airlines to Zurich, where we stayed for a night and then flew to Athens the next day. While it would have been possible to fly on the same day to Athens, we would have arrived near midnight, and when travelling with a child I decided it was better to spend a night along the way because of baby jet-lag. The hope was that we'd be able to find some afternoon sun.

From Greece 2013

At Kloten, we were able to find a children's playground and while the sun was not very strong, we were hopeful that our sleep wouldn't be so interrupted. Unfortunately, that hope proved false, and our son woke up at midnight and stayed awake until 4am.

The flight to Athens was delayed because of a technical problem with the airplane, and as a result we ended up at Hotel Tony at 4pm. The room had been recently renovated and I was quite impressed with it. We went out to dinner at a recommended place and had great views of the Acropolis in the backdrop. After dinner, we visited the Acropolis, but it was closed to visitors after 5pm.

From Greece 2013

The next day, we went back to the airport and flew to Thira/Santorini (Santorini is the collection of islands, and Thira is the name of the one of them with an airport and sizeable population). The rental car company met us at the airport and gave us the car keys, including the drop off instructions (which involved just leaving the car unlocked at the parking lot with the keys in the obvious place!). After a bit of driving, we found the Hippocampus Hotel where we had reservations. They had plenty of room so we were able to change our rooms with minimal costs. In addition, they gave us directions to the various attractions on Santorini, and arranged for us to have a visit to the Volcano, etc. We drove up to the Ancient City they'd described, and got in the last visit before the closing.

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

After that, we went swimming on the beach and had dinner at an excellent restaurant the hotel staff recommended. So far, it'd been a good trip, despite Bowen's persistent jet lag.

From Greece 2013

The Volcano visit as a bit of a bore. Having visited lots of volcanoes in the past, this one wasn't particularly interesting except for the vistas of the surrounding, populated islands. (The white you see below isn't snow, but houses!) The visit to the hot springs was also disappointing. The hot springs was embedded in a bay off an island, and the seepage of hot water into the relatively cool Mediterranean waters led to a luke-warm spring experience. I would rate the entire day a "pass," unless you've never seen a Volcano before.

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

Our last full day on Santorini was spent visiting the Red Beach, Fira, and Oia. The Red Beach was interesting and surprisingly good swimming despite relatively high winds.

From Greece 2013

While getting to Fira, we got lost for a bit, and ended up at the highest point on Thira. The views were OK, but the winds were too strong for anything more than a photo. Fira was surprisingly pretty, and very nice. We found great ice cream and a decent lunch.

From Greece 2013

We then drove to Oia, which was even prettier!

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

From Greece 2013

We thought about staying for the sunset but the overcast weather put us off. We left a bit early --- to our regrets because the sunset as seen from the road was spectacular!

Greece 2013

We went to Greece this year for a sailing trip, bookended by days in Athens and Thira (on Santorini). I'll break up the visit thus into those 3 sections. This is the index page. I'll post links to other people's pictures as they get them up.

Photos:

• Arturo's photos

Trip Report:

• Thira/Santorini
• Sailing in the Argolic and Northern Cyclades
• Athens
• Conclusions

Review: The Best American Essays 2011

I picked up The Best American Essays 2011 during an Amazon sale for about $1.99. At that price, it was a good buy for the 3-4 good articles in it. The articles span a lot of topics, and too many of them are simple mood pieces or have too much literary flourish for me to have patience. There are a few deeply analytical ones, but even the piece on say, the slow decline of Detroit read too much like a fancy pansy literary piece rather than hard hitting journalism. At the default Kindle price of $8.99, this is a rip off.

Not recommended. I had to force myself to read about half the book.

Review: The Fine Print

The Fine Print is David Cay Johnston's book about how corporations rip off the American people. The book starts with a great science fiction story: imagine a world where after a strange event happens, some people are discovered to be immortal. They can still be killed and die through accidents, but they will not age and will not die of old age. Further, the strange event has changed them so that they are now solely motivated by money. The answer of course, is that this science fiction story is not science fiction at all, but the "people" involved are called corporations.

In chapter after chapter, Johnston takes on one aspect after another of corporate malfeasance. Whether it's AT&T/Verizon/Comcast ripping you off on your phone bill and charging you insane amounts of money for service that would cost one third what citizens of other developing countries pay, or PG&E neglecting maintenance of gas pipelines leading to massive explosions and people dead, there's even grist here to get your blood boiling and hopefully you mad enough.

Johnston knows all of these topics well, and leverages his facility with numbers and his strong sense of journalism to bring the stories to life. Some chapters are short (like the ones on Hollywood tax breaks), and some are long, but they all go a long way to debunk the myth that there is such a thing as a virtuous, successful capitalist in modern American society. Neither Google nor Warren Buffett come off as the heroes they are portrayed as in popular press.

Despite all that Johnston shrinks back from the obvious conclusion: the modern limited liability corporation is a terrible legal construct and a lousy way to run society --- there are no circumstances under which a society with such entities wouldn't end up corrupt and undemocratic. Yes, there are other developed countries that do a good job of keeping such entities under control (Western Europe, for instance), but they're also societies that come under frequent pressure to follow the Washington consensus.

This is a book that won't get read by enough people to make a difference, but you know what, you should read it anyway. Highly recommended.

Review: Redshirts

I'm  a big fan of John Scalzi's sense of humor, especially in Old Man's War. However, when I heard about Redshirts, I was less than 100% excited. While it is ridiculous that Red-shirts dropped dead all the time on away team missions, I didn't think that the joke itself could sustain an entire novel. As a result, I waited until I could check it out from the library before reading.

Unfortunately, I was right. The central premise is funny. You've got a crew that's scared to go on away missions, and you've got characters that get shot and wounded only to recover all the time on missions. You've got technical gobbledy gook with ridiculous technical solutions, how despite how advanced the ship is, nobody sends e-mail and messages are always delivered in person. It's pretty funny, but it lasted about half the book and then the rest of the novel becomes a farce, barely worth reading.

I eventually limped along to the end, but only out of a sense of masochism. I wouldn't recommend anybody put themselves through the entire novel. Read until the sense of fun is over and then abort the mission.

Not recommended.

Re-read: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteneance

I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in high school, and reading it then was an amazing discovery. I remember not being able to stop reading it, going on until well past midnight, barely able to stop when it was time to sleep, and finishing it the next day. When I saw that the Kindle edition was down to $2.99, I didn't hesitate and bought it and read it again.

Books are different beasts when you read them a second time. The first time I loved the description of the scientific method and it's application to debugging computer programs (in addition to the problems you find when you need to repair a motorcycle):

When you’ve hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, “Okay, Nature, that’s the end of the nice guy,” and you crank up the formal scientific method. For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up. (Loc 1603)

This time around, I found another part of the story, the story about a father and son, re-united after a horrifying personal disaster, and the realization that it as his son that brought him out of the psychiatric ward:

We’re related to each other in ways we never fully understand, maybe hardly understand at all. He was always the real reason for coming out of the hospital. To have let him grow up alone would have been really wrong. In the dream too he was the one who was always trying to open the door. I haven’t been carrying him at all. He’s been carrying me! (Loc 6249)

What's great about the book is that all this is interspersed with a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California. It's full of little tips about cycle touring that indicate that Pirsig did do quite a bit of motorcycle touring, though he does spend way too much time on a freeway in California instead of riding down the coast. (And much like most tourists, he makes the mistake of visiting the California coast during the summer, when it's mostly fogged in) There are also little interesting observations about people on the road:

While we wait for chocolate malteds I notice a high-schooler sitting at the counter exchanging looks with the girl next to him. She’s gorgeous, and I’m not the only other one who notices it. The girl behind the counter waiting on them is also watching with an anger she thinks no one else sees. Some kind of triangle. We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives. (Loc 4385)

Ultimately, the book's a philosophical novel, with lots of explanation of the authors' ideas about the nature of Quality, the split between the arts and the sciences, and his attempts to unify the two by keeping Quality undefined as, "You know it when you see it." For a rhetoric class at the places Pirsig has taught, I think this approach might work. For those of us working in technology, however, I'm not sure that non-definition is useful. There's a certain sense that those who care passionately enough about their work enough to have strong opinions and defend them are better engineers than those for whom engineering is "just work." On the other hand, you could argue that in many ways, the constant arguments over the quality of say, the choice of programming language is well over-blown, and people would mostly be better of getting work done than engaging in the low-Quality flame wars that you find on the internet.

Regardless of how you feel, however, the novel is thought-provoking, interesting, and never dull, despite being mostly about ideas, rather than being about characters or plot. It's a great book and well worth reading and re-reading. Highly recommended.

Review: Big Skinny World Bifold Wallet

I answer a lot of questions on Quora, but the one time I asked a question, I never got a satisfactory answer. I travel enough internationally that I find domestic wallets to be useless, since they can't handle cash that's too wide or tall, which many international currencies are. I was using a wallet I picked up in Switzerland a few years ago. That wallet was nice, especially since it had multiple pockets for cash and coins, letting you sort say, Euros and dollars, or Euros and CHF. However, it's leather, doesn't have sufficient pockets for the large number of cards I carry, and is slowly being worn out.

I found a coupon for a Big Skinny World Bifold, and ordered one. It's made out of Nylon rather than leather , so it's much lighter than my old wallet, which is nice. It's also wide enough and tall enough for non-US currency. It has an outside zipper for coins and keys, and sufficient card slots for 16 cards as well as two inner pockets for business cards and other sundries. It ended up being quite a bit slimmer than my old Swiss wallet.

Recommended.

Review: Your Child's Growing Mind

Mike Samuel recommended Your Child's Growing Mind to me, and while it was a good read, it's written in a verbose fashion, full of useless anecdotes that don't reflect research findings, with the interesting research findings almost deliberately obfuscated.

For instance, in the section on enriched environment, she notes that lab rat studies showed that a cage with lots of toys, etc would build a rat with a bigger brain, a free roaming rat that played outside the cage would have a bigger brain than even the enriched rat's brain. This demonstrates that free play and spending time outside with freedom to explore is far more important than how many toys you can buy your child, but strangely this passage received no emphasis.

The book is strangely light on early childhood development, but once it get to elementary school, starts providing tips on reading, writing, and math. Each section is full of tips on how to teach your kids the relevant skills, including sections on what play activities are great for letting the entire family participate. The tips are split by age group, and there's good explanation on what works. There's a big emphasis on trouble-shooting learning problems with adequate prescription.

Like all such books written by Americans, it has zero information about bilingual or multi-lingual households, and there's apparently been no academic research on how best to optimal the environment for multi-language learning in such households. I wonder if European books are better in this regard.

I would recommend referring to this book over the years (especially if your child has a learning disability), but you should still read John Medina's Brain Rules for Baby first.

Review: Wool

I picked up Wool because I'd read about the success of the author, Hugh Howey, in going completely independent, first selling the book as a serial on the Kindle store, culminating in selling the paperback rights to a traditional publisher while keeping the electronic rights to himself. The omnibus is frequently on sale at a good price, indicating that Howey understands how to market and price fiction in the digital/electronic era, unlike any of the dead-tree publishers he's competing against.

The book is an addictive read. The traditions of serial writing are clear, and Howey is a master of them: keep the cliffhangers coming quickly and in rapid succession, and never leave the reader in a state where he can get a breath in to get distracted by other pressing matters. The characters are wooden and there's next to no character development, but the world of an underground Silo following some sort of catastrophe (what exactly happened is never revealed, but we do learn that it's man-made) is the main focus, and the reveal happens at a pace that's compelling and fun to read.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

What the book isn't, however, is great science fiction. There are too many plot-holes and things that don't make sense. For instance, the great villain is the head of IT, and we read about the mysterious PACT and that power for servers make up for the biggest power draw on the generators. This makes no sense, since as far as I can tell, there's nothing for those servers to actually do. If all you need is for the servers to store data, they can do their job just as easily powered down as up, and there's no reason for them to draw power. Furthermore, Howey clearly has no idea of the kind of machinery and equipment needed to run modern equipment. Even the manufacture of a single hard drive or flash chip requires factories and a sequence of production steps far larger than the Silos described. Most science fiction novels have characters as wooden as what you'll find in Wool, but most science fiction novels have much better science.

If you can ignore these huge gaping plot-holes (big enough to drive a Google data-center through), however, the book is a fun read. It's the perfect airplane novel, and I can therefore recommend it as such. I expect to buy Howey's other books before my next long flight.

PSA: Do take the undergraduate compilers class

We just closed our hiring cycle for summer interns at Quark. During this period, we vetted tons of transcripts and resumes from top tier universities including CMU, Berkeley, and Stanford. Our hiring standards are demanding, and I personally did a lot of interviewing. Congratulations to Kevin and Kevin.

If you're a Cal student, I have very specific knowledge of the classes offered. Once upon a time, CS 162 (Operating Systems) and CS 164 (Compilers) were considered core classes in the CS curriculum. They were required of all CS graduates. In this day of "applications first" approach to CS, CS 162 is still required but CS 164 is now optional.

From the perspective of a hiring manager, however, taking CS164 early in your undergraduate career signals several very positive things:

1. You're not intimidated by challenging classes that require lots of coding. The ability to do well in CS 164 depends very much on your ability to utilize tools, write a lot of code, and test and debug at a meta-level that none of the other classes require.
2. You're not satisfied with understanding computers at the topmost abstraction layers. You want to dig beneath the abstraction layer of a programming language and understand how they work, down to the point of producing assembly for the machine to execute. The reason CS162 and CS164 were required in the past was that digging beneath those abstraction layers was highly prized for anyone doing any kind of work. (CS152 is very nice as well, since you now get down to the logic layer --- knowing how to do anything at the transistor level isn't necessary, but it's also useful)
3. CS164 requires full use of almost all data structures you were taught in your data structures class. You'll build parse trees. You'll use symbol tables. You'll need to walk trees and do type-checking. CS164 integrates all the knowledge you got from data structures. Getting this in early in your career will only benefit you.
4. People who take CS164 will not balk at writing a parser, or even designing a whole new programming language or DSL in order to better solve a problem. This approach of meta-programming (or Meta-Object Protocols) is very useful and the skills necessary to implement it in a non-LISP environment are only available for people who know how to write compilers and other language translators.

I know it's fashionable now to deride the traditional computer science education with its emphasis on hardcore topics. But when I interview students with the traditional computer science education versus students without, the difference is clear: the former are much better problem solvers, and write better code. Ultimately, they'll make better hires and will get more and better job offers.

So for those at Cal: take CS162 and 164 as early as you can. For those elsewhere, please don't neglect your systems classes. They'll make you stronger engineers.