Review: Up the Down Staircase

Up the Down Staircase is a novel about a teacher stuck in what I'm convinced must be the ninth level of hell: teaching English to the "slow readers" in high school of the under-privileged in New York City. Written in the 60s, the novel describes an attempt to teach indifferent students from varying backgrounds and affectations that range from the would-be career politician to the cool dropout wanna be.

The novel is written in the form of intra-school memos, handed in notes (through a suggestion box), various forms and bureaucratic memos and circulars, and letters (written frantically) to friends for emotional and moral support. (It would be fun to think of a modern version of this book, with e-mail replacing memos, twitter messages replacing the suggestion box, and of course, Facebook likes instead of messages passed between students)

What does come through is the strength of the bureaucracy in preventing positive change, the dire lack of materials and facilities facing underfunded school systems, and of course, the crazy idea that one adult in a classroom of 40+ teenagers with raging hormones might be able to control the class long enough to teach. (Caveat: I've never been an American high school. I went to school in a much more regimented, polite, and well-behaved Asian school, where the most defiant posture struck by a student would be one of refusing to hand in homework --- Kaufman might actually have been able to teach under those conditions, but would have a field day with the public canings!)

In any case, the novel's a fun read, complete with the misspellings and grammatical errors provided by the students, and it's short and quick, so not a waste of time.

I picked this book up through the Kindle Unlimited program, and discovered that the black and white Kindle is not the ideal way to read the book: the blackboard facsimile pages are pretty much undecipherable, so pick up the paper copy if you can.

Recommended.

PSA: How to Resolve Your Lollipop Slowness

A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded my Xperia Z1 to Lollipop. Other than it being good policy in general to stay on the latest release for security reasons, the major reason for the upgrade was that Lollipop enables the use of SD Card storage for apps. That's a particularly nice feature to have, since the Z1 comes with only about 16GB of storage, and after all is said and done only 10GB is really available to the user. 64GB microSD cards can now be had for under $30, a good deal by almost any measure. (In reality, I tend to buy these things only when they go on sale, and have netted them at an average price well under $25)

The Lollipop upgrade for the Xperia phones comes via Sony software tethered to a PC. The process went smoothly, but a day or two after the upgrade, however, I noticed that the phone was getting slower and started running like molasses. Facebook would take half a minute to load. At one point, I even missed a phone call because the UI was so slow that the counter-party had hung up before the swipe-to-answer operation completed.

Worse, battery life had deteriorated! Not only was my phone so slow I was rebooting it once a day, my battery life (despite turning on Stamina mode) was miserable. I started charging the phone at every opportunity, like a Nexus 4/5 user. The phone's bluetooth connection to my car was also spotty, dropping music. Even turning off Moves didn't help. Not that Moves was doing much at this point: the slowness and lagginess of the phone meant that movement tracking was so laughably off that the data was worthless.

I got so frustrated that I researched ways to rollback the Xperia Z1. Heck, I started contemplating replacing my Z1 with the Lumia 635. While doing the above research, I came across a post noting that slowness after upgrade from Kitkat to Lollipop was common, and that the solution was actually straightforward: factory reset!

Painful as it was to lose about 4 months of state, I figured I'd give this a try before downgrading to KitKat for real. And indeed, my phone is now fast again! Bluetooth connections no longer suck. Battery life is now more than acceptable. Moves is now fairly accurate once more. I don't even lose phone calls! I can now contemplate that my Z1 will have acceptable performance for at least another year or two! I no longer wondered how Lollipop could have made it past QA/Sony's certification process without being labeled a piece of crap.

So, if your phone got upgraded from Kitkat to Lollipop and performance and battery life sucks. It's not necessarily Lollipop's fault. Try a factory reset and you might get a new lease on life. It's silly than neither Sony nor Google actually resolved this problem before releasing software. But at least there's a workaround. I just wonder how Google expects Android NOT to lose market share to the competition if they keep ignoring the upgrade scenario.

Review: Murasaki Baby (PS Vita)

I will say that the Playstation Vita and its library of unique games has continued to be a delight in the year and a half since I bought it. In combination with a Playstation Plus subscription, you end up with a collection of games that are delightful, exciting, fun, and some of them exclusive to the platform with experiences you can't get anywhere else.

Murasaki Baby was on this month's PS Plus subscription, and I picked it up not expecting to have it just sit on my Vita for an almost continual playthrough. It's billed as a puzzle/platformer, and I do extremely poorly on puzzle games, but this one is so good and exceptional in design, atmosphere, and playability.

You play a child's going through her nightmare searching for her mommy. She's holding on to a purple balloon, which if lost or burst, ends the sequence and restarts you at a checkpoint. The game eschews conventional game controls, relying only on the front and rear touchscreen. It also ignores the game conventions of having a tutorial, dumping you into the game and expecting you to figure out the very simple controls. Tugging on the child or the balloon on the touchscreen moves them. Swiping on the rear touchscreen swipes between backgrounds on the playfield, and tapping on the rear touchscreen activates the play mode. On occasion you might have to turn the Vita physically, and in one stage you use the joystick controls.

Each puzzle inside the game is extremely logical: you usually pick a background, and then tap on it to activate, and then swipe to a different background to proceed. Each mode does something interesting, and the puzzles aren't repetitious, though they do build up, so by the end of each "level", you're swiping between 3-4 different backgrounds, activating them in a particular sequence, while also moving the character and/or the balloon to overcome the challenge. Some puzzles are time/action oriented, but the time pressure is never so prevalent as to be frantic. This is a good thing, as touch controls aren't either precise or super-responsive, so frantic time pressure is likely to lead to frustration.

The art and music are also quirkly, befitting the game. The music, in particular, is so atmospheric that the game begs to be played with headphones on.

The negatives of the game include the rather floaty and occasionally unresponsive controls (which sometimes lead to a cheap death). I also encountered a bug halfway through the game where it suddenly failed to save. It turned out that I hadn't installed the latest version of the game. Doing that fixed the problem. Some might consider the game a bit short (how long to beat estimates game play time at 2.5 hours, which sounds about right), but I'd much rather have an excellent short game than a long game padded with repetition and frustration.

All in all, an excellent game that fully justifies its play time. Recommended!

Review: The Well of Ascension

The Well of Ascension is the sequel to Mistborn, and is the middle book of the Mistborn trilogy. Middle books are typically the weakest volume of any trilogy, and unfortunately, Sanderson's trilogy is no exception.

While the action sequences are still well-written, the book suffers from fantasy-level-up-escalation, carried to the extremes, as the main character, Vin grows in power, and as a result, the rest of the threats have to scale up as well. This would be OK if the other characters on her team grows in power as well, but they don't, so you're treated to increasingly lopsided situations that could be mistaken for the typical Mary Sue fantasy.

The unfortunate thing is that Sanderson's ability to do character development seems to be limited to depicting characters agonizing about dilemmas that in no way feel real (i.e., the reader has so much information that he knows what the right choices are, and in no way feels like the characters will do anything but). Worse, some long running supporting characters are killed off in cheap fashion that do not serve the plot in any way.

Finally, the ultimate reveal sucks: not only was the reader misled in every way, the entire state of the world is left dangling and obviously hanging for the final book in the trilogy. In some ways, this is some of the worst sins of writing a fantasy series: an entire book in which nothing substantial happens, and you could easily have skipped an entire book and gone on with the series without missing much. While this book isn't as abusive of readers as A Dance With Dragons or A Feast For Crows, Sanderson's not doing anyone any favors with this novel. I'm debating between plowing ahead and finishing the series for the sake of completion or abandoning Sanderson permanently altogether.

Not recommended.

RIP Jobst Brandt (1935/1/14 - 2015/5/5)

My first encounter with Jobst Brandt was on USENET in 1992, right after buying  a bike. He was one of the designers of the Avocet tires, and recommended their use. I had bad luck with those tires, and so switched to Michelin Hi-lite tires which were cheaper.

It wasn't until years later that I discovered what changed my life: his Tour of the Alps trip reports. I thought to myself, how can one guy ride pretty much the same roads year after year, and not get bored? In fact, some of his trip reports looked like they'd been copy/pasted from year to year with minor variations. I saw for myself in 2003, and met him in person just before the trip. Off the cuff, he gave me directions to the Inn river bike path from Imst. I found the bike path precisely as described from his directions. (Those directions are now obsolete)

From then, I was hooked, not just because of the beauty and bicycle-friendliness of the countries I cycled through, but also because I noticed that every time I stayed in a hotel that he'd visited multiple times, the quality of the food went up while the price of the lodging went down. Soon, I was studying multiple years of his trip reports, trying to ferret out which places of note to visit with the excellent food and great prices. To this day, it's always exciting to me to get a chance to visit a "Jobst Hotel" that's new to me. (And yes, beloved Rosenlaui is a Jobst hotel) This forced me to read every one of his trip reports, some of which were amazing. He'd overcome so many early obstacles (some of which required rebuilding wheels using wooden rims in the middle of a tour) that you can still find a poster-sized photo of him climbing the Gavia at the refuge at the top of that pass today.

One of my favorite excerpts from his trip reports went as follow:

After descending the Costalunga (1753m) to Canazei, I ran into a group of Berkeley riders with Gary Erickson of Cliff Bars. He was having a great time but his recruits, who had never seen so many mountains, were pretty long in the face. He sent them on to Canazei, out of the steady rain that we hardly noticed as we exchanged adventures of our rides.

By 2007, I'd become a Jobst-disciple of sorts, teaching Wheel Building classes at Google, and leading Tours in the Alps that were nowhere as tough as the ones he did. In 2005, in fact, I ran into Jobst while at the foot of Grosse Scheidegg, and we chatted for a bit while I ate at his favorite restaurant, the Lammi.

Unlike him, I didn't tour the Alps every year, and I would venture to new territory every so often. Most of these experiences taught me something that Jobst had always known: it's nearly impossible to find better cycling than in the European mountains. But I had to see for myself.

Jobst wasn't easy to communicate with. Sometimes he would answer the question he wished you had asked, rather than the question you asked him. I once sent him e-mail asking him if Lauterbrunnen valley was worth visiting. Rather than answer the question, he replied as though I'd ask him for train trip recommendations in Switzerland, and gave me a list of mountain trains to ride. I filed away that e-mail never intending to read the details, but then in 2013 with Xiaoqin and Bowen in tow, I dug up that e-mail and we rode every train he recommended, and they were indeed amazingly beautiful.

So even my failed communications with him turned out to have stunning results. We have seen a passing of a legendary cyclist, and an inspiration to all and any who would explore the world by bicycle.

Review: Mistborn

Mistborn is Brandon Sanderson's novel about a rebellion in a fantasy world against an empire ruled by a god. It's part of a trilogy, but can be read alone with a satisfying conclusion and non cliff-hangers, an unusual and notable attribute in this day and age.

The novel starts slowly, introducing the characters and rules of the magic system in the novel (and presumably the series). The main viewpoint character is Vin, a street urchin who's been abandoned by her brother and eventually grows to become a powerful allomancer, a person who can extract magical powers from metals and alloys and then use it to effect the world.

The milieu isn't as detailed as those provided by the traditional classics of the genre: entire civilizations and even the primary political system is barely sketched out. Sanderson's clear emphasis here is on the magic systems made available in the world. The other viewpoint characters are mostly there to mentor Vin, educate her on how the world works, and turn her from a suspicious street urchin into a human being who can trust other people and become loyal to them.

That means, unfortunately, that the characters are also barely sketched out. Even the love interest gets relatively little exposure, while Vin's primary mentor (her steward Sazed) is better described, but you never get the sense that the relationships are real.

Nevertheless, the final quarter of the novel makes everything pay off. The reveals are smartly done, and the villains, unlike the cookie-cutter villains of the old are actually smart and operate intelligently, foiling the protagonists' plans over and over again. The eventual overthrow of the Final Empire is well done and doesn't have major plot holes. And of course, there's lots of action, and the Sanderson might not be able to write a romance to save his life but is definitely great at action.

Recommended.

Meet Boen Na (蓝博恩）

Born 12:49pm, 4/28/2015
Length: 19.5"
Weight: 6 lbs 10ozs

Both mommy and baby are doing fine.

As before, a name that works in English and Mandarin, but it was much tougher to find a good name this time, so the pronunciation is different in English vs the Chinese. In English, the e is silent, while it's enunciated in Mandarin.

Update: The proper English pronunciation is "Bon", as in "Bonny".

Review: Edge of Eternity

Edge of Eternity is Ken Follett's concluding novel covering the 20th century. After having a novel each covering the two world wars, having one novel covering the rest of the century feels rushed. As such, Follett skipped the Korean war entirely, and jumps straight into the 60s.

It's a surprisingly good book considering it covers events that most people already know. The problem is that in fictionalizing history, Follett has to put his characters front and center, thereby replacing Walter Cronkite, Jane Fonda, Woodword/Bernstein, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with his own fictional characters so that he use first-hand narratives about the major events of that era.

Because the events are separated by such moments in time, the strength and the continuity of the narrative suffers. Nevertheless, all the major events are covered, though some in much less detail than others. Nevertheless, some events (such as the fall of the Berlin wall) were so memorable that I can remember where I was when I saw the news, and could even remember thinking "now that's history in the making." That sense of power comes through, but I will always wonder whether that's because of my personal association with those memories.

Looking at the Amazon reviews, I'm amused by the highly negative reviews about the liberal bias of the novel. The novel is written in hindsight, of course, so I suppose that's the equivalent of saying that history has a liberal bias.

As with the previous two novels, Edge of Eternity is transparent reading, and compelling and entertaining. It might even be educational, if you hadn't lived through those events. I wouldn't be surprised if children learning history would be be better served by reading these novels rather than the usual boring history books. Recommended.

Review: Heavy Rain (PS3)

It's a good thing I picked up and played Heavy Rain after The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead. It makes those two games look sad by comparison.

These games fall into the category of "choose-your-own-adventure". The puzzles provided per-se aren't particularly challenging, so what I evaluate these games on is the deepness and richness of the content: how often are the decisions meaningful? How many different ways can the story end? Does the story provide emotional impact? Is the story coherent?

By those standards Heavy Rain is outstanding. In fact, if you own a PS3, just stop reading, find yourself a copy, and play!

Still with me? OK. Heavy Rain is a story about parenthood. It starts with Ethan Mars' interaction with his family, and a defining incident in which he fails to save his son from a traffic collision. Years later, we find him depressed and subject to occasional blackouts. During one of those blackouts, his second son disappears, kidnapped by the "origami killer", a serial killer who focuses on killing children. The rest of the game follows Ethan's attempt to rescue his son and uncover who the origami killer is.

There are 3 other playable characters: Madison Paige, a reporter, Scott Shelby, a private detective also investigating the case, and Jayden, the FBI agent assigned to the case. The viewpoint of the game shifts between these playable characters, and you see them cross-paths, or even watch one storyline uncover clues while another storyline is oblivious.

The script is exceedingly well written. The characters are believable, and their interaction choices don't leave me frustrated. Furthermore, when the reveal happens, not only was I surprised, when I thought back to all the clues previously provided I felt that the mystery was fair: I had enough clues to figure out who the killer was, but the misdirection and setup had distracted me enough that I didn't put them together. This is exceedingly hard to do, and Heavy Rain succeeds.

What's even more amazing is the game play. In The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us, if you fail at one of the "game" section, the game restarts at a checkpoint and then you play it over until you succeed. Heavy Rain throws away such conceits. If you fail at one point, your viewpoint character can die but the game carries on! The story changes, and you can get a different ending. I'm not a great game player, so by the time I finished the game two of my characters have died, and poor Ethan Mars was a mess of injuries. But the ending still satisfied me and didn't leave me feeling as though I was cheated of storyline that I should have observed but didn't.

What's more, the game did a fantastic job making me feel what the characters were going through. Because lives were at stake and because I could fail, the story was intense. At several points I winced as the killer put Ethan Mars through trials to see how far a father would go to save his son. Whenever I failed one of those trials, I felt devastated. Some of those scenes had me shaking while pushing buttons on the controller, events that never happened in other games.

When I bought the game, I thought I'd sell it when I'd finished. Now that I'm done, I realize that like a good movie, it's a game I wouldn't mind playing again, especially since you can get different endings. (If you want to shorten the time it takes to watch all the different endings, you should save frequently so you can try both success and failure scenarios --- I wasn't aware of this feature until it was too late) I liked this game enough that I'll probably hunt down Quantic Dream's other games in the future.

What are the nits in the game? The controls are a little painful: sometimes you have to hold down multiple buttons and then shake the controller in order to get certain things to happen. If your controller is broken in that the six-axis sensor is inconsistent this can drive you nuts. This game definitely depends on a low latency screen as well. My plasma screen even in game mode made this game harder because of the induced latency. The background music is not as enjoyable as I would like: the game uses the same themes too often, which makes it repetitive. Being a PS3 game, the graphics are fantastic for that era but of course cannot compare to the PS4. I'm looking forward to Quantic Dream's future games on the PS4. Finally, the adult situations and nudity means that this game is unsuitable for pre-teens.

But despite these faults, I'd say that this game is exhibit A in why a dedicated home console (especially Sony's) makes sense. You can't get games of this quality on any other platform, and it's clear that Quantic Dream's efforts are of a level of maturity, sophistication, and emotional impact that makes other efforts on competing platforms look like they're multiple decades behind. Highly recommended!

Review: The Winter of The World

The Fall of Giants was so compelling that I immediately checked out The Winter of The World from the library to follow along the novel. When you read history in novel form, especially the history of this episode from the previous century, it's easy to think about how compelling the narrative of the story is. It's almost as though real life thought that "World War" was so good that it deserved "World War 2: The Sequel".

The big difference for me personally is that while I wasn't as aware of what happened during World War I, World War II was something I was much more knowledgeable about. As with the prior novel, the prose is compellingly readable and transparent, while the characters get sent all over the world in increasingly unbelievable ways so the author can get them into the midst of the action. One character in particular went from working in Roosevelt's state department to witnessing Pearl Harbor and then parachuting down into France as part of D-Day all in the span of a few years.

Another interesting consequence of the approach the author took is that while the first novel started everyone more or less in poverty, by the start of the second world war, most of the characters are wealthy people. It's easy to understand why: in order to be able to ship the characters all over the world in order to cover all the events during this period properly, they need to do so. But as a result, you can see the gears grinding behind the plot and events.

By far the biggest problem in the novel is that it doesn't do a good job explaining why such people stayed put and put up with the obvious disasters that were moving towards them. For instance, by the end of the war, the fairly wealthy characters in Berlin had been through hell, and could see the iron curtain moving in, yet they stayed put instead of moving to West Germany. Now, we know this is needed so the author can get some viewpoint characters in the sequel, but a more compelling explanation of the characters' motivations would have made the novel stronger.

Nevertheless, the novel is compelling reading and a lot of fun, while reminding me how important this history was. For instance, this novel did a better job in explaining why Churchill lost the election after winning the war than any source that I can remember. Recommended.

Review: The Fall of Giants

After reading The Pillars of The Earth, I went back to the library and placed a hold on The Fall of Giants, to see if Follett was consistently book. I deliberately didn't read any reviews, as I didn't want to be biased.

To my surprise, The Fall of Giants is even better, and still compelling reading. It's a long novel but I plowed through it rapidly, not wanting to stop. The novel covers the events surrounding World War I, including the Bolshevik revolution, the rise of women's suffrage, and of course, the involvement of Germany, the United States, and Great Britain.

Now, I'd read enough history and even literature (nobody's ever allowed to skip Animal Farm or Wilfred Owen) to know at an abstract level what happened during those years, but Follett manages to make it personal, and in doing so, create empathy for the common people who were caught up in those historic events. By doing so, he enables a deeper understanding of why events unfolded during that period the way they did.

In particular, by the end of the novel, Follett had gotten me to care about  Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, which was something that had horribly bored me in history classes (and which I'd never cared very much about. That's a considerable achievement.

Now, in order to get such a wide ranging set of people's narratives to tie together, Follett had to include some fairly improbable events (though as a novelist he's great at ensuring that the characters' motivations are consistent). But that's easily forgiven in a novel with such great scope.


This novel's a great achievement, and did far more for my understanding of those events far more than both my history and literature classes in school. Highly recommended. Needless to say, I'm ready to keep going and read the next novel in the series.

Music Lessons

Living in Silicon Valley sometimes feels a lot like living in Singapore for one reason: sometimes, it feels as though people around here (the ones with kids anyway) engage in competitive parenting more than any other sports. At one point, someone told me about how she forced her kid to practice music in order to earn hours at video games. And then there's the mandatory after-school Chinese language lessons (for those who are Chinese). There's nothing like useless jumping-through-hoops hyper-competitive parenting to make kids resent the subject.

You hear a lot of junk science about how this is supposed to teach kids self-discipline, or teach them to persevere to be good at something. There's also the frequent comment that it's harder to learn music as an adult. There's the real-science behind it mentioned in Brain Rules for Baby, which discusses how about 10 years of music lessons is correlated with better understanding of emotions or empathy. (I don't remember which)

Anyway, Xiaoqin said, "if those parents like music so much, why don't they learn the instrument themselves instead of making their kids that way?" My tip for kids is to make this bargain with their parents: they'd spend precisely as much time practicing their instruments as their parents spend playing Bloodborne. (Those kids who want to have mercy on their parents can choose an easier game like Uncharted 2 instead) (No, I'm not afraid of my kids doing this to me --- I've been secretly practicing video games)

In any case, I grew up hating piano lessons as well, just like many other Asian kids. Thankfully, my parents let us give up on those lessons before any permanent damage was done: I'll never love classical music, but at least I can enjoy some music.

In any case, I'd always thought that I'd enjoy the flute. I bought a tiny white recorder-toy for Bowen, and could play a few tunes for him, but the recorder's range is pretty limited. And then during a re-watch of Battlestar Galactica (we knew to stop at Season 3, Episode 4), I heard Wander My Friends, which captivated me. Coupled with my wife's comments about learning an instrument, I decided to buy a cheapo flute and a book and try to learn how to play.

A few days into it, I realized that learning an instrument from a book was a recipe for giving myself bad habits, and engaged an instructor for private lessons. A couple of weeks of practice later, and I'm beginning to hit high notes. Most of all, I'm now actually able to play tunes that I like, albeit not mistake free, and perhaps at a halting tempo. (I've long been able to play anything by ear, with minor experimentation, so this is not a surprise --- my sight reading skills are still piss-poor, however, mostly because playing by ear has made me neglect those skills)

The flute's a much tougher instrument than the piano: rather than just working your fingers and hands, you have to form an embouchure. Worse, the embouchure varies from note to note, so you're changing the embouchure and your fingering at the same time, which makes for challenging practicing. On the other hand, it's a much more fun instrument than the piano.

For one thing, you don't have to sit! I never realized how much I disliked sitting in front of a piano until the day I realized that the flute didn't have to be played sitting down. I can stand and play, walk around and play, and generally move around. The instrument is portable, and if I ever got really good at it, I supposed I could hike and practice at the same time. If you're a cyclist, hiker, sailor, a piano is a ridiculous thing to bring with you on trips, but it's entirely feasible to bring along a flute, or its cheap but robust relative, the fife.

So a couple of weeks later, my cheapo flute developed an air-leak that made me unable to play certain notes. My instructor looked at it and asked me how much I paid for it. When I told him, he said that he was surprised that it even made any noise at all. He recommended that I upgraded to the Gemeinhardt. That darn thing cost $300, but it was a revelation! Now I can easily hit every note I can form a decent embouchure for, and I could now play Wander My Friends. The day it arrived I spent a couple of hours playing it because it was so much fun being able to play whatever I wanted without the instrument getting in the way!  I was never that motivated as a kid! Note that the technical practice still sucks. It's still boring to repeatedly play the same piece over and over again, and it's still annoying as heck to fail for 4-5 days until suddenly everything clicks and you can do it on the 6th.

So the argument that it's easier to learn music as a kid doesn't really pan out for me. As an adult, it's easier for me to tolerate having to do technical exercises in order to get better. I've learned to reward myself by playing tunes I like after I'm done with the technical exercises. I also have low standards. I'm not going after orchestra-level performance: I'm playing for my own satisfaction and fun. When it gets boring, I stop.

And of course, Bowen after seeing me play, wants to play too. But even if we start him on lessons (most music instructors will agree that 5 years is about the right age to start, not earlier), there's no way I'm going to make him practice or let him treat music as anything but fun. Though having read this answer on Quora, I'm tempted to force him into music lessons and use math or cycling as a reward instead.

I think as far as music lessons are concerned, the advice written by Antoine de Saint Exupery from decades ago applies, more than anything else:
"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

Review: The Altar Girl

I'll admit that while I religiously pick up my free Kindle First book, I rarely get around to reading them, let alone finish them. They don't usually have good writing, and frequently have all too many cliches like Vampires, Zombies, or marrying a billionaire.

The Altar Girl promised to be an exception. First, the protagonist is unusual: a Ukrainian woman  (Nadia Tesla) who separated from her community, and estranged from her family. When her godfather dies, she comes back and discovers that he was probably murdered. Like any other noir novel, her investigations leads her into deeper and deeper trouble, until a "thrilling" conclusion.

The Ukrainian background is authentic (the author himself is Ukrainian), and the heroine herself is more or less competent. The mystery, however, is kinda matter-of-fact, and has a cliched twist that doesn't quite play fair with the reader. (That means that the novel properly falls into the "thriller" category rather than the mystery category)

There's a flashback thread involving an incident in Nadia's childhood that doesn't actually add much, and serves more of a red herring than anything else. While it's good to depict Nadia's character from a young age, there's too big a discontinuity from her childhood event to her depiction as an adult for it to carry much weight.

Nevertheless, the novel is short and doesn't cost a lot of time, so I'd recommend it as an airplane novel. Mildly recommended.

Review: Skinny Mini Pen

If you're like me, you can never find a pen whenever you need one. I'm forever borrowing pens in order to fill out customs forms while traveling, or even to write a check. I've tried buying boxes of pens from Costco or Amazon, but that doesn't work. Before I know it, the  pens have disappered, and I'm back to borrowing random pens from strangers if I'm lucky, or just searching through every nook and cranny of the house in the hopes of finding one that works.

The solution for me, it turned out, it to forget about traditional pens, and buy a wallet pen. If you Google that, you'll get outrageously priced garbage that's pretty to look at but actually won't fit in your wallet. However, during a recent sale, I found the Skinny Mini Pen. This device is actually engineered to fit in the fold of your wallet, and when I keep it there, I hardly ever notice that it's around.

However, because of its location, I can always find it, since I usually have my wallet with me! The pen telescopes to become longer in case you have bigger hands than mine, but for me, I can just use it without that feature. The biggest issue I have with this pen is that the cap is a screw on cap. That slows things down for me, but much less so than desperately having to look for a pen would. It even has replaceable ink fillers, which is very nice, but given how little I need to write nowadays, I'll be surprised if I have to replace the filler more than once every 5 years.

In any case, this is highly recommended. If you never have a pen when you need one, this is the solution for you.

Review: Camelbak Podium Bottle

I'm a notorious cheapskate, and have been using my Google-issued water bottles for at least the last 8-9 years. But they recently sprung a leak, which would normally have me keep using them if all I had in them was water and/or ice, but because I've been adding Nuun tablets to my bottles, end up with all sorts of electrolytes bursting out. Not really acceptable, since it would cause rapid chain wear.

There was a deal for the Camelbak Podium bottle, so I got 2 effectively for free, despite my skepticism about them truly working. I'm abashed to say that they actually do work, and work well. Even with an effervescent tablet in them, they don't leak, and when you squeeze the bottle, they do provide water. There's a fully lock out tab, which I've used by mistake, but it's easy to undo while riding.

My biggest problem with them is that I still keep bumping the bottle spouts with my chin in an attempt to close or open them out of habit.

Recommended. When it comes time to replace my insulated bottles, I'll seriously consider the insulated "Chill" version of these bottles as well.

Montebello Open Space Preserve Backpack Camp

Last year's S24O with Bowen gave me confidence to propose another camping trip this year to him. He enjoyed the camping, but didn't want to go beach camping again. For this year's trip, Arturo had told me that there's a backpack campground on the Montebello road in the open space preserve. I'd ridden past the site before, but always thought it didn't have water, but it turned out that the site is fed by a spring. At $2/person, and an easy 2 mile hike in from the parking lot, it was a great idea.

When I broached the idea to Bowen, he was enthusiastic about it, and was constantly looking forward to the trip. You book the site via the website at the MROSD. They e-mail you a permit, which you print, and then you pay after you camp, which is very friendly. They note that  the spring water requires not just filtration, but chemical treatment to make it safe to drink, so we bought potable aqua tablets. That didn't turn out to be necessary because we ended up boiling all our water.
We left the parking lot at around 2:00pm, and started the walk towards the campground. Bowen asked to be carried at first, but then we offered him marshmallows in exchange for walking, and that got him motivated. Heck, after enough marshmallows, he didn't just walk, he ran, and we actually had to jog along to keep up with him. It was a beautiful spring day, perfect weather for hiking, and we saw plenty of poppies, deer, and had great views of San Francisco and the Bay from the ridge, but could see a fog bank hanging out near the coast. A couple of backpackers passed us on the way to the group camp, but we were the first to arrive at the individual tent sites.

The first order of business was to pitch the tent. This went well, but I broke my Easton tent stake. It was very disappointing, as these stakes hadn't been used for very long. Fortunately, Arturo had extra stakes, so we pitched the tents anyway.

Bowen got excited and crawled into the tent, as I handed him all the sleeping equipment. He played for a while while Arturo and I unpacked, stuck all the food into the food lockers, and setup the stove to make tea, Apple Cider, and hot chocolate. He liked the hot chocolate, but once he tasted Arturo's apple cider refused to try anything else! On our last camping trip I'd made the same Apple Cider but he refused to have any of it. What a difference half a year makes. After this, we walked up to the top of black mountain for the panoramas, availing ourselves of the late afternoon light. It was sweet: I'd cycled up to the area and hiked up to it many times, but had never been here near sunset. It's gorgeous. We went back to the campground for dinner to find that everyone else had arrived. I expected that Bowen would be one of the youngest kids camping, but I was wrong. There were two 1-year olds, and 1 2-year old, and Bowen was in fact the oldest kid at the campground! The 1-year olds were carted in on bike trailers, with the dads riding mountain bikes to ferry the camping gear as well as the kids. The two year old was carried in by his father.

After dinner, we went to see the city lights from the top of the Black Mountain summit, and got to identify where our house might be from the well lit streets of the area. Since the park's closed half an hour after sunset, this is the only way to get those night views of the area, which makes this trip all the more special. Arturo has a tripod which he used to shoot more pictures of the night scene, and I look forward to seeing them.

The next morning it rained, so we quickly ate breakfast in the drizzle, packed up our wet tent, and then quickly walked down the mountain. Bowen got his socks quickly wet, and begged to be carried. Well, this was the downhill direction, so Arturo and I took turns adding the 30-pound handicap weight to our shoulders and hoofed it back to the car.

I'd never considered camping on Black Mountain before, since when I had time, I'd always want to be further from home. But that's a mistake. It's a beautiful location, and an excellent site to boot. The closeness of it to the trailhead makes it such that bringing along a small child is plausible and enjoyable, and easy if you use bicycles. And you can't beat the price.

Recommended. P.S. Because of running out of Google's quota, I've switched to OneDrive (where I have 250GB of free quota) for photo hosting. Here's the complete photo album for this trip.

Review: Diablo III Ultimate Evil Edition (PS4)

Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition is the latest iteration of Blizzard's randomly generated dungeon crawler. I remember getting a demo of the first Diablo way back in 1996 at Mpath from Blizzard's team and thinking, Oh, just a Nethack with prettier graphics. To my surprise, not only was the game very well received, it was one of the few games I actually finished.

By contrast, I never finished Diablo II, mostly because I started getting worried about RSI from clicking the darn mouse so much. Thus I avoided Diablo III on the PC, and only picked up the Ultimate Evil Edition for the PS4 when it went on sale during the holidays.

The big disadvantage of the game on the PS4 is that the controller has much fewer buttons than the keyboard, so you're restricted in attacks to the 4 face buttons, R1, R2, and L2. (L1 is reserved for the healing potion: there are no other potion types in the game as far as I can tell!) The flip side of this UI is that the PS4 controllers are much better for you ergonomically than the mouse, and you're much less likely to get RSI from the PS4 controller than any mouse.

The most impressive thing about Diablo III is how well balanced it is. I have no shame when it comes to playing video games: I start every game on Easy, and I never upgrade difficulty levels because "Easy" hardly ever matches the description when you're over 40 and the typical gamer is 9 years old and has the reflexes of a ninja by comparison. Well, "Easy" on Diablo is called "Normal", but within 6 play sessions, I'd realized that I wasn't ever using healing potions and upgraded to Hard, then Expert, Master, and then Torment I, before dropping back down to Master for the final boss fight when I died once. The algorithm suggested on the internet for determining the correct difficulty level is that if you have an easy time killing the treasure goblin, then you should up the difficulty level. If you have a tough time killing the treasure goblin, then you should go down one difficulty level. In practice, being one difficulty level too hard (on a Wizard, at least) is no big deal and won't kill you too often, but makes progressing challenging as every minor fight takes a long time.

The smartest thing about the difficulty level system in Diablo III is that it gives you something back for picking a higher difficulty level: you gain experience faster, and the loot drops are better. That gives you an incentive to self-adjust the difficulty level to optimize your experience. Far too many games rely on trophies to drive you to play at higher difficulty levels or new game plus, but those incentives don't work on me. Diablo III's rewards, however do.

After a bit, I realized that the reason for this is that Diablo III's difficulty is dependent much more on character optimization than on game play technique. In other words, if you frequently check your character stats, and optimize your character's equipment loadout, then pick spells (I was playing a Wizard) your playstyle (which in my case was to forget about staying far away from enemies but just getting close to them and unleashing a barrage of spells) didn't matter that much. Your total damage per second would be so high that you would essentially wipe the floor with enemies. Only in special situations (when facing elites that could block off escape routes) would my character die.

Death has a very low penalty in the non-hardcore version of the game (and I'm not dumb enough to start off in hardcore mode): your equipment loses 10% of it's durability, and you'd have to pay to repair it. Given that gold is fairly easy to come by and you quickly run out of uses for it, this is no big deal, and you could respawn and finish wiping the floor with a renewed character (dropping in difficulty if you have to) and then keep going.

Up until around level 60, the leveling up frequently unlocks new spells and other character abilities, giving you new modes of play, which would change the game enough to keep you interested. The story is cliched and boring, but you don't play any version of Diablo for the story anyway. Even the cut scenes seem particularly uninspired in this one. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered even the hidden level during my first play through.

I tried a few levels in co-op, and the game is surprisingly fun, even when the two of you don't coordinate and end up playing Wizards. The difficulty of the game gets bumped when you add players, but this didn't seem to affect game play much. The game truly is well balanced and scaled well. There's even an apprentice mode, where the lower level character is beefed up so as to not automatically die if a 1st level character was paired up with a 30th level character. I tried this with my 3 year old son playing my 30th level Wizard, and me playing a 1st level Monk, and it did work. I had to quickly stop, however, when Bowen started discarding valuable magic items through some combination of key presses on the controller which I hadn't known about and have no way to disable.

There are a few nits in the PS4 version of Diablo III. There's no explicit save that I could find, so occasionally, I'd play until I get to some level of the dungeon, have to quit the game for whatever reason, and upon coming back discover that I'd have to redo most of the work. My memory of the original Diablo was that on the PC at least, you could save anywhere and resume anywhere and retain all your state, but the PS4 version for whatever reason doesn't do that. It took me a while to figure out that I had to keep playing until the next "Checkpoint Reached" banner, which could take quite a while, since the randomly generated dungeon could put your objective in the opposite corner from where you started exploring.

The other nit has to do with the display. The game doesn't always do a good job of telling you where your character is in the display. This is particularly bad if there are walls occluding the characters and your characters are surrounded by monsters. During those fights you just fight blindly and are thankful that there's no such thing as "friendly fire" in the game. The game does run well at 60fps, with very rare glitches that aren't noticeable no matter how busy the game gets. The PS4 does however run the fan pretty hard while you're playing.

With console games, I'm always tempted to sell them after I play through the first time since it's unlikely I have enough time to play it again. However, I'll make an exception for Diablo III: with 5 more character classes, an adventure mode I haven't explored yet, and a co-op mode that's very promising, I could see it as a game that I could return to time and again.

Recommended.

Review: Counterspy (PS Vita)

CounterSpy is a side-scrolling stealth/action game available for Android, iOS, and Playstation (PS3, Vita, and PS4). I'm reviewing the PS Vita version, but I don't expect the Android version to be much different, and the PS4 version was pretty much identical.

The game consists of sneaking through a military base, pilfering secrets from safes, killing or avoiding enemies and security cameras, and finally recovering ammunition or health from various cabinets. The controls are pretty basics, and the initial tutorial does a great job of covering all the basics and then letting you go wild.

The story is ignorable and tongue in cheek, giving you nothing except an excuse to pilfer bases from both American and Soviet sites. What's interesting to me is that the game gives each side an alert level (called DEFCON) that persists from one level to another, ensuring that if you screw up on one side, then your next visit to that side will be much harder and more prone to failure. The game does give you ways of lowering DEFCON, either by threatening officers (which can only be done after you've killed every other soldier around them) or by paying.

There are also weapon upgrades that can be found, which lets you turn the game from being a stealth game into a shooter. The game's not great as a shooter, with basically duck and roll being the only options other than the joystick controls, but it's serviceable and still fun. Once the shooting starts, however, you usually have a limited time to kill everyone off before someone gets on the radio and calls for help, raising the DEFCON level and making life hard. One nitpick here is that on a level with multiple locations, sometimes someone standing at a different location will get on the radio and then you won't have time to stop them before the DEFCON goes up because the travel time is too long. This is a nitpick because as long as you pick off everyone quietly it shouldn't happen.

This is all great until you get to the final level, where you're required to stealth into the base of the highest DEFCON side you've got. Well, that means you have to do more missions to attempt to lower the DEFCON before attempting the final, tough mission. Fortunately for me, I triggered some bug trying to do so which gave me the lowest DEFCON side instead for my final mission, and successfully beat the game without much trouble.

The game provides network play by telling you about other rival spies (users) with the same amount of score. If you beat that rival's spies' score, you get to loot their body, which gets placed somewhere randomly on the next mission.

All in all, the game was fun. On the technical side, my biggest complaint is that the loading times for levels are too long (each level is randomly generated, so my guess is that their generation algorithm is single threaded) on my PS Vita, though the PS 4 version wasn't much faster. The game ended up staying on my PS Vita for a long time because in many ways it's the ideal mobile game: each level takes just a few minutes to play through, and there's not a ton of context carried over level to level so you're never lost. Since the Android version is $5 (I got the game as part of this month's Playstation Plus subscription) and has no micro-transactions (what a concept!), it definitely deserves your attention.

Recommended.

Review: Chaos Quarter

Chaos Quarter is David Welch's science fiction novel about a travel through space. It reads like a setup for a bunch of sequels, and is full of cliches.

The characters, kingdoms, and worlds described in the book seem drawn out of a cookie-cutter, with serial numbers filed off and names changed.

What makes the book bearable is that the writer can actually string sentences together and make them flow, which is no mean feat given how bad the other elements of the novel (characters, plot, and setting) are. What this tells you is how important style and readability is when writing a novel.

Not recommended.

Review: On Immunity: An Innoculation

On Immunity is Eula Bliss' book about vaccination. It's not a science book. Rather, it's written in the style of Susan Sontag, meant to explore the issue of whether or not to vaccinate your kids from an English major, "I can't read the papers or understand the scientific background, but I'm full of empathy" perspective.

This drives me nuts. For instance, Bliss' father is a physician. She'll ask him why people would organize measles parties for their kids. His answer (which I love, being the kind of empathy-lacking person he is) is, "Because they're idiots." Bliss, on the other hand would prevaricate, and talk about all sorts of irrelevant issues without providing statistics, facts, or science.

So the target audience isn't you if you're a scientist or engineer. As far as I can tell, the target audience is someone who's not a scientist or engineer, who's incredibly neurotic about her kids (i.e., will panic over every little event --- those people shouldn't have boys, because boys will do things like break bones and play with fire, making such mothers into nervous wrecks), and is incapable of understanding statistics, but would love to debate morality.

Now, there are a few little titbits here and there that make this book not a complete waste of time, but by and large, they're buried in so much other verbose garbage that I got very impatient. I suppose there's a possibility that a book like this could persuade non-vaccinators who belong in her audience, but my experience with anti-vaccine folks is that they're not persuadable by any reasonable means anyway. The book describes how America used to deal with such people, which is via gunpoint.

Not recommended.