Wealthfront's Customer Service

Recently, someone pointed me to the wired article about the risk parity fund that Wealthfront introduced and asked me why I wasn't even concerned enough to think about it? The honest answer is that Wealthfront has great credibility with me because of the way they handled customer issues in the past, so when I saw the risk parity e-mail I just said to myself, "This is Andy Rachleff introducing something cool, and I don't have to think about it."

Here's what happened 2 years ago, which has made my wife and I Wealthfront investors, instead of just customers who got a really good deal. Turbotax had indicated that our tax bill would be significantly reduced if we contributed to our IRAs. My IRA was with Vanguard, so I just did that. My wife's IRA was with Wealthfront. She initiated the process, but Wealthfront sent a confirmation e-mail that required that she click on a link to complete the process. Since we were traveling, she ignored the e-mail and forgot about it. The result was that her IRA contribution didn't go through and we were forced to file an amended return.

When Wealthfront found out about this (which happened to other customers, not just us), they were very apologetic. We got phone calls asking how they could make it up to us. They offered other customers a permanent waiver from fees, but since we already had that, their solution was to ask if we'd like to get stock options in Wealthfront instead. Yes, at this point, you're probably thinking about the irony that Wealthfront had screwed up, and the net result was that we ended up buying their stock and giving them money, but if you know anything about me and my wife, you know that it takes a very special company (with exceptional customer service) to get us to put money in.

Nevertheless, since I got prodded by a friend of mine, I contacted Andy Rachleff to ask about his response to the wired article. His response impressed me: Risk Parity is essentially taking academic research and bringing it to the masses. The idea is that lower volatility securities have higher risk-adjusted returns in the long run. The reason why bond funds have always returned lower is because they're much lower risk. So how would you take advantage of this? The answer is to use leverage: borrow money to buy bonds, multiplying the risk (and the returns). If you know me, you know that I'm allergic to borrowing money, but in this case, what's happening is that Wealthfront is borrowing at wholesale rates and the yield on the bonds exceed the interest the Risk Parity fund is paying, so there's no risk of being forced to sell if the bond market crashed. The expected return on this maneuver is high enough that at the 20% cap Wealthfront expects your overall returns to improve. The reason for the 20% cap is that tax loss harvesting is a big feature in a Wealthfront account, and there's no reasonable alternative for Wealthfront's Risk Parity fund to tax loss harvest into.

Wealthfront just announced yesterday that they're cutting expense ratios on the Risk Parity fund in half (to 0.25% from 0.5%), to avoid accusations that they're using the Risk Parity fund as a hidden profit center. The expectation is that cost savings from increased scale would also lead to further reductions in expense ratios in the future, just as Vanguard fund has done.

So, in response to people who're asking the question: would I still recommend Wealthfront? My answer is: "Yes, whole heartedly." I'm happy to be both a Wealthfront investor and customer. They've been very good about both fixing mistakes, and introducing features in their products that make money for their customers. I intend on adding more assets to my Wealthfront account in the future.

Review: The Sun is Also a Star

The Sun is Also a Star is a romance detailing the meeting and one day encounter between Natasha and Daniel. Reminiscent of Before Sunrise, Natasha's family is facing deportation and they have just one day to go through all the phases of a relationship, including the attraction, intensity, and of course, the lovers' quarrels and argument.

The cynical person in me wants to call this a paint-by-the-numbers romance. But it's "paint-by-the-numbers" via opposites. For instance, to make the boy and girl break stereotypes, Nicola Yoon makes the boy the poet and romantic and the girl the data-scientist wanna be. Like Nicola and her husband, the Natasha is Jamaican and Daniel is Korean. (Just in case you're wondering, there's probably a lot of autobiography in this novel: Yoon majored in electrical engineering at Cornell, and herself married a Korean American)

Daniel cites the study mentioned in the New York Times article about ways to make people fall in love, and proposes that Natasha and he perform that experiment. Woven about this narrative are side-glimpses into the lives of the people who touch them (and whom they in turn touch). There are a few wise glimpses into American society depicted by the novel:

America’s not really a melting pot. It’s more like one of those divided metal plates with separate sections for starch, meat, and veggies. I’m looking at him and he’s still not looking at me. (Loc 1620)

Ultimately, the book is short and enjoyable, not outlasting its welcome. To the extent that it feels youthful and shallow, it's probably because its protagonists have never done any bike touring:

When they do finally pull apart, it’s with a new knowledge. They have a sense that the length of a day is mutable, and you can never see the end from the beginning. (Loc 3920)

Perhaps most people who're giddy about falling in love are that way because it's the only intense experience in their life where one day can be made to last forever. The book is slightly mar'd by an ending that's too similar to Your Name, but otherwise can be recommended as a quick easy read that won't strain you while you're recovering from a cold your kids just gave you, or as an easy airplane novel.

Review: Captain Marvel: Caro Danvers - The Ms Marvel Years

One of my goals of buying a Kindle Fire HD8 was to read more comics, and to some extent, that's been fulfilled. Marvel regularly has sales that bring down the cost of books like Carol Danvers - The Ms Marvel Years to $1, and given that the library doesn't have the book, I don't even feel guilty buying it even if I don't read it.

The problem is, the book wasn't any good. A glance at Ms Marvel's list of powers indicates that this is a hero with distinctive possibilities: energy absorption and reflection seems like a great unusual power that in the right hands could be used creatively and intelligently. The problem with the book is that "creative" and "intelligent" seems out of the question for the main character. Her primary weapon seems to be her fists, and every problem seems to be resolved by beating things up. Even her ability to shoot photon pulses out of her fingers is seldom used or prove ineffective.

The book is huge, at 432 pages. But in the end, the character is just too boring for me to want to read more about her. Wikipedia quotes: " "she's now the House of Ideas' premier heroine"" I can't imagine what their B-list is like.

Not recommended.

Review: The Year of Living Danishly

The Year of Living Danishly is a memoir by Helen Russell about her move to Denmark with her husband. Russell is a freelance journalist, and her husband decided to take a job with Lego in Jutland and the story of her move comes along with her attempt to investigate why the Danes are the happiest country in the world.

It's quite clear early on that Russell loves to exaggerate for what she imagines to be comic effect. Early on in her move to the country, she makes statements like "not knowing where the bakeries are." Of course, anyone with a smartphone always knows where everything is, and she later admits that, completely destroying her credibility with me.

The book is not without redemption and facts. She does interview several people about their happiness (in very unscientific fashion, of course), and gives you a good overview of Danish society including the warts (an incredibly high divorce rate, dreary winters that not even a sunlamp could cure), and perhaps a high degree of uniformity (right down to the baby names needing to be a on a list provided by the government). But overall, the society seems well constructed and stress free.

I enjoyed the glimpse into a move by an English speaking country into a Scandinavian one. I'm not sure I needed the embellishments and exaggerations, so I won't recommend this book.

Review: Capresso Infinity Burr Grinder

After 3 years, our Cusinart CBM-18 finally bit the dust and stopped working. It was way past the warranty, so time to buy a new one.

First, I tried one of the cheaper models. The one I tried was the Mr. Coffee automatic burr grinder. It worked fine, but it was noisy as heck! So I ended up ordering the Capresso Infinity Burr Grinder. The marketing literature claims that the stainless version is the quietest grinder in the industry, so I bought the stainless version.

Well, it's quiet for sure! The noise is no longer deafening, and the timer seems to work. The grind is also consistent and fine, which is what I expect from a conical bur grinder. But the best feature is that the grind collection basket is sanely designed, making it easy to pour the grounds into an aeropress without spilling grounds all over the place.

The only improvement I can think of for this grinder would be to have a way to slot an aeropress right into the middle so I can avoid having to pour grounds at all. Recommended.

First Impressions: LG V20

To be honest, I didn't purchase the LG V20 to use as a cell phone at all! What happened was that I was shopping for a high res music player. In particular, I wanted LDAC or AptX-HD support as well. But even the cheapest high res music player from Sony was $218 and wasn't capable of say, playing back movies or doing anything interesting except for playing music.

The LG V20, however, has always had great reviews for audio, and during an eBay sale, you could get one for $135 after a coupon code. That's even cheaper than a refurbed or used Sony, so I bought it, reasoning that at worst, I had a music player that could double as a portable movie machine on a plane as well.

The biggest problem with buying used or refurbished smartphones is the battery life. Lithium Ion batteries have a limited lifespan usually measured in cycles. If the battery on the phone is regularly drained, within a year, the battery would have gone from barely making it through a day to not making it at all. But the LG V20 was the last of the flagship phones that has a removable battery, so that concern was not an issue either.

Through a freak accident, on the same weekend my LG V20 arrived, the camera on my Moto G5 Plus was smashed. My best guess as to what happened was that I had the Moto G5+ in my cycling jersey pocket, and my kids pedaled the tandem right into my back and the nose rivet of my brooks saddle smashed the lens like a hammer. In the old days, losing a smartphone camera would have been a "so what" event, given that I have dedicated cameras and are not afraid to use them. But nowadays all sorts of apps on the phone depend on the camera, including the all important check deposit app.

So when I got home and unboxed the LG V20, I didn't just plug it in, I removed my sim card and sd card from the Moto G5+ and put those into the phone as well. I did eventually repair the Moto G5+, but it was a ham-fisted repair and didn't really restore the camera to full functionality (the camera's output is still marred).

The LG V20's SoC, the Snapdragon 820, dates from the same era as the Moto G5+'s, the Snapdragon 625. In all the benchmarks, the 820 runs circles around the 625: not only are the cores fully custom Qualcomm "Kryo" cores, they're also clocked higher. In real life, we run applications, not benchmarks, and the LG V20 doesn't feel appreciably faster than the Moto G5+ did, just more power hungry. With one exception: RideWithGPS's route planning web-site does feel faster, because the single-threaded Javascript website just run faster with higher single-core performance, demonstrating that for native Android apps, the 625's 4 additional cores make up for each core not being as fast as the 820's faster cores.

In exchange, the phone's battery life is abysmal compared to the Moto G5+. While I could regularly charge the Moto G5+ to 80% and make it through the day, there's no way the LG V20 could do so. In fact, if I charged it to 100%, it might make it to 6pm before begging for more power. And that's without doing anything expensive like navigation. I immediately bought a 2nd battery for the phone. Given that the phone's battery is replaceable, I could charge the battery to 100% each time without worrying about longevity.

The big pluses are significant. First of all, the audio is indeed awesome. I'd come close to retiring my Sennheiser HD 600 headphones, because they weren't appreciably better than other random stuff I had sitting around. Plug those into the LG V20, and wow. OK, I just didn't have suitable amplication to drive them before! They sound awesome! The bluetooth stack seems better engineered as well, dropping much less frequently than the Moto G5+ did when playing music wirelessly (and the device will use AptX-HD if your headphones support it). My garmin watch also disconnected much less frequently and at higher distances than Moto G5+ did. It does connect with Apt-X HD with  my Sony X1000/M2, but I don't think I can actually hear the difference between Apt-X and Apt-X HD.

The bigger screen is better, though I'm not sure I notice the resolution increase. I didn't miss having NFC on the Moto G5+, but it's actually fairly useful, not just because of Android Pay (which is mostly a gimmick --- you still wouldn't leave the house without your wallet, not just because your driver's license and health insurance cards are in there, but also because enough vendors still don't take Android Pay that you'd be stuck without a payment method in the worst possible places), but because of the "tap to link" camera implementation that Canon has implemented in both the M5 and the G7X2. Now that's a feature that no iPhone has. The NFC antenna/chip is implemented in the back cover of the case (near the top), rather than the battery (like some Samsung phones), so you can swap out the battery without losing NFC, a very nice feature. You can even buy a Murgen 9300mAh extended battery that comes with a new cover and the NFC chip for an extended run-time, though apparently the added weight of that battery means that the phone is no longer mil-spec for drop purposes, and you can't find a protective rubber case for the phone if you attach the big battery.

The fingerprint reader's on the back of the phone, which is useful when picking up the phone off the desk, but not useful if you're trying to use it on a table while eating breakfast, for instance. I also miss the "touch gestures" that Motorola implemented on the Moto G5+, which saved some screen real estate. That's made up by the fact that a 5.7" screen with .2" lopped off for the navigation buttons still gives you a 5.5" screen.

The camera is meh. It's not nearly as good as the Moto G5+'s, which surprised the heck out of me, given that the LG V20 has 3 cameras (2 front and 1 self-facing). I was also surprised by the lack of a selfie-flash, which was present in my wife's Moto Z Play, another phone that's also not in the same price range. It's also not waterproof, but again, if it didn't have a user-swappable battery, I wouldn't have even given the phone a second thought --- my experience buying a refurbished Samsung S7 was that refurbished phones are worthless not because the phone's not functional, but because battery wear usually renders the phone useless:  it doesn't matter how many cool features your phone has if the battery is dead.

The second screen on the phone is also pretty worthless -- it just doesn't add enough usability to the device for me to value it highly, and it feels that it's just using up power for no reason. The LG V30 probably eliminated that feature for this reason.

I do miss the Moto G5+'s gesture: twist to shoot, shake to turn on flashlight. The LG equivalents are clunky: you tap the volume down button twice to activate the camera when the phone is locked, but because of where the buttons are positioned, I have to use my thumb to do that, which is ergonomically unsound. Maybe if I was left-handed it would work better. And the flashlight has mysteriously turned on in my pocket for no reason I can discern, and then it's a bear to turn off requiring unlocking the phone and multiple gestures.

For those who care, the V20 does get excellent updates for the software. After I booted up the phone, it immediately popped up update notifications, and a few days later gave me yet another security update. The phone's even supposed to eventually get Android Oreo. The Moto G5+, by contrast, got maybe 2 updates in the nearly 1 year period during which I owned it, and even though it too is supposed to get Oreo, it's quite clear at this point that Motorola isn't only going to follow through on that reluctantly, if at all. My wife's Moto Z Play does get fairly regular updates, however, so this is entirely due to the price/tier of the phone rather than Motorola's inability to keep up with Android revisions.

All in all, there's no way this phone was worth the $500 premium over the Moto G5+'s price when both were new. And I wouldn't pay more than the $135 I paid for the LG V20. But at the price I paid, I'm somewhat OK using this phone. It's got some pluses, some minus, and overall, the pluses are just barely enough to make up for the minuses as long as I'm not traveling.

But I now know what I'd really like to see as a "flagship" device. I'd like to see the "flagship" features (e.g., huge screen, NFC, waterproofing, nice camera, micro sd card, headphone jack - especially with the Quad LDAC that LG put in), but paired with a power-efficient chipset like the Snapdragon 625 and a lower resolution screen to save battery power. Now that would be a phone worth paying real money for. But of course, no such phone exists, and it doesn't look like any of the Android vendors will have the courage required to make such a radical move in the near future --- they're too busy chasing Apple. Which is a real pity, because again, a phone with a dead battery is a phone with zero features, which is what I see all too frequently with this phone.

Review: Columbia Featherweight Hiking Shirt

I was very skeptical that Columbia's "featherweight" hiking shirt was actually light. How can anything with long sleeves, buttons and a pocket be light compared with a short sleeve cycling jersey? But indeed when I bought it off Columbia's website with a $5 coupon and free shipping ($39.98), it weighed in at 3oz, handily beating my lightest weight cycling jersey (4.2oz) and my standard weight cycling jersey (5.4oz).

I put it on, and it's comfortable. It's as comfortable as any T-shirt I've ever worn, which is saying a lot. In fact, it's as comfortable as silk. I wore it on a cool spring day carrying Boen up and down various hills in Diablo State Preserve, and it was very comfortable. Not having to wear sunscreen on the arms is a good bonus factor, but the comfort factor is by far the best thing about the shirt.

It remains to be seen how long the shirt will last with regular wearing and washings, but Columbia's One Year warranty is reassuring, and the shirt comes with spare buttons (which were included in the weight of the shirt I listed above!) After writing this review, I went out and bought another one, which means that this shirt came highly recommended at the current sale price.

Review: D&D Starter Edition (5e)

I seem to be in the habit of playing only every odd numbered edition of D&D. I skipped 2nd Edition, played 3rd Edition to death, and got into 5th edition (after selling all my 1st and 3rd editions of the book) because Bowen, after reading The Hobbit, started pretending to be certain characters in the story, and of course, the grand-daddy of all RPGs inspired by Middle-Earth is D&D.

I picked up the 5th Edition Starter Set for $12 on Amazon, thinking that at worse, it would turn into reading material. The starter set comes with 5 characters, no character creation rules, and no rules for going above 5th level. It comes with a set of polyhedral dice, and a 32-page starter adventure. There are no miniatures, but the game doesn't really need it, as 5th Edition is a bit of a throwback to the old 1st edition.

Things seem pretty loose: most DM adjudications are pretty much only "advantage" (roll 2 d20, take the highest) or "disadvantage" (roll 2 d20, take the lowest). Most modifiers do not stack, and there are very few "named" modifiers, which I remember being significant load to take care of. This is a good thing, because I was going to run a game for 3 6-8 year olds and their Dads, and we already had our hands full with the kids.

Bowen had set his mind on playing "Gendalf", his imaginary version of the well-known Wizard. On an initial reading of the rules, I was quite impressed: the power scaling of the characters are much different from the 3rd edition of the game. Characters' proficiency bonuses do not scale up rapidly: at high levels in 3E games, you can pretty much ignore the d20 unless the results are a 1 or a 20. The modifiers overwhelm the d20. The maximum proficiency modifier in 5e at 20th level is a whopping +6 (as opposed to +2 at 1st level). That means the threats scale quite differently as well.

The rules for spellcasting are also quite different: spell casters now "prepare" spells by selecting what spells they have available (and again, the scaling is very low), but now they can use whatever spells they have prepared in the spell slots they have at will. Spell slots scale very slowly and there are no ways to get bonus slots. On the other hand, cantrips have been boosted in power and can be used an unlimited number of times, so the Wizard is never stuck shooting crossbows and can always hurl an attack cantrip (which while doing the same amount of damage mechanically, does add quite a bit of flavor).

The packed-in adventure is intended to take in characters from 1-5, and is very reminiscent of The Keep on the Borderlands in all sorts of good ways. The characters are thrown into an open world, and have the flexibility to go in whatever direction they wish (and also get themselves killed an a number of creative ways). It took all of 30 minutes of play for my characters to jump off script in a way that only D&D characters can.

All in all, Bowen loves the game, and has now made me read The Players Handbook or The Monster Manual to him at bedtime. The game sessions double as practice sessions for arithmetic, and he gets excited about the game sessions. And any thing that gets him wanting to read more is good in my book. Recommended.

Review: The Lost Art of Finding Our Way

Larry Hosken highly recommended The Lost Art of Finding Our Way on his book review. I love navigating and navigation problems. When I walked across England, I got lost nearly every day on the trip and loved it. One of my favorite things about cycle touring is that you get to do it all: you pick the destination and decide on the best way to get there, based on what you get to see and do along the way. There are some who just want to be told where to go, but to me that's missing the joy of exploration.

The Lost Art of Finding Our Way (LAFOW) is written by a Harvard Physics professor. It doesn't, however, read like dry academic prose, though it's hardly a practical manual of navigation either. It starts out explaining his explorations by kayak during which a fog bank rolls in and obscures the view of land. He then used the wind to navigate back, and upon returning discovers that two young women in kayaks had gotten lost and were not found until their bodies were discovered days later, dead.

He then discusses a bunch of topics near and dear to navigation: what people do when they get lost, and how search and rescue operates. Surprisingly, most people are found within a mile of when they got lost: the definition of being lost is that you've completely lost track of where you are, and hence it's easy to literally walk around in circles without aim. I guess that by that definition, I've never really been lost, because even as a kid, if I lost track of my parents I always knew where the car was, and would be found crying next to the car waiting for my parents to get back.

The typical topics include triangulation, use of landmarks, use of sun and wind for direction finding as well as the rules of thumb used to gauge distance by measuring it against your fingers or your hand. Then there's coverage of celestial navigation and an unfortunately short description of the use of the sextant as well as how it was developed. The methods of determining longitude have been covered elsewhere, so fortunately Huth doesn't spend too much time on it. One of the best sections of the book covered the use of waves and swells for direction finding as well as predicting the weather and determining current. In one particularly educational story, the book describes some ocean navigators discovering some unusual wave patterns, and upon checking against their celestial reckoning realized they were miles off where they thought they ought to be, and realized that a huge storm was coming and changed direction, escaping a storm which claimed the lives of other sailors who were caught in the same storm.

The final part of the book surprisingly enough, goes into the design of hulls and sails that allow ships to sail into the wind, but of course, have little to do with navigation. (Hey, how could a Physics professor abstain from a treatise on the Bernoulli effect) And the entire book is finished off with a story of a navigator who led a tribe to invade another island, but on the return trip, didn't explain her approach to navigating home, whereupon the rest of the tribe rebelled and threw her off the lead canoe. She was picked up by a loyal member of the family at the tail end of the flotilla, and of course, she survived to navigate home while the rest of the tribe, having lost the only person who knew what she was doing, got lost and were never seen again. It's both a parable about the importance of navigational skills as well as the need of even a star navigator to be able to explain herself to her friends, which is something I need prodding on as well.

The book is full of illustrations and pictures and wouldn't translate well to a Kindle (one of the Amazon reviewers also noted that the Kindle edition of the book is terrible and full of typos), so it's one of the few paper books I've bought in recent years. Recommended. If you'd like to borrow my copy please let me know.

Review: Peter Parker - The Spectacular Spider-Man - Into the Twilight

I thought that Spiderman: Homecoming was the best Spiderman movie in years, and decided for $1, I could pick up a recent Spiderman comic. Into the Twilight was on sale, and the reviews weren't bad. The book starts off well enough, with Peter Parker on a "date" with Mary Jane Watson. Apparently there was a marvel universe reset ages ago that I missed since I distinctly remember a period when Peter Park was married to MJ.

Then the plot gets even stranger as more characters from the reset that I didn't know about showed up. Most of it is explained well enough, but it never felt like it got to a resolution. The last chapter of the book nearly redeems it all, as Spiderman is forced to have dinner with J. Jonah Jameson. But not enough, since the story ended too quickly.

Spiderman as a character is great. This book, however, wasn't enough to get me to pony up more money to find out more about this rebooted Spiderman.

Review: Vision - The Complete Series - Director's Cut

I never really paid much attention to Vision as a character until I saw the Age of Ultron. Paul Bettany's performance as Vision was great, and so when marvel had a $1 sale for the Eisner award winning graphic novel I picked it up.

The pace of the book is great, with plenty of foreshadowing, and reveals galore. I enjoyed the Vision's attempt to construct a fully synthesized family, and how well integrated his backstory was (including his former relationship with the Scarlet Witch). The book attempts to juxtapose the Vision's role as white house adviser and superhero with his attempt to lead a normal life with his family.

There are a few false notes, the worst of which is the book's attempt to explain P vs NP. If you don't want your kids to grow up with an incorrect understanding of what an NP problem is, keep this book out of their hands! On the other hand, the Marvel universe has always treated Physics, Chemistry, and the various hard sciences as being optional rules, so maybe it was time for Computer Science to get its turn at getting bent.

As a superhero book, it's superior: the characterization is great, and the plot has many elements of classic tragedy: one bad decision leads to another, over and over until things fall apart. Recommended. Just try not to wince too hard when the discussion of CS theory comes up.

A case of too much privacy

The current brouhaha about the Cambridge Analytica use of Facebook data has gotten lots of people to talk about privacy and the use of Facebook. My take on the situation is that now I know why in recent years there's been a spate of "Quizes on the internet" spreading on Facebook: it's information gathering.

I, personally, think that our "big bad overlords" like Google and Facebook aren't actually making good use of their data. For instance, even after you've already bought a product from Amazon, ads for that product continue following all around the internet. Don't sell me the product, sell me accessories for the product. Or show me competitive products in the hopes that I might return the first one and buy the second one instead!

One particular use case bothers me: when touring, I'll use Google maps to derive a cycling route to a location. After deciding between a few alternatives, I'll fire up my Wahoo ELEMNT app and then try to get it to route me to that location. Wahoo ELEMNT proudly tells me that it's "powered by Google Maps", indicating that they use the Google API to derive their routing directions and then pass that along to myWahoo Bolt. But 9 times out of 10, the route shown to me on the Wahoo ELEMNT isn't even close to what the Google maps app shows me! ON THE SAME PHONE! I want Google to derive from my phone's IP (or other identification) and give me the exact same route I just found on Google Maps. But no. Where's my evil overlord when I need one?!!

One of Garmin's best recently introduced features is Garmin's Heat Maps routing. Unfortunately, they only use it to suggest loop rides. That's silly. When I'm touring, I don't want to ride a loop! I want to get to a certain destination. And since I'm cycling, I want to use routes favored by other cyclists. Heck, I'd love it if Garmin profiled me and gave me the perfect route for when I'm riding on my single bike vs riding on the tandem with my son. But again, despite having all that data (which Google probably also has), they refuse to do anything useful with it.

In any case, I don't want to argue against privacy (or that Facebook shouldn't be punished for not revealing about how that data was used until 2 years after the fact). I just think that when it comes to using customer data, the big tech companies both go too far while simultaneously do not go far enough.

Review: The Tangled Lands

The Tangled Lands belongs to Paolo Bacigullpi's peculiar brand of ecological fiction: the environmental allegory. This time, he teams up with Tobias Bucknell to bring us the world of the Tangled Lands, a fantasy world where magic exists, but the use of magic makes bramble grow, but not necessarily in the immediate vicinity. This bramble is a particularly evil plant: anyone pricked by it falls asleep (think Cinderella), but unlike in Cinderella, this doesn't put the person into suspended animation: the flesh can still be preyed upon by various creepy-crawlies, etc. In any case, since the fantasy world doesn't have advanced technology, healing, etc has to be done by magic, and this puts the inhabitants of the world in a dilemma. Use magic, and cause bramble to grow (and it's very difficult to cut back), or live without the conveniences and (occasionally) life-saving magic and watch your neighbors do it.

The 4 short stories (2 contributed by each author) in the book explore the implications of this world: the wealthy and powerful use their privilege to crush the less well endowed, and even suppress technologies that could resolve the dilemma. Disappointingly, there's no overall arc in the stories: they're all unrelated to one another, and the result is that while each story is individually in and of itself relatively well-written with good characters, by the end of the second story you feel that the authors of exhausted the implications of the world they've created and are just committed to showing you how desperate the folks who live in it are.

While this in itself isn't a bad thing, I feel like the world has much more potential, and the authors could have made better use of the reader's time and theirs in crafting stories set in it. Perhaps a follow up novel would be much more worth your time.

Review: Columbia Outdry Ex Gold Pants

My old pair of rain pants are so old that I've forgotten when I bought it. I want to say I bought it in Switzerland during one of the more rainy tours of the Alps (hence it must have been outrageously expensive), but it could easily have been in Austria. In any case, this winter, I discovered that it wasn't waterproof any more. (It might never have been waterproof, but the plasticky surface fooled me into thinking that it was)

Having had a great experience with the Columbia Mens Titanium Outdry Ex jacket, I bought the Gold Titanium Outdry Pants, which strangely enough are not actually gold, but are the same color as the jacket I bought. Whoever names these clothing items at Columbia must be even more color-blind than I am. (And before you tell me that it's obvious that "Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Titanium" must be obviously grade levels for gear quality, I have searched in vain on Columbia's website to see if there's any rhyme or reason to the metal-type they use in their branding and have found nothing)

The pants are relatively light at 286g for my size (size small, in both jacket and pants). They come with belt loops in addition to the elastic. That's good, because the elastic is insufficient to keep the pants up on my svelte waist, so I had to add a belt. It's also not good, because that means I have to carry a belt on tour! The pants also fold neatly into a pocket that's labeled "packable," a neat feature with no counterpart in the jacket! (Again, no rhyme or consistency in their product-line) The packed size is quite big, but the packing protects the shiny material so it won't wear out prematurely in  your pannier or saddlebag.

In practice the pants are big enough that I can wear normal (non-cycling) pants under it and ride comfortably. The pants flare out a bit too much at the bottom, so if you're a cyclist you MUST use ankle ties or the pants will get caught in the chain/chainrings eventually. Yet another thing to carry on tour. Clearly, it's designed more for hikers than for cyclists. Some complain that the pants are noisy, but they must be hikers: on my bike I can't tell, mainly because the rain drowns out any noise from the pants.

The pants do stay dry (which included time not just cycling, but also fixing a flat tire in the rain). They're also nice and warm (though how much of it was that I was wearing a whole layer of hiking pants underneath, I don't know), maybe a bit too warm. Not a problem on tour: just don't wear leg warmers under these pants. I wish the color was something bright (like the jacket), but again, these seem designed for hiking and not cycling, but I'd say that they're very good for what they do, and well worth the price. (Around $90 or so on sale) I'm discovering that I must be a Columbia fan, because my favorite pair of hiking pants (bought so long ago that I don't remember when) also say Columbia Titanium on them.

Recommended.

Why I'm not a Strava Premium Customer

Those who know me probably know that I'm a big Garmin and Strava user. Since the day Strava became free for all users to upload their rides, I've connected my Garmin devices to Strava and uploaded nearly every ride to Strava. (I don't make every ride public, since there's no point cluttering up my friends' feeds with every run to the grocery store, drug store, etc) When I write my tour reports, every day has a Strava route map front and center.

I was wondering why I was so opposed to paying for Strava, despite using it so much. Then one day, I got yet another ad on my feed remind me to pay up for Strava so that I could get my Suffer score. That triggered an "aha" insight. I don't ride my bike for suffering. I don't even ride my bike for exercise. One of my favorite jokes (that's occasionally attributed to me on the internet) came in the form of the Zen Koan:

A Zen Teacher saw five of his students return from the market, riding their bicycles. When they had dismounted, the teacher asked the students, "Why are you riding your bicycles?"

The first student replied, "The bicycle is carrying this sack of potatoes. I am glad that I do not have to carry them on my back!" The teacher praised the student, saying, "You are a smart boy. When you grow old, you will not walk hunched over, as I do." 

The second student replied, "I love to watch the trees and fields pass by as I roll down the path." The teacher commended the student, "Your eyes are open and you see the world." 

The third student replied, "When I ride my bicycle, I am content to chant, nam myoho renge kyo." The teacher gave praise to the third student, "Your mind will roll with the ease of a newly trued wheel." 

The fourth student answered, "Riding my bicycle, I live in harmony with all beings." The teacher was pleased and said, "You are riding on the golden path of non-harming." 

The fifth student replied, "I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle." The teacher went and sat at the feet of the fifth student, and said, "I am your disciple."

 Strangely enough, the only time when I felt like I was willing to pay for an internet cycling service was with RideWithGPS, where I once found an interesting route, downloaded it to my Bolt, and then rode it with great happiness. (The web-site, unfortunately, was barely usable on a smartphone, which made it mostly useless when touring) Maybe RideWithGPS will provide a "pleasure score", or a "scenery score", or a "singing with children score."

As I get older, I realize that the best things in life aren't easily quantifiable or captured in a single (or multiple) number(s). My best rides have always been the ones so good that I felt like stopping every few minutes to take pictures because it was just too pretty to pass by.

Long Term Review: Cressi Galileo

It's been about 18 months since I last reviewed the Cressi Galileo, (original review) so now it's time to revisit the product and provide a recommendation. One big change is that Amazon has started carrying the goggles in their USA store. The price, at $60 is incredibly high, so I recommend getting one from Amazon UK, where it is just 24 pounds. Shipping from the UK to the US doesn't exceed $5 (though it does take the better part of a week), but cheap-skate that I am, last year while doing Bowen's bike tour I ordered an extra pair to bring home in case my first pair wore out.

I swim twice a week for about half an hour each time. The goggles are still holding up fine, though the crevices in the goggles have gotten moldy. That doesn't bother me very much, but if it bothers you you can get rid of the mold by soaking them in white vinegar. Unlike previous pairs of goggles that I've owned, the tempered glass in these goggles absolutely do not fade or turn milky white with UV exposure. These truly are goggles for life.

A few caveats: they're heavy: so much so that when I travel I don't bring them, but instead buy a pair of cheap goggles that will get discarded after the trip. The weight savings might not be a big deal if you're car touring or sailing,  but for bicycle touring or back-country camping these definitely get left at home. Secondly, as mentioned before, they seem designed to fit really big heads.

If they fit, these are the longest lasting goggles you'll ever have. (They're basically like diving masks without the nose coverage). Recommended.

Review: Accubattery

I will admit to not usually reviewing apps, but I'll make an exception for Accubattery, which was good enough that I paid to remove ads from it. The idea behind Accubattery is that if you want to prolong the life of a lithium ion battery, what you want to do is to (a) keep it cool, (b) don't deep discharge it, and (c) don't charge it to the maximum charge level.

Accubattery is an app that helps you do (c). Obviously, (b) is already well within your control, and (a) is not usually within your control. The app lets you set a charge alarm to remind you to unplug your phone from the charger once it hits about 80%. If you can do so consistently, the number of discharge cycles you get out of the battery goes from 300-500 cycles to about 850-1500 cycles, basically tripling your battery life. This is not so  big a deal if you tend to buy cheap phones like I do, but if you're the kind of person who spends big money on phones, this app would let you hang on to your fancy phone for longer.

If I run cheap phones, why do I care? The main reason is that most of the time, I don't really tax my phone. Which means if I start the day partially discharged, I don't care. But when I'm bicycle touring, I'll start the day with a full battery every time, since the phone becomes a crucial information tool. (I've had days when a weather forecast at lunch completely changed my route and gave me a much better experience than I would have had otherwise) So to some extent I do want to preserve battery life on my phones, despite it being no big deal if I had to replace my phone prematurely.

The other use of Accubattery, of course, is that the app will tell you what the current charge capacity of your phone is, so you know when you either need a new battery, or need to recycle your phone and replace it altogether. The information provided is detailed, though 2 of the screens provide conflicting information. I sent a query about this to their support e-mail address (which wasn't easy to find), and got back a satisfying answer on how to use the "battery health" info.

It's a good app. Recommended.

Review: Eufy Genie Smart Speaker

The Eufy was on sale for $20, which made it even cheaper than the cheapest Echo Dot. For some reason I thought it was made my Anker, and bought it for the master bedroom. It's missing a few features that the Dot has, such as being able to use it as a bluetooth speaker, but in practice, I didn't use that feature very much. It does have an audio out, unlike a Google Home, which means that you can use it to drive the nice speaker system that's attached to your TV.

The far field microphone isn't as well implemented as Amazon's, and it seems to misunderstand me more than an echo, but works just fine for setting times, listening to audible books (which is a big deal in my opinion), and listening to music. (I have it positioned so that it's easy to move it into the bathroom for showers, etc)

Is it as good as an Echo Dot? No. But if you can get it for $20, it's a bargain. As a result we now have an Echo in the dining room, an Echo Dot in Bowen's bedroom (for the nightly audio book), and this Eufy in the master bedroom. Recommended.

Not A Review: Rivendell Cheviot

About a year ago, we ordered and picked up a Rivendell Cheviot for Xiaoqin from Rivendell Bicycle Works. The process by which we ended up with the bike was long and dragged out: Xiaoqin test rode many bikes at many bike shops big and small before finally I took her to Rivendell and she tried the Cheviot and immediately said, "This is the bike I've been riding all my life." (Incidentally, Arturo said the same of his Rivendell Roadeo clone) By the way, if Rivendell hadn't worked out I was going to take her to Calfee next,  but I was starting to feel desperate.

I've always pegged the bike as being my wife's bike. To be honest, I was initially  unimpressed. Every time I've had to lift it to put it on the bike rack on the back of the car, I've been annoyed by how unwieldy it was: compared to my Ti frame, it was heavy. It even looked heavy: Grant had put on the lightest tire he had in his inventory, but the big fat tires with 650B wheels and the triple-tubed rear triangle just combine to make it look like a tank.

The assembly also wasn't perfect. Since we bought the bike, I'd fixed the shifter and brakes a few times, and had to completely replace the chain when it completely fell apart. Not all of this could be attributed to "break-in", either. In one case, the derailleur clamp just wasn't tightened properly! But Xiaoqin was happy with the bike, so I figured it's just the kind of bicycle that you rode if you grew up with "Flying Pigeon" bikes and couldn't get used to the nice lightweight bikes that everyone else rode. When I had to remove the front wheel to stick the bike into a car, I was severely disappointed to discover very prominent lawyer lips, much worse than any of the other bikes in the garage, let alone the much earlier Rivendell or Bridgestone models. "How could you do this, Grant?" I thought. Upon reflection, maybe the kind of person who bought a Cheviot wouldn't be expected to know how to properly use a quick release skewer.

I did notice that whenever I rode it for short distances, that the Cheviot didn't exactly ride like a Flying Pigeon. The steering was light and the bike could accelerate. It didn't feel heavy, even if it was heavy.

Then this past Sunday, we rode from La Honda to Pescadero and once in Pescadero, the wife and kids decided to kick back and enjoy the afternoon. Which left me a choice of riding back to fetch the car with the Cheviot or the triplet. There was no question that I'd take the Cheviot. Fortunately, I'd equipped the Cheviot with A530 pedals, which meant that all I had to do was raise the seat and then ride.

The bike felt floppy and flexy: some of it is because of the traditional square taper crank, which don't feel nearly as stiff as the new style external BB cranks. There's also the missing top tube. But once I started cranking hard, the flexiness didn't get worse, and I quickly caught up to the Western Wheelers C+ group and hung in the draft on the flat. (Those bullhorn bars are NOT aero, no matter what) To my surprise, when the climb started, I could hang out in front with the faster cyclists, setting PRs for Stage Road and the connection from Stage to La Honda. Now this isn't a fair test: when I'm normally out here on the coast, I'd have already climbed both Page Mill Road and Haskins Hill, which means that Stage Road is an afternoon waddle and my edge has long been taken off. But what this showed me was that the Cheviot, while heavier than my normal bike, just wasn't holding me back. When it came to braking, the side-pull brakes were sure and effective. They're still the best brakes available for any except the dedicated off-road machines.

Now, I still wouldn't want to ride the Cheviot for 30 miles (my jaunt on it was 15 miles at maximum speed), and my position on it wasn't ideal for pushing hard (and it probably isn't the right size for me anyway), but that'll teach me to turn up my nose at anything Grant designed. For the right person, it's not a bad bike, and its performance is more limited by your strength and aerobic capacity than the inherent weight of the bike. What can I say: the man's a great bike designer. The Cheviot is a lot like a Mercedes Benz. It's going to eliminate a lot of the road chatter and feedback that I like to have, but when push comes to shove, it's going to perform just as well as that BMW that feeds every road bump back into your hand (and butt). It's still going to come down to how good a cyclist you are, and no matter how much it resembles a beach cruiser in looks, get beyond that and it's a bike that will make the club riders with their fancy carbon fiber frames and aero wheels stare at you as you pass them at speed and do a double-take. And there's gotta be some fun in that! And with the 6" difference in height between my wife and I, it's remarkable that any bike that she can ride would even come close to fitting me, so this makes a great family layabout bike.

Review: Batman Arkham VR

I was really hesitating the pay the $12 sale price for Arkham VR, but then I read people complaining that the game was too short, so I paid the price and tried it. A short game means that I'll actually finish it and experience it to completion, and I'm discovering that VR goggles aren't really suitable for extended use anyway.

The story is simple and just a frame upon which for Rocksteady to show-off a few set-pieces. In fact, it's barely coherent even in those circumstances. What is exciting is the investigative bent of the game: in one sequence you use your controllers to examine a crime scene and can roll the events back and forth and view it from multiple angles. This is cool stuff that really cannot be done in any other medium. (For instance, if you tried to replicate this using live-action actors, you'd have no way to hide the camera --- 3D modeling and animation is really the only way to show this off in 3D)

The downsides: some of the gadgets are a little too finicky. There were places where I tried to use the Bat-analyzer tool and it would snap the tool back into my utility belt instead of activating the tool. Some of it might have been that I'm too close to the PS4 camera, but my guess is that they didn't really test it well enough in all possible VR configurations and separate the UI gestures correctly.

I was very excited when I got the choice between the Batwing and the Batmobile, but it turned out that I never got to experience sitting in either: the game basically blanks out when shifting between scenes with no transitions. This avoids VR nausea, but really takes away from the experiences they could have provided.

For a couple of hours, it was really fun pretending to be Batman. Many of the scenes are very well rendered, and unlike other 3D experiences where artists would slave over the details of the environment that you'd only glance at for a few seconds, the VR environment is such that you would experience each scene in detail and all that effort isn't wasted.

If you own a VR set, I'd consider $20 a bit too much to ask for this "game", but $12 (or in my case $8 since I'd gotten my Playstation Wallet monies at a discount) is a good price and unlike many other games, you'd actually get to experience all of it. Recommended.