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.

Fictional Leadership

I've often maintained that fiction is as good a source of leadership training as non-fiction, since much non-fiction is written in terms of platitudes and generalities, while fiction frequently presents specific situations. Of course, leaders in fiction are always superb, but humans always learn better from positive examples than from negative examples, so that's not a bad thing.

I was watching the Battlestar Galactica reboot's Hand of God episode the other day with Xiaoqin, and was particularly struck by how great an example of leadership the episode had in the form of commander Adama. We see him in various different roles that illustrate what role leadership plays, and what a great manager should do.

The episode begins with a planning meeting. Adama's role here is simple: he needs the proper diversity of thinking and expertise in the planning stage to design the best plan for the assault on the Cylon base. Note that while the news media loves to consider diversity of races as a proxy for diversity of thinking, here Adama cares very much about having a diverse of mindset. He turns to Starbuck (Kara Thrace) to provide that. Not only that, at the meeting he carefully backs up Starbuck, by telling both Apollo and Colonel Tigh: "With all due respect, none of us are as crazy as Starbuck." There are lots of subtleties about that meeting, including that Starbuck and Tigh hate each other, and Adama is aware of that. Notice how deftly he shuts down the name calling that the two of them were about to start, which would have been unproductive and prevented a good plan for being formed. Leadership is frequently about bringing the right people in the room and managing the context so that you can get the most out of everyone, and this is a great example.

Starbuck is a great pilot. In the arena of technical management, she'd be considered a great tech lead. That made her a natural to lead the assault, but her healing leg meant that she had to be kept out of the fight. Adama convinces Starbuck of this not by giving her an order, but by showing her that her legs are not yet strong enough to  let her perform at her best. This is another great example of leadership as persuasion: it's not enough to say "no, you shouldn't do this." You have to provide examples why.

Then there's the scene where Apollo is up the night before the mission. He's anxious, and already defensive because everyone knows that Starbuck's the best pilot in the fleet but he's having to substitute for her. Adama's aware of this, and carefully steers Apollo's anxieties away from this, providing assurance that he's going to do a great job. He even hands Apollo his personal lucky charm to assist. He then tells Apollo to get some rest in preparation for the mission.

During the execution of the mission, Adama provides leadership mentoring to Starbuck, telling her that once she's laid down the plan, the execution is in the hands of the others, and that her obvious anxiousness would actually undermine the operation if she doesn't retain a good grip on herself in the operations room. Not only does that calm her, he's clearly also grooming her as a future leader.

Finally, when the operation is successful and everyone's celebrating, notice what Adama does. He carefully places himself at the edge of the celebration. He's cheering folks on, and there to receive the lucky charm back from Apollo, but at no point does he attempt to steal the credit for the success. His people are allowed to say to themselves, "We did this great thing!" This is servant leadership at its greatest, and you very rarely see it in real life.

Of course, the fictional universe Adama is in is very stark. Adama isn't racing for the next promotion (there's no one to promote him), and the stakes are high, so it's easier to motivate people to do the right thing. But that's actually not that much different from a startup (getting a promotion at an unsuccessful startup isn't going to do much good). But it's still great to watch a great leader in action, and I can only think of a very small handful of people who in real life could match what Adama did in this episode.

If you haven't already seen this, it's well worth the $1.99 to watch this episode for these leadership lessons. As a technical manager, it's well worth the 44 minutes of your time.

Review: Uncommon Stock, Version 1

Business novels are rare, and rightly so. They're impossible to get right, and most are simply downright boring. For instance, I love DeMarco's Peopleware, but The Deadline is boring and insipid. Typically, the best way to get good ideas about leadership and management is to read fiction that's not intended to be about business. (Battlestar Galactica's first two seasons, and any of the Horatio Hornblower series come to mind)

Uncommon Stock, therefore, surprised me in being readable. Not only is it readable, the characters are well-written and not completely stupid. The conflicts between the technical co-founder and the business co-founder is well-done, with very well negotiated scenes, and the exposition about term sheets, venture funding, and angel investors (as well as the worthlessness of startup competitions) is interesting. Complete with the baggage that the startup is about accounting, and you've got challenging material that's surprising that the author managed to make interesting.

There are a few gotchas in the book. The first is that the novel is clearly setup for sequels, and that makes the novel weaker. The author felt obliged to stick in a long running plot-line (some obvious bad guys who are dumb enough to send thugs solo to kill people) that's not resolvable in one novel and that "spices up" the startup process. This betrays a lack of faith in the topic of the novel not being exciting enough by itself. The second is that the fifty-fifty split in a startup is an inherently unstable structure (as Raising The Bar describes), and you'd expect it to cause trouble, but it doesn't.

Regardless, though, the novel is an achievement in that it's interesting to read, doesn't have too many stupidities, and if you don't know much about the startup world, does a good enough job at explaining the necessity of a vesting schedule for founders, for instance. It's worth a quick read.

Mildly recommended.

Review: Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee Costco package

I was intrigued by varying reviews of Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee, but the priced seemed prohibitive. Costco, however, sells a package where you get 4 pounds of blend and 1 pound of pure coffee for about $60, so I figured it was worth trying once just to see what the most expensive coffee bean in the world tasted like.

The pure Blue Mountain Coffee is pretty good. There's not much of an aroma when you grind the beans, but the taste is very pure. There's almost no bitterness, and there's no need to add milk or sweetener in the coffee: you should just drink it black. In fact, add milk and it doesn't taste as good as the cheap stuff. You can get this for about $30/pound if you don't want to buy it in a package.

I expected the blend to be a step down, being at most 5% of the good stuff. In reality, however, it has many of the characteristics as the pure stuff, with a little bit more bitterness, but not enough for me to want to add milk or sweetener. At $9/pound, it's not bad if you're in the habit of drinking the coffee black.

I think I do enjoy coffee with milk, however, so I'll probably go back to the $5/pound cheap costco coffee in the future.

Review: Macross

Years ago, I wrote a review of the Macross TV series. I wanted to hyperlink to it recently while writing another review, but realized that it came from an old website which I never updated and has now been lost in time. So I'm reposting this review. Macross was one of the best shows out and still holds up well today, and it turns out that my AnimEigo set is now a collector's item. Who knew?


Introduction
I first saw Macross when I was a kid of about 15 in Singapore, rushing home from school every Thursday evening to try to catch the latest episode, which had been dubbed into Mandarin by the Taiwanese. My brother recently got a DVD player, borrowed the entire TV series (36 episodes) from his friend Jason, and we watched it all over again, this time in the original Japanese with Chinese subtitles. What a difference 13 years make!

Macross is a girl’s story
For some reason, when you’re a kid, you don’t notice that Macross is really a girl’s story. Sure, it’s got giant transforming robots. It’s also got space batttles, lots of neat gadgets, and a cool science fiction plot that stands up even to adult scrutiny (well, the corny parts of the science fiction plot are motivated by the romantic bent of the whole series). But the heart and soul of Macross is the romance between the main characters. Nobody’s motivated by anything else!

The plot revolves around 3 main characters. Hikaru Ichijou, a boy pilot who grows up eventually to be a squadron leader, Linn Minmei (also spelled Lynn MinMay), a school girl of about 16 who wins a beauty contest and goes on to become a pop singer, and Misa Hayase (a good translation might be Lisa Hayes, which the American "Robotech" uses), a flight controller/battle coordinator for the ship, Macross. Of course, there’s a love triangle between them, and how the interaction between the characters play out and whom Hikaru eventually decides in favor of presents the series with its romantic climax. To give you an idea of how unimportant the military climax was, it occurs fully 8 episodes before the end of the series, to give the creators more time to focus on what was obviously dear to their hearts. The science fiction elements of the plot are discussed elsewhere (see below for a collection of links to various home pages), so I won’t go into them in detail.

So, ok, Macross is a trashy romance/soap opera. But if all soap operas were like this I’d watch them. None of the characters are stilted or artificial. Hikaru seems like a dork at times, but he does wake up to his situations and corrects himself. Lynn Minmei seems like your stereotypical cute airhead at first, but even she has to suffer the consequences of her decisions and becomes a stronger person. Misa Hayase seems like a rigid, strictly military person, but she suffers from her own bouts of insecurities and when she eventually gives in to her feelings becomes such a sympathetic character that you find yourself rooting for her. Nobody’s a bad guy (or a bad girl), and character development is handled consistently and with great care. Everybody has to suffer a little in order to grow up, and the primary characters in Macross are not immune to suffering. A common theme seems to be that the characters have to let go of their desires in order to deserve what they desire. But unlike the morality plays you see in Saturday morning cartoons, these themes are handled very subtly (so subtly that they were lost on me, of course, when I was a kid).

How has Macross aged over the last 15 years for me personally? What I’ve found is that the situations I found myself in over the last 10 years or so were in some ways paralleled in Macross. There are lots of little touches, like in the ambiguous way Minmei treats Hikaru throughout most of the series was something I’ve encountered in the Asian dating scene. It is entirely possible that if you're not familiar with how Asian-Asian dating works a very few of the cultural cues might not work for you. There are some poignant moments, like the time when Misa Hayase waits a whole day at a road side café for Hikaru, who shows up in the evening after being much delayed. While Misa is waiting, a little friendly dog comes up to her and she looks at him and says, "Hey, you’re alone too." She picks him up and starts feeding him but in the middle of it the dog’s owner (a little girl that we can’t quite see) shouts the dog’s name from across the street and the dog leaps out of Misa’s arms and bounds towards the little girl. Hikaru shows up right after that and the parallels that the preceding scene has with Misa's relationship with Hikaru and Minmei just about broke my heart. These quiet scenes become by far the most powerful ones. They have a haunting quality that sticks with you even after you’re done watching the series.

While technology mostly stays in the background, the characters in Macross are facile with it, and use it naturally as part of day-to-day life. In one episode, for instance, as Hikaru escorts Misa's shuttle towards Earth, he sends a farewell message to her by signalling (in Morse code) with the wing-tip lights on his fighter.

There are quite a number of corny scenes however. Given the series' preoccupation with romance, it shouldn't surprise you that characters find themselves working through their issues while bombs are literally falling around them. But then again, I've already told you that Macross is a trashy romance, haven't I?

One of the things I missed watching the series in Singapore was the end title credits. The end credit sequence shows a helmet, and a photo album. A hand moves in and turns the photo album’s pages, revealing photographs of Minmei, and Minmei and Hikaru. The helmet is a standin for Hikaru’s pilot’s helmet, but what you don’t realize is that the hand moving the photo album isn’t Hikaru’s (the helmet doesn't belong to Hikaru, either)! The scene shows up 28 episodes into the series. The final episode ends with a freeze-frame, and a hand turns the page over to the end of the photo album while the caption comes up "2012: So long!", giving one a sense of closure about the story as a whole. The end theme is also sung by a different performer for the last episode. It is little touches like that that distinguish the long running Japanese/Asian TV series from the American series. It is quite obvious that Macross was a story planned with a beginning, middle, climax, and end right from the start, while American series (except for the mini-series, which don't typically run as long as the Asian series) do not usually have the coherency of a single vision guiding their work.

Animation
All TV animation series have to be relatively low budget. Watching all 36 episodes in order in relatively short time gives you a very good sense as to which episodes were important to the producers. There are entire episodes that seem stitched togther from flashbacks in order to either let the audience catch up from the previous episode or in order to meet a deadline. Then there are episodes like the military climax, or the last 4 episodes of the series, where the producers pull out all stops---the machines and ships look almost real, and the women and men look gorgeous. It almost looks as if Misa Hayase underwent a facelift in the last 8 episodes of the series! Even in the best-drawn episodes, however, budget seems a primary consideration: you can definitely recognize battle scenes that have been cut and spliced from previous episodes. However, don’t let this deter you—even the badly drawn episodes have the virtue that the story line is consistently high quality. There’s an episode devoted to Hikaru’s dream sequence that is hilarious, for instance. It is not at all unusual to find humor thrown into the mix to good effect, and even the serious episodes can have a bit of farce thrown in.

Minmei's singing
A frequent source of derision whenever the Macross comes up among anime fans is Minmei's pop songs. If you like Japanese pop, there's nothing wrong with her performance. Iijima Mari is a pop/idol singer who did voice-acting as Lynn Minmei when she was nineteen (Minmei is 16 at the start of the TV series), so not only was she a good fit for Minmei's voice, she could sing as well. If your exposure to Minmei was through the American dubbed series, you will definitely find Iijima Mari to be at least someone who can hit the notes when she wants to. That said, however, even Iijima Mari is embarrassed about the most overused song in Macross, Watashi no Kare wa Pairotto (My boyfriend is a pilot). Apparently, things that weren't embarrassing to sing when you were nineteen have a way of catching up to you when you're 35. Well, you can always fast-forward through the singing without missing anything.

The background music in Macross is reasonably well-done. In fact, if you watch any kind of Asian television, you will run into some low-budget Taiwanese shows that have "borrowed" background music from Macross. (Presumably, they just cut their background music from the myriad CDs that have sprung up) If you're going to buy a soundtrack album, the movie soundtrack has the best orchestrations.

Is it worth 18 hours?
So how do I feel about spending 18 hours watching this series over a period of a few weeks? I’d do it again. I wouldn’t do it unless I could watch all of it, since you will not be satisfied without getting to know the climax and the ending, and there’s no easy way to skip episodes without missing some character or plot development. There is one catch-up episode around episode 12 that you can skip because it’s used to catch laggards up with the series, and that’s about it. If I had only 2 hours to spend, I’d definitely just watch the last 4 episodes or perhaps the last 8 episodes if I had more time. (These are the "reconstruction of Earth" episodes—other science fiction shows have the heroes saving the world, this one has the heroes failing to save the Earth) These episodes focus almost solely on the romance, but the caveat is that you’ll miss a lot without getting the setup that the first twenty-something episodes give you. For instance, Roy Fokker plays a major part early on in the series, and episode 33 doesn’t make much sense if you don’t know who he is. If you can, watch the series in the original Japanese. Not only is the voice acting much better, but you’ll get a stronger sense of what gets lost in the translation. (I’ll never forgive whoever translated "Merry Christmas" into a long awkward Chinese sentence!) There’s a surprising amount of English in the TV series, too, so you might not find yourself as lost as you might imagine.

The movie
A final word before going into the hyperlinks. The movie isn’t the same story as the TV series. If you’ve seen the movie, it will still be worth your while to watch the TV series, just as it’s worth your while to read a novel of a movie that was made from a novel. There are many plot differences between the movie and the TV series. Outright contradictions are common: in the TV series, Minmei is never kidnapped by the Zentraedi, while in the movie, she was captured and persuades the aliens to return her with her songs! Your feelings about the characters will be much stronger if you watch the TV series. If you had to choose one or the other (and given that the movie’s only 90 minutes but the TV series is 18 hours, they’re not quite comparable), the TV series is definitely better. The movie, as might be expected, has gorgeous animation, and if you want to see the characters drawn at their best, that’s a good place to see them!
Web-sites
Just a note. I've tried to keep spoilers away from this review of Macross in the hopes that you'll go ahead and try to watch it. Some of the hyperlinks below contain spoilers that you might not want to see. (In particular, the compendium site can be very dangerous)

• The Official Macross Website. Hosted in Japan, this is a very poor site with relatively few stills from the movie or the TV series. However, the description of the characters in "Japlish" is hilarious! If you want to see pictures of the characters I've mentioned, this site contains no spoilers.
• The Macross Compendium. This is the mother of all fan-sites, and has a chronology as well as explanations of all the varying Macross TV series.

Review: Arrow Season 1

Green Arrow is definitely one of the second tier heroes in the DC universe. This is both a good thing and a bad thing when you build a TV show like Arrow after him. There's not a ton of baggage associated with the character, so the writers and directors have free reign over what to make of him. I don't even remember his origin story from the comics.

I watched the TV show on Blu Ray on a HDTV system setup at optimal viewing distance. The transfer and quality of the picture is amazing. You can see every pore on the faces of the characters on closeup. This is a show where the production values are definitely way up there.

The plot revolves around Oliver Queen (Green Arrow, though he's never referred to as such in the show), a billionaire by inheritance who was rescued off an island he was stuck on for 5 years. The story then flips back and forth between his time on the island, where he went from being a playboy to becoming a badass, and his time in Starling City, where he uses his badass MMA skills (with several trick arrows) to beat up bad guys and in some cases kill them.

The story is dark: as dark as the Batman movies, but not as deep as say, Buffy. It's decent watching, but I wouldn't put it up there with my favorite TV series (either Buffy or Macross). Nevertheless, the set pieces are jaw-droppingly beautiful, and tastes vary so you might as well take a look.

Mildly recommended.

Review: Console Wars

Console Wars is Blake Harris' account of the rise and fall of Sega of America during the 1990s. Despite the title, it focuses almost exclusively on Sega, devotes relatively little time to Nintendo, and Sony's efforts only makes cameo appearances, even though it was the Sony that would ultimately dominate the generation.

Written like a novel, the protagonist of the account is Tom Kalinske, the CEO Sega recruited from Mattel to run Sega of America. Deficient in the account are any technical details, such as the actual creation of any of the consoles or games that feature during the actual wars.

This is as it should be. Sega of America was chiefly a marketing operation. While they had minor inputs as far as the character of Sonic the Hedgehog went, they couldn't dictate either hardware or software strategy, though they did bankroll a few games, such as Ecco the Dolphin.

This is by no means a bad thing. As a technical person, I've always been mystified by marketing and the efforts that go behind it. My preference, of course, has always been to work on product that would sell themselves, ranging from Purify, to of course, Google search. Harris does a good job de-mystifying that process, and explaining (through illustration) how important market positioning, branding and courting the press matters.

In the end, of course, we all know the end of the story. Marketing can only go so far: it makes the difference when your product is actually technically competitive, but no amount of marketing could save the Sega Saturn from the technical onslaught of the Playstation. It's a pity that Harris didn't go into that second half of the story, but again, as a story largely about marketing, Console Wars ended at exactly the right place.

Ultimately, the book illustrates a key principle in technology companies: you cannot control your fate without control over the technical development of future products. No matter how brilliant an executive Kalinske was, when he could not persuade his masters at Sega Japan to work on machines that would match the competition, he was doomed to failure.

The book also clearly illustrates the problems and politics associated with a multi-national corporate organization. Kalinske's American team clearly found the Japanese team inscrutable, and were frequently frustrated by Sega Japan's inability to pay attention to them despite their success. This is a great lesson for any one who struggles to get their remote office recognized from halfway across the world.

Recommended.

First Impression: Co-Motion Periscope Quad Convertible (Triplet configuration)

Bowen turned 3 last year, but despite our coaxing, he still hasn't shown much interest in his Strider bike. But more than that, even if he could ride, it would be a while before we could trust him out riding in the streets, touring, or even visiting his friends that way. I'd seriously considered a triplet before, but with another son on the way, we thought hard and went with a custom Co-Motion Convertible Periscope Quad. Since I already had heavy duty tandem wheels from our previous touring tandem, I opted for a custom frame built to take 700c wheels, dual pivot long reach caliper brakes and drum brakes, in case I ever got so crazy as to take a quad up a mountain.
The build job took months, and the fitting to Bowen took weeks. The periscope feature enables kids as short as 4' 2" to ride, but Bowen was still far from that. Co-Motion asked us to work with their local dealer, the Bicycle Outfitter, and they kindly agreed to take on fitting Bowen as a pilot project. Basically, they took an existing crank, got a local machinist to machine off the crank arms, and then attached a second bottom bracket and stoker assembly to the bike, added a backrest with restraining seat belt, and then customized the handlebar assembly for the Bowen. This was serious work. We tried to find SPD shoes that would fit him, but none of them were small enough, so we made do we rat trap pedals.
The tandem handles surprisingly well. I felt a wobble early on, but the shop discovered that it was a loose headset. We took it up and down some twisty roads, and the bike did not display any disconcerting behavior compared to our previous stiff-framed aluminum tandem. What does happen, however, is that the S&S couplers come loose on the bike because of the sheer amount of torsion placed on the joints, so we actually have to check and tighten down the couplers every ride. My previous Co-Motion S&S coupled tandem never exhibited this, so it must be unique to these super long bikes.
The reason we opted for a convertible is that we expect the bike to stay in triplet configuration for a few years until the youngest one gets old enough to move into Bowen's seat, at which point Bowen would have graduated into a seat without a back rest/seat restraint. Then we'll ride it in quad configuration until Bowen graduates onto his own bike. And yes, when the kids are all graduated we can stick the front and back halves of the bike together and ride it as a tandem. The minute Bowen saw the bike he immediately knew which seat was his. After 2 rides, he'd figured out how to get into the seat and his feet into the pedals without assistance. He takes great pleasure in wearing his own cycling gloves, and his helmet, though he still has a hard time getting through 2 days without destroying his sunglasses. He was terrified of descents at first, but now demands that I work harder so the bike goes faster. And in case you're wondering, yes, my wife and I ride the bike together without him, and the bike feels quite a bit lighter, so even though he's maintaining 90rpm with us, his contribution to powering the bike at the moment is negligible.
Yes, the bike is slow. 3% grades feel hard, and 6% grades require we get down to the granny gears (a 24x36, in case you're wondering). The bike is well north of 50 pounds in the triplet configuration. We've not tried for any speed records yet, but it will take descents at speed with no problems. One  bug we had trouble with on the bike was the horizontal water bottle cages: any less than a grippy bottle cage would eject the bottles on a bump, and even with a stainless steel high grip bottle cage, if the bottle wasn't inserted deep into the cage, a bumpy road would still take it out.
Taking and putting the bike back together is also more work than you might expect. Basically, you'd have to remove all the timing chains, which require loosening the eccentrics, derailing the chains and storing them before you could unscrew the couplers. When I stowed it into the Scion xB this weekend for a 3 day trip to Monterey Bay, we could get the bike into the car by removing the captain's seat post, uncoupling the bike, and stowing the 3 pieces vertically with one of the rear seats folded down. It's quite clear that with 2 kids, we're going to have to buy a custom rack for one of our cars.
Time to disassemble: 30 minutes. Time to reassemble: 45 minutes. Aligning the couplers on the big heavy bike is enough work that you have to take extra time to do it right, as well as using the special grease that S&S machine recommends.
All in all, the bike does what it's supposed to. People I know (including some cycling enthusiasts in the bike club) have occasionally complained that their children don't like to spend time outside, or don't want to ride bicycles with them. My impression so far is that if you give your child a chance to spend time with you outdoors, he'd happily take that over almost any other kind of stimulation. However, sour that by trying to make a kid keep up with you, or making yourself bored by having to stay at his pace or constantly worrying about traffic, and it's going to be frustrating for everyone involved.  Tandems, triplets, and quads  are ridiculously expensive and practically impossible to resell, but resolve these problems easily and maximize the chance that your child's association with cycling will be a pleasant one.

Review: The Pillars of the Earth

The Pillars of the Earth is Ken Follett's historical novel about the building of a Cathedral in Kingsbridge, England in the 1100s. It's certainly not the kind of the book I usually read, and I expected to stop reading after a couple of chapters, but it rapidly become compelling reading and I found myself reading it continually. It's bee a while since a book captivated me, and it was an unexpected pleasure.

What makes the book interesting is the description of political maneuvering throughout the country at the time, with the church, the earls and kings all maneuvering to rule the land. There are a few interesting romances in the book, and they lend human interest to the entire affair, but are really secondary to the overall plot.

I found the characters interesting, and the depiction of the treatment of women in the era is probably accurate, with a few anachronisms that I never would have known about without referring to Wikipedia.

What's fun about the book is that the author plays a very long game. Insignificant events right at the end of the book get used later on, which then leads to interesting plot points. The villains are suitably villainous, and the protagonists, while not without their fault, are plausible. For instance, Prior Philips grows from being politically naive to becoming able to take advantage of setbacks and turn them into strengths, even to the point of humbling a king.

The book is written in clear transparent style, and is very accessible as a result. The language is clearly not that which would have been spoken during that era, but on the other hand, I'd much rather not have to struggle through Old English or Latin in order to understand what's happening.

I can recommend this book, even if you're not normally a fan of historical fiction, and have no real interest in religious affairs.

My Color Rant

Like 8% of men, I'm color blind. In normal day to day life, this isn't much of a disability. For instance, traffic lights are designed by men, so the red in the light is tinted with yellow, and the green in the light is tinted with blue, so the difference in the colors are very very distinctive. The same goes for lights for entering and leaving ports.

In recent years, the most annoying color-sensitive objects are those designed for the general consumers by UI designers who don't know any better. In particular, those devices that are not designed for use by men tend are the greatest offenders.

Take, for instance, Canon's digital cameras. The S90 was clearly designed by a person sensitive to color blindness. The charger had 2 LEDs: one for charging, one for charged. Even if you were color blind, you could use the position of the lit light to tell when a battery had been charged. My Makita power tools and the Canon 5DMk2 (and other professional series cameras) are also designed correctly. Rather than depend on color, the chargers blink while charging and become steady when charged. Note that making devices that the color blind can use in no way makes the experience worse for those who are not color blind!

By contrast, the Canon S100 was not designed by the same people. Instead of 2 LEDs, it was designed to have only 1 LED. That flipped from red to green when charged. And of course, there was no way for me to tell when the battery is charged, which drives me bonkers. Countless cell phones have the same issue (though to my relief, the Sony Xperia Z1's charged indicator flips between red and blue instead of red and green, which is at least usable by me, though not by a mono-chromat). And of course, web-sites that use red and green are also similarly annoying.

Do industrial design schools or UI design classes in schools not have disabilities/color-blindness studies as part of their curriculum? Or do those designers just not care? How can even one company like Canon have such completely disparate policies for products in the same product line?

Returning to the Xperia Z1

I broke my Xperia Z1 in mid December, and shipped it back to Sony for a warranty repair. Not knowing if I was going to ever get it back (Sony once hung on to one of my RMAs for over a year!), I bought a Lumia 635. Then last week, Sony finally sent me back a new (complete with box) Xperia Z1 6906, which wasn't the same as the 6903 which I had purchased. The difference is that the 6906 will handle LTE in the US, while the 6903 model has a few bands that are more frequently used outside the US. Since you're going to be restricted to 2G outside the US if you're mostly on T-mobile anyway, this was actually an improvement for me.

A few things that I miss between the Z1 vs the Lumia 635:

• The Lumia 635 has phenomenal battery life. It's a weaker phone with a smaller screen, so I wasn't tempted to use it as much, but with the Xperia Z1, I turned on all the stamina mode features of the Z1 this time around, and have to get into the habit of keeping the phone charged the whole time. The day I didn't do that, battery life was abysmal.
• The smaller Lumia 635 and the fact that it's cheaper meant that the fitness tracking feature was actually useful. I could stick it in any pocket, and didn't really care if I was going to sit on it. There's a lot to be said for having a phone so cheap that I could buy 6 of it for the price of the Z1. The compactness can be solved by buying a compact Z series phone, but you can't solve for cheapness any other way than by spending less.

But there are also many reasons to be relieved to get the Z1 back:

• That nice big screen is really sweet. When using it to shop on Amazon, or use Feedly, I never felt cramped or constrained.
• Apps. It's funny how Outlook is much better on Android than on Windows Phone. This is because Microsoft bought Accompli, but it's still nice. Similarly, I had to pay for Phonly (a view into Feedly) but Feedly on Android was free. People frequently say that having a forked Android store in the form of the Amazon App store hurts the Android ecosystem, but I disagree. Having 2 stores to shop from creates competition, which means that overall prices are lower for apps, and Amazon frequently gives me discounts or free coins to buy apps with. What this means is that apps I might have had to pay for on Windows such as Plex are essentially free on Android. Even  better, because the Amazon appstore is not tied to a Google account the way the Google Play app store is, my wife gets those apps for free too!
• That camera on the Z1 is just amazing for a smart phone camera. Enough said. As a matter of fact, together with the IP58 waterproofing rating that's the reason to get a Z series smartphone.
• Waterproofing: lots of people claim that they don't see this as a key feature. The first time you rinse off the phone casually to get rid of fingerprints, etc., everyone else in the room goes, woah, you can do that?
• Power. Smartphone processors simply haven't been improving as rapidly over the last few years, so the Z1 is still within striking distance of current flagship phone performance. This is no big deal for typical reading e-mail, checking RSS feed, etc., as the 635 shows, but for photo editing and processing videos, it's nice to be able to do this without having to resort to a desktop or a laptop.

All in all, after several months of using the Z1 and comparing it against the 635, I will admit that the improvements over the cheaper phone is probably justified, but requires surprising numbers of tweaks (e.g., to power management) to get there.

The current model Xperia Z3 Compact and Z3 phones reportedly do not suffer from the power management tweaking required to get decent battery life. They do, however, come at a much higher price ($476 and $575 are the current Amazon.com prices), which mean that they're not as immediately a no-brainer compared to the Nexus 5 as the Z1/Z1 compact are. However, since the Nexus 5 is no longer easily available, and the nearest comparable is the Moto X ($399.99), compared to those phones, the Xperia Z3 series would be a no-brainer.

Review: The Fifth Discipline

The Fifth Discipline is Peter Senge's management book about building learning organizations. I first read it in the 1990s, and recently read the new edition again. Re-reading it again nearly 20 years later is definitely an experience that's different from the first time.

As a writer, The Fifth Discipline is verbose, meanders all over the place, repeats itself frequently, and name-drops obscure people that you'd never have heard of. These properties makes it a difficult and frequently frustrating read.

As a manager, however, the fifth discipline encodes some ideas about leadership that I've found nowhere else, and hammers home certain ideas in ways that not only make sense, but have you excited about putting them in place.

The central premise of the book is that human organizations are dynamic living systems which have non-linear behavior in response to events and change. This includes several properties that make leadership challenging:

• Many incentive systems improve performance in the short term but decrease performance over the long term.
• Many feedback cycles are extremely long, far beyond what humans were evolved to deal with, and exacerbate human tendencies to either blame individuals for poor performance or put in place patch after patch to try to solve problems rather than deal with an integrative approach to problem solving. In particular, who you hire, who you fire, and who you promote has performance impact on your organization measured in years, making it difficult to get better because the feedback cycle takes so long.
• Most long term solutions and systems approach to problem solving are counter-intuitive and difficult to sell to short-term oriented business cultures. 

The tool that the book uses to illustrate this is the Beer Game, developed at MIT's Sloan school of management. The structure of the game ensures that very similar outcome happens despite having  explained the rules to very smart people and having very smart people play them. The game illustrates that given a poorly structure system and organization in place, it doesn't matter who's playing the game---it's very difficult to do a good job. In fact, the wider economy exhibits this behavior in the form of bubbles of various forms.

You can see many examples of this kind of organizational pitfalls in many Silicon Valley tech companies:

• Conventional wisdom is that whenever you promote a great engineer into being a manager you lose a great engineer and get a lousy manager. Companies frequently therefore hire managers from the outside. In the short term this solves the above problem. In the long term, however, outside managers frequently dilute the culture, and more perniciously, by not having a culture of promoting from within, in the long term you get demoralized employees and end up with retention problems.
• I can think of one case where a great engineer was promoted into a lead. This person only worked at night and never met her team-mates. She was, however, very productive (since she never actually spent any time on leadership). This led to a promotion since leads weren't evaluated on leadership. Other leads in the department took note, however, and soon leadership was devalued as everyone followed her lead. The company would end up with a culture where leads would grab all the great work for themselves, since promotions depended not on ensuring that your team was successful, but on individual performance.

The book not only illustrates the approach (called "Systems Thinking"), but in one of the appendices has a complete catalog of corporate dysfunction patterns, with diagrams of feedback cycles, diagnoses, and solutions. So if you're in a hurry, just read "The Beer Game" chapter, the section on "Systems Thinking", and then flip straight over to Appendix 2. Everything else can be treated as fluff.

Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium #2

The Walking Dead Compendium #2 is follows straight on from the first volume, which already put Rick Grimes, the protagonist through hell and back.

My big beef with the first volume was the sheer selfishness of people involved, and the implausibility that somewhere, someone hasn't actually tried to build civilization and society. When you think about the zombie menace as portrayed in The Walking Dead, they're simply not that hard to deal with.

Well, this second volume addressed most of my concerns. Rather than one nasty community after another, this volume mostly deals with a community that recruits Rick's band, integrates them into society, and then actually makes good use of what they're good at. It's very well written, and the plot twists aren't silly and stupid.

Rick himself has an epiphany about the reason civilization exists, and the series begins to turn the corner. Color me impressed. Rarely do comic books that become this successful address their biggest failings, and I can see this series becoming really good.

Recommended.

Swimming Music, Round 2

After a year and a half, my Pyle swimming headphones had a mechanical breakage which made them unusable for my swimming workouts. Long before the mechanical damage, however, the headphones had greatly diminished in sound quality, presumably through water working its way into the headphones. Replacing the ear pieces didn't help any, so I decided to switch players.

For the player, I picked the Aerb 4G IPX-8 MP3 player. It's a nice, no-frills player with a clip that clips into your goggles, while charging through the headphone port, which is the first time I'd seen that design. This is nice, because there are no fiddly doors to open and close and wear out and let water in. The problem is that it doesn't have a shuffle feature, so it'll just play all songs from beginning to end. If you want the shuffle feature you might want to upgrade to the version that comes with an FM Radio. Not having shuffle doesn't bother me much so I kept this. The battery lasts forever. I charged it once when I bought it and 2 months later my twice weekly swimming workout still has not destroyed them.

Now, the headphones that come with this (and other swimming MP3 players) are crapThey won't stay in your ear, or provide a decent seal to prevent water from coming in. However, decent headphones for swimming cost only $4.59 on Amazon, with the caveat that it'll take about a month for them to arrive via the slow boat from China. But these cheap headphones are amazing. They come with 3 clips to clip onto your goggles, and you can flip turn, and thrash about in the water and they absolutely will not come off. They seal decently and provide relatively great sound in the water. I'm buying a second pair.

Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium 1

I'm a sucker for deals, so even though I'm not a fan of zombies, The Walking Dead Compendium 1 & 2 were on sale on Google Play books, so I bought them to read. I'd read some of the early parts of the series years before, but they weren't compelling enough to draw me in. Binge reading entirely 48 issue series at a time, however, is a different experience.

First of all, in the time since the original comic series came out, story telling in the zombie-plagued future has had better story telling than when the series first started. It's no longer stupid horror stories, which I understand that this series pioneered. When compared to say, The Last of Us, The Walking Dead no longer stands as an example of how to do future dystopia right. In fact, The Last of Us being "only" a 12 hour video game feels like it does a much better job due to tighter story telling and a confined plot. The art style in The Last of Us, of course, is much much stronger than the black and white Walking Dead.

There's much to like about the series, however. The world portrayed is strong, and is as much of a character as the lead character, Rick. As a foreign born immigrant reading these books, however, it strikes me as how uniquely American these books are. The strong individualistic culture of "I've got mine, screw you!" comes across extremely well in these stories, and they are stories you wouldn't find in other cultures. For instance, at a crucial juncture in this book, a few of the characters decide that they'd stand a much better chance of survival by abandoning the group and running away, leaving the rest to die. You'd think that people who've depended on each other for survival for that long (well over a year) couldn't do that to each other, but in the individualistic libertarian morality play that is The Walking Dead, this isn't just plausible, it's the right thing to do. (They do come back later but the rationality behind that behavior isn't explained and they are punished for it)

If something like The Walking Dead was written by say, the Japanese, it'd be much more a story about how society comes together to build a future in a desperate future, rather than a story about constant betrayal and stupid decisions.

If you enjoy drama, betrayal, and a feeling of desperation as well as insight into why American culture is constantly about the strong screwing over the weak, you cannot find better source material than The Walking Dead series. But quite frankly, I wouldn't want to live in a world filled with idiots, and as Wallace Stegner frequently pointed out, American society and history is actually filled with examples of people building institutions and societies, rather than doing their own selfish things.

Review: The Marshmallow Test

By now, you've heard of the Marshmallow Test. If you haven't, go visit YouTube and search for the many videos filmed of the test. This book was written by Walter Mischel, the psychologist responsible for designing the test and describes the various follow up studies over the years to understand the nature of willpower, and whether or not it can be trained.

The marshmallow test is an indicator of executive function (EF), This book is therefore an exploration of executive function. There are several interesting attributes that just a surface understanding of the results behind the marshmallow test wouldn't get you.

First of all, it turns out that willpower or executive function is contextual. Any examination of Bill Clinton's career, for instance, shows that he had plenty of willpower when it came to his most important goals, but was of course, undone by an affair with an intern. This pattern is repeated in many Hollywood movie stars, and even military generals like David Petraeus. What happened in those cases is that for such people, their focused willpower doesn't extend to certain areas of weaknesses which was what brought them down.

Secondly, willpower is not a fixed resource. It can be drained through use, so your willpower is strongest in the morning but weakest in the afternoon and in the evening. That's why bars, etc open late at night so they get more revenue when your willpower is the lowest.

Finally, executive function can be trained. There are several strategies that many adults try, including meditation, "mindfulness", and other well-documented techniques. Mischel goes through most of them and details the reasons they succeed (or fail), and how to make the more common ones more effective.

More importantly for parents, there are definite ways of bringing up children so that they have more or less willpower. In particular, modeling is critical, as is being supportive and not over-controlling:

The message here is that parents who overcontrol their toddlers risk undermining the development of their children’s self-control skills, while those who support and encourage autonomy in problem-solving efforts are likely to maximize their children’s chances of coming home from preschool eager to tell them how they got their two marshmallows.  (Page 60)

Not surprisingly, having absent parents or growing up in an unpredictable environment also leads to lower willpower:

 Beginning in early childhood, far too many people live in untrustworthy, unreliable worlds in which promises for delayed larger rewards are made but never kept. Given this history, it makes little sense to wait rather than grab whatever is at hand. When preschoolers have an experience with a promise maker who fails to keep his promise, not surprisingly they are much less likely to be willing to wait for two marshmallows than to take one now. These commonsense expectations have long been confirmed in experiments demonstrating that when people don’t expect delayed rewards to be delivered, they behave rationally and won’t choose to wait for them. (Page 72)

That means that keeping your promises to your kids is very important. There's also pre-natal advice, and advice that reducing quarrels between parents during the first few years is critical to having a kid with more executive function.

Overall, the book is good reading, though it's rather verbose in places and doesn't always do a great job getting to the point quickly. Nevertheless, it's got plenty of practical advise, and provides details behind the workings of executive function that a surface understand of what's happening during the test wouldn't give you, so I recommend reading the book for yourself.