Meet Boen Na (蓝博恩）

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

Both mommy and baby are doing fine.

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

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

Review: Edge of Eternity

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Heavy Rain (PS3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: The Winter of The World

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

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

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

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

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

Review: The Fall of Giants

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

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

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

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

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


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

Music Lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: The Altar Girl

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Skinny Mini Pen

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

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

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

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

Review: Camelbak Podium Bottle

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

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

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

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

Montebello Open Space Preserve Backpack Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Diablo III Ultimate Evil Edition (PS4)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended.

Review: Counterspy (PS Vita)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended.

Review: Chaos Quarter

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

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

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

Not recommended.

Review: On Immunity: An Innoculation

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

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

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

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

Not recommended.

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.