January 2012
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3
There are only 3 things that are valuable to a person
time
respect
thrill
The things people often regard as valuable (money, food, community, security) are valuable because they provide some portion of these 3 essentials.
November 2011
1 post
Next June 23-24
Plan A: Western States
Plan B: Homme d’Fer
June 2011
1 post
everyday
That crusty intellectual rag Harper’s magazine once printed an exchange between a retired English teacher and the marketing department of Coca-Cola about their slogan for Dasani water, which confused the word “everyday” with the two words “every day”. The company’s response was pretty funny and luckily someone else scanned it...
May 2011
2 posts
Rediscovering Libraries
With all the attention taken by Kindles, iPads, blogs, twitter, RSS and other electronic reading options, it’s fair to ask: who cares about libraries? Haven’t we moved on to better things, “recontextualized for the Information Superhighway”?
It’s true, these new ways to read have much to offer. I love Amazon.com for books: its giant selection, reasonable prices,...
Nigeria Rising
From the UN, via The Economist:
What if the world population looked like this in 2100? It’s safe to say that much would have changed between now and then. Assuming this is an accurate forecast (unlikely, due to notoriously inadequate understanding of fertility trends), which of these countries would you want to live in come 2100? The US trend appears to my eye the best among these. China...
November 2010
4 posts
Unwillful neglect
Tonight I saw a PBS newshour segment on end-of-life care. It is a wrenching experience, full of strong emotions that are uncomfortable. Who wants to feel responsible for deciding when to end someone else’s life? It’s an awful position. But how many people prepare for this situation and do what’s needed to prevent putting their relatives through it? Beyond the impact on a...
Delayed reaction to the "instant" phenomenon
A few months ago, Google’s “Instant” search interface launched and got great press coverage. People were very excited - they claimed we would save 1 or 2 seconds every time we searched the web with it! pooh-pooh, I thought. Now I finally understand why it’s so great…
But it’s not about making web searches faster.
It’s about making Google better for...
“one’s prestige at PayPal was measured by how few people could stop you...”
– http://www.quora.com/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-for-entrepreneurialism-did-Peter-Max-David-have-at-PayPal
October 2010
3 posts
Running advice
If I had a time machine, I would travel back and tell my past self these things about running.
Why run? Running regularly is a great way to be ready for all kinds of activities that stress the heart and lungs, like bicycling, hiking, skiing, etc. With a base of running fitness, it will be easier to do these other things. Eventually running itself will start to feel good, but that will take some...
Quitting TV again
Yesterday I unplugged my TV for maybe the 4th time in a year. This is harder than I thought - I must really be addicted to that thing. It’s tougher right now because I just watched two good movies on it. So long, Hitachi, no more of your time wasting!
WatchCalifornia high speed rail
September 2010
17 posts
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Nic's open house
Once a year, this guy I know named Nic has an open house and invites everyone to come by and check out his place. It’s a big draw and the line is huge. Even with my connections I spent 4 hours watching the sun rise and shuffling slowly with the crowd. Here’s the last ~90 minutes’ worth of the queue of Nic’s friends.
Finally we got to the garden entrance and baggage scan....
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Adieu, mon ami
Today I said goodbye to my faithful friend and companion for the last 650 miles.
To the Mondia: Some other lucky person has been able to see potential in your 1980s brown paint, your stretched chain, and your tires smothered in rim glue. I will miss you and think fondly of the many intimate hours we spent together on roads and freeways, over gravel trails and cowpaths. You treated me well.
And...
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Now that's a peloton
Day 7 (bonus!): Paris to Honfleur
My good luck continued for one more day of cycling, as the annual Levallois-Honfleur bicycle tour took place during my trip. This was the 25th edition of the event, a big one on the calendars of French cyclists. I heard about it through a triathlon training group called the expaTRIes that I started running with last week. And with their generous help, everything...
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The Paris office
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Paris le fin
Day 6: Epernay to Paris
Epernay hasn’t figured out that a wine growing region should keep its wineries open on the weekends. Some would open later in the day, but many would be closed. So I left the town without seeing inside any of the famous chateaux and caves. The exteriors were very impressive, for example:
This year’s tour de france went through Epernay, and I followed along...
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Early Champagne
Day 5: From Neufchateau to Epernay
Yesterday’s long session got me thinking that I could get all the way to the champagne region today (a day early) if I rode quickly and didn’t make any big wrong turns. It was a pleasure to leave uninspired Neufchateau after a quick breakfast and start the route along the country roads. The weather was hot and sunny, and the roads were reasonably...
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As West as possible
Day 4: from the Vosges to Neufchateau
If yesterday’s goal was adventure, today’s goal was to travel as far westward as possible through the French farmland. In the Michelin maps, they use stars to designate interesting places, and if a place is really great it gets 2 or even 3 stars. As an example, Riquewihr was given 3 stars, and so is Versailles and a small number of other places....
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Into the Vosges
Day 3: Freiburg to France’s Vosges mountains
Another early start, powered by heaps of muesli and yogurt. Today had the largest agenda of any day in the entire trip, so I was eager to get moving. The first challenge was getting out of Freiburg in the correct direction. It’s much easier to find the way to a city’s center than it is to find the way out of it. Eventually I got on...
August 2010
13 posts
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Freiburg
Day 2: Basel to Freiburg
The wheels held up well today, spinning the way to Freiburg. It was a gorgeous ride, hard to believe it was only about 60 miles with all the variety of scenery and terrain. Finding the way was much easier than I expected, because there are excellent bicycle paths parallel to the country roads in between towns. Who needs nationally sanctioned bike paths when the regional...
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Bicycle repair in Basel
Basel is a good place to be stuck for a day.
On Monday morning I found a shop that sold glue-on type tires, and they were not too expensive. So I spent the morning glueing two new tires onto the rims, and glueing all kinds of dirt and grease onto my hands. They are still a sticky mess as I’m writing this on Monday night, after spending all day wringing and washing and scrubbing my hands....
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Jetzt beginnen wir radzufahren!
Day 1: Zurich to Basel
On Sunday Dan and I loaded up our bikes and set off from his house near Zurich with the plan to make it to Basel by evening. The bike performed well during its dress rehearsal, and its owner had a new and humbler approach to finding his way around Swiss bike trails. Fortunately, Dan knows the roads between Zurich (his home town) and Basel (where he went to college) very...
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Tour de Suisse sauvage
Zurich is heaven for bicycling, with hills and views and car-free travel even better than the SF bay area. I learned this the hard way yesterday.
Soon after setting off from the suburbs of Zurich, I got lost in the farming country. Not very lost, but confused by the bicycle route signs, which are small and point down roads like the one in the picture above. To my American eyes, this looks more...
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Rafting the Thur and Rhein
Setting up the boats and kids
Grill-Partie afterwards
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Velo boerse
Saturday morning at Helvetiaplatz, at least a thousand used bicycles for sale. Among the city cruisers and mountain bikes, I found a road bike for $200 that looks like it will be able to make it to Paris.
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Hallo Zurich
The smoking hot Zurich See. After a difficult flight connecting through Dulles, everything was easy.
July 2010
2 posts
Forget this, graduates
‘Tis the season for graduation, a time for students to listen to inspiring speeches like this one (text version). When moving out of a school environment, there are some things you should leave behind. I wish I had this list of ideas to un-learn when I left college. Things you learn in school classes that don’t apply to life outside school:
Clever people get rewarded. Quiet, friendly...
A plan for free wireless data
Perhaps before the end of this year, ubiquitous city-wide free, unlimited wireless data for mobile devices will be possible. This is important because right now it costs roughly $80-$100 per month per subscriber, well beyond the reach of most people. Why is it so expensive? The infrastructure is expensive (cell towers, base stations, and centralized routing systems) and mobile carriers need to...
April 2010
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Backin that thang up
How do you keep your digital valuables safe? One answer is to store duplicate copies on a different system. Ideally the backup copy will always be available if the original gets lost. This suggests putting the backup on a very different system to minimize the likelihood of a single problem destroying both the original and the backup. For example, having a few types of differences can provide...
March 2010
1 post
Intuit hates linux
I just did my taxes online, using TurboTax like always. But this year Intuit added a “system check” to the process to make sure its customers’ computers run the Windows or OSX operating system and one of the major browsers (IE/Firefox/Safari). Intuit would not let my Linux+Chrome system into their site. This is strange because I had already begun a return about a month ago with...
February 2010
1 post
Things that go boom
In no particular order: cars and more recently ho’s, tricks the dynamite supersonic aircraft portable stereos my operating system (sorry, no link available)After years of hard use — with great moments in hackery punctuated by episodes of in-flight repair, unnecessary tweaking, necessary tweaking, updating, upgrading, downgrading, converting, reverting, and just plain hurting —...
December 2009
2 posts
Goodbye, COBRA
Why is our national health insurance extension program called COBRA? Are they really hoping to associate their service with a venomous snake? Or perhaps they wanted to evoke memories of GI Joe’s nemesis, a ruthless terrorist organization bent on world domination? In each of the last 18 months I sent a check for $350 to COBRA, but no more! That’s about four thousand bucks a year for...
Resolve
in 2010 I will: Fix my feet and apply again for WS100 Disconnect TV cable for the month of January and maybe for ever after Learn how to cross-country ski Form company Sell products Delight customers
June 2009
1 post
Starting with a big pile of data
What can one do with a list of names from the US census? One example is the Name Generator, which lets you explore the data and play with it, and is surprisingly entertaining. The most basic function it has is to create random combinations of first and last names, eg. Craig Apple Lashawn Ichinotsubo Dixie Peon Once you have some names, it invites you to tag the name with a descriptive term. For...