September 30th, 2007
5:36 pm
I’ve started listening to podcasts. While working. While exercising. While driving. While eating. While talking to my wife. While sleeping. Constantly.
So far so good. The player I purchased is the 1GB Coby MPC-885, shown here. It’s about 2 inches long, runs on a AAA battery, and includes a few barebones features including an AM/FM tuner, a built-in mic for recording audio notes. I picked this one because it has the two features that were important to me: a simple built-in USB connection (easy to transfer podcasts, and also usable as a spare thumb drive when needed), and low price ($30). I have no plans to ever move to an iPod or a Zune or anything else that I’d give a second thought to if I left it in a bar or dropped it in a toilet. My cell phone is enough responsibility, thank you very much.
I’m loving this thing, because it has solved a growing problem in my life: too many books to read, not enough time. I have a bunch of technical topics on it, including computer science seminars, promotional info about various products, interviews with software developers, and similar things. So I can absorb what I need from those while I’m doing other things with my hands and eyes, and I’m saving reading time for books that I really want to read (as opposed to books I feel I need to read but aren’t, well, fun to read).
I’ve looked around for good sources of free podcasts, and there’s one great collection I’ve found: UC Berkeley’s webcasts/podcasts of course lectures. They’re free, and they cover a wide variety of topics from philosophy and history to mathematics and computer science. The computer science lectures cover some very modern topics — for example, I’ve just finished a few hours on functional programming, lambda expressions, and map/reduce. (*)
Anyway, if anybody has suggestions on similar archives of technical podcasts, let me know. I’d even pay for them if they’re good, but I’m not interested in “interviews with visionaries” and similar fluff: I’d like to actually learn some things, and I get plenty of opportunities to be impressed by “visionaries” in my day job. So college lectures are good, or interviews with hands-on developers who talk about paint more than art, if you know what I mean.
Oh, if you’re in the market for good headphones, I really like the Sennheiser PX100s I picked up with this player. They’re much higher quality than the ear plugs that comes with most players, but smaller and more convenient than the big over-the-ear models. I spent nearly twice as much on the headphones as I did on the player, which feels about right to me … hey, you listen to these things, right?
(*) A slight tanget regarding the map/reduce course at UC Berkeley …
That seminar is something new that they’re offering because Google funded it, to help the university deliver more “real-world” development topics. I think that’s a great strategy by Google: they do a ton of map/reduce programming, and it requires a specialized set of skills that most developers don’t have, so now they have a nearby university starting to crank out map/reduce experts. They’ve identified their specific recruiting problem as a “broader problem facing higher education in general,” and then they’ve generously offered to help solve the problem.
Nicely done. I hope we (Microsoft) are funding similarly “real-world” topics at the University of Washington.
September 29th, 2007
12:37 am
We spent the evening at Peter Koen’s house, out in the Woodinville area. It was fun. Peter is moving back to Austria soon, and it was great to hear his Steinway “A” and hang out a bit while he’s here.
We tried a few wines from Austria, Australia, and other places, then moved on to single malts (Lagavulin, Talisker), then some kind of vodka from Russia that can’t be named in this font, and so on. Beethoveen, Mozart, Poulenc, Rachmaninoff, and others rounded out a great evening of music and related pleasures.
Next time, Peter, our house.
September 27th, 2007
8:48 pm
Looks like we’ve declared war on more words. Climate change joins drugs and terror, forming the true axis of evil … the axis of evil words …
Nations must fight climate change like terrorism, Rice says
WASHINGTON (CNN) — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday told delegates to a global climate change conference that countries around the world must work together to combat climate change, much as they cooperate against terror and the spread of disease.
“No one nation, no matter how much power or political will it possesses, can succeed alone,” she said. “We all need partners, and we all need to work in concert.”
Rice said the United States takes climate change seriously, “for we are both a major economy and a major emitter.”
Other nations have been critical of the Bush administration’s policy on climate change after the United States withdrew from the 1997 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as the Kyoto Protocol. More than 150 countries signed the Kyoto agreement, which mandates limits on emissions.
Read more …
It should be fun to watch Condi and her superhero friends “fight climate change like terrorism.”
After all, the war on terror has reduced Osama Bin Laden to living as the fugitive head of a terrorist group, on the run and hiding in mountain caves. That is, the same thing he had been doing for years. Big polluters, take note — you could be next.
Go get ‘em, girl!
September 24th, 2007
9:51 pm
I wasn’t really planning to take a shot in the garage, and forgot I was in party mode. Sometimes that happens. You can get strange results when you forget you’re still in party mode. In my experience.
September 23rd, 2007
10:48 pm
Xorge taught me this one years ago, and it’s still my favorite setting for snapshots after dark: “party mode.”
The basic concept is that you have a much longer exposure than the usual flash photo (1/60th second, typically), and that lets the background colors really come through. A subtle burst of flash lights up the foreground right at the end of the exposure, but the long shutter lets the low-light background come through much stronger than in the standard faster-shutter flash photo.
Here are two shots showing the difference, taken a few seconds apart with only one setthing change: “S” mode versus “P” mode. They’re both photos of the birdhouse on my Mom’s deck, with Puget Sound and the sun setting over the Olympic mountains to the west.
The photo on the left is in “P” mode (auto-everything), with the flash up, so it’s a 1/60 shutter speed. The photo on the right is in “S” mode (shutter-priority mode, meaning you set the shutter speed and the camera adjusts everything else to match), with a 1/5th second shutter speed. The flash is still up, so it lights up the foreground at the end of the 1/5 second, throwing less total light than in the 1/60th exposure because after that long 1/5h exposure the background has already contributed quite a bit of light to the overall exposure calculation.
As you can see, the longer exposure makes the background come out much more. And you can adjust this all you want — instead of going to 1/5th second, you can simply spin to 1/20th second, or whatever, and press the shutter again.
That’s “party mode.” I use this mode most of the time at parties, and it works great. I’m often surprised at the cool effects. One thing to know is to set “rear-curtain flash” (meaning that the flash fires at the end of the long shutter opening), so that the trailers of light end in the crisp flash-lit image, rather than starting there.
The combination of properly exposed background and flash-filled foreground can create photos with great balance between background and foreground. And if things are moving (the photographer or the subjects), the background can have long trails of light while the foreground is crisp and clear from that rear-curtain flash. I love this setting.
September 23rd, 2007
11:50 am
The pace of blogging around here has really slowed down lately. This is primarily due to the 24-hour nature of the day on this planet … after trying to get a bit of exercise (I have a new bike to ride, you know), maybe hitting a few golf balls (the season’s almost over and we haven’t begun!), doing some work (lots going on in Redmond these days, and I’m trying to catch up from so much time on the road), and other things that seem to come up every day, it’s hard to find the time to post anything.
But it looks like rain today, in which case maybe we won’t get to the golf course after all, so I might get a few things posted.
Oh, another thing that has interfered with blogging time lately: reading books. I’m usually an avid reader, but I’ve been so busy this year that I hadn’t read many books, and now in the last month I’ve started to make up for lost time.
I finished “Napoleon’s Egypt” yesterday, the inspiring story of an imperial power’s attempt to invade and conquer the Middle East and their discovery that slaughtering the brutal leadership of a country can lead to even more brutality instead of less; who knew? And I’m most of the way through several work-related books on XML topics (Philo Janus’s InfoPath book is pretty good), and tonight I hope to finish up Malcolm Gladwell’s entertaining “Blink,” which is a book about why the shallowest and simplest of salesmen tend to be better putters than highly educated scientists and engineers. (Well, Gladwell doesn’t actually mention putting, but I know what he’s really talking about, and will probably explain in tedious detail in this space before long.)
But the book I’d like to ramble on about today is Nick Hornby’s “The Complete Polysyllabic Spree.” I finished it the same day I started it, reading the whole damn thing (well, a trim 270 pages) on the flight across the Pacific last week. The last time I read a book in a day was also a flight over the Pacific Ocean: “Killing Pablo” between Sydney and Los Angeles. When they don’t have working electrical outlets in business class I read a book, because my Toshiba M4 laptop has 8 minutes of battery life these days — I’ve timed it — so it’s not even worth booting up without an outlet handy.
I bought “Spree” in Kinokuniya Books at the Petronas Towers shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur. I can’t really explain why. I think it was the garish cover. And the sub-title, I guess: “the diary of an occasionally exasperated but ever hopeful reader.” I was wandering around the bookstore, checking out the cute cashier and stern security guard, and after passing the religion section and noting that Christianity was up front but the Islam section was much larger, I came upon a few “best-sellers” and there it was. Sold.
Nick Hornby wrote a column for Believer magazine called “Polysyllabic Spree,” and this book is a collection of two years of those columns. Each column starts with a list of books purchased that month, and books read that month (usually a bit of overlap between the two lists), and then offers some rambling, disjointed, often outrageous thoughts about the buying and reading involved. To call these “book reviews” would be a bit of a stretch; they’re no more book reviews than, say, the things construction workers say to one another when a nicely dressed woman walks past are “fashion reviews.”
Hornby is a real writer, who has written novels and reads the classics. So the first chapter’s list of books bought, full of Salingers and poem collections and so on, scared me a bit. I wondered if I’d have the patience to actually finish the thing, but I took heart in seeing Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened” on the list, a book I’ve purchased myself, although I misplaced it after reading a couple chapters and have never missed it. But the Salinger … I tried to read “Franny and Zoey” many years ago (and even claimed to have finished it, because that seemed to be important to somebody I wanted to impress at the time), but I sure didn’t get it.
But the good news is, this book isn’t about literature. It’s about reading. For example, here’s the paragraph that starts the second chapter/column:
If you write books — or a certain kind of book, anyway — you can’t resist a scan around the hotel swimming pool when you go on holiday. you just can’t help yourself, despite the odds: you need to know, straight off, whether anyone is reading one of yours. You imagine spending your days under a parasol watching, transfixed and humbled, as a beautiful and intelligent young man or woman, almost certainly a future best friend, maybe even spouse, weeps and guffaws through three hundred pages of your brilliant prose, too absorbed even to go for a swim, or take a sip of Evian. I was cured of this particular fantasy a couple of years ago, when I spent a week watching a woman on the other side of the pool reading my first novel, High Fidelity. Unfortunately, however, I was on holiday with my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law provided a gleeful and frankly unfraternal running commentary. ‘Look!. Her lips are moving.’ ‘Ha! She’s fallen asleep! Again!’ ‘I talked to her in the bar last night. Not a bright woman, I’m afraid.’ And at one point, alarmingly, she dropped the book and ran off. ‘She’s gone to put out her eyes!’ my brother-in-law yelled triumphantly. I was glad when she’s finished it and moved on to Harry Potter or Dr. Seuss or whatever else it was she’d packed.
Hornby takes us through dozens of books and the experience of reading them, often latching on to a little detail like that and writing about it instead of the plot or the characters of the books themselves. For example, in Woodward’s “Bush at War” (yes, he does cover a bit of non-fiction), the author found it disturbing to read of the President being “woken up by the Secret Service at 11:08PM” on 9/11. ‘If it had been me, I would have been up until about six, drinking and smoking and watching TV, and I would have been useless the next day.’ Nick Hornby for President, I say!
Oh, he can’t be President because he’s British. As he constantly reminds us. In fact, I think nobody in his own country reads him at all, because he always assumes the reader is American. For example, right after saying “it would be great to be you, sometimes” he goes into a rant about how Americans like to read Johnathan Livington Seagull’s message of “don’t abandon your dreams,” but contemporary British culture is based on the “more truthful” motto “ABANDON YOUR DREAMS.” The word “you” means “you stupid Americans,” everywhere it is used in this book.
Other recurring themes include the comic relief provided by autistic kids (he has one himself, so he should know), religion (not a reverent perspective, as you might imagine), soccer (much reverence here, though), and biographies of famous people (ranging from Dickens and other literary bigshots to Nikki Sixx, whose tale of “naked groupies, endless combinations of class-A drugs, and booze” Hornby finds to be “weirdly, not a bad book”).
Having lived in Spokane for a few years, I especially enjoyed his comments about “Citizen Vince” by Jess Walter, including an excerpt that starts like this:
Eighty-seven bars in greater Spokane, serving three hundred thousand people. One taxicab company: eight cabs. So on a Tuesday morning just past two a.m., last call, the economics are clear: more drunks than the market can bear. They leach out onto the sidewalks and stagger and yawn into their cars — those who own them and remember where they’re parked. The rest walk from downtown to the neighborhoods, scattering in all directions across bridges, through underpasses, beneath trestles, up hills to dark residential streets, solitary figures beneath thought bubbles of warm breath and cigarette smoke. Rehearsed lies.
Megan and I are familar with that long drunken walk up the South Hill to which the author alludes, and all the other details of this passage ring true as well. Maybe it’s not true that Spokane only has one cab company (I recall having two cab companies’ numbers in my wallet, actually), but it’s entirely believable that Spokane would, and that’s really the charm of Spokane: there’s nothing so base or crass that one couldn’t imagine it happening there. So when Walters’s book comes across a late-night argument in a gravel parking lot between a john and hooker who ask a passer-by his opinion on whether it’s possible to deliver exactly half a blow job, and the passer-by helps calm the hooker down and sends her on her way, then tries to sell the john a bag of pot, that sounds like Spokane, too.
Enough rambling. Read the book. I think you’ll like it.
Of course, first you have to buy it. And that’s a bit tricky, if you’re not in Malaysia at the moment. It seems that Amazon.com only has an older version which was published before this one. I guess that’s why it says “THE COMPLETE” on it, because mine contains a bunch of material written after that version was published in 2004. There’s a “complete” version on Amazon UK here, although the cover’s different from mine, and the ISBN is different too so I’m not sure that’s the same content. Although it might be better, who knows.
OK, I finally found where to buy the version I have, from a UK bookseller. Here’s the link. Enjoy!
September 13th, 2007
5:54 am
Hey, I’m in the Taipei airport when lots of other people are here, in the evening. Makes the place downright cosy.
I left Malaysia this afternoon, and wrote this post on the plane somewhere off the coast of Vietnam. I’ll upload it from here, and then it’s on to San Francisco, where I’ll arrive just 4 hours after I left Malaysia, due to the phenomenon known as the International Date Line. (Actual elapsed time will be 19 hours.)
Malaysia is a beautiful and friendly country. Well, I’m sure I could find somebody there who would beat me up or worse if I really tried, but everyone I dealt with was great. The counter people at the airport and hotel were my favorites anywhere I’ve been: smart, friendly, hard-working, and all speaking better English than I usually bother to. And the flight crews on Malaysia Airlines are consistently great, too.
The picture above was taken yesterday morning when I took a long walk near my hotel. It was great having the Microsoft office and convention center within a block of the hotel, and also the 50-acre park right next door. The picture to the right, from my walk back to the hotel last night after the TechEd speaker/MVP party, shows how close it all was.
Speaking of the party … it was at Bosso Nova, and they served churrascaria, the swashbuckling style of tableside sliced-meat dining that’s popular in Brazil. After dinner we had a surprise: drinking games, pitting randomly selected teams against each other. Well, not entirely random — they had a rule that no team could contain more than two Germans or two Australians. As a proud American, I took offense at that rule, of course. I focused my indignation enough to briefly return to 20-something form, but our team (three Americans, a Sikh and a Malaysian) lost in a playoff to a team that just seemed to want it more than we did.
In the puritanical United States, I’ve never heard of organized drinking competitions at a company-sponsored event, unless the company was a bar. So when I headed for the door at the end of the evening, I teased a few of my Malaysian colleagues and told them “in the US we’re taught that Muslims are ascetic and have no vices.” They responded by making me join them for yet another round of drinks. Thanks, Fai, that’s just what I needed. 
Anyway, here are the pictures that explain why this morning I slept a little later than usual (or at least tried to):
