Kushal, His Blog

Another animal in the street

2010-02-23T10:35:00.000-08:00

Stolen from David! ( see earlier post for context )

The best part about support via chat is you can post the transcript

2010-01-12T19:48:00.000-08:00

Such a funny mix of helpful and unhelpful!

Brigitte(22:29:54): Please give me a moment to pull up your Account.
Brigitte(22:31:54): Are you connecting to the internet/
Brigitte(22:32:00): ?
Kushal Dave(22:32:13): yes
Kushal Dave(22:32:31): although on the set top box, the features like Help do not work
Kushal Dave(22:32:43): it says it has an IP address, though
Brigitte(22:33:18): that is strange but it is not updating the box
Kushal Dave(22:34:25): uh oh
Kushal Dave(22:34:32): i saw some people saying the upgrade messed it up?
Brigitte(22:37:48): It was not an upgrade issue, it is DAC ERROR with the stb
Brigitte(22:38:18): Verizon is aware of that issue
Kushal Dave(22:38:25): i see
Kushal Dave(22:38:28): when i can expect it to be fixed
Brigitte(22:41:33): Well this has been going for sometime now
Kushal Dave(22:41:50): yes
Brigitte(22:42:00): Please have patient with us
Brigitte(22:43:00): Is there anything else?
Kushal Dave(22:43:33): well, can i get a credit on my account?
Kushal Dave(22:43:37): the dvr is much less useful without a guide
Brigitte(22:44:32): For a credit you will have to go to billing
Brigitte(22:44:58): And yes it useless with out the guide
Kushal Dave(22:45:12): okay, i guess i will try billing
Kushal Dave(22:45:16): thank you
Brigitte(22:45:42): Is there anything else?
Kushal Dave(22:46:12): nope
Brigitte(22:46:37): Have a good day. You may receive a survey regard ing this chat. I hope you can rate us a 10 based on your experience with me today. Thank you for choosing Verizon.

Is design undermining the Internet?

2009-11-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

I've often thought that a big part of the success of Twitter versus, say, RSS, is the consistency and completeness of the UI. Trying to find the RSS subscribe link, sending it to the right reader, and understanding the relationship between your reader and the site you came from is a fair number of hurdles. On the other hand, finding "follow" is easy and the behavior very well-defined. It sucks that Twitter is a big centralized service, but that's what makes it work so well.

Similarly, it's lame that every band is forced to have a MySpace page, especially given how ugly MySpace can sometimes be. But when I ended up at weezer.com trying to find a way to listen to the new album, the easiest thing to do was to find the MySpace link and click on it, because I know that MySpace = listen to album, and the UI for doing so is quite prominent.

I wonder if web designers will ever be able to agree on design conventions to overcome this tendency for centralized sites to be more usable?

A million human interest stories is a tragedy

2009-10-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

Between the bubble boy incident, the awesome Gillmor article, and linguistic errors in stories I am knowledgeable about, I've been getting grumpier at the media.

Every morning, I'm forced to choose between New York 1, where a nice man conveys actual information by summarizing stories from various newspapers that morning, and the Today Show, where the real news is increasingly compressed into a couple of cursory minutes. As much as I find Today a much more pleasant aesthetic experience in the morning, with its energy, beautiful people, lush colors, soothing music, and high production values, I find myself opting for NY1 more and more.

I really don't understand where journalism got off on this obsession with small human dramas. I'm happy enough to listen to stories about fashion or food or saving money, but every in-depth interview about some local murder or some missing person or even a plane crash makes me die a little bit inside. This is not important news that the entire country needs to hear. As much as I love reality television, I like it best when it's not masquerading as news. Millions of people dying every year because of our "market" health-care system while the politicians we elected cave to audacious lobbying seems much more deserving of an incessant drumbeat of coverage than these sad but minor tragedies around the country.

This seems of a kind with the deterioration of the New Yorker and Wired, two of my favorite magazines, into cute little biographies that occasionally discuss the world surrounding these people. After a paragraph of Richard Holbrooke's resume, I'm much more interested in how he's going to fix Afghanistan. After a bit of the story of Shai Agassi, I'm much more interested in whether his plan is going to work. After about a page of sychophancy, I'm interested in factually accurate reporting.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that facts and information are becoming less and less important in a country almost proud of being dumber than ever. But I'd like to think this whole Bubble Boy hoax/non-hoax thing might make reporters think twice about where they're directing our precious time. I'm sure CNN is really proud of getting the boy to blurt out that this might have been a hoax. But I think they should be embarrassed that they haven't produced any coverage about the health care debate that would inspire the country to rally together and start talking about facts.

Diagrammr

2009-08-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

Mihai let the cat out of the bag recently about my little side project to let you create, embed, and collaborate on diagrams that are generated from simple sentences, and, he being the celebrity he is, it's gotten a lot of buzz (including Kent Beck(!), even if he doesn't know what it's for). :)

It's not as polished as I'd like (anybody know a pretty Java Linux font?), but that's launching early and often for you. It seems to be already useful, I've used it for a few things at work and found it way faster than wrestling with Visio or something.

The actual design is a little convoluted so that I could get a reliable data storage system with minimal changes from my current hosting environment. Ideally, the whole app would be on App Engine, but Java2D isn't available in the sandbox yet. You can see how it works here. I really, really wanted to avoid calling out to Dot, but after some time spent reading the paper, I realized how hopeless that was. :(

A shout out to some similar tools that just didn't quite do it for me:

instaviz

diagramic

gliffy

websequencediagrams

Also a shout out to Alan Donovan, who built something similar inside of Google that I <3ed.

Crazy times

2009-07-09T08:53:00.000-07:00

Richard got my blog all up and running again on his new server4you server (yay Richard!). Now I can recount various exciting goings on. Sadly, all the effort that went into this (plus the hotness of the new Wordpress) make me lazier about my planned switch to Blogger, even though I should, if only for the reliability and backups.

Anyway, the big event last week was the Preposition Bar Crawl, the follow-up to the great Exponential Decay Bar Crawl. This was quite some time in the making, since the only two we could come up with at first were Off the Wagon and Against the Grain. Searching for prepositions on Yelp turned up Under the Volcano, also recommended by Renee, and Dolapo suggested In Vino, so we sort of had a crawl at that point. Lindsay threw in Down the Hatch, and we were good to go. Akshay came up with Zum Schneider at the last minute, which turned out to be a lifesaver when In Vino didn't want us and ATG wanted us to wait. Also I had a gigantic Schneider Weisse there, as depicted. The turnout was excellent, which I attribute mostly to people's love of prepositions (ahem, where would we be without them?), rather than it being my 28th birthday and my last day at Google*, both of which it just so happened to be.

The other exciting thing that happened was Apple finally approved my iPhone app, Where Was I?. It's a pretty silly app, is just fetches your Google search history, but it could be handy in a pinch. Why did it take two months to approve? I don't know. Why does Apple require apps to use their buggy network-detection code? I don't know.

*That's right. I'm leaving the (awesome in many ways) nest! I think reading the sad comments on the Google Notebook blog tipped me over the edge. Don't worry, commenters, someone was reading your complaints, he was just powerless to do anything. I'll be trying out life at tiny, tiny chartbeat starting next week.

Japan in no particular order (and belatedly): Food

2009-05-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

Mostly, trying to eat in Japan consisted of looking for places from our guidebook and failing because Tokyo is unnavigable or because the place is closed, then walking in somewhere, and having them speak exactly enough English to tell you there's nothing vegetarian to eat. But that made the good finds all the more exciting...

We had fried vegetables and cheese on sticks (kushiage, and it's written as 串 - things on a stick!) at a street-side restaurant. It came with cabbage and sesame oil and tasty beer. Other fun street foods were noodles from a vendor at the park in Tokyo, and a baked potato in a random Tokyo suburb.

The best meal was definitely at Biotei, this really low-key place in Kyoto with an awesome prix fixe menu of tofu, vegetables, and soup. We went to a fancier place (Kyotofu) in Tokyo, which definitely wins for range of preparation, but actually was not as tasty.

Other meals: At a temple in Kyoto, we had vegetarian soba. Lots of red bean desserts. Tofu donuts and savory peanut brittle at Nishiki market. Conveyor belt sushi. Rice with cereal grains at the fancy ramen place in Kyoto. Wasabi corn nuts!

Switching to Mac

2009-05-03T15:05:00.000-07:00

After a couple of years of thinking I should get a Mac laptop for myself, I finally bought a MacBook Pro. Of course, the first thing I needed to do was copy my music over. This was way more annoying than it needed to be, and the various instructions on the Internet all disagreed with each other. It eventually took up most of Saturday, and it's fairly lame iTunes doesn't support better cross-computer syncing. What ended up working:

1. Turning on remote login on the Mac, and using WinSCP to copy the files over. (The Mac couldn't find the PC's Samba server, and the last time I tried PC copying to a Mac samba share, a bunch of file names with extended characters caused trouble). The copy was also insanely fast connecting the laptops directly with an Ethernet cable.
2. Run iTunes once on the Mac but don't import anything, then quit.
3. Export library... on the PC and then copy Library.XML over to the Mac
4. Open Library.xml in emacs and replace all the file://localhost/C:/My%20Documents.... paths with file://localhost/Users/kushal/Music
5. Overwrite iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml with my Library.xml file
6. cat /dev/null > iTunes Music Library
7. option-click on iTunes icon so that it lets you Choose library...
8. Choose iTunes Music Library
9. Because the file is corrupt, it restores from the XML file
10. Voila! Playlists, ratings, and play counts are all there. The only things that didn't make it were my podcasts, not really sure why, but I just did Add to library... and then resubscribed. There may or may not be a few other songs missing.

I think this might have been smoother if I had done "Consolidate music" in iTunes on the PC before copying, but it claimed to not have enough hard drive space? I think as long as the consolidate/organize settings are consistent, things work out okay.

(Thanks to Mihai and Dolapo for walking me through this! :) )

Japan in no particular order: Manners

2009-04-27T16:53:00.000-07:00

Late in the game, Emma and I discover that the following things are considered rude:

Blowing your nose or sneezing in public
Wearing sandals barefoot without socks
Eating or drinking while walking

Good thing we are doing them constantly. Oops! Sorry Japan!

The second of these is pretty unfortunate given how hot it gets. And the third is super-strange given the ubiquitous soda vending machines. It explains the lack of trash cans, though.

Japan in no particular order: Baseball

2009-04-25T04:37:00.000-07:00

After Lonely Planet tells us that there are "beer girls with kegs strapped to their backs," there is no question we are going to the game. Luckily, the Yakult Swallows suck, so the ticket prices are cheap. (ticket girl: "You want to sit on the *home team* side?"). On the way in, we pick up sake and edamame, which you are allowed to bring in. The game starts out normally, and (phew!) there really are keg girls.

Then crazy things start happening. The other team has carefully-coordinated cheers involving sitting down and standing up and colored shirts and singing. The third batter comes out to Toto's Africa (homage to the Japanese toilet manufacturer?). The next batter opts for Carmina Burana. When the Swallows score, every other fan busts out a pink or blue clear plastic umbrella and thursts it into the air. There are cheerleaders, but in conservative outfits. There is a mascot dressed as a Swallow. When the Carp finally score, they inflate thousands of balloons shaped like sperm and release them all at once.

The Swallows pull off a surprise victory, due no doubt to our keg-girl-beer-fueled cheering.

More fun with TGUPT

2009-02-16T15:16:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to hack up a quick straight men-vs-straight women comparison, and I figured there was no better way to honor our Presidents than by finally getting around to it. enjoy! and take the test if you haven't already!

New digs!

2009-02-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

I've failed to post about my new apartment, or about how awesome life has been since Emma moved in with me. This is probably because we've been so busy unpacking and furnishing and painting. Some things have gone well: the new neighborhood is much better for eating and subwaying than the LES, the view is amazing, the kitchen is a pleasure to cook in (garbage disposal!), Elfa shelving is relatively easy to install. Some things have been tricky: Wells Fargo freaked out at the last minute, Oz Moving ripped me off with charges for boxes, painting is way harder than anybody told us, brand-new apartments have kinks that require working out.

Last weekend, we had a housewarming at which copious amounts of alcohol were presented and consumed, much of it by people who bravely ventured across the bridge from Manhattan (or New Haven!). Luckily, this party was on Friday, leaving me well-rested to run the Bronx Half-Marathon on Sunday. 1:59:13 was slower than Brooklyn (and much slower than Brian and Monzy), but not bad considering how little I've been training. Later in the week, I purchased a bag of candy hearts and ate all 900 calories of them, undoing any potential benefits from the training.

The Grown-Up Purity Test!

2008-12-27T18:19:00.000-08:00

During the company ski trip last year, we somehow found ourselves taking purity tests, something we hadn't done since college. Much fun was had (at least until Akshay turned off the Internet in a fit of rage, and we had to score the tests using the Firebug console). Many, many drinks later, we somehow decided that what the world really needed was a hip web-2.0ish purity test, with keyboard shortcuts and big fonts and statistics comparing you to other test takers and fewer "have you ever held hands with a MOS?" type questions. So I registered tgupt.com for The Grown-Up Purity Test (pronounced tee-gupt) and figured it couldn't take more than a weekend of hacking to do.

Since it's now a year later, it's clear I severely underestimated what was involved. Writing the questions was surprisingly hard, and took a lot of feedback and help from various folks, especially David. I'm still not 100% happy with them, but this project has dragged out much longer than anything this frivolous and puerile ever should.

<technical details>
Also tricky was figuring out how to work around the limitations of the App Engine data store. In a relational database, it would be pretty easy to go from normalized data to selecting the mean score for some demographic group. But App Engine doesn't offer aggregation functions, doesn't do joins, and doesn't fetch more than 1,000 rows. I ended up doing several writes on each answered question and each finished test. If a 27-year-old male answered yes to Question 1, I write the following:


AggregateQuestion
Question 1, Yes: 1, Total: 1
Question 1, Gender: male, Orientation: straight, Yes: 1, Total: 1
Question 1, Gender: male, Orientation: straight, Age: 27 Yes: 1, Total: 1

Initially, I thought I would have to store all combinations of gender, orientation, and age as separate aggregates to future-proof myself for any graphs I might want to make. This was really slow, especially with atomic writes. Then I realized that for attributes with few possible values, like gender and orientation, I could fetch, say, both the male and female values from the datastore and combine them in the application code to create a gender-neutral statistic as needed. For overall scores, I updated both a global mean as well a set of score buckets in order to make histograms easier to generate. There's more discussion of these sorts of solutions here and here. You can check out the TGUPT code at code.google.com
</technical details>

Anyway, go take the test and let me know what you think.

Animals in streets

2008-10-12T12:40:00.000-07:00

I've been up to various exciting things lately, like Austin City Limits and running a half-marathon this morning (albeit verrry slowly). But at the moment I really want to discuss pictures of animals in streets. So far I only have two of them. But they make me giggle. Please share more.

Oo, my blog's back!

2008-09-03T14:30:00.000-07:00

Richard thinks there was some DOS attack. Spammers piss me off. If I were the police, and I had the choice of say, arresting someone for smoking marijuana, or castrating a spammer, I would not be especially torn. But since Google's better at fighting spam than Richard is, should I switch to blogger?

Anyway, I was all excited to blog about running the Nike Human Race 10K (a race with a pun!) this weekend. It was crowded and started late, but people pretty much lined up at the right pace points, unlike NYRR races, making the race itself pretty smooth. I overshot, trying to run a 8:15 and running 8:43 instead. Nike even gave us split times, clearly showing me starting off too fast, slowing wayyy down, and then picking it up at the end. It helped that the Naked Cowboy and people drumming on plastic drums were there to cheer us along. And the individually-numbered race shirts and disposable paper timing chips were snazzy. Pro-tip: don't take the bus to Randall's Island. It's slow and crowded and $5, while the walk is pretty and pleasant.

In hindsight, a drinks-to-hours-asleep ratio exceeding 2:1 is not good race preparation

2008-07-14T16:37:00.000-07:00

This weekend, Jon and I had a co-birthday, with pre-drinking, the Girl Talk album, Anchor Steam Porter, margs, remote.app, popcorn, and cake manipulation at my place and then dancing at The Delancey. I was sporting my new shirt from French Connection, which turns out to make small and extra-small shirts that fit me(!). A good time was had by all (based on twittering, which is the new picture-taking), although apparently I am not very good at clapping on the beat. Beats are for suckers, anyway. Also, we had to pay the bouncers $40 to get the last five people in, which is like a total scam. I think there might have been shots involved...

...because when I woke up 4 hours later to go to the Park to Park race (with the fun free trip to the pool at the end), I didn't feel so good. I didn't make it in time to attach my chip or number, but I finished alive and kept pace with a slightly-gimpy Bolin. Sadly, the NYRR website claims I didn't finish the race. We had a tasty brunch at the cafe from You've Got Mail, which has awesome eggs-with-herbs, but I couldn't finish it, due to aforementioned yucky-feelingness. I went home and went back to bed.

Anyway, that was my weekend. I hope we all learned a valuable lesson about how much more badass you feel running a race after a night of crazy partying, or something.

Confusingly, Portland is full of beer, not port

2008-06-29T15:18:00.000-07:00

During this week's mini-vacation, I learned about many fine things Portland produces, mostly in the form of alcohol. Notably, Emma (another fine thing Portland has produced) and I consumed Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir at Sokol Blosser, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir at Lange (along with an excellent view), Foggy Notion Weissbier at Bill's Tavern, Rope Walk Amber at Bridgeport Brewery, and Black Butte XX at Deschutes. (We also went to the Erath Winery, but weren't impressed by anything.) There seems to be a microbrewery on every corner in Portland, which is awesome.

To wash all this down, we had great taffy and pizza in Cannon Beach, tacos and tamales at Por Que No?, mango gelato at Mia Gelato, polenta at Lovely Hula Hands (restaurants have funny names in Portland), and various tasty things at Emma's parents'. Our trip was not limited to eating, however. We also walked and ran on Cannon Beach, which has a giant rock (pictured here) called Haystack Rock, and we wandered the Rose Garden and the Pearl during Portland's record heat. Luckily, Portland has a giant water fountain where you can sit and have water massage your feet. As an added bonus, the square is filled with a bunch of dazed newfound fathers letting their babies loose in the mini-pool the fountain creates.

But going for a run tonight reminded me why New York is still awesome. It turns out the crazy public art waterfall thing is a few blocks from my apartment, and totally breathtaking, and worth dragging your lazy butt to go see. (I also saw a graceful and fun temporary building made of wood set up for citysol up at 23rd.)

Gramercy Tavern + Anniversary = Happy Kushal

2008-06-12T15:39:00.000-07:00

One big challenge as a vegetarian is finding fancy restaurants that have tasty vegetarian options. (yes yes, I know, life is sooo hard) Some places don't list anything on the menu, but can whip up amazing things, like the crazy olive and pine nut concoction on the vegetable plate at Allen & Delancey. Some places have boring vegetable plates, so unmemorable I can't even remember where I had them. And Italian places like Babbo are awesome, but variety is nice. Wandering through the list of New York Michelin restaurants (how many have you been to? I've been to five. looking at the list reminds me, Saul also did a great job putting together something vegetarian, as did Grocery. yay Brooklyn! all I remember about Cafe Bouloud was the bread, though)...where was I? Oh yeah, going through the list reminded me that Gramercy Tavern always looks so gorgeous when I run past it on my 20th st loop. When I saw the vegetarian tasting menu that had nothing I was allergic to, many of my favorite things, and some removable seafood, it was love at first sight. (Per Se also has a vegetarian tasting menu, but I don't think I'm quite ready to take it to that level yet.) Emma made a reservation for our one-year anniversary (one year? really? wow! Hi Emma!), which is technically later this week, but which we celebrated yesterday.

So how was the tasting menu? Yummmmmy. Our favorites were the nettle soup with pea shoots, and the mushroom ravioli in balsalmic, but the range of treatments of radishes, asparagus, and ramps were also really exciting. (The gelatin in the asparagus terrine was a little off, though, and the desserts were just good, not amazing). The celery in the lemon risotto had a nice bite to it, and the rice was perfectly cooked. It felt like we were in Top Chef! (Which we watched when we got home. Yay <spoiler>Stephanie!</spoiler>.)

This was just the latest in a range of recent adventures that have kept me too busy to blog, including Coney Island, Passing Strange, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Little Branch, Angel's Share, Flatiron Lounge, Cookshop, Po, Alvin Ailey, I'm From Barcelona, Barrio Chino, a new favorite wine bar, hiking, arm wrestling, a not-so-fry party, a chocolate fountain, caparinhas, tasty house-cooling goat cheese tarts, and BSG & margs. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

Introducing the Millidunst calculator

2008-04-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

I have long (jokingly) maintained that Kirsten Dunst is the standard against which all other hot celebrities should be measured. This is partially because measuring actresses in "millidunsts" kinda rolls off of the tongue, as in "Michelle Trachtenberg is like 500 millidunsts." Dolapo begs to differ, though. He's completely obsessed with her, and is unswayed by the dark side she displayed on Gossip Girl this week. Clearly, we need an objective source of truth. Enter xrank from Microsoft, which is like Google Trends, but easier to scrape and more celebrity-focused. I was looking for a way to play with App Engine (which is amazingly easy to work with, by the way), and this seemed liked a good choice. Behold, the (slightly slow) Millidunst calculator! Enjoy.

Belize, Part 3: Sea-ing is belize-ing

2008-02-17T15:33:00.000-08:00

Day 6, Thursday. We take a cab to Placencia at 8 in the morning, which feels less ungodly when you go to bed at 10. We check in at Westwind and head to the snorkeling shop (Nite Wind) where the nice lady sets up with some gear and takes a fair amount of our money. We're headed to the Silk Cayes, which are supposed to be on an excellent barrier reef. The boat is fast and bumpy and our guide is improbably named Engelbert. But there's a storm coming and wetake shelter on a random caye, where we get to know our fellow snorkelers. They include some college kids from Belgium living in Guatemala and some folks from LA staying at the really expensive Coppola resort up the road. We also get to know some hermit crabs, a rooster, and bugs that leave behind these gnarly looking bites with white circles around them. Thank god for DEET. We learn that no alcohol will be served in Belize until 6 when the polls close! This is amazing since until now there appear to be no laws related to the time, location, or age of alcohol consumption. (I am sure that American moralists will be shocked to discover that despite all this we encountered nary a drunken brawl or orgy.) We are glad we picked today to snorkel, despite the storm, since being stuck in town without booze would have left us pretty directionless. The storm lasts longer than planned, but soon we're on our way. I can't swim so well, and I figure there's a good chance of dying untimelyly today. But it turns out I can snorkel with a life vest, and life is good. Snorkeling is fun, but a little tricky when you're not allowed to wear your glasses and the waves are pushing you in the wrong direction. Also, the salt water keeps attacking my gums. The nice people help us around the reef, and we see a shark, and some purple fish going to school (we wave, but they don't wave back), some rainbow-colored fish, and a fish with a mohawk. The coral itself is awesome, just like on TV, but trying not to touch it is tricky because of the goggles' disorienting magnification. We eat a barbecue lunch cooked on burning coconut husks, and then we head to another caye. The reef here is a bit less vibrant, and most of the cool stuff is blurry to nearsighted ol' me. Engelbert pulls out a sea cucumber and a conch for us to examine. We head back, and on the way we see dolphins! Yay dolphins. Dolphins look a lot like waves and are tricky to spot. We also feel the beginning of a narly sunburn. Back in town, the bars are still closed! A lot of the bars and restaurants do not bother to open even at 6, through some combination of political fervor and economic resignation. We eat tasty Italian food because it is the only remotely vegetarian thing open. I introduce Emma to the mudslide at the one open beach bar, and she is enamored. It is unclear how Emma has never met the mudslide before.

Day 7, Friday. The whole day is allocated to relaxing. We start with fry jacks at De Tatch. Fry jacks are fried tortillas that you dip in honey, a Belizean version of fried dough that has somehow made it past the breakfast food censors. We stroll around town visiting shops. In one shop, we hear the music of Andy Palacio, which I will download on eMusic next week and listen to incessantly. We drink at the Barefoot Beach Bar again, and go for a several mile walk on the beach, checking out the resorts in town and burning whatever skin we had left. There is also some hanging out in hammocks. The food options are a bit limited and we end up eating Italian again, but the homemade pasta is delicious.

Day 8, Saturday. Time to leave, but first we wander around town and read in hammocks. The cab takes 10 minutes to take us to the airport, and it takes us about 10 seconds to check in. Our cab driver explains that the only difference between the two local airlines is that one pays its pilots per flight instead of per day, leading them to more willingly take off in inclement weather, which the cab driver considers a virtue. Lonely Planet informs us that, unsurprisingly, the airline has had more crashes. Our Cessna, thankfully, does not crash, and it flies low, giving us a chance to see a lot of Belize by air. At the airport, we spend our leftover money on snacks in anticipation of the hamburgers on Continental, which neither of us will eat. We also see t-shirts featuring every possible Belize pun - I feel very unoriginal. We notice a bit too late that everybody in the airport is drinking beer and rum punch. The airport has a bar and you can take the drinks with you! Emma, bored with her book and still waiting for me to finish What is the What, lines up and buys us beer with the last of our money. Hooray beer. Belize has been beautiful and fun and wonderfully remote, but I'm excited to get back to the Internet, television, restaurant options, and not getting sunburnt.

Belize, Part 2: B is for Belize, and for buses, beer, beaches, and bikes

2008-02-11T16:06:00.000-08:00

(Addendum to part 1: Emma keeps a list of Questions for the Internet in her journal during the trip. This is a tradition begun during a disconnected ski trip last year, and it served us well. One of the questions for the Internet: how do I fold a towel elephant? Emma found the answer.)

Day 4, Tuesday. We say goodbye to our Caves Branch friends and walk to the road to catch a bus. We anxiously scan the horizon for buses so we have ample time to flag one we think will show up around 10:30. Somehow, we find the right bus, and we even transfer successfully to a second bus. Some hitchhiker tries to convince me to pay his bus fare, one of the few examples of someone being not nice, much less shady, during our entire trip. A little kid on the bus plays air guitar while drinking sprite and wearing giant yellow sunglasses. The trip is remarkably quick, although the last few miles to Placencia are unpaved and bumpy. We arrive with half the day left, check into our hotel, and head across the street to the beach. The beach has palapas at regular intervals, and we settle into cozy little hammocks. There are only a couple of people on the whole beach, but nearly as many dogs following us around. We get nachos and beer at the Green Parrot and then go back to doing nothing. I try running on the beach, but it turns out to suck for running through a combination of sloping, detritus, interruption by trees, and limited tidal differences. We hang out in the pool for a bit, looking out at the sea. Our room has a TV, and there is some bizarre movie on with Keira Knightley playing a bounty hunter, plus news about how Obama is doing. There appears to be no local content. We have dinner at the nicest restaurant in town. Emma has a watermelon margartia and sassy shrimp. I have a mojito and a bunch of tasty appetizers. Bedtime! We go to bed early here. It's pitch black on our walk back - no street lights and barely any lights at all - the stars are amazing.

Day 5, Wednesday. The hotel's kayaks look a bit ghetto, so we opt for their also-ghetto but less-likely-to-drown-us bikes. We bike the 7 miles to Placencia, which takes a couple of hours due to the terrible condition of the road and the blistering heat. Along the way, we stop by the dreary, untouristy Garifuna town of Seine Bight, where we follow an ad for Lola's Art. Emma buys a mask, we both buy beverages. We look both ways for airplanes and then bike across the airport. Placencia! Emma calls it surprisingly ramshackle, this sounds about right. It's a small town with one road and one "street" that is literally a sidewalk. We find a Barefoot Beach Bar and drink away the afternoon in the shade with our books. We make it back fairly quickly, checking out some restaurants on the way. We opt for dinner at the Green Parrot, which suspiciously and generically resembles their lunch. We try "premium" Belikin beer, which is less than a dollar more and tastes marginally better. Time for bed again - tomorrow will be a long day.

Belize, Part I: In which the jungle generously decides not to kill us

2008-02-10T06:47:00.000-08:00

Day 1, Saturday. Belize City's airport is small and squat and it takes two minutes to get through customs. The tropical/post-colonial architecture and typography is reminiscent of India. Our cab driver is excited because the election is on Thursday and they're hoping to replace the PUP, believed to be corrupt and selling out the country's assets, with the UDP. (Sadly, there are no engineers around to make UDP jokes to.) We quickly learn that Belizean English is highly accented, and is even written with Caribbean slang. Also, the Belizean dollar is pegged at half a US dollar, but prices are sometimes listed in US dollars, requiring a double take when looking at any price.

The best way to get to Ian Anderson's Caves Branch is via bus. Bus schedules are under-codified, but the right bus eventually shows up. It's a former US school bus, but painted orange. The bus ride is a good time to learn new facts about Belize from our dear friend Mr. Lonely Planet: the entire country has 300,000 people, for example. Also, in the old days, some pirates got tired of stealing wood and become loggers in Belize instead, and some ants told the Mayans to stop their successful rebellion in Central America. We drive past farms and small towns and lush jungles on the main highway - two lanes.

Caves Branch greets us with a welcome drink of rum punch. Welcome drinks are fucking genius and every hotel should have them. Walking from the road to the resort, Emma notices a snake, which we photograph and walk past. On Day 3, we will discover that this is a fer-de-lance and getting bitten would have killed us immediately. Our room at Caves Branch has no windows, just mosquito netting, and no electric light, just beautiful-if-easily-damanged oil lamps. It's made of gorgeous dark wood, has a real thatch roof, and the towels are folded into elephant shapes and are bearing flowers. At dinner, we make friends with some fun guys from Amazon, who tip us off to the idea of making cookie dough without the eggs for safe-dough-eating, among other things. We first encounter Belikin, the national beer.

Day 2, Sunday. We're signed up for the Black Hole Drop, which is a long hike up in the jungle, rappelling down into a canyon left by the collapse of a ginormous limestone cave, hiking around the caves, looking at some petroglyphs, and then hiking back out. We see a range of palm trees, plus two hazardous trees that grow conveniently next to their antidotes. The weather is great and there are surprisingly few bugs. Lunch is thick tortillas with fresh vegetables and cheese. Delicious. Our guide's grandparents are founders of the neighboring town that is now trying without success to institute a tax on its residents. The other person on our trip is a nice young woman from Montreal named Manon. Emma tries to eat an orange from the orange fields while we wait to go home but can't get through the tough skin. We take our first outdoor showers. There is enough time for a nap before chips and drinks at 6. The schedule they've set up is great, and the all-inclusive package means stress-free drinking. This is my first Times-inspired vacation, and it's yuppily wonderful.

Day 3, Monday. Today's activity is cave tubing. We stand on a flatbed pulled by a tractor, which fords 3 rivers in the course of our journey. It's like living the Oregon Trail. Cave tubing turns out not to be the leisurely activity we imagined, and our arms are tired of paddling our innertubes around the same time the novelty wears off. The caves have the occasional bats and verdant windows into the outside world, but are mostly pretty homogeneous. I fall out of my tube in some wussy rapids. We drop by the local cenote, the Blue Hole, and then it's time for last of free drinking before we head for the beach in the morning. The mango and rum drink is tasty. Ian Anderson tells us about all the scary animals on the premises, including aforementioned deadly snake. The guys from Amazon tell us that a transit system in Seattle was briefly called SLUT.

Coming soon: part 2, and pictures.

Acrophobe!

2008-01-03T16:05:00.000-08:00

Everyone needs a coding project over winter vacation, right? Mine started out as a Facebook game called Sentences, where you'd get a random set of words, try to make a sentence out of them, and then vote for your favorite of the ones you friends wrote. I spent a bunch of time collecting word frequency lists and trying to pick words with different frequencies, but in the end the game actually didn't seem like it would be fun. You can try playing against your self here. Anyway, I got talked into writing a simple Acrophobia clone, which actually let me reuse a lot of the code. It still took longer than I'd expected, mostly because PHP is a terrible, terrible language - a lot of weird silent failures, odd object-copying semantics, etc. Anyway, Acrophobe's done! It hasn't been played that many times, so you may encounter some bugs. There's also a notebook with notes from my wanderings, including various word and letter frequency lists. (It was actually hard to find a numeric list of initial letter frequency, so the numbers I'm using for Acrophobe are sort of inferred from the few sources I found.) The app is even hosted by Joyent's free hosting, which was relatively easy to set up and probably more reliable than the server for this blog is. ;-)

Beerownies

2007-12-04T02:22:00.000-08:00

Last night, Emma lured me to Brooklyn with a promise of beer and brownies. While waiting for the extremely delayed train to Brooklyn (do the Brooklyn trains ever run smoothly?), I suggested we combine them into beerownies. I then repeated this over and over, as I am wont to do. Anyway, there are no Google results for beerownies! How sad is that? But there is a recipe for Triple Chocolate Stout Brownies provided selflessly by the National Beer Wholesalers Association. Please make some and bring them to me. I will call them "beerownies" and then titter endlessly. Much fun will be had.

Orange crush

2007-11-23T08:55:00.000-08:00

The other day at work I was trying to come up with a clever name for my new workstation, and with the help of Ak and David, we decided it would be orangecrush (easier to spell than electrolite, less like an SNL actor than fallonme). But one of my worries was that Orange Crush was kind of a depressing song, although I wasn't quite sure what it was about. Some Googling found that wikipedia, songmeanings, and songfacts all had some interesting tidbits from interviews and concerts (interspersed with the usual population of clueless illiterates). I decided to make a handy dandy Custom Search Engine for the next time I need to do such a search. Try it out, it seems to work better than my other CSE attempts.

Colors and figures

2007-11-20T16:27:00.000-08:00

(Emma's favorite was Cut)

I finally made it to the Whitney after two years of thinking I'd really like to go, now that there are two artists on exhibit I'd read about, Lawrence Weiner and Kara Walker. Both were as fascinating as I'd hoped. (I also liked the room in the regular collection that featured paintings of modern anxiety.) The profile of Kara Walker in the New Yorker was really interesting to me, since it mentioned how she had started out not thinking much about her race and then sort of grew into it. (Foolishly, I thew out the magazine assuming it would be online, and it's not. You can get a little bit of a sense of it in this interview and in the Times.)

It's not quite the same, but I find it sort of strange that this is the first time in my life I've had Indian friends or really referred to my ethnicity in everyday conversation (notably the ongoing battle with Neil, Ak, Vijay, and Rohit for most brown). I used to be annoyed I wasn't like everyone else, and just did my best to pretend I was, although somehow I was also annoyed if there were other Indians present, because then I wasn't special anymore. Maybe I'm just easily annoyed.

Not wanting to be thought of as Indian feels a bit like my friend's (can I say who you are, friend?) discomfort anytime someone discusses an Asian fetish. She's Asian, and I can sort of see why this sort of conversation might be troubling - it's sort of depersonalizing. I'd like to think that anyone attracted to me didn't just have an Indian fetish, but is that really so different than liking curly hair or a slim figure? (And shouldn't I just be glad someone's attracted to me at all?) I feel like in most cases these "fetishes" aren't really these mindless impersonal things, right?

Anyway, just wanted to put that out there. Say something interesting in the comments.

(Also, I wouldn't be really male without quickly switching the topic from emotions to technology, so... the Walker exhibit had some bits and pieces she'd typed on index cards. I really love the typewriter aesthetic, and the other week we were noticing how well magnetbox did (lcd soundsystem also has a good analog/kitsch vibe, though not so typewritery). After the exhibit, I started playing with trying to make Courier work harder programatically, rather than using fonts or Photoshop, but the best I could do in the moments I stole yesterday looks super-hokey and only works in Firefox. :( )

New Notebook Version!

2007-11-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to share my relief at getting a new version of Notebook out the door. It includes the ability to tag and sort notes and integrates with Google Bookmarks, features that people have been wanting since we launched a year and a half ago! It also includes (thanks to David's 20% time and Akshay's whining) the ability to export your Notebook maps into Map Shop. For example, I exported the final route of the Exponential Decay Bar Crawl.

Breathless summary of recent events of or relating to Southern California and marriage

2007-10-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

I promised Annie a shout-out in honor of her getting married, so (belatedly), Hi Annie! Congrats! She was quite the radiant bride, and the wedding had numerous highlights, including but not limited to

the bartender giving me a bottle of Curvoisier to take back to my table
Annie's brother-in-law explaining how getting married was choosing a life of "ennobling pain"
this Newlywed Game-ish quiz about who does what in their relationship

Wes also did a great job showing me around LA - we went to the Dali exhibit (that man was obsessed with ants), had tasty Italian food, shopped for a couch, went to Trader Joe's for panini ingredients, ate at a pancake place that his friend saw Turk from Scrubs at twice, and went to a tea bar showing football games with scantily-clad waitresses. I guess I should actually thank Yelp, which is where Wes's roommate-to-be found most of these places.

While I was in SoCal, I also got to catch up with Jen, Robin, Vince, Albert, Yaz, Jenn, Judy, Kathy, Richard, and Charles. So many people! Other than the fact that everybody's getting engaged (congrats Yaz and Robin!) or in relationships, the most important thing is that we need to convince Vince to recapture his dream to start a business.

I also spent a lot of time in traffic. How do people put up with that?

Speaking of Southern California - my family was evacuated but is now back home. Thanks to everyone who was checking in - I felt very loved!

Cleaning up is hard to do

2007-09-30T10:35:00.000-07:00

One of the few things I routinely use my kitchen for is to make popcorn, which is very tasty, but always leaves a frustratingly hard-to-clean oily pot behind. This weekend, Googling in anger, I discovered that I should be using a Dobie pad. Skeptical of the ridiculous name but desperate, I bought one, and it worked miracles! Dobie pad, I love you! The Dobie pad has joined the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and Scrubbing Bubbles in my pantheon of life-altering cleaning products.

Tips for Manhattanites venturing into Brooklyn

2007-09-23T16:55:00.000-07:00

After countless forays into our hipper, less convenient neighbor to the East (mostly to meet up with girls - why do all girls live in Brooklyn? discuss), including one just this Saturday, I feel like I should share the various valuable lessons I have learned:

Bring an umbrella. Especially if Dolapo is coming. Nine out of ten times, if Dolapo is present in Brooklyn, it will be raining. I do not know why this is. Maybe Dolapo secretly controls the weather and does this to give him ammo against future invitations to Brooklyn. Maybe Brooklyn hates Dolapo. The jury is still out, so your umbrella should be, too.
Bring numbers of car services. Dolapo-inspired rain can humble even the most golfish of umbrellas. For example, an awesome Philip Glass/Dracula/Kronos Quartet was cancelled halfway through because the lightning might possibly kill us. If this happened in Manhattan, we would hail a cab and head for safety. This is not an option in Brooklyn, where there is significant religious opposition to cabs. Instead, it's important to bring the numbers of some "car services" which you can call for a ride out.
On a related note, bring a map. Most of Brooklyn is not near a subway and these are often places you want to go, such as the Red Hook ball fields (remember NOT to bring Dolapo!). And the parts that are on the subway turn out not to be near one another. If, for example, you are going from Park Slope to Williamsburg, it's pretty much a toss up between walking, a horse and buggy, and the G train. If you are going from my apartment to Prospect Heights or Fort Greene, it will take at least two transfers, and probably the train will be skipping exactly the stop you intend to get off at.
Be sure to tell people serving you food and/or beverages that you are from Manhattan. For example, the man serving us mojitos on Saturday (in lieu of our ballfields visit, *cough* Dolapo *cough*), was very entertained to hear that we were from Manhattan, and promised to do his best to rival those on our island. Although the drinks were cheap, they also tasted heavily of sour mix.

Don't get me wrong. Brooklyn is awesome. There's tasty food. And a park. And large apartments. Just come prepared.

Oo, my 10-year high school reunion is coming

2007-09-09T04:26:00.000-07:00

I was catching up on my blog reading, and it was a good thing, too, because Annie had a link to the web page for our reunion. And now I'm passing it on!

I sold my soul to Apple and all I got was a wasted evening

2007-08-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

[ pretend there were some prefatory remarks about not blogging in a while because so many exciting things have happened, too many to enumerate at this late juncture here ]

This Saturday, I lost my phone in a cab (yes, the second time this year, but only the second time in my whole life (not counting some close calls)) just as I was lusting after everybody's iPhones, which was quite convenient, some might say suspiciously so. So Sunday, I finally went to the Apple Store and decided, hell, while I was there, why not get the Mini I've wanted forever as a media PC (if only it could play Netflix movies without buying Parallels!). Being a good OCD shopper, I had already looked up the various options for connecting the Mini to my TV, which suck, since Apple has decided the Mini, because it is useful, should be harder to connect to your TV that the Apple TV, which is neither useful nor more expensive. I believe this is what they call "market segmentation," in so far as I, the market, want to segment my eyeballs in frustration.

So, here I am, it's Monday night. I was up late last night with a tool called DisplayConfigX, which is about user-friendly as its name might suggest, eventually gave up, came home, and tried again for a few hours. There are all sorts of random settings for various TVs posted on the Interwebs, but not the ones for mine. Although my TV claims it can do 1024 x 720, when I feed it that resolution, the image is most definitely cropped on the top and the bottom, and that's even after fiddling with the "front porch" and "back porch" of the signal to get it to center correctly. Did you know video signals had porches? It's fascinating. I'm imagining my desktop drinking mint juleps between frames. Or not.

Right, so, it's Monday night and instead of doing anything remotely useful, I have labored extensively and am now the proud owner of a screen that has a 1 inch black stripe on the right side and is cropped on the top and bottom and another that is center horizontally and vertically but still cropped and ostensibly the wrong resolution. Two great choices.

But I am listening to my mp3s over an optical connection to my receiver, which is hott. And I do love love love my iPhone. Anyway, if anybody has any leads on getting this perfect on my TH-37PHD8UK, I'm all ears.

Update 11/23: I managed to at least make all the pixels show up and not look funny and fill most of the screen at the totally random resolution of 1048 x 700. The settings are Horizontal (16 front, 112 sync, 216 back) and Vertical (40 front, 3 sync, 21 back).

Liveblogging jury duty

2007-07-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

The rumors are true, there is Wi-fi in the waiting room! But, for reasons that have not really been explained even during the handy video introduction from some of your favorite national news personalities (including graphic depictions of the trial-by-ordeal that we should be grateful for supplanting with this "jury" thing, a reminder that some day when we're on trial the awesome jury we get will justify all the waiting around, and the specious assertion that jurying is more important than voting), the demand for jurors is incredibly unpredictable. Anyway, we arrived at 8:45, the first people left at 10 something, and around 11:15 they dismissed us from a 3 hour lunch. Now, an hour later, 1 batch of folks has left and the rest of us are sitting around. A girl in front of me has read 150 pages of In Cold Blood so far. Highlight of the day: bubble tea. Yum.

Math makes intoxication classy

2007-07-08T16:10:00.000-07:00

Saturday was the long-awaited exponential decay bar crawl. Thanks to a handy-dandy planning notebook, some fuzzy math, and Rohit's task-mastering, things went very well, whiny-trooper-friends-without-any-girls-to-enamor-them-between-64-and-8 notwithstanding. We went to Baker Street @63 (cute bartender), Blockheads @34 (cheap frozen margs), Petite Abeille @20 (very alcoholic Belgian -beer), Bua @8 (espresso martini!), Stillwater @4 (outdoor seating!), dba @2 (mollie bought me framboise!), one and one (dancing! late arrivals! more booze!), and double happiness (more dancing!). All in all, about as ridiculous as you might expect. Luckily, the hangover was not so bad.

My new running secret

2007-06-24T07:15:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I discovered that it's possible to cut across Manhattan pretty quickly on Houston, and this pretty much changed my life. Anywhere north or south of Houston is pretty crappy due to a combination of lights and pedestrians - best I've done is Tribeca, but there's a lot of annoying twists and turns involved in that. Today, Ak tagged along on my second 10 miler in the past few weeks, and he was annoyingly in shape considering he doesn't run that much, but fun was had.

I'm also getting a lot of, ahem, mileage out of my new Fuel Belt, which keeps me from buying lots of overpriced and heavy Gatorades en route. It took some getting used to and weighs me down a bit, but it was totally worth it. I'm going to try tracking my runs on Sanoodi, although it's a little annoying because I can't list a date without also listing a time, and I never precisely time anything.

Whence Union Square?

2007-06-10T15:32:00.000-07:00

Susannah and I were debating what Union Squares around the US were named for. My vote was railroads, hers was labor unions rallying. We're both wrong.

10 things I learned at my 5-year reunion

2007-06-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

1. People don't change much in 5 years
2. Except that all the girls are engaged
3. And everybody is now a lawyer, doctor, or grad student
4. Guys age less attractively than girls
5. Yale runs a stingy open bar
6. The ghetto mall has been turned into upscale apartments with this surreal indoor courtyard thingy
7. When Yale says they are going to serve you $50 tofu ravioli with a side of quinoa, they may decide to omit the ravioli
8. Large groups of people you haven't seen in 5 years are intimidating but fun
9. Skipping out on getting a room and trying to take the 4:40 am train (last train at 11 pm = wtf) is possible, but unpleasant
10. Bars in New Haven are cheap, but close too early

Personal space

2007-06-07T04:27:00.000-07:00

Apropos of almost nothing*, I was thinking about how it is that although my first first kiss definitely occurred when I was sober, pretty much every other first kiss since then has not. The idea that I could ever brashly invade someone's personal space like that without some sort of lubrication seems pretty absurd.** Who knew that girls would actually get more intimidating as I got older?

*I could try to argue the fact that the rental company's smallest car on Monday was a Ford Mustang is a symptom of some deep-seated American need for a maximal radius of inviolability, but I'm not going to play that card.

**The exception to this is of course the oh-right-you're-one-of-those-girls-who-hugs-goodbye goodbye hugs. These are simultaneously awkward and pleasant, but still less awkward than the goodbye handshake with another guy, especially a good friend (When did our personal friendships start to so closely resemble business acquaintanceships? "Thanks for hanging out"? Foolishness.) that turns into a half-handshake half-hug with manly back-patting after a confusing are-we-going-shake-hands-or-hug-i-mean-we're-really-good-friends-we-should-probably-hug-right(?) moment.

Things

2007-05-23T17:46:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last post, so, for narrative simplicity, I have done some soul-searching and grouped recent events into 3 handy categories: things that make me unaccountably sad, things that make me happy, and things about which I am ambivalent.

Things that make me unaccountably sad:

Truffle oil isn't really infused with truffles
Online dating. I spent some time trying to fill out a profile on Ok/Cupid before deciding being lonely was probably easier than fabricating and documenting ways in which I'm unique and exciting.
Freya. Will I ever beat Guitar Hero on expert? Not at this rate.

Things that make me happy:

SpamKarma. Saved my life, where by life I mean, you know, blog
New music. Car Wash for Peace. Wax Tailor. Heartbreak World Silversun Pickups. Cloud Cult. Peter Bjorn and John.
The Burg
Parties themed around food wrapped in dough
7th Inning Stretch in Milwaukee
Man Diego
San Francisco in the daytime. Significantly reduced sense that one will be attacked and killed.
Mojitos, as always.
Grilled cheese at Tiny's. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Things about which I am ambivalent:

Frost/Nixon. I'm glad Zan convinced me to see it, and it was very well staged and provocative and well-acted, but it's somehow annoying that facts were manipulated for dramatic effect (real video, real transcripts)
Autograph Man. Entertaining, but a little disjointed and not as good as White Teeth.
Orthotics. With new shoes, they're better, but not perfect. Am I doomed? Discuss.
Zombie Movies. Somehow Dolapo dragged me to see both Grindhouse and 28 Weeks Later (even though I was much more excited to see Kirsten Dun...Spiderman 3). They were fun and all, but especially Planet Terror (the first part of Grindhouse - the second part is an awesome Quentin Tarantino flick that inspired me to rent Reservoir Dogs) had me cringing the whole time and left me wondering what sort of terrible thing was around the corner in everything I encountered from then on. Damn you, Dolapo, damn you.

Free as in association

2007-04-15T04:26:00.000-07:00

So, I lost my voice on Friday, which is one of those things that always sounds fun in that girls-will-find-me-pathetic-andor-sexy-and-swoon-before-me kind of way. And it was sort of entertaining for the first few hours, but on day 3 it's just getting to plain annoying. It especially sucks because I'm going to be out of town a bunch soon and was going to meet up with people I haven't seen in a while, but since meeting up with such people involves obligatory catching-up conversations, we decided that it was best to not meet at all. Which is weird, and yet somehow sensible.

In any case, canceling those plans and my need for warm beverages and entertainment did free me up to explore my neighborhood a bit more. I'm really starting to enjoy it now that I have a favorite coffee shop (Full City, which always has good music and where I randomly ran into someone from work yesterday). I tried out the exotic indie donut shop I always walk past but for some reason decided to play it safe and get a cinnamon bun. I also tried out this new Flicker's Coffee Shop, which didn't have seating, making me skeptical about their prospects. I also went to the library across the street, where I picked up Autograph Man and Human Stain*, but not Interpreter of Maladies. I was very excited that they had a reasonable selection of books in English despite its Chinatownness. At this point, I'm just concerned my rent will go up a bunch and I'll have to leave. Word is that Spike Jonze is moving into a building down the street and there's some organic wine bar opening up near by. Hello gentrification!

Later in the evening, after dinner at Mercadito (awesome drinks and guac, okay taco things), we tried out High Chai, which looked neat when I walked past it. As it turned out, the service was not great and the tea was frustratingly lukewarm, although at least there were live music and tasty scones. I guess trying out new places is a classic high-risk/high-reward activity.

Speaking of high-risk, high-reward, I think this quote from the author of Black Swans in Wired was right on: "All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options. It's like venture capital: Most of the money you make is from things you weren't looking for. But you can find them only if you search."

--

*About some guy's life being ruined by a misinterpreted racial slur - surprisingly contemporary given the whole Imus thing.

...a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony....I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping form one end of the White House to the other and bearing a legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.

Are you kidding me?

2007-04-12T03:14:00.000-07:00

I think I'm in the wrong line of work for my height.

...in a study of more than 20,000 online daters...They found that a 5-foot-8 man was just as successful in getting dates as a 6-footer if he made more money — precisely $146,000 a year more. For a 5-foot-2 man, the number was $277,000.

Also (and be sure to read comment 84)

on average, a woman got a “yes” from about half the men she met (meaning that the guy would like to go out with her). But a man, on average, got the thumbs-up from only a third of the women

and

the more attractive women set a higher bar for their partners than less attractive women did. But the German men set about the same bar for their partners no matter what they looked like themselves or how successful they were professionally

Google Notebook is all grown up!

2007-03-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

After a long slog, our sexy new version of Google Notebook is out. There are still bugs and things missing, but I think this version is a lot more fun than the old one. To celebrate (and hunt for bugs - I found 3 scary ones Sunday morning (you really wouldn't believe the mind-blowing Javascript convolutions involved in this bad boy)), I made a notebook about the bars in New York with dancing (I snuck away from my computer last Saturday night to go to Double Happiness). It demonstrates my pet feature, which I've been wanting to do pretty much since Notebook launched: you can view it on a map. I think this would be especially hot for apartment hunting and such. It's also good for my New York to Try notebook. Anyway, enjoy the new Notebook. Tell your friends. I look forward to interacting with human beings, laundry machines, and restaurants on the weekend again. ;-)

Yay plays

2007-03-13T16:37:00.000-07:00

I saw 2 plays in the past 5 days, which is a record for me, both very last minute, which is definitely my style. The first wasn't actually a play, but a bunch of one-acts, some featuring sraub's friend. My favorite part was a chorus of four girls who opened the show and reappeared during set changes. They sang a series of "lullabies" about a guy they dated who died named Jamal. They were pretty haunting and subtle. The rest of the plays had some good performances and clever premises, but except for one about two couples and one about a reading group, were a little overeager.

Anyway, tonight I saw Coast of Utopia when Ardan had an extra ticket. I'd been wanting to see it after sraub and Andrew recommended it, but I'm sure I'd never have gotten my act together on my own. It's about these Russian poets and philosophers in the 1830s, and it's a sometimes-earnest, sometimes-irreverent blend of love, philosophy, politics, and art. The acting was amazing - especially Billy Crudup who plays this sort of insane little guy (Ethan Hawke played a really unlovable character) - and the set blew my mind. So now we have to go back and see parts 2 and 3. Weirdly, the play is directed by Jack O'Brien, who directed basically everything in San Diego when I was a kid.

It's been a busy few weeks at work. I feel guilty enough about taking time out to go to these plays - I definitely shouldn't be blogging much. ;-) (Although, while I'm here, can we discuss how ridiculously slow it is to move money between bank accounts? It would be easier to get cash and ship it UPS. Some industries just don't quite seem to be in the digital age.)

Wine after Wine Index

2007-03-04T09:27:00.000-08:00

(For those of you not in the know, Wine after Wine was my dubiously-conceived high-school/wine-party mashup. You can judge the results for yourself.)

Bottles of wine consumed: 18.25 (2 malbecs, 2 cabernets, 2 rieslings, 2 shirazes, 1 sangioevese, 1 moscato d'asti, 1 merlot, 1 pinot noir, 1 haute-medoc, 1 montepulciano, 3 random spanish/portugese reds, 1 random spanish white, part of a bottle of port)

Corkscrews mangled: 2
Corks mangled: 3
Corkscrews purchased mid-party: 1

Fraction of Kushal's party playlist deemed inappropriate for parties: 1/4
Cyndi Lauper songs on said playlist: 2

Ratio at which table salt should be substituted for kosher salt: .5
Approximate number of masa tots made with a substitution ratio of 1: 60
Number consumed: 20

Avocados consumed in guac form: 3

Discussions about whether Tom is grabbing Lisa's breast in their save-the-date manget: 3

High school yearbooks analyzed: 1

Viewings of Can't Hardly Wait: 1

Failed attempts by Larry to put his name tag on his wine: 3

New life goal

2007-03-01T16:32:00.000-08:00

Pass the Wikipedia notability standards. This one should keep me busy for a while. ;-)

Oo, another musical

2007-02-26T16:46:00.000-08:00

Making up for lost time, I went to see Company on Sunday (thanks for the invite, sraub!). The music wasn't as rockin' as Spring Awakening, but the book was really interesting, very incisively conveying all the ambivalence about marriage and adulthood that may or may not have led me to make terrible mistakes in my life decisions. ;-) Lots of funny, memorable characters, trippy set, and the whole thing where the singers are also the orchestra is pretty awesome. Great gem of irony from Wikipedia: "Shortly after opening night, Jones withdrew from the show, allegedly due to illness, but actually due to stress he was suffering from ongoing divorce proceedings."

Totally Fucked...

2007-02-15T15:42:00.000-08:00

...is my favorite song from Spring Awakening, which I saw with Mollie after she agreed to see it for a second time. We got tickets on the stage, which seemed magically cheap at $31.25 (plus the usual usurious fees) until we got there and realized that it's hard to hear the vocals when the speakers are pointed away from you and you're next to the band and that faux schoolroom chairs are incredibly uncomfortable. But pretty much everything else about the performance was awesome - great songs, cast (including Miles Papazian from 24), lighting, and it was pretty surreal having the action happen all around you.

I always feel better when I take advantage of living in New York. ;-)

Overheard in Taboo

2007-02-11T12:41:00.000-08:00

Craig: Shift-6 on a keyboard. Shift 6!
Crowd: Percent? Dollar?
Craig: You can eat it.
Michael: Hash?
Akshay: Colon?

In other news from the Google ski trip, I can almost kinda sorta turn now.

In which TV saves the day

2007-01-30T03:06:00.000-08:00

I watched a lot of TV on the 6 hour (plus 1/2 an hour at JFK - can someone explain to me again why the planes can't just be scheduled to board at a time closer to their actual takeoff?) flight last night, and a lot of it was good. Besides the obvious Daily Show (although Bill Gates got to use all the same canned stuff he used on the Today show - is Jon Stewart that much of a shill?) and Colbert and My Super Sweet 16 and 24, there was also Engineering an Empire (which I can't link to directly because apparently the history channel doesn't understand this whole hyperlink/Internet thing). Engineering an Empire is history the way I'd like to learn it, with the occasional mention of wars and politicians as background to various feats of engineering. ;-) Dimitri Martin. Person. also rocked. Yay JetBlue!

Kicking the ITunes habit

2007-01-25T06:02:00.000-08:00

After an awesome, awesome Essex Green (even better than I hoped, and when I bought a shirt, the band itself was manning the merch table) / Camera Obscura (surprisingly good) concert at the Warsaw (high-school-gym-ish, a little out of the way) last night, I was compelled to buy another EG album, and the "Underachievers Please Try Harder" album from Camera Obscura, which has the haunting track "Books Written For Girls" (well, it was haunting in concert, less hot on the album). As I was about to spend $20 at Itunes for DRM-ed music, I remembered Akshay's insistence that almost everything anyone could want was available on Emusic, so I investigated. Stupidly, Emusic.com shoves you into signing up without seeing what tracks are available, but some Googling helped verify that the CDs I wanted were available. So, I'm now paying less money for music that (gasp) can be copied and shared. I feel liberated. So take that, iTunes. I wonder if Apple will ever be less compulsive about restricting my rights? Maybe they'll be forced to legally? Certainly locking down the iPhone is a step in the wrong direction.

Tasty tapas

2007-01-09T15:03:00.000-08:00

Dinner tonight at Boqueria was a reminder of how bad I am at predicting what will be best from a menu. The thing I expected to be deliciousest (because, in Spain, it was) - Pa Amb Tomaquet - was the most bland. And the most boring sounding - Patatas Bravas and Pimientos de Padron - were really tasty. Yay tapas, for letting me try lots of stuff. The desserts were uniformly awesome, and we had a good Priorat wine. For a tapas place in New York, it was reasonably priced and the wait wasn't bad.

Added to the good restaurant notebook.

Poll: What's your most-listened song in iTunes?

2007-01-09T07:26:00.000-08:00

In honor of international iPhone day, what song has the highest play count in your iTunes? Mine is Don't Know Why by Essex Green with 116. This is surprisingly low given how much I play single songs on loop. Anyway, not coincidentally, I have an extra ticket to an Essex Green/Camera Obscura concert this month, but nobody wants to go. :-(

Problems. Solutions.

2007-01-07T07:37:00.000-08:00

- When I got my hot new HK receiver and JBL speakers, I was all excited to play music off my laptop. But there was this annoying electric hum. Then, last night, it occurred to me that I could use the attenuator I got to use my Shure headphones on airplanes. Voila! Now I'm listening to all the new music I downloaded for running (Fergalicious, Love Generation, SexyBack, Right Here Right Now) with pounding bass and annoying my neighbors! I think I also need to work on lowering the input level at the receiver itself, but that involves more menu navigation than I have the energy for.

- On Friday, I went to Rosa Mexicano. They don't list anything vegetarian on the menu, and I was worried. But as soon as I said I was vegetarian, the waitress said they could make a vegetable enchilada. This was exactly what I wanted, but WHY DON'T THEY JUST LIST THIS ON THEIR MENU? This always happens with French restaurants. I don't get it. In any case, the atmosphere was awesome, but if I'm going to pay obscene amounts of money for enchiladas, I prefer Dos Caminos.

- Last weekend, I did two 6 mile runs in a row, and what felt like my shoes digging into my foot turned into incredible pain. I broke down and went to a podiatrist, who said it was just inflammation (I guess fractures cause the foot to swell up?). Anyway, some Aleve and ice made it go away, although to keep it away, he's suggesting I get ridiculously-expensive custom orthotics. I guess I'll just break down and do it.

- As long-time readers of this blog will know, I'm on an unending and unpleasant quest to find shirts and jackets that fit me. For some reason, small implies wide (and often also tall). I guess that's what happens when you compress two dimensions into one, and why our beloved capitalist system has failed to move beyond this is totally mystifying. Anyway, Catherine spotted XS sweaters at jcrew.com (not available in stores). Very exciting. They also have XS shirts. Akshay & co recently procured a XS fleece from Uniqlo for me (thanks!). And I was able to find a nearly-fitting sportcoat at Zara. Yay.

- Problem: I was almost done with Guitar Hero. Solution: Richard got me Guitar Hero 2 for Christmas! Problem: I keep playing Guitar Hero instead of going to bed. Solution: Caffeine.

- I couldn't go much longer without mentioning that Catherine and I broke up last month after 3 mostly-awesome years. I guess it would be more accurate to say that I broke up with her. I'm pretty sure that makes me an asshole, and possibly stupid. Haven't found a solution to this one yet.

(On a lighter note, Happy Birthday Brian!)

I'm in the Times Fashion section!

2006-12-30T06:13:00.000-08:00

Well, not exactly, but this is as close as I'll get, I'm sure. There's an article about our office, and in the last picture, there's some loser wearing a red shirt over (Seth Cohen/Craig-at-work -ishly) a long-sleeve green shirt hanging out with all the hip UI designers. Well, that loser is me! (And Chaz, that shirt is the one you made!)

Less frivolous updates soon. Still undoing jetlag.

My other Google baby

2006-12-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

After a very long time, my other project finally has something out the door. To see it, try searches for a restaurant or bar or whatnot that has a homepage. e.g. babbo, and look at the little plusbox under the first result.

(Also, while I'm discussing work, I'm excited that Mondrian is public. It's just one of the snazzy new tools at work that make me wonder how people get anything done anywhere else.)

Bugs fixed in partychat

2006-12-04T17:13:00.000-08:00

We have this chat room tool Akshay wrote that just shows up as a buddy in Google Talk called Partychat. But it's had some bugs for a while. In a fit of boredom Sunday, I fixed them. It was kind of fun to work on an open source project again, even if it was a little-used one powered by Googlers. The hardest part turned out to be getting the Sourceforge CVS to cooperate with Eclipse. For some reason, the initial checkin mapped src/ to C:\users\... and weirdness ensued from there. By deleting the src symlink, creating an actual src directory, and then running a CVS update, I made the weirdness go away, but boy was that obscure. I also had to manually download the library files. For some reason the CVS ones showed up as empty inside of Eclipse. If anyone has seen this before and knows why, we're all ears.

The Official Drink-all-week Week FAQ

2006-12-03T16:56:00.000-08:00

Q. What is drink-all-week week?
A: When Kushal went out on Tuesday (who can resist Klong mojitos and good company?), after going out on Monday (who can resist band name pictionary at Flight 151?), and he knew he would be drinking on Thursday (beer tasting at work!) and Friday (holiday party!), he figured he might as well go out on Wednesday, too.

Q: What's all the fuss about?
A: Kushal was surprised to be informed that he would also have to drink on Saturday and Sunday to complete the week, and that he had to buy the drinks for them to count, voiding his Thursday and Friday plans.

Q: Isn't this stupid, or even borderline alcoholic?
A: It did become clear at point that this was sort of a foolish undertaking, but, as with so many things in life, it seemed like Kushal might as well follow through. At least all of the drinking was social, although the person who was supposed to be present at all the events (we'll call him Lame Brian) did end up flaking on Wednesday.

Q: What happened on the other nights?
A: On Thursday, mosh dragged Kushal to a Vienna Teng concert at Union Hall that ended up being pretty good. (The other acts were also good, but all the updated calendar pages mean there's no easy way to figure out their names now.) Vienna is sort of a calmer/funnier version of Tori Amos or Regina Spektor. Kushal had a wheat beer called Grandpa's Wheat. On Friday, Kushal didn't actually pay for extra drinks, but he tipped a bartender in exchange for water at some random bar, and he was drunk enough on free booze that we're going to cut him some slack. On Saturday, Kushal had mimosas at Essex (and some shockingly good peach beer later). And, on Sunday, he had Monkey Puzzle Pinot Noir with dinner at Temple and some port at a nearby creperie.

Q: When will the next one be? I want to participate!
A: Hopefully not for a long time. Drinking all week is exhausting!

The Paradox of Choice

2006-11-27T15:22:00.000-08:00

I randomly picked The Paradox of Choice out of Catherine's bookshelf (during an awesome Thanksgiving weekend that also featured a hike in the Blue Hills, a hike up Mount Liberty, the very awesome Stranger than Fiction, the surprisingly dark The Prestige, the tasty BV Rutherford and Roederer, and pumpkin curry soup). I had read some articles about the book, but unlike so many of these sorts of books (e.g. The Wisdom of Crowds), it actually had many more ideas to convey than I had seen in the reviews and excerpts. It was really a whirlwind tour of a bunch of interesting psychology results: things like how people remember the peak and end of experiences, how quickly people adapt to changes to their lives, how the enjoyment of something is reduced by the sum of the opportunity costs of other options considered, how the nature and number of options can increase or decrease the tendency to make a decision at all, how marginal enjoyment diminishes and is less than marginal displeasure, how framing matters, how we're averse to losses and risk, how we refuse to part with whatever we already have. Some of these were ideas I'd encountered before, but it was interesting to see them all in one place. It's hard to say how easy it is to change myself in response to the book, though. There are some decisions I just get unreasonably compulsive about.

Can someone PLEASE explain the ambiguously gay British concert hooligans?

2006-11-15T18:09:00.000-08:00

I've been to, like, five concerts this year, and at two of them (Starsailor last month, and the kickass Radiohead-esquely dissonant Modest Mouse concert last night) there were a pair of intoxicated and muscular young British men with several orders of magnitude too much enthusiasm. In both cases, they threw their arms around, groped each other, and pushed each other into the crowd every five seconds. The problem, as you can imagine, is that in a crowded concert venue, bulky Brits blindly falling in every direction are incredibly distracting and scary. Where's security when you need them? This time, they nearly picked a fight with some people before wandering to another part of the venue. Thank goodness.

But the question is - what's up with this weird trend? (Sarah said the same thing happened to her at another concert, and everybody knows three examples make a trend.) Is this standard concert behavior in England? Are gay men in England so repressed they take it out on American concertgoers? Is this some sort of death-by-a-thousand-cuts terrorist plot? Someone please clue me in.

Update: Dolapo says the same thing happened at the Goldfrapp concert, but he's too lazy to post. Also, I forgot to clarify that the thugs at the first concert were not the same as the thugs at the second.

Bill Clinton rocks

2006-11-14T17:20:00.000-08:00

Have you ever read one of those books that sort of seems to contain all of life in it? Bill Clinton's speech to the Slate 60 philanthropy conference is sort of like that. Deep thinking, interesting facts and figures, eloquence, gravity, emotion—everything our current president lacks. One of my favorite parts is where he compares the Kyoto Protocol to jobs or marriages, pointing out that if the requirement for uniting with others were perfection, we wouldn't join anything. I can't find a transcript online - but this is absolutely worth dropping onto your iPod and going for a long walk.

In general, the Slate podcasts are great.

I don't know why population density keeps coming up

2006-11-01T16:56:00.000-08:00

but first there was this fun map of population density from Time (which is much more information dense than the poorly-presented religion graphs, which in turn sent me wondering about how this could be better presented (probably a bar chart would be fine, although sieve diagrams also look interesting?)), and then we were talking about the number of users Notebook has from Japan, which led to the discovery that Japan had 1/3rd the population of the US in what is clearly much less the area. Everyone looked at me like I was a moron at work, I guess I was the last to know. Anyway, I made this little table (Wikipedia has bigger lists.)

	population	area (km^2)	density (per km^2)
japan	127 million	374,000	340
us	300 million	9 million	31
tokyo	12 million	2,000	5,796 (13,000 in the "special wards")
new york	8 million	785	10,000

All of which is to say that I really want to go to Tokyo sometime and see all this density in action (although Wikipedia claims New York's densest area (Manhattan, duh) has 25,000 people per km^2, exceeding Nakano's 20,000). I'm pretty content with my small patch of land in New York (less to clean!), but I'm not sure I'd be happy with something too much smaller.

Speaking of cities, I'm enjoying paging through The Works in random moments. Thanks, peopleatworkwhorecommendedit!

Nice companies

2006-10-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

After my encounter with Orbitz, it's been refreshing to have companies care at least a bit more when something bad happens. Jetblue and Netflix both recently sent me small credits after some amazingly crappy service when I missed a flight and screwing up the order of my Battlestar Galactica DVD's multiple times, respectively. Yay, nice companies!

Luxury buildings

2006-10-15T08:49:00.000-07:00

I have kind of a love-hate relationship with luxury buildings. On the one hand, they're soulless and overpriced, and stand for everything that's wrong with the new face of New York. On the other hand, they're incredibly convenient: doormen to take packages, elevator for bringing things up to your apartment, gym when it's too cold or late to leave the building, no broker wasting your time and then emptying your wallet, no unruly supers taking forever to do repairs, modern appliances.

The one frustrating thing about these buildings is that they're hard to find. A lot of them only list their prices in the paper New York Times. A lot of them want you to call or email for prices, a waste of time for all involved. Nearly identical buildings can vary greatly in price. As part of my apartment hunting, I collected my notes in a Google Notebook. But what I really wanted was a good list of luxury buildings and their prices. Nybits was okay, but slow to go through. Apartment ratings was promising, but had almost no data.

So, I broke down and made something myself, borrowing liberally from my friend and coworker Mihai's overplot mashup. The result is luxurny. It's a little clunky and could use some more coverage, so please send me additions. For now, I'm limiting it to Manhattan luxury buildings.

Wikipedia really does have everything

2006-10-11T17:30:00.000-07:00

I always feel dumb when I don't post for a while and lots of exciting things happen in my life, and my next post is decidedly inconsequential. But, oh well. I was reading Glen's blog (and I finally got to meet Glen on my most recent trip to Mountain View!) and I decided to see if my high school was on Wikipedia. And Voila! It even mentions that our school was featured in "Bring It On," which is probably the most exciting thing about it, other than the fact that it had 3,000ish students the year I graduated, which freaks the hell out of East Coasters.

So Ronrey!

2006-08-30T17:13:00.000-07:00

Last week kicked ass. Catherine and I went to Babbo, which was especially awesome after reading Heat. Calling didn't work to get a reservation, but we had a concierge at work that pulled some sort of magic. I had to-die-for goat cheese tortelloni and tasty parpadelle with chanterelles, plus salad with blood orange dressing, peach grappa, a delicious wine, a sparkling red dessert wine, and saffron panna cotta. Also, we sat next to Paul Giamatti! And he ogled the parpadelle!

The next night, we saw Paul Giamatti in The Illusionist, which was entertaining, although it turns out we had confused the movie with the trailers for the similar-sounding The Prestige. Paul Giammati is evil in it, though.

This week we had to move, since C's off to Harvard Law. My movers were so late the buildings were threatening to not let them use the elevators. Also, I waited in line for half an hour at Time Warner only to find out that the idiot on the phone who told me I could self-install a new account was wrong. Of course, WHY can't I self-install a new account? The building is a in-bed-with-Time-Warner-for-a-small-discount building, so I would hope the connectivity is well-tested, which was the only reason they gave for needing to send a technician. Note also that said technician is soonest available Sept 13 beween 10 and 2. Luckily, my new neighbor has kindly neglected to secure his or her Wifi. Phew!

Now I can shop for a new TV, and with slightly less urgency, a bed. ;-)

Funny conversation about seeing Snakes on a Plane

2006-08-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

--dork jokes alert--

(on Partychat)

[dan] Are we really going Thursday night to SoaP?
["ak"] you object?
[dan] No.
[dan] I'm making plans.
Kushal: i'd prefer to see XML-RPC on the big screen
partychat: ["skateboard_p"] we're definitely in
[dan] Oh Kushal.
[dan] Give it a REST.
Kushal: i wonder if one of the snakes is a CORBA

Murphy's Postal Service

2006-07-26T09:04:00.000-07:00

In the past year, the only things I know to have gotten lost in the mail are a) my tax return and b) a stock certificate, both of which led to annoying fines. Why is the postal service so selectively crappy?

New toys

2006-07-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

After some research, I ended up getting a D807 from Cingular (via letstalk, which unfortunately ported by number 2 days before it arrived but was otherwise great - I realized just before I ordered that Amazon can't port Cingular numbers. WTF). It's so nice to be able to install applications without paying a tax to profiteering control-freaks. I immediately (after some guidance from Dolapo) installed Google Maps and Opera Mini (which show up under "games" on my phone - sigh). And I can get to Reader Mobile and Gmail Mobile! The $10 data+messaging addon from Cingular is a real deal.

Also, Catherine and I dropped by our third-favorite Union Square wine store (after the Warehouse and Trader Joe's of course) in its new location. They have these automated tasting machines where you insert a smart card that lets you get samples of wines. As you buy wines, you get more credits. The staff was rather surly, but we were eventually able to taste a Montsant (next door to Priorat, which we enjoyed in Spain).

PearlJam++

2006-07-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

So Pearl Jam performed an awesome revision of Phil Ochs's song "Here's to the State of Mississippi" on Storytellers, and at the time I couldn't find any copies of it online. But then they performed it at a recent concert, which you can purchase at their handy-dandy bootleg site. The whole concert - 38 tracks, no DRM - is $10. Other bands could really learn a lesson.

Back from Maine

2006-07-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

(Grr, BlogThis in Flickr is cool, but the template is crap!)

I'm back from Maine! We saw moose in Rangeley, went hiking in Amherst, the White Mountains and Acadia (mmm, new hiking boots), and lounged on the great beach in Ogunquit. Remnants of our planning in my notebook (natch). But I'm still dealing with my accumulated work email. :-(

The only thing weirder...

2006-07-17T12:39:00.000-07:00

...than seeing Bert in The New York Times is seeing him there for a joke.

Congrats

2006-07-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

Yay Carl. Now Gelf just needs to win an award. ;-)

This shot is on fire

2006-07-04T16:02:00.000-07:00

It was quite an eventful birthday. ;-) Thanks to Harryh for recommending The Delancey, and Ak for Pangea (pictured here), and everybody who came out to celebrate.

As a present to myself (as decided after the fact), I bought Guitar Hero and a PS2 (from RedOctane and buy.com), both of which arrived in three days with the cheap shipping. Go figure. We've been playing a lot of both. I also bought myself some presents at Banana Republic and a new pair of hiking boots. Buying myself presents is very efficient!

Gah!

2006-06-22T16:21:00.000-07:00

There's another kushal dave on facebook. Scary.

In other news, Notebook was in the Times.

And C. and I went to a wedding in Chattanooga, but the pictures are of Rock City and Georgia's higest point (Brasstown Bald).

Huh?

2006-06-22T15:55:00.000-07:00

Stadium Arcadium is $11.88 at Amazon, which has to ship a CD from a warehouse to me, and $19.90 at Itunes, which has to send me a few bits over a wire. If I buy from Itunes, nobody on the work network can listen to my cool new album. Why don't people buy music legally? Because the music industry is run by greedy idiots. Fuck 'em both, I'm buying it from the Russians for $3.45. Sigh. (I've also found the Russians are a guilt-free place to retrieve albums I've had stolen, and they have a snazzy new Windows client.)

Radiohead rocks

2006-06-15T05:24:00.000-07:00

The Radiohead concert at MSG was incredible. It was actually a much smaller venue than I expected, and we had a great view despite the swaying tall guy, two Blackberry-entranced businessmen, and aggresive pot smokers in front of us. Even the Radiohead songs I like less were great in concert. Much more of an edge. I feel like the same was true when I saw REM in concert. Why aren't there more live albums? Sigh.

In other news, I made a little notebook of my favorite New York restaurants, since so many people keep asking. I'll fill it out with some second tier places when I get more energy.

Spiderman!

2006-06-10T11:51:00.000-07:00

They're filming Spiderman 3 a block from our house. Later, there were people with pointy helmets! Lots of cabs parked on that street, lots of trailers on the surrounding streets. This is way more impressive than when Conviction was filming around here.

Concert ticket dilemma

2006-06-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

I bought Radiohead tickets for June 13th as part of making up my long absence to Catherine (at 2x face value!) and then I found out that the Eels are playing for free that night. :-( But it looks like Craiglist has a semi-vibrant ticket forum, so maybe I'll be able to pull off a trade. One cool thing, though, in Google Calendar, you can search for the New York Free Concerts feed, which includes all the River to River shows.

Google Notebook finally out!

2006-05-15T18:13:00.000-07:00

After a few incredibly-hard, girlfriend-frustrating weeks at work, Google Notebook is out. It has a few more warts than we might like, but it'll be nice to see people using it. Even the early broken versions of it were super-useful to me. Anyway, I'm going to catch up on sleep, but I'm looking forward to having my life back. ;-)

Why is it

2006-04-25T18:13:00.000-07:00

that when you do interesting things, you're too busy to blog about them?

I spent the past few weekends out of town, and, in anticipation of that, did a bunch of fun stuff last month right before I left. We finally had dinner at Po (tasty, especially for the price), got cheese at Murray's (tasty), and went to the Bodies exhibit (much cooler than I thought it would be - diseased organs, vascular systems - although be sure to ask for the free MetroCard discount before you pay). I also had the 3-is-sort-of-like-unlimited-mimosas brunch at Essex (hip) and a *cough* few drinks afterward, and brunch at Cookshop (divine).

Inspired by Po, I found a recipe for wild rice with lemony escarole that was tasty. And tonight I made pasta with brocoli rabe and gorgonzola sauce (inspired by a cookbook my mom got as part of a rampage when she saw one on my Amazon wish list).

As for all the weekend trips, I went to Charles's wedding (beautiful) and talked Richard into buying Guitar Hero. The weekend after, I was in Barcelona (pictures at left), where we went to the market, a cava factory, the Sagrada Familia, a random military museum, and a restaurant with moderinsme on the walls and a great wine pick by Catherine's friend's husband. This past weekend, I went to DC to meet up with my family, where our planned baseball game was rained out, but we still went to Mt. Vernon, the American History Museum, where we spent most of the time on the science stuff, and the Holocaust Museum, which has an intense temporary exhibition about eugenics.

Obviously, it's nice to be back home, but now work's hectic and we have lots of Tribeca Film Festival tickets (resident discount - score!). Maybe June will be calm.

Bit o stuff

2006-03-05T12:34:00.000-08:00

Went gallery-hopping with Jordan Saturday. Saw some interesting stuff, like paintings with nails in them, several paintings of people underwater, sculptures of heads, blurry paintings based on photo collages, digitially-altered photos of taxidermy in nature, foggy New York scenes, comics about going vegan as performance art, rooms with words painted on the walls, photorealistic paintings of cloth wrapping unknown objects.

But the definite star of the show was Fields of Fire, video pieces depicting highly abstracted oil drilling and a 10 minute movie of flowing oil and blood that was amazingly intense. One weird thing is that I couldn't find out much about how the artist (who actually was hanging out at the gallery!) did what she did. The best clue was on this Corcoran page, which explains, "She achieves unusual effects of motion and color by re-photographing her images repeatedly, by transferring them from video to film and back again, and by using digital manipulation." (Also in the how'd-they-do-that category, a good article in Wired about rotoscoping for Scanner Darkly.)

Patois brunch was tasty, although they ran out of french toast, and the mimosas were pleasantly free-flowing until they ran out of champagne (!).

Catherine and I got caught up in the Project Runway marathon. It was actually very entrancing. I'm rooting for Santino, even if he is an ass. This, plus an article about collectives in the Times, plus the gallery-hopping, left me thinking about the production of art. I wonder how much real-world fashion is actually the result of a single creative effort, as opposed to soliciting input from coworkers, bosses, focus groups and such, as with movies, software, and books. It's interesting that industries like fashion seem to do okay despite the absence of a filter/promotion engine like a publishing company. It's not like the winners of Runway have a hope of being something-equivalent-to-an-artist-being-signed-by-a-label. But maybe I just don't know enough about the fashion industry.

Meanwhile, the Times podcasts are a dangerously blood-pressure-raising way of passing the time on the way to work. So much stupidity from the Bush administration, but nothing ever comes of the columnists' whining. Maybe they should lock Bush in a room with a stack of them and not him leave till he recognize how incompetent he is. And then there's David Brooks, insisting that the only things worth knowing happened in Plato (yay infringing copy, columns want to be free!). Is he really this dumb? Also, he suggests that people take statistics. If only he had. Is there really nobody smarter than him to take up that space in the Times? Even Dowd is more interesting.

Conviction is taping around the corner at 10 (that's life living near the courts). Sounds like a fun outing to me.

Silliness

2006-01-31T02:31:00.000-08:00

It turns out the manual activation of the backlight not working with the new Ipod firmware is a known issue. Thanks Apple! That was an upgrade well worth a half hour install and a restart. Uh, not.

In other silliness news, I noticed that Mark Pilgrim's Butler script blocks Google ads. I wonder how often the ad to buy his book on Google has made him money. Come on, Mark, don't you think your script would be sufficiently useful without that?

I fall down less

2006-01-30T07:45:00.000-08:00

The Google ski trip rundown from Dens is better than I could ever manage, especially because I was too lazy to tote my camera around. The parties raged, and the Mike's Way green run at Stratton let me feel all grown up, coming down from the top of the mountain while only occasionally losing my skis.

Better Business Bureau came through!

2006-01-28T05:29:00.000-08:00

While still admitting no fault, at least Orbitz responded when I complained via the BBB.

Dear Mr. Dave:

Better Business Bureau has forwarded your recent complaint to us for review and direct follow up with you. Thank you for your recent comments regarding your experience with Orbitz. On behalf of my colleagues at Orbitz, I sincerely apologize for the dissatisfaction you've expressed, and I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

We know that understanding the expectations of our premium customers is the key to maintaining their loyalty and support. We can understand when we don't that you may doubt our desire and ability to provide you with the quality of service you expect and deserve. Please be assured we are listening and that your comments have not gone unheard.

Although we fully sympathize with your situation, however, at the same time we do not want to come across as being insensitive to your concerns. After a thorough investigation about this matter, our record indicates that your hotel reservation was successfully transmitted to the hotel on January 12, 2006 at 17:29 GMT. Nevertheless, please understand that Hotels just like the airlines do overbook and on occasion will exceed overbooking ratios. This process is solely controlled by the individual hotels and or their representative companies. On occasion we find these hotels are unsuccessful in closing their inventory allowing customers the ability to still book rooms. Although we understand this does not excuse your experience, Orbitz fully holds the hotel responsible. By sharing your concerns we hope the property will take action in better managing their inventory in the future. We thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Furthermore, in the interest of goodwill, Orbitz has made a one time exception and would like to offer you a $200 rebate on your next Orbitz.com booking. This compensation is not intended to place a value on your experience. It is meant to emphasize our commitment to you as a customer and to encourage you to continue using Orbitz for your travel needs....

Note that they have no record of acknowledgement by the hotel. Good thing Orbitz doesn't write networking protocols for a living. Anyway, the lessons here are: Orbitz may be cheap, but you have to double-check their work, and if somebody tries to dick you around, let the BBB know.

Favorite band of the moment

2006-01-25T03:40:00.000-08:00

What Made Milwaukee Famous (via Panda's Hideout 24). Weirdly, not for sale on Amazon, but available on ITunes. If JHymn would get updated, my LAN friends could listen in. :-(

Orbitz, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

2006-01-23T04:34:00.000-08:00

The, uh, nice people at Orbitz wrote back:

When booking with any online service you are acting as your own travel agent. It always a good idea, as well as your responsibility to verify all travel information before going. ... In this situation the hotel states the reservation did not go through even though Orbitz shows the electronic transfer of the reservation as successful. The hotels are responsible for managing their inventories and unfortunately this hotel did not.

Since Orbitz is not prepared to recover the cost of the screw-up from the hotel, what am I paying Orbitz for? A few guesses.

For a terrible web site. One that forgets who am I even though I check "remember me." One that times out sessions after a few minutes. One that is slow. One that doesn't understand simultaneous sessions. One that can't learn when my default airport has changed. One where the price changes every time I try to buy something. In a fraction of the time, Yahoo has already made them look lime amateurs.
For obnoxious customer service. Customer service that tells regular customers that they have to pay $50 change fees. Customer service that tells me I should double-check everything they do because they might screw up and leave me without a hotel at my destination. Customer service that tells me I should double-check everything even though the confirmation tells me not to contact the hotel directly. Customer service that thinks it's okay when they land me in Miami with no hotel and can only find me a dreary room at the same price but minus the excellent location, 4 stars, and ktichen of the original (possibly explaining why it was free at the last minute). Customer service that discourages me from speaking to a manager and tells me I should not expect compensation. Customer service that says I must continue my discussion by email and then cuts off the email thread and says I must continue by phone.
For incurring additional risk. When I book a hotel directly, I can usually cancel without penalty. When I book airfare directly, I usually have 24 hours to cancel. When I book with Orbitz, I'm screwed. With an Orbitz travel package, I pay $50 to cancel the hotel and the airfare is nonrefundable.

At the end of the day, I am forced to use Orbitz because they have their special deal with the airlines that lets me search all of their cheapest airfares. Luckily, you can usually save $5 by booking straight with the airline and even get a few miles in the process. Next time, I'm going to start with Travelocity's supposedly pleasant customer service and work my way down.

Any tips on getting some finanically-meaningful apology out of Orbitz? Anybody have any luck with the Better Business Bureau or something?

SoBe

2006-01-22T13:25:00.000-08:00

Catherine and I are back from South Beach, which was really fun, except for the part where Orbitz somehow didn't book our hotel and then tried to buy us off with a $50 travel voucher (we'll see how that all shakes out) and my bum foot, which made running a bit tough. We sat on the beach and read and played in the waves and ate Cuban food.

The art deco hotels are awesome. What is it about art deco that is so captivating?

NetFlix brought Harold and Kumar to our mailbox. Very entertaining.

more pics »

Grrr

2006-01-18T09:10:00.000-08:00

When I visited Mountain View last week, I decided to stay in San Francisco so I could go out and explore the city. It turns out SF is a dump. Who knew? Especially on the way to my only-thing-left-during-MacWorld hotel, the smell of human feces was overwhelming. The only people on the street were scary, aggressive drug addicts. Also, the last BART leaves SFO before midnight. Silliness! There were good coffee shops in the Mission, at least.

But the worst part about it was that I woke up at 8:11 for a 9 am meeting in Mountain View. The shuttle takes an hour, and the next one was at 8:40. Running to make sure I didn't miss it with a heavy backpack on, I appear to have mangled my foot, which has put a real damper on my running.

Damn you, San Francisco! Whoever says New York is dangerous should try walking anywhere in our sister to the West.

Delta whore, and other stories...

2006-01-04T03:24:00.000-08:00

Is it wrong that I'm really excited about my new "medallion" status on Delta? On my trip home, I was upgraded to First Class for free on my trip home. Being a pliant consumer is rewarding.

Speaking of consuming, C and I signed up for Netflix. If you're a user, add me as your friend. I've also started adding friends on Amazon. That all started when I wanted to send Lisa a link to a book and there was a checkbox to make her my friend. I wonder if having ugly URLs was part of their strategy all along?

Although I worship at the altar of capitalism, I of course remain skeptical about religion. This ceremony I went to at home left me wondering about how Hinduism led to all this caste nonsense. Of course, Wikipedia had the answer. Now the question is, is there any religion that hasn't been used to cause harm to others? Maybe Buddhism? Unitarianism? In any case, I read about these interesting anti-religious children's books in the New Yorker - I think I might check 'em out.

Recent choice podcats:

KEXP 5 - who knew that sound engineers even have ouveres to sample?

AGDFA 21 - if you have to listen to Christmas music, it might as well be alternative and rock

If there's any doubt that podcasts help sell music (wait! didn't we already have this argument with radio?), I bought The Magic Numbers album after hearing them on KEXP Live Performances.

Back in action!

2005-12-30T09:39:00.000-08:00

I am now a WordPress user, after Richard became convinced that CGI was fundamentally unsecurable. We'll see if this lock-down makes the server any happier, but WP is pretty, anyway.

On an unrelated note, I made a map of the long runs I've started doing. Of course, it doesn't do justice to some of the rough hills.

Random stuff

2005-11-21T14:20:00.000-08:00

Simpsons:
Lisa: I hate going to the zoo. I feel so sorry for the animals.
...
Homer: In the wild, they would never experience boredom, obesity, loss of purpose... you know, the American dream.

New Yorker:
"We have to do something about satellite television to keep society free from this horny jerk-off situation."

For those of you using Google Reader, I wrote a Greasemonkey script that lets you open the current item in a new tab.

On the weekend-yuppie-meter, a score of 7

2005-11-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

Friday night, dinner at Nam, which had the typical almost-too-much decor of Tribeca, but suprisingly good vegetables in curry and banana bread with ice cream (but bad soup, according to C).

Saturday, went to dia:Beacon. (Tip: buy the discount package from Metro-North machines using the Getaways button in the upper right corner.) Favorites included On Kawara, Agnes Martin, and Fred Sandback. A very cool space. (Good reviews at from the floor and findarticles.)

Along the way had an interesting discussion with Sarah, who works in publishing, about why Google Print might be evil. She explained that they have to buy the right to song titles to put into textbooks, so who are we to even tangentially repurpose and possibly profit from whole pages of books? Compelling, but this really just suggests that this permission crap has gotten out of hand.

Today, unlimited mimosas and coffee at Basso Est, shoe shopping at Jackrabbit Sports, and plate-hanger-buying at Home Depot.

I also started running with my iPod. Running with shuffle and using the free case it comes with is actually pretty workable. So much music at my fingertips... Still hunting for good podcasts. I did get a scary error message from my iPod about not being able to write to the disk, but some people on the Internet attribute it to problems with USB port, which given the weird messages I get about USB 2.0 seems like a possible issue.

Exegesis is up to 27 links on del.icio.us and few mentions in blogs. A plug on kottke helped a bunch. (Thanks!) By the way, two new hidden features: 1) searching for a word that does not occur (e.g. "fags") will highlight verses linked by any pages that match the word and 2) usng the left and right arrow keys in the search box will jump to next and previous search matches.

Exegesis

2005-11-01T12:31:00.000-08:00

So, my big Bible art project launched today at Turbulence. It's funny, I started out with some ambitious ideas but then I realized the amount of data was large enough (and that animation was a beastly enough thing to code and seems to annoy people anyway), that I had my hands full getting something simple done, even with several months to work on it. I think I was also pretty spoiled using such a fast computer. I had to use it on Linux and hear about the Mac users before realizing I was accidentally doing some needless O(n^2) operations in the GUI thread. I'm hoping they'll let me sneak in some cleanups, at least. I think it's still possible to get interesting stuff out of it, and my beta testers called it "neat" and "cute," so I've got that going for me, which is nice. And at least one unbiased person had nice things to say. Still, it definitely feels clunky and frustrating, depending on what you try to do with it.

I'm sure there's more to tell about the long process to getting here, but I'm a little incoherent after staying up till 2 and then catching the 8 am Jet Blue to Mountain View (although, I must say, Jet Blue is pretty nice - if only they had mp3's like Song! rip, Song. also, budget rental finally has economy cars. yay gas prices)

What a day

2005-10-30T10:47:00.000-08:00

After a fun Halloween at Glo, I decided to shirk my upcoming art project deadline to get a much-needed haircut. I heard these could be gotten cheaply in Chinatown, but I failed to realize that this might involve surrendering my fate to someone who didn't speak English. My new hair is, uh, interesting.

Also, I bought an iPod (after trying out the clunky iriver at best buy). It's very pretty! I'm slowly filling it with music, podcasts, and subway maps. My laptop appears to have a 2.0 controller but 1.1 ports, or else something else is amiss. Now will I start buying music at iTunes? That's the big question.

which news pun is more popular?

2005-10-29T11:31:00.000-07:00

plame game ~34,600 results
quag mier (and then some) ~946 results

What's that song?

2005-10-26T14:28:00.000-07:00

I heart the Internet.

Weatherman trailer
Jarhead trailer
Bravia ad
Shopgirl trailer

Good & Bad

2005-10-20T15:01:00.000-07:00

Good: seeing the Daily Show in person (Jon is short!), indie music podcast, franz ferdinand remixes

Bad: enamel loss, idiotic arguments (try lessig instead), and Nov 1 deadlines

The new ipod still don't have cases to run with, which leaves me free to remain undecided.

Fun wildcard search of the day

2005-10-14T02:33:00.000-07:00

Today's fun search is inspired by Martins' tag fame. Try it out: in the future *.

In other news, I upgraded Moveable Type! I'm slowly working my way back through 20,000+ spam comments, but in the meantime, you'll have to use TypeKey to comment, and no trackbacks.

And I wrote a Greasemonkey script to put Google Reader content in a scrollign div, if that's something you'd find useful.

So much going on

2005-10-07T09:49:00.000-07:00

Another week of recovering from sleep! This time, I came back from Chris's bachelor party in Vegas. Good times were had by all. The pools (wave machine! river!) at Mandalay Bay are amazing. (Yes, there were strippers, but it was very class compared to past experiences. Are they being exploited? C disagrees on this, but especially after reading about them, it seems no less absurd than being a model or actress, or anything else, really. they definitely make good money. Sadly, only a few of them displayed any real athleticism, despite Greenspun's belief after seeing the same art I saw that strippers who can hang upside down were a dime a dozen.)

Unfortunately, on the way there, I missed yet another flight, and had to pay a fee AND hang out at the airport for 5 hours. Delta has this new system where they guarantee you on the flight, but you have to wait till 3 hours before. This meant I had to hang out without food for 2 hours before I could go through security. Lame. JFK is far too annoying to get to, although considering I was late for a bus that left 5 blocks from here to DC, I suspect I might have some lateness issues of my own.

Meanwhile, I'm still deliberating about whether I want a Nano or a hard drive player that's Napster-compatible. This would be easier if I weren't also committing to a music provider. LimeWire still seems more convenient than being locked into ITunes for the rest of my life. But anything has to beat my poor little Audible player. Luckily Song has lots of great mp3s to listen to during the flight.

With the added time waiting for my flight, I managed to finish Super-Cannes. It's a little heavy-handed at points and a little obvious in others, but overall is very entertaining.

Oh, and Catherine and I went to Grocery, where, despite my apprehensions, the vegetable plate entree turned out to be both exotic and tasty, if a bit heavy on beets. Yum!

I'll conclude with a shoutout: Good luck on Grand Challenge, Richard!

Still catching up on sleep

2005-09-23T04:10:00.000-07:00

After doing the Reach the Beach relay last week, I'm still trying to catch up on sleep. It was awesome, though. I ran (according to Walt's spreadhseet magic) 4.6 miles at a 9:03 pace, 7.1 at a 8:26 pace, and 4.2 at a 8:20 pace. Go me. And our team kicked ass overall, running the whole thing in 31 hours (8:51 pace). It was a fun bunch. We stayed at the hotel from the Shining, ate at Friendly's and Cracker Barrel and gas station markets, and listened to disgusting stories from Ki and to Hollaback Girl on repeat. The 7 miles were in near-total darkness, it was very Long Walk-y/transcendental. The ocean at the end was wonderfully cold. This racing thing is fun. ;-)

In other news, the Google Toolbar for Firefox is out of beta. Get it and use AutoLink! Also, the experiment I worked on is out. It's nice to be launching things after a long pause since merchant ratings and advertiser ratings.