Another animal in the street

Stolen from David! ( see earlier post for context )

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Blowing your nose or sneezing in public
   
2. Wearing sandals barefoot without socks
   
3. 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

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

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!

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!

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.