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

(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

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!

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

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

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

(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!

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

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

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

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:

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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

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

[ 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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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?

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!

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

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

(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

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

Oo, another musical

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...

...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

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

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

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

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?

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.

- 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!

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

--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

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

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++

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

(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. :-(