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!