Supersize Me

A few weeks ago, I was eating at a Mexican restaurant with two of my Indian colleagues. I point out their ethnicity because as we ate, one complained about the very large portion of food he was given. Indeed, he split the dish partly with his friend. From my perspective, it wasn't that much food. It was typical of what you get at a restaurant.

Later, I was eating at a "Red Hot and Blue", and again, the sandwiches two of the guys ate (both Indian, one the same as the one at the Mexican place) was too much. I had eaten my meal, and could have eaten more.

I had to imagine that I was simply used to eating twice as much as Indians were, and thinking that was normal. These guys weren't spectacularly thin, but it made me think that what Americans think of as typical amount of food is indeed, excessive, by world standards. And that they struggle with their waistline has to do with restaurants providing too much food.

More Trinity

The quality of this video should be better. Still hard to see the football hitting the ground on the last lateral.

Are Resumes Silly?

When it comes to job hunting, especially in the US, but I'm sure elsewhere as well, the key is writing a good resume.

And, boy, are there opinions on writing resumes. So, here's the deal. A company is looking to hire. They want to make a decision quickly. If there were a way to put a number or several numbers, much like SAT scores, that was reliable, companies would prefer that. The numbers might be, say, personality, ingenuity, diligence. Or something.

Instead, we get resumes. This is a spewing of skills, education, etc., that are meant to showcase a person's skills/talents, except that some people are picky about details that may, in the end, not matter.

Here's some advice that people offer when writing resumes. First, if you're recently graduated, put your GPA, if it's good. This one is at least easy enough, and has some value to some employers. It's the one number that people could begin to make comparisons.

I'll list out other stuff that you're supposed to put for a software developer since that's what's familiar to me. First, there's the laundry list of programming languages. People put a list down. Great. But you self-evaluate, and there's no one to tell you how good you are at programming each of those languages. So, someone who is good may look like someone who is average.

And what does it mean to be good at programming anyway? There's familiarity with the language. A person can know the ins and outs and subtle nuances of a language. That's useful. Presumably, they can learn additional libraries? But sometimes there are problems that require an intimate knowledge of hardware, of AI, of really difficult math. In that case, that deep knowledge of a programming language knowledge may not be worth that much except that if you can master a language's intricacies, you might be the kind of person whose willing to dig deep in arcane stuff.

How about grammar? That's always one people pick on. Bad grammar equals bad employees. This is one of the silly ones people use and the use it because they want something--anything--to weed someone out. They claim "oh, it's easy to find someone who will clean up the grammar of a resume". Well, if that's the case, then it shouldn't be worth so much, right? And yet people nitpick because that's what you're supposed to do on a resume.

How about length? Some people don't want to wade through pages of a resume. I guess that's fair. But is two pages enough?

The one thing about a resume most people like is that they write it themselves. This makes introverts and extroverts somewhat equal. The ideal way to write the resume isn't that ideal. This is to let a few other people write it for you. The problem is that this might favor a person who can bully someone else to write it for them. And if this were truly done, we'd discover that many people really aren't all that qualified for their jobs. Resumes are an attempt to hide that from most everyone else.

In the software development industry, maybe 10% are truly outstanding. Maybe 20% more are pretty good. These numbers I'm completely making up with some hope they resemble the truth. The remaining folks are mediocre. But the industry requires folks, and they do a reasonable enough job.

For example, I play tennis. I play much better than a lot of people because most people simply don't play. But I'm sure I can find lots of people better than me. And even the number 1 player in most high school girl's teams would wallop me, even from teams that suck. And they don't compare to competitive juniors, and they don't compare to pro women ranked 200 and below who don't compare to the women in the top 100 but not in the top 10 who don't compare to women in the top ten.

Meaning that the top ten are so incredibly good, at such a higher plane than everyone in the world, that it's hard to even compare them to a really good junior.

The software industry isn't quite like this, only because there's such a wide range of problems and skills one can learn, and we're not playing a simple game with simple constraints. Even so, there are likely to be either frickin geniuses or coders that crank out code so fast, so prodigiously, so intelligently, that the rest of us would be left in the dust. Some of these find themselves writing code where they can express this talent, and some, I'm sure, just do it for fun, their job requiring little of their extreme talent.

Tennis has a way to measure skill, in the broadest sense. Can you beat someone?

The work world does not have this. And in any case, we're not looking to employ the equivalent of Steffi Graf or Andre Agassi. Most companies are looking for the very good weekend hacker, who knows their stuff well, who plays smart, and wins a bit above average, and for the most part, looks like thousands of other players.

And so the work world resorts to resumes. And they build rules about what makes a resume good. And they tell people that's what they need to do. And they assume this will somehow tell the true story.

Which is why the sad reality, that personal recommendations matter more (since you can get past a person's own distorted evaluation of themselves), even as people dole out more advice on writing a better resume.

Lateral Thinking

Normally, ESPN doesn't give a hoot about Division 3 football. They say the last true amateurs in college sports compete in Division 3. Division 1 is the premier division. All the football, baseball, basketball that you see is Division 1 with rare exception. When kids graduate from high school and want to play in college, they want Division 1.

Division 3 is for the rest of them. Those who lack the talent to play at a higher level, or perhaps some lack of luck. They don't get many fans. A few of them are smart enough to have career doing something else besides sports.

But occasionally, something so unusual happens, that even ESPN takes a few moments to give Division 3 its due.

In this case, it's a 15 lateral sequence. In case you don't know that much about football, you can only throw one forward pass. However, you can throw as many backward passes as you want. A backward pass is called a lateral.

Why throw it backwards when the goal is to throw it forwards? Throwing the ball moves the ball faster than runners can run. But when you throw it backwards, you need to run forward to compensate.

The quality of the video is poor, so there's one part that's hard to see. On the last lateral, the ball hits the ground, and the player lifts it up, and runs into the endzone for a score. Apparently, it's legal.

Oh yeah, the two teams are Trinity and Millsaps. I can't really tell you much more than that.

Zig a Zig Zig

I was at the orthodontist, finally getting my teeth straightened, after a lifetime of not. One of the orthodontists, the senior one, was telling a story of a guy named Zig Ziglar. I had maybe vaguely known about this guy, or at least, heard his unusual name.

Turns out he was a motivational speaker, from 30-40 years back, probably before the term "motivational speaker" was even used. Most people who, when asked, "How are you?" would say "Good". He said they should say "Great!". This would make other people feel good, and it would make them feel better too.

He was the guy who said "Failure is an event, not a person".

What's interesting about him is that his popularity may have shaped the way Americans view themselves, leading to a current need to make things "extreme". Once you're great, well, that becomes ordinary, so you have to be "awesome" until awesome isn't. Superlatives pile upon superlatives, so that when you meet someone who says "I'm fine", you find it's a bit lacking. What's wrong with them that they aren't better than wonderful?

And all thanks to the motivational talk of one Zig Ziglar.

Peanuts and Popcorn

I used to consider baseball one of the most boring sports imaginable. People sat around. The pitchers would throw the ball to first base, to prevent the base stealer from going too far.

I saw two of the games that lead the Red Sox to overcome a 3-1 deficit, and win against the Cleveland Indians leaving Cleveland, once again, to be sorriest sports city in the US, unable to win championships.

But something has made baseball more interesting to watch. First, like any sport, you generally have to care for one team or another. If you don't, then most sports are pointless. I suppose you can still admire it for artistry or skill, but nothing beats the irrational desire to have one team have more points than the other.

Once you get past that, you realize that, as much as anything, baseball is about nothing. If you want your team to win, you hope the pitcher doesn't give up runs. And baseball is tantalizing because of it. Players do, invariably, get on base. And they get even load up the bases. And sometimes, many times, the pitcher gets out of it, and the fans are relieved.

And because pitchers are so dominant, fans can be held breathless, hoping the team will score. An inning will go. Then, another, then another. Often, there are no last minute heroics. But because they are rare, when it happens, fans cheer. They're excited beyond belief.

And, so, for a while, the Red Sox and Indians seemed pretty close, and there was concern in Beantown that the Sox couldn't pull it out. And then, boom, boom, boom, scoring a-plenty, and the Red Sox had a comfortable lead and were heading to the World Series against the improbably Colorado Rockies, winner of 21 of 22 games.

And Cleveland.

Ah yes, Cleveland. Left to head home, and wonder what had happened to their precious 3-1 lead, and how they might face their fans, who, perhaps after all this time, understand that it is the fate of Cleveland teams not to fare as well as their bigger time brothers.

Coverage

Something happened to me recently that's never happened before.

My cell phone (I should really call it mobole) received signal but I couldn't make a call. Why? Because all the other providers in the area like Sprint and Verizon have good coverage, but Tmoobile has zero, zilch, zip.

At worst, I get no signal, often inside buildings and such. Some places are isolated. But never have I had no signal, while everyone else had strong ones.

That's not good when it's midnight and you're trying to find your way to some place and you're lost. Turns out that the US is great for one thing. While many countries shut down at 10 PM so people can get sleep and such, the US has quickie marts that are open late and hotels almost always have a front desk opened around the clock.

Using those two services, I was able to get directions by an upstate NY girl with metal studs in her tongue (but a knowledge of her surroundings), and then got on 46, then to another store near Hamilton (after 30 miles of driving), and asked for directions.

I even managed to wander around Colgate's campus late at night, looking for some place I could make a call, noting students staying up past 1 or 2 AM wandering the campuses, seeking perhaps some post bar entertainment.

I discovered there was a hotel or inn near campus, called Jaime, who told me he just lived around the corner. So it's good even without a functioning phone, that I could still make it here.

I checked to see if Ithaca had coverage and it looks good.

Perhaps I should invest in a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go phone that uses another network, just for fun occasions like this.

Im-pressed

I had never heard of Kuhn Rikon until recently. My garlic press of choice had been the Susi garlic press, recommended by Jeff Smith, who was once seen all over PBS before the ignominious accusation of pedophilia drove him from the air, and then, he passed away. This man who did as much to popularize cooking as anyone, loved his Susi press.

But if he had ever had a chance to try the Kuhn Rikon 2315 Epicurean Garlic Press, I feel certain he would have raved over it. This thing is pricey, no doubt about it. It cost nearly 3 times the Susi, running a price of 40 dollars. But it looks sweet, and it crunches pretty sweet too. And more ingenious than that, it cleans well without the plastic insert device that was clearly the drawback of Susi. You had to keep this blue or red plastic thing that was meant to poke out the garlic skin so you could clean it.

Having said that, the Kuhn is still better pressing peeled garlic. You can press it with the peel still on, but it seems to do a better job if the peel is removed. Furthermore, it feels like it can only hold about one largish garlic clove at a time. But the pressure needed to crunch the garlic seems quite a bit less than the Susi press, and it looks absolutely great, resembling more a carpenter's tool than a kitchen gadget.

If you're willing to put some bucks to something nice, give this a try.

Starbucks As Social Hangout

People criticize Starbucks. They see it as a kind of Walmart, running local coffee houses out of business. Well, maybe not. After all, unlike Walmart, Starbuck's doesn't try to cut prices much. A good coffeehouse sells their stuff in the same price range.

Some don't like Starbuck's overly roasted coffee, which cause some to nickname Starburnts.

And many people think, as coffeehouses go, Starbuck's doesn't engender the kind of homey, albeit arty, atmosphere that most coffeehouses have.

But, oddly enough, despite all that, despite the fact that it's easier to find a Starbucks than a McDonald's, despite the blandness of most Starbucks interiors, there are so many of them, that a few of them are bound to have regulars.

I go to one on Muddy Branch, and some elderly folks like to hang out there. I've been to one in Germantown next door to a Safeway. One night I was there, and there were a bunch of high school Asian kids, seemingly their after some other get-together, getting their lattes or what-have-you.

So somehow, despite Starbucks rather clunky means, there are some Starbucks where people do hangout, sit in the morning, chat some. It does somehow work. It's sad that Starbuck's doesn't try a bit harder to create a warmer atmosphere, but even so, it sorta works.

And the crowd it attracts? It's not the goth crowd or the arty crowd where the likely hanger on has a portfolio or has smoked something or is wearing heavy rimmed glasses or prefers to wear black. It might be the kind of crowd that used to hang out at diners who asked for a cup of joe when that cost 10 cents and tasted like tar.

While I would prefer to spend my money on a local coffeehouse, I can't deny the convenience that is Starbucks. And I sit and observe a few folks that hang out there and marvel that such a commercially crass place like Starbucks, so cookie cutter in its conception, somehow manages to do what coffeehouses are supposed to do, almost i spite of itself, and that is to get people to connect.

In And Outlet

In my blatant paean to commercialism, I ended up asking a friend where I could get a Le Creuset dutch oven. For those who don't know, a dutch oven is typically a cast iron pot (doesn't have to be) that can sit on the stovetop as well as go in the oven.

Did I mention that cast iron is heavy? Think bowling ball.

Cast iron pans come in two varieties. Those meant for shepherds and cowboys and campers on the range that want a heavy pot to do their cooking over the campfire. And those meant for people who want to show off at home.

I fit in the second category. Those who fit in the first can find a pretty good cast iron pot for 40-60 dollars from a company called Lodge. These cast iron pots look the part. They are heavy, rough, rugged and black. Those who fit in the second have one name that is the Rolls Royce of pots: Le Creuset. A mediumish to tiny pot might be 5 quarts and typically goes for a shade under 200 dollars.

A largish pot at 13 quarts costs 350 dollars. When you can get a pot of that size at IKEA for 60 dollars, it makes you wonder why you would shell 6 times that amount for a pot that weighs a ton.

So the claim goes like this. A cast iron pot is so heavy that the pot doesn't really have hot or cold spots. The entire pot radiates at the same heat (once it heats up, that is). And the enamel coating on Le Creuset gives it a shimmering beauty. You don't want to do any cooking that is sticky, like eggs. Instead, it's better for stews and casseroles.

I was looking for a cheap alternative, but nothing seemed to shine as a good alternative. Back when people used film in their cameras, many found the excessive prices of Leica and Hasselblad, German makers of film cameras with superior optics, whose prices ran into 4 digits, far too steep for their pocketbook. Instead, they opted for Japanese makes which could give you pretty decent optics with great electronics at less than half the price. Many pros relied on its precision to do their work. Only classic portrait photographers opted for the pricier German models.

Much like the car industry.

Le Creuset doesn't have a particular challenger. There's at least one other brand that sells in their price range. Chausseur also makes similarly priced pots. Even Lodge, the guys I said made rugged pots have gotten into the swing of things, offering their version of enamel pots, priced similarly to Le Creuset.

Even so, I resigned myself to the fact that were I to find a pot, even at an outlet store, it would still maybe be 20 to 30 percent cheaper, which, while a relative bargain, still cost a lot.

A coworker recommened I go to Leesburg Premium Outlet Shops out on Leesburg Pike, which is kinda in the middle of nowhere. You head to Tyson's Corner, get on Leesburg Pike, and head out about 20 miles. It's off on US 15 North. You could also head to Frederick and come in from the north. Frederick, Tyson's Corner, and Rockville form a kind of triangle from which you can access the other two points via parts of 270, 495, and Leesburg Pike.

Let me just say that these outlet malls are like Disneyland for the shopper. Shops are lined up everywhere. There are some drawbacks. For one, the food court is pitiful, geared primarily to fast food eaters. Places like Burger King and Sbarro's abound. Abound is too generous a word. There's maybe 5 fast food places, and none too great. The better not to distract you from your shopping.

The prices aren't tremendously great. Some places do have reasonably good discounts. The Williams-Sonoma store seems to have fewer items than their main stores, but has more seasonal items they want to get rid of. They have a "professional" ice crusher, for instance. Feed in ice cubes. Get out crushed ice. I was tempted, but ended up saying no.

What is cool are the specialty shops, from the Nike only shop, to the Adidas only shop, to Ralph Lauren, to Seiko, to yes, Le Creuset. Unlike, say, the Gap, which was packed with people looking for bargains, Le Creuset isn't packed. Let's face it. Selling pots at 5 times the going price doesn't attract lots of customers. But I went in looking for a Dutch Oven.

The only key was how big and whether I picked round or oval. I eventually decided on oval, because I thought I might be able to put a small bird in their (like a chicken). This was suggested by the young man with the bizarre accent. Furthermore, the oval one was 5 quarts as opposed to 5.5 quarts for the round one. That half a quart meant 10 dollars, and 5 quarts seemed plenty big for what I needed.

I picked from the second choice pile which was about 20% cheaper than the normal pile, which is "discounted". That discount is pretty much the same everywhere. You're an idiot if you buy Le Creuset full price, at least, the price they claim is full price (one could argue you're an idiot buying Le Creuset, but let's not indulge in this point, shall we?).

I decided to shop their last because I was going to be carrying the equivalent of a bowling ball (albeit a light one) home, and I wanted to postpone that as late as I could. I went to shop at various clothing places, one where I didn't really get a discount, but the prices seemed OK, so I bought it anyway, and two others which had good prices.

I'm not sure I would make the journey down there too often. It's quite a far trek. It is nice to visit, but the savings aren't so ridiculous that I would go there all the time.

Even so, going to my first outlet mall, and getting my first Le Creuset was something of an adventure.

Now to do some cookin'.

Gerry

I saw Gus Van Sant's Gerry quite a while ago, when it first came out.

For a while, Van Sant's career had apparently veered away into mundane films, films that betrayed his quirky qualities. Films like Finding Forrester and even the fairly enjoyable Good Will Hunting, but it wasn't the oddness of My Own Private Idaho.

Van Sant then returned back to his more auteurist roots with two films in succession: Elephant and Gerry.

Elephant is Gus Van Sant's take on Columbine. He doesn't take the traditional narrative approach, which would be trying to explain why things happened, or to get really deep into who the characters are, and how their lives were snuffed.

Instead, he treats it as a kind of exercise, trying to imagine, if a bit artificially, what events might have passed on the last day before the shooting, following several characters around, even as their lives intersect at a moment in the hallway.

If anything, rather than sensationalize the event, Van Sant treats it somewhat matter of factly. The events take place. This day was not particularly special.

Van Sant went even more minimalist in Gerry. You have to like films a lot to enjoy this. When most people treasure a plot, a rooting interest, good guys and bad guys, and a heroic action at the end, Gerry has none of these.

Two friends go out into the desert, get lost, and spend the rest of the film, well, trying to get out. There's almost no meaningful dialogue. You're not meant to understand who these people are. At best, you think of what you would do if you were in the same situations.

Van Sant focuses on the bizarre beauty of the desert. He spends minutes on scenes, from the two walking in a strange parallel in the desert, to the shadow and light play as the clouds roll over. My guess is that, because this film is so out of the ordinary, so lacking in plot, characters, everything people want, that it will last quite a time.

After a while, you look for some meaning, any meaning. You look for changes in the sky. The rhythm of the way the two walk. You want to know who these people are, and after a while, you might ask "What am I watching?". After a while, you see the odd, lyrical quality of their surroundings, which serve, I suppose as a kind of character.

In the end, there is a kind of minimalist plot. Matt Damon's character who is dying ultimately blames Casey Affleck's character, and kills him. It appears that he is going to die too, but he somehow walks a bit longer, and finds a road, and it may be that both were so close to living. Or were they? Was the road only there because he did what he did? There's a hallucinogenic quality.

What's Damon's character thinking? Regret? Relief? In the end, you decide these things. Van Sant wants you to bring something of yourself to watching Gerry. The question is whether you're willing to invest.

Losing Interest

I've had my money in a high-interest savings account for a while now. It's a good way to earn money without too much effort.

The interest I was earning, that is, until today, was 5.05%, which makes it one of the highest in the nation. But then, the Fed rate dropped and this has impacted various banks, including mine. Here's the a blog about it.

I suppose it's still pretty high, but it's surprising I wasn't notified by the bank. Presumably, it's not something they want to wave the flag about.

Pins N Needles

I have a collection of CDs somewhere. Through my various moves, I've misplaced them, and I'm hoping to dig them up at some point. Among the CDs I had were from a band named Pinback.

Until recently, I had forgotten this group. Chris, who went to the 930 Club to listen to them reminded me, and so I listened to an album I'm pretty sure I didn't have then, which is Summer in Abaddon, which is pretty pleasant indie pop.

If you listen to enough indie music, you find that many bands sound like one another, slightly quirky enough to prevent it from being complete pop. I suppose such pronouncements make me sound like folks that say all rap sounds the same, but at least, I listen to a fair bit of indie stuff.

This reminds me. I was just at Borders nearby. One of the cashiers was talking to a friend of hers (I presume) about Menomena and Stars. I have both their CDs, but I find it a bit unlistenable, even though, at the time, they sounded pretty cool. Even so, they seem to have struck a resonance with a certain (probably very white) crowd.

Oh, and I went to this wine place in Kentlands, and mentioned to this guy working at a wine place that someone at a Starbuck's had recommended that I try Delirium, a Belgian beer. Surprise. This guy had some on stock. I haven't tried it out yet. It's in this oversized bottle, that holds maybe twice the usual amount. It's interesting how one bumps into folks that have common interests (though I was in a wine store, that also sold beer).

Reminders abound.

Monday Night Madness

It's been, what, 13 years? More? Since the Buffalo Bills were featured on Monday Night Football. MNF used to be the premier showcase for football. Invented in the 70s, it gave football fans another day to watch football. For the teams playing, they were the sole focus. No other games were played.

But Buffalo hasn't been good in years, and so they haven't had opportunities to be showcased.

Last night, they wanted to make the most of their opportunity. Tony Romo seemed happy to oblige turning the ball over some five times. Normally, such generosity is rewarded with a loss. However, despite such ineptitude, Dallas was still in the game.

Down 24-16, Dallas needed a touchdown with a 2 point conversion to tie the game. Late in the fourth quarter, they had a fourth quarter touchdown strike to Patrick Crayton. The two point up-for-grabs went to TO, but it was stripped from his hands. And yet, Dallas still had a chance.

They could go for an onsides kick and try to recover.

Normally, once you score, you kick to the other team, and they get a chance to be on offense. However, you can, more or less, attempt to kick it back to yourself. The ball must travel at least ten yards on the kickoff. The success rate is abysmally low.

However, somehow, it bumped off a player, and was recovered by Dallas, which had less than a minute to win the game.

Romo tossed the ball to Owens who appeared to catch it. Then, they had to quickly spike the ball, which they did with a second to go. But replay showed that TO had actually dropped the ball, and so it was incomplete, and so seconds were added back to the clock since the clock stops at the incomplete.

Romo made one throw where the receiver went out of bounds. 60 yards for the field goal. He had 7 seconds, so he could get off one more play to bring the field goal attempt closer than the ridiculous 60 yards.

The second pass attempt was also good and made the field goal attempt 52 yards which was still far, but manageable for the best field goal kickers. Nick Folk was basically a rookie, having never hit at that distance, except in practice. As he kicked and the ball sailed through the uprights, the umpires said timeout had been called just as he was kicking.

He was forced to kick again, and again, the ball flew true, and Dallas won the game by one point, stealing Buffalo's thunder, redeeming drops by TO, interceptions by Romo, and further jabbing the decade long futility of Buffalo. It has to hurt that with so many botches on Dallas's side that they still won, making one improbably completion after another.

And sometimes that's why it's fun to watch football on a Monday night.

Beer Run

One thing that bugs me about beer and liquor stores is that they're completely independent. This means that you have to do some research to find out which place has a good selection and which doesn't. It would be nice if liquor stores had some rating system, even something as simple as the number of microbrews and the number of foreign beers.

The best selection I've seen so far is Corridor Fine Wine and Liquors, but it's all the way in Laurel. That used to be 20 minutes away, now it's 40 minutes. This place is like a supermarket for beer and wine. Even Corridor can't overcome the second injustice with beer. You can't get beers from all over the country all over the country. Suppose I want Fat Tire beer from Seattle or Mirror Pond from Portland. Can't get it. Just can't.

You would think someone might get it, somewhere, but no. There's probably some weird rule. It's too bad that the selection it limited by some weird rules.

A coworker suggested I try going to a place in Frederick on the so-called golden mile. I'll get to that later. This place was called Westridge Liquor. Google Maps said this was on Exit 13B on some road called Patrick.

So I was thinking, there's a 13B nearby, though that's not Frederick, but maybe you'd call it "South Frederick"? I mean, clearly it made no sense that this 13B, the one that I had just gone to on Friday for lunch, was wrong. As you go further north, the exits merely increase, right?

But Google Maps said it was 25 minutes away, so something wasn't right.

As I wandered, I stopped by where I like to stop when I need directions.

Starbucks.

I don't know why. I figure you get a certain class of people that work at Starbuck's and they are likely to know directions. Worse gets to worst, I can always get some coffee.

Now it turns out I was way off, but they had no idea because I was nearly 20 miles off, and no one who worked there was from Frederick. I asked African American guy working the counter, and he asked this Indian (American) female. Finally, there was this third white guy, and he seemed to realize I needed to go further north. He even had a beer to suggest, called Delirium, which is a Belgian beer.

Sometimes I think you can meet interesting folks just talking to various people working at Starbuck's. I now regret that I didn't discuss beer more with this fellow. Perhaps he had other suggestions I could look into.

In any case, I started driving north. I thought, is it possible that there is another exit 13?

I'm driving and driving, and it feels like I'm going more and more into the boonies. The drive becomes a touch quieter. The speed limit goes up more. Eventually, it says that 270 ends.

Ends!

Of course, it just goes on, but it's not called 270. And get this. It starts numbering again. Back at exit 13.

So I take exit 13B a second time, and try to look for this liquor store.

I also see why this place is called the golden mile. My colleague calls "Frederick", "Fredneck", as in "redneck". The golden mile is a stretch of road with lots of shops. Restaurants, stores, etc. Indeed, it almost looks like the stretch of road in Laurel where Corridor is located.

Anyway, I finally find this liquor store, which is near a Giant. It's run by some Koreans, and it's bigger than usual. It does have a few unusual beers. Usually, a sign of unusual beers is if they sell Duvel beer, a dark Belgian beer. It's not so unusual that you aren't likely to see it, but it says something if this place sells it.

Since it is run by Koreans, they do sell OB, a Korean beer.

There is just a few unusual beers, but nothing like Corridor. The question is whether it's worth taking that trip out, and right now, I'd say no.

I look back on this minor adventure and wonder if such a thing would happen in India. Of course, the logistics would be quite different. I have a car. Most Indians don't. I'm willing to go 20 miles or so to find beer. The average middle class Indian tends to think of beer as a no-no. There's still something of a negative stigma associated with beer (or other alcohol). True, some people drink freely and find nothing wrong, but they realize there's a large segment of society (none the least of which are Muslims) that find it wrong and heck, Gandhi was a teetotaler too.

Still, it gave me an odd excuse to head to Frederick which I wouldn't do otherwise. I might make the visit again at some point.

We'll see.

Buggin'

I'm not a baseball fan. The season consists of 162 games. There's probably no one that watches the entire season. There isn't enough time. At that point, you just care about the wins and losses. In many ways, baseball makes you care about the race to the postseason but not so much the individual games. One reason that football is so enticing is that the season is 16 games. You worry about one game a week, and fans watch each and every game.

I don't have any particular team I root for. Maybe I'd like the local teams to do well. The Orioles. The Nationals. But both are mildly awful. The Orioles, in particular, are in the same division with the Red Sox and the Yankees. Usually, one wins the division, and the other enters as the wildcard.

I suppose no other sport makes reaching the postseason so meaningful as baseball. At one point, baseball had four divisions, and only the four division winners made it to the postseason. This meant a lot of teams were out of it halfway through the season. However, other teams were often winning division year after year, and they felt it a kind of birthright to make it to the postseason.

The wildcard really made things interesting. The number of divisions went from 4 to 6, and two more wildcards were added. Each of the 6 division winners made it to the postseason. Then, of all the remaining teams, the one with the most wins makes it as the wildcard. This year, the National League had potential for a four way tie. It had a one-game playoff that put the Rockies in over the Padres. The Mets collapsed, despite a 7 game lead with 17 games to play to fail to make the playoffs.

In baseball, the individual games don't matter much. It's the final result. How to accumulate enough wins to make it to the postseason.

I lived with a Red Sox fan, who had lamented their inability to beat the Yankees. Indeed, they hadn't won since 1918. There was a claim that there was a "curse of the Bambino" which referred to Babe Ruth, who was traded to the Yankees, as Ruth then performed his magic for a rival team. The Red Sox were perennially a good team, and had several chances to win over the many decades, but it was in frustration.

In 2004, the Red Sox, winner of the wildcard, faced the dreaded Yankees again. The previous year, they had played til a seventh game, and a Yankee player of little note (but who happened to be the brother of one of the announcers) belted a run, and broke the hearts of Red Sox fans once again.

2004 looked to be even worse. The Red Sox fell back 3-0, and many Red Sox fans felt that this year wasn't meant to be. All that "cowboy up" and a fun bunch were going to lose to New York. Again. But then, they scrapped out a win, in the 12th inning. And they did it again in the next game. And then, they won a third. And it was 3-all, and the Red Sox fans wondered whether their team was just torturing them, just tantalizing them.

Get their hopes up. Get the series tied. And lose it in the seventh. But it didn't happen. The Red Sox took a comfortable lead, and won this series in a way that made up for all the agony of all those years. To come back from 3-0, against the dreaded Yankees, to snatch their obvious, ordained victory from them, to wipe the smug "Well, you guys played hard" from their faces, was all the more sweet.

Of course, they still had to win the World Series, but that was anti-climatic. It was a sweep.

Since then, neither the Red Sox or Yankees have won, but the Red Sox seem to take as much glee in the Yankees not winning as them winning, as the likelihood of the Yankees losing in the postseason is more likely than the Red Sox winning it all. And given their postseason success, having them not achieve their yearly goals of winning it all gives Sox fans such delight.

Perhaps for that reason, and perhaps because the Orioles are nearby, that I will root for the Yankees to lose. I don't really despise them because I simply don't care about baseball that much, but it makes watching games more interesting. If you can't find a team you like, then the second best thing is to find a team you dislike. And it's no more fun than watching during the postseason, when things really matter.

But that's the kind of fun the postseason is, provided you care about who wins and who loses. Most people find the fascination of sports about the silly passions we have for one team or another, and the uncertainty of who will win, and the improbability of winning in some situations.

Baseball, for instance, is such a defensive sport, that being down one run can mean a loss. This is not basketball, where it's hard to stop points from being scored. Since one run can be the difference, and since pitchers are so good, baseball often brings stuff to the brink. The pitcher gets one person out, then another.

A player gets on base. Another is walked.

And so it happened last night. The Indians were up 1-0 in the series. The Yankees had a tenuous 1-0 lead. Then, the midges came out, like some Biblical plague, and swarmed the field. These miniature relative of the mosquitoes don't bite, but they do annoy, as bugs are wont to do. Most of the pitchers had bug spray to dissuade the midges.

Joba Chamberlain wasn't so lucky. The pun-masters were out. As crafty and successful a pitcher as he had been all season, the midges wouldn't leave him alone, and he couldn't control his pitches, eventually, giving up a run, letting the Indians tie it.

And it went to extra innings.

Manuel Rivera, the Yankees most celebrated closer, had people on base, but managed to serve his two innings without incident. But closers are special purpose, and despite his success, they didn't want to play him more than two innings. He had done his job.

Luis Vizcaino came in to relieve. And as is common, players get on base, and pretty soon, the bases were loaded. And there were two outs. And it went the full count. Three balls. Two strikes. And it was the bottom of the 11th.

And Travis Hafner struck a shot solidly, and drove in the one run that won the game.

And the Indians were up 2-0.

And the Yankees lost. Again.

Broil, Broil, Toil and Trouble

I've heard the term broil for a long time, but never quite knew what it was. It sounds like boil, but sound-alike isn't the same as being alike. I know there's a setting on the oven for it, but what does it mean?

And why do I care?

It turns out I have a recipe for chicken tikka masala, which, apparently, is a Westernized version of an Indian dish, something like Chicken Hunan is a representative Hunan chicken dish.

I don't mind that's it's not perfectly authentic, since I'm trying this for the first time. Here's the issue though. It requires-you guess it-broiling.

It turns out broiling is kinda like the inverse of grilling. When you grill, you are cooking meat with direct radiant heat, typically from charcoal. Ovens, on the other hand, use convection heat, i.e., heat from the air getting hot.

It's easier to understand broiling with an electric stove. At the top, there are coils. You move a broiling pan which is typically two very flat pans. The top pan has slits and lets the juices fall through to the bottom pan, which serves to catch this so it doesn't fall to the bottom of the oven.

You typically stick the pan as high as it will go, so it's near the radiant parts. The direct heat, unlike grilling, comes from above, instead of below, but otherwise behaves much the same as grilling.

Some ovens have a separate chamber below the main oven which is much smaller (so the heat is more direct) and serves the same purpose.

Here's a good article on the subject.

The key to broiling is to keep an eye on it, as you will only spend a few minutes heating it, as opposed to 20 minutes to several hours with conventional baking.

The things you learn on the Internet. It's really quite an invention.

No Country For Old Programmers

I was eating lunch today out, as I normally do, and oddly enough, the following question came up. "Why are there no old programmers?"

This was based on the following observation, which was, admittedly, rather limited. At our company, we have maybe 6-7 programmers around 30, perhaps 3-4 above 30 but within their early 40s, probably another 5-6 aged 25 or under. In any case, there aren't any programmers (well, maybe one) that are 45 or above. It's a relatively young company, and I'm on the older end.

Why is that? Why don't we find programmers above 45 or so.

It's not that they don't exist. I think one thing about "good" companies is that they do hire young, because, while older guys do have some experience, they have to continuously learn, and that's a new skill that's being expected in computing that didn't exist before.

Think about this. If you look at programming in the early 80s, it didn't require you understand databases (mostly), version control, reading incomplete APIs on the web, knowing about stuff like RSS or CSS or various protocols or learning a sophisticated IDEs, and then learning new stuff a few years later.

Indeed, many jobs require you do roughly the same thing over and over again, and use those skills over and over. For a programmer, at the time, that would mean learning a single language, learning the techniques of the day, learning to debug in a certain way. All that time spent getting good at that, and they need to learn something new again.

To give an analogy, think about MS Word. They just came out with Word 2007. This is supposed to be an overhaul of the system. All the time you spent learning how to do stuff in Word, may have to partially relearned. At the very least, you have the benefit that it's MS releasing the product, and they won't do something completely different. But it is different enough. You do need to do a fair bit of work to adapt skills you didn't think had to be adapted!

This happens all the time to programmers and worse. There are more resources to programmers, just as their are more resources to everyone--from the Web! You now have to find libraries and documentation and have to know where to find it. Scouring the Web has become a necessary skill. Before, you had a limited number of choices, if it wasn't obvious from the software you had what to do, then that was it. With the Web, there's always some search that might yield results, which is both boon and bane, good and bad.

Older programmers learned to program, but in a certain language, in a certain way. They didn't expect that they had to keep up with programming like some people keep up with Hollywood gossip.

The generation of programmers that learned during the 90s and beyond are starting to realize that the skill of continuous learning is needed. To give an example, recently, someone in our company found a nifty tool and suggested that people give it a try.

So what causes one person to think "Yeah, that's cool, I will try it out", and another to think "Well, I'm not required to use it, and I don't see a need for it, so why bother?". The modern programmer needs to look for new tools and try it out, and see if they can use it. It's like the person searching for that perfect diet, except where that search is typically futile, finding good tools is often not futile.

But why do people not learn new tools? First, they have to find it. Then, they have to install it. That may not be trivial. And imagine it takes a day of tinkering to get right. At what point is someone likely to say "Forget it. Unless I'm required to do it, I'm not going to waste my time, not even 20 minutes, trying to get this to work."

Then, you have to use it and get some value out of it. This may force you to work in a way you're not used to. Think of version control. Version control offers a ton of benefits, but there's work. You have to think about version control, what commands are available, knowing whether to branch or not, and perhaps fixing stuff up that's broken. Imagine what happens when you don't use version control. You don't have to deal with any of this.

And the downside? If you lose stuff, you lose stuff. And some people are content with that, because it means less they have to worry about right now.

And installation? Not all software installs easily. Some require hunting for libraries and such. Think about every computer science class you've taken. Most of them prepare all the software you need. That way, you don't have to deal with those headaches yourself. The good news is, over time, installation has become a lot easier. In the old days, you were left to figure out all sorts of things on your own, including, if you were on UNIX, what kind of UNIX you were on.

If you have the attitude that you want to use a new tool, even if it takes time to master, then you're likely to become better, to improve because you are willing to waste ten hours to save ten seconds. You're willing to force yourself to think in a new way because it offers benefits to you.

I'll give you another example. Since I went through academia, I became aware of TeX and LaTeX, which are the typesetting system created by Knuth and modified by Leslie Lamport (and since then, modified by a bunch of other folks). Knuth is not only a computer scientist, he's an aesthete. He cares about beauty.

He spent ten years of his life trying to preserve high quality typography. He cared that in good texts, ff, placed together, is replaced by two f's that overlap. That if you have the word Vast, the "a" sits underneath the "V", which doesn't happen with most word processors because each character is in a bounding box that doesn't overlap.

I know, for example, there is a different between left double quotes and right double quotes. Indeed, one of our data sources uses "TeX" style representation to represent left double quotes (two backticks in a row is considered a left double quote). I recognize this because I've used TeX.

But the average computer programmer graduating from college is not likely to have seen this. Indeed, they may have only learned about ASCII, heard about Unicode, and not realized that Unicode is not merely a 16 bit extension of ASCII (though at its core, that's what it is), and that this increase in characters allows a lot more punctuation.

Thus, the average computer science graduate might not have to worry about fonts, but someone out there does or they have to worry about some standard or they have to worry about Unicode. This often means spending a good deal of time learning about stuff they didn't teach you.

So this fella, who's actually pretty young, had never heard of this, didn't do that much research on the topic--didn't even know there was more to be researched (even as I pointed out an article to him), and probably finds all this rather tedious. Why study this when there's more interesting, more straightforward stuff to learn. Read about the world in a book, and it reads like a story. Let someone digest it for you so you can regurgitate it back.

To give you another analogy. At the end of every year, there's some sophisticated formula for deciding who needs to win and lose to get into the NFL (American football) playoffs. Most announcers have no idea how this is done, because they simply don't sit down and learn it. They figure they were bad at math, and so there's no reason to learn it, and they stop.

Or how the salary cap works. That's usually beyond most people, but once you study it and figure it out, it's not that hard.

So I posited that, unless there was going to be something completely different coming up, that the programmers of today might become old programmers. They're willing to spend the time figuring this out or figuring that out, even stuff that seems a complete waste of time to learn. It's this desire to figure new stuff out that will make today's programmers age gracefully.

It's not to say that every programmer will survive. After all, there's still a fair bit of programming that requires, say, debugging, and some people simply don't like debugging code, especially code they didn't write.

But these skills were skills that programmers of the past, even very bright people, those with Ph.D's didn't have. In math, you learn a notation and a system of proof, and that's it. They don't change notation on you just because it's trendy to do so. It means if you sent a mathematician through time in the future, they would have some chance of following a proof today, because the language stayed the same, but someone who wrote FORTRAN would find today's C++ code nearly indecipherable. The ideas involved, the sophistication used, and this is just day-to-day everyday programming, not genius code, would be hard to figure out.

We're still in the early stages of computer programming development, maybe comparable to Babe Ruth playing baseball. There's likely to be a lot more thought given to the craft of programming. In the meanwhile, we're still in the quagmire of today, where learning to program is still very hard, and learning to program well, requiring a philosophy, requiring us to care how the code is written.

The question is whether we want to grow old doing it.

Captcha

Luis von Ahn is one clever guy. I have no idea if he's smart in the computer science way, but he's clever.

He's a computer science professor at CMU, and his biggest idea is using humans as computers, that is, using humans to do things that computers have a hard time doing. He is most noted for captchas, which are those distorted text you enter to be sure you're a person, and not a bot.

The next new clever idea based on captchas is to digitize text from books that have been scanned in. Facebook has used this, where you type in two words. One word, they already know what it says. The other, they aren't so sure. The word they know is used to make sure that you, the person, is real, and if you enter that word correctly, it's felt that the other word should also be entered correctly too.

In addition to captchas, people can tag photos with relevant words. So the idea is that object recognition is hard in photos, but people can handle it easily. But you don't completely trust the people tagging, so you find a way to prevent the occasionally person who is trying to use bad tags.

Next time you enter a captcha, you may be helping a digitizing effort.

Full House

Columbo was a detective series from the 70s, and had the same basic premise, week after week. Within five minutes, you, the audience, were told who the guilty party was. Columbo wasn't so lucky. He'd spend the rest of the show trying to figure out who did it. What mattered was how he found out. As the devoted viewer, you'd see if Columbo looked like he was going off track.

Perhaps in the end, the reason the show survived is that people liked Peter Falk.

House is a series that has the same basic plot week after week. Patient comes down with a mysterious ailment. House and his assistants must try to figure out what's going on. Usually, their first or second attempt is wrong, and nearly kills the patient. Eventually, they figure out what's going on, and the patient is saved.

But why does it work beyond that? Is it possible that you, gasp, like the guy, or his assistants? I mean, you only learn a little bit each time, but maybe as time goes by, you like the characters. Of course, cast members are typically chosen because they are good looking, and sure, it helps if they can act some so you can feel good that you like the person for who they are, rather than because they happen to be hot.

Anyway, they were showing an episode where House is picking new assistants out of a cast of many, and he imagines he sees his former assistants, making you think he cares, underneath that irascible personality is someone that cares. Maybe it's that brief shining moment that people look for, that this impatient, smug, gruff individual who doesn't care, does indeed care.

Ikon Blend

A while back, I complained that pretty much every blender looked the same, and most were incapable of preventing an air pocket when enough ice was thrown in. I wanted to make a smoothie, and it should be done with the minimum amount of fuss. I shouldn't have to add a cube at a time or some mundane process like that. Smoothie King doesn't have to do that. Why should I?

I had noticed most blenders look the same, but there is an exception. Ikon Breville, a newcomer in the kitchen appliance space (one must use "space" to refer to the consumer electronics niche to be cool). And they have additional blades, including one that appears to sweep across the bottom.

The catch? The Ikon Breville blender is 200 to 300 dollars, or nearly triple of what my current (inadequate) blender costs. And I don't even know if that extra blade helps! But it appears like it would, and at least, they are coming up with some kind of novel design. I have to give them credit for that.

Blender companies have to realize people want to make smoothies, and their invention should make this as easy as possible, which means redesigning the blade mechanism to make it easy to make smoothies.

Way to go guys!

Authoritative Advice

Here I go again.

There are plenty of articles that assert advice on the authority of some expert, and yet the research that backs up the research is missing. For example, I just read an article about correct posture in front of a computer. But how much of this is real, and how much of this is "Well, this must be how it is". That is, the obviousness of why this is the correct way to sit makes it so. If your neck hurts, well, clearly you have the monitor too high, or off to an angle.

I agree some of it appears to be common sense, but then, there used to be tons of other remedies that really don't make sense except someone just felt the need to assert it.

Still, so many of us want to hear the ring of authority, so we listen, without questioning why. The funny thing is that when there is some scientific basis, then if someone argues against it (say, global warming), we feel there must be a debate, and thus we are willing to say there's not strong evidence, even when we don't explore the issues in depth.

If education teaches us anything, it should teach us how to assess "expert advice".

Monday Night Tony

Tony Kornheiser picked up what had to be a dream gig. Cohost of Monday Night Football. OK, so it's not the original MNF. That disappeared when ABC, which had hosted MNF since its inception, decided Sunday night was better, and swapped it with ESPN, which had been doing Sunday Night Football (To be fair, ABC owns ESPN).

Tony even survived the purge. Joe Theismann (who I can't stand as an announcer) was his co-host and had been doing football for ESPN for quite a while. But most people observed that Theismann and Kornheiser didn't get along. Tony would say, graciously, on his show that the two got along just fine. But Kornheiser felt constrained. In order to be nice to his buddy, he held back on critical words.

They eventually replaced Theismann with Ron Jaworski. Former Philadelphia Eagles QB, Jaworski (called "Jaws") is gregarious, gets along well with Tony, and studies the game fastidiously. He used to cohost a show where they went over game tape and break stuff down like coaches do. The kind of stuff that fanboys love. Jaws is not only a geek ( of a sports variety), he positively effervesces. And Tony is suitably deferential when it comes to Jaws's expertise. And Jaws is so active and non-egotistical, that Tony feels relaxed enough to be himself.

But here's the rub.

Tony's a guy made for radio. Every time Tony is on camera, he looks constipated. He's uncomfortable. OK, he's not exactly like Mary Carillo who automatically smiles when she's listening, almost cloyingly sweet (almost, but not quite).

Which is too bad because Tony can be brilliant on radio.

But anytime Tony has to sit down and wait for other people to speak, he looks like deer in headlight. Good thing this doesn't happen too much.

In Your Facebook

Facebook was originally aimed at college students. Indeed, you couldn't get an account if you didn't have a school account. Then, they let the floodgates open, and anyone could get an account. People began to see Facebook as a more mature MySpace.

I had vaguely entertained the idea of getting an account despite being out of the typical demographic. To be fair, ever since Facebook let anyone join, the average age has probably jumped 10 years, so the typical user is more likely to be 30 than 20 (as with many blogs, I assert this with only a scarce recollection as my only evidence).

But nothing much was pushing me to get the account until a former student signed up for one, and apparently used one of his IM clients and spammed everyone on the list, which included me. I hadn't spoken to him in a bit. I knew he moved and had gotten married, but since his IM was beckoning me to try it out, I set one up.

Of course, once you add one person, then you want to add another, and then somehow, it networks, and people you knew, find you, and they want to add you. It's worse than LinkedIn.

Indeed, one tends to spend time doing little things, trying to join networks to join a group, and so forth. There's still a little bit of elitism (meant to protect folks I suppose) and some hoops one must jump through to get access to certain groups.

I suppose the novelty will wear off, except, of course, your "friends" can ping you and then send messages and you can see them update their page, and so forth.

Makes you wonder how this generation of kids, the one that sits past Generation X (I probably fit in that generation, though I'm sure few of the adjectives that applied to that generation apply to me, which in fact, was probably a smaller generation than one might imagine, concocted by the media desperate to try to understand the most vocal segment of the youth population).

It's the Internet generation, and they've learned you don't need to be a programmer to use the Internet. And the desire to be popular has extended far beyond the confines of Ivy League campuses and far beyond the sea of lockers that line hallways of high schools throughout the country. You call people your friends that hardly know you. Oh you were the guy that was at this party that was with this girl who had the accident. You know.

Still, with those AJAX forms fading in and out, the Web 2.0 goodness that says not only are we cool among kids but we're cool among geeks too.

Will being a member of Facebook tell me what's going on in the world of college kids. Will new trends come out that the media once defined, and now might self-organize? We're connected in more ways than ever before, and yet, we may know each other less well than before.

Thus, social networking may be increasing asocial, as the average contact per "friend" decreases until this commodity we call "friend" is something like tag, a label we place on others, so we can have the most toys.

Pop 'Em

I made a trip to Virginia to visit Linens N Things. I had been down on them for a while, but I think they are competitive with Bed, Bath, and Beyond. However, the local Rockville site didn't have an Oxo Pop Container.

Oxo makes tons of products. They now make stuff to compete against themselves. Multiple can openers, for example.

The popup container competes against stuff like Click-Clack containers. You can put rice, flour, sugar in these acrylic containers. The key for the Oxo is that there's a button on top. Press it, and it creates a vacuum seal. Press it again, and it pops out, and serves as a handle. It's pretty darn cool.

Except it was a pain to find.

Google Maps failed me again. It took me to the wrong address for Linens N Things. It pointed me further up the road, and I was wandering wondering how any store could be buried far off the main road and not be visible. It didn't make sense.

I decided to go the other direction a bit, which took nearly half an hour, because I kept wandering around, and found it, by a place called World Market. It's hard to say what kind of store this is. It has furniture, kitchen stuff, mostly containers, and such, but also spices, coffee, tea, etc. I can't quite say what the store reminds me of. Pier One?

Anyway, I ended up getting a bunch of spices there for a dollar each. Then, they suggested I get spice jars, of which they had like 5 different kinds.

Then, I went to Linens N Things to find the Pop container. I didn't see it, at first, then finally realized it was on the shelf on the other side. The person who helped, despite being friendly, didn't realize it was sitting on the other side.

Then, I headed to look at Williams and Sonoma, which is generally overpriced, but tries to keep this air of sophistication.

Anyway, Oxo is generally hit or miss. Not all their products are that good. I just bought ice trays with the tops (they slide over the ice). The tops suck, but the ice tray is reasonably OK.

I could be buying stuff for a while for the kitchen, so I'm running into issues finding places to put everything. The usual kitchen dilemma.