Trying the Topspin Serve

Last night, it was supposed to be in the mid 40s, which I thought would be pretty reasonable. Chilly, but not crazy cold. It was pretty much that. Chilly, but not crazy cold.

I had been looking at YouTube videos on how to this the topspin serve and was eager to try it out. I need a bit more practice, but I found that I wasn't getting that much pace, which may be a result of either falling back on old habits, or that topspin serves are just not hit that hard.

One thing I was able to do better was to hit the serve while pronating the arm, but I can't consistently get the spin and trajectory right. That's what practice is for.

I should go back and try to hit the serve by "throwing" the racquet, since that was giving me better pace, and alternate back and forth with this topspin serve.

Silky Kumar

Who is Silky Kumar?

Most of the songs (and associated dances) from India come in Bollywood film. While the films aren't exactly extended music videos (they resemble more of the music interludes in Austin Powers), they do form the most popular way of disseminating music.

Recently, a video was produced by MTV India with a guy named Silky Kumar, who is something of a dork. The song is "Scent of Desire".

This is really more of a sly marketing ad. While no mention of Axe body spray is mentioned, the product was released sometime later and was accompanied by this music, which the advertisers paid for.

It's interesting to see how ads are customized for the culture they are in. With the prodigious number of films produced and watched in India, it's a surprise that someone hasn't thought of this idea before.

Get a Grip

I like this article demonstrating the various grips using the base knuckle rather than the classic "V".

Follow Through

I had been hitting my forehand in something of a classical manner, where the racquet would end up pointing forward after I hit the shot, but if you look at any photograph of any top pro hitting their forehand, whether it be Nadal or Roddick or Agassi or Federer, their follow through is amazing.

Literally the racquet will be either above their left shoulder or somewhere above their left arm. Indeed, there's a bit of wrist pronation going on.

Vic Braden once said that what you do after you hit the ball doesn't matter. He claimed the racquet can be all over the place. But that's much like saying a baseball player hitting a ball can do anything after they hit the ball. Indeed, they can't. Baseball hitters have so much momentum that the bat keeps moving far after they hit it.

You also see this with American football players when they run to tackle a quarterback. They want to hurt the quarterback so much that they run full-speed. However, an astute quarterback typically just takes a few steps forward, and the would-be tackler, running full-bore, completely misses his target. He can't adjust that quickly if he runs that hard and that fast.

Similarly, to get power, you have to really swing fast, and this motion needs to go somewhere, so it follows through over to the other side of the body. You see nearly all modern players striking the ball with tremendous follow through. None of that compact McEnroe shot making. It's especially important when you want to generate a lot of spin.

I find that thinking more about the follow through has helped me keep power on shots that are on the run, when I'm likely to be more defensive. You have to give the racquet a pretty good swing, and let the momentum carry the racquet on.

(And I haven't begun to talk about feet position, hip, shoulder, etc).

Are You Being Served?

The hardest part of tennis is learning how to serve. The amazing thing about professional players isn't so much the pace of their serves, though that's pretty amazing, but that they can get it in the court so reliably.

Just to give you a sense of how hard the serve is, watch some slow motion serves. Here's a link to the serve of Joachim Johansson. In case you don't know who Joachim Johansson is, he's a 6'6" Swedish tennis player with a huge serve. We're talking speeds that are comparable to Andy Roddick. I was watching some Davis Cup rerun with US against Sweden, and Johansson was making Roddick's life miserable with his serve.

OK, let's start with the arm itself. People often talk about a wrist snap when serving. It's more properly called wrist pronation, which is something Vic Braden pointed out. Most average players really have a hard time understanding this, much less hitting it properly. Basically, if you watch the pros in slow motion, it appears as if they are about to hit the ball edge on.

At the last moment, they pronate their wrist, and the racquet face is flat on for the moment it's hit, and then it flip over so the racquet face which had been pointing to the left (for a rightie), then flat on, is now pointing to the right. To get a sense of this, take your right hand and raise it above your head.

Then, have the palm point left. This means your thumb would be (were it ninety degrees to your fingers pointing straight up) pointing behind you. Now, turn your palm forward. Your thumb points left.

Then, turn your palm to the right, which is pretty awkward. Your thumb points forward.

This motion, when done really fast, is wrist pronation. I've heard the analogy of whipping very much like using a large thermometer.

The way to learn wrist pronation is to really simplify the motion and just think backswing, and minimal follow through (with the pronation). Very hard to get this right, but easier then adding all the other motion to the serve.

Beyond that, there's the knee bend, the location of the hips, the hip rotation, the backscratching position, etc. That is, your hips and knees also play a role in hitting a big serve, in addition to the hard part of wrist pronation.

The other thing I learned was to "throw" the racquet, which gives it acceleration all the way through. I'd often just worry about hitting it at the point of contact, and making it more from the elbow on up, rather than the rest of the arm. I used to know this guy, who, when he was young, played baseball. The ball throwing movement he was used to making made for a really powerful serve, so the analogy of "throwing" the racquet is not so far off (except I was never that good at throwing a ball).

What you often see the average player do is to push the ball forward using the wrist as a hinge. Compared to the proper way to hit a serve, it's far simpler, but not that great for applying spin, and also not great for power. While the motion of wrist pronation feels more natural the more your practice it, it certainly feels completely unnatural until you learn how to hit it properly. And of course, it's completely unintuitive, which is why the average player would never learn it on their own without having slomo video of top servers (and they wouldn't even know what to look for, and how to achieve that motion).

What's something of a relief is that Roger Federer is not one of the biggest servers in the game. His serve might be fifth best in the world or lower, behind Sampras, Johansson, Roddick, Isner, and a few others. But it is pretty effective, nonetheless, and he returns really well too. It's interesting to note that the top two matches in terms of aces with 55 and 51 aces respectively, the person who served the most aces lost. Even with lots of aces, it needs to be timed right. When you don't get an ace, you still need to win points. And there's still the return of serve.

Which isn't to say a powerful serve doesn't help. It helped Sampras, Lendl, McEnroe, Edberg, Safin, etc. But there are many players with incredible serves which helps them get in the top 50, or even the top 30, but not much further. As hard as Roddick hits his serve, he can still hit a pretty good forehand and backhand, otherwise, he wouldn't even be mentioned as a top player.

So learning a serve is pretty tough!

Loud and Proud

More like loud and annoying. I had been referred to some article that claimed commercials aren't louder than normal programming, but that at regular TV programming reaches peak volume very rarely while commercials spend its duration at that peak volume. The analogy given is having to stare at a flash bulb. It's quick, though irritating, and having a light that is as bright as a flash bulb but continuously on.

For some reason, despite years of watching television, I've become more sensitive to it. I hear just how loud the commercials are and it's pretty annoying.

Visual Learning

When I first started playing tennis, my parents had bought a VCR. To be more precise, they have bought a Betamax. These were the days when there were two formats: VHS and Betamax, and eventually VHS won out, partly, I imagine, due to a longer format (it could record so-so quality for several hours). They didn't buy the VCR for tennis. That was mostly coincidence.

I'd record tennis matches and try to watch the players hit the strokes in slow motion. Even after imitating players like Courier or Agassi (or more likely in those days, Wilander or Lendl), I found it somewhat difficult to fully translate to the court. I'm sure an experienced coach could give me more advice.

But since then, the great information saviour of the world came about, namely, the web. And video also came, mostly YouTube. This allowed people to put all manners of videos online, in particular, videos for teaching tennis.

These videos I've included seem pretty good at teaching the topspin serve, a serve I've been trying to learn for a while. Admittedly, you have to know something about tennis serve mechanics to get the idea fully (for example, there's a wrist pronation going on in the second video). But it's a great step-by-step introduction to the topspin serve. I want to try this out on the court and see how it works out.

Tennis Lesson

I've been taking tennis lessons since Ravi was taking them too, figuring I hadn't had lessons in a long time, and my game wasn't going much of anywhere in a long time either.

The first set of lessons I took were in a group setting, and it lasted five weeks. It reminded me of the kind of environment Nick Bollettieri has at his academy (Agassi, Courier, Seles, etc. all went to his academy). Kids run drills, hit a shot, get back to the end of the line.

I find that kind of hitting pretty stressful, because you have to get ready right away, then wait and wait, then hit again. It doesn't lead to getting your strokes "grooved", meaning, in a rhythm, so that you feel comfortable.

Over time, I began to think of these drills as more exercise, meant to get your movement down, and less about hitting the ball properly. If you hit the ball well, that's good, but if you miss, you just keep going on. Once you can forget about whether you hit it in or not, it works better.

Even so, we didn't get that much instruction. I found, as I was practicing, that my backhand isn't very good, nor is my serve. My serve has been improving some, mostly because I've been trying to get better technique.

During this time, Ravi would tell me about his lessons, which were also group lessons, and how his instructor would talk about throwing the racquet, and holding the racquet a certain way. I wasn't sure what to make of it.

Thanksgiving weekend arrived and our instructor decided to take the weekend to visit relatives and such and cancelled the lesson. So I decided to take a (pricey) private lesson. And it turns out the guy teaching that was Joel. Joel's got huge dreadlocks, and is pretty chatty, but gave a lot of ideas to think about.

In particular, he talked about throwing the racquet as well. What he meant was to let the momentum of the racquet do the work. That's an interesting visualization as people tend to "muscle" the ball, which causes their arm, ironically enough, to move slower, and this idea of throwing was meant to make it move faster, and more relaxed.

I should say that "throwing" isn't quite the right visualization. You don't throw it per se. Instead, as you swing the racquet, you let the momentum carry it through. The idea of throwing it means that you make sure the momentum is pretty high.

We also worked on simplifying my backhand some, getting down some, and again, letting more of the momentum do the work. I also did this on my serve, and the pace seemed a lot better than I was used to.

I think Joel's advice worked better than I expected partly because I tend to be over-analytical about my own shots. I'm sure some people hit and don't know what they do. I try to think about how I hit my shots, how my take back should be, and so forth, and tinker with it from time to time. Lately, for instance, I've been trying to emulate more of an Agassi backhand, which is short and compact, at least in the takeback.

I was also trying to work on the pronation of the wrist that people claim is needed for a good spin serve. It didn't occur to me to hit it with more of a forehand grip as I was more of a backhand grip player (having modeled it somewhat like Edberg's serve). It felt awkward, but the spin was reasonably good, so I was a bit surprised. I might have to experiment with that some more.

All in all, though the lesson was twice as expensive, it gave me some nuggets to think about.

Too bad it's getting cold. Hope I find some time to practice.

The Popularizaton of Science

It used to be that science fiction TV shows, most notably, Star Trek, attracted people to science. Weird, since Star Trek wasn't that heavy on the science (although we pretty much have communicators).

Nowadays, there are channels like the Discovery Channel that talk about science and the universe, or Nova, the PBS show. Even those shows feel quite compelled to use CG effects to make everything seem more exciting, more enticing. It seems a bit amateurish, but I bet it works.

They use as many visual effects and analogies as possible. (Like bouncing balls representing photons).

But given the lack of math skills of most Americans, they don't bother with any serious math. Heck, any math at all. The nerdy folks will learn math and be steered in the direction of physics of some such and be out next generation of physicists.

It's sad that we can't do much math because the average person finds math too hard. To be fair, it takes a long time to learn math, and a lot of thinking, and so a show isn't really prepared to teach that in an hour's time.

It's eye candy, but only that.

The Blender Challenge

Now that smoothies are popular, it's impressive how the entire industry that makes blenders have done virtually nothing to make this easier.

Here's the challenge. Add ice. Add frozen fruit. Hit blend.

If you have to stir the items because there's an air pocket created, thus causing no blending to occur, you fail. Design it so it doesn't do this.

It's amazing how there's so little intellectual power spent on coming up with a truly innovative design. Consider how the burr grinder is a completely different design from the blade grinder for grinding beans.

Try a little harder, guys.

Western India

India's a complicated country. In a sense, it's very much many countries into one, as each state in India typically has its own language and customs. What unifies the country is religion, but even religious observations vary from state to state.

Here's an interesting article about women seeking some independence prior to marriage.

Without women working, a woman being able to live on her own would be challenging, at best. Once a society allows women to work and to make comparable money to a man, then women begin to think about a life outside of marriage.

These behaviors are more typical of "metros" or the major cities of India.

The reason that India is complex is that many women still live rather traditionally. Even the vaunted IT revolution of India only affects a small percentage of Indians, which means that most Indians still live, one would imagine, much like their parents did.

Like the rest of Asia, India struggles balancing traditional values with more "Western" values, and those can be at odds with one another.

This is not to say Western values are necessarily superior, but that when there are more options available, people are going to take those options.

While India zooms to the 21st century technologically (at least, parts of India), cultural changes will be slower. How will attitudes change in the upcoming 40 years?

Turkey Dilemma

Although this is the I-dont-know-how-many Thanksgiving I've spent away from family, I still don't know much about how to cook a turkey. My dad does a reasonably good job, so I should just follow that (having said that, Alton Brown has a version that takes, other than brining, about 3 hours).

First lesson. Don't buy a turkey on the day before. There just aren't that many choices. I went to two grocery stores that had turkeys between about 14 pounds and 15 pounds. 13 pounds? No. 15 pounds? No. Now how could that possibly be? My answer is that it's a good middling number, and many stores have resorted to having too few turkeys rather than too many and getting 14 pound turkeys when their supply runs out.

I had to go to a smallish grocery store to find turkeys that had different sizes. In this case, other than the ubiquitous 14 pounder, there was the 18-20 pounds. I did spot a few 11 pounders. That was OK, though overpriced.

Second, these turkey are popsicles. They are frozen blocks of ice. So my strategy of brining probably was far less successful than it could have been. First, being frozen, I have no idea how much brine it absorbed. Second, being frozen, all the turkey parts, wrapped in plastic, were fused inside the body cavity of the turkey.

If I got them early, then I might have let it thaw for a day, before even brining.

Third, brining is a total pain. First, to get a container that's even big enough is daunting. I bought a huge stockpot (at least, I thought it was huge). Apparently, not huge enough. You're better off buying a cheap plastic bucket (Alton Brown recommends 5 galons). I could barely fit my tiny turkey (not so tiny, as it turns out) in this stockpot, and could not submerge it at all.

Finally, slow cooking is not the ideal way to bake a turkey. I cooked the turkey over 9 hours at pretty low temperature (250 F). It causes the turkey's skin to be really dry, although the turkey itself was only modestly dry. I might aim for Alton Brown's solution which is at the other extreme. Heat at 500 F(!) for half an hour, then at normal cooking temps for 2 to 2.5 hours.

I think I need a real meat thermometer too, so I don't let it cook and cook. That would probably help as well.

All I can say is that making turkey ain't easy.

Oh yeah, and there's a lot of food to eat too.

No Country for Old Men

In a film which puts its audience on edge, sometimes the quiet moments say more than the carnage.

No Country for Old Men is the Coen brothers' latest, and pits, if that's the right word, three characters against one another. There's Llewelyn Moss, who stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad, and picks up a pile of cash, which seems, in most films, a cause for trouble. There's Tommy Lee Jones, the sheriff, whose trying to figure out what's going on. You wonder, perhaps, like Misery, whether his inquisitive nature will get him into similar consequences as the sheriff in that film. Then, there's Anton Chigurh, whose much like the Terminator. You can't stop him.

His character reminds me a little of Samuel Jackson's character, Jules Winnfield, in Pulp Fiction. To be fair, Jules, outside of his killing, seems to go on about his life as usual, trying to be cool and hip. Eventually, however, he wonders whether his life is meant for killing, and has a change of heart.

Whether that's what happens to Chigurh, is not entirely clear. Up until the ending, the film seems to be building up, as many films of this kind of genre are, to some kind of final showdown, to see who is the most clever, and who wins in the end, and yet that would lead, I imagine, to something the film can't easily deliver.

Why does Chigurh do what he does? How is Llewelyn so darn clever? Why doesn't Chigurh kill the sheriff (it seems that he could have)? Does Llewelyn's wife survive? If she doesn't, why does he seem to feel remorse? If she does, what does that mean? Has mercy meant that he's now going to pay for a life full of mayhem? Was he some kind of devil's spawn, forced to see good, and then punished for it?

Almost aside from the cat-and-mouse of the two men are the quiet conversations with Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. He relates a story early on about the old times when the sheriffs didn't need guns. What does that say about now? That we're heading to lawlessness?

And what of the rather bizarre weapon that Chigurh uses? Why does he pick something so strange? Is it because no one will suspect it is a weapon? Indeed, we don't. Many of the people he kills are randomly innocent. Does he use the weapon because he sees them as some kind of cattle, being slaughtered by him (perhaps echoing some basic idea in Killer of Sheep).

There's no doubt that the Coens are good at what they do, building up tension, but not keeping it ratcheted up throughout, letting the quiet moments be, as the sheriff recounts stories of the past.

And what of the Mexicans? They serve no function except to be some vague threat that Chigurh disposes of. What is their role? (Javier Bardem, as it turns out, is Spanish, so his American accent is fairly impressive).

The film's ending is, of course, rather abrupt. The kind of ending you don't have in really popular films because, well, it doesn't seem to satisfy. But it leaves at a point where you don't know what's going to happen. Is Llewelyn just a more sympathetic killer, who will eventually do what Chigurh does? Does the sheriff decide to leave this violence? Is the sheriff the son of Chigurh (that was a random thought I had)?

An intense film worth watching, even if it leaves your head scratching.

Internet and Films

I was just reading a review by Mike D'Angelo about a film called Reservation Road, which is a story of a lawyer, who gets into an accident and kills a kid while driving, but leaves the scene, and is later asked by the father to find who did it, and try to sue the heck out of the guy.

The point Mike finds fascinating is not the odd trap that the lawyer finds himself, and how he will deal with this situation, of a furious father asking him for help, and not knowing that the lawyer was the guy.

It's that the guy uses the Internet, mainly Google, to find information, and to find support in moments of grief, reaching out to strangers, rather than to his own wife.

The Internet is treated in a non-chalant way, instead of the way it's dealt with in older films like, say, Copycat, which uses huge fonts, and huge text so you can see the chat, or Mission Impossible, which uses a graphic of an email send randomly out by a flipping envelope. Or even more obvious film plots like You've Got Mail.

It's very much like the difference between the cyberpunk novels and Asimov novels. Asimov SF is very fascinated with the technology that Asimov has invented in his head, and the characters talk about it. In cyberpunk novels, the world is the way it is, and the people inhabiting it merely use the technology. There's no explanation of why or how the technology fully came about, even as the stories themselves to emphasize technology.

Unlike, say, Star Wars. Star Wars treats technology even more off-handedly. No one even bothers to talk about where this technology comes from. Who builds the ships? Where's the labor? Where are the smart people? All completely ignored to tell the story. But where the viewer is constantly being shown amazing images of a kind of future society (or the past, in the Star Wars mythos), it's a far remove from the culture we know today.

Certainly cell phones already make part of our current society, but the Internet has affected people more profoundly than films have represented, and in perhaps ways that are more subtle than film-makers would like. For example, people might really get into Facebook.

I've been using it lately to find some people I haven't met in a while, hoping, they, too, might have gotten on. Some folks have, while others, thinking that this is for kids, have avoided it. But it acts a bit better than LinkedIn for keeping up with people. Where's the dramatic value in that?

And more interestingly is how people are more willing to meet new people out of the blue, rather than simply restricting their circle of friends to merely the workplace or college. In that respect, the Internet allows people to meet others more easily, although possibly more superficially. It's hard to make a really good film that strikes the right balance, portraying accurately what happens to people, without seeming like some weird cautionary tale (such as the many movies or tv episodes about cyberstalking).

In particular, we now have the ability to find information about all sorts of things, from restaurants, to directions, to the origins of a holiday, to information about people, should they, for example, choose to blog about it. This is something that wasn't there before, but is there now, and the film industry has yet to popularly capture this.

And that's not even including those who love MMORPGs. I'm sure filmmakers know such players exist, but can't even imagine how that all works, or how to craft an interesting story from it.

But perhaps this is the first of more films that will treat the topic more maturely, more matter-of-factly.

Black Hole

I remember watching The Black Hole as a youth in a local movie theater. The story was about the crew of the Palomino that discovers the Cygnus, a ship once thought lost, near the event horizon of a black hole. As it turns out, the Cygnus is run by a madman, named Reinhardt. He has a right hand man, which is a robot, named Maximillian. The rest of his crew is (apparently) robots, his crew (allegedly) having abandoned him.

The film was made two years after Star Wars, and was Disney's response. Wow, does this film look old compared to Star Wars. You have Anthony Perkins (of Psycho), Ernest Borgnine, Robert Forster (Baretta). There are two robots, Vincent and Bob, that are analogous to C3PO and R2-D2. Although the film was made in 1979, the look of the film screams 1960s. The music is slightly bizarre sounding very much like James Bond's Goldfinger, which is not surprising since both were composed by John Barry.

The music also sounds a bit like Pink Panther, with the piano riff, which seems oddly out of place.

The quality of special effects, apparently well-note at the time, really doesn't hold up at all, especially, the lasers and the thrusters, which Star Wars, after all these years, still looks reasonably good. The meteors also look pretty bad. What looks good is the Cygnus itself, which is large and ponderous, but at least doesn't look like Star Wars ships.

The movie ends pretty surreal, with the crew forced to go into the black hole, and a scene that echoes a bit of 2001. Pretty unusual for a Disney film, but perhaps people were still taking their cues more from 2001 than Star Wars.

The pacing, the story, of all of it seems pretty off, despite the money spent on it. At least, Star Trek, which used (I believe) ILM for its special effects and came out the same year still looks pretty good from special effects. That, too, seemed inspired from 2001, and I think, despite its pacing, holds up pretty well even 30 years after its release.

Short and Sweet

The television was, some feared, the harbinger of doom for the film industry. One reason the television's aspect ratio was made boxish was to prevent movies from easily going to the television. Most films have pretty wide aspect ratios making it fairly rectangular.

Now, of course, with televisions becoming wider to match film ratios, films survive by getting on television.

At times, you don't realize a trip to the movies is controlled by many factors. The films themselves are almost always longer than an hour and a half, but shorter than three hours. An hour and a half or a little more is typical for a comedy, and two hours plus more common for dramas.

Most movies have to introduce the characters, action, and tell a story within those time constraints. An hour or so is just enough to do that. It contrasts greatly with ensemble shows on television, where you have many episodes to flesh out characters and relationships.

For example, Star Trek: The Next Generation had seven seasons to introduce their characters. And if people want to grow attached to the characters, you can't kill them off (which is sad that STTNG felt the need to have the "danger of the week" where the ship might blow up or characters might be killed, but, of course, aren't). Such ensemble pieces often struggle with strong, memorable characters. These are characters you become familiar with.

The weakness of this form is often seen in the big screen, when many of the minor characters are jettisoned, partly because of their acting skill, partly because the story or director is not skilled enough to juggle so many people (not everyone can be John Sayles).

The films that make it to the megaplex often have big budgets, big name actors, and tell fairly mainstream or genre pictures.

On the other end of the spectrum is the short film. Short films are often the product of film school students. Making an hour and a half film is extremely laborious requiring lots of people and lots of time. However, even a short film of twenty minutes is not nearly the "fire up the digicam and roll" experience one might imagine.

Twenty minutes is also really short to develop characters, to develop history, to have a semblance of a plot. It can be done, of course, but usually something has to go, and that something is typically both plot and characterization. Furthermore, the acting sometimes suffers, though typically, there is a glut of pretty good actors out there.

I was watching a short called Night Swimming
on TV. You'd kind of call it a coming-of-age film, but really, it's almost too short for that. One teen, whose father wants him to apply to college, is having second thoughts. His best friend is dating a girl who seem hot for one another. The two decide to head to a concert in New York City. The girl can't go because her parents won't let her.

Already, this summary shows some of the cracks of film-making. The director/writer needs a way to have the two guys be together for a quiet moment, and yet needs to stress the importance of the girlfriend, and thus, the awkward idea that she can't make it to the concert.

As they go, they end up going off the beaten path (partly because it's more scenic), and the car breaks down. With technology, one could use cell phones to call (though I've discovered some places are pretty rural, and calling out can be an issue), so this evokes a time where cell phones weren't so ubiquitous. They decide to hang out the evening until they can figure out what to do in the morning.

At this point, there is a rather odd artificial plot element added. A gunshot is fired. After all, they are in the woods. Perhaps someone is hunting. And one guy says there's some psycho out there. This turns out to be a bit of a red herring, but it adds tension to the rest of the film, because of all the old conventions of people getting killed.

After a while, it's revealed the loner teen whose dad wants him to go to college has long had a thing for his best friend. It's implied that something possibly goes on that evening as they sleep in the back of their SUV. The next day, Otter (the main character) gets up, and his friend has found the hunter, whose willing to give them a drive back. He looks creepy, and there's a thought something might go on, but again, more movie imagination. Already, his buddy is starting to distance himself from the experience.

Once they head home, his buddy is no longer interested in being together, though Otter wants it to go on, realizing it probably can't go on. He eventually places the envelope for applying to college in a mailbox (how quaint), and decides to get on with the rest of his life.

Now, compared to a longer film, this one barely has time to get to the key point of this film which is the quiet moment where one guy (Otter) finally admits to himself and his best friend how he feels. But a short film can hide some of the faults of a longer film. You'd be hard-pressed to imagine how they might stretch this film to standard feature length. That length would require a completely different plot, or something highly creative to work.

For a twenty minute film, however, there are smaller things to notice. The drive in secluded upstate New York, the sun shining in the trees, a small pickup truck, the music. Indeed, these elements, evocative of a time and place, trite as the may be, work better in short films. Short films are likely to lack in originality, mostly because the directors are often inspired by something important in their lives, often taken from films they've seen.

Even so, I'm willing to forgive a lot for shorter films because they are the stepping stone of directors, who often try to tell personal stories. You aren't likely to get genius, but you are likely to get reasonably good acting, reasonably good production values, and the germ of an idea trying to peek its head through.

Brokeback Phil

Phil Jackson, the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, recently made a remark about some Brokeback Mountain strategy involving penetration and kickouts. While this got some laughs from reporters, gay and lesbian groups found it offensive.

Some sports shows questioned whether it was offensive. Shows that had, months earlier, found Don Imus's comments of nappy-haired hos offensive, which eventually lead to Don Imus's firing (although I think he's been rehired elsewhere--man, does he look old!).

Often, many things that don't seem offensive can sound pretty offensive when you simply substitute, say, African Americans for gays, and see how that sounds.

To be fair, I think people are pretty sensitive to too many things. The comments tend to touch on issues that aren't tackled head on. For example, why is the comment "nappy haired hos" offensive? When people call other people "hos", do they really imply that they are whores? When people call someone mofos (or it's more colorful variation), is that what they really mean? Or is it something they say so often that is meant to sound offensive, but not meant exactly as stated.

I'm sure the comments will disappear. Sports is short on memory. There's always some new game being played, some new controversy. A comment like the one made by Phil Jackson will disappear, if it hasn't already. Is that good or bad?

Success, Women, and Society

I used to teach computer science. Most male computer science majors will point out that there are very few women computer science majors. Women make about 20% of the majors, and possibly less as time goes on. Depending on the course, that percentage can dip precipitously low. Certain computer science course are perceived as more "male", usually the hard core programming classes like operating systems, networking, or compilers.

If you were to take a closer look at the demographics of women, you might discover that many women are Asian. That is, Indian, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and so forth. There are some white Americans, but not like white American males (the demographics are likely to be significantly different depending on what part of the US you look).

Although this doesn't provide anywhere near a full explanation of why there are so many Asian women, I want to think about why Indian women are in computer science.

Indian society is still pretty conservative. Guys don't date women, at least, the vast majority don't seem to do it (Indians seem bent on telling you how things are changing, but I would simply run the test of naming all the people they know that go dating on their own, and how many don't, and they would see the numbers are comparatively insignificant).

Most Americans find the thought of arranged marriages as ludicrous. They can't imagine trusting their parents to decide who they should spend their lives with. How would their parents know who a person finds attractive, whether this be physical attractiveness, or personality.

But let's ponder what this means. If a society prefers arranged marriages, this means that you need to segregate boys and girls. Parents also need to play a strong role in their children's lives, and children need to have respect for their parents. In the US, it's more common, I'd imagine, to find kids who simply don't get along with their parents. In India, I imagine this is rarer, though I'm simply guessing. You wouldn't imagine kids yelling at their parents telling them how much they hate them and how they are ruining their lives.

The force of marriage is so culturally strong that when Bollywood couples get together, they stay together. You don't hear of Bollywood actresses like Elizabeth Taylor, famous for having seven marriages.

Once women and men are separate, and somewhat dependent on their parents to find their spouses, then one of the rituals of American society is no longer important. That is, guys wanting to meet girls. Well, it's not to say that they don't think about this, but that opportunities to take it very far aren't nearly as common, and so both guys and girls can get on the business of being students.

Ah, students. I'm now focusing on a small subset of Indians, the literate, well-educated subset. Since women face fewer issues of guys trying to proposition them, or the pressure of having to be dumb or beautiful to be attractive, and since parents may seek a well-educated girl to match a well-educated guy, parents may find it's advantageous for their daughters to be well-educated.

And that's an interesting thought. A well-educated guy is likely to want a well-educated woman, but typically, not as well-educated as them. So can parents be compelling enough to overcome social pressure, allowing daughters to strive for academic success, when in the US, many parents opt for the simple goal of "having happy kids", which means they don't compel their kids to succeed academically.

There's a kind of irony here. A conservative society (but progressive enough to see women as needing jobs and being educated) might actually produce far more well-adjusted, academically minded girls, in contrast to a so-called freer, liberal society, where guys and girls try to adjust their behavior during a period of their lives where they are expected to go find someone they like or want to marry.

Running To The End

Once upon a time, there were only 3 channels of note: ABC, NBC, CBS (yeah, I guess PBS too). A 30 minute program would last 22 minutes. This meant that a program that went from 7 to 7:30 would usually end at 7:26. There'd be four minutes of commercial, and closing credits, leaving the viewer enough time to snack, hit the bathroom, whatever.

However, after 30 years of cable, one thing has changed. People like to surf, which means they like to see content from start to end. Many cable programs now have content to the very end of the show. You can watch content at 7:29, so even if you were surfing, and missed stuff from 7:25 to 7:28, there's still something on up to the very last minute.

I like that.

Amusing

See here.

Backpacks

I've had backpacks for as long as I can remember, and I've been upset at many of them for as long as I can remember.

Initially, I wasn't happy with them because they didn't carry enough. The average backpack manufacturer assumes that a person might carry two or three books tops. I wanted to carry four or five books, and notebooks, and it would weigh 20 pounds or more.

Lately, I want to have a backpack for gym purposes, but I want one pocket large enough to hold shoes, and another one large enough for other stuff, like towels, gym clothes, etc. This would be still be pretty large, but I haven't found anything like that.

Sadly, this leads to another pet peeve. We buy stuff before we can properly use it. Sure, we can return it, but it can be a pain. And sometimes, we can't return it.

I can't tell you how many things I've bought that I don't use because the moment I tried it out, I realized it wasn't any good. If I could only have found out at the store, I wouldn't have even bothered.

I think the lesson I've learned, at least when it comes to backpacks is: see it before you buy it. I bought one based on a good review, and the sucker is tiny. I think it can serve my needs, but it isn't ideal.

One day, I think, they'll let people do some of the design on their own before buying it, much like people do with PCs, and that day will be revolutionary.

Love and Marriage

As much as we are bombarded by television and movies, it's amazing they don't have more influence than they do.

I'll give you an example. The typical Bollywood film, beyond being about song and dance, tends to focus on love stories. Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, that kinda thing. There are still some hangups in society which prevent, say, the three-minute onscreen kiss that, to be fair, was a problem in US cinema 50 or more years ago (and directors tried very much to skate to the edge of what was allowed), is pretty much verboten.

Yet, the entire subcontinent, which is India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh (I'm sure I'm missing some other countries) are one of the largest, last bastions of arranged marriages. Indeed, there is a name given to marriages that aren't arranged: love marriages.

Cinematically, arranged marriages aren't as dramatic as love marriages, and really, to skirt around that issue, marriages aren't even the point. It's the fairy tale meeting of boy and girl.

While guys and girls are less segregated in the metros (what we call "cities"), there is still segregation, and it's more profound in the villages, and, to be fair, even in the IT industry. I remember goading on this guy to talk to the girls in the company, and he said that he would get kicked by the girls if he tried. He was perfectly content having his marriage arranged, and not having to think about finding someone. Indeed, he might argue that he shouldn't buck tradition, and that his parents knew best.

And the funny thing? Despite the movies showing a world that seems at odds with the ones that most desis live in, movies are good entertainment. I doubt these displays of wholesome love is considered a travesty, something that criticizes the traditions of arranged marriages.

Why is that? Why, after all the movies that are shown, with many a guy wooing many a woman, does that not translate to the real world? The answer is rather simple. Guys understand they aren't the dashing movie stars that are shown. They are shy. Even in the US, where arranged marriages are practically unheard of, guys find it tough meeting that first girl. They often have to be egged on by their male friends, encouraging them to take that step, until they finally muster the courage to ask for a date. After that, it's probably not SO bad (though some always find it challenging).

And when every male you know is not asking women out, then you live with the status quo, and let the parents figure it out, so you don't have to. This, despite film after film, encouraging the notion of love.

For a less extreme example of the lack of power in pop entertainment, consider television programs. How often do you hear a Southern accent? Until the 70s, you didn't much hear African American accents. And Boston and New York accents are uncommon.

Yet, despite how common "good English" is spoken on television, the influence of family and friends seems much stronger than television, and accents persist. It hasn't been washed out because of television.

I find it fascinating how much or how little
popular entertainment affects the behavior of people.

Why Facebook Works

A few weeks ago, perhaps even a bit longer than that, I was invited to get a Facebook account. I had never thought about using, say, MySpace, but I had been somewhat intrigued by Facebook as a cleaner version of MySpace.

But until I started using Facebook, I didn't realize what was its appeal.

To take stock of this, let me backtrack a bit. One of the earliest social networking sites of the ilk of MySpace was LiveJournal. LiveJournal has been around a while, and it focuses on one thing: blogging. You can't do that much more than blog. You can add friends, but mostly it's just their names.

MySpace also allowed for blogging, but you don't have to if you don't want. You can put some information about yourself. It has a few attractive features. First, you can add music fairly easily. There's an annoying player that starts off when you visit a page. And, then the other part, as far as I can tell, was the list of friends, which you showed off like collecting cards, and these two aspects, music and a long list of friends, seemed to appeal to lots of teens (and horrid backgrounds).

Facebook seems to dispense with blogging altogether. It's not easy to point to why Facebook works, but in a nutshell, I'd say it's the constant feed.

You have a feed of what all your friends are doing, and this constant activity lets you see who becomes friends with whom, and what groups or networks people are joining, what games they might be playing, and then you can "poke" people as well, forcing interaction in the simplest of ways. Facebook is kind of a mishmash of features from stuff like IRC (in slow motion) and game-playing.

I go to do two things. First, to add more friends to see what they are doing, and then to play this movie game, which I do partly to annoy someone else, and partly because it's mildly addictive (and not very satisfying, I must admit, though it's decidedly clever by not telling you what the top scorers have score, but merely telling you your rank).

And there is a twitter like status bar letting others know what you are up to. In a weird way, it's news of your friends, and it feels like this idea grew organically rather than being completely planned. This feed idea works even as many people who use Facebook don't even know what a feed (e.g., an RSS feed) is.

I talked to someone who's younger than I am, but has a pretty busy schedule who feels (correctly) that he has no time for this. In the end, Facebook is a time-sink, whether you are interacting with your friends, or doing individual activities.

I suppose Facebook also appeals to Web 2.0 folks, because it has the fade effects, and overlays, and so forth. Stuff you expect to see in typical Web 2.0 sites.

I dunno how long this will last, but I came to it late, and people still seem to be doggedly involved, even as many have abandoned MySpace, partly because blogging is way too time consuming for most people, whereas a Twitter like status is low barrier to entry. Rather than spew paragraph after paragraph, it's only one line, and the others read it, and possibly react to that one line.

I'll fill you in if I figure out more about why Facebook works so well.

Repeat Business

I was at the orthodontist a while back. For some reason, there were several seats side by side. Perhaps it's because it's cheaper not to have several rooms, or they were meant for kids, but now have been retuned to handle adults.

In any case, next to me, two people were discussing their Comcast cable, and basically complaining. Here's the issue in a nutshell. Comcast provides cable and charges probably 40-60 dollars per month. People just don't like spending that amount per month. If they could get the same service for, oh, 20 dollars a month, they'd be super happy. Maybe not super happy, but happy.

And this has prodded some people to get rid of cable altogether, because it ain't cheap. The basic point is that people don't like monthly charges. Rent is bad enough already, but when you add on top of that services like TV, people start to think, is it really necessary?

Clearly, the cable companies want you to spend as much as possible, and people do. Is there going to be some valid alternative?

And maybe this is why DVRs haven't been more successful. Tivo requires monthly fees too. Even though it's about 15 dollars a month, when you add all the other monthly fees people pay, it adds up.

DirecTv has a clever add. They claim they have monthly services of 30 dollars a month. That's true, but the services are minimal, and the next service up is almost 50 dollars a month. It's not like you get more value at 35 or even 40 dollars. It jumps up 20 dollars to get the next set, and that's where most of the interesting stuff (for most people) are. In a sense, you aren't saving that much over regular cable, but many companies do stuff like that.

The most devious of this is U-Haul, that advertises 20 dollars. But there's that sneaky "plus mileage", which is often a dollar a mile, so you easily double it, and then they suggest insurance, and pretty soon you are paying 70 dollars, not 20, and you realize that 20 is totally ridiculous. You imagine the government would step in and force them to advertise something far more reasonable, which, of course, they won't.

It's too bad we don't have more people fighting on behalf of the consumer, who, by their very name, already consume more than they should.

Ephemeral Actor

It's 7 AM, and I'm watching Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, and I was curious who played some role. After checking out with IMDB, I think it's Edward Clements, but even if it isn't, Edward Clements is interesting because he's only ever had two roles, the one in Metropolitan, and a smallish role in Star Trek 6.

And that's it. It's not perhaps nearly as bizarre as Chris Tucker's career, who, despite a flashy (read, annoying) role in The Fifth Element has really only had three roles in the last 6 years, namely, the three Rush Hour movies. You'd think Chris Tucker, a guy you probably have heard of, would have acted in something else.

In any case, Edward Clements. Here was a guy who had two roles in the space of two years, and it seems his first role was a rather large role in a rather unknown film. People who watch films, and I mean a fair bit of films, are likely to know of the quirky films of Whit Stillman, with his mannered characters and mannered dialog, it seems much like a British film of manners set in the US, which lends to its strangeness, as no one else makes films like it (which doesn't mean it's exciting, just different).

And as many people of that generation weren't really computer savvy, Mr. Clements appears to have disappeared. Where is he now? How did he get this role to begin with given that he's never acted before? Friend of the director?

And this, I imagine, is the story of many an actor, who has a breakthrough role (as much any role in a film is breakthrough), then decides, a year later, that they aren't going to be an actor anymore?

Such an ephemeral job, acting.

Array Array!

Much in the tradition of repeated titles such as Europa Europa, Jamon Jamon, and Corinna Corinna, there's Array Array!.

Except this is not a film, but a play on words. "Array" roughly "hey" as in "hey you" in Hindi. And in computer-ese, arrays are the simplest data structures beyond the lowly variable. Once you teach a beginning programmer a variable, if-then, then it's time for loops and arrays. And, in this day and age, the next step is objects.

We say familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds love. People gravitate to the stuff they find easiest. Since arrays come so early on, people use arrays, even as, in principle, they learned objects.

To give a more drastic example, I heard of a project where students were asked to design classes for a project. Up until that point, they had been told classes and methods to implement. They didn't have to think it up themselves.

When asked to do this project, students fell into one of two categories. Those who used one super class to do everything. And those who treated each class as if it were a variable(!). Thus, if the program needed ten variables, they created ten classes.

Indeed, you also find, despite knowing better, that beginners prefer to write super functions hundreds of lines long rather than break it up into functions. The thought of having to pass variables to functions, even to break down a problem into functions drives them nuts. They have no idea how to do it. Indeed, given their druthers, they might prefer to code in FORTRAN, and forget about modular design, despite all attempts to teach them otherwise.

I have an idea how to solve this.

Teach design.

And teach design separately from coding it up. There's perhaps many a entry level coder, who goes to a computer job, and finds execs who've never programmed seriously a day in their lives making decisions on how this should be done and that should be done, and says "I could make those decisions too!" (They probably can't, but it seems easier than coding).

Design is something like making managerial decisions. If you don't have to code the design up, you might create a more sensible design. Then, the design can be critiqued on its own, and eventually, this might lead to better designs, which means coders will care about design rather than care about getting the code to work with the least hassle possible.

Of course, after the novice coders create a design, then they should implement it, to see if they regress into arrays and huge functions. If they don't, then the idea has merit.

On Awesomeness

I'm listening to All Kinds of Time by the group Fountains of Wayne who made such quirky pop-melodies as "Stacy's Mom", a song about a guy who's fallen for Stacy's mom (implied that Stacy is his age).

All Kinds of Time is about football, but more precisely, it's about reaching a kind of nirvana in a sport where avoiding mistakes is emphasized. To give you a sense of this, football (American) is essentially a game of errors. A quarterback tries to make good plays, while avoiding giving the ball to the opposition.

A quarterback's mistakes are no more dramatized then when he passes the ball, because this is a high risk move, that can lead to turnovers. In football, a turnover means the other team's offense gets control of the ball, and if you are deep in your own territory, it can be an easy score for the opposition.

In a typical scenario, the offense must move the ball about 80 yards to score a touchdown. They have three chances to move the ball ten yards at a time. If successful, they get three more chances, otherwise, they typically kick the ball to the opposition. Kicking the ball typically puts the ball deep in the opposition's side of the field, meaning they have to go about 80 yards to score.

If, on the other hand, the quarterback turns the ball over, the opposition might get the ball and only have to go, say 40 yards. In football, the shorter the distance, the better your chances to score. Turning the ball over means you've (temporarily) lost the chance to score, and your opponent may have a great chance to score.

When passing, a quarterback may only have a few seconds to decide whether a receiver is "open", i.e., it's safe enough to pass the ball without the defense (the opposition) intercepting the ball (thus, turning the ball over to the opposition). The more time a quarterback has to throw, the more likely they can be successful in making a decision. Even so, quarterbacks get desperate, and feel they can "squeeze" a pass, and often this leads to turnovers.

The song, then, is about when a quarterback has "all kinds of time" to make a pass. Even though the offensive line has a lot to do that, the song is about reaching a point when the quarterback "gets it", and that he's going to be successful. It's the aha! moment.

This leads me to Eric Hodel.

I was talking to Eric Hodel in what has to be the creepiest way to talk to someone (well, not really), which is merely to hang out while he's having a conversation. You resort to such breaks of decorum realizing such opportunities are pretty rare. After all, I'm not likely to meet Eric for months at least.

Oh, yeah, who is Eric Hodel. Hmm, well, that's a good one. From what I gather, he's a prolific Ruby coder who's contributed a lot to the open source community, in particular, writing autotest that removes one layer of human involvement in getting tests run. He's apparently written a fair bit of other code too.

From his talk, and from his general appearance, he seems like a meek personality, so it surprised me a little, when I followed up and asked him how does one become a good coder.

And he says (more or less) "Some people code, and some want to be awesome. I want to be awesome.".

Thoughts of Zig Ziglar came to mind. Zig Ziglar, as I mentioned in a previous blog, was a Christian motivational speaker back in the 60s, and might have single-handedly lead Americans to emphasize everything to the Nth degree. Rather than say "I'm good", you say "I'm great!". And of course, leading to "I'm awesome".

It was a brief comment, probably meant in the simplest of terms.

Eric Hodel wants to be awesome.

But as I am wont to do, I thought about what this meant, especially in light of what Marcel Molina (Junior) said about beauty.

Awesomeness, at least, when it applies to a person seems equivalent to "I do awesome things", which is more like "I write awesome code", as opposed to "My personality is awesome". Awesomeness, in this respect, appears to be about action. Getting stuff done. It is, presumably, also about a state of being. It is a goal, a task.

Awesomeness has a catch.

How do you obtain it? Part of it is, I'd imagine, inherent. For example, if you've never trained to be, say, a tennis player, then to be an awesome tennis player may be out of your grasp. However, if you've been a pretty good coder in some language, or if you're still in school learning to be a good coder, then becoming awesome might be in your grasp.

I had planned to ask Eric why he thought his talk was popular. He had given a talk on how to be more productive. My guess? People want to be more productive. But more importantly, they want to know if there's a secret. What does one of the most prolific coders in Ruby do, and can I do the same thing?

The likelihood is no, you can't do the same thing. You can only do better relative to yourself. Eric said that, in the end, he writes open source for stuff he cares about, and that he's not out to fix everyone else's wishlist of missing features. He figures they could do it.

Except, of course, they can't or won't because it takes too much work or smarts to be awesome. It's hard! They lack passion and brainpower. Eric might rightly point out, yeah, well that's your problem. And that'd be completely fair, which isn't to say some people don't ask anyway.

In some disciplines, most notably sports, there appears to be some criteria to judge how awesome you are. You can compare where you are to where you want to be. With coding, that's not nearly so clear. How do you know what to do to get better?

And in the end, why do we want to be awesome? Is it because society places a premium on success? That we strive to be better than others because we have pride? Or does it merely facilitate doing things. If I'm awesome, then I can things I want to. If I'm an awesome basketball player, I can dribble-drive and dunk. If I'm a chess player, I can compete against grandmasters.

And does the pursuit of awesomeness (as opposed to happyness) make one much more likely to achieve this level?

Somehow, I think it might make a difference.

Ruby and VoIP

Jay Phillips (hope I have his name right) of Adhearsion gave the third talk this morning. You might imagine that there wouldn't be that many people interested in telephony, or at least, writing software for telephony (just like far fewer people design cars than drive cars), but the Ruby community seems diverse, and a good number of people had had some experience in telephony.

His talk was putting a Ruby layer on top of Asterisk, an API for telephony, that would make coding telephony applications easier than it is now.

My point isn't to summarize his talk, but to summarize the way he gave his talk. The most successful talks do several things right, and one thing that is amazingly overlooked is sound. Universally, getting audio right is horrible. No one can seem to do it. It requires engineers, you need to be close to the mike, and so forth.

Some guy named Dr. Nic gave a talk. Between his accent and the volume, it was hard to hear what sounded like quite an entertaining talk. If you do nothing right, make sure you can be heard. It is absolutely critical to a good talk. It can torpedo a great talk, which is why folks like Dave Thomas seem to know "get the sound right".

The second key is to have minimal slides. Play a bit with the fonts so it looks aesthetically pleasing, but don't cram much information. If you do, it's probably too technical for a crowd like this. Some of the most successful talks seem to be the least technical because it appeals to a wide crowd. Talks that make people think, even as it may not offer much in terms of improving skill, can be far better than those that attempt to teach something that requires a lot of time to figure out.

And so this talk went well because the sound went well, the slides were good, Jay spoke well. It meandered a bit at the end when he was just doing demo after demo, but other than that, it piqued interest, which is what most talks should aim to do.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Matz

Yukihiro Matsumoto goes by the name "Matz". He's been going by it so long that I'm sure few people know his full name, being typically polysyllabic as Japanese names are wont to be.

Asian society tends to favor modesty, and so I had come to the talk a little late, but then it was running late anyway. "Matz" had been sitting up in the front row (I was in the front row, but off to the side) with his mini laptop clicking away on previous days. At least, they had a spot for him. But today, he stood near the back for some of the talks, standing, because, he wasn't going to be so presumptuous as to take someone's seat. After all, he's a nice guy.

But it's still interesting to see, that a society that emphasize modesty and circumspection affects its people so profoundly. You never know. Maybe Matz is really proud of what he's done, and perhaps that has gone to his head, but no one much could tell if that were the case.

It's a bit of a contrast to DHH who kinda revels in his rock star status, wearing his slightly modern indie dragon clothing. To be fair, Matz wears a leather jacket, jeans and nice shoes, creating the aura of Western cool, combined with typical Japanese reserve (mostly the language).

I had bumped into some woman getting an omelette this morning. She was asking what was going on in the conference, and the guy making omelettes said there was a Ruby conference (in addition to weddings and such). So I explained a bit about Ruby to her, which is to say that I told her it was a programming language (had no idea if this even rung a bell) and that the inventor of the language had come from Japan, and people were there to see him.

That wasn't entirely true, but neither was it entirely false. She seemed amused at the idea, but I'm sure had, say, the President been there, a guy who had invented nothing (or at least half-truths), she would have found that desperately profound. Things only seem silly in their context, but we all do sillier things, find things profound where others chuckle at the seriousness of it all.

I suppose I have a sense that being in the back of the room resembles some feeble analogy to Rosa Parks, but I guess it's all good. I'm sure Matz was compensated for his trip, and even if there wasn't some stately throne for him to sit, eventually, he found some place to sit.

Transiency

Here's my problem. I'm in Charlotte. The conference pays for some of the food. Which is to say I pay the conference which pays the hotel which gives me some food in compensation.

But usually the food is discounted, the kind of 5 dollar a person meal that hotels seem to do when the conference is on a budget. I don't mind that, because it gives me an excuse to look around and find places.

I didn't rent a car as there's really no place to park that I wouldn't get charged for it. As it is, transportation to and from the airport is overly pricey, so this is one way to save money.

One way to waste money, and one I'm reasonably happy to partake, is to eat at local establishments. The problem is getting recommendations and finding someplace close by. I had asked the folks at the Omni, and they provided a sheet with nearby restaurants, which seems to only scratch the surface of nearby places.

I wanted to go to a place called Belle's BBQ because it seemed local and it seemed North Carolina.

I looked for it yesterday and couldn't find it, so I went to a chain, sadly, called Rock Bottom Brewery or somesuch. Still, I got some beer, chicken, ribs, so a rough approximation of what I should have had.

This morning I got up early enough to go search for this Belle's BBQ. And this time I found it. Which is to say, I found a sign that used to have Belle's BBQ, but it's gone. Yeah, some other restaurant called Feast(?) would be opening soon.

Here's the problem.

I went to some other rival hotel, which escapes me now, and they assured me the restaurant existed. But it could have closed down last week, or it could have closed down a month ago. Who would even know? They surely didn't. I asked about a Dilworth Coffee House. That was supposed to be nearby. Webpage was wrong about that too.

This is the problem. Untrustworthy web. It gets stale, out of date, and no one feels much pressure to update it. And it seems the obvious thing is to get people to do this, and people could do it, if they cared. After all, people pass by these shops all the time, and so someone could note if the locations they see are correct, and it could be up-to-date, but it isn't.

So I spent time trying to look for two places, neither of which were where they were supposed to be. I did find the only other place I was looking for which is a place called Fujo, a Japanese place, which was so-so, but at least, not too expensive.

I had breakfast at the hotel, and that was a bit of a ripoff. The buffet was as small as could be consisting of sausage, bacon, grits, eggs, potatoes, and a guy making omelettes. All for 15 bucks. Not including drinks! Ok, there was also French Toast, but usually there's fruits, danish pastries, breads, and a few other items.

Oh well, it was something different, and prices at hotels like this are bound to be excessive. I should have known what I was getting into.

Anyway, now I have to arrange to get back to DC, which means I'll leave the conference early, but at least I should get back at some reasonable hour.

Stupidest Elevator Evah

The Omni Charlotte has four elevators. They are the stupidest elevators in existence. You have to wait minutes before any elevator arrives.

Of course, by stupid, I mean that the algorithms used to govern its behavior is idiotic. For example, several guys jumped on an elevator marked to go down. They (smartly) figured that eventually it would go up. And so it must have, because when the elevator arrived to go up, they weren't in it, meaning I got the same elevator they did.

It's perhaps no surprise many elevators no longer tell you what floor it is on when you are waiting for it so this massive amount of stupidity isn't put on prominent display at every moment.

One Hand Clapping

Eric Hodel was giving his talk. He only had about half an hour speech, which is pretty good, especially when you know that there isn't 20 more minutes to talk. So he opened it up to questions, and because his topic was general enough, and because he seems like a prolific coder, people asked him questions that might pertain back to himself.

And so there were a series of questions. I asked one about how Eric learned to be a better coder (pair programming helped).

And then, there was a pause, and then someone clapped. And had that person not clapped, I'm sure Eric would have taken more questions, but it was a clever, though subtle way to end the conversation, and allow the next person to set up.

Clever.

More Presentation Sux

Besides a presenter not being great, another thing that kills presentations is when there are technical difficulties. If your talk is ready to go at 2:00, then it should go at 2:00. Nothing is more frustrating than sitting wondering why something that should simply work doesn't.

The good news is that I left, and went over to the session where they talked about contributing to open source. I think Stuart Holloway (hope I have his name correctly) is a great speaker. He pointed to some small piece of code in Rake, and how it bothered him, and how he strove to make it more beautiful. There was some agreement that it wasn't pretty, but not a general consensus on how best to fix it. Someone likened it to a bikeshed, where people could argue what color it should be.

I ended up skipping a talk on optimizing Ruby, and it seemed OK to skip, due to the quality of the presentation, not necessarily the quality of the content.

I'm now listening to a guy talk about "tightening the feedback loop". He's now doing a show of quick hands is that the Ruby community is heavily into testing. Apparently, there are two kinds of testing, some unit test and RSpec, which I heard during Railsconf, which is a unit test that looks like a spec. Apparently, the audience was split about half-half as to which they used.

He points out to something called autotest. Does this work in the background? Or run tests when you save?

He's now talking about something called flymake. Apparently does some on-the-fly syntax checking and shown within the editor (don't most IDEs do this?).

The guy wrote a e-lisp extension that does something similar to flymake with Ruby (flymake works with C). This highlighting works on tests, rather than on compiles. The code itself is highlighted in green and red, for good and bad.

Phil Hagelberg is giving the talk. The speaking rhythm could be a bit better. Some of it is not being particularly loud or into the talk. Not bad, but room for improvement.

Anyway, I decided to walk out on that one. I headed back to the open source development thing, but most people were coding, and nothing was being presented. I tried the next room, but got caught in the middle of something, and it didn't seem that interesting.

Did I mention how cool it is to be in the same hotel as the conference. When you aren't feeling it, you just go up to your room and rest. I took a quick shower, watched a touch of football. All cool.

Now I've moved to a talk on "maximizing productivity". I'm really hoping this will be a half-way decent talk. I'm telling you, a good talk is as much presentation as it is content. I know shy folks who don't like that, who are plenty bright, but have no idea how to engage a crowd. This is why they hire good actors for television shows than cast neighbors, because it would be nigh well unwatchable, even if what's being performed is intriguing.

Did I mention that conferences have another big issue? Because the rooms used to present are often combined to one bigger room, one big problem is that the floor is flat. That seems reasonable, but when you are watching someone speak, you don't want to be on the same level as the presenter. At the very least, you want the presenter to be elevated on a stage. As it is, without stadium style seating, you're forced to look over other people's shoulders, which is another reason I like to sit up front.

I was looking at the Rubyconf website. Compared to the Railsconf website, the content is minimalistic, only describing what the talks are. There isn't a wiki, places to go around town, ways to interact offline. Surely, with all the web development prowess in the Ruby community, someone would have produced a free version to handle conferences to give all these features, so it's trivial to set up. But apparently, these kinds of websites aren't particularly interesting to make?

This talk is being given by Eric Hodel. So far, his advice has been pretty straightforward, but one thing that's interesting is its simplicity. For example, being selfish, and just coding what you want, rather than solving everyone else's problems.

Eric is the second person who has mentioned autotest, which apparently is a tool that tests (on each save?).

Another key is having everything in sight. Code, autotest, test, and terminal as the primary windows, and a few other things.

He's the second person I've heard to mention something called heckle. Apparently, it modifies tests slightly and see if it still passes?

Another key is to automate as much as you can. Setup, migrations, and common tasks.

Spend time knowing your editor. That's usually a tough one because editors are complex beasts, and many people do the opposite. They find the fewest commands that allows them to work.

Apparently, releasing something is a bit of a pain. There's some involved process to create a release. There's a tool called "Hoe" that helps automates releases. It takes him about 5 minutes to do this.

One issue is that some people don't use bug trackers, and send bugs by email or as a comment in a blog entry. I would imagine that's because there's no uniform way to enter bugs. Each tracker does it differently, and people get frustrated.

Eric mentions "Hacking Night", which is something that happens at the Seattle Ruby Brigade. Apparently, this is useful to hash out ideas, or at least help other folks out, while avoiding your own problems.

Another goal is to write "pain-killers", which is code that allows you to do something less painfully.

So this was a reasonably good talk. I think the one thing that would improve it (other than humor) is volume.

Presentation Sux

Everyone does presentations, most likely on Powerpoint. Or maybe Keynote on the Mac. But they all have issues, and you don't even have to do presentations to see this. You just have to watch presentations.

The main problem is trying to do a demo. You have to stop your presentation, move to a new screen, continue, move back, and the audience gets to see all the presentation software, because, well, you can't easily imbed a window or screen in the middle of your presentation.

It's also difficult to back up correctly, especially with animations. You have to hunt around when someone says "Can you please go back". It seems the solution is that when you back up, you should skip over the animation, and force the person to have to restart it.

An interesting question is whether what you see, as the presenter, on your laptop, should match what is shown to the audience. After all, you might want to do all sorts of things the audience doesn't care about (take notes, for instance, or search through your slides).

It's interesting that this was one of the last "Office-like" items Google put into place, partly, I suppose, because compared to spreadsheets and word processing, it seems the least important.

And then there's simply the issue of displaying the information from the laptop, where you might have to tinker with resolution, and screen sizes, and how to mirror, and how this is far more difficult than it should be.

Indeed, Andrea O.K. Wright had to have her presentation postponed because no one could figure out how to get her laptop to display properly, leaving the audience vexed and confused.

Does anyone care about this, about how to make this kinda thing better?

Is There No Truth in Beauty?

This is Day One of Rubyconf 2007, held in Charlotte. The flight was pretty smooth last night. Clear weather, cool. For some reason, we still took off about 20 minutes after the scheduled time. I guess that's typical for flights to be arbitrarily delayed. At least, it landed on time.

The sessions at Rubyconf are being held much like Railsconf. There are morning sessions where everyone attends. The afternoon sessions break up into three groups, two with talks, and one more that's freeform.

The first talk of the day was given by Marcel Molina whose name, of course, reminds me of Alfred Molina (the actor). Marcel's talk was on the beauty of code. Since he had studied literature in college, he's long been interested in how humans define beauty, though in this case, how notions of beauty apply to code.

Several thoughts. I wonder if beauty is a social construct. Someone pointed out that his wife was beautiful, but he couldn't define why. All of advertising is meant to induce us to buy things, and sex sells. So advertisers want beautiful people.

So do people who make television programs. In fact, there are so many beautiful people in television, we don't even realize, except that we think that people are hot on this show, and that is not the norm of the world.

As Marcel points out, beauty can be transitory. What is a beautiful woman to someone from the 1500s may not be beautiful now.

To me, beauty has some transitory nature.

Yet, there are some things that feel like they hold on even years after they are discovered. Marcel points out Pythagoras's theorem (who also defined beauty) and that theorem is beautiful thousands of years later.

He points out beauty in language, but he points mostly to English. Is French more beautiful? Japanese? Are the equally beautiful? Can they really be equally beautiful?

I ask this because he eventually says that Ruby is beautiful, and therefore other languages, presumably Java or FORTRAN are ugly even if, at one point, they might have been considered beautiful.

He points out how assembly was the standard for a long time, and so the simple construct of a switch statement must have seemed beautiful at the time.

I wonder if beauty can only be produced by individuals. We think of artists as working in a solitary fashion. We don't think of art by committee. Maybe we can write code in solitary fashion, beautiful code. Can we write beautiful code if someone else is dictating what the code must do? Might it create mess that wasn't intended?

For example, at one point, the Communist party in the Soviet Union and China believed in utilitarian art, that glorified communism. Was this beautiful? What if you requested a person wear this bland uniform instead of a lovely outfit? Or if they smiled more naturally? Or more unnaturally?

He gave a particularly simple problem of converting strings to various data types. In particular, true, false, integers, dates, and then strings. What if he had ten types to convert? And it had to escape stuff? And it had to plug in different languages so true/false could also be vrai/faux.

You have to support internationalization! And this crappy date format, which odd exceptions.

As some point, all those constraints work against you to impact beauty. There's something to be said about simplicity, or even symmetry, in beauty. So the highly ornate decorations of buildings from old Europe or India might not be simple, but have beauty, partly because the constraints don't impact beauty.

Beauty is also comparative. We talk about beauty relative to things that are ugly. Can beauty mean anything if we aren't comparing? Is a person beautiful because they are beautiful relative to something that we consider ugly?

As related to code, beauty comes from making "mistakes". Writing code that feels ugly, and comparing it to code that feels clean, and starting to figure out principles of good code.

There's a sense that beauty refers to something permanent, as opposed to say, infatuation. So people always say you might fall in love when young but that is merely infatuation, and youth lacks maturity and lacks a sense of what love truly is.

That's all nice and touchy-feely, but implicit in the talk about beauty is that this is something we appreciate and should feel happy about.

And that's fine. After all, beauty, as it pertains to code, as touchy-feely as it is, attempts to address the question "what makes good code?". And people do strive for that, even if they aren't quite sure what that is.

Mathematicians and physicists talk about beauty and elegance in math. Beauty apparently need not be understood by all, even if some people treat beauty as if it were inherently universal, independent of human opinion. It's not. Beautiful code still looks like gibberish to the average person.

I have to hand it to Marcel, a guy who made the leap from literature to coding, for making me think about beauty in code. I have a book called Beautiful Code, which they were handing out copies during a raffle, and he gave some basic criteria for beautiful code, outlined by ideas of beauty from one Thomas Aquinas.

Marcel (and Thomas) said beauty consisted of proportion, integrity, and clarity. Basically, is the code nice and short, does it do what it's supposed to do, and can you tell what's going on? That is a practical measure of beauty, at least as it applies to coding.

Beauty is one of those things that it's hard to talk about to beginning programmers, because beginning programmers simply try to get the code to work. They don't care that it's convoluted, cut-n-pasted to death, not terribly robust, or perhaps doesn't even solve the problem. And in the end, programs don't have to be particularly beautiful, but the reason we raise the issue is that this unnatural way we write, that is, code, is something people often hate to read.

Indeed, in the early days of code, people would only do things themselves. They wanted to know how to do something, and they weren't prepared to read other people's code which has some weirdness to it. These days, it's important to learn how to read other people's code, and so beauty is an issue, because it really means readibility, but in the cause of getting stuff to work.

It's a complex issue, but it's interesting to discuss.

From The Mouth of Babes

The tech world, perhaps like many other niches, has its share of superstars. Of course, superstar is a bit of an exaggeration. Even within the programming community, not everyone has heard of "Matz", not everyone has heard of David Heinemeier Hansson. I was able to meet up with "Matz" and ask him a pretty silly question. Although he's attended many a Ruby conference, and although he has pretty good vocabulary, American accents and speed of talking seem to confuse him.

I asked him whether he thought about writing another language, possibly a crazy one, and he said that such languages have a very short lifetime, while languages like Ruby, being more general, have a longer lifetime.

I asked him this question because I recall that Niklaus Wirth, who wrote Pascal, wrote at least two or three other languages. But perhaps Wirth wrote languages at a time where its growth was not expected. Wirth probably figured he'd write it, and he'd be done with it. I'd guess that he would weary of thinking about what feature to add, what had to be supported, and so forth. I'm completely speculating of course.

On the flip side, two Duke students asked Matz about using Ruby as an intro language. He said that it has been used in Japan, though someone (Amy Hoy, to be precise) asked whether Ruby would make a good introductory language, and he said that some parents avoid giving their kids sharp knives, but some people give it to them. He wrote the language for himself, a programmer, and he was unsure how well it would work for beginning programmers.

I was curious why these Duke students were interested in Ruby as a language. I talked to Justin Wickett, who apparently runs a small company, and Michael Ansel, who are in computer science and computer engineering, respectively. They mentioned how there was too much math and theory, and while this would make them well-rounded, there was this huge world of web development that they were missing out on.

There is a though, prevalent in college, that students should be taught something, and taught something useful. The ultimate lesson in college should be that you can teach yourself. Even so, it's funny how most colleges, despite having this as their underlying theme, don't address the point directly. Why don't they tell students how to go about learning on their own? Indeed, it's often done by doing a poor job teaching, thus forcing themselves to pick up a language or a skill or a concept or something.

The computer industry is weird in that way. The people who best succeed need a combination of curiosity, initiative, and smarts, and it helps to have all three. the smarts will give you the ability to understand difficult things. The initiative (and/or patience/persistence) will compel you to work through times when things seem idiotic, or particularly challenging. And you have to be curious to find new things, because the industry is so faddish. People try this, or they try that. And as a conscientious developer, you need to pay attention to all sorts of things.

And that can be completely infuriating to many people who don't like that.

But back to Justin and Michael. They reflect a common belief in students that computer science departments fail to keep up with the real world, and while there's cool stuff being done, they don't seem to be doing it, and they feel bad that they lack these skills. But in particular, they feel the teachers should teach it to them (perhaps for the tuition they are paying, they wonder why they have to go through all the mistakes). But if the profs lack experience in these fields, then they lack experience, and they would be better served trying to find other resources to accomplish the tasks they want to achieve.

If that sounds like an indictment on the way we teach computer science, perhaps it is, but it also reflects the kind of reality of practical software development which flies in the face of the kind of knowledge that universities are used to imparting. Computer science professors are likely to say the only useful information is that which stands the test of time, thus compiler theory, automata theory, algorithms, data structures, are all stuff that seem to stand the test of time despite the fact that most of these subjects are less than 50 years old. In the computer industry, 50 years is a lifetime.

The problem with real world development is that it's not clean and sanitized as it is for computer science courses. Often, many of the real world difficulties are hidden away to give students one less thing to worry about. I recall talking to Jaime and he said that he ended up doing some of the work for a student working on a project because it was hairy, and the student wouldn't be able to figure it out. And yet, that's the kind of tedium real computer programming often involves.

At some point, people have to see it.

So that raises the question. Is Ruby a good programming language for beginners? Is there some suitable subset that can be taught that, while it doesn't fully show the power of the language, still covers enough of the important topics?

Many students struggle with programming, which is why a sanitized version is often given to students. And of course, they have other courses, which is why stuff is sanitized.

Conference 0.1

Ah conferences. They are ultimately undone by the fact that hotels haven't much changed the way conferences have worked in years. The biggest change has been getting wireless connectivity to handle the masses that need Internet all the time. Indeed, for a tech conference, that's what people crave.

Here's a typical situation. You have three rooms, or maybe four, and one talk is really popular. The rest are so-so. And wow, just no place to sit. It's hoped that all talks are about the same.

There's no simple way to redistribute the seats, no polite way to deal with a talk that seems boring, no way to flip from talk to talk to talk, short of seating everyone in their own room, with their own close captioned feed, and then they would lack the immediacy of talking to the person up front.

I was sitting in a talk by Andrea O. K. Wright. I'm sure she's an accomplished developer, and it helps to have a woman in a field that seems utterly dominated by men, but why oh why can't she be a better speaker? I know it's a lot to ask that someone be both a good coder and a good speaker, but it can really help.

I was sitting listening to a talk by Nathan Sobo. I mean, he's talking about frickin' parsing! It seems to be a solved problem, except he has a way to move beyond regexp (though to be fair, most parsers can do more than regexps--it's composition that's probably more interesting). In any case, he was a compelling speaker, did a live coding session that didn't suck.

Did I mention I was sitting by Obie Fernandez. Now, if you had asked me yesterday, nay, even this morning, who the hell Obie was, I couldn't tell you. To be frank, I can't even tell you now, except that he had his book sitting out titled The Rails Way (I own The Ruby Way so I know this book was out there, but had not thought it was published). Obie had his unique John Hancock on his nametag, his schedule, and so forth.

This is Rubyconf for you. You can bump into "famous" folks and not even know it, and they might think (haha) that they are similarly sitting by someone famous, except I happen to like sitting up front.

Sometimes I feel, when I attend these conferences, that it's a little like attending a physics conference. I feel like an outsider, an interloper. I don't play enough with Ruby nor Rails to really get what I need to out of these conferences. These conferences aren't particularly aimed at beginners (though David Black, he of the Amish beard, made a game attempt, but realized that running a free-form session, as appealing as that may be, really requires a bit more direction--I could probably suggest a way to do it. Instead, it turned out to be a crowd that wanted a break from the talks, and were pretty knowledgeable. A tough bind to be in, I'd say).

But then, I get to meet some folks that are learning Ruby too. The real problem is that these conferences range the entire gamut, from Ruby power coders to Ruby wannabe coders, and no one knows which one is which.

I see some of the same faces I saw at Railsconf at Rubyconf, even though it's a trip from one coast to the other. Apparently, DHH doesn't attend Rubyconf, though it would be a bit of a sin not to have Railsconf without DHH. I suspect he's given a pretty penny to show up.

Anyway, back to the theme. We deal with the most modern of technologies, but it seems so much easier when it's bits. It's so much harder when it's physical sites. Even if people have great idea for how to improve presentations, the implementation is the bottleneck. It costs too much, and so hotels simply don't bother. They already find it painful to switch 300 dollar televisions for 1000 dollar televisions. The furniture that the TVs fit in simply can't accomodate 32, 40, 46 inch televisions, and they aren't prepared to ditch that too.