In Your Facebook

A year ago, we were besieged by MySpace. It seemed like every kid wanted a MySpace page. Most of these MySpacers had the artistic talent of a hyperactive monkey in a room of paint-filled balloons. The resulting backgrounds were garish. Entering the page caused tunes to play, and you had to hunt around to turn the damn thing off. But it made it easy for kids to write a webpage. Unlike, say, Livejournal, it didn't have to be about blogging. It emphasized getting your friends to declare you as a friend. All the kind of high school popularism that infects who desperately crave this faux attention and care, treating friendships like merit badges. The neediest guy of all being founder Tom Anderson. At one point, everyone, by default, had Tom as a friend.

Did I also mention that MySpace is ugly?

The "grown-up" counterpart to MySpace is Facebook. Now, for a while, you couldn't easily get a Facebook account. It really was aimed at college students, and you were supposed to be invited, or something, to enter a Facebook network. Eventually, they let high school students create accounts, then everyone.

Everyone seems to say Facebook is a far cleaner version of MySpace, but it's become something of a social networking Web 2.0 darling. Check out TechMeme today and you'll find several articles about Facebook, most likely (I haven't fully checked it out) because you can write plug-ins for Facebook, and this has lead geekdom to do so.

Now, you might think that having a site that permits plugins is awfully geeky. Who would ever use such a thing? But here's the key: you don't need that many people to write plugins. A few is enough, and it allows the geeky part of the community to contribute to this online community.

Of course, I'm plenty late to the Facebook phenomenon. Heck, I'm still writing on Blogger! But I like to point this out to people even more lost about the trends.

Over time, I figure that's what I want to do. Check out trends and write about them. Normally, by the time I notice, it's already a trend. After all, you have to see it a lot, and by then, you know it's too late.

Even so, it's a good record for me to note it down.

Road to Nowhere

NPR is just chock full of good stuff.

Here's a question for you. Do you think computers in the classroom is a good thing? Many people do, and have pushed for computing in the classroom. The Web was supposed to bring the world's information to your desktop. Ah, if the world were only so virtuous.

What the Web brought, in addition to all this information, was porn, stuff to buy, sports scores, blogs, and all sorts of time wasting activities. You can download software to talk to others, work on your Myspace page (please let it be Facebook). In other words, many, many, many things that have little to do with learning, and everything to do with distraction.

Indeed, being hooked up to the Internet means savvy students can simply ignore what you're talking about. What educators want is a way to restrict students' access to the Web. Indeed, a better approach may be to limit or restrict access to the Internet, instead only permitting access to limited information.

Perhaps a different protocol for education websites that don't link up to the usual ones.

How many schools thought that just having computers would solve their woes? How much innovation came from teaching people to use computers? It would be something, at the very least, to give presentations, since many students lack good speaking skills.

But how many news organizations would even think about this subject matter? So often it's serious news like Iraq, or inane news like Paris Hilton. NPR, even more than PBS, seems to hit great topics that lie just on the side of news. They want to know what's happening to society, how it is evolving, and not simply cover what people think is important, but actually cover what is important.

Interpreters vs. Compilers

When I was first learning computer science, I used to wonder the distinction between a compiler and an interpreter. Honestly, it helps to write one or the other to know the difference.

I think it's easier to explain a compiler. A compiler takes a (mostly) human-readable program written in some language and (typically) translates this to machine code. CPUs , at its lowest levels, execute machine instructions. Typically, people compile code because running native machine code is faster than handling interpreted code.

Here's an analogy. Suppose you want to write an instruction manual. You have it written in English, but you intend for it to be used by Japanese folks. So you have the stuff translated to Japanese.

What's an interpreter? An interpreter is a program that understands a program you've written, and runs it on the fly. Let me give you an analogy, although this is a programming analogy.

Suppose you want to write a "robot language". You can tell the robot to move forward, turn left, turn right, etc. You can either convert this robot language directly to machine code, or you can write a program that incrementally processes it. When the user wants to robot to move forward, you call some code to move it forward.

Typically, interpreters are used in an "environment" where the user can make decisions on the fly, and the interpreter can offer commands to the interpreter as well as run code. The code it runs may not be converted directly to machine code and optimized, but is run though high level programming language code.

Wow, this is really hard to explain. Hmm, I think the closest analogy I can think of is that a compiler is like having a series of detailed explanations completely worked out and sent to someone. They can't ask you for more help afterwards. An interpreter is more like having a person answer your questions as needed. In other words, the interpreter is a program that serves as a kind of middleman, being able to handle commands as you type it in, while a compiler expects all of its input to exist right away, and makes a complete translation to lower-level code.

There's a software engineering analogy. A compiler is closer to the "big design up front" while an interpreter is more like agile design, where the customer can make changes along the way.

Fundamentally, they share stuff in common (basic parsing and such), but the goal of n interpreter is interactivity between the user and the interpreter where as a compiled program is meant to just run (it can have interactivity too, but not with the developer).

Ugh, I wonder what's a better way to explain the difference.

French Open

Many years ago, I'd watch an entire French Open from beginning to end. These days, I'll catch a set or two, here or there, and do something else instead.

I watched the first set of the women's final, between Justine Henin and newcomer, Ana Ivanovic. Ivanovic looked, for all the world, like she was going to pummel Henin. She broke Henin's serve to start the game, and went up 40-0 on her own serve. But, if anything, Henin is plucky. She'll fight, play smart, hit hard when she has to. Henin won that game and the rest of the set.

When people say tennis is mental, this is what they mean. If Ivanovic had the fight of Henin, if she believed she could keep up, pressure Henin, she might have won this match. Instead, nerves affected her, and she was unable to control the shots she used to demolish Maria Sharapova in the semifinals.

The bigger story surrounding Henin was how she was trying to reach out to her family. To be a successful player, Henin cut off her family, who she felt did not understand the kind of dedication a person needed to be a top player. Even as she won her first French, she did not receive any congratulations from her family--and she was happy they didn't bother her, claiming she wanted space to be herself.

But as she separated from her husband a few years ago, she decided to reach out to her family, her brothers and sisters and her father. Her mother had passed away some years ago. The siblings were tense, hoping Henin would be able to hang in there, but eventually realizing that Henin was going to have her way.

The men's final seemed much more inevitable than the women. For the last year, the story had been Federer and Nadal, Nadal and Federer. Federer was the best player in the world. Nadal, the best on clay. Federer had even recently beaten Nadal on clay, and had to feel great confidence as he made the finals.

But Nadal also fights. Unlike last year where Nadal came out nervous and was blown away in the first set, Federer and Nadal played a tight match. It says something that in the first two sets, Federer had some 16 break opportunities and broken only once. Nadal frequently fell behind two, three break points, and played long deuce games, but never cracked.

Nadal's basic strategy was to run around his backhand and basically punish Federer's own backhand. Federer seemed content to exchange his backhand with Nadal's forehand (Nadal being a lefty player). Surprisingly, Federer didn't try one of two things. He didn't serve and volley much, nor did he chip and charge much. To be fair, this is clay, and you don't expect such tactics, but still, it would be nice to see Nadal have to pass more.

Federer also didn't try to do the same to Nadal. He could have tried to force his own backhand to Nadal's backhand, and then try to attack Nadal's backhand, or he could have tried running around it (which he did more of in the second set).

I only saw Nadal go up 3-0 in the third before I went to lunch, so I can't say I know what happened.

Nadal's strategy had one interesting effect. By hitting to his backhand so much, Federer's tendency was to lean to his backhand, which meant Nadal had chances to strike into the open court to Federer's forehand.

Perhaps what really did Federer in was his unforced errors. Nadal played generally error-free tennis, while Federer went for more on his shots and missed more as a result. Federer served pretty poorly the first set, so it was amazing the set was as close as it was (Nadal did break twice, though it's hard to tell with a 6-3 score).

Still, Federer can view this much like Sampras. There's always Wimbledon where his serve is much more of a weapon. Can Nadal make it to the final again? Players like Roddick should do well, but he has a tendency to lose early. Nadal should be the wildcard again, and is more likely not to make the Wimbledon final than Federer.

Three more weeks til Wimbledon!

Review: A Dirty Carnival

Hong Kong films, especially those by John Woo, defined the Asian gangster movie. Films like The Killer and Hard-Boiled gave a new vision of gangster life. Woo peddled in cool. Slow-mo, double-fisted gun play, evil and good mirroring each other, doves flying in churches.

Woo liked the idea that good and evil weren't so clear-cut. Gangsters could have ethics, even as they were blowing people away ("but they were all bad!"). There are ludicrous moments such as the Chow Yun-Fat being in love with a blind woman who doesn't know what he does, or the rescue scene at a hospital where babies are being brought out as the body count hits double digits.

Like many Asian films, women don't fare well. Even as many of these directors are married, they seem to lack much understanding of women, so they keep them to stereotypes, helpless or pure.

Korean cinema has taken Hong Kong cinema and added a gritty realism to it. They aren't completely immune from a bit of silliness, mostly related to nostalgia. I'm reminded of the odd film Battle Royale whose conceit is that parents, tired of their rebellious teens have them sent to an island where the last remaining survivor gets to live. Meanwhile, each person is armed with an odd weapon, and slowly, the group descends into a kind of chaos, though not exactly of Lord of the Flies proportions. There's something unrealistic about the whole proceedings, because we're lead to believe that these teens are really on the verge of killing each other (OK, beyond the actual crackpot idea of putting teens on an island, playing Survivor, literally).

In the midst of this mayhem, there are flashbacks to a more innocent time, when the teens were all playing basketball. This scene is played in flashback, where the relationships are hinted at, and then you see what happens.

A Dirty Carnival is pretty sentimental, recalling a time when they were all kids and things were much more innocent.

Hmm, I'll briefly summarize the story. Byung-du is a mid-level gangster, of the sort that occupies GoodFellas. His mother is ill, and he can barely make ends meet. He plays a heavy, extorting money, but getting to keep very little of his own. The gang leader wants the DA offed, and it takes a while, but Byung-du, whose the leader of a tiny gang of his own, decides he must do this, so he can look good.

In the midst of Byung-du's trying to be a better gangster, he meets up with Min-Ho, a childhood buddy, who wants to make a film about gangsters, and needs to interview some real-life gangsters. Byung-du had always had a longing for Hyeon-ju, who is (amazingly) single working as a bookshop worker.

The structure is similar to Spiderman, alternating between Byung-du's life as a gangster, and his courting of Hyeon-ju, who's nervous dealing with a guy that's a gangster, even if he has a heart of gold.

Western music plays a central role in this film. Tango music is played throughout, and much like Hong Kong films, key characters sing songs that have meaning beyond just lyrics, including the Byung-du, Hyeon-ju, and the head gang boss.

What places this film beyond the typical Hong-Kong equivalent is what makes Spiderman more intriguing than Superman or Batman. Byung-du struggles as a gangster. Even as he leads his small group, he can't seem to move up the ladder, without drastic action that leads to drastic consequences.

The relationship between Byung-du and Hyeon-ju is worked out in more detail, much like Peter Parker and Mary Jane. Even so, women tend to be idealized in such films. Hyeon-ju is practically the only female, and she's generally a good person. Would it be more compelling if she weren't so good (she has no discernible faults other than being poor)? This is always a problem when men make movies. They don't want to write about women that they don't want to deal with.

And of course, there's the problem of having gangsters having a conscious and feeling sorry for what they do. It's a matter of circumstances, don't you understand?

Scorsese, for instance, doesn't really peddle in good and evil, but mostly in the weaknesses of men. He doesn't mind making characters that aren't all that likable. In GoodFellas, there's no ideal women. (I've heard, in earlier films, there are guys who imagine women to be alternately saints and sinners, the so-called Madonna-whore complex, but these are views held by the men).

In this view of the world as flawed and good, A Dirty Carnival owes far more to Hong Kong gangster films then say, a Scorsese film. Kim Ki-duk doesn't fall for this. Samaritan Girl has a kind of idealized female, but she's basically a teenage hooker, and even then, she's a bit eerie, smiling all the time, thinking she is trying to achieve a higher goal.

A Dirty Carnival also doesn't kick you in the gut quite like GoodFellas. It lacks Scorsese's intensity, but it also is far more sentimental than Scorsese ever would be. But the violence that does exist is far more intense than the stylized Hong Kong violence. Early on, scenes with gangsters battering each other with poles border between cartoonish violence (how can they be his so often) and something a bit more realistic. Korean cinema doesn't try to achieve wire-fu mastery like the Chinese films where fights are more like kinetic ballet, but attempt to make things more visceral, while still not being perfectly "real".

Why Korean cinema has evolved this way, I'm not sure. Perhaps the history of South Korea with corruption? Or with real riots? Maybe these things inform their films where such events may not have occurred in Hong Kong, so they imagine a kind of violence that's different.

It's not nearly as stark as, say, Takeshi Kitano's work, where he juxtaposes sharp moments of violence with moments of peace and artistic beauty.

I will say, for a film I had not heard of, it was pretty entertaining, even if I thought they could have aimed to be more realistic (how the filmmaker betrays his gangster friend almost doesn't make sense to me, except that he's desperate to be a filmmaker too). Ha Yu, the director, like Kim Ki-duk is able to hint at what people are thinking. As a group, Korean directors show a great affinity for wordless dialogue, getting you to figure out what's going on without words having been said.

As I think about how Korean films continue to garner more attention, I wonder what's happened to Japanese, Chinese (mainland) and Hong Kong cinema.

Passion 8

I think passion is overrated. This is a myth on par with living happily ever after. I'm sure there's a select few couples who are so in love with one another, that it feels like this mythical magic perfect relationship that movies and fairy tales espouse that simply want to make you gag.

Kathy Sierra, for example, believes companies ought to create passionate users. The idea is both fascinating and mildly repulsive. On the one hand, she stresses the idea that companies should make the best stuff they can that make users want the product so much, that they can't help but brag about it to their friends. This would, presumably mean not only better products for us all, but also happier customers. Who wouldn't love that?

But then it suggests that we, as consumers, became slaves to the consuming. How many people, ten years (or less) of living in the same place, staring at the same furniture, the same walls, want to remodel, redecorate? They're tired of living in the same place, seeing the same things. Their friends are remodelling. They want to remodel.

You know, this has rarely affected my parents. Many, many things are twenty years old. We have wallpaper dating to the 70s. It looks as tacky now as it did then, but they never think about replacing it. Why bother? They don't need to show off the house. They don't need the snazziest furniture. Why waste money?

And yet, having companies make these snazzy products that allow users to "kick ass" means you're asking people to spend money, to consume. Ipods are great, I admit. But I have a friend that's broken everyone he's had. Why do they break so much? Indeed, I bet most of the business of the genius bar is trying to fix broken Ipods.

There's something vaguely distasteful to me about trying to get consumers to get products, something akin to brainwashing. Having said that, I have to agree that if I am going to be consumerist (and alas I am, far more than my parents), I'd rather buy "good" stuff.

Although I cringe at the word passion for this reason, this time I'm going to write something positive about passion.

I was reading an IM message sent a few days back from Ken. I had somehow missed it because it was sent to my home computer, and I wasn't paying attention to it until yesterday. He said, why yes, he did have lots of books on running, even some on physiology. This, to me, is a kind of passion, though one could call it obsessive-compulsive.

Obsessive-compulsiveness is a trait that many software guys have. Who else would sit hours poring through code, searching for bugs. It's not particularly fun (even if some sick people seem to relish the challenge), and yet there you are, trying to figure out which, of many hundreds of lines of code, caused the problem.

I'd have to think Ken, as much as he likes programming and such, is more passionate about running. I wonder if he worries about getting older, about not being able to train like he's able to do now. I suppose you try not to worry about such things, and just do what you do, and adjust as needed. One could argue that any activity that one does while young might no longer be possible when one is older.

I'd also imagine that if he could simply make a living running, maybe he would. There are people I know that have hobbies that they really enjoy, but society makes it difficult to make a living out of it. Heck, there are plenty of video game players that enjoy playing video games, and some who wish they could make a living out of it. But then, you'd probably have to compete against others, and that might make it less fun.

But the point I want to make is not whether one could make a living doing a hobby or activity you really enjoy, but to think about what drives a person to want to excel. Now, Ken, I figure, isn't the fastest runner, or the guy with the most endurance, or what have you. In all reasonable measures, he's not in the "elite". But where he does excel is that he knows a lot about what he does. He tracks it, he reads about it, and he tries to maximize what he does for himself, without causing injury.

It's a bit like the commentators and columnists in baseball who realized they lacked the physical skills to play professionally, but had the acumen to understand statistics, and began cranking away, trying to use their superior math skills to compensate for athletic talent they weren't born with.

It makes me wonder, how passionate are people? And I don't necessarily mean that people are on some emotional, ecstatic high when they do stuff, but how much they feel compelled to push themselves to do something as best they can? I suspect a large number of people are not passionate about anything.

Some people loving shopping, and I suppose it can be considered a passion, though as a non-shopper, I can't begin to imagine how to quantify this. With Ken, I could probably ask him a bunch of questions, look at the various stats he's collected. I don't know what I'd do with all that information, but it would give some quantification over being passionate.

I remember many years ago, I knew this guy who was trying to finish a computer science degree? Anyway, he used to spend a tremendous time trying to get good at tennis. When he was young, he used to train in martial arts. Perhaps that gave him discipline to learn tennis, realizing he needed to learn the "right" technique, so he could master tennis as quickly as possible.

He would take lessons, read up on tennis, get videotapes (I think) on the subject. He'd devote at least three days a week to tennis, even trying to cut back on work so he could play. His wife thought he was taking tennis way too seriously, that he was completely obsessed about it. And perhaps he was.

But I figure most people would find being too obsessed about being really good is better than not caring about anything. Our society, in general, prefers people to excel rather than to be average. Indeed, sports is all about this.

Now, to be fair, we work in a company where most of the developers are pretty good, better than average. I could say we all have a passion for software development, but, at least for me, that's not quite right. Perhaps because I don't know what that means exactly. Perhaps when I see a sliver of what Ken does, I can more readily recognize that as a kind of passion, and wonder what that must be like.

I could point to my prodigious blogging as a kind of passion, but it would be great if I had more interesting things to say more often. I don't mind, as I find practicing writing useful.

Well, that's it for now. Ciao!

Chemical Brothers

A series of ads are making their way on the air, and they have me thinking.

Once upon a time, two people looking to meet might have to rely on parents or friends or their own initiative to find someone, then go through the usual courtship rituals, and if all went well, get married (assuming the goal was marriage).

But this is the 21st century, and web has sprouted up businesses that languored a bit in other mediums, including online dating. Of the dating services, perhaps the best known is eHarmony. eHarmony has some restrictions, its most notable is they don't accept gay relationships.

They claim that they have not focused their complex algorithms in that direction, and have no particular desire to do so. This can be viewed in several ways. First, a company doesn't have to cater to everyone. If you want to run a dog-sitting service, you're not compelled to run a cat-sitting service, a babysitting service, and so forth. Maybe you like dogs better.

But it does say something interesting about eHarmony. It suggests that the powers that be that run the company don't approve of gay relationships and want no part of it. That may be false, but given that eHarmony's apparent value is in the way it handles matches, the public isn't privy to the real reasons why they have this policy.

But this being a capitalistic society, someone's gotta want to fill the need, and already you see ads for this. I was watching the French Open's women's final (well, the first set, before I got called by a friend who wanted to talk at some length, thus I missed the rout of a second set) and an ad for chemistry.com came on.

It's pretty humorous. A guy is looking at a magazine. It appears to be a Playboy magazine of sorts. He says "Yeah, yeah" as he turns the magazine on edge to show an ostensible centerfold.

"Nope, I'm still gay".

Followed by "Rejected by eHarmony". It's a pretty clever ad striking at a deficiency of eHarmony.

That had me thinking about India.

Again.

Bollywood films usually center on romance. Indeed, if you were to watch Indian films, you'd think that love marriages were the norm. Love marriages are in contrast to arranged marriages, which are still very common in India. I've seen maybe three or four Bollywood films, so my sample size is small, but you rarely ever see people in arranged marriages where parents play a significant role. Indeed, these films seem to model relationships on the West.

But, much like American films which feature a lot of shooting, or highly erotic love scenes, or people who are crudely funny, the vast majority of the viewing public does not imitate what they see on film. If pressed about the issue, they might say "well, that's just the movies--it's not real life".

Yet, take that same American viewer, have them watch a Bollywood film, then immerse them in Indian culture, and you might exclaim "The women wear skimpy Western clothes. They sing songs proclaiming their love for one another. The parents are hardly visible. Why doesn't the public have more love marriages?"

The answer might be the same. Those are just movies. Arranged marriages don't make for good drama. They involve parents trying to vet families. Conservative families still prefer to marry within the caste, even as there have been marriages outside the caste and outside the religion. Typically, love marriages have had some more flexibility.

Now, how do the two topics relate? Love marriages in India vs. dating services in the US?

In a sense, the dating service is a kind of matchmaking, though modernized. Computer algorithms allegedly figure out compatible personalities, a thought that would have seemed utterly ludicrous years ago. It's the same kind of belief that arranged marriages are utterly ludicrous to Americans. Most Americans don't trust their parents to pick someone they would like, though many Americans (I read an article that 1.5% of the public is ultra-shy and never get into any relationships) make an effort to meet people, so they have at least some nominal skill and desire to find someone to, at the very least, date.

Given how shy the average person is, finding someone to date is challenging. It would perhaps surprise the typical Indian, used to speed of arranged marriages, that
couples can date years before deciding to get married (though dating can mean living together and engaging in sex, so it's practically marriage, but not in the legal sense).

Let me back up some. Why are arranged marriages so quick? Let's do some role-playing. Suppose you have a daughter or son. You've been spending some time trying to decide who they should marry. As a parent, your considerations aren't quite the same as, say, the children themselves. A typical American might decide based on a number of factors, including, how hot is the other person.

While parents may take appearance into consideration, a bigger key is the (for sake of example), the bride-to-be's family? Are they a good family? What do they do? Are they of a suitable caste (if you're Hindu)? And so forth. Arranged marriages have always been more about marrying families rather than finding the person your offspring would like to be with most.

This goal may indeed make Indians more friendly. If you're a crazy family, full of trouble, no one will want to to marry into your family (or they might--who knows?).

Let's say you find a perfect girl for your son. You make negotiations with the girl's family. Both sides agree the other side is acceptable.

Now, the key is the wedding itself. How long do you want to spend for the wedding? Several years? Since it's not you that's getting married, you probably want to get it done as soon as possible. Thus, have the whole thing arranged and done within six months. To wait years seems futile since you've already made your decision. It seems more like a decision to purchase a car than a decision that you might regret if you don't spend years trying it out.

Once it becomes your own decision, that decision may not be so final after all. And if there's high rate in divorces, then you may want a trial period deciding whether this will work or not.

Americans might be surprised about arranged marriages and their speed, while Indians may scratch their heads wondering why Americans take so long to get married (especially, once they realize that they do things that married couples already do). They may even be more surprised that a couple, dating years and year, living together, having sex, would decide, after all that time, not to get married. The concept might be shocking (well, those not that accustomed to Western decadence).

I look at India and wonder, are they where Americans were 50-60 years ago? Will they begin to go to love marriages? If so, will this cause the "breakdown" of Indian society, where divorces might go up, where drinking and casual sex become the norm? Or will the society, which has never gotten rid of the caste system, be able to maintain itself, with its emphasis on family and tradition, even in the midst of Western morality (or lack thereof).

And is America thinking that having others do some of the arranging isn't such a bad idea, even as algorithms try to find compatibility, at least as a first step? This idea which would have seemed so bizarre years ago is wrapped up in words that don't suggest machines (like eHarmony's emphasis on harmony, a non-technical word evoking idealistic relationships).

What amounts to be something of a chemical process (falling in love) and something of a biological imperative (the success of the human race) has created many different solutions, and those solutions have impacted how societies form and what their beliefs are. It is perhaps very prescient of Isaac Asimov to note that perhaps people's aggregate behavior can be predicted. While he left these equations completely nebulous, as you look at societies and how they run, you get a sense that certain global belief systems may drive people to act the way they do, and that throwing in new variables can change how societies behave.

Fascinating, really.

(What about the lolcats!)

Geek Celebrity

Ever heard of Richard Stallman? How about David Heinemeier Hanson? Maybe Linus Torvalds? Donald Knuth? Joshua Bloch? Joel Spolsky? Michael Arrington? Kathy Sierra? Bjarne Stroustrup?

These folks are geek celebrities, which means if you aren't in the computer business, you've probably not heard of them. Every field seems to have its own celebrities that are basically unknown except to people in the brotherhood (sadly, often men and not too many women).

Unlike the other fields, these celebrities often do act like celebrities. They go out to give speeches at O'Reilly conferences and tour around like minor rock stars. Not everyone, of course. Donald Knuth acts like the academic that he is. But David Heinemeier Hanson? He's got his hip arty crowd clothing (is that a dragon?). You can't have a Rails conference if DHH doesn't speak. He went from just another Dane, to Rails rockstar.

And more than that. The computing industry is hooked up. On the web! With blogs and reddit and Digg, there's an avenue for geeks to look up information on their favorite geek guru. Got Twitter? You can follow the willing celeb minute to minute.

How about watching live feed of Justin from justin.tv who takes The Real World to the next level (ah, but I don't think any of the roommates are getting kicked out).

Even geek cartoonists can be celebs. Why, just the other day, I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt with TRex, the start of the Dinosaur Comics, penned by one Ryan North. You can write a Ruby tutorial with cartoon foxes and that makes you a celeb ("Why" of "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby").

What's the effect of this celebrity? Income. People will pay to listen to the gurus of the computing industry talk. You can have Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. I'll have DHH and the ukelele-playing Chad Fowler, thanks.

The Heat Is On

I suppose this is technically the second week of running for me. I ran on a Friday, and it was warm. I didn't run on Monday because it was raining. Ran Tuesday, Wednesday, both cool days, and then today, a warm day.

As anyone knows who's been out in the heat, it's easy to get exhausted when it's warm outside. This is probably not the best time of year to start running, but I figured what am I waiting for. If it gets too warm, I'll start running earlier in the day, probably at the beginning.

Currently, I'm running about a mile, which, I admit, is kinda short. I hope to double this in a few weeks, maybe as soon as two weeks, though the heat will make that challenging.

This isn't much of an entry, but it's mostly to mark how I'm doing.

On Adsense

I have no idea if Adsense is making me money. Likely, no. I don't edit myself much, so what I write can come off as jarring. Do those two sentences go together? Did he just switch tenses?

I also don't stick to any particular topic, so Adsense gets confused. For example, I had a blog talking about running shorts, and another about tennis, so Adsense now gives me entries on tennis shorts. I had two blog entries on Lebron James, and so there is clothing stuff with Lebron.

When I was blogging about Ruby on Rails, I had a bunch of entries on Ruby. I had an entry on mimosa, so there were mimosa recipes.

I have to wonder how well Adsense works. When you read my entries on mimosas, are you ready to go and click on Adsense on mimosas? I mean, literally, every few days, you see the content changing.

And I wonder, much like Schroedinger's poor kitty, and I changing what I write because Adsense is sitting there, analyzing my prose, trying to piece together what I'm writing about (through, presumably little semantic understanding) and get you to buy something?

And why would Blogger care whether I make money this way? I suppose, as bloggers, we're some weird audience that drums up support for advertisers, and advertisers don't care if people buy their product due to TV commercials, radio commercials, print ads, or, well, bloggers.

You know, I read there are millions of blogs out there, even some actively kept up. But given the pigeonhole principle, how many are really read? I mean, I assume I have fewer than ten readers. That's fine by me, although making gobs of cash from blogging would be cool. But I even exhaust those who read my blog because I'm both prodigious in my content, and also rather content-free.

If you read me, you must have lots of time on your hands, and given that I'm not Dave Barry, what the heck are you doing? Don't you have work you could be doing instead of reading what I write?

Blogs, as I've said before, appeal to some because they offer a window into a person, even if the person isn't completely honest, or even if the person isn't completely accurate (they may feel they are honest, but we're all biased about ourselves). Sometimes, you pass by a person, and you don't think that much about the person. Then, you read their blog and you say, gee, that's one f***ked up person. Or, wow, they really think deeper thoughts than I thought they were capable of.

Not every blog is that way. I could read a blog and not know a person was married, had two kids, had an argument that morning with their spouse, spilled coffee on themselves, had to turn back to the house, get changed, got caught in traffic, got late to a meeting, got yelled out by a superior, and had a generally crappy day. Instead, they may tell you about some cool piece of code they wrote, and not air dirty laundry.

Those blogs are good too. Not as exciting. How many people write blogs that read like a bad (or good!) soap opera who totally mismanage their lives and the people they meet? Not too many, I suppose.

Anyway, take that Adsense, try to sell something based on this blog entry!

Beyotch!

(Adding that makes this blog entry humorous, and that's why I did it)

Ben Folds Live

Ben Folds is perhaps the heir apparent to Billy Joel and Elton John, a guy who makes piano music. A lot of his stuff is pretty catchy, and so it's not surprising that if you like either Joel or John (note that Folds doesn't work as a first name), then you'd probably like Ben Folds.

Ben Folds used to have a band, which was called Ben Folds Five, which, given the verb-like nature of his last name, had me thinking he was doing origami (or making a fist). It didn't occur to me, for a long time, that Folds was actually his last name.

Anyway, I had a few Ben Folds CDs, but not his live album, which I just received today. Amazon reviews say it's an amazing CD, even if you don't like Ben Folds.

But the question is how can it be that amazing? Especially if you don't like him? Did he play the piano like Rachmaninoff? Did his voice become the male equivalent of Celine Dion? Did he just do covers of bands that people like better?

Spoilers ahead if you want to be surprised at what Ben Folds does on this CD.

Ben Folds...interacts. That's it. His fans love his music so much that they know how to sing along, providing a choral effect. This audience participation, almost unheard of in most bands, can be captured on a CD more readily than, say, a stage performance with laser lights, and precision dancers, and moonwalking.

The effect of listening to the audience sing along is absolutely captivating. It's impressive how he's able to do this. He even does an impromptu song based on comments from the audience.

Folds is a bit of a manipulator. Some of his plunkings head to discordant territory, as he presses random notes, realizing that it causes a cringing effect, then heads back to a catchy melody. But that's probably the key to any pop musician. You try to write tunes people will like, and a large number of people at that.

And Ben Folds does something that no popular singer outside of, well, rappers do. He swears in his songs. Hmm, that may have something to do with why he isn't heard more often, even if it seems to enhance the listenership by rap fans. But it's almost like being a geek, and hanging out with other geeks, and most of you are good kids, but this one guy, who seems like a leader swears, and you think, yeah, that is so cool. Even if it isn't.

And of course, since his song is so catchy, he gets the audience to sing along, and that's grand manipulation, but heck, that's what makes his CD so good. They join along, and for a moment, you don't care that he's doing what he does because you are in the moment, you are willing to be lead, you're falling under Ben Folds' spell.

The funny thing, I suppose, is that as good as Ben Folds is, he's still practically unknown. Billy Joel and Elton John are far, far, far better known than Ben Folds. Why that is, I can't quite say. In my mind, his tunes are at least as catchy, his piano prowess as accomplished, his voice as melodic as either of them. I'm sure his fans would agree.

Anyway, if you want to get a live album, or haven't heard Ben Folds before, pick up his live CD, Ben Folds Live.

Followup: Bjorkman

The mantle of the oldest man left in the men's draw at the French Open no longer resides with Jonas Bjorkman. In a match where he was mostly statistically better than Carlos Moya, Bjork succumbed in straight sets. Bjorkman had fewer unforced errors, about as many winners, but really couldn't handle Moya's serves (or at least, his service games).

Moya will now have the joy of facing number 2 seed, and fellow Spaniard, Rafael Nadal. Moya is now the oldest remaining player. Nadal should still be highly favored, though Spaniards tend to be confident playing one another.

Nadal, for his part, beat Lleyton Hewitt in straight sets and has yet to drop a set. He's doing his part in a collision course with Federer. The two seem certain to meet one another.

Finals this weekend.

Hype and Circumstance

I was listening to some sports commentator saying how, back in the day, he had felt the hype surrounding Lebron James was too much, but now that he's seen what Lebron can do, he's man enough to retract his statements. Lebron is that good.

But why? Why must he retract any of what he said?

Somehow, among sports know-it-alls, winning allows us to forgive all. Was it so long ago that Kobe was accused of rape? But then he began scoring 50 point games, and the subject seemed like a distant memory. When you win, people don't seem to care.

Even if Lebron is a good guy, even if he's the next Magic Johnson, we can still say that any hype, no matter how good the person is, is undeserved. Sports pundits like to be prognosticators, and as is often the case, people guess wrong far more than they guess right.

So people might have guessed wrong about Lebron. The sentiment expressed then should not depend on whether Lebron was a successful player, and a person people should emulate, or whether he is a flameout, or a malcontent, where commentators layer scorn upon them like Pac-mac Jones.

Don't let success get to your head when making judgements in sports.

Tennis Comedian

How funny you find this depends on how much you watch tennis. Andy Roddick impersonate a bunch of players including Boris Becker, John McEnroe, and Pete Sampras.

Sweet 16 at the French

I've lived without cable TV for so long that I rarely follow tennis anymore. Occasionally, curiosity strikes, and I'll check out some scores. Currently, the French Open is heading into week 2. The two top men's seeds are still on track to meet each other, namely, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

But right now, in the fourth round, there's an unlikely player playing. Swede Jonas Bjorkman. Bjorn Borg ushered in the era of really good Swedes. Following his stellar example, Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, Henrik Sundstrom, Kent Carlson, Joachim Nystrom, Mikael Pernforns, Anders Jarryd all played decently good tennis. These days, though, there isn't a top young Swede. Jonas Bjorkman is one of those journeyman pros who plays well enough to get to a fourth round or the quarterfinals, but is old enough to have been among the last Swedes from the era that brought Edberg and Wilander.

Bjorkman was born in 1972. He's reached the semis of Wimbledon last year, a surface better suited to his serve and volley talents, and made the semis of the US Open back in 1997. He's in the fourth round, and he's 35 years old. It's true Jimmy Connors made the semis of the US Open when he was 39 years old (his birthday always fell during the Open). However, no one expects a player that age to win anymore. And let's face it, while Connors goes down as one of the best players ever, Jonas Bjorkman won't have that distinction.

There's something cagey about this veteran player. Of all the players who made it to the fourth round, only three of them were born before 1980. Guillermo Canas of Argentina was born in 1977, when Guillermo Vilas had his best year. Carlos Moya, a very solid Spaniard, as born in 1976. Bjorkman, his fourth-round opponent, was born in 1972.

The vast majority of players were born in 1981-1982, making them about 25 or 26 years of age, which seems to be the peak age for tennis.

Andre Agassi is two years older than Bjorkman, and retired last year at the US Open, though he had been struggling throughout the summer. It's all the more impressive that Bjorkman, who is likely to be forgotten in the history of tennis, can produce this quality of tennis at his age. He's no freak of nature like Martina, who was still chugging along at 40 and continued to play sporadic doubles til she was 50.

So cheers, Jonas. You're the old man of tennis, showing that a crafty Swede can still take it to the young'uns.

Run, Lola, Run

(I don't usually edit my writings much. This is my third pass at it. Don't know if it will improve much).

Oprah seems to have been around forever. I remember vaguely hearing about her from The Color Purple where Oprah received a nomination. She'd eventually take her local Chicago show nationally. Originally, more of a Jerry Springer show, it became the show it is today, a kind of self-help show, and it resonated with women everywhere.

For those who don't follow the show (and I include myself among them), one thing we remember about Oprah is her diets. Her show evolved due, perhaps, to the way she handled her weight issues. She'd lose weight, then gain it back, then try to lose it again. Her battle is not so dissimilar to many others. We live in a society that values being thin, and Oprah discovered, like many others, that it's work to stay thin for most of us.

Of course, Oprah is filthy rich, and she can afford trainers and cooks and so forth. Even so, she wasn't immune to the cravings of food. She even admitted, later on, that she suffered from abuse as a child, and that may have had something to do with issues with food and weight.

While I can't relate at that level, I found myself caring about weight when it was the furthest thing from my mind when I was in college. I was pretty thin in college, weighing around 130 pounds. I'm not particularly tall, but even so, that's pretty light.

My weight went up to 150 pounds when I went to grad school, attributable, really to lack of exercise. I used to walk about two miles a day from my dorm to class and back, and carried a backpack weighing at least twenty pounds. Cornell's meals were generally healthy, and in any case, I didn't gorge out on that food. I gained 20 pounds by eating out and driving a car everywhere in grad school.

I tried exercising then, but not without a great deal of vigor. My weight stayed mostly fixed, even as I tried running and weights.

Once I began teaching, the weight started up again, mostly because I ate out more, and was even more sedentary. My weight went up another 20 pounds topping out at 170. It's then I seriously tried to reduce my weight and got down to 135 pounds or so, or nearly my college weight. At the time, I wasn't working, so I could devote a great deal of time to exercising.

Since working full-time, my weight's gone from 150 to 160 and then close to 170 or mostly back to where I was before. While I've exercised some throughout, it's not really reduced my weight. I know how much work it takes, and it's a lot. And worse still, it's probably harder to lose weight now than when I did it the first time.

There's a mental war going on, and it's sad. Sometimes I think I should not worry about it. Some people are large and in charge, and they aren't particularly worried. America's getting fatter, don't you know? So many people live with their extra pounds (oh why didn't we go metric?) But I think it's better for my long-term health, so I worry about it.

But I didn't do that much because, well, the weight gain was somewhat gradual. I think it's like that story of putting a frog in water and raising the temperature slowly. Pretty soon, the frog is in boiling water, when it could have saved itself if it had known.

I had been like this frog. My weight went to 165, but then I got braces, and because I was basically eating baby food (puddings and yogurt), I dropped down to 160, and had hoped to go down even more. However, once I started eating food again, that weight came back up again.

To me, the boiling water alarm occurred about two weeks ago.

A few weeks ago, I was in Portland. I had made what I thought was a conscious effort not to eat that much, though I had thought I would exercise while I was there. Due to crappy exercise equipment at the hotel, that didn't happen. But I thought carrying a heavy backpack and walking around was exercise enough. Nope. I was barely eating lunches, though I'd get a decent breakfast. The dinners were light enough. The last evening, I ate a huge meal at an Ethiopian place. Mistake, but tasty.

Once I got back from Portland, I discovered I was actually 1-2 pounds heavier! And I thought I had lost weight. Ah, how much weight has occupied my mind the last ten years or so.

I try to exercise at work. I really do.

I use an exercise bike at work (kudos to the building for getting a quality exercise bike) and had been upping the time I spent biking from 10 minutes to 15, and now to 20, and thinking of going higher. But it is work time, and in any case, I'd rather not spend 30 or more minutes on the bike. Having said that, exercise bikes have one virtue. I can read while exercising. Almost no other equipment keeps my body still enough to do that comfortably. And I want to read more often.

But biking is not a particularly efficient way to exercise. You only exercise your legs. Running, even if more difficult on the body, burns more calories than biking. While you use your legs, the entire body weight is being used on your legs.

I wanted to run again. I was never a serious runner, but I had done some before. In college, I took a running class, which is now starting to be 20 years ago. Back then I was wiry thin, not even 130 pounds, wearing 30 inch waist jeans. I was thin, thin, thin. I started college at 125 pounds. I ran mostly to get in better shape and to keep alert (it didn't help so much there), not because I really wanted to lose weight.

Since then, I've run sporadically. I tried to do when I hit 150 pounds in the early 90s. Then, I read that building muscles helps with weight loss and started doing that (after taking a class). It never really helped, but I did get stronger and have better endurance because of it. Still, without much success, I didn't do it regularly.

For a long time, my exercise was confined to playing tennis and racquetball and occasionally biking or getting on an elliptical at the gym. I even cut back on that when I was teaching, which consumed a ton of my time, so much so, that I rarely exercised.

At the end of 2003, years of sedentary living and bad eating caught up to me. My weight had ballooned to 170 pounds (I know, my brother would love to get to that weight!). I wanted to be closer to 150 pounds, and 170 was too heavy. I was wearing 36 inch waist pants when I used to wear 30 inch pants.

So I decided to get serious about the weight loss at the start of 2004. I exercise-biked 45-50 minutes a day, sometimes twice a day, 6 days a week. I also cut back on what I was eating. Every time I weighed myself, I was losing about 0.4 pounds, which means I was losing about 2-3 pounds each week. This was the first time I tried to lose weight and was successful. It was pretty encouraging, I can tell you.

This weight loss continued for three months. Eventually, I lost 35 pounds. My pants size reduced from 36 inches down to 31 inches, basically what I was wearing nearly 20 years earlier. Losing weight, while gratifying, was like a full-time job. I was spending maybe 2 hours a day on this, and there was getting to and from the gym, and that I wasn't always up to do a lot more the rest of the day.

But once I started to work full-time, the exercise stopped, and eating out for lunch started up. Guess what? Yeah. The weight came back. Not really fast. Initially, I was around 150, then it crept to 155, then 160, then 165. The weight gain happened slowly, over about two years of time.

Now that I'm back to where I was before I lost all that weight, I figure it's time to do something again.

In such a situation, I find myself looking for a "drastic" solution.

I talked briefly to co-worker, Ken. Everyone knows Ken runs a lot. He tries to run around lunchtime every day. Ken's no casual runner. He's serious without being super-serious. This means he likes to track his progress, see where he runs, measure his heartrate, and so forth. He's got all sorts of gadgets to help him figure out how he's doing. I don't think he's trying to "beat" anyone in particular. Runners, I suspect, tend to race against themselves, because there's always someone faster, more gifted at running.

Like many sports, runners like Ken dress the part. Remember the 70s? Tennis was all the rage. And you had to dress to play tennis. In those days, it was wristbands and headbands and Fila shorts and shirts and nice tennis shoes. That was fit for the 70s. Runners have their own gear, and Ken's not bucking the trend with what he wears. It's what runners wear.

A typical Ken outfit is a muscle t-shirt (but it really is used by runners since it wicks away sweat) and short shorts. All of this clothing is optimized for running, at least, that's how it's advertised. Serious runners wear this stuff. It's good that running is such a solitary sport, because the rest of us are laughing.

Ken's also a programming type, and programming types are obsessive-compulsive by nature. I figured this meant that Ken might not be the most talented runner, but he was going to be a smart runner, who knew a lot about running because he read a fair bit on it. And of course, the fabulous running gadgets!

I knew he was just the kind of guy to talk to. (My housemate has likewise studied running, and used to run a fair bit, but we like to call him the crazy Romanian for his maniacal laughing. He'll read books on physiology of running and probably reads about how the body deals with lactic acid, and such).

To be fair, even though I've never run seriously, I've read some stuff about exercising, so I wasn't totally in the dark talking to Ken.

I had arranged to go out on a run with him, even though I was going to look rather foolish. Ken's been running since, well, a long time. I don't run with any regularity. I'd run some with Jaime, but it was hardly regular. But I was plenty prepared to look silly. I just wanted to figure out where to run nearby, so I had a path to follow, and Ken had already done the homework for me.

Did I mention how hot it was last Friday? It was frickin' hot! One thing about heat. It fatigues you quickly. I knew this from tennis. Cold weather tires you out far less. I had hoped I could run maybe a mile. I knew I wasn't in great shape because Jaime, who's nowhere near the same shape he was when he ran in college, could still run circles around me, and he'd freely admit that he's way out of shape (though he's exercising these days too).

The run was complicated by another issue. With the warm weather, I knew I needed some shorts. I had some shorts, but they were pretty tight. You know. Weight gain. So I thought I'd get some shorts. But I wasn't really ready to get Ken shorts, the really short running shorts. But I needed looser shorts. So I went to Kohl's with David who was returning some clothes. I got some shorts there, but they were basically khakis, and had a bit more waist room than the ones I already had.

I was ready for running.

Or so I thought.


While my shorts seemed to fit OK at the store, they were a touch loose. But, as I ran, I found they were more than just a touch loose. My shorts were literally falling off as I ran, and I had to keep holding them up, while struggling to keep up, and trying to catch my breath. I spent the first half-mile grasping onto a belt loop, wondering what the hell I was doing.

Fortunately, Ken was savvy to my misery, and suggested I cut the run a little short, since it was hot. I took his advice and began heading back to the office, while he meandered on for a serious run.

I walked back to the office. As I walked to the gym inside, I realized that I didn't have my card-key. Ah, Ken did mention that didn't he? He said the back door, where the maintenance guys go in, was open, and I could go in.

Except it wasn't open.

It was locked.

I knocked at the glass door. Inside, I could see a TV on. I figured someone was exercising, but I couldn't see anyone, and no one was answering. So up the elevator I went. I started knocking on the door. No one was there. Then, I went further down the hall, and knocked there. No answer.

D***. It was lunch.

And most people were out.

I tried across the hall. Dave opened the door, but most everyone was out, and his cardkey didn't open up the gym downstairs.

Finally, I found Dan who rarely eats out, and borrowed his keycard, got a shower, and got back to work. The next day, when I got up, I was sore. I wondered why. Ah, the running.

Since my casual clothing attire didn't work well on Friday, I decided to kick it up a notch. Time to get some more appropriate clothing. Step one for me was to get better shorts to run. The shorts at Kohl's didn't seem like the right thing for running.

Before I tell you about my adventures in trying to be a running geek, I want to recount an interesting social trend.

If you watch basketball in the early to mid 80s, you'll immediately notice something. The players wore very short shorts. Just think John Stockton, who seemed to have missed the memo to lengthen his shorts.

Recall that Reagan was president throughout the early 80s (and then Bush, Sr. after him). The political conservatism also affected popular culture.

In particular, the long hair from the 60s and 70s gave way to shorter hair in the 80s, some of which can be attributed to the punk movement. Short spiky hair replaced the large hair of the early 80s. Basketball shorts also began getting longer. They went from waist-height and proceeded down to the knees. Indeed, this trend affects all shorts, not just basketball shorts.

Unless you get golf shorts or some tennis shorts, the typical shorts you get at the local mall, either casual khaki style shorts or cargo shorts or even basketball shorts are basically down to the knees. For a while, tennis tried a different idea, popularized by Andre Agassi, where conventional shorter shorts was combined with knee-length spandex underneath. These days, Rafael Nadal wears capri pants which appear to be narrow shorts that extend a little past the knees.

The lengthening of shorts made its way to swimwear. Guy used to wear pretty short shorts for swim wear, but just like the basketball short cousins, swimwear for guys started to dip down to the knees. I can't quite say why that style was more in-fashion except that it contrasted with a clothing style prevalent during the 70s that I completely missed until well into the 90s.

Tight jeans. During the women's liberation movement of the 70s, guys were starting to be objectified in much the same way women were being objectified all the years before then. Men began wearing designer jeans, and those jeans were meant to give women (and gay men) a clue about how much stuffing a guy had. And this extended to both ends. Tight jeans were used to good effect show off a fine derrière as well as emphasize genitalia. (Women also wore tight jeans to show off the junk in their trunk).

Perhaps the 80s lead to a degree of shyness (by the 90s, for example, parents did not want their kids showering at the high school level or below, even though it was common to do so in the 70s and before). Longer pants and looser fits would counter the 70s trend of showing off the male form.

But you know who bucks this trend towards longer shorts?

Yup, runners.

For runners, short shorts are still preferred, though it's done for a fairly practical reason. Long shorts retard the leg as one runs. Indeed, the trend among runners is to wear the lightest weight shorts possible. These puppies (why do people use "puppies" to represent pretty much any doo-dad?) are feather-light and often exclude such niceties, like pockets.

If you're new to running, running shorts are a shock to the sensibilities. Do you really want to show that much leg? Fortunately, the industry empathizes with those who realize you aren't ready for the running equivalent of the mini-skirt.

For the more modest, there are longer running shorts. They still come up above the knee, but they aren't quite at point where the two legs conjoin, where if it were any shorter, you'd be in Lindsay Lohan/Paris Hilton territory. These are the training bikes of running shorts, meant to get you acclimated to less material, until you make the leap to the short shorts and join the brotherhood of runners.

But there's more. What happens when you run?

Right, you sweat.

And potentially a lot.

Thus, running shares something in common with water sports (swimming!). You get wet. It's not a stretch of the imagination to see to create running shorts that mimic swim trunks. Swimming trunks, in case you haven't worn them in a while, usually have an inner lining. After all, getting in the pool means you're getting your trunks wet, and if you were wearing underwear, they'd get wet too. Unless you're wearing Speedos, most swimwear has an inner lining that serves as a kind of underwear, and a modesty guard.

Not surprising that "real" running shorts also have this feature. The good news is that you don't get your underwear soaked in sweat.

I kinda figured this from Ken. Fortunately, while I was a bit concerned about wearing such shorts before, I'm not so worried about modesty and things like that. If there's a pragmatic reason that I should be wearing short shorts with inner lining to run, I'll do it.

Ah, but where to get the clothing?

I generally prefer to go to specialty shops because the local Sports Authority, while it does a fine job serving the masses, often lacks the knowledgeable folks of a place that specializes in running. About two years ago, I went with Jaime to Metro Run and Walk which is near Seven Seas, a decent Chinese restaurant in Rockville. I bought a semi-expensive pair of running shoes which I've used less than half a dozen times. Still, it seemed like a decent store.

Ken had been told by Jay, another coworker, about a shop called RNJ Sports, also located in Rockville, which has a half-off shoe section. All their items are 20% off, which one generally must take with a grain of salt.

This store is a bit off the beaten path. By that, I mean it's on the second floor of a two story building that doesn't look at all commercial. It's easy to miss, though I happened to find it without problems. It looked like a pretty good store.

First thing I have to give props to is the sign-up list. If you sign up, there's someone who will call you up, and answer your questions. So, I signed up, and they had some guy--probably Korean-American--help me out. Another positive point. The store had about five people to help out, which is a lot.

I asked the guy questions about shorts, and he said really short shorts with the inner lining (a la swimming trunks) were common. You weren't supposed to wear any underwear while wearing them. He pointed out that there were somewhat longer running shorts if the really shorts ones were bothersome, and even longer ones with no inner lining (i.e., you would wear underwear with those) if you really weren't ready to take the plunge.

I figured I'd bite the bullet and get ones with inner lining. What the heck, might as well do it right. It wasn't the super-short ones, but it was shorter than I was used to.

I had thought about getting shorts from the half-off rack, but all the shorts there are pretty long, so I picked from the other racks.

Running shorts have pretty nice drawstrings, so on the off-chance that I am losing weight, I can draw them more tightly and not have to buy a new pair of shorts right away.

After picking out two shorts, I quickly found two shirts---the kind that wick away sweat, probably used by anyone doing outdoor stuff like biking.

Now I wanted to get shoes.

To decide which pairs to get, the guy helping me had me walk to see what I was doing.

He said I overpronated, mostly because I have flat feet. This means, he explained, that I roll my feet inward after my foot lands. If my feet had a typical arch, it wouldn't roll. So, he said, I needed shoes that have good support where the arch would be (on the inside of my feet).

We went to the half-off shoe section (everything 50% off!) in the back, a treasure trove of good prices. He said shoe manufacturers have recently agreed to color the shoe cushion gray to indicate higher density, thus increased support for the arch area. I should look for shoes with this gray color and a wider last (basically, the footprint area).

He had me walk, then jog, and said while these shoes improved my step, I should go for shoes with even more support. However, he said that would cost twice as much since none of the discount shoes in my size had that support.

But, then he did something that I have to respect. He must know that beginning runners often quit after a short time. I might shell out a hundred bucks on shoes I would hardly use (it happened before).

Why spend a ton of money on shoes if one never uses it? So he said, why don't I just buy these discounted shoes? They give pretty good support, and if they were giving me problems in a couple of months, I could come back and look for a pair with better support.

I agreed, and thought it was rather classy of him to give this advice. It makes better sense for a store to be honest (unlike, say rental cars, who are grubby money grabbers) and try to save me some money, than to advise getting the priciest thing available. Hopefully, these guys don't work on commission, which doesn't really serve the customer at all.

In the back room, I eyed a duffel bag that I liked. I've been wanting to replace the tiny bag I've been using. It's a bit bigger than I want, but the one I have is too small, so I'd rather err on too big. This duffel has side pockets where I can put stuff like socks and underwear, and it's large enough that I can also put shoes in it too.

The total cost was a bit pricey, but I said, what the heck. If I were only more frugal.

There was one thing I was missing. Running shorts don't exactly have pockets, and even those that do seem problematic. It seems like anything could fall out of those pockets.

I wanted something I could use to hold a card key. You can get stuff to wear, but they were either hugely unwieldy (meant to hold water bottles), or they were a bit small (meant to hold cell-phones). I wanted something that I could either wear on my arm, or on my shoe (attached to the laces) or some tiny belt I could wear, and nothing quite fit the bill.

So I left without buying something to hold a keycard. Then, I went to Metro Run and Walk, you know, the store I went with Jaime to a few years back to see if they had something. I noticed that it's both smaller and pricey than RNJ (the store I was at), and they didn't really have what I was looking for.

I decided to take a break and get some coffee at Starbuck's, the one by the Barnes and Noble. I saw the Hudson's Outfitters place next door. They mostly do camping and hiking, but I thought they might have what I was looking for.

Sometimes, you have to look at something that's a little unrelated to find the stuff you want. Thus, what you want may not be in a running shop, but in, say, a biking shop.

I finally found a shoe "pocket" held to the laces by velcro that could hold something credit card sized, which was just what I wanted, and it wasn't too pricey either.

And so I could run, right?

Ah, the weather.

It's raining.

Of course.

Followup: Mimosa

I've never made a mimosa before. It would have been easy to get snacks or beers. Some chose to take the next level, making desserts or fruit salad. Indeed, getting the ingredients for a mimosa should have been simple.

But, no.

I had to go up to Corridor Fine Wines and Spirits, which Google Maps gave incorrect directions for (it's possible Corridor has their directions wrong), adding twenty minutes to a twenty minute trip (then I ate, then looked around). I left at about 11:30, and thought I'd be back by 12:30, but it was more like 1:00. I ended up staying at my house for another half hour, then off to Ikea to get cups.

I still needed orange juice, and I wanted to get these pour spout things that bartenders have. That was a bit of a mistake. I knew a liquor store in Rockville that I thought would have it. Alas, they only served liquor and beer. No knick-knacks. They suggested I go to Target. There's a huge Target there, but again, no real luck.

So I went to Giant to get the juice, and again, no luck in finding the spout thingy.

As I was driving on Rockville Pike, I saw Whole Foods, so I tried looking in there. Nope. Then, I eyed The Container Store. Surely, they had it. Right now, the time is around 4:10. The party started at 3:30. I have champagne and raspberry liqeur in the freezer at work. I'm a little concerned it will freeze and shatter, though I figured it was alcohol, which has a lower freezing temperature than water, and so it shouldn't really freeze. Even so, an hour and a half might get there.

I get back to the office, and fortunately, the drinks are chilled, and dragged it to my car, and headed to the event, which was only 10 minutes away. I arrived a little after 4:30, about an hour after it started.

I ended up drinking about four glasses of mimosa, and three other people drank three more glasses, which means I didn't use up even one of the two bottles of cheap champagne I had.

But I'll say, there's something nicely elegant about the entire set up. Mimosas are easy to make, and the YouTube video at The Art Of The Drink was really quite convenient, because I had a visualization of what to do. It looks far cooler making it, given the ease of making it. Of course, I spent nearly 5 hours running to and fro trying to get all the stuff, and spent a pretty penny too, given all of that.

So for those of you who have a bunch of guests, and don't mind the effort, I highly recommend trying to make mimosas.

I note that I could have made it "fresher" by using freshly squeezed orange juice. I figured it wasn't worth that much effort. I also decided that good champagne wasn't necessary, given the juice would take up much of the flavor. The raspberry was a nice visual touch, though I'm not sure I could easily taste it.

Give it a try if you have the time.

Followup: Lebron

Given Lebron's 48 points in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals, which lead Cleveland to a 3-2 lead, with one more win to take them to the Finals, Detroit's plan was simple. Stop Lebron. Double-team him. Triple-team him. Usually, if there's no other good player on the team, you can stop one team's best player.

Normally, a guy like Larry Hughes would be the number two choice. Or maybe Ilgauskas? The names don't roll off the tongue. These aren't the Celtics of the 80s, nor the Lakers of the 80s. It's not the bad boys of Detroit from the late 80s. Even the Spurs, now the odds-on favorites to win, have at least three weapons in Duncan, Ginobli, and Parker.

But the guy who came though in Game 4, when Hughes was hurt, one Daniel Gibson, nicknamed Boobie, who had a 21 point outburst, topped himself, when Detroit made it their mission to shut down King James.

Gibson poured in 31 points, on a night when James was held to 20 points. And it wasn't a Iverson-like 31 points where he misses more shots than he made. Boobie was in the zone, eerily efficient in his scoring. 12 of 15 free throws. 5 of 5 on three point shots. 7 of 9 field goals made. When making 50% of your shots is a pretty efficient night, Gibson was stratospheric, making 70% of his shots.

Lebron knew that Detroit would try to shut him down, and looked to Gibson to bail him out. He told him to have no fear, to take the shots when he had them. Lebron had been mentoring Gibson this season, and his faith paid off in Lebron's first trip to the finals. The NBA, fearing the blah Pistons and against the blah Spurs, were understandably relieved when Cleveland made it through. Flip Saunders now has to fear for his job, a guy who has his team play great in the regular season, but unable to take the step that Larry Brown did, that is, giving the Pistons the title.

Instead, King James and, as importantly, Boobie Gibson, have put the Cavaliers in the finals. No one expects the Cavaliers to put up much of a fight to the Spurs. The Spurs have so many weapons and play suffocating defense. The Cavaliers, one might say, is just Lebron James. But maybe no longer.

Stockton and Malone. Jordan and Pippen. Shaq and Kobe. Is it time for Lebron and Gibson? Will we look back years from now and say it wasn't Lebron that was the real steal, but Gibson?

Portland Natively

You know who Brokeback Mountain was directed by? That's right, Ang Lee. Ang Lee started off with films made in Taiwan, most notably, The Wedding Banquet and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. Emma Thompson gave him his first opportunity to do a picture in English, Sense and Sensibility, which she both starred in and wrote the screenplay adaptation for.

But do you know who was supposed to have directed it? Gay director, Gus Van Sant. One has to imagine that would have been a completely different film.

Gus Van Sant has completed a film called Paranoid Park written by Blake Nelson, who sets the story in Portland. Van Sant has cast local Portland natives in this film adaptation.

That made me think that Nelson's thinking of what makes Portland Portland is completely different from my perception. After all, I wasn't even there an entire week, and have no idea about what makes a certain place the way it is.

Indeed, if a city's effect isn't purely based on landmarks, and on local sports team, and perhaps a dance club, or an eating establishment, or a music scene, then what exactly makes a city a city? There's always the people themselves.

In any case, I'm curious to see Van Sant's film, at the very least to get a sense of what one director's vision of Portland is.

Kid's Play

A fairly common trivia question asks what the first video on MTV was. The answer is Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles, a perhaps appropriate title for a new network that would lead to a burst of creativity for visual mediums, even as America wasn't ready to actually watch music being played.

The band above consists of a harpist, a mandolin player, and a bassist, singing, rather impressively the same song. The call themselves, The Wrong Trousers, after the best of the four Wallace and Gromit films/

Give it a listen.

By the way, it's a bit odd when the same performers are filmed and YouTubed by two different people, so here they are again, at a different angle.

King James

Four years ago, people wondered if he was over-hyped. Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, heck, even Moses Malone, were players that skipped the formality of college, and jumped directly to the pros, much like their European brethren. Not every high school students who makes the leap is successful, but no NBA team wanted to be the one that missed the opportunity to get next Kobe or Kevin.

Four years ago, Lebron James was anointed The Chosen One. In a league filled with superstars, the NBA was looking for one to replace Michael Jordan, and they said Lebron was the one. Despite the comparisons to Michael Jordan, people saw him more like Magic Johnson, a guy who was just as willing to pass it as he was to take it to the hole.

Most pundits warned not to expect much from Lebron that first year. Yao Ming didn't exactly wow them right away. The less said about Kwame Brown, the better. No one would have been surprised if Lebron had a slow start, or even failed to live up to the promise, even as a few felt certain that Lebron was different.

Lebron was drafted by Cleveland. Being an Ohio boy, staying at home was seen as a boon for the local team, which had not seen much glory since Jordan himself was regularly beating Cleveland. The first two years, Cleveland came close to making the playoffs, but not quite.

Last year, Cleveland made it to the playoffs, where they were facing the resurgent Washington Wizards, making its second consecutive playoff appearance. The previous year, the Wizards had beaten a Chicago team that was also trying to rebuild its fortunes, ever since Jordan, then Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen, and the rest of the original Bulls left. They were young, with Kirk Hinrich replacing Jay Williams who had himself a bit of a biking accident, leaving Chicago short of a point guard.

The Wizards were looking to take the next step, but Cleveland, in its first playoffs with Lebron had other ideas, and eventually eliminated the Wizards. The Wizards, poised to make a decent playoff run, was hurt when not one, but two of its leading scorers (Gilbert Arenas and Caron Butler) went down with season ending injuries, and though they crawled into the playoffs, they were swept in four by Cleveland.

Cleveland then knocked out the Nets, recent finalists themselves, in 6 games. They were expected to lose to Pistons, although they had pushed them to 7 games last year. Detroit had a bit of an edge, taking the first two games by identical scores of 79-76. In game 1, Lebron passed up the last shot, and was chastised by the media for not playing the superstar. In game 2, Lebron had an opportunity to tie the game, and took, but missed the last shot.

Cleveland won the next game, which was close, too, but Larry Hughes, former Washington Wizard, got hurt, and it seemed James would have to look to the next year to try again. Although, Hughes pulled a Willis Reed and came out for a few minutes, but was largely ineffective. Due to the surprising play of rookie, Daniel Gibson, who scored 21 points in the game, Cleveland won game 4, and they tied up the series.

The NBA, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to make deals with TNT, making it impossible for those without cable or satellite to watch the games until the final. I had resigned myself to watching it on the web, where the ebb and flow seemed to go back and forth, and it seemed, near the end, that Detroit would win it, after all.

With three minutes to go, Detroit had an 88-81 lead. Lebron would score 2 points, get fouled, miss the free throw, and have his team recover the rebound, then they would get fouled, and Gooden (of Cleveland) would make 2 more free throws to bring the game to 4 points with 2:49 to go.

Lebron would score 3 to make it a one point game, then he'd score 2 to give Cleveland a lead of 1, then Billips would get 3 to give Detroit a 2 point lead, then Lebron would score 2 more points to tie it again, and it would go to overtime.

He would score every Cleveland point in the double overtime win, and scored 29 of his team's last 30 points.

Most pundits saw it more than simply a gutty win, one where Lebron had a signature moment. They were thinking that he may be on the verge of greatness, and this would be one of many moments like it in the future. People want to say they saw the next Michael Jordan and realized it while it was happening.

Will it happen? People had thought that Carmelo Anthony and Dwyane Wade were better than Lebron, two players that entered the league when Lebron did. Is Lebron ready to take this team to the finals?

Are we all witnesses to Lebron's coming of age in the NBA?

Liquor's Quicker

Last October, I went to Seattle to watch Sufjan Stevens in concert. This was the last leg of a US tour before he would head to Europe and perform there. When I arrived, I wanted to try some of the restaurants in Seattle, and settled on a breakfast place whose name escapes me.

The place seems a bit like a hangout for art types. I had to wait about twenty minutes to get seated because there was limited seating.

On the menu, there was a drink called a mimosa, which sounds like a make of porcelain. I asked what it was, and was told it was a mix of champagne and orange juice. Since then, I've learned it's sort of like a Bloody Mary, a drink people often drink on Sundays, presumably after a night of drinking. But unlike a Bloody Mary, which always seemed like an odd, hardcore drink remedy (to avoid a hangover, drink more!), a mimosa seemed more elegant, more refined.

Recently, I was invited to a party (more of a get-together). I was trying to figure out what to bring. Beer's a common choice. Simple, no fuss. I wanted to try something fancier. Originally, I thought I'd try to make sangria. Sangria is a drink made from wine, sugar, and a lot of fruits that sit in the drink. Often, you add ginger ale to it. It's kind of a cross between wine and fruit punch, and people think of summer.

But it does require a few ingredients, fruit being the minimum. That seemed a bit complex, and I wanted something simple. I then recalled my Seattle trip and my first experience with a mimosa and figured that couldn't be too hard.

Of course, being the geek that I am, I use the resource everyone seems to use, which is the Internet, more specifically, Wikipedia. In particular, this entry on mimosa, which conveniently had a link to The Art of the Drink's take on mimosa.

In particular, they suggested a mimosa royale, that uses a black raspberry liquer to kick it up a notch, as it were. Ah, that meant finding a raspberry liquer. Heck, I wasn't sure I knew what that was. Yesterday, I was at a liquor store, and saw the fruity concoctions, such as that, were put in the cordials section of the store.

I wanted to find a good liquor store, and hoped that the local Washingtonian would offer advice. Alas, while they do a good job of ranking restaurants (or at least pointing out good restaurants), they don't bother with liquor stores. Most liquor stores really rely on customers wanting beer, and not being too particularly picky about it. They aren't trying to have an eclectic selection. A few American beers, a few Japanese, a few European, and most people will be happy.

I eventually stumbled upon a place that I had been to about two years ago, but had forgotten about. This was the Corridor (Fine) Wine and Spirits. As liquor places go, this is like the Mecca of liquor. I'm sure there's some irony in saying that. Perhaps, I should say it's the IKEA of liquor stores or the Costco of liquor stores, mostly in that it's frickin' huge. Not IKEA huge, but huge nonetheless.

I mentioned this to Vasile, saying that this was perhaps the best liquor store. Of course, I was wrong in that sense. He mentioned that Rob had been in Germany, and visited a wine store where there were different rooms set at different controlled temperatures, where various wines sat. In Germany, they care enough to have multiple rooms, climate controlled, for certain kinds of wine.

Corridor's not like that, and therefore, it's closer to IKEA or Costco. Volume of choices is what they are about.

And it's stuck in what seems like redneck Maryland, built into the kind of suburban sprawl that afflicts much of the US. Nearby is a Kohl's and a Target thus leading to the truism "Thou shalt not build a strip mall in Maryland without a Kohl's and a Target". I ate at a nearby Panera, getting coffee and soup. You'd think you'd find such a place closer to a bigger city, but it was fine. I got a little lost finding it, thus adding about twenty minutes to my trip.

Then, I came back and realized I should get wine glasses, but this time, I would go to IKEA. One thing they make cheaply is wine glasses.

Now, I'm out to find an attachment you put on top of a liquor bottle to pour something out of.

Oh, did I mention? I've never made a mimosa, let alone a mimosa royale. We'll see how that goes.

Kitty Ha-Ha

Ever go to the grocery store and see those tabloids? Or even the classy Hollywood rags like People? Ever wonder who buys them? Are they teeny-bopper girls trying to figure out who's hot in Hollywood or not? (Is Ashton Kutcher no longer hot?). Are the middle-aged, soap-opera watching blue-haired ladies?

Why on Oprah's (and Al Gore's) green Earth would they waste their time trying to keep up with these pointless trends? Don't the have real lives?

But sadly, we in geekdom have our own dirty laundry, our own fetish. What it is depends on whatever moves the geek community.

Lately, it's been cats. Cats that are semi-illiterate. They get into everything! They're watching us from everywhere! And with such bad English!

As with any such trend, we geeks must give it a name, and indeed, we have. These cats are called lolcats, which puts two words together that only a geek could love. There's cats, of course. And there's lol.

Lol, for the IM/chat/messageboard deprived is short for "laughing out loud". When someone writes something funny, they type "lol".

Thus, these cats are "lolcats" although it's difficult to tell whether we are the ones laughing at the cats or whether, in their infinite curiosity, and plans to take over the world (or at least our hard drives) are the ones lol-ing at us.

Indeed, it must be so, because Wikipedia says it's so.

Here's one of the top blogs devoted to lolcats.

If you pay attention, you can begin to construct the grammar used in lol cat postings, and while most of us lack the geek chops or desire to do this, one Anil Dash has spared you the effort.

Lolcats appears to be a few months old, say, since the end of last year. Perhaps they were around longer, but needed time before enough of geekdom embraced these wily kitties.

The rest of us can worry about who adopted whom, why LiLo's life is down the toiler, why David Hasselhoff prefers to dine on the floor, why Alec Baldwin yells at his daughter. You know, useful stuff.

Get Smart

We always knew it.

Tony Kornheiser is one smart guy. The reason he runs the best sports radio on the air is that it isn't purely about sports. Mr. Tony is at least as passionate about music as he is about sports. He invites people to talk about movies, while other people just blah-blah-blah about Terrell Owens or Barry Bonds or any number of bad boys of sports. They put up rhetorical questions, invite callers to phone in questions, where they invariably beat down on them, wondering why they bother with calls.

Tony dispenses with all that. He doesn't take calls. Listeners may want to hear themselves on the air, but they aren't paid to come up with bon mots and witticisms in print. They aren't paid to have great insight. It's not that they can't, it's that so few of them really have something smart to say.

Today, Tony was talking to the sardonic Washington Post movie reviewer, Stephen Hunter, discussing the latest Kevin Costner movie (I hadn't heard of it) called Mr. Brooks where he plays an urbane serial killer (sounds familiar, Mr. Hopkins). In it (must like the film Copycat) there's a younger character that wants to imitate and learn from the master.

Hunter points out that it's about being cool and who's cool enough to do these grisly deeds, implying Costner, the upper class guy is, and Dane Cook, the wannabe somewhat-lower class guy, lacks this.

Then, Tony makes a really smart comment that shows (unlike Arsenio) that he's listening. He says "So he must kill this other guy". If the other guy is annoying, and the lead guy is a killer, it seems to follow that he should get his just desserts, no?

And even if it doesn't happen, that it makes sense for it to plausibly happen is insightful, far beyond what the average person would say, as they'd be totally uninterested in the movie.

And that's why I listen to Mr. Tony.

The Simple Life

Take a look at the following video:



The guy who did this goes by the name "DaxFlame". I think I've seen his videos once before, and didn't pay too much attention to it.

Your first impression might be "can a person be more annoying?". But why would you say this? Then, you start to think "Oh, oh, he probably suffers from mental retardation". Indeed, if you can watch the entire "vlog" (DaxFlame does a video blog), he's ecstatic about seeing the most beautiful woman ever (a lifeguard).

He said he had gone to a slide, and tried to go down real fast. He wants to go their as often as he can (but his mom probably won't let him). He thinks she's noticed how he was sliding so fast.

And the reaction is "You're kidding, right? That girls thinks you're a total weirdo, a mommy's boy" and so forth. You're not comfortable with the guy. Yet, he's so infectiously exuberant as he is socially awkward. His speech stutters. He thinks of something he wants to say, but changes his mind, and says something else, and this happens several times in a sentence.

Then, you think, why should I react this way? It brings you to regress to middle school or elementary school where socialization means trying to fit in, to figure out what's normal or acceptable, and sometimes failing. If you're repulsed (initially) by DaxFlame, it may be for exactly this reason. This was the kind of person you didn't want to be, even if DaxFlame doesn't know any better.

So you wonder if those strong childhood reflexes, your sense that you shouldn't react like this because you're a frickin' adult, are more powerful than you imagine. You realize that as mature as you are, some things are burned in from experiences as a kid. Is this experience quintessentially American, brought about by the kaleidoscope of growing up in the US?

Then, you might say, as awkward as he is, there's something oddly beguiling about what he does. And you might see that he has fans.

And then, your mental thought-experiment is jerked to reality. And you say, "Can I really trust anything I see on YouTube?". And, so here's a follow-up video:



This is done by another guy, named Derek Sigafoo. Apparently, he also "vlogs".

He's certainly less socially awkward, more typical of someone you might meet. There's perhaps an obsessive-compulsiveness, which earns big-time geek points, as he tries to figure out whether DaxFlame is as he appears, a somewhat mentally challenged, but overly excitable fellow, who has engendered a bit of a following, or whether, like Lars Von Trier's The Idiots, he's trying to reach his inner idiot, realizing in some bizarre stroke of genius, how to capture this total awkwardness into an act, and produce fresh material.

Derek investigates this showing he has mad geek chops, and finds some evidence (not terribly strong) that DaxFlame is more of a put-on than he appears to be. But, even Derek makes a compelling argument. He says "I love DaxFlame! Even if he's not real, I'd still watch every episode.", because there's some vaguely real about what DaxFlame does. If he's faking it, you don't feel completely offended (I'm sure you could if he were trying to push buttons), but instead he forces you to re-evaluate what you think about someone like Derek, and if it is indeed an act, it's due to strong observations about how people are.

And of course, the slightly scary thing is, that if you know enough geek types, you realize that this kind of mental retardation is honestly that close to the kind of social awkwardness (or as Lance might say "Asperger's!") that you might see in a geeky fellow. That being bright in a computer sort-of-way can sometimes be at odds (at least amongst us Americans--is it cultural?) with being smooth with da ladies.

And even Derek's follow up shows another facet of this, and of both their needs to be online, and for the kind of online communities to care enough to watch.

Indeed, are the lives of those on the edge, vlogging about themselves, the future of entertainment?