Presentation Sux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is There No Truth in Beauty?

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

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

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

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

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

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

To me, beauty has some transitory nature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Mouth of Babes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At some point, people have to see it.

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

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

Conference 0.1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supersize Me

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

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

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

More Trinity

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

Are Resumes Silly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lateral Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zig a Zig Zig

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

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

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

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

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

Peanuts and Popcorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Cleveland.

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

Coverage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Im-pressed

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

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

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

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

Starbucks As Social Hangout

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In And Outlet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much like the car industry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now to do some cookin'.

Gerry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Losing Interest

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

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

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

Pins N Needles

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

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

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

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

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

Reminders abound.

Monday Night Madness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beer Run

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starbucks.

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

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

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

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

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

Ends!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll see.

Buggin'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A player gets on base. Another is walked.

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

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

And it went to extra innings.

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

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

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

And the Indians were up 2-0.

And the Yankees lost. Again.