I Hop to IHOP!

It's been a while since I've been to IHOP.

I'm willing to guess on the order of years. I used to go to IHOP all the time. (Has IHOP been IHOP like forever? The JLo-ification of words has made McDonald's into Mickey-D's, which was always an unofficialy nickname, and Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC, but a ponderously pretentious name like International House of Pancakes just invites a shorter name like, well, IHOP).

I stopped going for several reasons. First, during the weekends, which is the time I'm most likely to go, it was a madhouse. There were too many people all the time. Second, service was often so-so. Third, it was often times expensive. You think of spending five bucks for pancakes, not ten bucks.

But in my vain effort to find some place to eat that was good, I ended up at IHOP (I had been hoping to make it to IKEA, which has cheap eating fare, but it wasn't open for twenty more minutes, and I wasn't willing to wait).

Surprisingly, the experience was rather pleasant. I was seated quickly, asked about a drink order (coffee, thank you), put in the order, got the order five minutes later (from a second person), and shortly thereafter, got a bill, and was ready to go. I think I was in and out of there in fifteen minutes, which is what I like to do when I'm by myself.

Speaking of which, restaurants need to learn that if you see a person dining by themselves, get their order in first (unless you're in the business of serving many people by themselves). Cut them in front of everybody else. If there were ten people ahead, put that one person up front.

That one person is there by themselves, and basically, they want to get food, and get out. People who come in groups see it as two things: hanging out with your friends and eating. You can do the first, while waiting for the second. You can see where I'm heading with this. A person sitting by himself or herself is a loser, and as such, they wish to eat and leave.

Restaurants, by and large, seem oblivious to this fact. Maybe the pricier places are more considerate, but your local run-of-the-mill restaurant should do it too. There's even an added benefit. If I want to eat and leave, then I'll do so far more quickly than the patrons who are there to yap, yap, yap, and you'll get a table opened up more quickly so you can seat other patrons that want to blah, blah, blah.

In any case, that wasn't the problem today. I was seated quickly, had my order, my food, and everything. Heck, I even had two kinds of hot sauces (the standard McIlhenny Co. Tabasco sauce---does anyone even know the companies name? Goodness! And the Cholula hot sauce, which is a bit sweeter and less tangy than the tabasco) offered. People were friendly.

Yes, it was still a madhouse. But, I think they dropped the prices. I seem to recall prices closer to ten bucks. This was $7. Had I paid attention to the ads on the table, I could have found pumpkin pancakes for $5. But oh well.

The only other problem, which isn't so much IHOP's fault, as restaurants in general, is that portions are just way too large in American restaurants. This is why we, as a country, are so fat (that, and the need to have fried foods everywhere). My order was Chicken Fried Streak with gravy, three pancakes, and three eggs.

Really, two smaller pancakes (the pancakes weren't that large, so that was good) and maybe an egg or so (the ones I got were a bit undercooked, so I was a bit underwhelmed).

Still, on the whole, it was a more positive experience than I had hoped.

I'd like to find a breakfast buffet. I remember a friend took me to one ages ago, but I neither recall the name, nor the place. It wasn't that great, but it had a pleasant atmosphere, and the buffet meant you didn't have to wait.

Now, I feel, as a colleague likes to say, loathesome. Ate too much food, and all I'm thinking about is passing out.

Cheers!

MySpace, the final frontier

Did I ever mention how frightful this editing pane is in Blogger? Folks in software discuss two kinds of software. Desktop applications and browser applications. Desktop applications are things you could use if you didn't have a browser. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, and so forth.

These applications are said to be feature-rich. They have good speed (usually), good interaction (usually).

Browser applications, on the other hand, have progressed beyond basic webpages, but not a whole lot. Blogger, for instance, uses this window pane that holds a different amount of text depending on the font you're using. The painful part is that you can't even resize this thing.

Generally speaking, I prefer browser apps, at least, in principle, because it attempts to be a kind of OS that works everywhere. I can be on a Mac or a PC or Unix workstation and expect (more or less) my applications to work. Except I would have thought someone would have come up with a decent language to write apps. Everything used on webpages generally sucks.

But I severely digress.

Because I wanted to talk about MySpace.

Again.

A few days ago, I came to the conclusion that there were many people migrating to MySpace. I'm sure news magazines have come to this conclusion far sooner than me. I had, of course, been puzzled wondering why MySpace was any more successful than, say, Blogger.

I was perusing through some MySpace, well, what do I call it? Blog? Spaces? Well, whatever they are, and began to piece together what makes it successful.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, MySpace's key is linking to friends, and the key to that is putting up a photo.

A few years ago, there was this website called something like amihotornot.com. The website, as I understood it, was something of a joke. You'd put a pic up and let the world decide whether you were hot or not. I suppose it became a way for people to decide whether they liked someone based solely on looks, which, alas, is how many people decide whether they like someone.

Many other sites began to copy this idea, with little variation. However, the sites made the act of seeing and being seen purely reductive. You ranked others. They ranked you. It was, fundamentally, a cheapening act, and yet people didn't seem to mind. Furthermore, that was all it was.

On the other end of the spectrum were blogs. These were sites where the more literary types (yeah, right!) would pontificate on such high-minded topics like whether Bush is good for the country (is that Reggie or Dubs?).

The problem with blogs? It takes a lot of work to keep up. Most people eventually tire of it, and the blog falls into decay. This is especially true, I'd say, for the younger crowd, even if, in the end, they have more time on their hands to maintain a blog.

What blogging services, like Blogger, lacked, was a particularly easy way to link to others, and more than that, to do away with the blog as the centerpiece of interaction.

MySpace is, therefore, a mix of Blogger and amihotornot. It allows people to tell who they are, then link themselves to all their "friends". That would be boring too, except now that people have to put photos up, they try to put something that will attract others. Should they look serious? Like they don't care? Fun? Whatever. They pick a pic that hopefully maximizes other people's interest.

The next step, which is also big, is enough browser real-estate to talk about yourself. This is done, typically, by describing yourself and what kind of person you're looking for. Many people fill out quizzes about themselves, and of course, you can blog about yourself, should you choose to.

The final step is to allow others to comment on you, naturally, with their picture, so you can see who's saying what. Commenting on other people's spaces is convenient because you don't have to write a lot. A short "I miss you so much! We really have to party again!" suffices (oh, I must retch after writing that).

Now, what prevents this from reducing down to a bunch of people you simply don't care about. In reality, I suppose nothing. But, for those involved in it, it becomes a kind of odd competition. Who has the most friends? How savvy are you? Who is the funniest, the quirkiest, the hottest?

And that brings me to the point that has me intrigued. Some people remember high school fondly. Some despised every minute of it. High schools are a story within a story.

On the surface, high schools are schools. They are places of education. People are supposed to learn.

However, the kids attending high schools are adolescents. They're evolving from kids, who like to watch cartoons, play video games, and hang out with their friends (wait, I know a few 20 somethings that this describes...) into adults who are starting to be interested in the opposite (or same) sex, and are beginning to worry about how popular they are or aren't.

Some people rely on their good looks. Others on their witty banter. Others on their brooding. Others are psychotic. Others brainy. The list goes on. But, for a long time, this kind of social Darwinism was primarily confined to the high school itself. Whether you were popular or not rarely mattered to the next high school over.

But things have changed, and we have the net to credit or blame for that. Now that it's relatively easy to post things on the web, and free of charge, once you pay the admission of having a computer and a decent connection to the net.

All of a sudden, your presence is not confined to your physical body, or possibly, phone calls or (egads!) letters sent via snail mail. You can now log into your favorite messenger service (or several!), and people know your virtual presence all day long.

And these days, people aren't shy about letting others know what their lives are all about. They're out eating, clubbing, watching a movie, taking an exam, even snogging.

To understand this mindset, ask yourself whether you do any of this? If you don't, ask yourself, why not? You might be saying to yourself "I don't want people to know what's going on in my life". You don't want to discuss what's up with your girlfriend or your spouse. You don't want to say you covet someone else. You don't want to mention the various pecadilloes you have, or the immature or spiteful thoughts that cross your mind. People don't deserve to know that.

And it's not really strangers you're afraid of, it's the people you know. Strangers, as long as they're content to not contact you, are this nebulous concept of someone "out there". The people you know, on the other hand, are they there because they find your writing style intense, your insights sharp, or are they trying to figure you out, trying to find some weakness, some flaw, some something that will make them giggle with glee because they have something on you.

These are natural fears that prevent people from actually blogging about anything more interesting than the movie they watched last week, but also, it's that people don't want others to know.

For some reason, such fears don't extend to high school (I should extend this to college, because it applies just as well). I suspect it's because, for the most part, people are single and therefore the consequences are less for anything bad they might do. They don't have jobs to worry about. They don't have spouses or kids that might check stuff out.

I suspect MySpace creates a dynamic that's somewhat similar to what you find in high school. There's a bunch of people trying to be accepted by others, except, in this case, on a much larger scale. On the other hand, there are people who'd rather not have a MySpace, because they don't want to compete with their more popular friends.

And the stage is frankly larger now. Rather than popularity in your high school, you can now become popular on a much wider scale. You look at your friends, and your friend's friends, and so forth. And because people are on the Internet, picking up conversations with "strangers" is even easier.

I don't even mean this in the boo-the-Internet-is-scary sort of way. When you head to college, you're meeting new people all the time. Why should it therefore matter that you meet them through MySpace?

And, beyond this brave new world of interaction are television shows like the O.C. (and earlier on Dawson's Creek) which are now shows that appeal to teens, especially teenage women.

Let me think about the shows that were aimed towards me when I was growing up. There were SF shows, like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers. There were shows like Dukes of Hazzard. I knew people who liked Dallas in high school.

But really, this isn't the kind of fare aimed at teens now. Instead, they are now seeing kids their own age. And what do they discover? That they don't match up! Look how devoted everyone is to each other! Look how mean they are!

I generally don't watch any of these shows, but occasionally, there it is in front of me. I'll relate about the only snippet I recall. Dawson is talking to one of his female friends, saying that he had forgotten his friend's birthday. He feels awful, and knows his friend hates him for it, and acknowledges that he is right for hating him for it.

It's this kind of sentiment that reveberates through shows like this. We owe it to our friends to be really, really friends, to think about them, to feel bad when we don't, to confess this to our other friends, who then advise us to make up. I mean, couldn't Dawson have just said "It's just a frickin' birthday!".

And so girls get to complain to guys about why they can't be sensitive like Dawson, who's such a good friend, even when he occasionally messes things up. Concerns that used to be placed on the twenty and thirtysomething set back in the 70s when women said they wanted men to be Alan Alda (sensitive, cries occasionally), instead of John Wayne, are now being pushed on the ten-something crowd.

All this is swirled together, creating more complexities for everyone. These aren't the high school portrayed in Napoleon Dynamite, isolated from the world (yeah, his brother did get on the internet, but it seems so 80s, using texting to communicate).

And the funny thing about MySpace? Nothing seems original. Nearly everything they did has been thought of before. LiveJournal comes closest to what MySpace does, except it centered on blogs. It allowed you to link to friends (but without pix!). It allowed you to comment on blogs (but on a separate page).

Maybe MySpace becomes the new way people communicate, the Google of the next generation. More than likely, something will replace it, but not real soon. I suspect MySpace will ride out maybe 2-3 years longer, and then there may be something out there that will attempt to compete.

This is hard to predict, because instant messengers are about the same as they were ten years ago, with the exception that ICQ, the granddaddy of them all seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. IMs are basically MSN, Yahoo, AIM, with, I suspect, GTalk way behind. And it appears that MySpace also has some chatting service, and if it does, that is just as key to what they are doing, which is encouraging people to link and talk to each other.

Orkut and Friendster tried to do this, with some success, but somehow MySpace seems to have won out.

This would be better and possibly more ironic if I were making this entry in a MySpace account.

But, please. I have my dignity.

My Space or Yours?

As you can tell, I'm using Blogger. One reason is that it's free. The other is that I've heard of it. There are a few others I know of. Microsoft has their "spaces" and there's SquareSpace (which is pay, although the guys who started it are from U. of Maryland).

But the one site that seems to have gained a lot in popularity is myspace.com, and I have no idea why. It may be one of those things, much like AIM, that once enough people were on it, then it became a deluge.

I suppose one thing myspace has that Blogger doesn't is a simple way to link to other people's myspace. Yes, I know you can do this in Blogger, but never underestimate making it as easy as possible to link to friends. If the page literally yells that you must do it, then you do it.

As far as I can tell, it does this two ways. Obviously, there's a link on the main page. However, that link is almost always a picture. So, when you go to someone's myspace page, you immediately see how many friends they have.

Incidentally, the founder of myspace is automatically a friend of everyone, which is why his picture always shows up. Clever of him, eh?

As I said, the first thing you notice is how many friends a person has. There's also, usually, a place for friends to put their comments on, so you can see how recent the comments are.

All in all, this appeals to the narcisstic, yet insecure teen, who needs to show off just how many friends they have. You look at a myspace page, and it is like looking at some yearbook, except in this case, it's more like, how cute or hot are your friends?

Point is, it seems to work. And that's odd, because LiveJournal did almost the same thing too, and possibly less gaudy. The one thing about LiveJournal is that it emphasizes the blog. MySpace seems to emphasize who you know, and lists. The blogging component, although it exists, isn't used, but it doesn't seem to matter that it isn't.

Oh yeah, I think LiveJournal makes you pay, where I bet MySpace is free, free, free. That has to help too.

Even though I find MySpace to look rather gaudy, it has done its job to attract lots of people. It goes to show you that emphasizing the right things can make it more enticing to people. It doesn't seem to do much original, but it's able to do the right combination of things that makes it appealing to a lot of people.

The Year In

Every time we head into a new year, it's a time for hopeful outlook, and a time to reflect. You see all sorts of best-of lists. I was listening to NPR's All Songs Considered listening to their end of the year best of. It was partly the opinions of several of the folks who do their music show, which leans heavily to the indie scene, as well as votes by fans of the show.

I'll list the top ten by votes. Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, Sigur Ros's Takk, the self-titled Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Spoon's Gimme Fiction, My Morning Jacket's Z, The Decemberist's Picaresque, The White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan, Death Cab for Cutie's Plans, Bright Eyes' I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, and the number one voted album, Sufjan Stevens Come On Feel The Illinoise.

Of these albums, I own all except the Fiona Apple, My Morning Jacket's, and the White Stripes. In other words, I have 7 of the 10 listed, which shouldn't be so surprising since I picked these albums primarily from the website (not quite so true for Sufjan, who I found browsing at Amazon).

The various people who host All Songs Considered were also asked to list their favorite songs. One of them really liked Feel Good, Inc. by Gorillaz.

I just watched the video online, and it is rather unusual. I've heard parts of the song, since Apple used it heavily in one of their Ipod ads. Leave it to Apple to add to its hip status by picking songs that, to anyone else, would just sound like a song, but has some meaning to those in the know. It's just elitist enough that others recognize it, but not so elitist that no one's heard of it.

The video for Feel Good, Inc. draws heavily from anime, but American (or at least non-Japanese) anime always seems a bit different. In this case, it's part anime, part inserted video, a la Apple's Big Brother ad, and ends in a rather subversive, ominous way, which you rarely see in anime. Of course, how would I know? I'm hardly an anime fan. It just seems different.

My listening habits are a bit odd in that I think I'm much older than the demographic for the music I listen to, but I think that I'm not that unusual. I suspect the trend is that as we get older, more of will continue to seek the latest "good" music.

The teens and post-teens that are listening to new groups like Sufjan or Clap Hands, are going to continue to listen to this scene as they grow older and head into their thirties and forties, being more hip to today's scenes than their parents were. You know how parents would often exclaim "That's not music!" when listening to the music of their kids. Now, they may be listening to that kind of stuff for much longer. Heck, NPR may be making this all respectable for the NPR set.

Ultimately, this is a splinter group, one that's gaining some popularity (enough that people have coined the term "yupster" which is short for "yuppie hipster", and yuppie itself being short for "young urban professionals". I suspect the other term for this is bobos, which, alas, sounds too silly to really really catch on. There's a sense of this term referring to a poser, someone who uses, as the Newsweek article points out, the soundtrack to the O.C. to inform their music selection (for that matter, Six Feet Under is also credited for bringing indie music to its fans).

Television shows use indie music to give it a kind of street cred. Although the purpose is completely different, this is how Indian music is distributed. Not through shows so much, but through films. Most bands in the west release CDs and/or tour. Popular Indian music is disseminated through film, usually as the lead actors lip sync their way through the songs (singers are considered so specialized in what they do that mere actors wouldn't think of trying to sing their own songs---Hong Kong actors can work around this because many of them came into the industry through talent scouts looking for singers, then producing albums, and finally, having these singers cross over into acting).

One of the albums I picked up this year was In The Heart of the Moon, a collaboration between Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabete. It's an unusual mix. Toure has often been called a Mali bluesman. Toumani plays the harp-like kora. Ry Cooder, who helped Toure produce one of his albums (I believe it was his last, Niafunke), was also key arranging these two in an improvisational session that lasted a few days.

To be fair, I had CDs from both of these guys years ago, so they weren't so new to me. Before trying out the indie music scene, I picked up a lot of music that's termed Afropop, a lot of it is quite good. There has been some crossover, with the album Dimanche A Bamako (Sunday at Bamako, I gather), two blind husband and wife musicians, singing in French. These two are also from Mali, which seems to be the hotbed of African music.

I also really like the deeply resonant, Cesaria Evora, but I don't know if she's released any albums lately.

I've just put in an order for Konono No. 1, which is a band from Congo. It was considered, along with Dimanche and In the Heart of the Moon, the three best albums coming out of Africa this past year.

I think I'm going to listen to a little more of Clap Hands Say Yeah. I suspect much of whether you like the album will depend on whether you can stand the voice of the lead singer, Alex Ounsworth. It sounds like a bit of a roller coaster of a song. The first "song" is more like an exhortation at a carnival or circus, which, alas grates, but the rest of the album is first-rate.

Although it was released in 2004, the soundtrack for Friday Night Lights, the somewhat fictionalized story of a Texas high school football team that feels the pressure of a town to win the state championship, has music by Explosions in the Sky, by a group that's classified as post-rock. It seems like a totally odd choice for music, but it works (for me). The group is based in Austin, which goes to show that all music from Texas isn't honky-tonk, line dancing, and country.

Oh, I'm going to end on a completely unrelated note. Whole Foods rocks! I was at Whole Foods yesterday looking for spices, in particular, nutmeg. I'm not a huge fan of nutmeg, but Dave wanted some, and it is often seen as an ingredient to pumpkin pie. I discover this huge stash of spices, and it's like dirt-cheap. Well, cheap enough. It's like going to an Indian store.

What I got for $2, I'd have to easily spend 3 or 4 times anywhere else. Sure, they're packaged up in cheap, throwaway plastic containers better used for pastries or what-have-you than spices, but I can deal if it's going to cost so little.

Deep in the Heart

I'm watching the game with my housemates and friends, and one of them says that Vince Young is not going to be able to do what he did in that game. He said Young's throwing motion is not exactly textbook, and that he runs a lot. While no one was able to run him down, even Vick doesn't rely as much on his legs in the NFL as he did in college. Defenses are too fast (and too tough hitting) for even the most nimble of quarterbacks to survive long as a running quarterback.

Whether this is true or not remains to be seen. I thought, despite his arm motion (which I couldn't tell good from bad), that Vince Young was pretty accurate. It sounds like, from Tony's commentary, Vince threw mostly to one guy, and when that wasn't successful, he ran, and he did that over and again.

To be fair, USC's defense is not one of the best, and the team often gives up a lot of points (strange given that Pete Carroll is the team's defense coordinator), and that, after the first half, neither team did a great job of stopping each other, though there was a critical fourth down stop, where USC decided that if they could make the fourth down, the game would have been over (and it would have been).

Texas came up big, but still had two minutes to make a touchdown, and needed all of 100 seconds to get it, all on the back of Vince Young.

Does success in college games lead to success in the pros? People are high on Leinart, Bush, and Young, the Heisman finalists. It doesn't hurt that Carson Palmer, who only had one good year with USC, is doing remarkably well this year, giving credence to the USC system (to be fair, Palmer is supposed to be taller and stronger than Leinart, but Leinart's been in the system several years).

Does Houston take Bush or Young, or neither? Wilbon argued for taking Bush, saying that Carr was not the problem with the Texans. The lack of a good offsensive line was the problem. Pick up Bush, get the O-line in shape, and Carr, already a few years into a quarterback apprenticeship, a position widely thought to be the slowest to develop, and you're better off than having Young.

Decisions in the NFL don't make that much sense though (the running joke is Detroit drafting yet another wide receiver, when the team so clearly has other needs, and that the wide receivers have not panned out).

Young said he'd return, but Wilbon says there's really, really no reason to do so. The same was said of Leinart, who came back, and his stock is about as good as it would have been last year, possibly better, since his health was in question a year ago (though no one much knew it until he declared he'd return).

We'll see come draft day.

Nice Package

Everything of consequence that folks buy seems to be shrink-wrapped in such inconvenient ways. Think about it. CD. Wrapped in plastic, then the ends have this sticky label. It is a complete pain to remove it.

Surely, surely, the manufacturers know this, and yet, they proceed to confound the consumers with packaging that is meant to infuriate. Why, oh why, do they do this?

I know. If it were so easy to open something, then someone would accidentally open it, and then what would you do? But is it really necessary to make it extremely painful? Is there no middle ground?

Well, that wasn't much to write about, so I'll throw in some other stuff.

USC was playing Texas in the national championship game. Of football. College football. I thought I should elaborate since you may not know this fact. But then, if I have to elaborate, you simply don't care.

USC was hyped up. Last year, they were undefeated, and won a national championship. This year, they were also undefeated. They won the national championship the year before too. They were trying to win three in a row, a feat never accomplished in college football.

Texas, meanwhile, has struggled in the past, especially to beat rival Oklahoma. That has to be rather shameful. Texas is a much larger state than Oklahoma, yet, Oklahoma has remained very competitive in football, even winning a national championship a few years ago. Texas would try again and again to beat their rival to the north.

This year, they finally thrashed them on their way to an undefeated season. However, given USC's track record and with electric stars like Reggie Bush, LenDale White, and Matt Leinart, a list that includes the last two Heisman trophy winners, it's no surprise that USC was favored, and somewhat heavily at that.

ESPN had, for weeks leading up to this evening, hypothesised how the 2005 USC Trojans would fare against a variety of opponents, and the pundits claimed they'd beat all the great teams of the past. Texas was noticeably left out of the discussion.

The game started off low-scoring, and eventually, USC took the lead, at the end. While Leinart and Bush was efficient, it was the Vince Young show for Texas, who was doing pretty much everything for them on offense--running, throwing.

In the end, coaching let USC down. When they had the ball, wanting to eat up clock, they threw a ball for an incomplete, rather than just run the ball. At fourth down, they went for it and did not make it, when they could have kicked the ball and given Texas a much longer field to work with. They called time outs when they didn't have to. A key penalty let Texas have a first down when it looked like they would turn the ball over.

In other words, USC had plenty of chances to seal the victory. Instead, Texas moved the ball down, and let Vince Young and his legs do the work, eventually trotting down with some twenty seconds left to take the lead, and making the 2 point conversion to lead by 3 points, forcing USC to cross enough of the field to attempt a field goal.

Though USC made up a lot of ground on the first play, they simply ran out of time on the second, unable to find an open receiver close enough to make a reasonable kick.

So, in 2006, Texas manages to beat juggernaut USC, showing that, in a close game, coaching still make a difference, or in this case, lack of good game-time decision.

Too bad these games run so long, but at least that's the end of college football until it starts up again in the fall.

Troll!

There used to be this thing, in the Usenet world of yesteryear (like in the 90s!), which was called a troll, which is a post that is meant to create a lot of discussion. For example, I used to read and post to a group called soc.college. Most people there believed in affirmative action, but there was one guy who stoutly did not, and would claim that it was racist to have affirmative action. Needless to say, this generated a lot of discussion, and not of the civil variety.

I'm starting to realize that this is what Joel Spolsky does. He doesn't want to write stuff that's so abstruse that only Alexandrescu understands. No one would read his blog. He doesn't want to make vaguely bland pronouncements. Instead, he wants to be provocative, but in an almost reasonable way.

For example, he recently ranted on JavaSchools (as he refers to them), which are computer science departments that have switched to Java. This is, to his dismay, making it challenging to detect smart people (boo-hoo, Joel!), but the rant is provocative enough that this is my second entry on it, because I suddenly had an epiphany: Joel is trolling!

OK, not the most profound epiphinany as epiphinies go (how do you make that plural?).

But why? Why do this? Because Joel is not Google. He is not Microsoft. He is not Apple. You haven't heard of Fog Creek Software, which sounds like it might write software for bluegrass musicians. And he wants the best. The way he does this is through his blog, through his writings, through word of mouth.

So, when people say, hey that Joel is being an ass, and hey, that Joel is so right about the demise of modern computer science education, it's exactly the kind of response he wants. He's not so dumb as to make this pronouncement sound completely like the rantings of a madman, even as he boils down programming guru-dom to understanding recursion and pointers, he takes precautions to talk about learning functional languages, and working through tough courses, advice that is reasonable, even as it's mired in histrionics.

Joel Spolsky, you are a troll!

And a mighty effective one at that!

Review of Kong

I've just read two reviews of Peter Jackson's King Kong. One is hardly a review, more than a quick sense of what he liked about the film. Yeah, I kinda missed the compare and contrast of the untamed jungle life vs. the crass commercialism of civilization.

The second one is a full-blooded review, which is that of Bryant Frazer. Unlike me, Bryant has seen the original King Kong, and he objects to one decision Jackson made. Where Jackson wanted a King Kong that actually seemed like an ape, which meant that his Kong wasn't going to be sexually interested, and he wanted Ann and Kong to have a mutual, if oddball relation, based on, well, animal magnetism?

The original Kong apparently played Kong as mighty Kong of the jungle who has fallen hopelessly in love with the main character. But here's the key. She doesn't fall for Kong. Thus, it represents, in some odd way, the kind of rejection males have when trying to woo the unobtainable, that even as imposing a figure as Kong can somehow lose complete control, and do anything to impress this woman who just doesn't care.

This creates a much different dynamic, and as Frazer points out, it makes for a creepy sensibility. Far from detracting from a movie, he thinks this vaguely icky idea is what makes the original Kong (and even the mid 70s remake) work. Jackson takes a deliberately more PC approach to the film.

This is the kind of review that's quite interesting because it defends an older approach, even as there's much to admire (and deride) in Jackson's approach.

It's also one reason I like to read good reviews, because they present an insight into the film that you don't get just by watching it, and that the best reviews observe stuff that you don't notice, or don't pay attention to, and describe it with such clever use of the English language, that you want to shrink back to a hole and never write again.

So be a good boy or girl, do a search on Senor Frazer, and read his review.

Memory

I may have covered this before, but I'll do it again since I feel like talking about. If I had to point to one thing that makes smart people smart, it's their ability to memorize things.

I knew someone who objected to this notion. He equated memorization with a lack of knowledge. I can appreciate that view. Teachers in grade school make you memorize presidents, and dates, and so forth. To what end? It's understanding what those events were all about and making intelligent comments that is really what we should strive for in education.

Even so, imagine if you're writing a program and keep forgetting the syntax. At some point, this wastes time, and in the worst case, it's so distracting that it's not even worth the bother.

To illustrate the importance of memorization, think about attending a lecture several times a week. If you can summarize what happened for the last few weeks without having to refer to your notes, imagine how much easier it is to learn the things you need to learn. If, on the other hand, you forget what happened in a lecture 20 minutes afterwards, then you have to go back and relearn it all.

OK, that's unfair. Most people, in fact, don't really learn that much from a lecture. Half the time they're falling asleep, the other half, they've completely lost their train of thought. In the end, sitting in the lecture didn't help. But if you pay attention, and follow what's going on, then you've saved a ton of effort when you actually have to learn the stuff in depth.

But the point is, the ability to keep focus on what's being said, and to digest it, and to remember it, really saves on time later on.

Now sometimes this memorization comes easily, albeit on the easiest of stuff. Many sportscasters have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, remembering results of games, what happened in each game, the key plays, the weather, and so forth. Tony Kornheiser's knowledge for pop songs over the last thirty years is incredible, and so is Nigel's, since he's the one picking the songs.

Some of this information is moderately useless, but just the ability to remember lots and lots of stuff makes it easier to learn.

I suspect memorization is really organizing the information in your head in an orderly manner. People who are bad at names and faces don't try hard to remember faces and names. I have that problem. The easiest way to remember names is to use it right away, or at the very least, not be embarassed to ask the name a second or a third or a fourth time.

Unlike my friend who says memorization and understanding are at odds with one another, I'd say that memorization leads one to understanding.

I know there are some exceptions. There are people who know they can't remember much, but what they remember where to look things up. Most people aren't good at looking things up because it's so laborious. When's the last time you looked up the definition of a word you didn't know? Sure, the web makes that easier than ever, but you still need to be at a computer to do it.

Memorization can be difficult if you don't understand what you're memorizing. The key to understanding anything, I believe, is being able to explain it in your own words. I went to a talk where the speaker calls this being "consciously competent". He says many people are "unconsciouly competent", meaning they don't know how they know, they just know. Forcing them to be consciously competent forces one to organize that information in the head so it makes coherent sense not only to themselves, but to others as well.

That's funny, because I heard this at a short course on Java-related technologies. The stuff I remember best about it is the stuff related to learning, and this one bit about conscious competence.

My brother related another interesting anecdote. He met up with a high school buddy of his (you don't go up there to "high school"---but I digress) who he claimed had a fantastic memory. He'd remember questions on exams and the answers he put, even months after it was done. He'd remember what day of the week certain events happened.

To be fair, since my brother doesn't remember these events, his friend could be lying, and he'd never know. Even so, his friend has no particular reason to lie. But he found his friend had a tough time remembering things that happened more recently in his life, such as stuff happening in the past year.

This, he claimed, was because he had more time to think about the stuff in the past. There's a line of thought (pun somewhat intended) that says that you don't remember things, that you remember the last time you remembered things, and that through repetition or refreshing of these thoughts, you reinforce what you remember. Most often, these recollections occur when you are recounting a story to someone. The more you do it, the more it becomes ingrained.

I recall Abe Lincoln claiming that it was hard for him to remember things, but when he remembered something, he remembered it. He likened it to etching something in metal. It's hard to do, but once done, it never goes away.

Knowing that people remember with different abilities, I knew that this would affect how I taught things. In particular, repeating stuff, rephrasing stuff, would cause it to reinforce. The funny (or sad) thing is that it would work far better on people who memorized stuff. If repetition works well on people who don't remember well, it really does a number on those who do.

The ability to memorize may differ from thing to thing. I knew one woman who was fantastic at remembering people, which one had kids, or which country they were from, but was awful once you did something technical, and made her have to memorize technical definitions. That stuff just didn't stick the way faces and names did. I don't know why that is, although I find I have the opposite problem.

Anyway, food for thought.

Weirdness

I'm trying to figure out why I'm getting an error, so I'm posting this small post.

More Punkin'

I tried making pumpkin pie a second time, but this time I did a few things differently. First, I cut back on the sugar and spices. Second, I cut back on the evaporated milk, because the last time I made it with milk, it overfilled the pie shell.

The recipe also says to heat the oven to 425 for fifteen minutes, then lower it to 350. However, we had a pizza stone in the oven, and it's difficult to lower the temperature quickly because the stone radiates heat, so I never set it up to 425.

However, the result of the pumpkin pie was something rather mushy. I'm not sure whether that's due to not heating it up til 425, or whether I needed more eggs. I used the two as requested, but next time I'll try 3, and see how that works.

In the meanwhile, since the rest of the housemates aren't into pumpkin pie, I'll slowly have to eat it all.

American Pie

I like cuisines of all sorts, particularly Asian cuisine. And I include Indian, when I say Asian, though I tend to exclude Turkish and Russian food. I mean, generally, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Indian foods.

But for some reason, perhaps because I grew up on desserts in the US, I don't care for desserts from other countries. I don't care for the sweets from India. I like some Chinese sweets. Overall, though, I prefer the chocolate chip cookies, the pies, and the general dessert fare in cooking Americana.

One dessert, in particular, I've taken a liking to late in life, and that's pumpkin pie. I'm sure I didn't eat much of it when I was a teen, but once I was in late high school and in college, I really like pumpkin pie.

It never quite struck me what goes into pumpkin pie other than pumpkins, and even then. If you've ever carved a pumpkin, pulled out its stringy guts, its seeds, you'd wonder how you would even eat this monstrosity.

Yet, when suitably pureed and canned, pumpkins make for a great confection. Except pumpkin pie is really a spice cookie made into a pie. Maybe pumpkin itself isnt a compelling enough dessert, or that it's too much like eating squash or some other vegetable.

But no, no, let's add spices, milk, and eggs to it. In particular, cinnamon. Cinnamon, by American standards, is seen as a dessert spice. Added to cinnamon rolls, or to spice up cider, or to sprinkle on gourmet coffees, cinnamon reminds people of sweets.

Except that it's not universally seen this way. In India, cinnamon, in conjunction with a myriad of spices, is as likely to be used to flavor meats, and so there is a cognitive disconnect between cinnamon and desserts that Indians have, which may make them shrug as to why Americans perceive it as dessert (even more fascinating is the smell of almonds, which Americans perceive as sweet, and Indians perceive as bitter, since the smell of almonds is really the smell of rotting, bitter almonds).

I wanted to figure out how to make pumpkin pie, but never did so, until I saw the cover of Saveur with its tempting cover of a pumpkin pie, slightly roasted, with the promise of a traditional Southern recipe, buried inside.

But really, the recipe is about what you'd find on the can, with the portions a little different, but the result about the tasty same.

Eggs, cinnamon, ground ginger, ground cloves, evaporated milk, sugar, pumpkin, bake, and pie.

And it's not that much more complex than buying a pie from the store. Suddenly, I'm all fascinated by foods that are much easier to cook than I had originally imagined, and robust enough to handle variations in the recipe.

Which reminds me. I need to get some pie.

Toodles!

Video and Print

A little while ago I blogged about Kurt Eichenwald's expose of the life of Justin Berry, a teen who had been webcamming for money since he was barely a teen. He's 18 or so now, quit the business, and turned in evidence.

It turns out there's an associated video interview which resembles those you see in 60 minutes, so I watched it, and noted how the video content is different from the written content.

The written article has a lot more information, as written articles generally do, and is often the reason I prefer reading news than watching it. But there's something you get in video, and it's hard to say whether it's more or less honest.

The first thing that strikes you about Justin Berry is that he seems like a normal kid, except that, oddly enough, he smiles a lot, and furrows his brow as he answers questions, as if puzzled, looking quizzically. If anything, he resembles a child star and I thought, in appearance, he resembled something like Macaulay Culkin.

Culkin's actually a good similarity, not just based on the superficial similar looks, but really, Culkin's life. Culkin starred in the Home Alone films and was the next big child star. His parents were managing his life. I can't say I remember much of the details, except, much like Drew Barrymore, his interaction with his parents was troubled, and what seemed like an innocent childhood, when brought in the light of public scrutiny and the untold wealths of acting, lead people--kids, parents--to act out. Not to say such acting out (yelling, screaming, lying) doesn't occur among those with less money, less means, but that it seems more magnified in the acting business.

Culkin dropped out of the acting business for a while, and has resurfaced some, doing independent movies. Barrymore has really come back despite a life of drugs and scenes that might come out of Mommie Dearest.

But this story's different, because Justin isn't a film star, his name isn't well-known, and yet many of the things that happened to him, albeit to a different degree, and to a much smaller, much intentedly focused audience, isn't that far removed from what happens to child actors.

For one, Berry is comfortable in front of the camera. He's used to smiling---a lot. He has an easy charm about the way he presents himself, so much so that you don't realize that most kids his age are really awkward in front of a camera. Watch a college-aged football player being interviewed, and you realize that despite their media popularity, many of them lack the polish to be on camera. We're so used to watching TV actors who are literally trained to be good on television, that we don't realize how unusual that is.

To be sure, programs like 60 Minutes often have guests that also seem comfortable in front of the camera. But I suspect that they prefer not to have people stammer in front of cameras, and probably make difficult decisions about people who aren't good in front of the camera. The key, I suppose, is keeping answers focused, and letting the interviewer push the discussion so the interviewee doesn't have to carry the weight of sustaining the conversation.

Much like the article, Eichenwald presents himself as the objective interviewer. He's balding, has the mannerisms and distancing of a reporter, and the interview isn't so much different from that of Mike Wallace or Ed Bradley. If anything, 60 Minutes tends to be far more manipulative, and that is quite telling about the investigative media.

Before there was 20/20, before there was Dateline, there was the venerable 60 Minutes, which often did quite well in the ratings. This show had the veneer of journalistic integrity with the dispassionate reporters all heading into retirement age, lending authority and gravitas to the situation, their uninflected voice giving the illusion of impartiality.

And therein lay the problem of such programs. They seemed like news, when they were advocates, and that's why they were so popular. Go watch a few segments of 60 Minutes, and you discover that they often present two sides, say, a whistleblower and that person's employers who have since fired them, and you find yourself rooting very strongly for one side.

Why is that? Isn't 60 Minutes impartial? Well, no. This is the secret of their popularity. They make it seem like they're presenting both sides arguments, but it always works out that one side is, by far, the good guys, and the other, the bad guys, and by the end, you're despising the bad guys. You've been roped to believe exactly what the makers of the segment want you to believe.

To be sure, had you collected the evidence yourself, you might have come to the same conclusion, but that's not the point. The point is you are being manipulated. Were it, say, some interview about the inner workings of how the interest rates are adjusted, you'd be bored out of your skull. Such segments never make it on the air because it lacks the emotional investment from the viewer.

20/20 caught onto this formula, mixing serious segments where you'd root for one side, with offbeat segments often starring John Stossel. Even 60 Minutes wasn't relentlessly serious. They, too, would have feel good segments about Martina Navratilova, or about some music star.

What's clearly missing from this generally pleasant interview is the agenda that Eichenwald has, which is that he is completely aghast by this entire situation. His calm misdemeanor throughout doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how thoroughly frightened he is of this world he knew nothing about, and how compelled he is to do something to stop it.

You only get a sense of this by the word he chooses, the questions he asks. In particular, he uses the phrase "adult pedophiles" and "pedophiles" quite frequently, and for that matter, so does Justin Berry. Is it accurate? What exactly is a pedophile anyway? It's important to ask this question because the word is so overloaded with stigma that it can be difficult to think of this term with any degree of objectivity, and is precisely the reason the term is used. It evokes a sense of disgust and a desire to protect.

But, to the definition. Wikipedia presents some information about pedophilia. There are several issues at hand. Age is one. Some people distinguish between people who are sexually interested in pre-pubescent kids, so, for boy, before the age of about 12, and for girls, maybe a little younger, and hebephiles,
which refers to a sexual interest in adolescents, presumably teens.

Justin was 13 when he first started his webcam, and presumably didn't hit his popularity until he was closer to 15. Now, most people would still find having thoughts with a minor to be abhorrent, but it's even more so when you think of it with someone pre-pubescent.

Pubescence, almost by definition, is about the changing of the body that involve developing sexual organs. For women, it is the development of breasts and the start of menstruation, i.e., the ability to have children. For men, it's more about the ability to produce semen. For both, there are other characteristics, mostly involving hair growth, the deepening of the voice. This is a period of transition as kids are becoming adults.

It's also a period where many teens are beginning to experiment sexually. Many teens, by the time they are 17, have already had their first sexual experience, but there are even teens who remember having sex at 13 or 14, what might seem, to some, like an extraordinarily young age. Often, this happens with say, a friend of an older brother or sister.

There are laws against sex with minors in the U.S. primarily because this period of time is very confusing for teens. While most people would forgive, say, two teens who are in a sexual relationship (are both pedophiles?), because they are both immature, and at least, they are close in age, people become queasy when the one person is significantly older than the other. Even perfectly legitimate relationships between 40 year olds and 20 year olds (think Hugh Hefner) are seen as manipulative, with the older flaunting wealth and the younger seduced by the maturity and the opportunity to buy whatever.

Is it unhealthy to have these thoughts? Ads push youth and sexuality, particularly, Calvin Klein, Abercrombie and Fitch. Most of those portrayed in the ads are usually between 18-25, which is just beyond the age that camwhores are, but not always. Camwhores themselves could be between 18-25 as well.

Remember Britney Spears? How old was she when she jiggled her way onto the male consciousness? How many men, even significantly older men, were turned on, and how much did she know that she was being provocative, that she would turn people on? She wasn't a pre-teen. She was a teen. She was already becoming a woman. People would have to remind themselves how old she was and tell themselves it was wrong, and yet, she could look just as she does, and be 5 years older, as she is now, and those thoughts would suddenly be fine again.

The reason people are unnerved by this situation is that teens are still emotionally vulnerable. We've automatically been told that it's wrong, but without understanding why it's wrong. It's not that these kids are innocents, because frankly, some of them are far from innocent. It's that they are emotionally raw at that age, and are unable to process their feelings adequately, and in particular, they may be prone to manipulation.

Again, such things already happen to teens by other teens, but in this case, it's the blind leading the blind. Those manipulating are not particularly good at it. In any case, there's something sweet about people of the same age being together. You think of high school proms, and dates to get ice cream, without realizing that modern day high schools are filled with kids who are already thinking about sex, and doing something about it.

It's just that when someone is much older, there's a sense that they are obsessed, beyond normal means, about the situation, and further, that they are able to take advantage of the situation.

I recall being in high school, where a girl, my age, was, by all accounts, having sex with the English teacher, a man old enough to be her father, and in fact, had a son not two years younger than the girl. Was this teacher nuts? Yes and no. The girl herself did not deal well with her own parents, in particular, she had many a fight with her father, who eventually hired a detective to find out what was going on. I suspect, as a sign of rebellion, she wanted to go out with said teacher. Now, he should have said no, and he had to know that the consequences were high: his wife, his son. And yet, temptation can work its ways, and often does (see Election for a movie treatment of this topic).

There was a combination of factors that lead this to happen, yet, it's easy to pin the blame on the predatorial nature of the teacher. I'm not saying that maybe he didn't think about these things, because honestly, I don't know him at all. What I am saying is that when something is so demonized, it's very difficult to treat the subject with any sense of rationality, to see what might be going on.

Back to the story. At some point, Justin also refers to his fans as pedophiles, and, to some extent, this is roughly accurate, because it pushes the boundaries of the definition in at least one major respect: that he was definitely peddling his sexuality. Where Britney hints at showing off her goods, Justin crosses that boundary.

So let's bring up another issue. Kids and drugs. When a teen does drugs, is the teen blameless? When they smoke pot, are they free from blame? Maybe because we think of the people who get kids on pot as just their age, or just a little older, we place the blame squarely on the kids themselves. It's not like parents are coming to schoolyards and selling it to kids, a thought which some might recoil at. But the kid takes some blame.

But why? Some kids say they've learned to say no. Others think it's cool and neat, and try it out. Perhaps they learn even more, that pot , while less harmful than serious drugs like cocaine or heroin, was lumped equally, because people wanted to pass laws that would get blacks into jail, and since blacks were into pot, then voila, let's criminalize that. It's a thought so pervasive that people who have distanced themselves from drugs often do equate pot and cocaine as equally dangerous.

What makes one kid do drugs, and another not do it? Part of it is to deal with problems. There are kids, given the same situation as Justin, who wouldn't have done what Justin did, pure and simple. Even teens realize that they shouldn't do this, and can get away from it. It's not entirely surprising that Justin did not get along well with his folks, and as cheerful as he seems in an interview, this is someone who was, indeed, seeking friends.

And to that extent, those involved were guilty of pushing Justin's emotional state. He wanted someone to care about him, and people were willing to take that role on. But, it's more subtle than that. There's reason to believe that people who wanted to be his friends honestly believed that, honestly deluded themselves into thinking that they were his friends, but if push came to shove, they'd know that without his acts, they'd be offended, and want more from their "friend".

And there's reason to believe that Justin didn't consider these people "pedophiles", at least, not in those terms, though probably the terms weird and scary would be more accurate.

And that gets to the point of the interview.

It strikes me as less than honest, not that the honest truth would be any less harsh, but that somehow Justin is seen as something of an innocent, and part of it is that he smiles his way through, when what went on was plenty enough serious on both sides. When he says he was "messed up", that's very true, and yet, for many years, he didn't mind that much. It gave him an odd power trip, it gave him money, and it gave him the warped life, much like a MacCauley Culkin that one can't even begin to imagine.

In particular, what doesn't come across in the interview, but what does somewhat come across in the written piece is that Justin, himself, was manipulative. He knew he had power. He'd ask for thousands of dollars, and he'd get it. I doubt he was Mr. Congeniality all the time, and probably berated fans, then came back whimpering later, begging for forgiveness.

The print version gives you a much better sense of this cautionary tale, that the video doesn't, and the video is, in fact, more likely to lie. Eichenwald being calm and impartial, when he's clearly not. Berry being wide-eye and, well, if not innocent, then possibly disarmingly charming, too much of a regular guy to have ever gotten into this, and really, saying words that he wouldn't have said had you approached him earlier on.

Did Justin really want to "save other kids", or was this impressed on him as a compelling reason by Eichenwald himself? I don't blame Eichenwald for wanting to get Justin out of the mess that is his life, in fact, I applaud it. But I'm sure he had to do as much manipulation as Justin's fans did to get Justin to realize the errors of his way, that if Justin didn't do the right thing, how many others would be hurt? Did he want others to really go through what he went through?

What he doesn't get at is its similarity to drugs, such as smoking or alcohol. You can tell people that they should stop doing drugs or alcohol because of the kind of evil it does to them. And yet, it hides the fact that they were hooked on it, bad, and that it was for lots of reasons they stay hooked.

Camming was a drug to Justin, as it is to many others. From it, he derived attention, power, money, and from it, he derived a warped sense of the world, met with people who could, more or less, lead normal lives, and yet felt compelled to a similar addiction of their own. You'll notice that the fans of his site were not interviewed. Why not?

Simple. They would seem far too normal, far too ordinary, and then they'd have to play up the theme of "evil lurking behind innocence", a Dave Lynchian theme from Blue Velvet. It would be the banality of evil going on, and the demonization would have to be amped up, even as the angelization of Justin is amped up too.

Ultimately, you'll not get an accurate picture of what really happened without other interviews, taking, alas, a more dispassionate (or possibly even sympathetic) view.

And that leads to a film I watched a few weeks ago called Good Night and Good Luck. A film about the life of Edward Murrow. He becomes symbolic of the kind of journalistic integrity and neutrality that journalists in the US inhabit, and yet, it really was this attempt to deal with the witchhunts of Joseph McCarthy, that he goes from journalist to a kind of advocacy.

Other countries are more clear about their biases. In France, if you want a liberal viewpoint, you get a liberal newspaper. If you want a conservative viewpoint, you get a conservative paper. In the end, you get the news shaded how you want to see it.

These days, Fox News is as close as you get to having news shaded the way a certain population wants to see it.

I don't mind that journalists generally want to appear neutral and unbiased. I think that's a strength of American journalism. What I do mind is when the try to lend the weight of unbiased journalism to something they clearly have bias on, and while Eichenwald doesn't entirely hide this fact, he also doesn't put it completely out in the open.

Were he to point the camera at himself and ask the questions that he should ask, you'd get an interesting answers. What did you think when you first heard the story? How do you react as a parent with three kids? Can you sympathize with the people who went to his site? Can you sympathize with Justin? Is this a kind of Taxi Driver thing going on ("you talking to me?")?

And one other problem with the story, which again, happens with shows like 20/20. It's the story of one person. When you hear one person's story, you get one view, and maybe that view isn't representative enough to tell the whole story. For example, I remember a segment where they send one white guy and one black guy with exactly the same credentials, and everywhere the black guy goes, he's unable to get a fair shake.

But that has to be shoddy journalism at best, seeking out just the kind of people who would act that way, claiming rampant racism. In that segment, the black man tries to hail down a taxi, and no one will stop, which doesn't get to the fact that many taxi drivers in New York City are often Pakistani, just as dark skinned as the passengers they may not be picking up, and yet, the point is to insinuate that these are white guys, and of course, had he been picked up, that part would be left out of the segment, as it doesn't illustrate the point that the writers so desperately want to convey.

Hot N Sour, Part 2

Typically, once you've made a recipe once or twice successfully, then you'll probably good after that, but for some reason, my third attempt at hot and sour soup did not go particularly well. Of course, it would have helped if I had followed exactly what I did the first two times.

Except, really, the first two times weren't successful. In particular, it wasn't hot enough. I'm following a recipe that is right out of Cooks Illustrated, but it seems to rely on white pepper to make the soup hot, and that just doesn't seem workable. At best, it may work with freshly ground pepper, but it isn't even close for stuff that's not fresh.

I also tried using black vinegar, by Koon Chun, and unless the bottle I have is bad, it doesn't come anywhere near close to making stuff sour. When I tried it last time, I used rice vinegar, and that worked pretty well. I may try Chianking(?) vinegar which is also some kind of black vinegar, with a much different taste.

I think I need to try the recipe out from Saveur, which is another snobby cooking magazine that seems to focus more on typical "American" cooking, despite its fancy name. Unlike, Cooks, Saveur does not explain why its recipes work. In that respect, Cooks is pretty much unique. I've complained before that recipes rarely explain why they work.

That's because people often pass it down, and rarely explain how they came to that recipe.

Anyway, I'll need to get the magazine recipe and see if that's any better.

Let you know how that goes.

Diving In

I own all of the Head First series. I'll say the style is starting to grate on me, but I still get the books because it's still one of the more original ways to explain stuff I've seen.

After veering into more sophisticated topics, JSP and Design Patterns, the latest book has aimed a bit simpler, with the goal of explaining HTML, CSS, and XHTML. I've always wanted to learn CSS, even if I find HTML kind of a pain in general. It's shown its resilience by not disappearing.

I would have thought, ten years after it came out, that some other de facto standard would have replaced it. The key has always been to get those folks who make browsers to implement your stuff. The closest rival, and it's a long shot by far, appear to be Flash, which uses ActionScript as the language to drive a certain kind of display.

I would have thought people would have created a language that allows you to control layout much better, even if that's antithetical to the original purpose of HTML, which was to describe the content, not its layout. But when you do that, you generally create universally crappy layout regardless of broswer.

Hopefully, it'll be a good read.

My Life as a Dog

I remember about a year or so ago, listening to NPR. It was probably This American Life. The story was so compelling that rather than leave my car to head to my destination, I just sat, listening to the story.

It was a story of Mark Whitacre, an executive at ADM (Archer, Daniels, Midland), who became an informant for the FBI. He had told them that ADM was in collusion with the Koreans and Japanese to artificially inflate the cost of lysine, so all colluders could get rich. This was done even though there were farmers that were struggling to pay for the escalating cost of lysine. He was wired up and met with representatives from competitors as he gathered evidence for the FBI for two years, all the while, his coworkers had no idea what was going on, and knowing he might be caught at any time.

Evenually, Whitacre deals a huge blow to the case, when he confesses that he has been embezzling money from ADM, to the tune of ten million dollars. He says all executives do it, and he was expected to do it too, and so he did. This story was written by reporter, Kurt Eichenwald, who has specialized in scandals on Wall Street. This book is scheduled to become a film by director, Steven Sodebergh, who also filmed a somewhat similar political thriller, Traffic.

So it comes as a surprise that I see his name on something so completely different for him, and on a story as harrowing as it comes. Reported in the New York Times, it tells the story of teen, Justin Berry, who, at the age of 13, got a webcam. He posted himself on the web, hoping to meet some girls, and instead, met some guys. Initially offered $50 to take his shirt off, he thought, why not, if someone is crazy enough to give me that much money just to take my shirt off?

Little did he realize that this would lead to a slippery slope. If he'd take his shirt off, what about his pants, and his boxers, and then, maybe do a little show, and then maybe have sex on camera with someone else, and so forth. He realized he could make lots of money on this. So his camera wasn't so good. No problem. Have an Amazon wish list that had the top of the line camera. So, he had only one camera. No problem, have his fans buy him more. But a faster connection.

Didn't his parents know? They just thought Justin liked being on the computer, and that being on the computer wasn't such a bad thing. Besides, Justin didn't exactly get along with his folks, and he had an adoring crowd who wanted to see his every move. As he got older, people paid for trips to visit them, for an apartment that he could go to, so he would be outside his parents watchful eye, and eventually fell into drug use. His own dad left the family, and when word was that he was in Mexico, he joined him there, only to tell his dad how he had so much money, and have his dad help him find prostitutes he could have sex with on his cam to make money.

He continued to do this for years, until he turned 19, until he agreed to talk to Kurt Eichenwald, and tell his story.

You had to feel Eichenwald, as much muck as he had seen in his life, was floored by Justin, floored by the fact that his story was not the only one of a teen convinced by a surrogate family to become a entertainer, about the kind of deceit it took to hide it from his family, and the emotional comfort he took from these strangers who claimed they loved him. Eichenwald must have told Justin that his life was totally messed up, that he was dealing with sleazebags, and it made him truly fearful. If it happened to Justin, it might happen to one of my kids.

I am a father. I can no longer be the objective reporter. I must help this kid out or be condemned to hell for my complete lack of feeling. And so Eichenwald must have proceeded to tell Justin that confession is good for soul, that what he was doing was far from normal, that he was damaged goods, and the only way he could save himself was to rat out those who had manipulated him all his teenage life, to turn over all his records, all his evidence, and to make amends.

There's a story behind this story that I'm sure is eventually going to make it into a book. Maybe not now. Maybe in a year or so. But I think, if it's to be truly honest, Kurt himself must be a character in this book. He must talk about why he chose to do what he did. It reminds me vaguely of the film Priest which is the film of a priest who hears the confession of a teenage girl that is being sexually abused by her father, with her mother oblivious to this fact.

The priest, felt bound by the sanctity of the priest-parishioner confidence, feels he must keep it secret, and yet, it's so horrible, he feels he must tell someone too. The film has a twist too. The priest is gay. He has his own secrets to hide as well.

Except this real-life story is so much more detailed, so much more jaw-dropping, that one can barely fathom it happened. The story concludes with Justin seeking out the church to deal with his problems, but I suspect he's damaged goods. This was a major addiction in his life. I don't think the church will provide him with what he's going to be missing. He got the kind of emotional support that he didn't have from his own family, by people driven more by their libido than by true goodwill. To be fair, they probably believed they loved and cared for him, but they could never have done so without the titillations that Justin offered. More importantly, he was a star. There were people who wanted to follow his every move, and yet, wanted to control his every move. Even so, he had control, or at least, he thought he did. To leave this all behind means to leave the pedestal, and while his name is splashed in a newspaper, the question is whether he can deal with this withdrawal.

The world that Justin inhabited is this brave new world, and it remains to be seen whether this is some anomaly, a result of troubled children, and troubled adults, pushed forward by technology, or whether this technology signals a change in the way people interact. Lest you think that Internet communication is somehow evil, many teens, now entering their twenties use chat all the time. They leave messages about their whereabouts for all their friends to read.

The outreach of an Internet community can have positive effects. I recall a story of someone with an illness who was part of some community, that recommended doctors, and helped pay for bills. People may not know the folks that live next door, but they may learn to meet folks who live all over the world, and relate to them through text and IM, and create virtual communities. Right now, this is a very tiny portion of the population, but will this grow over time. Think of how the telephone transformed the way we communicate. Will the Internet do the same?

But to get to the story at hand. I don't think I've ever seen an attempt to seem so journalistically neutral, and the complete abandoment of this notion when alarms go off in the head of the reporter who clearly didn't expect to be shocked, despite having seen the underbelly of disdainful practices in business.

Joel vs. Java

Ah Joel Spolsky, you ranter you! The latest Joel article is all about his views on teaching Java in computer science departments. Now clearly, his view about the goals of a computer science department contrast greatly with what these departments are trying to do.

On the one hand, Joel wants these departments to produce the best programmers possible, and to him, Java ain't the way there. That's because Joel has boiled down great programming to knowing two concepts: recursion and pointers. This is strange to me for several reasons. First, Java does indeed have pointers: it simply calls them references.

To be fair, I don't exactly know what Joel thinks one should know about pointers. For example, you can use pointers to attach linkeds lists and trees, but that can be done in Java just as well as C. Languages like C create a strong correspondence between arrays and pointers, and offer something languages like Pascal don't have: pointer arithmetic. Also, C pretty much allows you to cast an int to any arbitrary pointer type.

This means you can point to memory that you don't own. Most modern OSes do not allow rampant access of memory, and use techniques like virtual memory to prevent a process from arbitrarily accessing memory that belongs to other processes. Doing so causes a segmentation fault. Java makes it pretty much impossible to get segmentation faults because you can't perform arbitrary casting. Furthermore, it does bounds-checking on arrays, which is its way of making sure you don't access memory you don't own.

OK, I admit, since Java is a safe language, the worst you can do is a null pointer exception. In general, it protects you from arbitrary memory access, and even more, it guarantees that you are either pointing to an object of a valid type, or that it's null. C and languages like it don't hide this fact from you.

But there's more. Those languages also don't have garbage collection. There's a certain skill to tracking down memory errors, but by golly, they're evil. Real-world programmers need memory leak tools to help trace these problems, and I tell you that it is an incredible waste of time. These bugs are insidious because they are so hard to find. Without tools like Purify, people would go nuts.

Joel also talks about the ability to pack things into bits. Even programmers in C don't actually have to do this. A curriculum can get along perfectly well without teaching bit operations, even if sticks to C or C++. And it's not as if Java doesn't have these operations, because it does. The only headache in Java is that it lacks unsigned types, which creates problems as you cast to larger types (sign-extension and the like).

It's not that you can't learn these concepts in Java, because you can, especially if the person teaching it is aware that they need to teach it. It's just that when you don't know it well in languages like C or C++, it bites you much harder, and the best students are more aware of why these bad things happen. It's like being a tightrope walker with and without a net. When you don't have a net, you know it really hurts when you fall, and you're that much more attuned to the mistake and how best to deal with it.

As far a recursion goes, I mean, come on, which CS dept. worth its grain in salt doesn't cover this? To be fair, I somehow managed to avoid understanding this concept until really late, until pretty much I had graduated. However, if you take a data structures course, you've got to do some recursion, especially with any tree manipulation. Algorithms courses tend to rely on some recursion too.

But understanding recursion and pointers isn't enough to do world class programming. It just isn't. A person who understands both may be far more likely to deal with the complexities of programming, because there's a strong correlation between the ability of a mind to grasp these concepts and to do good programming, but that's all it is: a correlation. In pro football, there's this thing called the combine, where college players eligible for the draft that aren't sure things (like Reggie Bush is a sure thing) go. They run 40 yard dashes, and do all sorts of stuff to impress the scouts.

What they don't do is play the game in the combine. The scouts hope the numbers correlate well to playing football well. This is the same with recursion and pointers.

Now that I've been in the "real world" for a while, I'm beginning to see a lot of other skills that are just as important. First and foremost is the ability to work with other people's code. Most CS depts prefer their kids to write code from scratch. There's a huge number of benefits from doing so, not the least of which is that the person writing the programming project doesn't have to supply students with code. Heaven knows that teachers of programming don't want to supply code that has to be tested and debugged. Given their druthers, most teachers want to describe a project in 2-3 paragraphs, so it only takes them an hour to write up. Real world code isn't small and isolated like that.

You also have to have some idea of what it means to architect code. I have no idea how to do this. Well, that's not true. I have some idea, but I don't have the definitive idea on how to do this. And intro books are no better at it than anyone else. Intro books are good at covering the syntax of a language, and perhaps dealing with a few basic things like data structures, algorithms, and some testing. I bet many of these authors have never had to code much beyond a thousand lines long.

Once you get past the fundamentals of the language, of algorithms, and of data structures, the next step is thinking about how to design code, and that ain't easy. People are still coming up with new ways of how to write code, and nothing jumps out as the "right" way.

But, wait, there's more. What software company doesn't use version control, or a bug tracking system, or debuggers? How many CS departments teach the ins and outs of this technology? In the days of C, the build tool of choice was make, and this was so old and kludgy, that I think some high school kid wrote it, warts and all. If you're coding in Java, you use Ant as a build language, or maybe Maven, which builds on top of Ant.

Well, ladies and gents, Ant wasn't around five years ago (and if it was, it wasn't around ten years ago). You can't do serious Java coding without some rudiumentary understanding of Ant (OK, you can, because IDEs do a good job of hiding it, but still). Ant is a piece of technology, just like CVS, just like JUnit, that is part of the Java programming lexicon, and you've got to learn it if you're doing to do business in this field.

Which leads me to the flip side of the argument. Joel is ranting that CS departments are going to stop producing the coding whizzes he so desperately wants, or at the very least, he's going to have to do that much more work to identify the stars. The first scenario is a dilemma, the second, an inconvenience.

But to address this point head-on, why are CS departments doing this? Why are they "dumbing down" the curriculum? Joel has an elitist view of the world, especially the programming world. If there were 100 CS majors, he'd weed out 98 as hopeless, to keep the two superstars. The rest should find something else to do. Of course, if everyone believed that, then no one would ever graduate from college. Not that he cares. He wants the best. The rest is too much work to get to the best, and wasted work at that. Coding whizzes are effectively born, not created.

But CS departments, as many other departments, want students to graduate. That's a nice goal, right?

So why "dumb" it down? This leads me to my next point, which will come as a shocker to most people who aren't in computer science. There are plenty of professors that can't program. Oh, I don't mean, they can't program. They can, but they choose not to.

To illustrate this idea, let me introduce a mathematician of note. David Hilbert. (I could have picked anyone, but Hilbert will do). Hilbert was a brilliant German mathematician at the turn of the twentieth century. If he were still alive now, and in full mental capacity, he could probably still do mathematics today with the best of them. Math notation hasn't changed much in a hundred years (although he was responsible for some of the way math looks today). Sure, there are many advanced techniques in math that just weren't around in his day, but even so, math notation and the idea of proof is basically unchanged.

On the other hand, programming languages are highly ephemeral. I once heard of a professor who lamented that he had to learn Java to teach data structures. Since when did he stop knowing stuff about trees and stacks and graphs and so forth? He knew how to code it in Pascal! Why did he have to know it in Java? What did inheritance and interfaces and exceptions have to do with data structures? He could draw pictures of nodes and arrows, and that was a perfectly fine way of talking about data structures.

Many professors simply don't like the change. They aren't fans of technology. They like the fact that the proof for the irrationality of the square root of two that they used ten years ago is still good today, and will be good ten years from now. They don't like the fact that they have to explain a binary tree in FORTRAN twenty five years ago (the horror!), then in Pascal fifteen years ago, and now in Java. Why do they have to know OO programming? What's wrong with good old procedural programming?

The paper that Joel cites in his rant is typical of this. The committee that was formed (mostly profs. with an interest in teaching programming), want to find some subset of the Java API they can use to teach year after year after year. They want to ignore the fast-paced changes of the language so that teachers don't have to keep up with what's going on in the language. In fact, as they see it, things are getting worse. Languages are revised every year. Did Pascal really change once it got popular? I don't think so.

The reason they switched to Java was because C++ is an extremely difficult language to learn in its full extent. Try to read a book by Alexandrescu on templates, or explain to me what an abstract base class is, and you begin to appreciate just what a mess the language can be. You can easily create problems that can stump even Bjarne Stroustrup. Java promised to hide a lot of that ugliness away, and to a great extent, a lot of people are happy about it. In particular, teachers are happy about it.

I've heard a counter-retort. If ease of language is so important, then why not teach Visual Basic? OK, so people teaching programming realize that learning Visual Basic would take so many kids out of the market for real jobs. The reality is that most kids who learn to program are going to do best in exactly the language they were taught. And the "tougher" that language is, the better their chances of working in the real world. Yet, if it's too tough, then even the teachers struggle. And let's face it, Visual Basic is Microsoft, and people in academia loathe Microsoft.

OK, then why not teach a semi-respectable language like Scheme? Its syntax is far simpler than Visual Basic and Java, yet it has powerful features like closures and continuations. Yet, the world doesn't do much programming in Scheme, so kids who learn it, would have to learn Java and C#, and the change is so great for the average programmer, that it would be a disaster. It's no surprise then, that powerhouse universities like MIT, which attract kids that already program well in Java or what have you, are the ones teaching Scheme.

The point is that academia wants to teach a language that is easy enough for them to understand, without the messiness that students generally don't want to deal with, yet, not be so easy as to not be able to hit important concepts, in particular, object oriented programming.

And there are plenty of profs in the world that think OO programming is just a fad.

This leads me to a phrase that Microsoft espouses. They seek folks with a passion for technology. This means a willingness to embrace the new, to keep up with changes, much like fans of Hollywood want to know the latest dirt on Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt or Ben Affleck. Programming has become the flavor du jour. The hot topics (outside of MS land) is Ajax and Ruby on Rails. There are people pushing programming with mock objects. People who talk up Spring and Hibernate. People who think Groovy is groovy! Three years ago, these topics weren't on anyone's breath. Three years from now, they won't be on anyone's breath (or they may be!).

Academics want the ability to recycle their notes for the next ten years. I have a colleague who learned to teach programming in the eighties and early nineties. The big ideas then were "top-down programming". Now the buzz words are design patterns and unit testing. Newer buzzwords include mock object programming. Extreme programming. UML. XML. This teacher might well wonder what all this faddish stuff is all about, and why she has to learn it to teach programming. She doesn't realize that programming is like following the hot movie stars. Each year, something new comes out.

And somehow, someway, knowing about recursion and pointers is somehow equated to wanting to learn about all these technologies, and much of that, on your own time. There's a big difference between the ability to learn something, and the desire to learn something. Many academics find it a complete waste of their time to learn a new programming language. Those that have graduated more recently have begun to embrace these changes because they are in the midst of a kind of education revolution that is now taking place beyond the confines of academia.

Do you think kids who program now who know about CSS or RSS or Ajax or PHP or MySQL learned it in class? Come on. Kids these days who dabble in programming now pick this stuff on their own, while professors scoff at this as some kind of fad that's not really computer science.

And to some extent they are right.

If you're a C coder, do you have to know about Jar files and classpaths or Ant? Why did Java programmers have to learn about this, and why is it given such short shrift in many intro books? Because a lot of these Java books were written by C coders who didn't know they had to worry about classpaths.

And to be honest, why does knowledge of classpaths make you any smarter? How does it make you a better programmer? The flat answer is that it doesn't. But the followup answer is that you better know this stuff if you intend to code in Java. And so you have book writers and academics who throw their arms up in the air lamenting "Why am I forced to care about these things when I didn't have to care about them before?" and designers who say "Look at what wonderful things you can do now that you couldn't do before!", and academics who retort "but I don't care to learn that stuff, it's not a new proof, it's not profound, it's just technology!".

So I say that academics have it wrong and Joel has it wrong. Academics don't understand that the computer industry, by its very nature, is faddish, and that to be successful in this industry means having to follow fads all the time, every year. And teachers who are uncomfortable with the idea that what they know now and what they teach now will become, at least, partly obsolete (the basics of algortithms and data structures will remain the same, but how you design and structure code, plus the tools that allow you to build, test, and deploy code, plus tracking bugs, will change and change and change).

Ask an academic in computer science if they are going to teach version control and unit testing and regression testing and how to create and merge branches and use the debugger and so forth, and they'll say "What does that have to do with programming?". What they don't realize is that these tools are now part and parcel of the way code is developed today, and this may change again in five years time.

Knowing recursion and pointers isn't going to guarantee the people Joel finds will want to learn the newest technology and to embrace it. They may say, let's just code in Scheme, and be done with it, once and for all, and that simply isn't enough (though people like Paul Graham would disagree and say that we should code in Scheme or Lisp, and, yes, be done with all this other crap languages).

It's no wonder some people give up on programming, tired of chasing the latest technology, tired of realizing Unicode is not just a single coding standard but a family of coding standard, tired of dealing with RSS, tired of learning yet another tool that is supposed to make them more productive. They want to step off this road to nowhere, and learn a trade, get good at it, and stick to that same skill set the rest of their lives.

Gesundheit!

The most pedestrian of spices is salt and pepper. For the most part, salt from a salt shaker does its job. The information age has, of course, made snobs of us all, or at least, the portion of society that seems to care, which I suppose, includes me. Instead of table salt, you can also get kosher salt or sea salt. I haven't bought sea salt personally, but I have bought kosher salt, which you can get in boxes.

To the non-Jew, which includes me, the idea of kosher salt seemed peculiar. To me, kosher meant things like no pork, no shellfish, and animals killed for eating in a particular manner. What did salt have to do with that? I think it has to do with the process of killing requiring the use of salt.

In any case, whatever the reason, kosher salt is a bit flakier than its table salt cousin, and somewhat less salt. By weight, you have to use more kosher salt or less table salt, depending on what you're cooking. But table salt suffices.

Pepper, on the other hand, is almost always pre-ground. This creates a problem because much of pepper's bite comes from oils, which, when exposed to air begins to degrade the flavor, until you have a pale imitation of what used to be pepper. Freshly ground pepper is usually best, but here's the problem: getting a pepper grinder.

You can pick up one almost anywhere, but they are a bit pricey. They cost around twenty dollars or more. How do you find a good pepper mill? I was looking around at some usual locations: Williams and Sonoma, Crate and Barrel, Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and so forth.

Then, I recalled reading an article in Cooks Illustrated, one of my favorite cooking magazines, about a pepper mill they raved about. Problem was, I couldn't remember what the brand was. (Sad thing is I think I bought one a few years ago, but never used it). I did finally find its name: Unicorn Magnum Plus. It's rather pricey at around forty five bucks. I was going to buy one anyway, but once I found shipping and handling where going to add another ten bucks, I hesitated.

I found a place online that seems to be the company that distributes the entire line of Unicorn pepper mills: Pepper Gun and opted for one of their cheaper mills: Keytop. It's smaller than the Magnum Plus, and they're basically closed for business during the holidays, but hopefully in a week or so, I'll have the new pepper mill and talk about it then.

Now, you might wonder what I want with a pepper mill. Recently, I found a recipe for hot and sour soup (two, in fact, one in Cook's Illustrated and one in Saveur). The first recipe uses white pepper to create the heat for the soup.

Ah, white pepper. Ever heard of it? You know about black pepper. There's even red pepper. But white pepper? It's basically black pepper, but it's white. Or somewhat tannish. Unlike black pepper, which shows up as visible flecks in whatever you're cooking, white pepper dissolves and you can't see it.

For some reason, it is a challenge to find white pepper. McCormick's makes it, but all their spices are way overpriced. If you want to get cheap spices, find yourself an Indian grocery store. You can get bags of spices for a the cost of a tiny little bottle by McCormick. And that's if you can even find white pepper.

However, I wanted white peppercorns, so I could grind it fresh, which meant I needed a peppper mill, and now I need peppercorns. I think I'll be able to get the peppercorns from Williams Sonoma, which I visited a few days ago. They had a large jar of it for ten dollars. A little pricey, but it'll do.

Even harder to find are Sichuan peppercorns, which are often used in Sichuan cooking, i.e., spicy Chinese cooking. I suppose a well-stocked Chinese grocer might have it. We'll see.

Oh, the recipe. I've always wanted to make hot and sour soup. It's one of those comfort foods I like, though not all the time. I recall my mother making it once from a can, and it didn't really resemble the stuff I got from restaurants. I thought there was some magic secret to it.

Turns out, it's not all that hard to make, although it is modestly time consuming to cook. Basically, chicken stock, tofu, bamboo shoots, pork, sesame oil, egg, cornstarch, soy, and vinegar (and white pepper! or chili oil). The heat comes from white pepper, so says one recipe. However, the white pepper I had was pretty bland, and I added jalapenos to spice it up. The recipe suggested black vinegar, which I didn't have on hand (we did have something that was black, but it called Chianking vinegar, which did make for a unique tasting hot/sour soup).

OK, so finding good white pepper makes me something of a snob, I admit. Ultimately, being more educated about the world means being more snobbish. Instead of getting any pepper mill (or even knowing I should get a pepper mill), I have to find one that has been judged as good.

Alas, this snobbery means I can tell you that pepper is much like coffee. They say the best coffee comes from grinding the coffee fresh (there's also using good water, and getting a decent brand of beans). If the coffee is ground, then exposure to air starts to degrade its flavor until a year or so later, when it becomes near undrinkable. That's why some companies now vacuum seal their coffee, although some of those vacuum seal an "inferior" make of coffee. It's sort of like getting gourmet Spam. It can only be so good, right?

I know there are a bunch of people that don't care, but funny enough, there are a bunch who do care. Would I care if they didn't? I doubt it. There wouldn't be a market for people who care if there weren't enough people to care. Starbucks made people care about getting coffee of a certain grade, and convinced people it was worth shelling out several bucks.

I used to be one of those folks. I would shell out a few bucks for a latte or a cappuccino. Then, I realized I just wanted good caffeine, and so regular coffee suited me just fine. Thus, when I go to Starbucks, I get their coffee of the day.

Oh, but you know snobbery. Starbucks is the Walmart of coffee houses. But really, as much as they've made life tough for coffee houses, they also gave rise to places that had no coffeehouses. Magic Johnson made an effort to introduce Starbucks to the inner city because he thought even the poor would spend a few bucks on coffee.

In fact, that was the same thing that pushed the ordinary Joe to demand a better cup of Joe. Maybe you can't afford a BMW. Maybe you can't eat caviar, or dine in fine French restaurants, but by golly, you can drink a pricey cup of coffee.

Given my druthers, I'd rather have coffee at a good Seattle coffeehouse like Victrola, but quality coffeehouses aren't all that common. Go to a decent Seattle coffeehouse, and it's worth getting a latte, if for no other reason, than to see the floral pattern they make on the froth in the cup. The locations seem to attract a more bohemian lot than the usual denizens of a Starbucks.

This kind of thinking, I suppose, is endemic of the bobo mentality (bobo=bohemian bourgeois), i.e., folks who have money, but care about the quality of what they buy, and environmental friendliness, etc. This is a merit-based elitism, rather than a wealth-based, blue blood elitism.

All this from wanting better pepper for hot and sour soup.