By George!

There are four basketball "powers" in the Washington DC area: Georgetown, George Washington University, George Mason, and University of Maryland. Until recently, the preeminent basketball power was Maryland. Georgetown was plenty good when John Thompson, Jr. was head coach, but then he stepped down, handing over the reins to his longtime assistant, Craig Esherick.

Esherick wasn't a bad coach, but he wasn't a particularly successful coach, at least, with the mantle of John Thompson on his shoulders. It's much like following John Wooden of UCLA, who had some 11 national championships as coach back in the 50s and 60s. Eventually, Esherick was fired, and John Thompson's son, John Thompson, the 3rd, became coach.

JT3 (as I'll refer to him) had played basketball at Princeton, under Pete Carril. Carril was the one who conceived of the Princeton offense, an offense borne out of necessity. Princeton was only going to have so much talent. They used precision passing, three point shots, and the backdoor cut to score easy points, with athletes that were far less talented than power conference players.

Princeton's big moment came in 1989, when Georgetown was the number 1 seed, and Princeton was 16. Georgetown managed to win the game by one point, 50-49, on a last minute shot by Alonzo Mourning. Princeton continued to flourish under Coach Bill Carmody, and usually represented the Ivy Leagues throughout the 90s.

Carmody eventually left to coach Northwestern. By then, the Princeton offense was being played in places outside Princeton. Air Force, who was coached by a player who played on Princeton, played this style of offense. So did North Carolina State.

When Esherick was fired, they brought on JT3, who brought the Princeton offense to Georgetown. JT3 had one resource that he didn't easily have at Princeton. His dad. While the offense was his own, his dad was known for knowing how to coach big men, i.e., men who were 7 feet or taller. He could lend a hand with Georgetown's big man, Roy Hibbert.

Normally, tall guys with any modicum of talent are snatched by the NBA, who are looking for players with upside. They see players like Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Tracy McGrady, and Lebron James, who all skipped high school and are now highly successful NBA players, and wonder who the next Kobe is. This lead the Washington Wizards to draft Kwame Brown number 1 right out of high school. Several years of browbeating by his Airness, Michael Jordan, and coach Doug Collins left Brown unwilling to listen to the verbal punishment. Even the kinder hand of Eddie Jordan didn't help, and Brown was sent packing to the Lakers.

Hibbert lacked any such talent, despite size that make NBA agents and team drool. He was that bad. Mike Wilbon has written an article about the evolving talent of Hibbert, and how players that have skipped high school to the NBA might be better served with a college apprenticeship.

Who would have thought a few scant years after a national championship win, that Maryland would struggle so mightily to get into the NCAA tournament. This year marks the second year in a row that Maryland has played in the NIT. Last year, the players were willing to play in the second-place tournament, and managed to make it to the final four.

This year, coach Gary Williams wanted to bow out of the NIT before being informed by the athletic department that Maryland was contractually obligated to play. On Saturday, they proceeded to lose to Manhattan by some 5 points, perhaps reinforcing how much they didn't want to play the NIT.

In the meanwhile, the other universities in the DC area which had played second fiddle to Maryland have experience a minor resurgence. George Washington, under coach Karl Hobbs (who had himself been coached in high school by Mike Jarvis, who later coached GW as well, before heading to St. John's, and then getting fired from that job), coached GW to a 27-2 season.

This was the best record in the country, but the committee rewarded them with an 8th seed. Now, the committee gives four of every seed from 1 to 16, breaking the 64 team field into groups of 16, and seeding each group 1 to 16. This effectively meant the committee felt GW was no better than 32 teams.

The NCAA committee might pat itself on the back for its foresight, seeing how GW struggled against UNCW, a team Maryland had to beat on a last second three point shot by Drew Nicholas after John Goldsberry had knocked in 8 three pointers without a miss, a tournament recoerd. Goldsberry was on this year's team too, and it looked like UNCW would again be poised to knock out GW. Down 18 points, GW clawed and scratched, and eventually won the game.

However, that lead GW to have to face #1 seed, Duke. GW was hoping to give Duke a challenge, but sloppy play on GW's part, and Duke's precision attack lead GW struggling throughout, and lead to a loss. Still, had GW been given, say, a #3 seed, maybe they would have survived two rounds. This is true of many other teams, I think. Many teams that were #8 seeds have to face a tough #9 seed, and then get rewarded by playing the #1 seed. Even a #7 seed would have protected GW some, by playing a #2 seed instead.

The surprise of the three George's having made it this far has to be George Mason. At the time of their selection, George Mason was considered a bubble team, i.e., a team that might make it or might not. Tony Skinn had been benched for the opening game in the NCAA tournament, for punching a Hofstra player in the groin. Consider the implications.

It's true Coach Larranaga didn't have to bench his player for the game. After all, coaches are often rewarded for their wins, and often overlook bad behavior by players, especially if this keeps them winning. Worse still, by benching Skinn for a game, Larranaga was potentially preventing his team from making the NCAA tournament at all. The tournament committee has often lowered the seed of a team or decided to exclude a team altogether when a top player was not available due to injury.

George Mason was lucky. The tournament committee decided to allow George Mason to play, and then they took it from there. Their first team was Michigan State, a team that won the national championship a few years ago, and made it to the final four last year. Their reward was playing #3 seed, UNC, who won the national championship last year.

To be fair, UNC lost many of its players to the NBA, but they had beaten Duke, and had top freshman, Tyler Hansbrough, one of several white players that are making a name for themselves in the NCAA (the other two are NCAA leading scorers, Adam Morrison of Gonzaga, and J. J. Reddick of Duke). No one expected George Mason to beat a team lead by seniors from Michigan State and no one expected them to beat a young, but highly talented UNC team.

And, yet, they did.

Georgetown is now facing its chance to beat a higher seed. This time, it's #2 seed Ohio State. They are leading right now at the hald 38-25. Still, they had a big lead on Syracuse in the Big East tournament only to lose to Gerry McNamara and the Orangemen.

That makes three George's in the area, with only one out.

The funny thing is that they aren't entirely strangers to one another. Last year, the locally hosted BB&T Classic had GWU, George Mason, University of Maryland, and Michigan State. GW beat Michigan State in one group, and Maryland beat George Mason in the other. In the final, GW beat Maryland, and Michigan State managed to eke out a win over George Mason. They'd already seen each other before.

And even before that, a few years ago, George Mason, Georgetown, Maryland and Hampton (in Virginia) all flew out to Boise, Idaho to play in the year that Maryland won it all, and yet barely squeaked out past George Mason.

George Mason has been something of a bracket buster for me. I had Michigan State going deep in the tournament. Oh well, these things happen. For now, I'm still leading our brackets, but that can change as you head towards the final four. Points usually come from picking the final four well, especially one of the two winners. Upsets late tend to help because most people pick favorites such as Duke or UConn (in fact, I have both facing each other).

This weekend is always the most exciting because the upsets occur in the first weekend. Later on, the power teams do well.

Back to bball!

Deep in the Heart

In 2003, Mike D'Angelo's top four movies of the year were Gerry, a Gus Van Sant film about, um, I don't know. An existential crisis involving Matt Damon and Casey Affleck? Irreversible, the film post-Memento that's told backwards, and has a scene that dares you to leave the theater (and yet, you miss a wonderful second half, if you do). Dallas 362, which I hadn't seen, and knew almost nothing about except that Scott Caan directs. Finally, Bus 174, a documentary about a down-and-out street guy who decides to hold a bus hostage, while the media completely surrounds the bus waiting for his next move.

Last night, while trying to watch the brilliant Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, Justin decided that he didn't care for the film. It's foreign. It opens up with a guy cutting himself with sharp scissors, something of a wince-inducing scene. Scanning through the list of DVDs I hadn't seen, I wanted to watch Dallas 362.

Believe me, when I say I had no idea what this film was going to be about. I figured it would possibly be set in Dallas (it's not).

Scott Caan directs this film. Scott is the son of James Caan, who has been in a bunch of films. His most famous role? Hmm, maybe Sonny Corleone in the Godfather. Admittedly, if you haven't watched those films (I've only seen part 3, and they say it's awful), the only people you're likely to remember is Al Pacino and Marlon Brando. He was also the author in Misery. Given there are only two main characters in Misery, it's not hard to know who it is if you've seen the film.

Mike D'Angelo likes films that has unusual storytelling effects. I don't mean necessarily the big blockbusters like King Kong or any of the Star Wars series, many of which he didn't completely care for. But he's rated films like Mirrormask quite highly, which looks fantastic, but is oddly muted because the characters don't believe in the environment. It's a film that looks whimsical, with actors that seemed like that stumbled onto this set and wonder what's going on.

Mike has also enjoyed films like Memento and Irreversible, stories both told backwards. True, there is as much substance as style, but the style plays a huge part in these films.

The story in Dallas 362 could have been told without these effects, and its impact would have perhaps been as good. However, in a directorial debut, there's some sense that you want to put everything you can on the screen. This is almost the kind of freshman effort that you'd see the son of an actor do than actors in general. Because Caan's father has been in the acting business a long time, Scott surely grew up learning much of how the film industry works, even outside acting, learning the creative processes.

This is similar to the route Ron Howard took, as a child actor, who apparently has paid attention to a lot of films as he grew up. Usually, the most creative filmmakers are not actors, but filmmakers trying to make films.

The opening montage shows a bunch of black and white photos. The actors in the film are shown in tiny font, that grow big as they are emphasized. There's a film school quality about this film, yet, it shows the kind of maturity of someone who's had more experience.

OK, so what's this film about. Ultimately, it's about the things that happen in life that send us down the wrong paths. Shawn Hatosy plays Rusty, a kid from Texas who moved out to California because his dad, a rodeo clown, died, and his mom wanted to move as far away as possible.

He came to be friends with a guy named "Dallas" (is this the Dallas of Dallas 362?), who's a bit of a hustler and troublemaker. The two get into bar fights, and their job appears to be harassing folks to get money for bookies. Rusty's mom somehow puts up with all their antics, even though she can't stand it. As a viewer, you're wondering why does she put up with all this? You find out why.

You know how it is that John Woo films get categorized as homo-erotic? In his films, tough guys with guns hang out with other tough guys with guns, and it seems, they are the only ones that understand each other. Woo often likes to show that good and evil are two sides of the same coin. There's a really interesting film called Infernal Affairs which plays on an idea. A good cop is sent as a mole to a crime family (of sorts). A crime family son is sent to become a cop. Both are moles in each other's organizations. Very Woo, yet, not directed by Woo.

But the point people make is how guys are often closer to their male friends than to women, and this film skims about on this issue. Neither Rusty nor Dallas appear to have steady girlfriends, but they do have each other, and do think of each other like brothers.

Which is really important to the core of the story. Ultimately, Rusty has to make a decision about his life. He tells his mom that he's only good at a few things, most of which are illegal (hustling and fighting), and the one thing he can do well, his mom forbids him to do (rodeo cowboy). It's this relationship that is also being tested. When does a mom let go?

Admittedly, the Jeff Goldblum character is Goldblum as Goldblum. There's perhaps no other actor working that doesn't quite act, that plays nerdy characters, and yet, he's perfect being just that character in this film. He's a gimmick in the film in that you end up thinking there's no other person to play that role than Goldblum, and he's not doing anything particularly different than he does in any other role.

This story is really about how Dallas saves Rusty's life, in that, Rusty had nowhere to go, nothing he could really do, and Dallas gave him some purpose, even if this purpose also lead nowhere, and evolves to how Rusty realizes, despite what Dallas has done for him (be a friend when he had none), that Dallas is poisoning him. Rusty wants to save Dallas too, to take him away from a life that's doomed to kill him, yet Dallas (played by Caan) is oblivious to the life he leads. He's sure that it will all pay off soon, and he can lead the life he's always dreamed of.

It's the kind of dream that many people have, especially those that are down and out. It takes maturity for Rusty to realize he's much happier with a much simpler life.

For all the flashy camera tricks, the funny comments, the annoying character living in a waste dump, the unlikely pairing of the mom and Goldblum, it's the story of growing up and being reponsible and letting go that's at the heart of the film.

Dallas 362 is a remarkable debut. Sure, there's the happy ending that most indie films often eschew, but it feels earned here.

Two Bs? Not Two Bs!

A while back, I was reading the Washington Post article about teens in the techie age. These kids post up their own blogs on such sites as myspace.com. They mean for their blogs to be read and commented on by their friends. And, yet, since they are very much in the public domain, anyone can read it, including (surprise!) their parents!

The kids often are shocked about this. How dare my parents read the personal private blog entries I have that are on the web for anyone to read? Funny enough, a summer coop at my work had the same problem. She wrote a blog, mostly for friends to read. When she discovered her coworkers were reading it, she immediately shut down the blog.

In reality, she had little to worry about. The teenage mindset, nay, the female teenage mindset, nay, the Asian female teenage mindset is one that is difficult to comprehend by male software engineers that are ten years her senior. What seems like embarassment fodder to her, is teenage IM mumbo jumbo to others. Besides, what well-respecting male would admit to wanting to read teenage blogs? Hmm?

In the back of my mind, I understand I'm in exactly the same boat. When I write the blog, I don't think of myself as having a particular audience. I know a few people are aware of the blog. Some friends, a coworker, my brother. Even they don't read it on a regular basis for the same reasons some of my coworkers don't read blogs at all. Why read about other people's boring lives, unless yours is boring by comparison?

Recently, I blogged about meeting Joel Spolsky at ETECH. I also met the gang from TechSmith, the nice folks that bring you software like SnagIt, Camtasia, and Morae (where do they get these wonderful names?). All of a sudden, I get commentary from Betsy Weber.

Now, I had seen Betsy before, from Joel's Aardvark'd DVD. A little history. Aardvark was a project that Fog Creek came up with to have four interns build a project from start to end in ten weeks.

The project was "Copilot", a tool that would allow the tech-savvy kid to help his not tech-savvy parents or relatives with computer problems remotely. Using their tool, you could see the victim's desktop and control their cursor, so they could see what was going on. The helper didn't have to be anywhere near the victim. He could be in New York, and the victim in California.

The DVD was made by one Lerone Wilson, who, amazingly, doesn't appear in his own documentary once. OK, that's actually pretty common, unless your name is Michael Moore.

When the product is ready to be user-tested, Betsy Weber is invited to Fog Creek Software to help out with usability. They want to find people who are completely newbies to computers, and boy, do they find one. This one guy barely knows how to use a mouse. When asked to rate his computer skills from 1 to 5, he says "half".

Betsy (I believe) is the one who then responds by saying "you mean, like 3?" and he corrects her to mean half, like under 1, like I barely know what a computer is. Right and left mouse buttons do not register in my brain. I just want some free food, and some money!

Fortunately, the guy is rather entertaining, though he appears to have been a minor pain for Betsy.

The Aardvark video primarily focuses on the four interns in the group, plus Joel, plus the Visicalc guy (if you listen to the commentary, you discover that none of the interns even know who he is), plus an odd foray to Paul Graham's Y Combinator group who is working on what now seems like the "cooler" project, the ranking website, reddit.

On the periphery are people who work their full-time that aren't in the video for very long. These include the Fog Creek guys that I met at ETECH: Ben, Babak, and Brett.

Ben had a short blurb about being mildly jealous that the interns had a much cooler project than he did as an intern, but otherwise, they don't seem to be in it. Of the three, I think Brett has the most significant airtime, but I'd have to go rewatch the video.

I had brought the DVD with every intention of watching it again to remind me who was who, but then I also brought like eight books that I never read eith me either. I don't recall if Brett was the one growing the tomatoes or not. There's one other guy, Michael, that works there too. Just keeping track of which intern was which was hard enough.

I remember them in odd ways. There's the product manager dude who says "Owned" in the cockroach re-enactment scene. There's the juggling guy. There are two others, but when I first watched it, I couldn't tell who was who. Only when watching the commentary did I figure out who everyone was, but I watched it so long ago, I don't remember much.

I do remember there was one guy with like 8 names. There's a player on the Maryland team named Nik Caner-Medley. He's the leading white guy on the team, the Mr. Basketball of Maine (what a name for that title!). On the April Fool's Day issue, they said that Caner-Medley adds two more last names, just because.

That was funny.

There's a guy who's name is like that at Fog Creek.

Somehow I sense there was some gentle chiding that didn't quite make it onto the screen/

If Babak was in the video, I honestly don't recall.

These three have the kind of minor celebrity status that is particularly odd. I happen to know of them, though not them in particular, from Joel Spolsky. More properly, from Joel Spolsky's blog. If you were to have put the three of them in front of me, and I didn't know any better, than I wouldn't have known any of them. I'd probably recognize the four interns (probably, but I'm not great with faces, at least, first time).

And, I'm sure there are plenty of folks at ETECH that are, by comparison, far more famous than these guys. By the way, I'm not trying to say these guys are supposed to be famous or anything. I am trying to apply some metric for popularity comparison.

Going to ETECH is a bit like attending a music conference in Bangalore. You might bump into someone like Asha Bhosle and not even know it was her. (Asha Bhosle, if you're curious, recently recorded her "best of" hits with the Kronos Quartet. She and her sister are the most prolific singers in all of India, having sung some 40,000 songs between the two of them, for Indian films).

I'm sure there were plenty of people that had some fame, that I had no idea about. I saw Jesse James Garrett, the guy who coined the term "Ajax", at a talk. Sorry, I wouldn't know him from his grandma if you had pointed me out to him.

I saw Bruce Sterling. I knew his name, but never knew he looked like hippy Roger Ebert, wearing his biker jacket. I suppose he could have put on some mirrorshades too, this delightful 80s sunglasses, that used a mirrored surface, and was highly popular. I'm sure it had this mass appeal to SF writers like Sterling, since it reflected both the cool of wearing such glasses, and perhaps the hollowness too. When you'd stare into a person's "eyes" wearing mirrorshades, all you'd see is yourself (cuz, you know, it's a mirror!).

I felt there were so many people at the conference that I barely had a clue about. I wanted to talk to this kid, who looked all of 15, wandering around. He had a badge on, so I suppose he was legit, but did O'Reilly give him some kind of junior discount? Where was his chaperone? In any case, I didn't talk to him, for fear he'd talk about some Second Life object engine he'd written last night, and I'd cower away to abject humiliation.

Of course, he could have been 25, and just looked 15. I taught a class once where there was this kid that looked all of 13. He was kinda short, his voice pitched up a little high. I had to ask him how old he was, and he said he was like 18 or so, or some reasonable age. Not surprisingly, he gets carded all the time. He was saying that he tried to rent a car, and they didn't think he was old enough.

Anyway, I figured that there were plenty of people that were out there that would have been as famous, if not more so, than the 3 B's: Ben, Babak, and Brett. But if part of the goal is to schmooze with folks, and there's like, hundreds of people there, then you have to be selective.

Ah, I have to mention one guy I met like right off the bat. On Monday morning, I'm walking the five or so blocks from my cheap hotel (the recently converted Y, which is now "500 West") to the impossibly rich Manchester Grand Hyatt (take a chance to look for it on Google Earth, and you'll see it was under partial construction whenever they took the photos).

On the way in, there's a large entrance, with several desks. I had to turn left, go past some dining area, up the esclators, to where ETECH was being hosted.

While heading in, I talk to one Tom Nguyen, who works at Reuters. He's a techie, who's originally from California, but has been working in New York City. There was some in-joke at my work which I must say I missed about Reuters. Since I didn't quite know what it was all about, I didn't bring it up to him.

Tom's one of those rather cheery Asian guys that make you think "God, you're awfully pleasant" rather than the Asian guy that appears in the Cingular ads which makes you think "God, you're awfully scruffy. I want Tom to represent our people!"

We talked a bit, as we headed to breakfast, and joined some other folks. Breakfast, I'll say, was mildly disappointing. I've learned, in my limited travels, that "Continental Breakfasts" means "suck breakfast". I want artery clogging bacon and sausage and eggs. OK, I don't need an y of that, but come on, this hotel costs more to say in one night that I spend in rent in a month (well, maybe three weeks). Shouldn't they hire some Iron Chefs to make ice cream out of squid ink or something? I feel I'm not getting my money's worth.

Tom turns out to save the day. On Thursday, the last day of the conference, one guy was complaining about his inability to connect to his own website. There's something a bit humorous about a tech conference that can't get enough bandwidth, mostly because the attendees are like newborns, hooked up to their umbilical cord that feeds their laptops, and need to suck Internet bandwidth like Dracula sucks blood.

I imagine an ETECH conference, where they shut down any wireless connectivity, so the attendees at a conference themed "The Attention Economy" would, you know, pay attention. I could imagine the riots that would ensue, as patrons run to the front desk, quivering from their lack of an Internet fix.

I feel your pain, brothers. I feel it. I was in a hotel that only had wireless on the main and second floors. I was on the fifth floor. I could tap into the wireless in the next hotel over, but only for a fee.

My discussion keeps digressing off and off and off. Point is, I figured there's only three days. I hardly know anyone. I would like to meet a few folks, and better to meet a few folks well, than meet many people for a brief moment.

And I must say, one of the things I admire about the 3 B's is that they came without a laptop! Or at least, they didn't bring it with them to the conference. That was amazing. It's one of those things, if you don't pay attention to, you wouldn't even notice. No one ever asks "where's your laptop" even at a conference as techie as this one. They only care about their own laptops, and their precious, precious Internet!

Even now, I'm amazed at this.

But back to the issue of fame. Even though Brett, Babak, and Ben are not exactly household names (heck, even Joel Spolsky isn't that famous. I could ask their entire computer science grad school who Joel Spolsky was, and I'd suspect upwards of 90% would have no idea, because that would involve, you know, reading someone's blog. I told several folks I had met Spolsky. I offhandedly remarked "And Joel's gay.", which is something, I think most Joel readers know, but it's not something Joel waves around in people's faces. (Don't go there, people). He doesn't sport a campy voice. He's not wearing pink triangles or rainbow flags. He brings it up in funny subtle ways. He was talking about Ipods vs. similar, but less noteworthy MP3 players, and brings up A-list actors vs. B-list actors. I think he has Julia Roberts, and someone that's up and coming. He also puts up Brad Pitt, that seems to be gay America's poster boy, though Pitt doesn't really do it for me, and the "B" rated guy is Ian Somerhalder. Now, there's a name most people couldn't put a face to. If you are wondering who he is, he's the brother who was in the plane that was trapped in a tree, and fell, killing the brother, from the series, Lost. His name recognition is probably an nth degree higher for the gay community, not because he's gay (like say, Rupert Everett), but because he's a hunk. Joel sneaks that in. It doesn't matter particularly, who he puts there, but it's a wink and a nudge to those who might care.

In ETECH, a guy like Joel is techie royalty. Sure, he was there mostly to be charming, rather than to hawk a product. He did a review of trends in webpages and technology, which he liked, and which he didn't, but it didn't look like he expended a great deal of effort to make it happen. Nevertheless, he's invited because he's fun to listen to, and he's well known for his blog.

Which brings me back (again!) to the three B's. These guys, despite having 1/N the fame of Joel, are in many respects, extensions of his company. They represent Fog Creek, whether they actively think about it or not. I'm more of an Occam's razor guy, who thinks that Fog Creek simply hire great people, and I don't necessarily mean that from a tech point of view, but the kind of people who are inquisitive and outgoing.

I had eaten lunch with these guys, and there was some issue about why Duke's computer science grads are down this year. Turns out Ben just graduated from Duke. As a Terp, I should, of course, hate his guts, but the fact is, I was a graduate student Terp, and we can't be bothered by such pagan trivialities such as college sports (I'm lying, of course. I like college sports, but I'm not rabidly Terp). One of my former roommates (apartmentmates?) was a Dukie, but he graduated quite a few years ago.

I applied for a teaching position at Duke a few years ago, that simply went nowhere. If I had to guess, the job went to some guy named Robert Duvall (no, not that Robert Duvall) an instructor at Duke, who Ben did some work with (I think).

Somehow the discussion got onto whether math was harder as you get more advanced. Joel recalled that he struggled with, say, calculus, but then found, say, linear algebra easier. I think his boyfriend is a math guy (at least, I think it's his bf), who occasionally teaches him math (oh how sweet!), and Joel finds it much easier to grasp now then in college. One of the guys suggested that maybe this guy was great at teaching math, but Joel thought this wasn't the case.

As a former teacher, I would have suggested that as well. Good teaching can do wonders. But there's also the fact that math can get frickin hard, frickin quick. You think you understand some math now. Maybe some group theory. Maybe some combinatorics. But keep going up and up and up, and you'll cry for mercy. There's some level of math that will eventually defeat you. Either that, or Joel missed his true calling.

Having said that, there's something to be said about knowing a subject matter really well. The toughest courses in technical areas are often the earliest ones. When you first learn to program, that's the toughest time. As you get some proficiency, you learn how to learn. You're able to proceed at a much faster pace, partly because you have a wealth of knowledge to begin with (and partly because some of that extra learning is not conceptually hard, just new and dfiferent).

On Thursday, I met up with the guys while I was attending the talk on O'Reilly's Learning 2.0 (I'm getting a Headache 2.0 from writing that). Babak came in to watch the talk as well, which really, was not quite what I expected. The most interesting part was this guy from some company called Prolific, where the company actively encourages programmers to learn more, and improve their skills. OK, so these guys happen to write gambling software, but that's fine. The point is, in an area that is changing so quickly, software developers often miss even the biggest trends. Ajax has been touted for over a year, and yet, I've barely played with it (trying to, trying to!) while others don't know anything about it at all. Software companies need to be aware that these new technologies may provide a competitive edge, and be willing to invest in continuing learning throughout.

Furthermore, he raised a very interesting point. Remember the Meyer-Briggs tests? They measure you on four quantities. One is introvert-extrovert, which is often measured as "do you draw energy in a crowd, or away from a crowd". That's I vs. E. This guy was an E. Most programmers are I's.

There's sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. Sensing/intuition appears to be a person who prefers facts to someone who prefers ideas. Thinking/feeling is using facts for ideas, vs. a belief system or intuition. Judging/perceiving is whether you make decisions quickly or not. Some prefer to decide quickly so it can be decided. Others want to wait til the last possible moment.

These tests have been widely available. Last time I took it, I was INFP (Introvert, Sensing, Feeling, Perception). I think INTP's are the most common among programming types.

The point is, can this information be used to help employees get better. At companies like Fog Creek or Microsoft, presumably, the idea is "We hire smart people" and there are certain personality traits that the company expects people will have, and yet, that may not be true of everyone. Should a company be more aware of differences between folks, and learn how best to manage, due to those differences.

This topic has been of interest in academia because there are so few women in the sciences and in computer science. Can the way we teach those topics help?

So that talk was far more interesting for the one guy in the audience, than the two women that were presenting (it's sad that I think of lipstick and butch lesbians when I recall that presentation, because I'm conflicted about my reasons for thinking that).

Anyway, the following talk in the room was about hydrogen fuel cell cars. Babak had attended the Learning talk, but Ben and Brett had went elsewhere (oh, since they didn't have lunch served, I walked all the way to the Gaslamp quarter, probably some half a mile to a mile away, had lunch at a restaurant recommended to me by some employees at the Discovery Channel, where I bought this gaudy clock, so I could check the time, because I lost my cell phone, and then gave away the clock a few hours later to the woman working at the YMCA entrance just a floor below the main floor of the hotel I was at.)

I had a talks I had thought about attending throughout, and perhaps attended nothing close to what I thought I was attending. Most of the choices were made because of space (it's too crowded at this talk, I'm leaving) or because I simply chose to stay in the same room twice.

I wasn't planning on sitting in a non-techie talk about hydrogen fuel cell cars, but then all the Fog Creek guys showed up, and I thought the other talks weren't all that compelling either, so I decided not to leave. It turned out to be a fun talk. The woman clearly has done this kind of promotional, because she was experienced at it. She mentioned her son, who is into network security, while talking about how we're eventually going to move to hydrogen fuel cell cars.

I was thinking, there are all these tech talks that the Fog Creek guys could go to, why this? I thought some more. Several of the presentations were hawking new items. Foldera, Zimbra, etc. Is it worth attending a conference to watch someone demo their product? I think their thought was no. Attend only stuff that seems interesting. If the product is that cool, then you can check out the website later on.

Secondly, and more importantly, not every talk that you attend needs to be about computers. It's to the conferences credit to have a few off kilter topics that don't bear directly on a software engineer's job.

For example, I attended a talk about RFID (Radio Frequency IDs). I've been hearing this for a while from my housemate, who is always on the bleeding edge of what's new and trendy. This talk put things in perspective, giving the limitations of RFIDs now. It was also this woman's master's thesis. Interesting enough, I sat at another talk about information visualization with another woman doing her master's. I thought that was odd, but interesting.

Come to think of it, nearly half the talks I attended were presented by women.

Anyway, we decided to ride the hydrogen fuel cell cards. I think all of us honestly thought they would let us get in the vehicle and let us go where we please. In hindsight, that was completely silly, as these are vehicles that are nearly one-of-a-kind (I assume only a few hundred exist). Of course, they were going to have a chaperone with us.

We also thought we could rotate drivers. Who knew that the trip was only around the block and lasted five minutes? We volunteered Babak to drive. I personally didn't want to drive, and only do so out of necessity. It was pretty cramped because, oh, did I mention it, the Fog Creek guys are huge! Well, I don't mean they look like comic book collector guy, but that they are very tall guys.

All of a sudden, Joel's vaunted screening technique for hiring the best seemed to me to reduce to "Does your name start with B? And, are you above six feet tall?". I know, silly.

In fact, when I realized there would be five of us in the truck, I thought I should wait to get the next vehicle, but the guys asked me to join along. Unlucky Ben is crammed in the center, while Babak and our chaperone takes us around. Brett and Babak were all interested in the chemistry/physics behind the how the fuel cell car works.

This reminded me of something I recall way back in grad school. I know this guy, who's now a professor, who was working on some problem. My thinking, at the time, was that he lacked enough algorithms skill to do an adequate job, but there he was plugging away at it, which reminded me, of a few years earlier, when I was eating lunch at a Cornell dining hall, listening to two girls speaking French.

I understood nearly everything they said. It's not that I was so fluent in French. Despite five years of French, my skill is rudimentary at best. No, it was because these girls stuck to the minimal vocabulary that they knew and I knew. Where I might have been resigned to thinking, there's no way I can speak adequate French without a far larger knowledge of French, these girls were doing perfectly well, despite that. The point is, they tried.

Similarly, this grad student, despite not knowing a great deal of algorithms (which means, he took an undergrad and grad course on it), was still trying. I assume the Fog Creek guys only had basic college chemistry, and were using that to figure out what was going on. Reality may be that there are more subtle things going on that we, as rank amateurs, don't get.

That's not the point. They asked the question, and they were curious of the answer, even though it was in an area that wasn't their expertise. And, that, I'd have to say, was the most impressive part of meeting these guys.

Which then goes back to the thought I had way at the start. When you're out in public, and others can drop in and listen, is there a sense that you are trying to impress others? I mean, I have coworkers that talk about video games all the time, and they're clearly not trying to impress anyone. It's the geek equivalent of talking about American Idol.

Do Fog Creek guys think "we have to be on our best behavior out there, because we represent!"? I like to take the Occam's Razor approach and say, no, that's just the way they are.

Now to be perfectly fair, we're all trying to impress in one way or another. One of my housemates often likes to make a "bad" first impression. He says something a little off-color, but not truly offensive (he wouldn't say something racist, but he might say something slightly sexist, but merely to be provocative). After a while, you realize he's a funny guy, and that he reads Jared Diamond books. Thus, the first impression ("he's crude and crass and a jokester") is replaced by someone who reads and thinks.

Even when I blog, I write far more provocatively than I would generally talk. I'm trying to be hip. I do say a few things that I try to replay in my mind about what people will say. For example, I said, in a previous blog that Brett seemed a bit queeny.

In the back of my mind, I'm thinking "What if Brett reads this? What will he think?". Realistically, I don't think he'll read it, but then Betsy read the blog, so he might. Should I leave it out? I don't even consider that as something bad. (I was at a party once. A large African American fellow, who was a theater major, asked this young woman to come near her. He goes "Come here!". He is probably aware that there's some concern when a large black man wants to talk to you, so he tried to assuage her fears by saying "Don't be afraid. I'm a homosexual." Nothing like using that term to relieve fears. At which point, my housemate turns to me, and says "Now, why can't you be more like him!", a comment he says he can't recall making, though he feels isn't out of character with what he'd said).

That "queen" comment was indeed brought back to my attention as I was showing photos on my digital camera to a friend who was reading my blog.

So, those are the kinds of things that one worries about when writing the kind of blog I write. You'll note Joel doesn't write this kind of stuff, since he's respectable and all =).

Of course, I feel like some giddy groupie when talk about the Fog Creek guys (er, I'm not a groupie, I'm a band aid---see if you can figure out that movie reference), which would be completely embarassing if I could get myself to act more giddy. (This reminds me of my cousin's fiancee. We were in a restaurant celebrating the birthday of one of my cousin's and his fiancee's birthday. She recognizes someone coming into the restaurant, and starts to scream. I mean, I was thinking, she's the whitest Asian chick I know. She runs over to these people and starts to hug them, and say hi. That's the kind of giddy I should have mustered, which would have lead to some kind of ETECH restraining order).

Rather than end on this rather odd note, I will end on a different odd note.

Those who attended ETECH may remember a guy, who appeared to be Indian (of which kind, I can't be certain) with longish hair. He would assist on technical setup on stage, and reminded me of a witch doctor. Thoughts of incantations uttered in some dead language praying to the Internet gods to provide more bandwidth flitted across my mind.

Oh yes, I have a new cell phone.

It's a Samsung.

Simon Says

I want to write about Simon Bolivar. Well, not really. I mean, I don't want to write about the liberator of South America, the George Washington of South America. I'm actually trying to write about a friend of mine, but given his general paranoia about being blogged on, I'll hold off. I mean, I could have used his first name, but it's just unusual enough in the world he's popular in that most people might well guess who it is.

And that's partly what I want to talk about. I was in San Jose recently, or more properly, Mountain View. This is Silicon Valley. Google was about 3 miles from my hotel. Probably within 20 miles is Cupertino, which is where Apple is headquartered. Microsoft has an office in the area. Stanford University is another few miles away.

Why did I pick the name Simon? Ah, that's obscurity for you. So, my paranoid friend used to post under a pseudonym, and Simon Bolivar was it. I think he thought it was just amusing enough that few people would have any idea who this person was, sort of like going to Spain and claiming you're George Washington. While that name would draw stares in the U.S., it might warrant less than a glance in Spain.

I would have taken a picture, but he frets at the idea of his picture being put up on the net. It's not that he's a troll or anything. If anything, he's a reasonably handsome guy, though certainly not for all tastes (arguably, this is true of anyone, even Brad Pitt or Lindsay Lohan). In fact, his picture has been Flickr'd a bunch, well, 70 or 80 times. He appears to have his own blond stalker too.

Who is Simon? Simon's created a website that has some notoriety among the blogoscenti. It's not so much a blog as a blog aggregator. He runs a one man show. The site is entirely his own. No employees, other than himself. And frankly, no money, either, though he's had chances to make money. The problem is the conditions under which this money comes. How many companies will simply give you money and have nothing in exchange? They're not lotteries after all.

He spends prodigious amounts of hours working on the website, hacking away at code. For those who've known him (that would be about ten years or so, since I've met him), writing scripts had always been a passion. We'd call them Simon-lets named after applets, which would be a little funnier if I had used his real name. He had a script that kept track of who owed whom how much money. OK, that wasn't particularly sophisticated, but he wrote it.

He wrote a game where you could click the mouse, and a bunch of soldiers would generally aim in that direction. Some games have already thought of that, but he had thought of it too.

Simon goes to these various panels and parties and meet others who could call themselves members of the blogoscenti. Those who live in this world sometimes don't realize how prevalent they are not. I started to think about this during ETECH and shortly afterwards.

I've heard terms like RSS, feed aggregators, AJAX, REST, Ruby on Rails, Hibernate, Spring. ETECH introduced me to more terms like Web 2.0. Actually, I first heard of Web 2.0 about 6 months ago. In a nutshell, it basically means that the web, through technologies like AJAX are producing web pages that are more like desktop applications. We're so used to clicking on links on a webpage and expecting to go to another web page, instead of having the page update (e.g., when you press a button, it slides open some content).

These words are on the cutting edge (oh, is that ever an obsolete term, so much so, that people feel the need to push that term and call it the bleeding edge) of web apps, and yet, there are so many programmers out there that have heard nothing of this, and frankly, won't for some period of time.

To give an analogy, most of us work, right? Think of the wealthiest Americans. Their wealth allows them to do things like host fancy parties and partake in activities that most of us don't know about or care about. Maybe something trendy like having horses on ice skates do curling gets popular among the wealthy. The rest of the public, who is also working, doesn't care. They go on doing what they do.

I mean, people can still write simple web pages, using HTML that they learned in high school, and never have to think about Javascript or the DOM or Rails or Ajax. They don't have to hear about companies like Flickr or 37 Signals or know who Joel Spolsky or Paul Graham or a bunch of other bloggers are.

They can lead contented live administering databases, making sure accounts are handed out, or whatever, and never have to know this part of the technical universe. And, yet, I find myself keeping track of this stuff, and to be frank, I'm not even doing that good a job at it.

I attend ETECH as much to figure out what is going on. I can think of no other industry that examines itself under a microscope so often, trying to tap into the next new thing. Sometimes I think, people like Tim O'Reilly, who is head of O'Reilly publishing figures "I don't have to program, I don't have to code, I just have to spot trends, and give new words to it!".

And I suspect, he, and others, think this is a profound thing. You guys code. I conceive of ideas. O'Reilly, I believe, came up with Web 2.0, which is either appropriate or mocking or both. It resembles a term that was popular in the 80s, namely, Japan Inc, where Americans tended to think of Japan as this monolithic entity. They weren't simply Sony, Mitsubishi, Honda, Nintendo. They were some mishmash of them all, in collaboration with the Japanese government that favored an industrial policy, i.e., investing money into various industries (such as the semiconductor indusrty) to encourage growth, while protecting them from foreign competition.

This term was big in business, and held some currency for a few years. Web 2.0 might last all of two years before it becomes a forgotten term or something quaint, much like the software that people name with numbers are soon replaced by other numbers. People begin to attach 2.0 often without a whole lot of meaning (e.g., Learning 2.0).

Yet, there's discussion of this term, even if people poo-poo it, and to that extent, it's OK if they hate you, as long as they talk about you. Other terms that came up: mash-ups and alpha geeks.

I could, indeed, summarize ETECH 06 by the terms thrown around. Let me do that now. AJAX, Alpha-geeks, Ruby on Rails, Mash-ups, The Attention Economy, Web 2.0, RSS feeds, tagging, blogging. There was still some residual mention of "the long tail", the idea that companies like Amazon or Netflix can succeed because both have huge libraries that people can tap into. Even though the most obscure titles have few readers, all those obscure titles, put together, lead to sales. You don't have to be the Crown Books of the world, providing bestsellers, but making it tough to find early Orson Scott Card books.

Simon's in the middle of this. If, for no other reason, he doesn't operate his website in a vacuum. He wants to know how it's doing. If he attends panels, he doesn't want to say "What's AJAX?". He wants to use it in his website. Remember when Madonna used to wear that do-rag thing early, early in her career, and young teenage girls would dress like her?

I've basically blogged about this too. Why do I feel I need to keep up with all of this? My parents can basically lead lives they lead nearly ten years ago. The technologies that impacted them? The microwave, the VCR, the desktop computer, dial-in modems. They don't use the web that much. They like watching TV programs on the satellite televisions that show Chinese programs. But they've been doing that for years. They don't care much about this trend or that trend, and seem relatively content.

Even those who make it their business to do computers don't necessarily keep up.

How many people live and die by their RSS aggregator? And of those who don't, how many don't even bother reading online newspapers? Do they want new interfaces for getting information? Clearly, some people do. Clearly, many others don't.

The impression I got, eating sushi with Simon, was that he was consumed by this. I'm sure he would say he wasn't, and yet, he was. He had been working on this for over a year, with little rest. He should take a bit of a break, but he knows, more than academia, that the tech industry moves on, plugs on, and to keep up, he has to keep moving, know what everyone is doing, and try to one-up them.

Recently, there were a few posts criticizing his site, and he didn't particularly care for that, though, as usual, he blamed them for misunderstanding what his site was all about. But how did he know this? Surely, some friends pointed it out to him. Read what so-and-so said about you.

And the funny thing, I suppose, is that, like celebrities, he wants a share of fame, and a bit of anonymity at the same time. Thus, he doesn't like pix that trail where he goes (I just go to Flickr to get some sense of where he goes).

Your life, baby, is on the Internet. You're a movie star in cyberspace. And like most places, your fame is fleeting unless you keep one step ahead.

Back in the U.S. Argh!

Ugh, that's not a good pun. Anyway, I did manage to get back to DC. The flight was delayed out of San Jose for an hour, but as it was, I wasn't leaving LA til midnight, so it didn't affect me that much.

Slept most of the way to Chicago, ate a little in Chicago, then slept to DC. Then, a friend picked me up. We went to Bagel Place, the local bagel place near the Maryland campus.

It's weird coming back from a vacation.

And, yes, anonymous poster, I ended the previous post with a comma. Bet you were on the edge of your seat waiting for that next sentence, weren't you?

Flight Plan

I'm stuck at an airport. Again. Flight has been delayed about an hour now, and I suspect it will be another half an hour more. I think airlines must have conducted a study that says that the more you apologize for delays, the more passengers complain. So, some airlines don't even bother announcing any delays.

This was a little better than the one in Philadephia where we sat an hour. No explanation was offered for why we were late, no apologies provided. They just said nothing.

I suppose the good news is that my connecting flight is near midnight, and so I would have either had to wait a lot there or here, and thus, it doesn't make that much of a difference.

And, yes, I am paying for Internet here. Sigh. Free Internet for all.

Oh we've moved gates. Fun,

Noel Joel

I'm at ETECH because of Joel Spolsky, and I've realized, to my dismay, that I've been pronouncing his name wrong all this time, must like people sometimes prounounce Richard Feynman as "Fayne-man" instead of "Fine-man". I had been saying his name as "Spall-ski", rather than "Spol-ski" where the first syllable rhymes with Pole rather than Pall.

To this end, I must admit, rather sheepishly, that I had stalking intentions in mind. This feels like one of those missions where you go seek some movie star. There's a semi-famous video of some man who goes to the gates where John Lennon lived to protest him, and how Lennon actually came to the gate to have a discussion. It would be nice to say that this discussion lead to something fruitful, that Lennon had something profound to say. It's all the more amazing that someone was out there to film the thing, now that I think about it.

Tuesday afternoon, lunch was held just outside the majestic Manchester Grand Hyatt, named it seems after some wealthy family called the Manchesters, who seem to give money to Republicans, but don't seem to mind hosting conferences where liberals may be in great attendance. Money, it seems, is the great equalizer, and makes us all conservatives. Greenbacks speak louder than politics.

As I grabbed lunch, I was trying to see if I could find some place to sit, and, this meant, preferably where Joel was sitting, and this I managed to do. There was an empty seat between Brett and Ben. Now, you see, I don't particularly know either Brett nor Ben, except in the small excerpts of the Aardvark video. Ah, so let me back up on that. Joel's blogged about trying to get good talent to come to Fog Creek. Fog Creek is a small company based in New York City.

Were it not for the fact that Joel advertises heavily for his company, via his blog (and yes, even his book on usability, which, I bought way back in the day, before I even was aware that Joel had a blog), I would not know one whit about the people in the company, because I would not have purchased the Aardvark DVD. But, first things first. To get great talent to come to Fog Creek, Joel has been blogging, and even students of computer science are often quite aware of who he is. Much like Emeril, he wanted to kick it up a notch.

To get good talent often means grabbing them as interns. This past year, his team decided that they should have the interns build a product from start to end in ten weeks. This product was Co-Pilot, which would allow the brainy guy or girl to help his less computer savvy relatives to fix problems remotely. You would go to the site, help direct your loved one there, have them punch in some information, and the helper could connect to the victim's computer, and resuscitate.

To further promote this effort, director Lerone Wilson, who has a near uncanny resemblance to Tiger Woods, was hired to help film the ordeal. Four interns were invited, nearly doubling the folks that worked at Fog Creek. In the periphary of this all was Ben, who, if memory serves, complained a little about how his internship wasn't nearly so cool as Co-Pilot (but, c'mon, Ben, you got a full-time job--isn't that what counts?). Brett makes a bigger appearance, though certainly it focuses on the four guys, and Joel, and then some detours to the guy who invented Visicalc, and to the strange Paul Graham, and his bizarro world kids who were also creating a site, reddit.com.

I was struck, watching the DVD, about the kinds of unusual topics that the Fog Creek team would discuss, whiich apparently wasn't just Lerone catching these guys on a particular moment of lucidity, but really, this is how the guys talk. Brett and Babak in particular, are quite personable, readily asking questions, figuring who you are. In an odd cynical moment, Brett complains that he doesn't even like people! He notes one time how he asks someone about code, about some problem he could have figured out himself, when he realizes that he's a lonely man, at least, when he deigns to ask for such help.

The team seems to use their hair, facial or otherwise, to make a statement, though what statement I couldn't say. I have to be perfectly fair. I was sitting with them wearing my new San Diego Zoo cap, and the reality is, I almost never wear hats. I happened to wear it that day because I thought it might rain, and lacking an umbrella, I figured my piddly hat would serve as protection should nature's floodgates open. I also realized, of course, that such a hat would create some kind of distinction since most people opted for hatlessness.

Ah, the hair. Brett seems to have spiked his hair roughly up the center. Babak had a kind of goatee, punctuated by thick black glasses, that made him seem more artiste than coder. Very Greenwich Village, I'd imagine, if I even had half an idea of what that meant. Ben was the quiet one, the guy from Duke. This quietness might suggest a lack of opinions or perhaps deference to his elders, which, to be frank, are probably no more than ten years older than him. It's just a matter of prodding him to be a little more outgoing.

I ended up talking to Ben about how ironic it seemed that writing software that's easy to use, a big selling point for Fog Creek Software, would take such brilliant people to do it, but I've recognized that too, for myself. Writing programs for people is all about figuring out the tough things and presenting it easily to the user. It's depressing that no one does this for the programmer, i.e., makes their lives easier so they can make it easier for others.

Three other people were at today's table. One guy who worked for CafePress. He seemed like he'd belong on some dance floor raving away. Another guy had been working in academic settings, from universities to book publishers, before he went into business for himself, in an area I wasn't quite familiar with. The next guy was from England, by which I meant Scotland. Apparently, he does usability for companies that affect the entire company. For example, he might figure out how tellers can make themselves more usable. What actions do they do? His background was in psychology, and he was at ETECH trying to figure out how to work collaboratively. I was surprised at the number of international visitors coming to ETECH.

Today's lunch was sans Joel, who was, I gather, sitting with someone else. I had sat with him yesterday, but they were sitting with reps from a company called TechSmith, located in Michigan. They have three products they make: SnagIt, which allows you to do screen captures, Camtasia, which allows you to record actions in a window, and then annotate them, great for doing online tutorials, and Morae, which is meant to do usability tests. Betsy Weber had flown out to visit Fog Creek and conduct usability tests. This turns out to be rather unusual.

I talked to one of the guys at TechSmith, a bit of a queen, but rather interetsing to talk to. He and his colleague had went to visit some ship, which his boss(?) had said was not a battleship (it was the Midway) since battleships were named after states. To him, a ship engaged in military activities was a battleship. Apparently, he managed to get out there and enjoy it all.

For all of my stalking, I didn't actually get to talk to Joel that much. I talked to him shortly after his co-presentation with Betsy about the business program that he runs at Fog Creek. That was interesting to listen to, and I'm curious how that will work out. Its success may very well hinge on the fact that MBA programs rarely get people just out of college. They want previous work experience. He figures he can provide this, and if he's really lucky, they'll decide the real MBA wasn't so critical after all. He's just started this program, but they are expecting more people this summer.

Joel must be used to the fandom he receives. One guy from Asia (or at least, I thought he was from Asia--for all I know, he grep up in Orange County, New Jersey, and just wanted a photo-op with Joel, who was glad to oblige) wanted his picture with Joel, and that turned out to be my only photo op as well, as I took a picture of this guy and Joel as well.

To end, I wonder, in fact, if this kind of blog surfaces up, and people start discussing it over at Fog Creek, or whether it's buried under the morass of the blogosphere.

Oh yeah, I lost my cell phone.

That sucks.

I mean, really.

War of the Words

Monday was Tutorial Day. People willing to shill out a few hundred dollars more were treated to two half-day lectures unless you were one of the lucky few, or indeed, the lucky many that chose to listen to the all-day Flickr tutorial and learn about how to scale on the cheap and fast. I am told that this talk delved into the vagaries of automation and server setup, stuff that would seem somewhat obvious to those in the know. There were no secrets to be had, no deep insights.

Ah, forgive me for my impoliteness. I am attending the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, known briefly as ETech 2006. This is a four day conference held in sunny San Diego, and is in its fifth year since inception, when it was originally a peer-to-peer conference. Year Two was held in DC. The rest of the venues have been in California, and more recently, in San Diego, presumably its once and future home.

This year's conference is held in the majestic Manchest Grand Hyatt, a twin towers of a hotel building, with two spires thrust upward like two Siamese twins coyly spying the lovely lasses on the beach. The choice, no doubt, is a pragmatic one, born of the fact that too many participants need a large space to congregate, and only a handful of hotels, most notably, the fancy overpriced hotels can reasonably host such conferences. Combine that with the fact that you can convince companies to pay several thousand dollars for attendees to show up, and you have a recipe for legitimate decadence.

Back to the tutorials. The first tutorial I went to was co-hosted by Jeffrey Veen and Jesse James Garrett. Apparently, both co-founded a company several years ago called Adaptive Path devoted to issues of user experience. Although Garrett considers himself a designer, he is the guy who coined the term, AJAX. Garrett is one of those small, ultra-thin men with a goatee. Veen is the opposite, quite tall, with a soul patch that makes him seem like Shaggy. They were the Wilbon and Kornheiser of the web set.

Their first goal was to talk about Web 2.0, a term coined by Tim O'Reilly, referring to the next generation of web apps. The web started off as a visual hyperlinking system. Static web pages would link to other webpages. You only had to click on the blue underlined link, and be sent off to a new web page. The pages themselves were not much more than pages. They had text. They had tables. They had pictures. Much like pages in a picture book, you weren't meant to interact with it much, except to go to other webpages.

Such content stands in stark contrast with desktop applications, such as word processors, photo editors, MP3 players, video displays, even the browser itself, excluding the content it displays. These applications are called rich clients not so much because they have money, but because you can interact with them in far more sophisticated ways than clicking on a link.

The problem with making web pages more dynamic has been several fold, none the least of which is bandwidth. If you want to update web pages, and you want the server to do it (as opposed to applets, which are client-side applications, once downloaded by your browser), that takes time, and in the early days of the web, this was not readily available. Worse still is the browser itself. There are many flavors of browsers: IE6, Firefox, Safari, and lesser known ones such as Opera. While many support JavaScript and CSS, they often do not agree on how they should implement it, making designing for multiple browsers a grand headache for designers.

Now the question arises: why should the server do the heavy lifting of the content on the web page? Servers can be much more powerful than your home PC. Think of the number of computers that Google has to process searches. There's no way your home PC could ever do this.

However, the loading of new web pages provides a jarring experience, as users must wait for new content to come down. Wouldn't it be much nicer if you could interact with the web page more dynamically, say, drag and drop, move slider bars, the kinds of things you expect from a rich desktop client?

Yet, the user, used to static web pages whose content only changes if they switch away from it, isn't quite ready for this new "Web 2,0", the browser as application. And worse still, a desktop application can usually command the attention of the user because they spent some money acquiring it. A web page is like one of those panhandling kids, dressed in tatters, begging for money in a language that's not quite English. If the web page is cute and adorable and easy to interact, you'll hang around. If it does things that are unexpected, they won't hang around.

This means modern web pages have to be more usable than usual. They can't be complex applications, and if they are, they have to be based on stuff that you're already used to, like Word or Excel.

The talk was about providing users with the ability to experiment without feeling they are being roped in to doing things (like purchasing stuff they don't want to), that gives them the opportunity to explore. That provides feedback so they know that their actions do something. For example, when Blogger was redesigned, people wanted to see that pressing a button caused their blog to get created, even though it was effortless. The user was also given a save button, even though there was auto-save. They needed the security of seeing things happen, and since they aren't changing web pages, they need other cues to let them know something is up.

That talk was interesting.

The afternoon talk was a disaster. David Heinemeyer-Hanson, who I'll refer to as DHH from now on, basically coded up a Rails application live. You needed to know the basics of Rails, Ruby, and even Ajax. For those who knew that, perhaps DHH's presentation would mean something. I sat at Dave Thomas's talk of roughly equivalent nature at "No Fluff, Just Stuff". He did roughly the same thing, but you could actually follow parts of it. Plus Dave is quite funny. DHH seems a bit spacey, twisting the English language, partly out of amusement, I'd imagine ("on the other leg").

I'll talk more about the evening in a later post.

Mr. Clean

The second tutorial I signed up for is Ajax on Rails, being taught by David Heinemeier Hansson. I've seen talks on the topic by Dave Thomas, who has co-written two books, one on Ruby, one on Ruby on Rails. Dave's an entertaining speaker, who's nonetheless informative.

David wants to create Ajax Shop. Using sqllite2? Using TextMate to edit Ruby.

Rails generates a bunch of Javascript files for you. Starts up a server that Rails comes set up with.

Starts with a generator to generate a controller. Allows you to shop. Starts writing code with rails in Ruby.

I realize it's a bit difficult to write anything coherent, if your intention is to listen to the talk. My brain was so fried after the day, that thoughts of sleep continuously rammed into my head, until I was able to, shortly after 5, head back to the hotel, and enjoy an hour of repose.

And now it's Tuesday, and I post part deux.

Whale's V!

Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diego, which of course in German means a whale's vagina.

So I'm San Diego, day one, of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, which is the tutorials. The all day Flickr tutorial is all sold out. I'm now sitting in the front row listening to a tutorial of next-gen web apps. The speakers formed the company of Adaptive Path, who are people interested in doing user experience work.

One guy has already joined Google because they acquired a software product from Adaptive Path.

The first slide is a big one, saying "Web 2.0", and they wish to define what that's all about.

They started off with a history of boom and bust, talking about the Dutch tulip mania from several hundred years ago, where tulips were coming from northern Africa (?), and due to a virus, the tulips were producing fantastic colors, and people were giving up a month's worth of salary to get those tulips.

The tutorial wants to discuss what "Web 2.0" is all about.

The initial part is the elements of web style. Key to this is understanding the web as hypertext vs. the web as a software application. Expectations differ depending on which way you view the web. (This information is on http://jjg.net/elements.

The evolution of use is having the user control more of their data. The user can make decisions on how they want to see the data. This is an issue of building trust with users. The initial level is the surface attractiveness. Thus, how a website looks can do a lot for a website, even if anything below is horrible.

What is AJax really? The guy who coined the term, Jesse James Garrett, talks about what is Ajax. He says it's asynchronous interaction within a browser, and that's it. It doesn't have to be Javascript, or whatever. However, what Javascript provides is a split between client and server. The client interaction doesn't have to be synchronous with the server. Garrett uses the phrase "roller skates on the Web", which was what Bruce Sterling said when he read the article on Ajax.

Garrett says that Web 2.0 is really about better interactions, not better technologies. One of the keys of AJAX is technical, which is to incrementally migrate to this technology. Another key is the ability to read each other's source.

The technology for AJAX has been around a while, but why is it popular now? Some of that has to do with browser manufacturers have stopped adding features, and have fixed features that were buggy to begin with. Better Javascript support, for example.

Now interaction design involves discoverability. For example, adding suggestions as you type in a city for a planned flight. But that can be overwhelming too. Users may not catch on to suggestions.

What features do these new web applications have to have to that users can get a richer experience? Findability and discoverability is one of those issues.

Another issue is the ability to recover from errors. Users are scared about clicking a link, because they feel like they are going to purchase something they don't want. Can interactions be changed to placate the user? AJAX can be used to improve the intercation without losing their place.

Tagging is another way to let relationships be drawn by users in a community, rather than being imposed by a designer.

The location for the rest of Jeff's talk is: Etech PDF.

Large Cap, Small Cap

Occasionally, people hear about the kind of contracts that football players sign. For example, some player signs a 70 million dollar, 7-year deal with, say, a 5 million dollar signing bonus. After gasping at the amount of money the players get and quibble over, people begin to wonder, why on earth did the team sign them for 7 years, especially, if they're like 28. How do they expect them to keep the player until they are 35? How do they know they'll be any good in 7 years?

The answer is simple. These deals are not meant to complete. When a player signs a 7 year deal, around year 4 or year 5, the deal is going to be far too expensive for the team to afford, and the player will either leave or he will rework out his contract.

Why sign a deal if there's no chance the player will ever complete it?

The answer is the salary cap and the funny rules associated with it. Each NFL team is given a salary cap, which is, these days, somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 million dollars. Each team has some 52 players it must pay with that amount of money.

NFL contracts, unlike baseball contracts, are not guaranteed. At any time, a team can fire a player, and the player is not paid the remainder of their contract. Thus, if a player signs a 7 year deal, he can be let go after year 1, and the team does not have to pay the remaining 6 years.

That sounds like a bad deal for the player, and it is. This is why players negotiate a signing bonus. This is money they see up front (or within the first two years). While the rest of the contract is not guaranteed, the signing bonus is guaranteed. If the player is fired (he can't
"quit", at least, not exactly), he still gets the bonus.

This bonus counts against the salary cap too, but usually the bonus is so large, that taking this hit is too onerous for a team. The NFL, therefore, allows you to prorate the bonus over the time of the contract. Thus, if you have a 7 year contract, with a 7 million dollar bonus, then it counts 1 million dollars each year on the salary cap, and that's even after the player has been fired. Thus, if a team fires a player, they are still accountable for their signing bonus.

Player's contracts are back loaded. Usually the last few years are extremely costly to the team. What's the point? Players don't really want to be in really long-term contracts. So, they make it extremely expensive at the end to force a team to either come up with a new contract, or to let them go to another team. Either way, in about year 4 or 5, the player negotiates a new contract, and gets a new signing bonus. They don't have to wait the full time before they get a new contract again. The contracts are therefore meant to pressure teams to renegotiate new contracts at the end.

For that matter, a team could, if they wanted, just claim to play the player a hundred million dollars in the last year of the contract. It doesn't matter. It won't be paid out.

The point is to stretch the contract for a lot of years to lessen the salary cap impact (dividing over more years), and yet give the player a way to leave the contract in a shorter time (by making the salary way too high for teams to afford at the end).

Other leagues either have no salary cap (like baseball) or have a soft salary cap (like basketball). Basketball, in principle, has a salary cap. However, players like Larry Bird, then Michael Jordan wanted to be paid a lot more than the salary cap would allow. When Jordan was at his height, he was paid some 30 million dollars a year, in salary. This would have killed any salary cap.

However, unlike the NFL, the NBA markets its stars, and wants its stars to stay at one team, so they made an exemption. Star players on a team could get as much as they wanted, without having to count against their cap. This was called the "Larry Bird" rule. Football, on the other hand, stresses equality, and so they take their salary caps more seriously. Of the three unions, the players union in football is the weakest, which is why players don't have guaranteed contracts.

A guaranteed contract basically says you get paid no matter what. You can sit out with injuries, and you still get paid. The NFL would simply cut you. That makes more sense to the average fan, but players have realized they are the show, and in baseball, have negotiated very strongly in their favor.

Right now, there's a dispute in the NFL. The players and owners are having negotiation problems that may leave the salary cap short, forcing teams to get rid of expensive, good players, to meet the cap. If no deal is made, the teams make the cuts by the weekend, and the year after next, there is no salary cap, and teams can pay as much as they want.

This was expected to come to a head yesterday, but there's a three day extension, and word is that a deal will be made. Most people feel the parity in the NFL is a good thing. It may produce worse quality football, since no team can hold onto great players for long periods of time (the 49ers were able to do this, and then some, into free agency, by playing salary cap tricks, but now they're in big trouble, being an awful, awful team). However, it means any team can go from worst to first, and that creates excitement for many teams, and makes the NFL the most profitable of the major sports in the US.

This is why people feel certain a deal will be worked out that preserves the current structure. Owners will buckle in, but the salary cap will still be there.

We'll see. The decision is expected to be reached by the weekend.

The Web Makes Me Smart

Remember the novelty of the web? You pressed a word underlined in blue, and it would take you to some other place. How novel! And you'd search in Alta Vista, which used to be the top search engine of the day (yes, before Google!).

But who could really estimate the true impact of the web. Many factors made this possible. The Internet itself, of course, is one big reason. We needed someway of networking, and this was the clear choice. Then, there was the browser, the killer app of the web that let us see things in pictures, not just text, a la Archie and the old Internet apps (yes, before the Web!). And then we got sound, and animations, and more!

However, other things also had to happen. People needed computers in the home. Thus, when you could buy a computer for under $1000, and now, even under $500, people were less reluctant to shell out the money. When people saw that email (the original Internet killer app) could be managed by others (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail), this gave incentive to have a computer so you could check your email every few minutes.

Less important, but still useful, was cheap high speed Internet. True, $40 a month or so is a bit pricey, but wow, so much better than dial-up. Still, dial-up is good enough to get on the Internet.

HTML was another innovation. Sure, it sucks now, but it wasn't hard to learn, and more importantly, browsers didn't hide the HTML source from those who wanted to see plenty of examples.

Once people saw the convenience of the web, they could start getting information. And perhaps the most commonly sought information (at least among males) is sports. People who can't watch sports (lack of cable, or at work) can, at the very least, keep up with scores, and unlike newspapers, you can keep up in real-time.

That's the missing piece of the equation: content. Someone has to provide content. And that someone can be anyone, you, me, a major newspaper, whoever. Of course, you need the ability to find the content, which is what search engines are for

With all this wealth of information available at your fingertips, you have the ability to read up on all sorts of information that you wouldn't have thought possible. My folks are still the old-fashioned types. They read newspapers. They watch television. Surfing hours on the Internet is still something they don't quite grasp.

So how many of us feel the guilt to have to keep up. I'm reminded of a tale told by a graduate student, some 15 years ago. He said, back in the day (which would have been 10 years earlier), professors rarely wrote their own papers. Which is to say, they rarely typed their own papers. The computer was not in wide use, and even those that were available were too primitive to write papers.

Then, Donald Knuth decided that typesetting was a skill that was disappearing. An aesthete, Knuth wanted his books to look professional. He decided one way to do this was to write a program to do typesetting. This took him on a detour from the books he was writing about the fundamentals of computer science that lasted ten years. I suspect he thought he was saving the field of typography, and that this was worth a detour.

He invented TeX (which he pronounced "Tech", because the "X" was really the Greek letter "chi" pronounced "ki" as in what you would say if you were to say "kite" but not reach the letter "t"). TeX was effectively a programming language. It was a pain to edit correctly, though some managed its arcane structure. Leslie Lamport wrote wrappers on top of it, and named it (partly) after himself, and called it LaTeX, which he didn't advocate a pronunciation. Thus, he would accept "Lah-tech", "Lay-tech" and even "Lay-tex".

Problem is that most people aren't programmers, and so the people most capable of using LaTeX were computer scientists. All of a sudden, this elevated the quality of papers, from a typographical point of view, to great heights. If you can find papers written in the 1970's, you'll see they look like total crap. They use typewriters that are specially used for writing math. It looks awful. But everyone had their technical secretary type their papers.

All of a sudden, those secretaries wouldn't be able to figure out how to use LaTeX and grad students, then professors, began writing their papers in LaTeX and fighting with it, now they can typeset. The time they used to spend doing, you know, research, was now being spent typing papers. Or formatting them.

Point is, now that people could typeset papers, they were doing them, and spending their time making their papers look professional.

Do people feel the same guilt with the web. Now the web brings information to me, I need to go look at it. Back when you had to visit the library and locate papers from across the world, well, you wouldn't do it. A housemate of mine just said he avoids reading papers that aren't available online.

Now think of that. People used to have to locate papers in the library. Look stuff up in one book, see if the library had the right journals, drag the book to the copier, and make copies. Heck, if ain't in Cite-Seer, no one's going to read it.

What does it mean to be smarter anyway? One measure is the amount of information you can cram in your heads. Another is learning how to reason about difficult issues. This could be proving a theorem, writing a program, and analyzing works of literature. I suppose the Web can make you smart there, but more than likely, it's helping you find recipes, note which statistics are important to success in football. You can read more opinions on the web and that can be enlightening.

I enjoy reading film reviews, and some of the best are on the Internet. Has that made me smarter? I don't know.

How much pressure are you feeling to keep up, now that you can?

Seeing Double

There's a reason why triple jumps often look like doubles. The first half revolution is typically on the ground. Let's say you do a triple toe. When you kick and rotate, your foot is typically on the ground up until you have turned 180 degrees, i.e., you enter the jump backward, kick, twist 180, are airborne, and finish the two and a half revolutions in the air.

It's hard to pay attention, but you should see the shoulders three times. The first time is just past that half revolution, then again, then again on the landing. The third one is hard to catch as well because they usually finish the third revolution right as they hit the ground, thus, you tend to see the first two revolutions, but not notice the one as the skater lands.

Oh yes, and the lutz. Watch for the skater toe-picking with the foot, and landing with the foot. A rightie should toe-pick with the right (thus skate backwards on the left), and land with the right. So remember that, toe-pick on one foot, land on same foot, that should be a lutz. A toe-loop should toe-pick with one foot, and land on the other. This is one of those things you should record, and watch in slow mo, until you can remember. I suppose another way to do it is to mimic the moves yourself, while doing the spins on the ground (unless you can spin in the air several times!).

Jump for my Love

There are six jumps that you see in figure skating: the triple axel, the triple salchow, the triple loop, the triple lutz, the triple flip, and the triple toe.

Jumps are really hard to see, for the uninitiated. For me, triples always look like doubles, and doubles look like singles. So, if you think it's a double, it's probably a triple.

Jumps fall into two categories: edge jumps and toe-pick jumps. Toe-pick jumps use the free leg to kick on the ice, and assist the jump. The edge jumps are: the axel, the loop, and the salchow. The axel is the easiest to spot. It's the only one that starts off forward.

Assume you are right handed. The triple axel starts off with the left foot skating forward, and lands on the right foot, skating backwards. There's a foot switch here. The loop starts and ends on the same foot, thus start and ends on your right foot. The salchow starts on the left foot and lands on the right foot. The loop, to me, is the third easiest jump to spot, usually one foot is in front of the other, in a line, and the jump is made there.

The lutz starts off with the left foot, kick with the right, and lands on the right. This is the second easiest to spot, because it usually has a long straight line set-up before you see the kick. The flip goes from left foot, and lands on the right foot. The difference between the flip and lutz is that the flip is done on a back inside edge on the left foot, which is the edge that the spin occurs most easily, while the lutz is on the outside edge, which forces the spin to go opposite. Some skaters have been known to flutz, i.e., start off like a lutz, but at the last moment, leaning to an inside edge, and making the jump easier.

The triple toe loop uses the left foot to kick, thus, skates on the right foot, and lands on the right foot. Apparently, this is the easiest jump, even though, compared to either the flip or lutz, it kicks off with the left foot, instead of the right.

The key to watching jumps then is to determine which foot the jump started on and whether it was a toe-pick or not. If you start and land on the same foot, then it's either a loop, or a toe loop. If it's opposite feet, then it's one of the other four. The axel is the easiest to spot. If there's no toe pick, then it must be a triple loop. If the feet switched, it's the salchow.

If there is a toe-pick, and the foot switched, it's either a lutz or flip. The lutz is usually easier to spot because there's a long straight set-up. It's easier to see than whether the skater skates on an inside or outside edge.

As essential as this is to figure skating, most announcers don't like to describe it, because it forces the viewer to remember six different things, and even as it's really only 5, because the axel is easy to spot, people still can't remember. Fortunately, I can help make it one step easier. Only the loop starts and ends on the same foot. Thus, the triple loop (no toe-pick) and the triple toe-loop (toe-pick). Keep an eye on which is the takeoff foot, and you can begin to see which jump is which.

Let me help you with the triple loop. Stand with your feet side by side. Now, imagine a straight line drawn forward, and it is coming from your right foot. Move your left foot in front of your right foot. Now imagine you are skating backwards this way. You jump off your right foot, and land on your right foot. That's a triple loop.

Next time you watch figure skating, pay attention to which foot the skater lifts off from, and you'll be on your way to identifying these jumps.

Ch-ching

Two posts ago, I referred to the movie as Payback instead of Paycheck. Apparently, Payback is this rather grisly revenge plot where Gibson goes medieval on the people that killed his family. This is the usual kind of excuse for violence that is perceived as fine. For example, it forms the central revenge plot for Gladiator where the main character's wife and son are killed, and he kills the man that ordered it.

I was going to say I had seen Payback, but really, I've seen Ransom, which is based on a Kurosawa film, though that film has a far more intriguing plot. In Ransom, Gibson plays a wealthy man who's son is kidnapped. Eventually, he decides that whoever kills the abductors will get a large amount of money, even as he risks his own child in the process. Needless to say, his risk pays off.

The Kurosawa story is about a similar kidnapping, except in this case, instead of the wealthy man's son getting kidnapped, his chauffeur's son is kidnapped instead. The kidnappers still hold him for ransom, seeing whether the wealthy man is willing to make the payment for someone who isn't his own offspring. This is the film High and Low which also goes by a much less well known title, The Ransom. One of Kurosawa's films that's not set in feudal Japan, and one I'd like to see.

Go Figure

I used to watch figure skating. I wouldn't say a lot, but compared to other people, it would be a lot. Let me put it this way. I watched figure skating before the Harding/Kerrigan controversy. I first noticed the basics of skating probably around 1984 or so. This was back when Torvill and Dean were making a name for themselves as the best ice dancers in the world.

Ice dancing was the ugly cousin of the figure skating events. I'm sure it was the latest one to be added as an Olympic event (a quick perusal of the Wikipedia indicates I'm correct--while added to the World Figure Skating Championships in 1952, it did not become an Olympic sport until 1976). Unlike pair skating, which emphasizes jumps and throws, both moves are illegal in ice dance, which emphasizes dance aspects.

I didn't really pay that much attention to figure skating until 1988. This Olympics features two story lines. Debi Thomas was the first African American to win the U.S. National Figure Skating gold, and was considered a favorite to medal. Katarina Witt, who had won gold in 1984, was also expected to medal. Thomas was considered the better technical skater. She was going to do a triple-triple combination. Witt would not do that, and would depend on her artistry to win.

In those days, women skated a bit conservatively. Nerves were a big issue. Dick Button, who seems to have been commentating forever, and Peggy Fleming, his co-host, and former Olympic gold medalist, would note how the women would back off of their planned triples. Debi Thomas had skated a powerful short program, but it was to a heavy beat, not to a classical theme, and the judges downgraded her for that, much to the anger of her coach, who held his nose, and gave thumbs down to their decisions.

In the long program, Debi Thomas seemed nervous and skated nervous. While she had hit her triple-triple confidently in the U.S. National Championships, she did not nail it in the 88 Olympics. Witt was relatively solid playing the role of Carmen, and skated well enough to win. Elizabeth Manley was considered the spunky skater from Canada who had problems with confidence, but skated her way to silver. Jill Trenary skated a conservative program, but placed just outside the medal at fourth.

It was also the first Olympics for Japanese sensation, Midori Ito. There have only been a handful of women to land the triple axel in competition. A triple axel is three and a half revolutions, and is the easiest of the triple jumps to identify, because the entry is made forward and lands backwards.

In the '88 Olympics, figures were still a mandatory part of figure skating. Figures involves tracing out intricate patterns on the ice with ones skates, and is considered a form of mastery of skate control. Ito was awful at figures. It wasn't Witt's strength either, but she did well enough not to be hurt by it.

Eventually, they ditched figures from competition. In particular, the Europeans did not want the figures included in competition. Americans liked it a lot, because it lacks the pressure of jumps, and because, compared to Europeans, ice time was comparatively cheap. The figures would have hurt Ito's chances to get any better, though she probably would have improved. Ito was an athlete. Her strength were her jumps, and the '88 Olympics was a time when she simply had fun, before the weight of a nation came down on her.

Ito finished fifth and would eventually win a silver medal, where she botched a triple axel, only to throw a second, successful triple axel at the end of her routine, and preserve silver, behind American, Kristi Yamaguchi. The list of successful women to have landed the triple axel are: Midori Ito, Tonya Harding (yes, that Tonya--who effectively became the Mike Tyson of women's figure skating), Yukari Nakano, Liudmila Nelidina, Kimmie Meissner, and Mao Asada (of Japan). Meissner won silver at this years U.S. Figure Skating Championships, behind Sasha Cohen, and ahead of Emily Hughes. Hughes' older sister, Sara, won gold in the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Michelle Kwan briefly took Hughes spot due to an injury exemption. Kwan herself had been prevent from skating in the Olympics due to the Kerrigan/Harding affair. Kerrigan couldn't compete in the Figure Skating Championship, which serves as the qualifying for the Olympics. Powerhouse countries in skating, like the U.S., get to send three skaters to the Olympics (and World Championships). The three medalist get to go. Weaker countries can only send two.

Kerrigan took Kwan's spot and skated to a silver in 1992, even though Baiul didn't skate that much better. The judges liked her better. Kerrigan suffered a bit from the public relations fallout. She didn't like doing an ad for Disneyworld, thinking it was idiotic. She also complained that Baiul was taking forever to head to the medal stand. To be sure, the networks milked this up by playing her comments on the air.

I haven't watch figure skating much since about 1995 or whenever I last had cable. So I didn't know what had happened to the sport.

The women haven't improved a great deal technically. The triple axel still represents the Mount Everest of the sport. To give you some idea of where the sport is technically, if Midori Ito were still skating at the level she was in 1992 (now 16 years ago), she would still have a great chance at medalling.

Where the women have improved is in their flexibility. Denise Biellmann, the Swiss skater who skated between 1975 and 1981, was noted for her ability to spin. She was credited with landing the first triple lutz, but it was her ability to spin and her flexibility that she's noted for. Her trademark was the Biellmann spin, where she grabs her leg behind her back, and stretches it upwards, so that her two arms and leg form something of a flower.

Most women simply weren't that flexible, and few imitated it. In this year's Olympics, nearly all women can do the Biellmann spin. I've only ever seen one man do this (Viktor Petrenko, I think), although the men have become increasingly flexible too.

I'm also seeing more triple combination moves, i.e., triple, double, double. Again, I had seen Petrenko do this, though it seems to have been discouraged until recently as perhaps too gimicky (this is the reason back flips are not permitted in competition).

The men have pushed the technical level. Currently, the top skaters can land the quad. Johnny Weir has even landed a quad-triple-triple, in practice. Most choose not to place so much risk in actual competition, and certainly, Weir didn't even try the quad. I believe the only two quads landed in competition are the quad-toe and the quad salchow. We're probably a long way from the quad axel (four and a half revolutions). The Chinese pairs skaters, Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao, attempted a throw quad salchow, which she fell and hurt herself. After feeling she was fine, they finished the rest of their program and won the silver.

For the men, I'd say what's improved is the different kinds of spins you see (these are not jumps, but spins on the ice) showing improved flexibility. The triples are attempted more often and landed more solidly, often in combination (a second triple tacked on at the end).

There are some moves that appear to be rare. I saw Buttle's routine, and he did a spread eagle (which again, requires a great deal of flexibility, which is why you don't see it all that often) and an Ina Bauer. Footwork sequences also seem to be somewhat rare. In figures, things begin and end with jumps.

I missed much of the Winter Olympics but I have to hand it to NBC by posting video at their website. I can watch the short program from two weeks ago. I can watch last night's short-track run by Apollo Ohno. This is wonderful! Except that my laptop PC doesn't seem to render graphics properly in Firefox. It doesn't have this problem on the desktop, so I don't know what's going on. I had to resort to using I.E. so I could see the display.

Ultimately, I see this as a far superior way of watching the Olympics. I know that the quality of video is rather awful, but the flexibility to watch it when I want to is great. I will say that navigating the site is a pain, and that the tabs don't do what they say (for example, there's a tab saying "Pre-Torino" and "Torino", both of which display pretty much the same thing).

Using this, I was able to watch Johnny Weir's free-skate, which didn't look all that bad. Considering that Buttle touched the ground twice in his free skate and still won bronze, Weir's mistake (a fall on a triple, and not completing a triple-triple combination, leaving off the second triple---OK, that was not good, since that would have been worth lots of points) didn't seem all that bad.

I'm still trying to get used to the new scoring system, which gives weight to many different elements, technical and otherwise, thus making sure skaters can do the spins as well as the jumps.

I'm struck a bit by the way Weir's personality contrasts a bit with his body. As an athlete, he needs strength, and most of that, for a skater, is in his legs, which look like, say, a speed skater (though clearly not as developed), and his personality, which is somewhat effiminate, yet rebellious too. I believe his fascination with Russian culture may have to do with Russian skaters being able to express themselves in more balletic ways (many have had training in ballet), where Americans and Canadians used to prefer to show some masculinity (less flamboyant arm movements, less flamboyant costumes, less flexibility). Weir may simply like the way Russians skate.

The website could still be far better. It's a pain to find who won what medals, where people placed in various competitions. Still, that I can get to the videos is pretty good. It might be useful to have organized the videos by day as well, and mention which days certain programs were on. In the end, content management is king, when it comes to dealing with this much content.