Game of the Name

I was in a chat recently (like a minute ago) when the phrase confirmation bias came up. Now, this is something unknown to me, and sounds a bit like a religious rite, like, I want to confirm you as Eastern Greek Orthodox, or some such. I can't say I know much about confirmation.

These days, I could plead ignorance and merely ask "well, what the heck is confirmation bias" and get an explanation. But we live in the information age, and that information is available. I would Google it but for stuff like this, it's just that much easier for me to head to Wikipedia.

I know, Wikipedia's been getting bashed as of late. People put in some faulty information, especially about other people. People working in Congress were banned from Wikipedia because they kept puffing up the representatives they work for.

But I find, because of the way Wikipedia works, that I'm likely to find what I'm looking for there. And thus I have. In a nutshell, confirmation bias means you look for evidence to back your own claims while ignoring evidence against it.

This happens a lot when people seek victimhood. Why does the media bash Clinton? Why don't they ever talk about Bush's infidelity? They only ever seem to notice negative articles, and never the balance media can provide.

I find academic types like giving names to things. If it sticks, they can point to it and say "I said that!". Thus, confirmation bias. Naming things shouldn't be underrated, because it is useful to name something so people can talk about it. For example, once I define design patterns, we can talk about it. I don't need to explain it every time we talk. It becomes shorthand.

Still, when there's an obsession to give names to things, you realize things have gone too far. Nowhere did I see this trend more than at ETECH, and Bruce Sterling was nearly as guilty as Tim O'Reilly. He wanted people to adopt his term, spimes, referring to objects trackable in space and time so one can query for it. He had referred to something as "everywear", I think. This has been incredibly difficult to find on the web. The closest one I've found has to do with wireless stuff you wear by a company named Charmed.

I'll need to see a transcript of Bruce's talk to make sure. But at least the name isn't nearly as hideous as Web 2.0, a term I heard back in September or so, coined by Tim O'Reilly.

I did like "continuous partial attention" as a phrase to refer to people who are constanly monitoring several forms of communication (email, IM, cell phone, other people, etc), even if the name sounds like a math function. (Nothing beats probably appoximately correct learning or PAC-learning for a great name. Shouldn't that be called "about right" learning? Ah, but in this case, probably refers to probability, which means it's highly probably, and approximately may have a stronger mathematical definition, and correct is relative to some definition of truth).

For some reason, this phrase from Billy Joel's Only the Good Die Young (whose title may have more relevance than imagined, but I digress), which goes:

You got a nice white dress and a party on your confirmation

Have you ever noticed how some words only come up in some contexts? Confirmation tends to be associated with religion. I was thinking of the word "vicariously". How many people think it always goes with "to live vicariously" typically through someone else?

I'm sure there are other phrases like this, but no more come to mind.

Blaming the Sports Media

Where was sports radio ten years ago? Nowhere, I imagine. Oh, I'm sure you could find sports programming on then, but it was rare. Once the great realization was made that people often commute to work and this commute is often slow and that people may not care to listen to music and would rather hear about sports, it was hear to stay. I used to listen to NPR a lot. But ever since I discovered sports radio, I find I just listen to that instead.

I know. There are plenty of people who can't stand sports. Sports radio must be even more puzzling. If watching sports is bad enough, then talking about sports must be worse. Most sports shows are on at least two hours, and possibly three. They have to fill the show with content, and since most of these aren't news shows, but commentary, they have to complain about something in sports.

There's been a sports story that has been of note for the past two weeks or so, and not because it has to do with sports, though, in a very real sense, it has to do with sports. It's about the Duke Lacrosse team.

Let's recap a little of what happened. Some members of the Duke lacrosse team were having a party, where they invited strippers. These strippers were, it should be noted, of color. One was a student from a nearby university. Most of the lacrosse players (all but one, we're reminded) are white. Surprisingly, there are some 47 lacrosse players, even if most of them must not play. There's probably about ten players. 47 means you could almost go 5 deep for each person playing.

One of the strippers claimed she had been raped by three white guys. It's not entirely clear to me if the party was only for lacrosse players, or involved others. The aftermath? The coach resigned. All the players but one submitted DNA samples. The claim is that the DNA didn't match. The district attorney, Mike Nifong, said he'd look into this more, that the investigation wasn't over. It's not entirely clear that a rape occurred at the house and rumors that the girl was injured prior to entering the house.

Why is this news? It's news for several reasons. First, even for a sport as insignificant as lacrosse, it's still sports news. When you have to fill up hours of content, you have to talk about this since it's sport news. To be fair, NPR and news stations also cover it, but again, it's because it's a sports team. Suppose a rape occurs on campus, but it's not somebody from sports. It's horrible. Is it news? Would it be news if it were a member of the debate club?

It's news because it's sports, and as much as we call these things "games", careers are made from reporting on games.

Indeed, this is about the only way lacrosse makes it into the news. It won't get a mention after this is over, at least, not as a sport. Anyone going to care about the national championships in lacrosse? Are Greenberg and Golic going to talk about it? Is Kornheiser and Wilbon? Heck, Maryland used to host the semis and finals for years, and it barely made news (mostly since it happened after the semester ended).

Is this going to disappear? I suppose. I consider the Baylor incident where one teammate killed another, and the coach attempted to cover it up, an order of magnitude worse. Yet, people are already forgetting that incident. Of course, Duke's name is a lot bigger than Baylor, so that may keep it around. And the lacrosse team was actually decent. Remeber George O'Leary. He was the guy who "puffed" his resume, and then it burned him when he tried to get the Notre Dame job (which lead to Ty Willingham getting hired, having one great season, and several average ones before he got hired as UW's head coach, and then Charlie Weis came from being offensive coordinator of the Patriots to coaching this team to a great record again).

O'Leary had several of his players tackle another guy for not protecting his QB in practice. Guy got hurt. O'Leary was criticized for this. He claimed he never intended for them to hit the player. Remember that? Probably not. How about Kobe Bryant? Here was a case that was almost as clear cut as you could get, in the sense that Kobe didn't deny being there, didn't deny having sex, only denied that it wasn't consensual. People probably still remember this incident, but when you score 81 points, it's easy to forget.

And that case was one of those where men probably view it differently from women. Women would say "no means no", and guys would say "it depends on the situation as whether it should be considered rape or not". In any case, she dropped the case, and was probably given a large settlement to keep it quiet. There is, I suppose, some difference when the report is several people "ganging up" on another person. No information has been provided as to the exact details. Everyone is talking through lawyers.

I remember five years ago when Mike Wilbon was saying sports was irrelevant, shortly after 9/11. That lasted, hmm, two weeks? It was his living. He wasn't going to do a Pat Tillman and head off to Afghanistan. He wasn't going to quit reporting on sports. And heck, even the soldiers sent overseas wanted to hear sports to take their minds away from the war they were in.

Sports has become highly relevant. Sports pages are highly read. More than the front page. More than money. People care about Barry Bonds and steroids and whether Tiger Woods wins and when football training camp starts and the results of the combine and Wonderlic tests. They want to see the draft. They want to participate in brackets.

And even so, we're not nearly as fanatic about sports as countries where players have been killed for performing poorly, where the entire country shuts down just to watch sports.

Why do universities like sports? Alumni seem to contribute more when the sports team is doing well. All those years spent in college and what they remember is being fans in stadiums. They can still hold onto that experience much longer than they hold onto the actual experience of learning. It says something about the priorities of Americans (and the world) when the average alumni thinks about sports more than education.

Education does, alas, lack the thing sports seems to bring into focus so clearly, and that is the evaluation of a person's skill on a public stage. If you do badly in an exam, you don't have the shame of an entire university bearing down on you. You can even keep this private from your classmates. Asian countries often post scores of all students to shame the poor students (it usually has a bad effect, which is they don't care about their grades anymore). There's also, effectively, a high teacher-student ratio. Check out any football team and how many coaches and assistants there are. Maybe 15 total? For 80 players? About one coach for every four players.

How often do you get that ratio in classes? And yet, college sports is big business, and winning is big business. Education is not, in and of itself, big business.

I write this, of course, but would watch college football or college basketball. And I still listen to sports talk radio. There's something that still appeals, the primal thrill of victory that somehow education is unable to match. I don't know how to explain it.

Joel Spolsky is not Gay Enough

I've always wanted to write something provocative like that. Well, not really. I'm reading Joel's latest column about the development abstraction layer, which I take to mean "make programmers happy". Of course, this is a message that's preaching to the choir. What happens when management thinks programmers are there to serve them? That they are the final arbiters of what goes? Does management usually crawl on their knees begging developers to maybe work out some idea they had? Do software engineers scoff at their time being wasted? I'm not sure it works that way, but maybe because Joel started his company as an engineer, as a developer, he can envision this world that echoes strains of Marx. The workers will rise and take over the cogs of the machinery.

No, that's not quite it either.

Ah, but I would be remiss if I didn't talk about Joel not being gay enough. With a juicy title like that, how could I let my fans down? (Except of course, I have no fans). He opens up his sentence about the perfect coder who is not only adept with memory management issues, but can wow it up with the ladies. He's an attractive man, after all. OK, those aren't his words, exactly. It's simply "He finds it easy to talk to women" (somewhere I realize I should be adding a link back to the article, and yet, the pain I must take to make that happen...fine, fine, here it be). Why not men? Why not hunky men? Why not Ian Somerhalder? Why not Brad Pitt? (By the way, a few weeks ago, when the tournament was still running, Bradley played University of Pittsburgh, and the scores were "BRAD" on top and "PITT" on bottom. Hmm. Yes. Well. I do credit a friend of a friend for making this eagle eyed observation)

I'm sure, a la Doctor McCoy, Joel would plead "I'm a software developer/manager/motivational speaker, not a gay activist". Must he wear tank tops cut off just about the midriff, shorts that reveal his religion, wave a rainbow flag, and call everyone "Miss Thang"? Can't he simply espouse the need for good software programmers, who are born, not made? (It's not a choice! It's Fortran!).

To be fair, he does sneak in Dolly Parton. The people in the "club" are supposed to know that Ms. Parton, who composed that song "I Will Always Love You" before Whitney burned this song into the brains of impressionable people growing up in the early 90s, might have meant the song for women. (Parton denies this in public, just like Jodie Foster).

OK, so this begs the more serious question. How much does Joel, or people of prominence, need to make mention of his preferences? This would be a more compelling question in sports, where no one in football, basketball, nor baseball has ever come out while actively in professional sports. It has happened in individual sports (Martina Navratilova, most famously, but Billie Jean King, Gigi Fernandez, Conchita Martinez as well, for men, the only one that was good, though not quite out, was Big Bill Tilden), but not professionals. Esera Tuaolo came out in the show Real Sports but he had retired from football.

These kinds of homophobic issues don't seem to be problematic in the programming community. Microsoft wanted to limit its support of gay rights legislation, fearing it didn't represent all the employees views, but then backtracked on that, reaffirming their support. Would the NFL do such a thing?

I've read dedications in computer books to male partners. Heck, programmers care about style, love Lisp, believe in unit testing, pair programming, switching who has control of the keyboard (I have no idea what this means, but it sounds dirty). of course, programmers are (type) safe, and always care about (memory) protection, and use LaTeX to protect themselves against WYSIWIGS and other kinds of viruses. Are you DVD-R+ or DVD-R-?

OK, this is just too silly a title, and just too silly an entry to write anymore.

Go home. Nothing to see here.

Salad Days

I'm not a salad person, really. I'm not sure I understand the phenomenon. My early childhood mostly spanned the 1970s, and I have to feel, though I have no evidence to support it, that salads became popular in the 70s (is it much older? there are salad forks and such). This was, I figure, a response to the health kick in the 70s. One man, perhaps, more than any other, Jim Fixx, inspired the health movement (OK, there was Jack LaLanne, who was around for much longer than that), by running. Diets were prevalent thoughout this decade as well. The first incarnation of Atkins was in the 1970s (as early as 1972!).

I figure people ate salad because it was a way to be healthier. There's only one problem. Salads taste awful. Which is to say, it tastes so bland, you feel like you're eating grass. Solution? Salad dressing. You could get French dressing, or Thousand Island, or, well, I don't know what.

But literally, adding salad dressing was like adding fat. There's some irony that people ate salad to be healthier, but put something bad for you on it because they didn't like the taste of healthy veggies. Over time, low-fat dressings were introduced, and vinaigrettes, which were tasty without being so fattening.

A few days ago, we had a huge farewell lunch for a coworker. This was a "party" lunch, meaning we were ordering off a limited menu (it wasn't bad---there were maybe 10 entrees to pick from). The meal, alas, started off with salad. Your choice of garden or Caesar. I picked Caeser. I don't even know what goes in a Caeser's salad. I just have fewer things to think about when I order such a salad.

The kind of salads I like don't qualify as "salads" per se. Egg salad, potato salad, macaroni salad, tuna salad, and chicken salad have the word salad in it, but when people think of salad, they think of something green, typically, lettuce. These salads are basically mayonnaise with stuff. I've learned most people don't like these salads, because of the mayonnaise.

I used to think my favorite salads were spinach salads. Baby spinach has a mild, possibly, no taste, and doesn't have the cruch of lettuce that I don't particularly care for. But honestly, it has no taste either.

My favorite salad is an Asian salad. Go to Mandalay's. It's a Burmese restaurant. I know. They're officially called Myanmar, but I don't think I can bring myself to say "Myanmarese". They have ginger salad, papaya salad, mango salad. They're made with shredded cabbage (much like cole slaw) and some kind of dressing that's tasty, plus shredded nuts (don't care for that). But those salads I enjoy eating.

Now, why devote a whole entry to salad, of all things? I was sitting by Lance whose blog I had been reading, and as we were ordering, he asked for ranch dressing. This is not the kind of thing I commit to memory, but the memory cells were refreshed on by reading that he used to get ranch dressing at home, and for a long time, it was hard to get at restaurants, but now it's rather widely availble, and I was thinking, yes, he did order ranch!

It's a silly observation, but these are the kinds of things that happen when you read a blog. What passes for something as irrelevant as "do you want fries with that" might pose more significance if you knew the context. But then, people are creatures of habit. People like the same cereals all the time for breakfast even if, in general, they don't want to eat the same lunch and dinner all the time. Jay likes Product 19. Dave likes shredded wheat.

Maybe I'll skip salad next time.

Pondering Blogs

These days, I rarely read other people's blogs. I want to distinguish between the kind of blog that is aware its audience is huge, say, Joel Spolsky, with the kind of blog that is small, say, mine.

I doubt anyone reads my blog that regularly, but if you do, you amaze me. When I get on a roll, I'm writing pages and pages of stuff, which meanders from one topic to the next. If you don't care about a subject matter that I care about (say, movies and sports), then my blog may seem half interesting, half boring.

I was reading a blog from a coworker. Several of my coworkers have blogs, but their suitably neutral. One guy merely points out interesting websites. His personal life is mostly left out of it. Another person has a little more to say, but again, not a lot of details. The one I'm reading isn't that much more in depth in terms of what's going on, and I respect that. After all, no matter how few people you think read it, someone is reading it. You didn't put it out on the Internet to keep it from the public, even in the back of your mind.

The thing that's fascinating about reading a blog of someone you know is that you see another side to that person. You say to yourself "is that what he (or she) was thinking?"

To be fair, some people only write in a certain state of mind, say, when they're depressed. That can give you a skewed view of who they are. And, if they're blogging, they know it's out for anyone to read, so there's a sense, like getting dressed for a night out, that you need to make yourself look better than usual. At the very least, maybe, caring a bit about grammar (which I generally don't).

Now it's possible, reading a blog, that you might get only one view of that person, and most likely, you are, assuming there's something to be mined out of reading a blog.

Perhaps the most jarring difference I saw was my friend Justin's. It's really hard to call what he writes a blog. It's not always about something real. The blog would come across rather intense while his personality seemed rather calm. I found it difficult, at first, to reconcile that he had written it at all.

As it turns out, Justin can be intense as a person, but you just don't see that right away. That kind of intensity can drive people away. I've told him that he's less nice to people the better you know him. Sometimes I find it surprising he keeps his friends, except that he's actually rather loyal to his friends.

I know people who read blogs to gain insight into people. Sometimes, it's to gain insight about a specific person. Sometime, that person serves as something representative, i.e., a guy's point of view, a girl's point of view. I've known guys who say they read blogs by women because they want to understand them, though I find that thinly veiled to mean, they're kinda hot for them, and want to figure what makes them tick.

In fact, that is one of the plot points in Casanova where Heath Ledger plays Casanova, and discovers this intellectual feminist has written some inflammatory prose under a nom de plume of a man. He's able to use what he's read to try to impress the woman.

But, in a sense, isn't this what people try to do anyway? Try to figure out how other people are, what makes them tick? My mother has tried to arrange for me and my brother to meet women, given that both of us should have been married by now. Needless to say, these are Asian women, as my mother would find it exceedingly difficult to find non-Asians in her endeavor (to be fair, my dad is also helps out in this regard).

However, what's made it challenging is that I (and my brother) are dealing with women from a culture we simply didn't grow up in. My mom's worldview might work well in Asia, but it doesn't always apply to people in the US. She believes people can be far more conniving and manipulative than I generally see. Perhaps that's my naivete, but I just think that she understands her world, and I understand mine. That leaves me trying to deal with folks with a different cultural background, even if it's technically my cultural heritage.

I am reminded of a story I heard about Turks working in Germany. They raised their kids in Germany, expecting, in ten or so years, to return back to Turkey. But by the time their kids had grown up, they had become assimilated into the culture, and thought of themselves as German. This must have come as a shock to the parents, and yet, they must have seen this slowly happening, though so slow as to not realize until was too late.

I recently read an article about Hines Ward, wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who just won the Super Bowl. Ward, on first glance, much like Tiger Woods, looks African American. I suppose, technically, he is. However, Ward's mother is Korean (and Tiger's is Thai), a product of an African American soldier stationed in Korea.

His father brought his mother to the States, but they eventually separated. At some point, he wanted his son to live with his mother. At first, he didn't like living with his Korean mother, but eventually grew to respect what she had done to live in a foreign country and make ends meet. He's become quite close to his mother.

As it turns out, there's a side effect. Due to the Super Bowl, his Korean heritage has become news, even in Korea, where there are some children of mixed parentage. Korea, having been taken over by other countries, has always been dubious of foreigners, and has often believed in pure bloodlines. This sounds a bit like Nazi Germany, but could also be the kind of thing that Jewish Americans worry about. If Jewish people don't marry one another, how do they survive?

People like Hines Ward have been making Koreans rethink this idea. I suspect the ideas are going to be hard to revise. I found it surprising that Korean attitudes on homosexuality seemed to lag far behind other Asian countries, and only recently, with the huge success of King and the Clown, a kind of Brokeback Mountain for the Korean set (though it looks far more like Crouching Tiger) have people begun to talk about this outside hushed circles.

Hines Ward grew up in the U.S., and so his worldview should be mostly American, but how did his Korean mother shape his view of the world? How did my own parents shape my own views? I know that I'm a far different person that I would be had I grown up in Asia, and, lacking another perspective, I'm rather happy that I did grow up here.

So as I read my coworker's blog, I am trying to read a view, filter it through what I understand, to make sense of what's going on about that person, and realizing that, as with anyone, I'm getting an incomplete picture.

In one of his entries, he points out that writing a blog, to some people's eyes, is incredibly narcissitic and pretentious. It's all about me, me, me. And I've read some blogs that are just like that, though they tend to be rare (or I don't really seek them out). And I think, that's exactly the kind of self-conscious comment that one makes when writing blogs. ("No, wait, I am not narcisstic! Really! Come back!")

One of my earliest entries was about how I felt I couldn't be completely honest about everything in a blog, not that anyone ever could, but because it's out in the open. And even as I write this, I'm thinking, what the heck am I babbling about. And you're thinking "how much time is he going to talk about talking, and why is he talking in the third person, and how dare he put thoughts in my head, and I'm gonna stop reading this blog, dammit, cuz I have better things to do, like eat ice cream, or watch Lost, or something, but not follow this incredibly inane, convoluted sentence, that just won't end, my goodness, why won't he stop, that son of a biscuit, that pretentious so-and-so".

You see, I'm having fun at this, no?

Well, there, I've put some thoughts in words, and it doesn't make that much sense.

I think I'll go back to reading other people's blogs.

And there is no Demosthenes and Locke. We'd rather read the sports column.

Take Me Out

This is not about the play Take Me Out, which I've blogged about. It is, however, about baseball, (unlike Take Me Out which is really more about baseball fandom, than really saying something meaningful about baseball).

Of all the major sports (though many call baseball, a pasttime), I like baseball the least. The only time I care to watch it is during playoffs, and even then, I don't really follow it. I follow hockey even less, because I both like it less, and I would need cable to see it at all.

So why blog about baseball? I'm not really. I'm blogging about ballbug.com, which is basically the memeorandum engine pointed at baseball blogs. I had suggested, a long time ago, to Gabe that it would be interesting to use what he does with sports. Now, Gabe isn't much of a sports person, not enough that he'd actually take time to really watch sports. But when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I mean, Gabe doesn't care that much about the entertainment industry either, I'd imagine. Even so, he has wesmirch.com.

Now I'd like to tell you that I found out about his new site because of the link on his main memeorandum page, but that's not how I did it.

Recently, I went to see cherry blossoms with Jay. I brought my camera, and took some pix. Jay kept bugging me to get him the photos. I already had a flickr account that I wasn't using and I just got the Flickr Hacks book from ETECH, so I thought I should try to figure out how to upload stuff to Flickr once again. Initially, I thought of it as a minor pain. But once I went through the steps again, it seemed a lot easier.

I remember Brett Kiefer (of Fog Creek) had asked the lunch table, way back at ETECH, whether anyone was actually tagging. None of us said yes. However, now that I put up some photos, I decided to do some tagging. I'll say, if you have enough photos, it's incredibly tedious, even with all the tools available to make it quick and dirty.

As I was checking this out, I decided to look up Gabe. For as much as Gabe can't seem to stand having his picture on all of Flickrdom, his picture and tag is there a lot. And in particular, there's now a screenshot of the baseball logo for his new memeorandum site.

That has to be the most indirect way of figuring out the new site. Alas, I'm more of a tennis guy, and so I won't be visiting it too much. As usual, Gabe has it Ajax'ed out. No webpage changes for him, no sirree Bob.

I also used the Flickr Exporter plugin to IPhoto. I'll say it's not quite what I had hoped for. It does the job, but the photos are too small, and I don't know why the images I get are much smaller than the 800 by 600 photos I specified. Amazingly enough, there's nearly no documentation on how to use the thing. Annoying, I must say.

All the same, I have a gazillion photos I should upload at some point, so I'll try to get to that in the next few weeks.

Bean There

I finally caught up with Shadow of the Giant, Orson Scott Card's latest in his Ender Shadow series.

Although Card has written plenty of books outside this trilogy, he's been writing Ender nearly as long as Lucas has been doing Star Wars. Card wrote a short story about Ender which appeared in Analog, a science fiction magazine, in August of 1977. Lucas had just released Star Wars in May of 77.

Card didn't make the short story into a novel until the mid-80s, and wrote four books in the series. The first one, Ender's Game is quite different from any of the four followups.

It chronicles the story of Ender (born Andrew, but called Ender, because his sister Valentine couldn't pronounce his name correctly, when she was young), the youngest of three children (sister Valentine, brother Peter). Earth has been fighting a war with aliens called "buggers". They won their last encounter when war hero Mazer Rackham destroyed their main ship. Now, they try to train children to be the finest strategic minds to do battle with the buggers.

Training is done in space on a space station, where the best of the best, fight in a battle room with kids divided up into teams playing what amounts to laser tag in zero-g.

The followup, Speaker for the Dead, takes place far away from Earth when Valentine and Ender leave to go to one of the colonies. Two more books serve as followups: Xenocide and Children of the Mind. After that, Card was done with the Ender series.

Or was he? A fellow author wanted to write in the Ender universe, and Card suggested writing about Bean from his perspective, set in the same universe as Ender's Game. Card became so intrigued with the idea that he decided to write it himself, and thus four books have come from this series.

As a science fiction writer, Card has never been too heavy on the science. His aliens are bug-like creatures. Light-speed travel causes time dilation. The ansible is the faster than light communication used. You're not going to find many intriguing science ideas in his books. Card's interest has always been politics and world history and there's evidence of both in his latest.

You can see Card is generally biased against Islam and China, though Islam takes the brunt of the abuse. He likes really old views of countries like India (where Virlomi proclaims she's a goddess) or the emperor of China ruling by the mandate of heaven, which are both consistent with the culture, though rather old.

What's exasperating about Card is how he doesn't mind ranking one person against another. Bean is clearly the best, even better than Ender. The loyalty to Ender is unswerving. Again and again, Card points out how Ender's jeesh (his slang for his "gang") are, by far, the top military strategists.

As a writer though, he favors the power of the word. In Ender's Game, columns written by Locke and Demosthenes (which are really Peter and Valentine Wiggin) are so influential, they convince many to fall on one side or the other. At the time, Usenet was still pretty young, so Card must have felt rather prescient thinking that writing could eventually carry weight (yet, it carries way too much, as some should simply not care).

He uses this again with essays by Lincoln and Martel (Peter and Petra, in this case). Card's been accused that his genius kids aren't very kidlike, and he's responded by saying that there have been bright kids who say that it's accurate.

Personally, I don't find it that accurate. Love and hate figure profoundly in his novels. Characters fall somewhere between ambiguously good to bad, bad, bad (Achilles mostly). Peter started off that way, as a bully of a kid, but in the Shadow series, he's rehabilitated and is shown as someone using power for the good of the world, even as it appears he's taking over the world.

Card has said one of his heroes of writing is Asimov. One thing he shares with Asimov is writing about people who have the most influence. Thus, the wars started by Ender's jeesh are mostly about them. The individuals who fight in the war are either incompetently trained, or highly trained, or highly loyal, or what-have-you. Their lives aren't particularly meaningful.

Despite Card's politics, like all Card novels, it's very readable and hard to put down. You may disagree with his characters that are supposed to be super smart, or his pronouncements on history, or even his belief that certain historical figures were that important (thus, the name Alexander being used throughout), you want to know what happens to this person or that.

Still, I did decide to wait a year until it came out in paperback before reading this. Enjoyable and exasperating at the same time.

New Kids on the Block

Since I lack great skill at writing reviews, I usually summarize a film. Brick isn't so easy to follow. A stylish debut by writer-director, Rian Johnson, it follows the tale of Brendan Frye, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who seems to have stayed very much in indie films (this is the third movie I seen from Levitt recently, including a small part in Latter Days, the lead in Mysterious Skin, and the lead in this film), whose discovered his ex-girlfriend is in trouble, and then ends up dead.

She asked for help, and he's willing to provide it. This ends up getting him involved with "The Pin", played by Lukas Haas (he was the little kid, in Witness so many years ago) who somehow runs a drug operation under the nose of his mom who has no clue, and can't decide whether to offer her guests milk or juice, the Tug, a brute of a guy played by Jamie Bell lookalike, Noah Fleiss, three women (Emily Kostach, the former girlfriend, Kara, who seems to do drama, and Laura Dannon, the femme fatale), and buddy, The Brain, who seems to know more about what's happening in the streets than general academics.

Indeed, it's not clear why the film is set at a high school since education and the issues of fitting in aren't entirely the subject of the film (though there is the goth, the jock, the troubled girl, the nerdy guy). Johnson has the character stereotypes you'd see in a high school drama, but puts them all in some more adult situation that you might see Bruce Willis in.

There's hard work to be done for the viewer sinc e you have to make head or tails of the lingo used. It alternates between stuff that's understandable, to stuff that seems like listening to Ride with the Devil, Ang Lee's film about the Civil War, which tries to reproduce dialog from that era, except I have a hard time believing this is based on how real people talk. Even so, it creates a hypnotic effect as you're transported to this world of violence.

I suspect the idea was very much like Bugsy Malone which came out in the 70s, directed by Alan Parker, with an all-teen cast playing the role f mobsters. Johnson's idea though, appears to be to put typical high school stereotypes into far more serious ground. It feels like he's referencing a bunch of movies (Kara looks like she's in Cabaret, and then also in some kabuki).

There's a physicality about the film. Levitt plays most of the film either beat up or beating people up, though mostly beat up.

Compelling from beginning to end, mostly in the single minded effort of Frye to vindicate what happened to ex-girlfriend, and for its labrynthine plot of cross and double-cross, you quickly forget that these are teens and that this should be too hard to believe as something real.

My complaint is that I didn't quite follow all of what was going on, but it was still enjoyable. All the actors give strong performances. The character that sticks out most for me is Laura Dannon played by Nora Zehetner, who seems like she'll play other roles pretty soon. (Turns out most of the characters are played be actors in their early 20s, but that's not so uncommon).

I give it a B+.

Up With People

Many years ago, I watched a segment on 60 Minutes (at least, I think it was 60 Minutes). 60 Minutes is perhaps the oldest of the news shows on the air. I remember it in the 1970s and it's now 30 years later.

Once upon a time, I used to think of news as being objective and while the press (Fox News, not withstanding) still maintains this air of objectivity, I began to realize shows like 60 Minutes does not. These are manipulative shows meant to give one side of a story, so that the audience sympathizes, while not giving the other side of the story a fair shake. It's one reason the show is so popular.

Eventually, the two other major networks developed their own news programs. 20/20 in the 80s, and Dateline probably in the 90s.

The segment I watched was about a man from Bangladesh (which is near India) who had studied business in the west, and realized most of what he had been taught did not apply to his poor country. Other countries had tried to invest, but many of the projects laid incomplete, and didn't help anyone.

He came up with a rather novel idea. He would open a bank to the poor. As it turned out, the very poor often had a raw deal. They might have basic skills, such as making baskets or chairs. However, to acquire the material, they had to make a deal with someone who would provide them material, and then take the made item and sell it, leaving her with only a little more than she had paid for to feed herself. They could never rise above their abject poverty. Of course, they were so poor, they couldn't get loans either.

The man once asked a woman if he were to loan her money, could she sell it for more money than she was making now, and she said definitely. So, he loaned her the money, and soon enough, she was making enough to repay that loan.

He realized that he needed to do more than simply loan the money, that the poor had been poor so long that they lack self-esteem and even the know-how of what to do with the money. He wanted to empower these women, so he came with a credo which the borrowers would recite, and some even joined the bank and could relate their stories to others.

The man, Muhammad Yunus, discovered women were better at repaying the loans than men, so many of the people he helped out were women. He would hold what amounted to a jamboree where those who had borrowed would come together as a group and meet one another.

This idea has apparently spread beyond Bangladesh, and has even made it to the United States.

This was a fascinating story of how people come up with ideas to help the indigent.

This morning, I had plans to go get my car looked at. It's fine, but the maintenance light turned on, and I knew this meant that it needed its periodic checkout. However, I had just been there very recently, so I wondered why the light was on (it's stupid, and doesn't know that maintenance was recently performed). So I came back to College Park, headed to the UM gym, and read Scientific American.

The article I read talked about prostitutes in Calcutta (these days, cities in India have changed their names, presumably from British rule, thus Calcutta is now Kolkata, and Bombay is now Mumbai, much like many of the cities in China changed names) who used to have a high incidence of HIV.

This was causing problems because men would visit these prostitutes, get infected, and then infect their wives. A doctor (I think) wanted to figure out a way to solve this problem. One solution was to convince these prostitutes to convince their clientele to use condoms.

However, this was not so easy to do. There was no incentive for them to do so. He had attended some conference where he had heard the term "sex worker". He realized that maybe, if he could convince these women, that they were workers much like he was a worker, that this would elevate their own image of themselves.

Many of these women were prostitutes not by choice but by force, and had lived this way since before they were teens. However, since customers didn't want to wear condoms, they might leave one worker for another. So, he had the women organize themselves, much like a union.

He also had to convince the police to stop raiding the brothels because the women needed steady income and a raid meant no income, and more likelihood to accede to customer requests not to use condoms. He was trying to convince people that prostitution would not go away, and that these women could also become educators, warning of the problems of HIV.

Not only has he reduced the percentage of sex workers with HIV, he has helped their self-image, their working conditions. He's seen as something of a saint for what he's done.

This is one of those intriguing stories that has as much to do with how society perceives its own ills. As much as people despised prostitution, there were enough men who sought out the services and enough women trapped in what they perceived as demeaning jobs, treated like slaves, that it took someone who had health concerns on his mind to look past the moral issues that comes with this.

This reminds me a bit of Firefly, the short-lived series by Joss Whedon. In Whedon's view of the universe, the prostitutes of the world, called companions have an elevated stature. They are trained, much like dancers or musicians, to be charming, well versed in many topics, and of course, able to please.

Of course, to me, that kind of view seems very much a male idea. This doctor in India has come as close to a real manifestation of this fantasy as anyone has, although for, in my mind, much nobler purposes.

This is one of those questions that vexes humanity. How do we improve the lot of people, when there are people inclined to the status quo and folks that simply aren't that well-behaved.

Usable Languages

Do you remember the first language you programmed? For me, it was BASIC. I don't mean Visual Basic. I mean the old basic where each line had a line number, where you used goto statements. All the things that folks like Dijkstra told us were bad, bad ideas (admittedly, the reason he didn't like goto, if memory serves, is because it was hard to prove correctness, and Dijkstra was big into correctness, which faded from popularity when people realized he wanted to automate proofs, and that was hard, even for the simplest of programs), they tossed into BASIC.

The nice thing about BASIC is its ease of implementation. Given a language, like, say, Java, you could probably code up a BASIC interpreter in a few thousand lines, maybe not even that.

Sometime in the 80s, there was this idea that we ought to move past text-based languages. Somehow, text seemed primitive. Shouldn't we draw circles and arrows and nice pictures? Wouldn't this make for nicer looking code? This never caught on. I'm sure a few theses came of this, but for the most part, we still type text.

Yet, something, in my opinion isn't right about that. For example, think about comments. There are many types of comments. There are comments that are describing what's going on. Input parameters, return results, exceptions thrown--the kind of stuff Javadoc is supposed to be good at. But beyond that, you may want to have something that reminds to get back to this piece of code. Many of us come up with ways to notify ourselves. Perhaps a "TODO:" that we can grep for.

And what about bug fix comments? At times, I want to write comments specifically to indicate that the code I just changed was a bug fix (will IDEs eventually incorporate with a bug tracking system, so it's easy to point to the solution). This would let me have some idea where I've had to fix code, but it's not the kind of comment I want to have that represents the meaning of the code.

The next issue I have is testing code. We all know we're supposed to use it, but here's a source of problems. I would like to have a visibility keyword "test-visible" that I could apply to method names, e.g., test-visible getFooBar() which could only be called classes that call themselves test classes. Non-test classes could not call these methods.

The most drastic idea I have, along these lines, is related somewhat to research one of my housemates is doing. Jaime (pronouced "Jay-me" rather than "Hi-me") is collecting data from introductory programming students, to determine how they program and what kind of bugs they generate (at least, ostensibly, that's what it would be used for, but really, the testing infrastructure is as important, or at least, as time-consuming).

One suggestion, noted by Professor Mike Hicks, is to use this data to create programming languages that's more usable. I know, there's something that screams "Isn't that what Visual Basic is for?", but really, has a language ever been designed like this? How many people, in C, wrote = to test for equality, instead of == and got burned? Could we learn how to write usable languages?

I've done some interviews where I've asked people to code up data structures. I find some people understand what to do conceptually, but when it comes to actually coding it up, they are on far shakier grounds. The funny thing is that this can happen to teachers too. At a university, it's somehow OK for a professor to say "I know very little about programming language X" and yet still teach data structures. After all, data structures are an abstract concept which can be quite independent of the programming language.

Why is it challenging? For the teachers, it's typically not because they lack the intellectual ability to program, but they find they don't want to learn the language. It's yet another way to do something (like learning a new foreign language) that they find unappealing. But for students, who have some vested interest in knowing the language (they need to submit programs and take tests), this difficulty is surprising.

Some of the problems lie with lack of use. Some people forget how to program in a language after even a few months of not programming. Even with expertise, some make the same mistakes over and over (such as = vs. == or believing that comparison functions return -1, 0, 1 instead of negative, zero, and positive). Those kinds of mistakes, it seems, could be avoided with a more "usable" language.

And yet, it seems rare to design a language in this way. Java has done a little. For example, one of the most common errors in C/C++, especially those coming from Pascal and Fortran is the use of == for equality. In C/C++, every type has a "zero" value. For pointers, it's NULL. For characters, it's '\0'. C/C++ treats zeroes as false and all other values as true. People would write conditions like if (x = 3) thinking they were testing 3, but instead, they assigned 3 to x, which is non-zero, and therefore always true.

Java fixed this up by insisting that conditions have type boolean which doesn't even exist as a proper type in C, and that fixed up most errors, since the compiler would flag (x = 3) as having type int, not boolean. It's not fail-safe, since you could assign a boolean to a variable, but that's somewhat uncommon.

Little things like that can help make it easier to avoid pitfalls while programming. I'll agree that programming is sufficiently hard that people are always going to have a hard time programming. Still, that doesn't mean we shouldn't make some things easier.

One complaint about a usable language is that it would lead to really basic languages. That depends on your audience. If you're trying to appeal to the run-of-the-mill web developer, then higher order functions, continuations, and other advanced features may be too intellectually complex. On the other hand, even languages like O'Caml might benefit from figuring out what kinds of mistakes people make. All I'm saying is that usability studies might provide another angle by which we can design programming languages.

Usability vs. Learnability

Ah, so I never did get around to talking about Betsy Weber and Joel Spolsky's talk. They were discussing usability. They talked about doing user tests with the Aardvark gang on Copilot. Betsy flew out from Michigan where TechSmith is headquartered and flew to the Fog Creek offices in NYC.

If you've seen the Aardvark'd DVD, you find one hilarious guy. Apparently, they recruited some folks out of Craig's List, but this guy must not have been one of them. Betsy asked "On a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being best, how do you rate your computer proficiency?". The guy said "half". And she goes "You mean, like 3?". And he goes "No, half, like less than 1". And he wasn't kidding. It's almost as if he'd never seen a mouse before. But he seemed awfully good-natured.

Betsy said that the people who get the most out of these usability tests (TechSmith makes a product, Morae, that allows you to use webcams and correlate mouse and keystrokes and video together) are often the programmers themselves. They don't realize what users can possibly do.

To be fair, this guy isn't exactly the target audience. The target audience of Copilot is for people who use computers regularly, but don't deal well when things break. In other words, they're fine as long as the programs they use behave just like they've always behaved. The tool can be used for other situations, to be fair, such as demonstrating how to use software.

In the middle of the discussion, there was a comment about usability vs. learnability. In a sense, what was being tested wasn't so much "how easy is it to use", but "how learnable it is". Someone asked the distinction between the two concepts. Joel said "Wizards are easily learnably, but not very usable. Once they know what they're doing, wizards slow people down". OK, I'm saying that in "quotes" but I'm just paraphrasing. That's an interesting thought.

It leads me to make a quick point. There's a lot of stuff on the web that's not that learnable. No one seems to have created an evolving interface that becomes more usable as you learn more (thus, wizards to start off with, and then something better as you get better, possibly with your own input). This allows the software to bridge the gap between novices and power users.

Many websites and software are aimed at the near video game generation. No instructions are provided, and you are left to deduce what to do. It's no surprise that the "dummies book" industry creates so many books. The real problem with making good online help (other than people ignore it) is that it creates a much longer development cycle. You have to think about how people learn and hope they way you picked appeals to enough folks without being totally annoying to power users.

Ali Farka Toure No More

I just Wikipedia (really!) and found that Toure died of bone cancer about a month ago to the day. Sad to hear.

Mali Serenades

Recently, Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate released an album titled, In the Heart of the Moon. You may not have heard of either one, unless you're into world music (as I was once upon a time). Both are musicians from Mali, but play different styles of music.

Toure has been compared to bluesman John Lee Hooker, and plays a bluesy blues that I prefer over real blues, mainly because I prefer listening to whatever they speak in (the official language of Mali is French, but I recognize French, so it is most likely Bambara).

Diabate plays the kora, which is a harp-like instrument, considered something more elegant.

Their duet would be akin to a classical musician pairing up with a banjo player. I've been a fan of Toure a while, but was never able to get into Diabate's music. But whoever thought of pairing them together (Ry Cooder, of course) could only have dreamed of the magic that would come of it.

I've heard the album several times, but if you're in a certain mood, wanting to be transported away, you have to listen to In the Heart of the Moon. The two really complement one another. For Toure, his songs almost always sound the same, although uniformly excellent. For Diabate, the bluesy Toure tunes create a likable tune which he overlays his kora mastery.

Toure is the older of the two, having played with Diabate's father before. He's supposed to be a legend in Mali with Diabate a kora prodigy.

Check out In the Heart of the Moon. You won't regret it.

Read It

No, no, NO! Not "read it" as in "reed it", but "read it" in the past tense as in "red it".

I had heard of reddit.com created by the kids working with Paul Graham. If you've seen the Aardvark'd video about four summer interns working at Fog Creek Software, then you saw a glimpse of the kids working for Graham. They developed the website, which seems rather simple. It allows users to submit and rank articles. It's been compared to digg.com.

A website is only as good as the articles it posts. I find that I'm heading to reddit just to skim the titles on there. A few always appeal to me. Yes, I'm a lurker who doesn't push article ratings up nor down. Many have titles that are far more interesting than the content it points to.

I point out reddit because it had nothing to do with the way people are supposed to look at online content. We're supposed to get personalized content, don't you know? Suited to individual tastes. And yet, this is not the way we've received content, at least not exactly.

When you subscribe to a newspaper, you choose one versus another, but the content of the paper is the same for anyone who subscribes to the paper (late and early editions, not withstanding). You let the editors decide what goes in the paper, then select the stuff you want to read.

I read somewhere that someone wanted memeorandum to have personalized content for the readers. Gabe, who started the site, thought it was that beyond what he felt technology could reasonably do. Picking the same content for everyone seems to work well enough.

He asked me if I used an RSS aggregator to get content. I tried it once, but realized if I didn't keep up, it would suddenly bloat up my page. It was a pain to mark the articles (meaning, I couldn't figure out an obvious way to do it in ten seconds). reddit doesn't care if I saw an article or not. Once it's gone, it's gone (oh, I suppose it could archive it), but it gives me the illusion there's only 20 articles I need to care about at any moment in time, and that's comforting.

RSS aggregation merely collects content. I want someone to filter it for me, to pick out the content I care about, and yet, I think I'm like Gabe in this respect. Can any automated means do this effectively for my personal tastes? Heck, I don't even know what I want to read about.

I know I surf the web a great deal, but most of my sports information comes from my morning commute listening to Mike and Mike in the morning and to Mr. Tony. I had suggested to Gabe to do the same thing in sports that he's done for politics, tech news, and now Hollywood gossip. But there may be no need. Sports sites have reporters and there's a proliferation of sports commentary shows which tend to have the same topics to talk about.

Most sports programs have a disdain for women's sports. For example, Maryland just won the women's national championship in basketball, an ugly game that saw the Terps claw back from a 13 point deficit to force over time with a 3-point shot with seconds winding off the clock, then finally edging out Duke in the overtime. I'm sure this topic was discussed some by Mike and Mike, but when I listened to it, the talk was on Barry Bonds.

Why? Male sports reporters hate women's sports. They hate soccer and tennis and sometimes hockey. Soccer is that European or South American sport that sports commentators are often happy to say they know nothing about. Some commentators say they know a little tennis, but really, how many are fans. A few like golf. But it's baseball, football, and basketball. Occasionally, you get notoriety for a smaller sport.

Duke lacrosse is suffering a huge blow. Their successful head coach has resigned due to a scandal that may involve rape, but certainly involves strippers. Were there racial epithets? There's a town-gown relationship between what is perceived to be the mostly white Duke (although I suspect they have their share of Asian Americans, but lacrosse tends to be very white, even though the famous football player, Jim Brown, often said his passion was lacrosse--and the man played tennis well too!) and the mostly African American Durham where Duke is situated.

But when does anyone ever talk about lacrosse. Sports reporters might as well not bother talking about such sports, even if they have a passion for it, because sports is built around personalities, and it takes time for people to learn who is who. The average fan needs to do some legwork before they can follow sports.

My brother, who doesn't care for sports, once asked how he could learn more. He wanted to look at sports scores, but that's the most horrendous way to follow sports. I told him two things. First, watch PTI, the show co-hosted by Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon. They hit the major sports issues in 30 minutes. It'll take a while to learn who they're talking about, but in a year, you'll know who's who. The other way is to pick a team and follow them. Not just their scores, but the names of players. In a sense, the numbers don't matter, the people do.

Anyway, point is that sports shows already aggregate information for you. Someone is already deciding what is important in sports. This is not the case in technology. For some reason, people can agree when it comes to national news and sports, but almost nothing else. Thus, tech news aggregators that can spot "interesting" articles are helpful. There's no good equivalent of PTI on television.

Let me end on an interesting compare/contrast. In Aardvark'd, the Fog Creek kids were compared/contrasted with the Graham ("Y Combinator") kids. The biggest difference was what they were doing as projects. On the one hand, Copilot has a model of making money that's rather obvious. Pay per use. Whether it can draw enough business remains to be scene.

reddit, on the other hand, is one of these websites where there's no obvious way to make any money from it. It's very much like comparing Microsoft to Google. Microsoft had obvious products that make money. Google does not. Where does Google make its money? Not search. Ads. It makes a whole bunch of other things, while cool, aren't themselves moneymakers. Google maps. Google Earth.

This is an intriguing contrast of obvious ways to make money vs. less obvious ways.

And there you go, my typical entry, starting from reddit to RSS aggregation to a summary of sports, to the contrast of reddit and Fog Creek. Hey, I didn't major in English.

Hide and Seek

Sometimes I think it's better to write a review much after watching the film. At that point, exact details are fuzzy, and you're not as likely to recap the film. I'll try this out on a review of Cache.

1984 posited this idea of a "Big Brother" who was watching you. This was meant to be a menacing presence, where you lose sense of privacy, even as "Big Brother" was meant to be friendly. Would Orwell have thought that people wouldn't mind giving up privacy? People want to be on Real World or Big Brother where everyone is watched. Who wouldn't mind giving up privacy if there's fame.

Michael Haneke's Cache is modern Orwellian vision of surveillance. A husband and wife begin to receive videotapes. Someone is clearly spying on them. Why?

Haneke can take the rather staid scene of the exterior of a Paris apartment an infuse it with a sense of dread. Indeed, for the first half hour, one gets exhausted in a body clench.

As much as this works as a kind of thriller, it might not have been more than an exercise in audience manipulation if the relationship between husband and wife didn't work so well. It feels like Auteil and Binoche are husband and wife, bickering about what to do, questioning what the husband's past is all about. It's easy to forget both actors are highly prolific (the best French actors seem to star in lots of films, more so than American actors of similar caliber). Haneke could have made a film just about family drama and made something highly effective.

There's one kicker of a scene that leaves you breathless as Haneke lingers and lingers on a scene that comes out of nowhere. There are scenes like this in other films and yet they are part of the imaginary landscape.

Haneke explores a theme that Egoyan often deals with, which is video. Egoyan's films mainly have actors interacting with the medium. In Calendar, Egoyan plays a photographer who looks at videos of his wife. In Speaking Parts, the woman who's life a film is being made about looks at a video of her dead brother when he was alive.

Although the video is watched by husband and wife, Haneke compels you to watch it too, to see yourself as the couple would see this, to put yourself in their place. He's much more participitory than Egoyan.

I watched some of Funny Games and this film seems more accomplished, mostly, I suspect because one can sympathize with the couple.

Grade: A-.

Go West, Young Man

The phrase "Go West, Young Man" was a phrase (incorrectly) attributed to Horace Greeley. One man who listened to this was Josiah Grinnell who went on to found Grinnell College. Now, you might ask, as many do, "Where the hell is Grinnell?" which works just as well for my alma mater ("Where the hell is Cornell?"--indeed, I know one guy who went to Grinnell as an undergrad, then Cornell as a grad). Grinnell is in Iowa, by the way.

I went to the more traditional west a few weeks ago, post ETECH '06 which was held in sunny San Diego. At least, it was supposed to be sunny. As I was noticing that southern Cal is not nearly as warm as advertised in early March and then hearing reports that temperatures were reaching the 70s in DC, I was thinking of how I could get my money back for failing to produce wonderful weather. Where's the Guvenator when you need him? Am I going to have to find Chuck Norris to kick Mama Nature's derriere?

The main highway near Mountain View, which is north of San Jose, is highway 101. On this road you can reach both Google on the Amphitheatre Parkway. California roads are strange right around San Jose. None of the highway exits are numbered. Further north, at Embarcadero Road, you can head towards Stanford University.

Most of us who care think of the elite universities as Ivy Leagues. The Ivy League is really an athletic conference. Perhaps the only sports they are any good at are hockey and lacrosse, and even then, a few other non-Ivies are competitive. The following eight universities comprise the Ivies: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Darmouth, and Brown. There are universities, of course, that have academic reputations similar to the Ivies, most notably, in that area, MIT, but are, nonetheless, not officially Ivy Leagues. Athletic conference. Remember that. Not a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

People who attend Ivy Leagues get snitty about that. Folks at Penn have it worse because some folks confuse Penn State (which is Pennsylvania State University, the one with the good football team) with University of Pennsylvania.

There are also other schools with good academic reputations. I grew up in the south, and there aren't a whole lot of great universities there. Among the ones people point to are: Virginia Tech, University of Virginia, Duke, Vanderbilt, Emory. And that's encompasses the following states: Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida. Heck, put the entire SEC in there (Arkansas, Louisiana, etc). I mean, there are other universities that might qualify for being "good", certainly, people are educated well enough at each states' flagship university.

As you head into the Northeast, you could include all of the Ivies, then all the small colleges in the area. Swarthmore, Amherst, Williams. Towards the midwest, you'd have Purdue, Notre Dame, Illinois, Michigan, Northwestern, Washington University. At this point, you'd jump out west. UC Berkeley, University of Washington, UCLA, UCSD, some of the Claremont Colleges.

Of the universities in the west, the one with the best reputation is Stanford University. (A close second is Berkeley, and then, I might head to University of Washington or UCSD or UCLA after that).

When I arrived in San Jose, I wanted to visit Stanford. I was trying to visit there and also meet up with a friend for lunch. This turned out to be trickier than expected. In particular, I forgot that checkout at most hotels is around noon. My friend had been out at some party or some such, and had come back in the wee hours of the morning. He wasn't expecting to wake up for a noon lunch, and wanted to meet at about 2 PM. Fine, I said. I wasn't sure he'd even meet up.

Then, I headed to Stanford. I had originally intended to get there around 9 AM, and hang out for a few hours, but I woke up rather tired, and didn't hit the road til sometime past 10 AM. By the time I found where Stanford was, it was just past 11.

For a guy who's never been to California until a week earlier, and who had been used to east coast universities, seeing streets lined with palm trees is exotic. I parked at a lot, and headed to the visitor's center. It was Saturday. Buildings at Stanford have a very south-of-the-border look, with ruffled brick roofs that make it look quite unlike buildings out east (or even north, up in Seattle). I was told that the tour group had left 15 minutes earlier, and the next one wouldn't head out until about 4 PM. I had to leave around 4 to catch my flight so that was out of the question.

I took a campus map and tried to catch up with the group. The first thing you notice about Stanford is just how expansive and empty it is. There are large buildings, but they seem to sit in isolation, at least, at some parts of the university. There's large areas of grass, and plenty of palm trees. The day was nice, if not overly warm. Sunny, with a few clouds above, it's the vision you have of California.

As I walked, I notice there were sculptures. It was more like walking through a museum than a college campus. I walked by a church with a large painting on the wall. Then, I saw the Bill Gates computer science building. They were hosting a Ph.D. admit weekend, but the doors were locked, and so I didn't try to go inside. (Excuse me, the William Gates building).

Bill Gates, of course, never attended Stanford. He was a Harvard boy, and is famously known for not completing his degree. That's OK, Sergei and Larry haven't finished their Ph.Ds at Stanford. However, Stanford is prestigious, and it's in California, and Bill's rich. He can afford. Buddy Paul Allen, who cofounded Microsoft, has his own building in Seattle, up near Microsoft land.

I walked by a Hewlett building and a Packard building (surprise, they're side by side). Eventually, I went to the Stanford bookstore to look around. The one on campus looks more like an R.E.I. with clear roofs, lots of wood, a coffee shop on the second floor, and wireless for the student population. It's a nice bookstore. I also had a bit of a headache which I was trying to remedy by gulping coffee.

I was planning to get in touch with my friend around 2 PM. Since I couldn't use my laptop to connect, I borrowed the display Mac laptops on the second floor and emailed my friend.

At that point, with time to kill, I walked around the area some more, and eventually found a hair salon. The salon only had two people working there, a woman and a guy. Apparently, they ran few hours on Saturday, but I was in early enough. I decided to get a haircut.

For some reason, I like getting haircuts at places I visit, especially on or near a campus. I've been to University of Washington, Seattle (referred to as "You Dub" by the locals as opposed to "Wash You" which is what they call Washington University in St. Louis) three times, and had haircuts at Rudy's (?) two times.

The woman who cut my hair had been living in the Stanford area some 40 years. She'd been cutting hair since the heyday of the 60s and 70s, and it was now 2006. I wonder what that's like. Working in one place, one prominent place, for that many years. Who's hair did she cut? Like many hair stylists, she talked a lot. She talked about how the price of living there was so high, how she originally didn't have a lot of training, but always seemed to know how to cut hair. She said the cut that she gave me would be no fuss for a while until the hair grew out more. That was just fine with me.

I got back to the bookstore just after 2 and headed upstairs to the Macs. Checking my email, I found that my friend has sent email some 10 minutes before 1, and was double-checking if I was going to be there. I had told him the change of plans, that he should no longer meet me at my hotel, but arrange to meet me at Stanford. He then gave me an address of a Japanese restaurant near campus.

This restaurant is on University Ave, which isn't really on campus, but certainly has a nice assortment of shops and restaurants. I was supposed to meet him around 2:30, but didn't actually arrive until 2:45, having parked my rental at the nearby parking garage.

I had sushi, my friend had a bento box. He was rather obsessed about the website he ran, which he devoted many hours of the day. It was clear that he was a bit frazzled, but then, he runs his own life. I had hoped to hang out at his place until I had to leave for the airport, but he didn't want to hang out that long. Said he had to go back to work. Things to do. He drove off in the same car he had back in grad school.

He told me there was a Border's nearby, so I went there. That was a bit of a trick as I took the wrong road to get there. I think I passed by a Whole Foods, some guy at a soccer field. It didn't help that my friend wasn't particularly specific about which direction Border's was.

It's an unusual Border's built at the site of a former movie theater, and even then, it looks a bit like a Spanish house, with a courtyard area. Despite claims they had wireless, I couldn't actually connect. I headed outside and saw an Apple Store, and headed inside. At least, I knew they had wireless. I fired up my laptop, and spoke to some friends on the east coast. It was perhaps 4 PM by then. I was about 5 blocks from where I parked.

By the time I reached my car, it was 5 PM. My flight was scheduled for 8 PM. I thought I should head there. I didn't have much more to do.

I knew I was supposed to take 101 to the airport. I had been there the day before to pick up a rental car, the result of miscommunication between me and another friend whose apartment I thought I was staying at (instead, I was at a hotel, and had a rental car, and didn't end up seeing her all of Saturday). It turned out for the better. She lives about twenty minutes further away than I was from the airport.

As I drove, I saw a sign to go to long-term parking, but I figured that wasn't where I was supposed to go. So I drove some more, and all of a sudden I see I'm passing the airport. Uh oh, something's wrong. I'm driving, for all I know, to Mexico, or at least, to Los Angeles. I'm off 101 and trying to figure out where I am, how I plan to find 101 again.

This was one of those things that's a minor disaster. But since I had left around 5 PM, I had like two hours to get to the airport, and I figured this would, at worst, add half an hour, and I was an hour earlier than planned.

Eventually, I saw a sign for 101, and figured, worse gets to worse, I head north, and I'll eventually turn around and head south again. But as luck would have it, there were signs to the airport, and I followed it. San Jose, by the way, has the most windiest roads around the airport. As I drove my rental out of the airport, I followed another car, which headed behind a barrier.

Mistake. Only people working for rental cars were heading back there. How was I supposed to know? A guy in a turban, a Sikh, I'm sure, banged on the car with the flat of his hand. He wanted me to back up, and had to hold up traffic to do so. I nearly hit the barrier itself, when he banged on the back again, and finally managed to squeeze out, and head back to my hotel.

Anyway, I'm in San Jose airport around 6ish or so. This is the week that most conferences are holding their championships. I'm sitting in the Expedia bar. Yeah, they have a bar. I'm drinking some alcohol. I eventually head to the airport, and log onto the airport's wireless. That cost a few bucks. You'd imagine most airports would all have decent wireless. Indeed, LA sucks for that reason. You can use a makeshift computer they have, but no wireless. At least, San Jose has wireless.

If memory serves, the flight is running an hour late. As it was, I wouldn't get onto the airplane at LA until maybe midnight or so, and so an hour delay didn't make much of a difference at San Diego. The layover was either in San Jose or LA, and San Jose had wireless.

Then, I flew from LA to Chicago. It was maybe 7 AM when I arrived there. Then, a flight to DC. When I arrived at DC, there were a bunch of teens that were arriving. It was probably one of those civics groups. You know, those upwardly mobile, I run for student council types, who want to visit DC. I knew their names at the time and had planned to look it up, but can't recall it anymore. The participants had t-shirts. It's times like that that I wonder all those people who trek to DC for one reason or another, especially students, since these are formative periods in their lives. What do they think of National Airport? What will they think of DC?

Jay picks me up from the Greenbelt station, and we head to Bagel Place for a cheap lunch. Jay's nice and dependable in that way. He's almost always home, and he doesn't sleep until noon on the weekends.

It's now a few weeks since this happened, and I write this mostly as a log of what I've done. I have to search my memory to recall what the whole trip was like. I find it's interesting to think that here it was, Sunday, and the day before, I was walking the Stanford campus, taking pictures. The day before I was at an Apple Store, and at a Borders, and eating at a Japanese restaurant.

And now I was back in College Park.

And the vacation was done.

Dictionary Man

I was at Jason Mraz's website just a few minutes ago. Jason who, you might ask? Yeah, I might have said the same thing to. This is what happens when you surf. You find webpages that you aren't quite sure how you go to, but there you are.

Jason Mraz is a singer who also maintains his own blogs. Most celebrity blogs seem like a chore to the celebrity. Do I have to write? You see sparse entries, and they don't say a whole lot. The most interesting blogs are those that either self-introspect, or at least comment on something aroudn them, and Mraz's blog fits in that category.

I'm trying to figure out how to pronounce this guy's last name, Mraz. Right now, I prounounce it in my head as Muraz. I would imagine that's not too far from right.

Mraz has released an album called Mr. A-Z, which, of course, uses the letters of his name, so I give him points for being clever. Apparently, the songs were written over the span of a year.

In one of his blog entries, Jason was talking about how he had recently started listening to music again after a long time of not listening to it, somewhat ironic for a musician, I suppose, but that he had gotten to the point where he couldn't quite listen to music without thinking of all the details that go into making music. But recently, he had found a few artists that he thought weren't crap and had a new IPod to boot, not the bulky one he used to one with heavy studio headphones, but the light white earbuds, thus making it cool for him to listen to music casually again.

The real problem with listening to music is taste. Music is very personal, and what sounds like the next great thing to one person sounds like crap to another. So it's funny to hear him say that he likes this or that musician because it doesn't sound like crap.

Jason wrote another entry about two deaf people he saw on a plane. These two made him wonder what was being said as they signed to each other, his only clues being their facial reactions. He pondered about what they think when they "hear" music, and so forth. Reasonable thoughts to have, but I have this bias that musicians aren't, well, smart enough to have these thoughts, especially pop musicians. An unfair stereotype, I know. Some of the brightest people I know are musicians or have strong musical background.

After reading a few of Mraz's blog entries and being suitably impressed by his insights, I headed over to Amazon to listen to a few clips. O. M. G. I would like to say it's good, but well...

It reminds me of a recommendation I got from a friend who's quite a bit younger than me. I asked if he could recommend someone good I could listen to, and he said, yes indeed, he did have a recommendation. I should listen to Michael Tolcher. He's really good. (His sister has some relation to Tolcher, but I'm not sure what).

So I bought the CD, even though I heard a few snippets on Amazon and felt, for sure, that this wasn't the kind of music I wanted to listen to. Still, I wanted to give Tolcher a chance.

I found, initially, I really couldn't stand Tolcher. He's very much like listening to some boy band (except it's just him). Such singers write catchy tunes that appeal to teenage girls. Really, it isn't what I normally listen to. Even so, over time, I've grown to grudgingly like the album. Mraz basically sounds like him.

There was a trend, sometime in the 90s or so, for white singers to sound more black, and I don't mean in the rap, Eminem sort of way, but in the Mariah Carey style. White singers like, say, Justin Timberlake (and I'm way out of my league here since I really don't listen to Timberlake), know that there's now a crossover sound that sounds like R&B and appeals to white teens.

Jason Mraz seems to fit that description. He sounds like a dozen other guys trying to do the same thing, fit in the same genre of singing. I know I'm not being at all fair in this. There are other genres of music I listen to that would probably sound all the same to people unaware of the songs. I ought to give Mraz a chance, and yet, it's my own time, my own money, and not like trying to give someone who has a different cultural or socioeconmic background a chance. Still, now that I write this, I may get a CD, just to see.

The reason I'm likely to give Mraz a chance with his album, honestly, is because of his blog, and that's an odd thing to say. After all, just because, say, Joel Spolsky writes entertaining pieces, doesn't mean I want to hear him sing. On the other hand, singing is Mraz's job. And coding is Spolsky's job, so I might give his software more of a chance because of the blog. It makes no sense to correlate two such disparate things, but I do. Right now, alas, I think Mraz's music sounds like crap.

And that's just to make my earlier point. Crap, in music, is relative. There are people who like the new wave sounds of New Order and Pet Shop Boys, but others who find the techno thump-thump-thump repetitive and, well, gay. Now, I happen to like techno stuff, even though I happen to own very little. Which is my other point. Musical taste is personal. People just need to realize that.

In case you're curious, most of my music tastes are in the indie scene. I've just put an order for Jim Guthrie's album. His song and the one by Men of Old are my two favorites on Mews Too, a collection of songs by various singers that know Sufjan Stevens. Jim Guthrie's latest, Now More Than Ever, has been called the "folk Radiohead", which hopefully is better than it sounds. I hope to get it soon, and hope that the songs on the album are worthy of that moniker.

So why am I writing about Jason Mraz? The main reason is that I write far more in my blog than I read. I used to read blogs rather often, at a time where blogs, as a term, wasn't even coined. People have had online diaries as long as there's been a web. I followed one from 1997 or so. What's been recent is blog websites, like Blogger, like myspace, that allow you to write blog entries relatively simply. Before that, you had to roll your own.

As I read other people's blog, I realize that they are under similar constraints that I am. They have to write in a short period of time. I feel, though, that say, a Wil Wheaton, the nerdiest actor of any fame, still sits and edits so his entries don't sound like total gibberish. It is possible that he writes as fast as he thinks, and he thinks far more coherently than I do. I know my attention when it comes to blogging wanders. For example, I'm talking about Wil Wheaton, when this entry is, ostensibly, about Jason Mraz.

But the point is that when I read other people's blogs, they seem far more coherent than what I write. Usually, I fire out entries with barely an edit. I edit as I read the paragraph. I don't even check that my formatting is correct, which is too bad, because on the rare occasion when I do check it out (like yesterday), I see all sorts of problems.

Still, this equivalent of blitz chess in blog writing allows me to write a lot of stuff, and I'm hoping, much like blitz chess, that there's a sense I'm getting better at writing thoughts out. I just need to read more blogs.

As if I don't spend enough time on the Internet as it stands.

[As a note, I did go back to re-edit this, and now I feel I should do that more often. Even a quick second edit makes everything sound that much better. I find the cadence of what I write rather poor, and that you can easily lose the meaning--heck, I lose what I'm trying to say, without a few more sentences. Anyhoo, just letting the gentle reader know that this is one of those entries I've quickly revised]

Paying Attention

I've been awake for about an hour. When I got up, it was dark and I wasn't sure what time it was, only it wasn't yet morning. There's that moment between asleep and awake, when the mind is trying to figure out where it is, what's happened. That's where I was.

On Saturday afternoon, I had planned to go see cherry blossoms with Jay. Cherry blossoms are an annual ritual of spring in Washington, DC. Although I'm well into my 30s, growing up, I never much paid attention to things blossoming. This, I suspect, has little to do with my gender, even as women are somehow more associated with flowers than men, then my general inattetion to nature as a whole.

A few years ago, I was living with someone who was a landscape architecture major. He had this idea that he'd grow tulips in our house, with special lights, then sell it to folks on campus for Valentine's Day. I don't know how successful that was, but I do recall asking him about how long things stayed in bloom, and remarking it was awfully short.

Fifteen years of living in DC and I had never been to the cherry blossoms. Not once. Every time I'd think about it, it would pass, and eventually, so would the cherry blossoms. Until recently, I didn't go much into DC. Over ten years of living here, and I hardly ventured into DC.

Much of that was due to, at the time, an irrational fear of DC. DC is one of the more crime-ridden cities in the US. It shares the dubious distinction, with its sister city Baltimore, as having many murders. Add to the fact that when I first came to the area, I had notions about African Americans that have since changed. To understand that, you have to know that Asian Americans get picked on and many Asian first generation folks don't look too kindly on African Americans who tend to like a little provocation. Over time, I realize that these are primarily cultural differences. While Asians tend to be quiet and reserved, African Americans are generally not.

This is what you get when you're raised out in the suburbs. It creates a wholly unrealistic fear of different situations. Over time, I've learned that the touristy spots of most cities are fine, that most people that you see are off minding their own business, and not interested in harassing you, and that taking the time to walk around a city gets you familiar with it more easily.

Even so, it was nice to have someone who had actually gone to the cherry blossoms before, because I had no idea where it was even located. The web is one thing that's made things a lot easier for me. Where's the cherry blossoms? I'll Google it. And so I did. I knew there was one of several stops to go to, and the Smithsonian seemed best.

Once we arrived, we started heading towards the Washington Monument. When you get off at the Smithsonian exit, you arrive at the "mall", a very large rectangular area defined by buildings all round. One on end is the Capitol. On the other, the Washington Monument. Along the side, various buildings, including the Smithsonian museum.

As we walked to the mall, we headed left. It was hard, judging by the movement of the crowds, to tell where the blossoms were located. Once we were past the monument, we could see the cherry blossoms, surrounding the water, with the Jefferson Memorial on the far end.

Cherry blossoms are trees that bloom for a few weeks each year. They're impressive because their blooms are the palest pink. To see a ring of trees lining what's known as the Tidal Basin is to see a wreath of white. Look at the image link and you'll see the Jefferson Memorial. The circular lake-like thing is the tidal basin, and there's cherry blossoms all around.

I'd imagine that cherry blossoms would not fascinate many people. To be sure, there are probably many who wonder what the fuss is over a bunch of trees. That must have been my thought over all these years. However, plenty of people always show up, so much so, that it is extremely crowded.

I had Jay take a picture of me in a cherry blossom tree. Some kid was getting his picture taken so I thought I'd do the same. It turns ou the bark on cherry blossom trees are rather prickly sort, and hard to grab on, so I didn't get up nearly as high as I had wanted to. This brought a rush of memories of climbing a dogwood tree just outside of the apartment I grew up in, or the even taller pine tree beside it. I hadn't done that much tree climbing since then.

We circled around the entire tidal basin (it seems awkward for me to refer to it as that, since I am relying on Google maps to tell me what its name is), past the Jefferson Memorial which was having a small cherry blossom band thing sponsored by Target. I'd hoped there would be Japanese music, with kotos, but it sounded like blues.

As we past the Jefferson Memorial, we walked by the FDR Memorial. I had no idea FDR even had a memorial. It's a sprawling memorial, mostly walls, quotes on the walls, and some bas relief metal depicting the war. It felt more like walking in a zoo than walking past the traditional kinds of memorials.

We stopped by an FDR store where I bought some water, Jay got a tourist map to replace the one he had given some visiting friends to DC. It wasn't the cool laminated map that he once bought, but it was fine for now.

As we continued to walk around on this wind-whipped day, we passed by some structure dedicated to World War I. It was a relatively small structure, but Jay remarked that it was built during the Depression. Adjacent to it were people playing soccer. We had, walking past the Washington Monument earlier, seen people flying kites, players playing flag football.

I had thought the WWI structure was really the WWII Memorial, which I had been to a year before. It turns out that that memorial was close by. There was some high school band, replete with baton twirlers and flag spinners performing.

At this point, we thought we should head back. I had thought one or two hours of visiting would be enough to keep me happy, and we'd been there two hours. We wanted to walk back to the Smithsonian, but they closed the entrance off, telling us to take the next one over. It was mobbed.

Fortunately, Jay had his trusty tourist map that he just bought, and we headed to the L'Enfant Plaza metro. This turned out to be a decent idea. That metro is on the Green Line, as is Greenbelt, the metro stop we started a few hours earlier. Smithsonian is on the Orange and Blue Line. To get to the Green, we'd have to transfe r to the Red Line at Metro Station, then once again to the Green Line at Gallery Place/Chinatown.

By this time, it was close to 6 PM, and I wanted to get back to see if George Mason could work its magic once again against a team (Florida) that most people had thought was playing the best basketball of the remaining teams.

As we came back, I was weary, having walked all the way around the Tidal Basin, then jogged for some part as we tried to get on the Metro, then walked even more as we had to get to the L'Enfant Plaza Metro instead.

I came back and wanted to get something to eat, and went to Popeye's. It's greasy. It's spicy. It's a guilty pleasure. I brought the four piece chicken with diet coke (only they gave me Sprite, further reinforcing the idea that people who work at fast food restaurants seem to get about 1 in every 3 orders wrong--the failure rate seems abysmally high, mostly because the people who work there don't even bother to confirm the order, and mostly because they don't care--it's not as if they are flogged if they make a mistake, so the mistakes keep coming).

As I watched George Mason, I saw that Florida seemed to be doing a lot better. Mason couldn't hit 3's and found even shots from short range weren't falling in. They were down by as many as ten points in the first half, but closed the deficit to five points. They had been down by more to both UNC and UConn, so there was no reason to think they couldn't win in the second half. I was busily eating spicy Popeye's, more fried than chicken.

Second half rolls around and Lee Humphrey takes over the game. Who? Well, that's probably your reaction if you don't follow Florida basketball or any basketball. If you've paid attention to the George Mason hype machine, you're now familiar with their lineup of Tony Skinn, Lamar Butler, Jai Lewis, Folarin Campbell. Their starting five play the majority of minutes since they have almost no bench to speak of. Florida can go quite a bit deeper.

Humphrey is a Tennessee boy having been born in Maryville, which is maybe an hour away from where I grew up. Folks around there call it something like "Murr-ville", the "y" barely pronounced with a Tennessee southern drawl.

He had grown up a fan of Peyton Manning. Even though Papa Manning had his heroics at University of Mississippi ("Ole Miss") and the Manning family lives in New Orleans, Peyton made his fame at University of Tennessee. He played all four years, the first year mostly because of an injury to the quarterback and lead Tennessee to the SEC championship. Twice he was up for he Heisman. Twice he missed, the second year because they decided Charles Woodson was more deserving. Woodson was a defensive player who played both sides.

Tennessee won a national championship in a mostly unforgettable matchup with Florida State whose quarterback, Chris Weinke, was injured and so a rookie QB had to play. They won with Tee Martin. However, it's Peyton Manning, and his success at the NFL that people remember.

Humphrey grew up admiring Manning, and wouldn't you know it, the final four was being held in Indianapolis, right where the Colts, the team that Manning quarterbacks plays. Manning came out to support his man, Humphrey.

His man didn't disappoint. Right out of the gates, Humphrey knocked down three 3-pointers, stretching a lead from 5 points to 14 points. Florida would keep this healthy lead to the end of the game. In hindsight, the Patriots should have fouled Humphrey whenever he touched the ball. As hot as he was hitting three pointers, he's actually a horrid free throw shooter, barely above 50%, a shocking number from a guy who can bomb it in from long range. Humphrey hit 6 of 12, the whole team 12 of 25. Mason missed the first 9, hitting 2 late. Florida's plan was to make Mason work for their 3's, a strategy other teams had missed because they felt GMU's strength was inside.

And inside, Noah created havoc, altering shots, swatting away others. The magic carpet ride, as Larranaga had pointed out, had ended (this reminded me of my own blog entry).

I was disappointed at the result, and was starting to get tired from all the walking and all that chicken. I didn't even bother watching the second game, and when I saw it on my laptop a half hour later, UCLA was on top. When I woke up a few hours later, UCLA had won. One guy in our local pool had been trailing, but he had UCLA in the final, and that made him winner by one point.

It would be cool to tell you that I am writing this at our local coffeehouse, College Perk. Indeed, as I woke up, I wanted to get out some, head out to eat or drink. College Perk is just down the road. I remember visiting it within a week of its opening. I had known a former student, who lived with one of the folks that was a close friend of the person who started up College Perk (it seems to have changed ownership since then).

It was mostly empty when I arrived. I knew it was daylight savings. I had just lost an hour. College Perk isn't the typical coffeehouse. It doesn't attract the bohemian artist set. I think of a place like the Victrola in Seattle or maybe this coffee place in New Haven, when I think coffee house. It really does resemble a kind of rundown Central Perk, from Friends, which old couches, and books and magazines no one wants to read.

I had wanted beer, but they'd stopped serving alcohol. I ordered chili and coffee instead. Nice on an empty stomach at 4 in the morning.
A copy of the NY Times was sitting around. They had released tapes of 911 on 9/11. That's nearly five years after the fact. Of course, in hindsight, the advice they gave was all wrong.

Stay put. Someone is coming to help. Don't leave. They had no idea that the towers would actually collapse, and leaving was actually the best idea. This was perhaps one of those things that haunt those answering calls. They played some on the radio, and it's remarkable how calm both sides were. There's smoke outside, something's crashed into the building. People on the OnStar network have panicked more.

But I didn't bring my laptop with me on this nippy night in College Park, so I'm typing this back at the comfort of my own room.

I'm now going to take an about face to talk about the topic I was originally going to talk about. That's ETECH.

I had meant to blog a great deal about ETECH while I was there. However, shoddy wireless connection (due to everyone wanting to use wireless) and trying to pay attention to what was going on meant I did very little. It would take longer to blog about ETECH that ETECH would run.

To understand why I was at ETECH, I need to wind back a few months. My company had made an offer for any employees to attend No Fluff, Just Stuff. This is a traveling band of speakers that visit maybe 20 cities twice a year to update folks on the latest ongoings in Java. This appeals mostly to the web community. Topics like Hibernate and Spring are covered. However, Ajax was popular, and Ruby on Rails was similarly popular.

Speakers are selected based on their speaking ability. People who attend the conference rate the speakers. I met Jared Richardson. You could tell, from his speech, that he was a Southern boy. Turns out from North Carolina. He's a likeable guy, though being a newbie at No Fluff, I thought he mentioned his credentials a little too often, but then, maybe it's part of the deal to come out on talks--he needs to plug his company. This was the second of his two tryout gigs, and he said it was successful. He'd be able to stay on tour.

No Fluff is sort of the Lollapalooza of technical conferences. Its goal, by its very name, is to get you skills you can use in your daily job. Now I don't work for a place that does web development (and by that, I mean a site that has need to use J2EE or similar technologies, not just a pretty page with information).

The conference is worker friendly. You take half a day off on Friday, then the weekend off as well. You lose only half a day's work overall. Turnout is therefore a lot better than if you held it three regular workdays.

It turns out it was quite informative for me. I had been teaching for a few years before that, and wasn't even aware of this conference which has been held for a while. Even though I do very little of what this conference aims to do, it gave me insight into the industry, and was an eye-opener.

The king of the speakers is Dave Thomas. He's written two books on Ruby. One on Ruby itself. Another on Ruby on Rails. He's British. He doesn't run a burger joint. He's very entertaining, as well as educational. It's worth going to one of these things just to hear Dave talk. I went to all of his talks, which amounted to five talks (they have about 4 each day).

After this, I was reading Joel on Software where he said he had asked his crew which conference they wanted to go to. He'd pay for everything. They got to choose. They chose ETECH.

I pretty much signed up knowing nothing about ETECH nor its history, and was blissfully ignorant about it, even as I arrived in San Diego, the Saturday before. I hadn't even known that there was a theme to this year's conference, the attention economy.

I did, at the back of my mind, wonder if I should try to find Joel Spolsky. It's one of those things I debate with myself. On the one hand, why bother someone who's relatively famous (at least, in some circles). On the other, why be a coward?

I had signed up for two tutorials the first day. The first was given by two speakers, Jesse James Garrett (the guy who came up with the name "Ajax") and Jeffrey Veen. They had been working for a user experience company, but Veen had since switched to Google. The talk was about how to build applications for "Web 2.0", which they said was the evolution from web pages as hyperlinking entities, to applications that were more desktop in nature. They talked about how to design the entire architecture.

It was a good talk, which I found fine, even if some might have branded it fluff. In fact, you could almost call ETECH, No Stuff, Just Fluff. I was to discover that this was more of an ideas conference than a true tech conference.

I then sat in a Rails talk by the Rails guy himself, David Heinemeier-Hanson, or DHH for short. It's one thing to sit and watch Dave Thomas code in front of you. Thomas knows something about learning theory, and knows how to keep a crowd entertained. DHH speaks an odd form of English. That's the problem listening to someone who has a Scandanavian background. Their accent comes closest to Americans, and yet, there's something strange about it. DHH would throw in twists of phrases like "on the other leg" or complain that he used the word "leverage" ("I hate that word" he muttered after using it). It was disaster if you didn't know basic Rails, and enough of the audience didn't know it.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, attending ETECH is a bit like a psychologist attending a prestigious computer science conference. You know that there's perhaps some "famous" people there, but you don't know who. I knew of DHH, but had never heard of Jesse James Garrett (I keep expecting him to bring a six shooter with a name like that).

I knew this was more of an ideas conference when I heard Bruce Sterling give a talk. If there are two names that are famous from the cyberpunk era, which was a phase in science fiction from the late 80s and early 90s, it's William Gibson, then Bruce Sterling. (OK, there's Neal Stephenson too).

Orson Scott Card, who had a disdain for cyberpunk, since its worldview was relentlessly dystopian, admired Bruce Sterling, who wasn't nearly so dark as Gibson. Gibson's view of the SF universe contrasts greatly with, say, Asimov, who wants to do two things. First, as he freely admitted himself, he wants to be clear. He doesn't peddle in dense phrasing, obscure semiotics, nor subtle symbolism. He explains like a teacher. Second, Asimov loves a discussion with two smart folks that discuss the give and take of a certain topic. He also likes to deal with the big universe, the movers and the shakers.

Gibson is nearly the anti-Asimov. His languages is cool, shimmery, full of dense technobabble. Asimov explains all the details so you miss nothing. Gibson pretends that you know it all, as if he were talking about a cellphone or a microwave oven. He refers to the stimsim without telling you what it stands for, relying on your intelligence to figure out that it's a stimulator simulator. When you figure it out, you're even happier with your acumen because it rhymes. Gibson works in the seedy underbelly of SF near future, extrapolating the evil that companies do, people who buy and sell technology (Johnny Mnemonic is about a guy who has some valuable information wired to his brain).

Sterling's books, by contrast, always seemed to be lighter in fare. He wasn't so relentlessly dark. Card liked him because Sterling seemed to know something of the way the world worked now. He knew about internalizations, and could write stories that weren't so white. He could bring in nationalities all over the world, showing he had some idea of where America was heading.

Still, it's a bit odd hearing a science fiction writer like Sterling. Why does he come to ETECH? What does he know about technology? It turns out, a fair bit. He keeps up well enough to brandish the terms Web 2.0 and Ajax.

He stood up, dressed in a leather jacket, looking like the hippie brother a la Arrested Development of Roger Ebert. Long white hair, voice like Philip Seymour Hoffman doing Truman Capote (the Oscars were held the night before).

He wanted to talk about the Internet of Things. And this really summed up, for me, what the conference was really about. I don't mean the ostensible subject, i.e., the attention economy. No, I mean the giving of names to technological trends.

People in the know will tell you that the idea behind Ajax (asynchronous calls to the server, which send down modifications to the DOM) was nothing new. The ideas behind them had already existed. Yet, it took both a name and Google's application of that idea to make it really take off. People had given it other names (like dynamic HTML, I think), but none stuck like Ajax.

That, in a nutshell, is the power of naming things. Sterling went through a list of names other folks had come up with, in particular, Everywear, at least, that's what I think he called it. This was the ubiquity of objects available on the Internet.

He talked a bit about artificial intelligence and how are obsession with AI has made it difficult to make advances. Google, he felt certain, would have come along much earlier if we thought of computers as they truly are. Things that computer, tag, sort, search. It's mundane, but it's what they do well.

He extrapolated the idea of Google finding information on the Internet to being able to tag everything. He imagined objects being created in a computer, then having form, then dying, all the while trackable, queryable by us. He could type in a query asking where his stuff was, and it would tell him.

He wanted to give such objects a name, and he decided to call these things spimes which he said were a combination of space and time. At any point, he could query about spimes and get an answer. (My friend said "they call those things that take up space and time 'objects'"). Point is, he wanted to give them a name, and in so doing, have something to refer to them.

As he gave this talk, all I could think about what, "where does this guy think up all of this stuff?". But then, that's his job. He's a science fiction writer, and not only a writer of the distant future, but of the speculative near future. For him to write about it, he needs to have some idea of where we are now, and imagine where we'll be in fifty years. He just happens to be very good at what he does.

I'd see Bruce Sterling walking around, but I wouldn't approach him. I wouldn't even know what to say to him. ("Man, I loved your book, Neuromancer?" Of course, that'd be me acting like an ass, since Gibson wrote that, and I'm sure he'd say something far too literary cool and I'd slink to my corner.) I'd see him hang out at breakfast eating with, well, whoever didn't feel all that nervous eating with Bruce Sterling.

Tim O'Reilly, who was hosting the conference, seems a bit like the Weinstein brothers. The Weinsteins used to head up Miramax. Their biggest coup was convincing the voting academy to select Shakespeare In Love over Saving Private Ryan. Harvey Weinstein, like many an executive, believes that since he has money and controls the company, that his creative input is more worthwhile than most. He slammed Rosie O'Donnell for telling him that maybe he should let M. Night Shymalayan figure out his own artistic ideas without his input.

For some reason, O'Reilly reminds me of that. Here's a guy that publishes books. Now, what he did was rather remarkable. He publishes books on topics few people would ever write on (he had a whole series on X Windows, back in the day) and has turned this into an empire of tech books. They were the pre-dummies books, and by all accounts are anti-dummies books. They vary a bit in quality, but have always been aimed to people who weren't so afraid of technology, and wanted a thorough accurate tome.

Every since the blogosphere grew (I was at modestly bad talk with 7 people discussing graphs about the Internet, one guy in particular, who had 2 minutes to speak, felt to urgency to complete his talk, which was tedious, then followed up by a mindless, but fun, talk about how a guy tracks the volume of email he receives, and how he thinks of vacationing in between schmoozing with clients. Anyway, one of the talk was a visual/aural growth of blogs in he blogosphere, which was cool, if again, mostly useless), Tim O'Reilly has joined the fray, and realized it's often more fun talking about technological trends and naming it, then actually making the technology possible. I'm sure Tim O'Reilly is a perfectly nice guy, but this is how an engineer like me thinks. Just another idea guy. Sterling, to be fair, does the same kind of thing, but he seems so much cooler presenting his ideas.

Now, let me quickly roll into day 2 of ETECH, so I can toss in the word TechSmith, so Betsy Weber can read this entry, buried many paragraphs beyond the cherry blossoms, after George Mason, and so forth.

The two key days of ETECH, which were Tuesday and Wednesday, started off with a bunch of keynotes in the morning, followed by lunch, followed by sessions in the afternoon. I have to say that most of the sessions weren't all that good, and random picking of sessions to attend worked out pretty well (often, I picked the one I could get a seat in).

Tuesday's lunch was held outside, and I thought to myself, I wonder whether I'll see Joel Spolsky. I thought it was rather possible he'd be eating off on his own somewhere. Turned out not to be the case. At his table sat maybe 6 other people. Three folks from TechSmith. Betsy, a guy that I was later to find out was the founder of TechSmith, and two others employees. They were talking about seeing the Arizona, or some ship of importance in the last war, and skipping out on some of the afternoon talks (which included Joel and Betsy, incidentally). The other three guys were Brett, Babak, and Ben, all working at Fog Creek. I had been hoping to see the Aardvark guys, but I knew only one had already joined the company, and was unsure of the rest.

They were talking about the exceedingly small numbers of computer science majors at Duke, where Ben had just graduated. Somehow the discussion went to math, and Joel was saying how he found math much easier as he went along. Math seemed so much tougher in the intro level. I was thinking that math can get real tough real fast, and that he just hadn't hit it yet. A friend said there was a Peter Principle of math. Eventually, you rise to your level of math incompetency (the Peter Principle is this rather 70s idea, saying that each person rose to his level of incompetency in a company) where the math is too hard to follow. I think Joel's bf is a math type who explains math to him. Brett (or someone) speculated that maybe he was a good teacher (my thought as well), but Joel dismissed that idea.

I'll say what I blogged about a few weeks ago. It's a lot of fun to hang out with the Fog Creekers since they talk about more than just video games (my lunch conversations often devolve to that, which is made worse since I don't play).

Anyway, since I've blogged about Fog Creek a bunch, I want to get back to other ETECH stuff I found interesting.

Perhaps the best talk I went to was by this woman on games. Her name was Amy Jo Kim (Kim? is she married to someone Korean?) of Shufflebrain. She wanted to show how websites use features of games to keep people coming back. Now, women, stereotypically, don't play video games. However, I'm told that MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) are often half-women. To her credit, she pointed out games such as WoW (Worlds of Warcraft) and Japanese games. Right now, there are popular games in Japan called "brain games" which are supposed to reduce your brain's age (that's, in theory, a good thing). The Japanese are into all sorts of interesting games that are educational in nature (how to sing, how to cook).

What fascinated me was how these ideas applied to websites like Ebay and the hideously ugly myspace.com. By allowing people to rate items and gain status, people come back. Ebay congratulates you when you sell your first item. Heck, some people come back because of the most trivial of things. Joel said he goes to Reddit because he wants to see what the Reddit alien is up to, even if that has absolutely zero to do with a website.

I attended a talk about RFIDs, which one of my housemates talks about a lot. This is radio frequency IDs. This was not a well-attended talk, but was interesting anyway. People talk about going to grocery stores buying items with RFIDs, going through a checkout line that automatically scans everything and charges you. No more lines!

Except RFID technology isn't there yet, and yet they want to put this in new passports. It's been a minor disaster for those using RFIDs for people visiting the country for short periods of time.

I don't think I attended one good, conventional tech talk. Well, the Web 2.0 tutorial by Garrett and Veen was pretty good, even if it was fairly general.

What I should comment on is something that O'Reilly really should give a conference on, but won't, because it's far from sexy. That's conference presentation. First, it's a complete pain to have to pick one of four talks to attend, when you barely have an idea what each is about. I attended a talk on bit literacy which had a huge walkout when people discovered it was on a topic they simply didn't care for (managing email volume).

Then, speakers used variations on Powerpoint, which mostly sucks. Then, wireless Internet was flaky at best, since practically everyone decided they didn't want to pay full attention. (In fact, one of the more interesting keynotes was given by Linda Stone, who coined the term "continuous partial attention" about people who are always paying some attention to, say, their email, their cell-phones, so that they never pay full atttention to you. This was very astute, since half her audience was off doing something else, even as she spoke. The irony of the attention economy is that the average person has decided that, whenever something is boring, which is nearly always, they can do something else).

I heard some talks about attempting to commodotize attention. I think there was something about things like attention stocks, as well as tracking what you keep attention on, and how you might use that information.

I was surprised at the number of talks pushing products of one sort or another. The coolest product that's available was some APIs for using some next generation Flash by Adobe. Yahoo was also providing some APIs as well. But there was Foldera and Zimbra, both pushing next-gen Outlook tools. There's Microsoft talking about next-gen cut-n-paste. There's EVDB (events database) and Plum (forgot what they do). There's this guy who was talking about patterns in discussion groups (comparing/contrasting Slashdot with Buffy fans discussion page).

If I had to sum it up, this was an ideas and products conference. As an engineer, I'd probably be happy with stuff I could use, but I think it's good to be exposed to ideas too, even if the conference seems to be all about trying to come up with the next great idea, rather than deal with some mundane issues that need someone to care (such as, how best to run conferences).

I'm curious to see how the conferences themselves will evolve. At ETECH, many people had laptops, and were tethered to wall outlets like some umbilical cord. Wireless connectivity was a key problem throughout. But the conference more or less ran like a conference. You met people in the hallways, and really, there were far too many people to really meet adequately. The reason I talked to folks from TechSmith and Fog Creek was to focus on a few people, rather than randomly talk to many.

(In addition to them, I talked to a guy who teaches distance learning in Alaska, a guy who is getting transcriptions of Supreme Court hearings on a website, Tom Nguyen, a techie from Reuters, some guy from Yahoo who happens to read memorandum, a website started by a former Maryland grad student I know, a guy from England who works on user interaction for companies, such as banks, a guy who was a teacher, but then went on to start his own web business, a guy who was from Charlotte who did some kind of network admin stuff, that I sat by during the first evening's keynote--I almost forgot about that, even though we talked about two hours that first evening. There was some guy in the Microsoft booth who had been at Microsoft for 12 years! He had been working as a high school student. Another guy, who was either a teacher or prof at UCSD showed up with one of his students, who he had helped get a job at EVDB, the events database that made an announcement at ETECH. This guy vaguely reminded me of someone I knew teaching at Maryland. He was planning on interviewing for a position at Microsoft, and wanted some advice.).

I find it's good to talk to people a second time, if possible, at a conference.

I only had a taste of what was going on at this conference. There are people knee-deep in this. Gabe, the guy who started Memeorandum (and told me that he was starting a new site, which he did, called "WeSmirch" which uses his blogging aggegration software to track Hollywood gossip--it's hard to tell how serious he takes it), quit his job at Intel and now travels the blogging circuit, where he ends up on panels with guys like Dave Sifry (who gave a shout out to Gabe in his talk), the guy who started Technorati.

Half these names I was unaware of when I went to ETECH, and to be fair, there may be a huge number of other folks I have no idea about that was milling about. I sat at a table with this guy at breakfast who said this was his third ETECH, though he hadn't been in about two years, since it had been getting a bit repetitive for his tastes. He pointed out some largish fellow who was basically shaved except for a spiral of hair that was cut out like some crop circle. That guy apparently had made some music website?

I've blogged on all these mundane details in the hope that, should I read it again sometime, I'll have some idea of what went on. I haven't even properly catalogued all the talks I went to.

Oh well, I'm in like hour 3 of writing, and I better stop. I admire your tenacity, if you've managed to get through all of this.