Musings, on motion

Corporate Jingle Mail

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:52:14 GMT

Morgan Stanley has decided to walk away from 5 office buildings in San Francisco they bought 2 years ago, in the first big case of corporate "Jingle Mail". Their spokesperson says this is not a default or foreclosure, they're just returning the buildings to get out of their [mortgage].

This has led to some discussion on the morality of a homeowner walking away from an underwater home. People are acting irrationally and not in their best interests by continuing to pay mortgage on property that is worth significantly less than they owe, partly because of unrealistic fears about what would happen if they just walked away.

Not being a homeowner I am certainly an uninformed commentator, but I'm enjoying the discussion here:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/12/strategic-defaults-is-it-conditioning-morality-or-naivete/

While simple laziness is surely a big reason why most homeowners will continue to pay $3,500 a month (if they can) for a house that is worth $200,000 less than what they owe instead of sending the keys back to the bank and renting a house down the street for about half the monthly payment, there is clearly a very big moral issue here, one that continues to surprise me every time I run across it.

What do you think? If you bought something really expensive with mostly borrowed money, and the only real consequence to giving it back was not being able to live there anymore, could you just mail the keys to the bank and walk away?

Sunday Drive

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:45:12 GMT

J and I drove up into the Santa Cruz mountains 2 weekends ago to have breakfast at Alice's Restaurant , then wandered winding down the far side of the mountain to Bonny Doon. They make a Chateauneuf du pape clone called Cigare Volante that I really like, and they've opened their cellar back to 1999. I bought a few old bottles, and the very helpful sales person gave me a large cigar box to put them in- there's a grainy photo here if you want to see, or come by and share a bottle with me- I'm really curious about the 1999.

It was sunny and cool, and the tall maples on our street were shedding bright red leaves while an explosion of deciduous trees in the Santa Cruz mountains were all dressed up for Thanksgiving. The crisp air at the altitude of Alice's felt like New England football weather in September. We crested the mountain ridge and headed down the other side, and it got warmer with every switchback towards the beach. J will tell you it never really got warm, but I liked it.

We saw a variety of hawks and dogs and locals while heading towards Santa Cruz from the north, but we went no further than the north edge of town. Bonny Doon's new cellar and restaurant are in a recently renovated area with several winery stores, restaurants, a french bakery and the Santa Cruz Brewing Company. There's a hot dog vendor outside a bottle-it-yourself winery selling the most California hot dogs I've ever heard of: German Bratwurst with a Oaxacan Mole' sauce and Dubliner Irish cheddar grated over the top. Yummy. Yuppie, granted, but yummy.

We took the road to 17 past the Redwood State Park and Henflings lesbian biker bar; up the mountain and back down into Silicon Valley. It's sunnier here, but with a little less character. However, driving about with J, parking the car on a display of crunchy red maple leaves, and wandering to the back yard together to evict ivy leaves from the bougainvillea and tomato vines gives a lovely contented feeling of home.

Kurt Vonnegut writes home after being a P.O.W.

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:32:56 GMT

The images of the letters, typewritten and carbon-stained, make me want to write more letters:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/11/slaughterhouse-five.html

We spent several days, including Christmas, on that Limberg siding. On Christmas eve the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Muhlburg, South of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year's Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn't.

Droid- First impressions

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:58:55 GMT

I was at a football game last Sunday and dropped my Treo 650 (which I've had since Verizon kicked my favorite phone ever off their network, the bastards) and it split in half lengthwise. Not for the first time, and once I stuffed all the pieces back in it worked just fine, but I decided since there was finally a cool smartphone on Verizon again, I'd order the Droid. The next morning I woke up, checked the stock market from under the covers as is my habit, and then ordered the phone. Verizon made it easy by knocking $50 off the purchase price because I'm on their 'new every two' plan and due for a discount.

First impressions: Oh man, the screen is beautiful. I mean, really, it's gorgeous. It's a higher resolution than the iPhone but about the same size, and it's just damn pretty.

The Pros:

The integration with GPS, Google Maps and StreetView is excellent, as is the Google-hosted speech-to-text. I pushed a button, said "Navigate to Trinidad Drive" and it started taking me there using a well-designed satnav application. I said "Navigate to Pizza" and it gave me a list of all the nearby pizza joints. I said "Call Steve" and it gave me a list of Steves in my phone book and asked which one I wanted. The maps have traffic, satellite, street views (that you can spin 360 degrees around inside).

The internal compass, accelerometers and gps make for some very cool games and apps. I know, old hat for a lot of you, but my Treo didn't have anything of the sort.

The built in speaker, for speakerphone and mp3s, is awesome. Clear, beautiful sound. You can create ring-tones from MP3s on the phone without paying anybody for anything, and give every one of your contacts their own custom ringtone.

There is a facebook app that ported all my facebook contacts onto the phone, including their phone numbers and user pics if they have them in their profile.

There is a YouTube app that shows HD videos from youtube, and they look amazing.

There are apps for graphing calculators, GPS tracking, working with Word and Excel docs, interfacing with Wikipedia and movie and finance info, etc. etc. etc. It's kind of awesome.

The phone syncs to your G-Mail, and you can have it notify you when you get e-mail. It integrates with google calendar, and a bunch of other google things. This is both a pro and a con; sometimes you want software you use daily to -not- be beta software. On the other hand, they appear to be responsive to criticism, and there are already a number of fixes coming out.

Oh, and it's a phone. The call quality is very good to excellent, the earpiece is loud and clear, the speakerphone works really well, and I've had full signal everywhere so far. The Verizon unlimited data plus 450 minutes plus unlimited calling to verizon customers runs me about $68/mo (with a 15% government employee discount). I have yet to go over my 450 minutes in years, because a lot of my regular calls are after 9pm or to verizon customers.

You can also use voice to respond to instant messages, and it converts your sentences to text. Not always perfectly, but surprisingly well.

The Cons:

It's definitely a tinkerer's phone. My grandmother probably could have figured out an iPhone, it takes a little more work to figure out Android. Instead of a simple settings menu, you generally have a whole host of settings, and if you accidentally set something you're not happy with, it can take some futzing to figure out which menu will let you undo it. Or a google search, since enough people are using the operating system now that there's a lot of advice online on how to make it less annoying. And you can, absolutely, make it mostly brilliant, but you have to be willing to poke at it. There are applications for free that other people have written to fix a bunch of the worst features, like there being no central control to adjust all of your many, many volume settings.

There are a few things they forgot, although fortunately all the faults I've found are software faults, which means they'll get fixed or worked around. For example, you can only save e-mail attachments that the phone recognizes. Pictures, no problem. MP3's, sure. Documents- only if you have a program that can read them. .csv files? no chance. I bumped into one of the developers at a party last night and he said he'd open a bug report for me. The camera phone fails to focus properly every 24 1/2 days. Then it's fine for the next 24 1/2 days. Ask me privately if you want to know why, but that will get fixed in the December software update.

Porting my data over from my Palm was dodgy at best. You're supposed to export your contacts to a .vcf file, then upload that to google, which will then download them to your phone. I'd say it worked about 80%, but lost a bunch of phone numbers, and the pictures I had associated with several people got replaced with their Facebook icons. Weird. I'm currently writing a program that will transfer the memos into a well-regarded Android memo program, and once I finish that it'll be a whole lot easier to get those ported over.

Speaking of google- the phone talks to google for just about everything- speech to text, mapping, contacts, location tracking, who knows what else. You need the unlimited data plan, and you need to be OK with google's constant desire for information about you. I'm not saying I'm not, I'm just saying that's a facet of the phone.

And finally, with all the playing and tinkering and downloading apps and trying them out, the battery life has been ugly. It has been unplugged for 28 hours, and it's already down to only 20% battery left. The treo at the end of its life would last 2 days, at the beginning it would last 4 if I didn't turn on bluetooth. This phone should be charged every night, no question. There are tricks you can use to extend it, and there's a high-capacity battery that I might end up getting (and possibly carrying the spare battery, charged, with me when I travel). Plugging the phone into the dock switches it to a mode where it acts like a desk clock and photo frame (with a dim button so it's not too bright when you're sleeping), so at least they make it pleasant and useful while it's charging.

So yeah- beautiful hardware, beta software but getting better. If I minded solving my own problems on a device I paid $150 for I might be pissed off, but I do like tinkering, and the next software update will probably fix the worst of the issues. All in all, it's a very good fit for me. And so pretty ;)

Halloween!

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:10:45 GMT

Saturday, amid what must have been 120 trick-or-treaters, we turned the house into a tomb and filled it with dancing people. We encouraged folks to dress up, and some of the costumes were inspired: a pinata, a jackal-headed canopic jar, a snuggie, Sekhmut (the lioness goddess of wrath, who is sated by beer) kermit and ms. piggy, a modern egyptian (hard to explain, look at the pics), a couple of tomb raiders and many more. Sometime around 1AM there was a conga line to 80's dance music, led around the tomb by pumapreysize. I'm not sure whether the clock was accounting for daylight savings, but it said 4:15 before I saw my pillow.

To make the tomb walls, we painted rolls of paper with strong instant coffee, giving them a sort of parchment color. Danna, Cynthia, Jamie and I sketched large gods and goddesses and heiroglyphics on the walls, and then colored them with soft earth-tone pastels.

We changed out the lightbulbs for reds and blues and blacks, hung a mummy poster outside looking in, carved Eye of Horus pumpkins, strung fake spider webs on the bookshelves, and put dry ice in the punchbowl. All in all, I'm quite pleased with the effect. I'm also quite pleased with our artistic friends. Click on any of these images to see the whole album.

In the invitation, we asked people to come up with cocktails that fit the names "Tomb Raider" and "Lily of the Nile", for the assembled to try and vote on. We had 5 entrants, here are their recipes and results:

David's Creamy Concoction

4 parts cream
1 part chambord
1 part bourbon
1 part amaretto

Mike's Tomb Raider (winner of a special house prize, for artistry)

2 parts Qi Lapsang Souchong liquor
1 part St. George's Chipotle Vodka
1/2 part yellow Chartreuse
-shaken over ice and served, it's a -very- smoky, spicy concoction that was generally reviled but I found it inspired.

Chris's Lily (third place, with 13 points)

2 parts black seal rum
2 parts triple sec
1 part allspice dram
-This was very warm and autumn-y

Mike's Lily (second place, with 14 points)

1.5 oz Mandarin Orange vodka
1.5 oz Gran Marnier (orange cognac)
1.5 oz Velvet Falernum (which tastes like cloves and lime)
juice of a freshly squeezed orange
squeeze of lemon
-I liked this, and want to muck around with the proportions some

Marty's Brass Monkey (first place, with 15 points, amid allegations of ballot stuffing ;0)

Drink a 40 of malt liquor down to the top of the label, at which point it starts to get too warm to appreciate
Top it with cold orange juice.
-Marty refused to divulge his recipe until he won, then unveiled it with great pleasure

http://picasaweb.google.com/philomath/HauntLikeAnEgyptian#

Monster Mash

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:34:02 GMT

We spent a bunch of last night turning the living room into an egyptian tomb- photos after Halloween, I don't want to spoil the surprise :)

Need an SF Sushi Restaurant

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:57:10 GMT

Hey folks!

I realize San Francisco is not a very good town for Sushi, and Berkeley (yay Kirala) and the South Bay are tons better for the stuff, but I need a recommendation for a monday-night sushi place in the city. Any ideas? Bonus points for proximity to Bourbon and Branch (the Tenderloin)

I know there are some real sushi snobs reading... who do you recommend?

Apples, again

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:03:59 GMT

The highest branch of the apple tree out back decided it wanted to see what all the fuss was about down here. Fortunately it didn't damage any structures, just some of the smaller trees below it. My hatchet and I made short work of the branches. When they dry, they'll make a lovely firestarter. I rescued 40 or so russeted Crispin apples, and another 75-100 got pretty banged up on the way down. Got a good recipe for applesauce?

Being surrounded by fallen apples took me back to a tent in a field in Caumont, picking apples with deity_inc quasi-legally some years ago to raise enough money to get home. Of course, once we got paid at the end of the season, which was right around this time of year, we decided to keep traveling instead of buying plane tickets. The primary question of life then was "now what", asked after the current 'what' came to a definitive end. Postulate: The older you get the further ahead you look. Mid-life crises are caused when your look-ahead exceeds your life expectancy.

the Citrus Grove's* hot toddy

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:33:24 GMT

A shot and a half of whiskey in a beer stein
squeeze a whole lemon after it
a couple of tablespoons of farmer's market honey
fill the rest of the stein with boiling water
(and, I'm told, cloves are a good thing to throw in, too)

It clears nearly all the symptoms of whatever the hell is trying to take over my body right now.

We're off to a Henry the Vth costume party this weekend ( I kind of want to go as Falstaff, but I've been -losing- weight lately), and we're turning the house into an Egyptian tomb for Halloween. So far I'm thinking putting rolls of paper on the walls and drawing in the scenery, but I have the feeling J has lots of ideas. Anybody feel like being artistic this weekend or late next week?

randomly, has anybody seen "Cassandra's Dream?"

*Citrus Grove is one possible name for the house... what do you think?

For the space geeks out there

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:52:06 GMT

The Augustine Commission just released its report on the future of human spaceflight. I recognize a couple of names on the committee- Sally Ride, of course, but also Ed Crawley who was(is?) the head of MIT Aero/Astro and guided the development of the course I wrote there. He gave the first lecture, giving the background of why Aero/Astro kids needed to learn some computer science by describing the number of lines of code in an F-16, and the cost of the software relative to the cost of the bird.

I've just skimmed the report so far, and will read it in detail at lunch today, but it starts out with a full page photo of John F. Kennedy, and a quote from his Rice University address where he launched the Apollo program: We do not do these things because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Then the first paragraph gives you the thesis of the thing:

The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an
unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice
of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.
Space operations are among the most demanding and unforgiving
pursuits ever undertaken by humans. It really is
rocket science. Space operations become all the more difficult
when means do not match aspirations. Such is the
case today.

You can see the whole report linked off http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/home/index.html

Foodies Unite and head for Napa or Los Gatos

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:06:51 GMT

Bay Area foodies: The latest Michelin guide for the S.F. bay area is out:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/mbauer/detail?entry_id=49845

Michelin 3 stars:
French Laundry (of course)

Michelin 2 stars:
Coi in North Beach
Cyrus in Healdsburg
Manresa in Los Altos
Meadowood in St. Helena

(Yes, I'm only posting this because I won't get lunch for another half hour)

Engineering is done, science starts now

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:05:06 GMT

Several hundred people, including a whole lot of school kids, curled up in space blankets and on thermarests on the Ames parade ground last night, and after speeches by the Ames director and one of the Apollo astronauts, settled in to watch movies all night on a 2-story inflatable screen. ovrclokd joined me for the early program, and I went back at 1 to catch October Sky and the main event.

The LCROSS shepherd satellite broadcast its first full-resolution image of the south pole of the moon at 3:44 am (that's the picture above, shown on the giant screen), and one of the mission controllers got a little choked up while he was talking about it. This has been a ridiculously fast-paced mission for these guys, less than a year from the word "Go" to tonight. Most of the text I've seen from the team has used the word 'bittersweet' in describing the big 'thump' their project was designed to make.

Over the next 45 minutes, the moon in the camera got closer and closer. The scientists requested the satellite controllers to adjust the capture resolution of one or another of the 9 imaging instruments- there is limited bandwidth between it and us, and they were manually load-balancing the data stream so the most important instrument at any given time could send its highest quality and most frequent images.

At 10 minutes to impact, the commands from the scientists got a little more frantic and frequent as the target crater, a black sunless hole in the screen, got larger and larger. At 4 minutes to impact the rocket slammed into the crater ahead of the shepherd, but nobody saw the flash. We waited for the plume of ice and rock to clear the rim of the crater and shimmer in the sunlight but there was nothing to see in the visible spectrum. At 1 minute to impact one of the scientists tried to correct a camera setting, a little panic in her voice making it unclear if she meant N-10 or M-10, and the mission controller flubbed the command then corrected it as the scientist insisted 'November! November!' seconds before the visual camera blanched white and the system switched to infrared momentarily and then went black.

There was a moment of breath-held silence, and then the controller confirmed impact and people all around me started clapping.

Reports have been coming in all morning, in a disappointed tone. In the visible spectrum, nobody saw anything. It'll take another couple of hours to download data from the Polar Orbiter that was directly overhead both vehicles at the time, and none of the 18 telescopes (including apparently the Hubble Space Telescope) have reported their data yet. One engineer has hypothesized we hit a dry crater or a plate of rock and just didn't kick up that much stuff. The scientists, however, aren't saying anything until they get all the numbers back and start sifting through them to see what we saw.

Penultimate LCROSS post

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:18:11 GMT

Here's where to see the big boom near you. Museums and planetariums all across the country are hosting lock-ins and educational events tonight and tomorrow:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/impact/event_index.html

Here is NASA's recommended impact music list (this isn't all that inspired, but hey, good enough for government work):
http://apps.facebook.com/ilike/library?uid=1615397342&pid=1019176800&view=custom_playlist

The LCROSS spaceship has a twitter account, @LCROSS_NASA. I'm kind of hoping that right before 4:30am it sends out a Douglas Adams inspired tweet:

And wow! Hey! What's this thing coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding word like... ow... ound... round... ground! That's it! That's a good name - ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?

And finally, if you're more into dirigibles than spaceships, I like this article for its use of the term extremophile biota:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2009/09-130AR.html

How quickly it happens

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:51:38 GMT

I watched this surveillance video from the Swansea, UK police department, and was reminded of one of my martial arts instructors talking about random violence. The upshot was, stuff happens fast, keep your eyes open.

1:13 Two drunk teenagers decide to pick on a couple of transvestites on the street in Swansea, Wales
1:19 After a few words, one of the drunks punches one of the transvestites, unprovoked
1:21 The assaulted person's friend comes out of nowhere and lands solid punches to the head to both drunks
1:22 The assaulted person gets a punch in on the attacker as he's headed for the tarmac
1:25 The friend runs in and gets a couple of kicks in for good measure
1:28 The assaulted person apparently checks the attacker for consciousness, and says something pithy
1:36 Teen manages to get to his feet and stumble off

elapsed time from awareness to first punch: 6 seconds
elapsed time until it's over: 12 seconds
elapsed time until someone coming out of the shop wouldn't have known anything just happened: 23 seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSILex-2Uu8

As it turns out, the two transvestites were professional cage fighters who were out on the town. Oops.

(article on the whole incident at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1218651/Thugs-attack-men-dresses--turn-cage-fighters.html )

Impact Night!

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:57:07 GMT

You may remember me talking about the LCROSS 'slam me into the moon' mission a few months ago, here.

Well, the time has come, and the probe is slamming into the moon at 4:30AM west coast time, Friday morning. Ames is having an all-night outdoor party from 5:30pm Thursday night to 6:30am Friday morning with music, speakers, movies like October Sky and The Dish on a huge screen at one end of the parade grounds, and starting at 3:30am Friday morning, live footage of the collision including live video streams from several earth-based observatories.

Don't expect me to be terribly coherent on Friday, especially if we find enough water in the craters to support a hotel, spa, and sand-dune ski resort.

http://files.myopera.com/leirom/files/MoonInflatableHabitat.jpg
http://pic.stardusts.net/images/20051218_LunarBase.jpg

Impact night program:

Thursday, October 8

5:30p.m. - Venue opens to the public for parking and seating
7:00 p.m. – Evening program (no ticket required)
Flight to the Moon presentation
Additional LCROSS animations and videos
7:30 p.m. - Guest Speakers:
S. Pete Worden, NASA Ames Center Director
Charlie Duke, Apollo 16 Astronaut (Moonwalker)
Victoria P. Friedensen, Advanced Capabilities Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, NASA
9:00 p.m. – Intermission
9:30 p.m. - Movies begin (Tickets required):
9:30 p.m. Fly me to the Moon, G
11:00 p.m. The Dish, PG-13
12:50 a.m. October Sky, PG
2:45 a.m. Kenji Williams, violin and visual performance
3:30 a.m. - Pre-Impact Coverage on NASA-TV (no ticket required).
Spacecraft data
Expert commentary
4:30a.m. - Impact Coverage on NASA-TV:
Spacecraft data
Expert commentary
Video streams from Earth-based observatories
And more!
6:00 a.m. – Event ends. All personnel and property removed by 6:30 a.m.
What to bring:
Please dress warmly and bring your own blankets, chairs, and snacks.

What not to bring:
The following items are not allowed, as these will pose a viewing and/or safety hazard to the other guests: camping lanterns (neither fueled or battery powered), camping stoves, fuel-powered heaters, generators, or glass containers. Furthermore, Moffett Field is federal property. Guests may not bring animals, weapons, or illegal substances in their car or to the venue. All vehicles and persons are subject to inspection.

this morning

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:09:40 GMT

J: What's the weather going to be like today?
T: 74 degrees and clear
J: Ooh, that's so cold!
T: Actually, that's room temperature
J: A really cold room. </pout>

The sacrifice of government service

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:05:58 GMT

We had a talk yesterday wherein someone was mentioning the sacrifice of public service, the altruism of people who devote their careers to working for the government, etc. etc. so I was thinking about that when I went over to Google to meet Banz for lunch.

Today in the NASA cafeteria:
Soup: Clam Chowder $1.50/2.15
Bistro: Cooks Choice (I shudder to think) $5.85
Passport: Chicken Fried Steak, Mashed Potato & Buttery Corn (note: not buttered corn, buttery corn) $5.85
Grill: French Dip/Fries $5.60
Veggie: Stuffed Bell Peppers\Green Salad (I'm not sure what determines which way the slashes slant in their menu)

Here's what I remember from the cafeteria we visited at Google (one of many, and I can only remember about 1/4 of what was there):

Pozole (mexican pork and vegetable soup)
Venison Tartare
Roast Squab with honey and rosemary
Hunter's Paella (with boar sausage and other game meats)
Moroccan couscous
Afghani cucumber and heirloom tomato finger sandwiches with olive tapenade
Fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies
Champagne grapes and assorted fine cheeses
Meyers lemon and mint lemonade

All free for the taking. I swear, if these guys ever get over this internet fad and start launching rockets, I'm sending over a resume.

XKCD fun

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:22:10 GMT

J and I went to a book release party for the XKCD webcomic book. The event was held at the offices of Y Combinator, a local VC firm, and Anybots, a robotics company. (BTW Amy, the founder thinks he remembers reading your thesis, I should put you two in touch). The evening started with beer and munchies, and a contest to see who could extend a steel tape measure the farthest before it bent. (There should be photos of my pathetic efforts online somewhere, but I haven't found them yet)

We then got a talk by BreadPig and Room to Read, who were hosting the event to raise money for a school-building program. The event was MC'ed by a co-founder of Reddit who J says she would have jumped if she was single. I sort of see her point, he was quite funny and at ease in front of the crowd.

Randall (the author) used to be a NASA researcher in NoVA before abandoning science for (as he puts it) drawing stick figures having sex, professionally. He told some stories about webcomics and his association with reddit, and showed some sketches from his notebook that have not and will not make it to the webcomics (jokes about the result of famous authors' alzheimers may not have popular appeal). Then they had an auction of a lunch with Randall and a custom comic drawn by him.

J and I got near the front of the line for book signing, where she amused herself by pulling my badge (which is on a springloaded string and which I absent-mindedly left on) and letting it go like a pull-string for a speak-and-spell. I obliged by trying to come up with unique NASA-related phrases each time. I think I repeated "Let's go to the Moon!" a couple of times, and fell back on "Math is hard!" once, but the game amused most of the people standing around us.

We left with copies of the XKCD book, t-shirts, and posters and headed for dinner. When we drove back past the event after dinner (at 11pm) the booksigning was still underway!

Edit: found some photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leifnordberg/3946650834/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leifnordberg/3946668184/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/18575617@N03/sets/72157622315762275/

Interesting...

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:54:47 GMT

If your home mortgage is held by the consolidator MERS, and half of American mortgages are, your mortgage holder just lost legal standing to foreclose on you. At least in Kansas (so far): http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/09/mortgage-electronic-registration-systems-loses-legal-shield/

Like water in the desert

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 21:17:16 GMT

If you've got this information handy, I wonder if you could share a little data with me. How many CCF (hundreds of cubic feet) or gallons of water were you billed for last time you saw a bill?

I was sorting through some bills and realized that the city of Sunnyvale is charging me for 41 CCF over 60 days. I've never paid much attention to that number, it seems small enough, but then I did the math and unless my multiplication leaves much to be desired, that's over 30,000 gallons of water in 2 months, which divides out to more than 450 gallons a day.

That seems like a lot for just J and I, as much as I love my morning shower, and so I'm wondering if the sprinkler system has a leak or something. I can't find my water meter, or I'd go watch it to see if it moved while nothing in the house is on.

But I have no idea if this is a reasonable number. So if you've got it handy, how much water do you use? Over what period of time? In what kind of house?

I'll start:

41.00 CCF (30670 Gallons) in 64 days. Small 3-bedroom house with automatic garden sprinklers.

Inappropriate conduct

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:26:12 GMT

I made my first and only political contribution ever today, to the opponent of Joe Wilson in next year's midterm elections. Decorum and respect seem to be getting rarer, and maybe it would be fun if our joint congressional sessions looked more like the British: a bawdy raucous meeting where fistfights over issues are not unheard of. But that's not the system we have. Respect is still expected.

This will probably get me on all sorts of calling and mailing lists that I will have to go to great lengths to get myself off of. I expect to have to say no to fundraisers a great deal in the next 6 months because of this whim. This will annoy the crap out of me, and you will probably hear about it. Sorry. However:

I got a little worked up over parents, teachers, and entire districts(!) keeping their kids from hearing the president's speech to students on Tuesday. Encouraging ignorance of the president's thoughts is dangerous and misguided, whatever you think of them. Teaching children to close their ears to people you disagree with is wrong. Talking to them afterwards about making up their own minds and critical thinking would be preferred. I refer you to This cartoon

With that as the backdrop, listening to the "honorable gentleman" burst out with "You Lie" in open session during a presidential address loosened my wallet. It doesn't even matter that much to me that he appears to have been incorrect, according to section 246 of the bill in question, which says no benefit is eligible to illegal residents. His behavior was unbecoming to a representative. The 2-year old with a hand-sketched sign around his neck during the speech (Rep. Gohmert from Texas I believe) was bad enough.

Perhaps he feels that insurance of any sort shouldn't be available to illegal residents (the bill does not prevent them from buying their own insurance, as long as they pay in full without federal funds). That's a valid topic for debate, I would listen to an argument that illegals should just keep going to emergency rooms where they can get the most expensive taxpayer funded care possible, instead of paying into insurance and being part of the system. I would probably discard that argument as short-sighted and imbecilic, but I would listen. Regardless, the appropriate forum for his opinion was not heckling in the middle of the speech.

I don't ask much from my politicians. Stay out of my way, make sure the majority of the people around me are happy enough not to revolt and cause a severe disruption to my day, keep my house from being invaded. If you've got time after that, keep the trains running and ensure that whatever money you take from me is being spent efficiently, if not wisely.

Oh, and one more thing. Be an intelligent, open-minded representative in one of the most powerful governments in the world. Not a goddamn 2 year old.

More Mexico photos

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:50:54 GMT

One of our traveling companions, who has a really good eye, put up some of his photos of the weekend here . They definitely beat mine in terms of quality, but sadly even his considerable talents couldn't make the beach volleyball scene look like that one in Top Gun. Sigh.

Back from paradise

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:33:13 GMT

From Playa Escondita

J and I landed in Puerta Vallarta on Friday around 3. After a little bit of acclimatization (which mostly involved walking in circles and saying no to pushy vendors of questionable vacation packages until we found ATMs, smaller bills than the 200 pesos the machines give you, and the local bus) we jumped local transport to Sayulita.

The bus has lived a hard life- the transmission sounds like it gave up the ghost a couple of years ago and is only hanging on until the rust disintegrates and allows it to fall. The windshield is spidered with cracks, but come to think of it I'm not sure I saw an intact windshield in the state of Jalisco. There was no air conditioning, and it would be a few days before I got really accustomed to natural heat and humidity. You shall know us by our sweaty brows. We found seats next to a couple of leathery, skinny, shirtless and sunburned gringos who felt like talking. One was from Berkeley originally, the other was a brit and they've lived in Jalisco for six years. J asked one if he surfed and he answered "I'm British", as if that was all the information you needed for the negative. He was full of advice of what we should do, including boat trips to remote islands, where to shop and how to get around. All fine advice if we were staying a little longer, but our jewel of a destination had plenty of not much for us to do. Our guides got off the bouncing rocking sweltering bus at the edge of a nondescript village along the highway, and I can't remember if we ever caught their names.

Closer to Sayulita, the bus picked up at least 20 women and children heading to the 'city', and we packed in tightly so most everyone could get a seat. J practiced her spanish with a sun-browned old woman with tiny delicate hands while I watched the parts of Mexico the tourists don't usually see go by and read everything I could for signs of our location and progress. Incidentally, I highly recommend the book Into The Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea for a vivid story of Mexico and the borderlands with brilliant characters.

All the locals got off at the edge of Sayulita, a bumpy bouncy winding hour of jungle travel from Puerta Vallarta. At the end of the line, near the town center and taxi stand, the bus driver gave me detailed instructions on how to return. Didn't catch a word of it.

My photos start where we reached the resort, and show a good bit of the experience- open, airy lodging nestled in the tropical jungle just above a beautiful beach; well-planned architecture blending into the environment; gourmet food and plentiful pina coladas. Horses, surf, leisure time with old and new friends, and bright and brilliant Jalisco sun with no trace of the hurricane that had just gone by. I should describe more of it, but I should also see how my office weathered my absence, so have a look at the pictures. They tell plenty of the weekend's stories.

Photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/philomath/PlayaEscondita#

(as an aside, Sayulita is the town that made Dog the Bounty Hunter famous when he came here to catch Andrew Luster, the refugee felon and Max Factor heir. And then got arrested for bounty hunting which is illegal in Mexico.)

South bound

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:28:04 GMT

J and I are in the Phoenix airport (Hi Tim! Hi Chris!) waiting for a flight to Puerta Vallarta and then a bus to Sayulita. The surf forecast calls for 4 foot swells, with 90 degree air and 80 degree water. Typical of our separate vacation styles, I already had a nice nap on the plane from San Jose and J is 60 pages into a Russian novel.

Category 4 hurricane approaches my cabana

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:23:32 GMT

J and I helped two camps pack up their Burning Man trucks this weekend, and then sent them on their merry way. I'm going to miss the event, but taking a year off is -definitely- the right thing to do.

So you remember the last scene in Point Break, don't you? When Bodhi goes surfing on the biggest wave in 20 years? I think that's what my weekend is going to look like. Hurricane Jimena is currently abreast of the resort, and heading north, so we won't be in danger of not getting to the beach, but I bet the start of the weekend is going to be a little wet and the surf will be awesome!

If you zoom in a couple of steps on this map, and click the buttons to overlay clouds and radar, then click "animate", it shows the last few hours of activity near Sayulita:
http://www.weatherbonk.com/weather/summary.jsp?where=%5B7.01366792756663%2C33.65120829920497%2C-137.197265625%2C-73.740234375%5D%3A4&_id=&_className=weathermaps.weather.user.WeatherRequest