Miscellany

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Rode 39 miles today. It was cold, windy. Riding into the wind sucks. Two guys blew past me down by the lake. The trailing guy said, "Nice paint job."
Got up at 7 a.m. this morning, with a raging headache. I still have a headache. For about two minutes, I felt good though. I was turning the pedals at 95rpm, going about 20, 21 mph, a light breeze at my back.
Most the day, I alternated between lying on my sofa watching the most awesome Cowboy Bebop and reading the "perfect for when you have a raging headache" fiction of Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, perhaps his most accomplished novel).
During one delusional moment, when I passed out cold, I dreamt of the first computer we had in our family, the amazingly cool Osborne 1. It had a monitor the size of a postcard, a
monochrome monitor with green text. I used to write my papers on it, using Wordstar. To this day, I remember that ^K-S was the
command for save. ^K-P was print. Or was it ^Q-S and ^Q-P? Maybe I don't remember after all. We had this daisywheel printer that made my papers looked hand-typed, far more aesthetically pleasing than the crappy dot-matrix printer output of my classmates. Of course, the Osborne didn't allow me to play the educational computer game Oregon Trail. For that you had to be fortunate enough to get a pass to the computer lab from your teacher.
Good news: Cubs first round pick from last year, pitcher Mark Prior of USC, is going to be very good. In a few years, the Cubs are going to very good. David Kelton, Luis Montanez, Bobby Hill, and Hee Seop Choi in the infield. Corey Patteron, Sammy Sosa, and either Roosevelt Brown or Nic Jackson in the outfield. Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, Juan Cruz, Ben Christensen, and maybe Carlos Zambrano in the rotation. Kyle Farnsworth and Scott Chiasson in the bullpen. Who knows who behind the plate--there are very few good catchers.
Bad news: Cubs have called up Jeff Shaw to ask him to replace an injured Tom Gordon. Jeff Shaw is overrated.
I love music by Philip Glass. When I'm working at the computer, I fire up this very cool interface created by IBM, the Glass Engine, and pick random clips from his long discography.
Remember Wil Wheaton from Stand by Me? Funny weblog.
William Shatner was all the buzz on weblogs this week because, well, he created his own weblog. Read this excerpt by Captain Kirk about his recent visit to Seattle for, what else, a Trek convention:
"I had a wonderful experience in Seattle a week ago. Lisabeth and I traveled there for a convention, and took the opportunity
before I went on-stage to tour around a bit. We ended up in Pike

The common cold

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The first sign that you've caught a cold is a slight tickling in the throat. I think I've caught a cold.
In a strange case of convergence (or are cases of convergence by definition normal?) my copy of The New Yorker arrived today with an article about the mysterious common cold. Very interesting stuff.
Among the facts I'm sure to memorize and use at the next cocktail party I attend: "An American observational study of an audience later found, in ordinary circumstances, one in three adults picks his nose every hour."
What have doctors learned about curing the common cold?
Take ibuprofen and an older antihistamine. The ibuprofen works on the cough, the antihistamine reduces stuffy and runny noses.
Zinc? Just tastes bad. Antibiotics? Useless. Vitamin C? Doesn't do much, though high doses may have a minor effect, but an antihistamine is better. Echinacea? No conclusive testing. Drinking lots of fluids? No proven effect.
Colds are transmitted through touch, primarily through the hands. So washing your hands often helps, but when cold viruses are on every surface, even doctors admit it's pretty hopeless. Yet even this is not conclusive. Some studies have shown that perhaps some other mechanism is responsible.
Oddly, the cold has nothing to do with temperature. Being physically cold does not increase your chances of catching a cold. This has been studied again and again. Yet colds are seasonal. No matter what part of the world and what the temperature patterns are, cold season tends to run from early fall through mid spring, with spikes at the beginning and end.
All I know is this. I'm going to be miserable for the next week or so.

Not a girl, not yet an American?

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Oops. The Seattle Times is apologizing to readers after having published a headling that read "American outshines Kwan, Slutskaya in skating surprise". No need to explain the types of angry letters the Times received, and the general outcry from the Asian American community. Michelle Kwan is an American. I am an American. That there is still any doubt about the issue is disturbing.
When I was young, my mom used to ask me which side I'd fight on if America went to war with China. I wasn't sure back then. But these days, especially upon reflection after Sept. 11, I can say unequivocally that I consider myself an American. The term Asian-American has always been a strange one to me. I prefer to just say American. Better to have the term American be a broad one, to reflect the unique melting pot that is our country's population, than to have that term reflect a narrow segment of our population (white Anglo-Saxons) and to come up with hyphenated terms to refer to all the other groups in this country.
I'm confident my generation will be one which comes to accept this as the conventional opinion. But articles like this remind me that my friends may be the wrong group to use as a proxy for the population at large. Occasionally I still hear a racist comment tossed my way, and in a way it's worse than the more frequent and vicious barbs heard on the playground in grade school. The difference is that people my age can't fall back on the excuse of childhood ignorance. They're just plain ignorant.
Thanks to Ken, who is in St. Louis, for pointing this article out to me. I'm the one who lives here in Seattle, but I never read the Times. Local newspapers are, for the most part, a waste of time. This story gives me little reason to believe otherwise.
This, of course, is an easy topic. Affirmative action is tougher, but plenty of misconceptions exist about that topic as well. One of these days I want to discuss it, particularly as my recent reading from Guns, Germs, and Steel has influenced my thought on why affirmative action is a good thing if defined properly.

My new website mailing list

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I just created a new mailing list for my weblog and my website. Subscribe and you'll receive an e-mail each time I publish a new weblog entry. I'll also post to the mailing list anytime I make a significant update or addition to the website.
Many people mention that they are somewhat sheepish to admit they occasionally visit my website. So I've made the subscriber list private. No one will know you're a subscriber.
When I first started visiting other people's websites I had the same feeling of being some type of voyeur. It felt like an illicit activity, or at least one that felt loserly, similar to being one of those chat room junkies in the early days of the Internet. But the fact is, my website is made public because it's intended for public consumption, and it's done more good than bad for me in keeping in touch with lots of people I know but couldn't otherwise update in such a detailed way.
Yes, it's true that some of you (as I've been reminded of over and over again) find out more about day to day events in my life from my weblog than you do from speaking with me. But overall it's a net positive: without my website most of you just wouldn't know what's going on in my life because I'm really busy at work and don't have as much time as I once did to socialize or gab on the phone. Anyway, guys don't gab on the phone. I'm working on it. One of my goals this year is more work/personal life balance.
Until I get there, I enjoy hearing from people who visit my website. Drop me a line, or sign my guestbook, or give me a call. Whoever you are, I probably miss you.

Edge of chaos

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Emergence is a fascinating idea I've recently discovered. It's not a new idea from what I've read. Emergence is the idea that complex and seemingly sophisticated objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions between simple and relatively dumb actors or units. It's closely related to theories around chaos and complexity. Like the theories around memes, emergence is an idea I'd like to explore through further reading.
This active essay on emergence is one of the more clever and fun pieces of interactive content on the web. Rather than presenting emergence in a long text, this essay uses a clever applet to demonstrate some of the basic principles of emergence.
An example of emergence? As noted in the book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, the global and seemingly organized intelligence of ant colonies arises not from central control but the interaction of many dumb individual ants, operating autonomously. The path that an ant trail takes from a food source to home base is almost without exception the shortest distance between those two points, yet no single ant is holding a bullhorn or flying overhead to coordinate their movements. Other examples of emergence include the patterns of life and traffic that emerge in cities (most famously modeled by the incredible computer game SimCity) and even the sophisticated recommendations engines of Amazon.com.
More on emergence in the future--I want to study the idea because I'm curious about what it can teach me about optimizing organizational design--but one of the principles that jumps out at me immediately is the idea of the edge of chaos. It's the simple yet powerful idea that designed sloppiness or structured chaos is a positive thing. That a somewhat messy desk at work is the sign of a productive worker. That to improve something like an organization one must push it towards the frontier of chaos. Not over, but as close to the edge as possible. Why are command-and-control models of management not effective? Why do reward systems like stock option plans fail to incent the best behavior in employees, despite all the talk of making every employee an owner?
It's encouraging because I have a hard time keeping my room or even my desk at work perfectly neat, and I've realized that it might not be such a bad thing. If they were always perfectly neat, I wouldn't be nearly as productive as I am. This is probably an abuse of emergence, but recently at work my life has been chaotic and complex, and I'm hopeful that that's a good thing, not a bad thing. It feels right--I've always known that I'm heading the right direction in life when everything has felt a little out of control, a little too hectic.

Rach 3

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Yesterday night, went to the symphony with Bean and heard Yefim Bronfman play the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #3 with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. The Rach Three, as its known, was made famous to the public at large in the movie Shine, in which a young David Helfgott goes crazy under the pressure of an oppressive father and his attempt to master this insanely difficult piano concerto. The Rach 3 is to piano concertos what Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto is to violin concertos--the most famously difficult major concerto for each instrument. Only virtuosos need apply. The first few violinists who attempted to play the Tchaikovsky actually found it too difficult.
I love Rachmaninoff's piano concertos. They're grand, unabashedly romantic and lyrical, which is also the reason many dislike them. Actually, his second piano concerto is more lyrical than the third--it just doesn't have a movie about it to back it up. But most fans of classical piano know and love it.
As I watched Bronfman sweat as his fingers pounded the keyboard of the Steinway grand, the music conveyed much of what I felt sitting there in that seat at that moment. Work is supremely challenging right now, so I could sympathize with Bronfman trying to master all the notes while still conveying the emotional theme. Listen to it sometime and see how you feel--that's how I felt yesterday when I was sitting there.
The symphony also played the Shostakovich Symphony #5, which is the most famous of his fifteen symphonies. Program notes point out that the symphony was well-received by Stalin, who had put Shostakovich under a lot of heat for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for its criticism of the Communist government. Ironically, the fifth symphony was a blatant critique of Stalin's regime, but the dictator was too musically dense to notice it and appreciated its Russian pomp and circumstance. I hope if I ever ascend to a position of power that I'm bright enough to recognize satire in all forms.
You wouldn't think Seattle has a large Russian population, but every one seems to come out every year to hear whichever Russian orchestra visits Benaroya Hall. They love their native musicians, too. Always lots of standing ovations, too many to count, and the night concluded with two encores, movements from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.
It reminded me of a concert I attended in New York several years ago. I was in Manhattan on a business trip with Jason, and during my time off I looked up my friend Hanh, and with some free time I realized that Vladimir Spivakov was in town with Russian National Orchestra. That night the orchestra played the Shostakovich Symphony #5, and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Spivakov himself played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, and as an encore, he played this solo on the violin, a slow piece, unbelievably beautiful. To this day, I wonder what that piece was. Hanh wanted to know as well, but no one could place it.
If anyone knows, please let me know.

Aches, pains, but a little bit of luck

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The snow was insanely deep at Whistler. In fact, it was too deep. It was cold, but the snow was both dry and thick. Very difficult to turn, and when you fell, you just sank in about two feet. Very difficult to get up on a board when you try to push off with your arms and they just sink into the snow. The first few runs were frustrating. Also, despite the heavy snowfall, the main runs were icy, bumpy, and that meant a hard day on the knees. I was bounced around all day. But despite all that, and the sub zero temps, I had a fun day out there. Snowboarding is almost always fun for me now that I have a better feel for the sport.
The luck: I hiked up to Spanky's Ladder with Sang to try it out for the first time. A run named Spanky's Ladder is definitely intimidating, and looking down from the top was a gut check. Sang skiied ahead towards a supposed chute called Sapphire, and I strapped in and tried to follow. Halfway down the hill, the front strap on my right binding fell off, and I lost control and did a face plant. I was frozen and also buried in the snow, but more troubling, I couldn't find my strap. I couldn't see Sang, who was down below a ridge downhill. Uphill all I could see was deep snow. The strap had to have been eaten by the deep powder. If it was gone, I'd have to hike back up a hill in waist nearly waist deep snow, and I was not only tired but frozen.
But I didn't have many other options. I managed to unstrap, then I began taking one step after another, counting two seconds between each step to catch my breath, back up the hill, retracing my path. Miraculously, I found the strap about 15 feet up. But I looked at it and the screw had fallen out. How I would find a half-inch screw in all that snow was beyond me, but then I spotted a small dark spot a few feet away. It was the screw.
Another 10 minute hike down to Sang, and I managed to put the strap back on with my snowboard tool. The run down from there was particularly satisfying as I basked in the glow of my good fortune. If I hadn't found the strap and the screw, you'd be reading lots of !@#$%%*&'s right now.
I can barely lift my head, my neck is so sore. I couldn't do a single crunch if I tried, my stomach is so sore from trying to pick myself up out of the powder so many times. The last run of the day, I tried to tackle some ice hard moguls and I actually managed to carve a few in sequence. What fun!

The artistic peak

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I enjoy reading Salon because they don't pull any punches. Here's an article saying Stephen King is over the hill as a writer.
Most artists seem to hit some peak and then start to head downhill. Maybe King has hit his. When's the last time Coppola or Spielberg made a great film (hint: Apocalypse Now (1979) and Schindler's List (1993))? Hey, everybody's a critic. I haven't even generated anything of note, though some would argue my first short story in intro fiction writing was my peak and ever since it's been nothing but a series of mediocre business e-mails.
It's true, though. Most directors don't end their career with their best film, most authors' last books aren't their best.

Let it ...., Let it ...., Let it ....


At this moment, the Whistler Blackcomb homepage headline reads "75 cm (2.5 feet) in the last 24 hours". Heaven help us. Canada here I come.

Goodbye David, Lauri, and Thanks!

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It was David and Lauri's last day at Amazon today. Two of the smartest people I've ever met and worked with. They're perhaps the two people most responsible for what people know as the Amazon.com shopping experience, from the shopping cart process/order pipeline to the store design to the way you navigate. All of that. They were smart not just in the conventional business sense of being smart, but they were smart about the web and website design. In fact, they're probably two of the smartest people about e-commerce website design in the entire world. To top it all off, they're also just two of the genuine good guys in white hats.
We posted a single page on Amazon.com's website that will live forever to honor David's accomplishments, but really the tribute to both of them is the website itself. It will be strange walking into the office on Monday, knowing they aren't there.
One of Stanford's own

Stanford graduate Daniel Pearl was killed by his Pakistani kidnappers. The gruesome murder was videotaped, and the tape was sent to the U.S. as evidence. Here are two articles about him from the paper where he worked, The Wall Street Journal.
A Selection of Daniel Pearl's Work
Reporter Daniel Pearl Is Dead, Killed by His Captors in Pakistan
There isn't much I can add to the discussion. It's a very sad story as he leaves behind a pregnant wife. Strangely, The West Wing did an episode two weeks ago in which a reporter was kidnapped and killed, a tragic foreshadowing of this event.

Figure skating

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Are there any figure skating duos that aren't also couples off the ice? In what other sport are so many partners also lovers off the playing field? It must be because they have to practice so much together. Most couples I see who are doubles partners are at each other's throats.
Is there any sport more agonizing to watch than women's figure skating? Of all the winter sports, it's the one that I can't bear to miss and can't bear to watch. Maybe because I'm always waiting for someone to fall. Is there any other Olympic sport where the mistakes are so obvious and so frequent? In the long program it seems like the majority of skaters fall or mess up at least once on a jump. You don't see every other downhill skier wipe out or every other luger fall of the luge.
Maybe it's because the skaters all look like they're twelve, and it seems cruel to put such young girls under such pressure. Are figure skaters getting younger? The Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Nancy Kerrigan, Katarina Witt crowd--what happened to them? Or am I just getting older and everyone looks younger? I have to think that it is a sport for the young. You want to be young enough to not feel the pressure, and just old enough to have enough experience to know what you need to do.
The free skate competition was the highlight of the Winter Olympics tonight. Sarah Hughes was amazing and deserving of the gold. Poor Michelle--I think the pressure got to her, and it's a shame that someone who has been so good for so long couldn't add a gold medal to her accomplishments.
The rules for Olympic eligibility should be revised. Why are professionals playing in ice hockey and yet Tara and Kristi aren't here competing in figure skating? That's the only way they could have improved on this evening.

Apolo

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I watched Apolo win the gold after the Korean Kim was disqualified for blocking. After doing the slo-mo ReplayTV thing on it a few times, I think the disqualification was unjust. Apolo got the home field advantage there. It's a tough thing to say, because he's a Seattle native. And he made an awesome pass of 3 skaters to get into second. But Kim's block wasn't nearly as blatant as all the papers are reporting, and I think he had a right to be where he was. Apolo waited a bit too long to make his move, and Kim was skating a tight line to force Apolo to go outside for the pass.
Apolo sold it with his wild arm gesture.

Money

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I've been meaning to write an article about money management, because it's something I've been thinking about a lot, and because most people I know are at that point in life when they need to figure it out. There are a couple ways to go. You can hire a money manager and pay them money to manage your money, or you can try and pick stocks yourself. Both are popular approaches, and both are really bad ideas for just about everyone.
I spent a number of years out of undergrad picking and buying stocks. I was a big fan of The Motley Fool, I read just about every book on investing out there, from Benjamin Graham to Warren Buffett to Peter Lynch to Burton Malkiel. I built spreadsheet models in which I keyed in income statements and balance sheets off annual reports and 10-Ks and 10-Qs, listened to any available public conference calls, subscribed to the Investors Business Daily and The Wall Street Journal, etc. Most importantly, I used all that info to invest money in individual stocks.
And I did alright. Over the years, I've come out ahead. But I'm smart enough to recognize I wasn't necessarily all that smart. For the amount of time I put in, I earned a bit more than I might have if I'd put all my money in an S&P 500 stock index, but a lot of that resulted from my interest in and overinvestment in technology stocks, which were hot. And what a time suck! There's a small part of me that still thinks if I spent enough time, I could pick a few winners. But it would have to be my sole endeavor in life, and who wants to spend their days and nights picking stocks? Seriously, it was a sad hobby. Spending time trying to make more money--that's what bankers do, and I bet most of them have mid-life crises.
Yeah, but aren't bankers wealthy, you might ask? What's wrong with making a few bucks? I have nothing against wanting to take care of you and your own. There are ways to do it, and it doesn't require a lot of time or effort, and for 99% of the world it will make more of your money than almost any other strategy, including those which require a ton of your time. You don't have to hire a money manager, who would charge you thousands of dollars to do roughly the same thing.
This strategy is based on Modern Portfolio Theory, an idea which won a Nobel Prize. It recognizes that the bulk of your expected investment return is easily traced to a few very controllable factors. I've been using this strategy for a while now and it works great. I don't spend much time worrying about it every year. Picking individual stocks? I gave that up when I started working at Amazon, a job which more than fills my days. No money manager takes my money, which is great, because I have enough bills to pay.
All it takes is some basic understanding of asset allocation. I'll write more about it tomorrow, and I'll even list all the index funds and other financial instruments which I use to implement the strategy. If you don't believe me, I'll list the three or four investment books which back me up. They're the only ones you'll ever need to purchase on investing again. And someday, when you're retired and getting a tan on the beach while on a vacation that you paid for using my strategy, you'll think, "That was the only piece of good advice I ever got from that bum."
So check back in, and I'll try to summarize all you need to know in the next week or two. One of my goals this year is to try and make my website a bit more valuable to visitors, and this is phase one: make y'all lotsa money.
By the way, on the topic of economics, most baseball fans think a salary cap would be a good idea, especially since it seems to drive competitiveness in football. The folks at Baseball Prospectus point out why that's a fallacy. Smart guys over there, and they just published their latest Baseball Prospectus, something I buy every year.

More flavor?

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Supposedly, Wrigley gum modified Big Red in late 2000 to make its cinnamon flavor more intense and longer lasting. I haven't chewed any Wrigley gum in years. Can anyone confirm that? Come to think of it, I rarely chew gum anymore. I wonder why. Do kids still chew gum? Looking at myself, I'd think the chewing gum industry was shrinking in a big way. All the gums today seem to be sugar-free, teeth-cleansing, healthy gums. When I was young, I was all about the massive piece of gum with a liquid sugar gel center that would probably rot your teeth right off, or a giant pack of shredded Big League Chew that I carried in the back pocket of my baseball jersey.
One of my resolutions for 2002: give up sugar substitutes. No more diet soda. Those sugar substitutes are a bad idea. They give lab rats cancer, and I'm not a lab rat, but I'll ride my bike an extra ten minutes to shed the sugar from real soda.

The Dido demographic

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Humorous and popular weblog-linked article in The Guardian about who the Dido demographic is. I took the test and I guess I qualify with 14 out of 25 CDs.
I'm not in my 30's, but damn, if I'm listening to the same music that these thirty-somethings are listening to then I may have to start hanging out with some kids. I have two more years, damn it. Must...hang...on...to...cool.

Top search terms

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Last week, here are some search terms entered in two search engines that drove traffic to my site:
Altavista
3: naked boys
1: skywalker
1: encore patch windows xp
1: women wearing sexy shoes
1: +"vanilla sky" +soundtrack
1: +skinnydip1.jpg
1: stripping naked
1: adobe premiere 6 crack
1: +"lord of the rings" +blooper +car
Google
6: res://c:\winnt\system32\shdoclc.dll/preview.dlg
3: "halle berry" and "bootleg"
2: photos of dr. sleep movie= goran visnjic
2: follow+unicornio
2: shdoclc.dll/preview.dlg
2: netflix case study
2: a knight's tale movie poem
2: "brotherhood of the wolf" shot on hd
2: eugene wei
1: teaching english in nerja spain
What it tells me is AltaVista really is a crappier search engine than Google. Seriously. I have no idea how some of those search terms would lead to my site.
"women wearing sexy shoes"?!? "naked boys"?!? Seriously, I'm running the wrong kind of site. I sense a big business opportunity. I should run pop-up windows featuring Netflix ads or all those other silly ads that I close without even glancing at what it is I'm closing. The proliferation of pop-ups must be causing, in aggregate, a lot more mouse clicks across the world. Which means more carpal tunnel syndrome, more health insurance claims...the costs of pop-ups is larger than we think.

Burt Reynolds is God

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I read this on IMDb:
Burt Reynolds is gearing up to play God on TV. The movie veteran has been called in to help boost the ratings on spooky sci-fi show The X-Files .
Well, that show has gone to crap anyway, might as well go for broke. I still believe that the most frightening thing in Deliverance may not have been those rapist back-country hill billies but Burt Reynolds in that black rubber vest. It's one look that might truly never become fashionable, ever. To think he used to be a sex symbol.
But he was great in Boogie Nights, playing a porn director. Figures.