Vancouver and transitions

Last weekend, I traveled to the Great White North to perhaps the greatest city in the world, Vancouver, BC. It was a great trip with great people, including the one and only Phillip Fung of the Facebook, who again proved to me he's one of the greatest people on earth to hang out with. It was a great chance to catch up with some people from my 2005 Microsoft internship as well as my 2005 trip to Vancouver from Seattle.

I really love Seattle, the area is beautiful, the people are nice, and there is no state income tax. I've thought long and hard about moving up to Seattle, but the traffic, lack of job diversity, and winters are very troubling for me.

Vancouver is like taking a trip to Asia and Canada all rolled into one. I tried pig's ears, had dim-sum, and went to a jazz festival all in a single 24 hour period. The thing that surprised me was how spectacular the views were in Vancouver harbor. Vancouver is a great town with savory Asian flavor that makes it a great place to visit for a weekend.

I had lunch with a friend two days before she was scheduled to move to Seattle to work for the Man at Microsoft. It did remind me about how tricky the initial transition was between working and school. One of the greatest things about school was having so many friends around you all the time as well as the ability to skip out on responsibilities without guilt. I'm still glad to be out of school, but there were a lot of great things about school (cheap golf).

Until the next Vancouver getaway...

Its hard to have a firesale if you have nothing for sale

I read a funny article this morning in the Mercury News about the Giants and trades. I found this amusing because it assumed that the Giants had tons of players that other teams wanted and that they could pull off a bunch of trades before the deadline.

The article lists the following players as players who could potential move at the deadline: Ray Durham, Omar Vizquel, Rich Aurilia, Matt Morris, Pedro Feliz, Steve Kline, and Barry Bonds.

At the deadline, the most traded players are veterans who are in the last year of their contracts. Of that list, only Feliz, Kline, Vizquel, and Bonds are in the last year of their deals. The other major criteria is that the player be playing well enough that the buying team feels they are getting an upgrade. Out of this list, only Bonds is probably playing well enough to upgrade a team's DH/LF position. Feliz and Vizquel would definitely upgrade any contender's bench, but given how they have been playing lately, it would be tough to see them being a major upgrade for a team in contention. Kline could provide a bullpen with a needed LHP, but he is not an impact guy at this stage in his career. None of these guys would be a premier trade target that would bring back multiple near majors prospects or pre-arbitration players.

Barry is a different cat altogether because of his perceived club-house cancer like behavior, steroid allegations, and pursuit of the home run record. I think the combination of these factors along with his $15 million dollar salary make dealing him almost impossible.

I could see a team taking a chance on Morris. Given his string of good outings, sharp curveball, and relatively cheap salary for a pitcher of his ability (at about 10 mil per) a team might take a chance on him for a couple of years. Recall that in MLB, all contracts are guaranteed, so if you trade for Morris, you'll have to pay him his 20M if he is hurt or not. Also, if you are traded in the middle of a multi-year contract (such as Morris would be) the player can demand a trade after the end of the first year. Both of these factors are likely reasons why most traded players are in the end of their contracts. You don't want to run the risk of trading for a guy who ends up not having much left in his career and have to pay him for multiple years. That's why I cannot see Durham or Aurilia changing teams, they just aren't playing well enough to justify their huge multi-year contracts.

The guys I think are most likely to move are the players who are cheaper, at the end of their deals, and still are playing acceptably well. Players in this category would include Ryan Klesko and to a lesser extent Kline.

Teams that have effective fire sales (such as the Marlins several times) have to have many top of the line players (such as Nen, Sheffield, Brown, etc) to have a nice sale. I just don't see the Giants in that position right now, which is a lot of the reason they are in last place.

Metaphors for life and Warren Haynes

I grew up believing that baseball is a great metaphor for life. You fail more times than you succeed, the season is long, there are lots of tough decisions to make, and there are lots of great sayings about baseball that certainly apply to life (for example "Don't get beat with your second best pitch" or "When you are mad, don't show it out the field, hit something in the clubhouse", but probably not "Don't make the first or last out at third base").

Recently in my life, I've learned to play poker from Andrew. This even has helped convince me that perhaps poker is a much better metaphor for life. Like baseball, you win some and lose some and lose a lot more than you win. However, poker captures many more of life's subtleties. Sometimes you have to push back and raise. You have to make a lot of tough decisions with very limited information. Sometimes you have to push when you have nothing. In poker, you really have to read people and often play people more than hands. There are a lot of times in life when you have to put up with crap, but there are also a good number of times when you don't have to take it and can push back and get people to fold. In life and poker, being aggressive helps.

I think any competitive game can be an effective metaphor for life, but right now with the Giants circling the drain, I think I'm going to stick to poker analogies for a while. Raise!

One really fun artist I've been listening to recently is Warren Haynes of the Allman Brothers and Gov't Mule. I like to think of his stuff as classic Southern Rock. Lots of great guitar licks, plenty of energy, and rough vocals. The kind of music you listen too when its too hot outside to do anything else. If you have a fantastic local public library, you should check his stuff out.

Life in Appalachia

This last weekend, I flew a red-eye to Atlanta then drove the the Great Smokey Mountains National Park in Western North Carolina and Tennessee. This completed my back-to-back weekends going to some of the finer national parks. What I liked best about this National Park marathon was the chance to contrast the two very different parks.

Yosemite has magnificent mountains and a very alpine array of flora and fauna. Since the Smokey Mountains are in the considerably shorter Appalachian Mountains in an area where there is much more rain, it features a wide variety of trees in a mixed broad leaf/pine forest. Everything in the Smokies is green but in Yosemite the best stuff is granite.

Back in high school, I hiked for three days through Yosemite along the Mexico-Canada Pacific Crest Trail. In the Smokies, I walked 4.2 miles of the Appalachian Trail. The contrast between the trails is remarkable as the PCT weaves through the Sierras winding around the huge mountains. The AT has much shorter mountains, so it goes directly up mountains and along some spectacular mountain ridges with tremendous views. Now I've been on two of the three major North-South trails, with only the Continental Divide Trail left on the list.

While on this trip, we also saw a play by and about the Cherokee Indians and went "gem mining". As you can imagine, a play about the history of the Cherokee was pretty sad filled with stories of betrayal and abuse. The gem mining thing was basically buying a tub of dirt and washing it off until you are just left with gems and rocks. It was quite educational about all of the various precious and semi-precious stones. It was a bit ironic to see the Indian play the night before doing some prospecting, an event that helped bring the beginning of the end for the Indians.

It was a great trip, I would recommend it for the views of a very unique mountain chain. The reason for the "Smokey" name and the "Blue Ridge Mountains" is that there is this blue cloudy haze along these spectacular green mountains. If I can figure out how to do it, I'll add a picture :).

I'm not a big fan of Yahoo! Search and watch out for Will's SuperPokes

Apologies to all of you out there who don't really care about search engine ranking algorithms, but after taking CS276 at Stanford, I am someone who does care about them and since this is my blog, I will write about my pagerank.

I'm on the second page of Yahoo! Search results, while I'm not only on the first page of a Google vanity search, I'm #4 with my paper citation at #6. Emily recording funny things I've said is #2. Yahoo's algorithm clearly over-values social networking sites, as the first page is full of Kenny Laus on LinkedIn and Friendster. Of course, none of those Kenny Laus is me, which makes me sad. Please, friends don't let friends search Yahoo!.

Basically, any Google search where you spell "thoughts" as "thougts" will very likely feature me on the first page. Ironically, I'm the first hit for 'dodger thougts', in spite of the fact I utterly and completely despise the LA Dodgers. I don't feel very sorry for any Dodger fan who wants to read some Dodger blog and ends up with my page because they can't spell "thoughts".

By the way, for no reason other than peer pressure, I added my first Facebook app today, the SuperPoke app. This was at least partially created by a good friend from Stanford, Will Liu. I have no idea how it work other than having Will send me lots of email telling me that it is really cool and I should try to use it. So yeah, go tell are your friends to add SuperPoke!

Yosemite and who is reading this

I spent the last weekend in Yosemite with my parents, which was a ton of fun. We did one new hike, the Panoramic trail, that I had never done before and it was fantastic. The hike goes from Glacier point, past 3 major waterfalls and ends up at Happy Isles. You can read more about the hike here. We also spent a day floating down the Merced River.

Being stuck in the middle of a nearly unending suburbia makes those trips to the backcountry all that much more enjoyable. It is amazing how quickly I could forget all of the good times I had on the many trips I've had throughout my life in Yosemite. My parents took me there over and over from the time I could crawl. You have to be very lucky to have a place like that so close to home. The park itself is a long thin valley with very steep cliffs on either side, which of course make for fantastic waterfalls and super challenging vertical hikes.

If you'd like to beta-test my "new" old open source photo technology, you can check out the beta photos page. Note that that page is a bit like open source, feel free to use it as is, but it comes with absolutely no warranty. I don't think that this site is going to stick around forever, because as soon as I can get rid of it for something better, I probably will. I really don't like the background skins it offers and it looks very Web 1.0. If you use or know of better software, let me know.

On a somewhat related note, I sort of wonder who reads this. I know the one guy who leaves comments (unityxx) must at least read enough of this to leave comments that convince me he reads the whole thing. Outside of that, I'm probably just writing this for myself. (On a related note, I have enabled comments on this blog, so if you have something to contribute, you can leave a comment below).

I've had several people tell me that they have read this, but I'm not really sure if people read this on a consistent basis. IMHO, blogging and RSS go hand in hand because you really need to aggregate all of your blogs together and be able to catch up to stay current with them. Most of these blog posts can be read by themselves as a unit, but getting all of the humor out of these most likely involves at least some computer science and baseball background.

I could be kind of stalker-like and look at my apache logs to see who this has been served to, but I really am not that desperate to know who reads this other than the Google-bot.

So come back soon or figure out how to us RSS to track this blog. Until next time, peace.