I blog because I have free time and Widowmaking

Because I tend to be quite busy at night, I have a horrendous guilt trip when I have a non-busy night to add some thoughts to this blog. While I feel that quality should trump quantity, I can't resist blogging something on those nights when I have a spare hour. I should enlist a crew of ghost writers so I can take some days off. I think today is one of those days, so I will take a post I half finished and finish it tonight.

I just finished watching the movie "K-19 Widowmaker", a very Hollywood retelling of a Russian nuclear submarine with a reactor leak. That has got to be about the worst possible thing that could happen on a nuclear submarine. Hitting an iceberg, being hit by a torpedo, or being stranded at sea have got to be a lot better than being stuck in a giant tin can full of radiation with 130 other men.

It got me thinking about how that project has many of the typical disaster signs as many software engineering projects. Except when software fails, you often don't have dead or fatally wounded people. That probably has something to do with why I work for a network security company and not a medical equipment company. The K-19 suffered from lack of fully skilled people and aggressive time schedule that caused related failures. Software projects have these issues too, but instead of dead people, I just have to look at a lot of tech-support requests, grumble about co-workers, and work overtime.

In the movie, the sub loses its doctor and chief reactor officer in the days prior to launch. The replacements are not well suited for the critical roles they play throughout the movie. The new nuclear technician is just out of school and the doctor hates the sea and has no knowledge of radiation poisoning.

Probably the biggest issue was that construction of the sub was rushed to reach a superficial deadline to demonstrate to the American intelligence community that the USSR had submarines capable of delivering missiles armed with nuclear warheads. The ship had to be launched prior to sufficient quality assurance as proof by the fact that the ship is constantly leaking (somehow in the movie it only leaks the first time the ship dives [Hollywood magic]). The ship also lacks a backup nuclear coolant system (which would be very useful when the coolant system fails) and radiation suits (which would come in handy if there was a reactor malfunction).

I'd like to take this moment to thank God that I don't work on a nuclear warship, even a well designed one. There are so many ways that could fail and none of them end well.

Hunting doesn't make much sense

I'll be the first one to admit I grew up in the suburbs, but I still don't get hunting. I'm perfectly happy to buy all of my dead animal and plant products in a grocery store where they can safely be wrapped in plastic.

Stories like this encourage me to never be a hunter. Someone gets shot because he didn't put the safety on his gun and his dog stepped on the trigger. I've never fired a gun and I would prefer if I could keep it that way. Firing a gun can cause two things to happen and one of them is very bad. Just ask James Harris.

Hunter-gathering in America is so 17oo's.

Detecting fake news

It has been written that a free press is the key to a free society. I don't think it takes much hand waving to decide that free society => free press, and the related implication that free press => free society is probably right on as well (~free_press | free_society == TRUE). Logic aside, for now this blog won't be the forum for deep philosophical debates, and I will instead focus on what I call fake news.

In my view, fake news is any news story where the author of the news either totally misses the point of the news event, can't detect that the slant of the story is bs, or the editor picks an outrageous headline that has nothing to do with the story. In my view, fake news is entirely a product of the commercialization of American news. There is no people supported public news source in this country, so sensationalist news sells. This of course implies that we should have lots of sensationalized news.

Here is my first example of fake news: Attack on Web site shuts down Rockies tix sale

The reason this is fake news is that nowhere in the article does it ever make it clear there was an actual attack on the Rockies ticket website. It is pretty clear to me that the Rockies simply could not scale their ticketing website to the volume of people who wanted to buy World Series tickets. The "attack" is just a good cover story for "We got a distributed denial of service attack from all of our hostile legitimate users". If there really was an extortion plot from some bot-network, wouldn't you want to tell all of the news writers that you are a victim and not just incompetent? Notice that the vendor the Rockies use to host ticketing had no comment. "Attack on World Series Website" is great sensational news but "Rockies website vendor's backend can't support demand" is not nearly as sexy. There isn't an attack because unnamed club officials said there was one.

We need to make sure that we keep PR out of our news. It can be hard to read between the lines, but I would love to get a better at this and I'll try to post things I view as fake news when I run across them.

Website uptime

I should have less problems with my website going down now that I have installed "ddclient" to automatically update my dns listing when my IP address changes. I think I finally got things working now, so I would be surprised if there is more than a few hours of downtime on future IP address changes. I thought it would be a big pain to install, but with ubuntu, you can just "apt-get install ddclient" and it installs and configures the whole thing for you. Yum and apt-get make Linux manageable for the rest of us.

My friends who work for web companies like to talk about the 5 9's. They want web pages to be up all 99.999% of the time (hence 5 9's) which I'm told works out to about a minute or two of downtime a year. I may be lucky to get 5 7's with my site. I'd like to think that the low cost of downtime makes it a lot more acceptable for me to be down 1/4th of the time, but I shall aim higher as I guilt more of my friends into reading this on a more consistent basis.

How much is a dollar worth?

We interrupt your regularly scheduled obscure, cynical and occasionally humorous programming to bring you the following rant...

About half of a pound?
About 120 yen?
1/800th of an oz of gold?
1/10th of a movie ticket?
A song on iTunes?
0.5 lbs of asparagus?
0.3 lbs of ground beef?
9 minutes at minimum wage?

As my sister Amy says, "money only matters when you don't have it." Clearly the first dollar you earn is worth a lot more than the 10,000th which is worth more than the 100,000th if you ever are so lucky as to pull in that much money before the earth spins around the sun one more time. There does seem to be a point where earning more money clearly has a diminishing return and the oportunity cost of earning that dollar is a lot more than the dollar is worth to you. If you live a thrifty life, there is a point where you earn more money than you can sanely justify spending. At that point, how much is another 1k, 5k or 10k worth?

They say if you make goals, you tend to have a higher chance of achieving them, however, I have never really been of the mind that "earn a lot of money" is a good goal. Basically, since you could always have more money, that is an unachievable goal. Unachievable goals suck but it seems very easy to be trapped in an achievable goal (such as make 40k in a year) and then decide to reset that goal for for a higher bar (like 50k per year). Since there are an infinite number of bars you can keep raising to, you've trapped yourself in an effectively unachievable goal. At what point does one say, "Enough is enough, I'm happy and I don't need more!"

Setting financial and personal goals seemed a lot easier back in high school when everything was theoretical and very divorced from reality. Things like "get an A in Spanish" are a lot more measurable than "get better at basketball". The scope of life was much smaller then. Life is so much more free once you get out the overarching high school goal of "get into a good college" (which in its own way is a very unachievable goal). I've been to college, now what?

Stay tuned next week for "A rant on self segregation". Don't forget to tip you waitress. I'll be here as long as my dynamic IP address doesn't change. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Page Rank and war movies

Mad props to co-worker "Richard" for doubling the number of in-links to my website by adding a link off his (quite interesting) blog. I don't know what I did to earn that real estate, but I am proud none the less. He's the resident UI experience guy and has a wealth of knowledge on the subject. I took one web-UI class at Stanford in my last quarter (along with an easy database class and golf) and that is why my color scheme is black and white on burnt orange and you are squinting to read this. I'm sure that tip is somewhere on his blog if you read it long enough. However, fixing that is not the highest priority item on the todo list.

Todo list for my website/blog:

1) Find a way to get a more "static" IP address without paying for it (i.e. stop trying to serve this page off a $19/mo dynamic IP addressed DSL line).
2) Figure out how to run a daemon on my webserver to automatically re-register a new dynamic IP address with my DNS server (so my page will stop going down for a day when AT&T changes my IP address every week :).
3) Get a webserver that doesn't sound like a hair dryer
4) Get a webserver that is not in my closet (this will also resolve [3]).
5) Get a webserver with a processor that was made this century
6) Fix blog color scheme so it is not as revolting
7) Make a smaller banner to my website so it can be served over previously stated DSL line
8) Fix the rest of this site that isn't this blog (i.e. pictures/template/etc)
9) Add tags/labels for all my blog entries

Richard also mentions in his blog that you should use proper grammar and spelling on any website. I hope if he RSS-es my page, he doesn't look at the title of this blog. I will change that some day when I find inspiration.

Getting back in the swing of things by adding a second topic per post, we now turn to the topic of war movies. I've seen two war movies in the last 4 days, "Saving Private Ryan" and "Jarhead". Both of these movies were almost more dramas than action movies and I can see why "Saving Private Ryan" won some Oscars. The first 30 minutes of that movie are a very graphic (and probably quite accurate) depiction of D-Day. "Jarhead" is almost completely a drama/political piece and while interesting is not as eternal as "Saving Private Ryan".

Movies like that, no matter how Hollywood they are, definitely make me glad I earn a living with a keyboard and not an M-16. I very much enjoy having my biggest problem be my dynamic-IP address instead of dodging bullets.

Globalization and the internet

I think there is no more convincing proof of how global our sports culture is when I can watch the baseball NLCS on a British sports channel streamed over the internet. I can't get it directly from TBS because I don't have cable.

IM Football with clean clothes

I know this is kinda Gene Pang, but I'll blog about my athletic achievements today (I will return to the dual-themed posts however). Today was definitely one of the more interesting IM football games I've played in. We started with 8 players and ended with on 6. It included a guy getting a cut eye (who was driven off the field in a fire truck) and Gene getting the worst calf cramp of his life. We blew an 8 point lead but then won it with a touchdown after I threw a pick with less than 2 minutes to play.

With about 2 minutes left and the game tied, we had the ball. Gene hit me for about a 20 yard gain, but then went down with a cramp. We played the rest of the game with only 6 players and with yours truly at QB. On the frist couple of plays, I ran for my life before throwing a long completion to get to the 15 yard line. On the next play, I threw a touchdown that was called back because the ref thought our guy dropped the ball. Our drive stalled there and I threw a gift interception in the end zone, giving them the ball at the 20. They then preceded to go 4 and out after not electing to punt the ball on a 4th and 5 so I had the ball again in their redzone. This time on third down I threw a jump ball that one of our guys jumped and tipped to a tackle for the touchdown. It was pretty exciting.

I have clean clothes now and I must admit, I feel like a home improvement specialist after hooking up the washer and dryer all by myself. I was able to do two loads of laundry with out a fire or a flood and the clothes seem cleaner than when they started. I did buy renter's insurance before attempting this!

Finally, the Los Gatos Creek Trail

Before I get tired of blogging, I'm about to go for the first 3 posts in a 24 hour period experience of my life...

My sister Amy and I decided we were going to go on some kind of hike this weekend. While we searched for apartments on craigslist, many of the places mentioned they were close to the "Los Gatos Creek Trail", so that seemed like a good place to start in terms of local hiking.

The night before the big hike, I was meeting (or perhaps more correctly stated "drinking") with members of my kickball team and they all insisted that I should not complete the hike and instead go on the kickball Caltrain Pub-Crawl with them. Their reasoning included allegations that the LGCT was the home of many rapists and quite boring. I figured I could deal with the second case as I have in my life previously seen very boring things, but it might be construed as unwise to walk down a trail through the den of rapists. I did a quick Google search for "los gatos trail rape" and when it came up sufficiently empty, I decided to carry on. Of course, the oportunity cost of a bit of family time was being on a train with a bunch of hot drunk girls.

So lets actually talk about the trail now. Our goal was to hike from Campbell to Los Gatos, which was a bit more than 6 miles. I will provide a picture collage to avoid having to type a ton here:


This trail could be called the "Highway 17 Trail" just as well as the highway was right next to us for more or less the whole time.


The first of many dams along the trail. The goal of spending a lot of state and federal money to build this trail include flood control. This concrete block is making my place in Campbell much safter.


This is the algae that is growing in each of the locks along the trail. Not very appetizing.


Most of the trail looked like this.


The trail walked past Vasona Lake, which is a nice big county park. It had some very nice views.

So what did I learn from this trip, blogger could use better photo management editing software.

Nobody likes U$C

Yesterday (October 6th) was perhaps the most bloggable day I've had in a long time and I feel almost legally compelled to comment on a couple of significant happenings of that day.

The first thing that I must comment on is of course U$C losing to Stanford (and their backup QB) in LA. This game is the very proof that if you turn the ball over 5 times in the second half, you can't beat anyone. That is pretty much the only way you can win almost every offensive category and still lose to a team with a lot less talent. Oh, that and giving up two 4th and longs on the game's final drive. I thought that the first call on 4th and goal would have worked too, but it was too bad that the refs figured out that Stanford had 4 wide receivers, a tight end, AND a running back. Legally using 12 men to score the game winning touchdown would really be a brains over brawn kinda thing.

Then of course, USC received the game on a silver platter when in spite not having any time outs, they got the ball at their own 40, needing about 35 yards for a field goal that a college kicker at a good D1 program should make. Booty didn't step up when the unblocked man came around the end and that sack cost them about half of their remaining time and more or less sealed the deal.

Stanford still can't run the ball...

Now for the non-football side of things. There truely is no better feeling in sports than watching U$C lose football games (perhaps aside from watching them lose at anything live). Needless to say their 5+ year home winning streak happened to directly overlap my 4 years at UCLA. In life, there aren't a lot of fun moments when you are standing in a blue wool uniform that says "UCLA" when your team is getting its face kicked in at the Colosseum and the only people left in the stands by the 3rd quarter also have blue wool uniforms and some sort of musical device. My good friend, Kevin says the most animated I've been while watching football was when I saw $C lose to UCLA on TV after the Big Game last year. He's probably got a point there, I don't particularly like U$C or really anyone that has graduated/attended that school (maybe I should make an exception for Gerran, but he'll have to separately petition to be on the exclusion list). Putting it more simply, yesterday was a good day for humanity, civilization, and the future of our country. Some philosophers may even view yesterday as proof of a divine being that is still active in the world. God bless America.

Putting a 4 pronged peg into a 3 pronged hole

Today was a very educational experience for me as I learned that not all 220 V outlets are created equal, the newer ones have 4 pegs, and the older ones have 3. This was of course learned by discovering that the dryer I just purchased is new enough to have a newer, safer 4 prong outlet, while the wall of my older apartment has a socket of the three prong variety.

The square peg...



The round hole ...




I also learned how difficult it can be to get good advice on things that can kill you on the internet. Screwing up the wiring on my dryer and burning it out is one thing, but electrocuting myself (or my sister) is another. I read all kinds of advice from "here is how you do it it no problem" to "you should never do something like this, it is totally unsafe and not up to code". I know from 6 years of computer science education that the pidgin hole principal applies here, and that if I have previously used 4 wires and now I have just 3 wires, so metal component that previously had a wire purely dedicated to it now is very lonely. To further complicate things, the 4 wire plug is color coded, while the replacement 3 prong plug is not. And don't forget the risk of electrocution.

I finally decided to trust "about.com" and went with this solution. I wired it up and the dryer did turn on, make noise, and did not electrocute me when I pushed the "on" button. Tomorrow when I buy a new exhaust hose and actually do my laundry, I will find out if my hack will really work.

Wish me luck...

First Food Review!!

Last night, I went to Twist Bistro in Campbell for dinner with some good friends. I really enjoyed my experience there and I think that means it is time for the first ever restaurant review in this blog.

Twist is a combo lunch-dinner place with common outside seating and separate seating for lunch and dinner. We sat outside and enjoyed a temperate night. All of the food I had was of high quality. Gene of course had ample servings of the fresh baguettes with lots of butter. We all tried escargot and I actually liked it quite a bit. It tasted like big juicy mushrooms coated in garlic and butter. Those were definitely not your run-of-the-mill garden snails. I don't know if I would have made it to the main course if they were.

I ordered the lamb medallions and they again were fantastic with a great presentation. I also tried a friend's thick and juicy pork chop that was equally delicious. Everything was very French which was one of the things I was looking for in the restaurant.

Finally, for dessert we had perhaps the greatest food item in existence, creme brulee. We also had vanilla ice cream embedded in a pastry and covered with several cups of chocolate syrup.

Ok, so maybe from this experience I'm learning that I don't quite have what it takes to be a food critic, but I would definitely recommend Twist. I'm inferring from writing this that perhaps the next time I do this I should focus more on the whole restaurant and not just tell you what I ate. Maybe talk about the extensiveness of the wine list or the ambiance. The truth is when I go out to eat I really tend to focus on the food :).