Dog Brothels in London

Is there much of a difference between this and this? Granted, one involves dogs and the other humans, but isn't Flexpetz just dog prostitution? Isn't it the Emperor's Club just Flexpetz for humans?

In both cases, you rent something by the hour for companionship and there is a website so you can pick out what you want to rent. Sounds pretty similar to me.

What's this world coming to when there are dog pimps and people can't own their own dog?

Loose Lips Sink Ships and the Bush League

War is a screwy thing. It brings out the worst in everyone and people die. That's a terrible combination.

War stresses secrecy and reduced freedoms. I would imagine that most libertarians don't like war.

I have a couple of interesting links related to war. One of them is a colletion of war posters from WWII. Life was pretty creepy back then. Nobody was sure if we'd all be speaking German or Japanese in the future, so they made absurd posters to dispel the fear. Talk about freaky. Even 60 years removed those posters give me the creeps.

Today we are just stuck with colors, but we don't get posters. I'm not sure what we should be more afraid of, pictures of sunken ships or colors that never get below yellow.

If you don't like war and the current administration, then you'll like this book: The Bush League of Nations. Written by one of my favorite people, it takes 400+ pages of shots at the "Six Wrong Hands on the Steering Wheel", Bush, Chaney and Rummy. He makes a lot of good points about just wars, mercenaries, and the media.

Jim Swanson is as hilarious, well spoken, and passionate in person as he is in the book. He's an eternal optimist, constantly predicting Stanford Football with reach the Rose Bowl. I really appreciate how he proposes some solutions instead of just pointing out the many things that are wrong with our nation. Plus, if you like judging books by their covers, it's cover is hilarious.

Also, in tribute to warriors in the past, I present a bunch of Italian guys that want to look like Tommy Trojan. Credits to Amy for pointing that out. I definitely like the picture of the guy with the portos and the random tourists with short skirts in the last picture.

On rejection

Sreekanth Ravi, CEO of Code Green Networks, had some interesting things to say at a company meeting today. He talked about how sales and marketing guys deal with a tremendous amount of rejection on a daily basis, and how you just gotta roll with that and get on with life. You can't get too down or else you'll never make it.

Engineering really doesn't have that kind of rejection. It lives in a bit of a bubble where you can brew on bad things happening and stay negative all the time. Rejection is a much larger issue that needs to be avoided. A successful engineering project just works, any failure is a big deal because the frequency of projects is low. A successful salesman, like a baseball player, only needs to succeed about 30% of the time.

I'm convinced I don't have enough rejection in my life, and that a daily dose of rejection might not be a bad thing so that when you get a big dose of it, you can roll a lot better. There aren't a whole lot of things I'm afraid of, but rejection is probably up there. I've learned ways to hedge rejection, but limited exposure to it just increases the fear of it.

I do get a lot of rejection when I play basketball. I'm short and I take expected shots, so tall guys know where to put their hands up to block my shots. I hedge by taking a lot of jump shots that are tough to block, but that doesn't get around the issue that I could probably score a lot more if I learned how to deal with rejection and still score those contested layups.

Here's to some good rejection!

A security mindset is anti-social, I have a proof

Maybe my security mindset is why I can come off as being negative. Its interesting to see Schneier views the security mindset in a positive way and rejoices when it is more formally taught in a class. While being very good at work, I find it hazardous to one's social life as you start to see all sorts of cracks in people's reasoning and draw some unconventional conclusions.

I often find myself doing semi-formal proofs of various things in my head and believing things only if I know them to be provable. That leads to a lot of doubt, questioning authority, and uncertainty. It also means you don't really trust that many people. Perhaps I need a mindset change.

Giants as the worst offense ever, its not just me saying so

ESPN presented this article on the worst offenses ever, with a lead in that your SF Giants could possibly be the worst team ever.

The two articles that people seem to be writing about the Giants is the fact that everyone is happier now that Barry is gone and that they have perhaps the worst offense ever.

Knowing that you face the chance to be the historically worst team ever makes it much more enjoyable when the Giants do score. In spite of this, it is bad when the bottom third of your linup is more or less an out.

Engineers with too much time on their hands

This blog post will be a tribune to what I hope will become a steady stream of posts to the blog, engineers with too much time on their hands. Engineers with too much time on their hands is any product/device that is cool but more or less useless because it is either impractical or overly complicated.

A good example of this is at Qualcomm, all of the break rooms had coffee machines. Nothing out of the ordinary as its likely every buesiness in America has coffee makers, but these were engineers with too much time on their hands. The coffee makers took tiny foil packets and generated coffee/tea/hot chocolate in less than one minute from whatever foil packet was inserted. How one makes a cup of tea in 10 seconds is beyond me. Don't you have to brew it for at least 3-5 mins? Regardless, these things were incredibly wasteful and it is very debatable if they are better than real coffee makers. The closest thing I could find on the internet is this contraption. Man, if it cost Qualcomm about $2k a piece, then no wonder their stock price is no longer in the 50s.

In a very enjoyable camping trip to New Brighton State Beach, this past weekend, I hiked with up the beach to Seacliff State Beach. Below is the view from New Brighton up to Seacliff.


Seacliff is home to a concrete freighter ship, which you can make out in the above picture. Below are two more zoomed in pictures. As you can tell, this thing really is made of concrete and today all that is left is chipped concrete and rusting rebar.

You probably want to know the backstory, which can be found at Seacliff's Website. It is replicated here:

In 1910 a Norwegian civil engineer named Fougner thought of using concrete to build ships. It wasn't until 1917, when wartime steel shortages required the use of cement for construction that Fougner's idea was used. Three concrete ships were built at the U.S. Naval Shipyard in Oakland, California. These ships were the Faith, the Peralta, and the Palo Alto. The Peralta and the Palo Alto were built for wartime use as tankers, however World WarOne ended before ship construction was finished -- so they were never used.

The Palo Alto remained docked in Oakland until 1929, when the Cal-Nevada Company bought the ship with the idea of making her into an amusement and fishing ship. Her maiden voyage was made under tow to Seacliff State Beach. Once positioned at the beach, the sea cocks were opened and the Palo Alto settled to the ocean bottom. By the summer of 1930 a pier had been built leading to the ship, the ship was remodeled. A dance floor on the main deck was added, also a cafe in the superstructure was built, as was a fifty-four foot heated swimming pool, and a series of carnival type concessions were placed on the afterdeck. The Cal-Nevada Company went broke after two seasons -- then the Palo Alto was stripped, leaving the ship and the pier to be used only for fishing.

So this is definitely an engineer with too much time (and too little steel) on his hands. When I told Amy about this, she said, "of course it sunk, that's not going to work". She definately had a good point and could Fougner a lot of time. You may think concrete ship building was a one time mistake here, but you can find a lot more concrete ships here. At UCLA, civil engineers build concrete canoes, which is a good reason they are civil engineers, not mechanical ones who still prefer to build their canoes out of steel or fiberglass.

Here's one more picture of a smiling guy at a nice beach in California. Here's to more beautiful weekends and spectacular Santa Cruz beaches!

Links on Monday

Stanley and Junior are opening up a robotic restaurant in Germany.

Korean-Americans spreading poo by using the Google.

I still have time to make $1M in a year!

Vests are a bad idea

Because the Campbell library is closed on Mondays, instead of me getting a book, you all get a blog post while I watch the end of the NCAA Championship basketball game and drink my camomile tea.

At our holiday party this year, we all got Code Green fleece vests as a token of appreciation. The previous year they gave away black fleece jacket which I wear all the time (perhaps to my fashion detriment). Now I've been on the record as saying I'm not a 'vest guy' and for the first 4 months after getting my CGN vest, I politely declined to wear it. However, most likely because it is free, these vests quickly became the hot fashion item around the office. I decided, if all these people wear these, they must be cool. Succumbing to peer pressure, I decided that April 4th would be V-Day and I would wear the CGN vest.

The look:

I don't think I looked particularly good, or at least not any better than I usually look. It is interesting to have some color contrast between your arms and your chest, but I don't think it did wonders for me.

More practical matters:

A vest is the only way I can be both cold and hot at the same time. The reason I wear outer garments is to keep my extremities warm, which clearly is not accomplished with a vest. As I sat at my desk, my arms were cold and my torso was hot. It was a very bizarre feeling for a non-vest wearer. The vest spent a lot more time sitting on my desk than being worn.

Therefore as you can imagine, I'm still firmly in the non-vest camp. The CGN vest will likely join my CGN bowling shirt at the end of my closet.

Camomile tea by the way is very good. And this championship game is going to overtime.

A few links

Slide, the company of the great Will Liu, go caught giving themselves false positive reviews. I guess marketing/product management people are sleazy at any company but probably more so on the internet. You will notice that the fake reviews were not for Will epic product, SuperPoke.

More fake news care of Freakonomics, does anyone really know why the stock market moved? I've always been suspicious of that. It's always sup-prime this, oil that...

Apples and supersition

I got to give some love to my new favorite apple the 'Jazz' apple. But as new love comes into ones live, I also have to sing the praises of my previous cruzh, the 'Fuji' apple. Dark red Fuji's that are crisp are about as good as you get if you want a sweet apple. Unchecked passion for your sweet taste buds combined with a satisfactory crunch. Even better if you can find them under $1/lb.

Jazz apples can't compete with Fuji's in terms for sweetness, but they have a great tangy flavor that leads to a much more enjoyable chew and finish. Its just a more complex apple, much like the art form they are named after. They are still crispy but have a delicious sweet/tart flavor. Plus they look good at the same time.

I've yet to buy a Jazz apple in a store, we get them delivered to the one and only Code Green Networks on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but if you see them, give it a try, you won't be disappointed. And don't forget that Fuji's are still good. Down with the red-(not so) delicious apples.

I wouldn't consider myself a superstitious guy, but I'm also very bent on getting UCLA a NCAA championship in basketball this year. My mom gave me a 'winter plumberry' candle that is very fragrant and an odd purple color for Easter. For the heck of it, Amy and I burned it at the start of the Sweet 16 game against WKU. UCLA was up by more than 10 at half time, and I blew it out. They got up by about 20 and then proceeded to blow the lead down to 4. In the process all of their guards that play significant minutes got 4 or 5 fouls on them. Things began to look bleak for the good guys.

I lighted the candle again, and UCLA regained control of the game and won comfortably. Then against a tough Xavier team, we burned the candle for all 40 minutes and UCLA ran them out of the gym.

So clearly this candle is the key to UCLA having success. Believe me, it will be burning in the Final 4 on Saturday.

Conservative Facebook Friends and 80

I added my first 'very conservative' friend on Facebook today. People form a nice bell curve centered around liberal on Facebook, and I think I only have one 'very liberal' friend. I can see what a very liberal person would be like, but one has to think a while as to what a very conservative person would be. At what point does one move from conservative to very conservative? Furthermore, what would convince someone to report themselves on Facebook as very conservative when identifying as conservative makes you an out-lier enough already? You have to know this friend.

Almost all of my friends who identify themselves as conservative on Facebook are married for what that is worth. The sets of married friends and conservative friends are highly conjoined.

In other news, my dad shot an 80 at the Santa Clara Golf Club today. That's really good for those of you scoring at home. Some day when I'm semi-retired, I hope to also archive such greatness, but for now, I go to work 5 days a week.