Music Review: Nickel Creek

A friend at UCLA told me about Nickel Creek and kind of poppy-bluegrass band. They are really fun, but definately not hardcore bluegrass (like the Osborne Brothers). Its a brother-sister pair on guitar and violin respectively along with a mandolin player. They're from Southern California, not Appalachia and you can tell from their very polished sound and vocals. What's nice is they have multiple people who sing lead, and on some songs they have quite polished Broadway-style harmonies.

Their self-titled first album has a lot more instrumentals, but a really beautiful song, "The Lighthouse's Tale" about a couple of tragic death's from a lighthouse's perspective. It has a great mandolin hook and the vocals really sell the song. They also have the great traditional song, "The Fox" about a fox off to steal some poultry from the "town-o".

I really like their second album, This Side. It has some really great songs including, "Spit on a Stranger", "This Side", and "Green to Gray". It starts with a tremendously catchy instrumental, "Smoothie Song" that is real honest to God bluegrass.



The above is a totally overproduced music video (isn't overproduced the definition of a music video) of This Side. I'm glad I'm not a rockstar who plays a mandolin, because there is no way to make a mandolin look manly in a music video. Looks like you play the wussie little guitar. Its worth playing the video just to see how weak it looks to rock out on mandolin in a music video.

Their third album is perhaps a bit overproduced, but in exchange for a more established sound you get some well written songs.

If you see them in your local public library, concert hall, or favorite mp3 site, give them a try.

Bush League of Nations Site Launch!

Some exciting news is that the best website I've ever designed has officially launched version one! You can check out the page at www.bushleagueofnations.com. The title is a play on a couple of terms, bush league, which means amateur and the League of Nations, which helped cause WWII. The books is full of other really intelligent humor and really peels back the curtain on what really happened (and is happening) in the Bush administration. It makes a great gift for that special politically motivated person in your life. What great timing that the California primaries are next week!

Be sure to appreciate how cool it is that the link to Amazon floats under the navigation bar. That took some CSS skillz. Also make your browser window bigger and smaller. Send me any bug reports.

The site will be even better when Jim gets the blog set up so we can keep providing keen political insight.

Rubbing Shoulders with Ambassadors

Today at a UC Santa Cruz astro-physics party, I met Dan Mozena, the US Ambassador to Angola. As this was by far the most senior diplomat I've encountered, this requires a blog past.

Angola is reaping the benefits of its oil reserves as they are flush with cash due to historically high oil prices. However, they are suffering from Dutch disease which turns them into a one-trick oil pony. Add instant oil money to a place with fixed number of goods and services and you get incredible inflation. His standard apartment costs $25k a month because there are only a limited number of well built homes and tons of oilmen who want to live in them! That makes it the most expensive home rented by the US state department. The second place finisher is a penthouse suite on the Upper East Side in New York used to entertain the Amabassador to the UN. He said a pound of cherries cost about $35.

As one might imagine, he was a good listener and easy to talk to about a wide variety of subjects dealing with travel to the current state of affairs. He's had foreign service posts in South Asia and Africa and loves to travel. We talked about HIV/AIDS, hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, beautiful places in India, and life in Angola. He also talked about being suspected of espionage and attempted bribes.

He is a career diplomat who has risen through the ranks over a long and distinguished career. Apparently only the "good" ambassadorships are given based on political favors, places like Angola just go to the most qualified people.

Best of luck to Dan and the nation of Angola as they try to recover from years of civil war.

Zito gets a win and a tragic death

Barry Zito is in the win column. The Giants have won 3 in a row. They are a very streaky team with bad streaks outnumbering good ones. They hit 3 home runs in the same game for the first time last night.

There are two questions that we will follow in this blog regarding the Giants:

1) Can Zito lose 20 games?

A typical pitcher makes about 33-36 starts in a year. Zito has made 10 and lost 8 of them. He's clearly on pace to lose 20, but he's pitched much better of late. They say it takes a really good pitcher to lose 20 games, because if you were that bad, they'd stop running you out there every 5th day. Zito could be that guy because the $128M contract keeps running him back out there. If Zito can stay healthy, he should get 30 starts, if he can lose 20 will be some fun drama in September.

2) Can the Giants avoid losing 100 games?

We can call this the quest for 63 (the number of wins you need to avoid losing 100 games in a 162 game season). As of today, they have 20 wins and are on pace to win 66 games. In order to avoid losing 100 games, you need to win at at least a 0.388 rate.

To make matters more interesting, the Padres and Rockies are also floating around the 100 loss rate. Could 3 teams from the NL west lose 100 games? That would be tough because each of these teams place the others 18 times. The Padres have a much better shot a being worse than the Giants because they have absolutely no offense. Keep posted.

Unfortunately, a fan died at Turner Field in Atlanta recently by falling over 150 feet on to the lower deck of the stadium. Not too surprisingly, he had some alcohol.

His family tries to play it off like he died doing things he does all the time at home, drink moderately and slide down the railing of a staircase. However, at home I'm guessing the cost of a drunken fall is a 3-5 foot drop, not at 150 foot one. This is a pretty sad story and an entirely preventable death.

StubHub! Review: Fantastic Legalized Scalping

If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you probably know that I enjoy Giants baseball and

When shopping for tickets, there are two quite obvious goals. First, I want the best seats and second I want to pay at market for the tickets. Because I believe in free markets, I don't want to pay what the team decides all tickets should be worth, but rather where supply meets demand.

Before StubHub! there were scalpers. You can identify them because they are people who both say they need tickets and simultaneously have an extra ticket at sporting events. One of my favorite images of going to a ballgame is watching one guy with a "Need Tickets" sign stand next to someone holding a fan of tickets. One of the great ironies in organized public events.


I love "free market ticket reselling" because of the great technique involved in bartering down the price. If you wait for the game to begin, there is no scenario where you shouldn't get a ticket for face. Even at the Rose Bowl, you could get a ticket for 30-40 bucks. As a buyer time is on your side and you need to wait as long as possible to get your ticket. Also, never show them how much cash you have on hand and don't be afraid to walk away.

Scalping is great, except for the fact that it is illegal. I'm convinced that this is one of those laws that was created to because of a lot of lobbying from teams and if I were a political fanatic, I'd like to get this overturned.

This year, the Giants partnered with StubHub! to become their legalized scalper. The Giants previously had their own home brewed "Double play ticket window" where you could buy seats that were priced over face. Now with StubHub!, the prices of tickets are free to rise and fall with demand.

The interface is great, you select a game, click on a section and then see a listing of tickets for that section along with their prices. I was able to pick up two $27 bleacher seats in the second row for $10 each when the Reds were in town. Giants ticket prices went up, but the quality of the team declined, so naturally the supply/demand intersection point is getting lower.

The biggest drawback to StubHub! is the cost of shipping is about $20 because all shipping is FedEx overnight. They have a new electronic transfer feature that is priced under $10, but it is not available on all tickets.

The tickets were shipped quickly to me with no issues. I know of a friend who had problems getting his tickets shipped, but StubHub! has a guarantee you'll get a seat as good or better than the one you bought, so after the tickets didn't show up, they shipped him a better pair of tickets. I see this as a nice feature to get around the unreliable nature of ticket sellers.

So that's my summary of ticket buying and my review of the market leading online ticket reseller. Here's to legalized scalping!

Some interesting links

Happy Link Day:

A plan to protect people from free alcohol ends up killing people. In an attempt to prevent politicians from giving out free booze for votes, the government closed down all the bars and liquor shops. That of course makes bootlegging more attractive. I guess in India, moonshine kills. This is not a good side effect of what seems like a questionable law.

Holes in the random number generator on Debian Linux have caused a stir in the crypto community. They've also caused a funny xkcd comic. My favorite xkcd comic, but only because I find anything to do with an SQL injection attack funny. Your results may vary. If you've written code or like computers, that strip is quite funny. If you've ever been in a non-professional graduate school, PhD Comics will be funny.

Someone who doesn't like Microsoft very much throws three eggs at Steve Balmer. Several points to take away from this.

1) I like how Balmer speaks in that very basic and clear English that one uses when traveling in Europe. It makes it sound like you are talking to a child who's been bad. Things would be a lot easier if we just taught everyone to speak English when they are little.

2) If I were to throw eggs at Mr. Balmer, which I have no intention of doing, I would use better technique. The last couple of eggs really lacked in the effort department. Of course, by that time, I think Balmer was behind the desk already. This was clearly a tactical move that the egg thrower didn't expect. He should have gotten a seat on the side of the auditorium where he could hit behind the desk.

3) Steve should have broken into "I love this company" to counter his claims of people hating Microsoft. I'd like to break that one down for you too, but this post is getting a bit long. One thing I will say is that he should have gotten into slightly better shape before attempting that stunt.

Don't look now, but the Giants are on pace to lose over 100 games. Zito also can lose 20, which is another thing I find funny, but not as funny as SQL injections. I guess things I find funny will have to be a later blog post.

Rehab the Crab!

It's been a while since I've had a Giant's post, and since the team is now on pace to lose over 100 games, I'd rather talk about the mascot. However as a furry marine mammal, Lou Seal will get plenty of love elsewhere. I'm of course talking about Crazy Crab, one mascot removed from Lou.

My first interaction with the mythical crab was in the Pac-Bell (long before SBC and AT&T) Park bleachers at the end of a Giant's loss. An inebriated bleacher bum kept screaming for "the crab". He discussed his displeasure with having a harbor seal as a mascot and kept campaigning for the return of Crazy Crab. I blew him off as a hooligan.

The cry for the crab continued. I finally spent some time researching Crazy Crab and was surprised to find a complete history detailed on the SF Giants webpage. Maybe that guy wasn't crazy, there really is a Crazy Crab! Plus, since I found this on the internet, it must be true!

So in honor of crazy crab, I'm going to post the one Crazy Crab sighting since the 80's right here in this very blog. Those of you who've been tuned into this station for a while will know this is the first video ever, which is kind of a big deal.



Well, that's it for now. Be sure to visit www.rehabthecrab.com and sign the petition to bring back Crazy Crab. Either that or sign the petition to go back in time, not sign Zito, Aurilia, Roberts, et. al.

How to become a millionare the reliable way

I'm glad that CNN finally has an article about the key part of the millionaire equation, saving money. It highlights a couple that is making less than $100k per year, yet is incredibly frugal and is on pace to save $3M by retirement age. They spend less than $86 a year on entertainment, stay out of non-housing debt, and budget 'savings' as an expense every month.

I've previously blogged on this topic and suggested the Millionaire Next Door as a great example of how saving will help you a lot more than earning. You can control your spending a lot better than you can control your earning and of course, everything you save is already taxed.

CNN (and all news sources for that matter) always like to show you the example of the instant millionaire, the NFL draftchoice signing the big deal, the lottery winner, and Mark Zuckerberg an internet billionaire. These kinds of millionaires are so infrequent, they have to be in the news. Just remember, the very definition of something being newsworthy is that it doesn't happen very often. Focus on what you can control and you can be like the Wisneskis.

Engineering mushrooms and equality for all

One of the great engineers at Code Green Networks reminded me that I'm just a mushroom. At least listen to the first verse and chorus. Maybe this only applies to disenfranchised engineers, but its quite humorous. I'm not surprised that the singer looks like this.

There is some good news in my state as long as you are a supporter of equality and fairness. Not so much if you believe in religious dogma and thinking inside of box. Maybe when I'm married and have kids I'll magically transform into the later, but while I'm still young and innocent, I'll celebrate an important step forward for this country (or at least the state of California).

I'm always amused when judges are 'activists' when they don't agree with you, and since when is being an activist a bad thing? Wouldn't the world be better if we all were activists?

Cryptogram turns 10 and how to secure your passwords

Crypto-gram, a free monthly newsletter from security guru Bruce Schneier has turned 10. This newsletter has been very influential on my views of computer security and perhaps even politics. I would highly recommend his books, including Applied Cryptography if you are interested in learning more about crypto. Its an easy read if you have some discreet math background. It was recommended to me by the great Miodrag Potkonjak, who wrote the recommendation that likely got me into Stanford.

As an introduction to Schneier, you should read his blog post on passwords and realize how your passwords fit into common patterns as well as how to secure them using tools.

Restaurant Quality Food

On a lazy Sunday afternoon or a panicked Monday night, I like to dabble in cooking. This is mostly caused by the fact I like eating well and I don't like paying well. Most of my food is really good, my family can attest to this, but it is a cut below the food at moderate restaurants. I've concluded I have two dishes that are "restaurant quality", mushroom chicken and chili.

My mushroom chicken is an onion, a carton of mushrooms, two zucchinis, 2 carrots, a couple chicken breasts, and the requisite garlic and Chinese stir-fry sauce. It is by far my best stir-fry because of the complex tastes of the zucchini and mushroom along with the texture of the carrots. The vegetables really make that dish.

The other dish is my chili. I hosted a chili cookoff last year and it was well received. It probably helped that I burned a competitor's chili when I was re-heating it, but that's another story for another day. I've made it for many independent people who might give me their honest opinions and they all seem to like it.

Runners up would include asparagus beef (on a good night), fried rice, some of the whole wheat penne pastas I've made recently, and this pork recipe I stole from the internets.

This is the second consecutive food post, I must be getting hungry.

Eating through New York

As promised, I'll add the first of several (or maybe just this one) blogs about New York. One of the best parts about my trip to New York was the food. Manhattan has a lot of people, a lot of money, and therefore a lot of people with money. If you have a lot of money, you might as well eat well.

The best day of eating in my trip was the day I spent with the one and only Alan from my MSCS program at Stanford. Alan is a Queens native who works on Manhattan and has a nose for finding good food.

We began our eating day in Chinatown, eating soup dumplings and some great Shanghai-style Chinese food. Soup dumplings are dumplings filled with a very savory soup and either pork or crab meat. In order to consume the boiling soup, you need to punch a hole in the dumpling, suck the soup out, and then eat everything else. Its a great cultural experience. They had some great seafood as well. Definitely a meal that could define a day, but this was just the beginning.

If you have a random Chinese friend (who really speaks Chinese, i.e. not me) who can take you off the menu of things you get at Panda Express, it behooves you to go out to a Chinese restaurant with them and just let them order, then close your eyes and eat everything. Even if its pigs ears. You will be a changed person or at worst a person who's eaten soup-dumplings.

We then walked down the street to get bubble tea.


Here is the gang posing in front of City Hall with bubble tea in hand.

Why stop at two great items when you can add an afternoon snack. We walked all over the south part of Manhattan, so it was time to sit down and enjoy Pinkberry.


Pinkberry serves frozen yogurt plus toppings. I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to say they have high margins (over $6 for a medium with 3 toppings). In spite of this, the yogurt was great and when mixed with fresh fruit, it makes a great afternoon snack. I regret not taking a picture of mine, but I went for blueberries, strawberries, and rasberries and the result was terrific, just not $6 terrific.

Finally, the nightcap was good old fashioned New York pizza. After turning down Alan's requests to eat delicious Korean fried chicken, we took the subway to Lombardi's for some original New York pizza.

The crispy, thin crusted pizza was great. The local beer wasn't too bad either. I enjoyed the classic Italian style decorations as well and the overflowing crowds made the place feel warm and comfortable. Be aware that there are long lines on Saturdays.

Be aware, a lot of restaurants in New York don't take credit cards, its all cash only. With that in mind I'm not really sure how much state sales tax is actually collected in New York. I have a feeling its not 100% of what they should get based on a few of my experiences at 'cash only' establishments (no receipts, handwritten receipts, etc). Bon Appetit!

The AMD Laptop Buying Guide

Recently, a friend asked me for an unusual but interesting request, advice on a laptop to purchase provided the following constraints, it needs to be able to run Autocad and it needs to run on AMD chips (because her bff's dad works at AMD). Her current laptop is fried and she needs another one.

Since right now Intel is dominating on the top end of performant laptop chips, this imposes some rather significant restrictions. Couple this with the following two issues. First that a significant number of laptop manufactures (Apple, Lenovo, etc) only sell Intel's line of chips. To compound this, those manufactures that do sell AMD chips sell them only at the low end of their laptop portfolios to take advantage of their price-performance advantages. My friend was looking for a mid to high range laptop (more or less a low end gaming laptop for doing graphics intensive Autocad).

Lets start with the requirements for Autocad. Ouch, so if you are going to run Vista, its going to take 2GB of RAM and a dual core laptop processor clocked at at least 2 GHz. Never before have the intensive resource-hogging nature of Vista been more clear than on that Autocad requirements page, as you need TWICE the amount of memory. Seems like a "downgrade" to Windows XP might be in order here.

From doing my research, there are about 2 stops on the tour of AMD laptops, HP and Toshiba. You can also go to some niche laptop manufactures, but if you want to stick with the big guys, those two seem to be your best bets.

Ok, so now into the heart of the discussion, beginning with Toshiba (These links may go dead soon as laptop buying tends to have a high time variance):

My brother bought one of these and he's pretty happy with it execpt for the fact that one of the keys fell out. When I was there in 2005, Microsoft bought exclusively Toshiba laptops (and Dell desktops). When I'm buying my next laptop, if it would probably be from Apple, Lenovo, or Toshiba (and it will probably have Intel processors).

These are both kinda big and heavy (6lbs), but that's more or less your basic laptop size and weight right now.

We probably don't want to go lower than this if we're serious about Autocad. Recall that Software always seems to demand MORE resources in future versions. This is on sale at Fry's for 600 bucks today (May 11, 2008).
http://explore.toshiba.com/laptops/satellite/A200/A215-S5850

This is a more powerful version of the previous machine. You should be able to get this for less than MSRP ($1k). It is a bit beefier version of the previous machine (more higher CPU clockrate, 50% more memory).
http://explore.toshiba.com/laptops/satellite/A300/A305D-S6835

Both of the above machines may be week in the graphics department, which could be important for Auto-cad as their graphics cards use system memory.

HP makes a similar laptop. HP seems to be the only AMD vendor that lets you customize your laptop computer. I was able to customize a laptop I think would fit the requirements for $890 on that site (with a dedicated memory graphics card). If they are anything like Dell, you can often find coupons just by searching "HP laptop coupons" in Google and save money at checkout (or get free upgrades).

So that's the abridged, blog-friendly view of buying AMD notebooks. If you can go above and beyond what I mentioned here, comments would be appriciated.

Stay tuned for the next episode, "Easy Data Recovery from a Spoiled Laptop" or "There is a reason I don't work in IT".

Sloshballing into 2008

While I promise some New York posts to commemorate my first ever (and fantastically fun) trip to the Big Apple, I'm going to use this post to give some page rank to the Sloshballer's website. The Sloshballers are the kickball team I play for on Wednesdays.


Not to toot my own horn, but last Wednesday, I almost single-handedly won the game against the best team from last year. I scored from third with two outs on a weak grounder to third where I slid under the ball and beat the force at home as well. That enabled us to get 3 runs in the first. I then managed to keep the other guys from scoring more than 2 runs by throwing two guys out at the plate in the late innings. I even used superior strategy, walking the bases loaded to get to a weak kicker for a 1-2 putout to end the inning.

We were significantly out-manned and under-womaned. We'll have to get into better kickball shape by the playoffs if we are going to beat these guys again because they have a lot of soccer players. We have a rematch the last week of the regular season. We also barely had 4 women show up, which is precisely the minimum allowed.

I'm normally quite modest in this blog, but if I'm going to give someone pagerank, I might as well give myself full credit for it :). I'm also going to exempt myself from any blame with respect to that page. I don't host it here, I don't know what's going on with the monkey game, and I like my orange color better. I'm sure future iterations will improve the look and feel of that page.