ndanger.organism

Check! And it really wasn’t bad. I got a sore “outer right knee” tendon and Iris (hiking buddy) got sore “behind the knee” muscles and a bout of indigestion (too much power-food, probably). My fancy new trekking poles did their job: easier up-hills, stable downhills and light enough to carry during the paved sections.

Oh yeah, the paved sections. The hike had a bunch of them. Combined with the power-line runs–think baking in the sun while going straight up and down–the hike was not what I would call “fun”. Iris and I both agreed it’s probably not worth doing again unless we’re out to prove something.

We never did the full calculation, but our total clock time was around 13 hours and hiking time around 12 hours. That’s a little slower than I thought, but not bad.

The next morning

Getting out of bed the day after was rough, but advil & stretching helped enough that I went mountain biking at Moraine State Park with Jack, Jess and Casey. On paper this was just about the worst trip ever. Before we even got on the trail Jack fell over doing a wheely–clipless pedals played a role, just as they did when I did the same thing at Boyce a month ago–and Casey stepped in a giant puddle after peeing in the woods.

Once we hit the trail, we found it was a mass of rocks. That wasn’t too bad on the power-line run (argh, more power line runs!), but as soon as the trail dipped into the woods it was a mass of slippy rocks. And 30″ log piles. All in all a little above our skill level.

I wiped out once trying a log pile. Actually, it was before the pile: I waited for Casey then tried to crank up some speed. And then I was laying down. Apparently my wheel slid sideways on a stick or something. The fall hurt my right knee (the same one that was already sore) luckily I had time to rest it while we fixed Casey’s chain, which broke about 30 seconds later.

We decided pretty soon to head back. I got a good rhythm on the back section and bombed over a bunch of rocks, including the wet ones hidden beneath undergrowth. The latter was good traning for quickly unclipping one foot and push biking without losing speed. Finally, I took the final rutted downhill plenty fast, thanks mostly to the confidence from wearing a helmet. Wearing a helmet off-road is probably a good idea but it gives me unfounded confidence: it might save my life but probably at the cost of a broken bone. Then again, I’ve never broken a bone so maybe I’m due. (I’ve also never ridden my bike so hard I threw up, which sounds like a worthy goal. So if anyone is looking to do some hard riding look me up)

After the ride we toweled down and found a picnic table. Jess & Jack always come correct with food: thai chicken wraps, mint tea and blueberry pie pockets. I brought chips and fresh salsa and Casey made fruit salad and brought some Dozen cinnamon buns courtesy of our friend Rachel.

Things were looking up until we got back in the car and Jack realized he didn’t have his hydro-pack. Unfortunately it contained his phone and, more importantly, an awesome Topeak multi-tool. We retraced our steps and eventually ended up in the parking lot of the biking office. We waited in the cab anxiously until Jack emerged triumphant, hydro-pack hoisted over head like some sort of conquered nylon & rubber hose beast.

What a happy ending

All in all I think we only rode for something like 40 minutes and covered about 2 1/4 miles. A pretty crappy ride, but something I’d do again. Or at least it’s better thank hiking 35 miles in one day… riding over wet rocks is a new skill, walking a lot is just masochism.

I know it might sound like I’m hating on the Rachel Carson Challenge, but I’ll probably end up doing it next year but with the express goal of hiking it in 9 and a half hours or something. Plus Iris and I had a conversation about the appropriateness of spandex and it’s correlation with sexy-ness. So we agreed next year we’re going all spandex, a worthy goal by itself.

After thinking and thinking it was clear that there was only one solution. I was going to have to move my shit out of the toilet and into my backpack

Definitely the best line in the mostly so-so Stuck In The Middle.

Another year, another 164 miles.

Saturday was 100 miles in ~5.5 hours, Sunday was 64 miles in ~3.25 hours, which puts my times pretty close to last year’s despite being on a road bike. So the road bike didn’t add much speed, but I’ve got to say my joints sure felt a lot better this year. Also last year I did some last minute cramming by riding to Ohiopyle and back (150 miles). This year my cramming was riding the Pittsburgh-Roubaix course, all 40 miles of it. Combined with the mountain biking and step running, my training this year perfectly prepared me for short intense rides, not 100 miles of rolling terrain. Oh well.

Thanks to all those who donated. I raised $155 online, probably around $100 in cash & checks and $400 in matching team funds (which is new this year, normally team funds only go to current employees, not ex hanger-ons like me).

If you didn’t get a chance to donate, don’t worry! Donations can keep coming in until July sometime. Email me or donate online. Thanks!

Avi’s blog post reminded me that I never summarized my trip to MeshU. In a word: good.

Or in several words…

Prelude

I left Pittsburgh in a shiny new rented Sebring and drove to Toronto in about 5 and a half hours. The only events of interest were 1) realizing I had no washer fluid and 2) a small delay at the Peace Bridge for Victoria Day.

I got parked ($10 CDN/night) and checked in to the Neill-Wycik, which exceeded it’s Hostels.com reviews. The room was a dorm single in a suite, though the other rooms seemed empty. I only saw one other person and only for the 2 seconds it took her to go from her room to the bathroom.

The roof offered some Victoria Day firework watching, unfortunately underwhelming compared to the Zambelli’s work. Then back to the room & free Wi-Fi to check if the post-conference weather would be good for camping. Not only was the weather looking dodgy, but I had forgotten my AC Adapter.

Tuesday morning

If I had to come up with a complaint of the Neill-Wycik, it would be the inability of the curtains to stop sharp rays of sunlight from stabbing me in the eyes. I woke up right around sunrise and spent some time reading Black Dogs. I considered showering, but since the plan was to drive straight from the conference to Tobermory and sleep in the car, it didn’t seem worth it. Plus I didn’t shave or bring business cards so I figured professionalism was right out the window. They’re lucky I wore pants.

Before going I checked all the drawers to make sure I didn’t forget anything. I’m not sure if it’s official Neill-Wycik policy, but there was a random porn DVD in a desk drawer. Feeling that this was the ultimate souvenier, I took it. This comes up later in the story.

I walked the few blocks to the MaRS center. The sign-in and breakfast (fruit & carbs) was in an open area immediately adjacent to the conference rooms. I found a table and “networked.” It was an interesting mix of designers, technical-ers, and entrepreneurs. They did a quick and–from where I was sitting–unintelligible intro and then we were off.

Beyond relational

I decided to see Avi Bryant’s “Beyond Relational Storage” talk based on the strength of his blog and Seaside.

I wasn’t disappointed: his talk was awesome (my notes).

He covered a bunch of alternate data storage strategies (SimpleDB, in memory, Prevayler, etc.), took questions, and then gave us a sneak-peak of MagLev (which has blown-up the blog world since it’s official debut at RailsConf).

Aftwerwards there was a small talk at my table. My neighbor was Markus, the CEO of Palomino System Innovations. They make a CMS, but mostly I was interested in their custom XML store.

Interlude

I was planning on running to Best Buy over break, but my laptop seemed to be doing ok in real ultimate power-saving mode so instead I made some calls.

Thorncrest Outfitters strongly–as in “we won’t rent you a kayak”–spoke against my proposed paddle to Flowerpot Island in Five Fathoms Marine Park. They proposed a one-day river kayaking trip, which sounded far less exciting.

Blue Heron affirmed that they take campers to Flowerpot Island but warned that the boat might be canceled since the weather called for rain and high winds.

Designing

One of the breakfast webbies, Angie (I think, I didn’t get a business card) was excited about Daniel Burka’s “Iterative Design Strategies” talk (notes) so I thought I’d check it out. I had planned to go see Reg’s talk, but, while neither designer or manager, I’m closer to designer. Or at least I occasionally make a user interface that isn’t a command line.

Daniel’s talk was “I sat on the floor” crowded. I liked his case study of his redesign of the Digg comment UI, but otherwise I wasn’t the right audience. It was basically Agile for designers. A good idea, but not something I need. It is however the only talk I took a picture of.

Lunchtime networking

Lunch was notable for the company. I sat with some current/recently matriculated students: Julie, Andrey, Andrew & uhm… the tall woman with the blond hair whose name I have forgotten. Pete Forde from Unspace was also there facilitating the conversation and unashamedly flogging Ruby Fringe, which sounds interesting but is too expensive for me & too non-work related for my employer.

Implementing OAuth

My third session was Leah Culver’s “Implementing OAuth” (notes). Leah started with a review of OAuth (and the difference from OpenID), explained the protocol & showed the code. A fairly good talk, though again not directly related to me.

Some of the questions coming from the front seemed strangely pointed… perhaps beacuse they were being asked by Cal Henderson. The old “plant in the audience” trick. Very clever, Leah and Cal, very clever…

And finally, Mr. John Resig

Despite the rumors that John Resig’s jQuery talk (notes) was going to be introductory, I wanted to see him talk. Plus I’ve never used jQuery, so I was ready for an introduction.

Before the talk John got some water from our table (near the front). I talked to him briefly about processing.js, which I’ve been meaning to look at for online plotting.

His talk was a quick introduction to jQuery followed by some live examples of unobtrusive prototyping against live pages. jQuery looks as good as its reputation, I’ll be trying it out whenever I have a chance / excuse.

The end of the day

I kind of wanted to go to the afterparty so I could tell Avi I liked his talk. He was busy at lunch and the only other time I saw him was at the urinal, which seemed like an awkward time. I also wanted to make up for my lack of pictures by getting photos of all the presenters giving me bunny ears. Alas it turns out the after-party was a significant distance away. Instead, I tagged along with Julie, Andrew & Andrey for some pan-asian dinner at Spring Roll.

Dinner & conversation were both good.

Then I walked back to the car.

The drive north south

Google Map directions took me North on Spadina, which seemed more than a little suspicious. Eventually I turned around got on the Gardiner Expressway. It was about 7:30 and it would take another 3 hours to get to Tobermory where I may or may not get to ride a boat to Flowerpot Island. Given the chances & the weather I just took Gardiner to the QEW and headed south.

I stopped at a Tim Horton’s to pee and pick up a tea. I figured I’d need the caffeine later.

I stopped a second time at the US border crossing.

The border guard asked me a bunch of questions. He seemed especially interested in the fact that I was only in Canada for a day. Then he confiscated my contraband oranges and bumped me to 2nd level border check. I parked in the directed spot and went inside. Some border agents checked my license and passport and asked more questions. Then they went to search the car.

I was sitting in the waiting room when I realized I had a mystery porn in the trunk. I ran through a few nightmare scenarios where it was actually child porn or something. Who would believe I found it in a drawer in a hostel? Luckily the agents came back in and told me I was free to go.

The agent didn’t have a solid reason on why I was stopped. It was probably because I spent a single day in Canada and was crossing the border at night, but I was hoping it was something like “the agent saw your trunk full of perversion.” That would at least give me a funny story. As it is I was just left with a dull feeling of violation and powerlessness. How Kafkaesque.

I gave the DVD to Casey. It’s a Japanese porn. Nothing special, and certainly not worth the stress.

Final words

I suppose I should wrap up something about the conference and how good it was to meet new and interesting people. But really, my advice is to just leave porn in drawers.

1. Have an external drive with mounted to S:
2. Have a network share mounted as S:
3. Open Disk Management
4. Right click the external drive and select “Properties”
5. Be surprised when the properties for the network share come up

It looks like Microsoft looks up properties via drive letter, even when you physically click the drive in the Disk Management app. Not deadly, just surprising. Maybe this should only be a WTHeck?

Spaces

Casey & Jennie’s Spaces show went well. See for yourself:

Fun-A-Day

It went well. I would like to point out that despite appearances, I didn’t pee my pants. It’s just water from the slushy winter roads. Yay, Pittsburgh!

Writing about monopolies reminded me of a This American Life episode. The last story talks about cracking organized crime’s hold on garbage pick-up in NYC. Once the mob was gone, prices dropped… temporarily. They rose as soon as big corporations took over.

I’m not anti-capitalist–I only switched my voter registration from Libertarian a few weeks ago, and that was just so I could vote in the PA primaries–so I’m not bothered by businesses getting large and successful. But I am bothered by anti-competitive practices. Maybe the general high cost of New York City is keeping a hot-young garbage start-up from disturbing the market, but maybe it’s restrictive laws or business collusion.

When it comes to biking, I think cars have a responsibility to watch out for cyclists. This is part of a general belief that power = responsibility. When the powerful don’t exhibit that responsibility I have no problem with regulations enforcing it for them.

At risk of sounding about 20 years older than I actually am, that’s what’s wrong with America these days. The banking bailout is an example where apparently responsibility != risk. And what’s the rational for CEO golden parachutes? The excuse for ballooning executive pay is that executives get great rewards for their great risks. Getting millions to quit your job doesn’t seem very risky to me. (and yes, I understand that successful CEO’s have a rare skill, which is why I don’t mind when they get paid. It’s the high paid failures that bother me)

But I wonder if the problem doesn’t start even higher. We’re in of a costly war based on false pretenses; some of that cost due to no-bid Halliburton contracts. Torture is considered acceptable and civil rights have been eroded. A depression is likely. The national debt is huge. Other than Scooter, who has paid?

Large corporations seem to have the green-light for corruption and the government won’t intervene, let alone admit its own mistakes.

I can’t wait for the election.

Rob tried to comment got both a rejection by WP-IDS and a nice PHP error message about missing paths. Woo boy.

The error was probably caused by a configuration error that I think I fixed. But I’ve got no idea why the comment was rejected in the first place.

If the same thing happens to me let me know and I’ll try to fix things.

LOTD disappeared… but it’s back. Not because I want it, but because the Wordpress hack I was using messed up paging. So I’m just not writing any new LOTD posts.

I’ve switched to storing my links under a del.icio.us tag. I’d also link to the RSS feed but something seems wrong, at least it shows up blank in Google Reader. Hopefully Venus Filters can help me clean that up when I get some free time.

1. Reinserted a contact instead of brushing my teeth
2. Put both contacts in one eye

Since Wordpress 2.3 added support for tags, I’ve moved my old categories to tags and created some new ones:

Cycling

Info about bikes

LOTD

Link of the day

Misc

Everything else

Music

Chunes

Programming

Computer related

Categories will be stable and let you filter down to the posts you care about. So if you find yourself saying “cygwho?”, maybe Programming isn’t for you.

The plan is to add some display of tags later. But man, tag clouds sure are ugly.

Implementation

Moving the categories around wasn’t too bad using the built-in cat2tag and Rob Miller’s Batch Categories plugin.

In the running for fastest followup ever…

The worst part of the Bush Administration’s war on facts is their attempt to censor experts. Franklin Foer’s article contains examples, including the climate change debate and Iraq war planning. It’s one thing–not a good thing, mind you–to ignore expert advice, it’s another much worse thing to make it seem like everyone agrees with you. This lack of transparency in expert opinions is just one example of opaque politics being bad. Others are political donations and gotcha legislation hidden within (e.g.) budgetary laws.

Obama’s history seems promising. He cosponsored the 2006 Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. He also plans to augment it. It’s not a panacea–a website and a CTO don’t ensure honesty–but it is a start.

What bothers me the most about the Bush administration is its reliance on ideology over facts. The best analysis I’ve read is Franklin Foer’s 2004 article Closing of the Presidential Mind. It’s a long article, so for those with short attention span you might prefer browsing these instead. Just kidding! Really, for those of you with short attention spans here is the 5 line summary:

1. Bush’s administration ignores facts it doesn’t like
2. This comes from a long history of conservatives rejecting the supposed left-skewed bias of the experts
3. The administration is politicizing bureaucracies such as the CBO, EFA and NSF
4. This has lead to policy disasters but
5. Bush doesn’t care because, dammit, he’s guided by ideology

With this in mind, I was tickled by Noam Scheiber’s article The Audacity of Data. According to Scheiber–and there is some debate, at least according to his followup–Obama not only consults with experts, but his experts reject sweeping changes and ideology. Instead they prefer pragmatic reforms driven by observations.

Adjusting your hypothesis to match reality? That sounds positively empirical. Combined with Obama’s other characteristics–sincerity, diplomacy, charisma, etc.–that sounds pretty good.

Intrestingly, Scheiber’s article wasn’t comparing Obama to Bush but to Bill Clinton. He only mentions Bush in his followup and only to identify a way in which Bush and Obama would be similar, namely their advisers would have pull. At first I thought Scheiber’s assertion that Bush relied on economic advisers contrasted with Foer’s assertion that Bush was a head-strong ninny, but I don’t think that’s true. Instead it demonstrates that once you start with an ideology it’s easy to fall into confirmation bias: if you already want to give tax cuts to the rich, it’s easy to surround yourself with advisers who think that’s a good idea.

Confirmation bias is difficult to avoid, all you can do is try to keep an open mind. Therefore good decisions require two levels of pragmatism: 1) don’t be ideological in your search for experts and 2) make sure they’re not ideological in their search for answers. Scheiber’s article seems to indicate that Obama has done both.

I’m about 1/3 of the way through the IAS 180 Issues in Foreign Policy after 911 podcasts. The first one is a waste–it’s mostly gabbing about the class and a bunch of inaudible audio clips–but after that… wow. Highly recommended

Due to continued space and power constraints in our primary data center,
we will be moving the “randy” cluster to one of our newer data centers.
This move will begin Friday, February 8, at 10PM PST, and is expected to
last up to 8 hours, until Saturday, February 9, 6AM PST. All web servers,
mail servers, file servers, and MySQL servers in the randy cluster will be
unreachable during this time.

Fear not, loyal readers! It is only 8 hours.

Gravion, I think you might have a translation problem:

On the other hand, maybe it’s thematic.

Is $200k/year enough money to be comfortably? Marty Peretz doesn’t think so. In fact, he says “…what we used to think of comfortably middle class is not comfortable at all.” (emphasis mine). I’m sure a falling economy and rising–if the evil Democracts have their way–taxes are unhappy lifestyle changes for the “upper middle class”, but if you can’t live comfortably on two hundred thousand dollars you’re doing it wrong.

In their otherwise worthless book, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter differentiate between absolute happiness (clean water, food, confidence that you won’t die in a bomb attack) and relative happiness (my car is bigger than yours). They compare the latter with an arms race: a one-up-manship downward spiral ending in economic apocalypse. Could this be the cause of all this discomfort?

Peretz’s specific example involves the cost of college. Ivy league schools are expensive, but how much of that is a “relative” expense? Is a Harvard education worth infinitely more than one from the Cooper Union. Is it worth twice as much as a state school? My guess would be that a child in a top-tier school is just another beamer to store in the “things that make my neighbors jealous” stable.

This isn’t to discount education–after all I spent 5 years on mine–or to say that there is no difference between schools. But if you believe that education is important you should probably make it a priority and, you know, save money for it. It’s also not to say that there aren’t people who can’t save money for them, but, to steal a line from Blackton “if you earn close to 200k and don’t have any catastrophic illness or have 10 children and claim you feel pinched, then frankly you are an idiot who needs to rein in your spending.”

Oh really?

In the spirit of never having to buy presents for anyone ever again, our family adopted a dutch auction secret santa. And the presents have to be homemade or free. So I present to you my idea and… well, mostly Casey’s work.

So how about that Lost episode where they want to deactivate that station… you know the one who gets it’s power from a land cable? You’ve got a bunch of plane wreckage, guns, and some dynamite. Clearly the solution is to have a suicide mission to deactivate the switch and not, you know, cut the cable.

I’m not saying Lost jumped the shark, but I’m saying I’m mostly watching it to see how the writers manage to wrap this up.