Brian2Brian

A total disaster

2006-11-19T01:34:00.000Z

OK, it has a Trader Joe's, for which I am grateful, but other than that, the newly renovated Bayshore Town Center is a total disaster. The incompetent developers seem to have overlooked some basic facts about the Milwaukee area:

It's cold here. Nobody wants to walk outside at the mall.
Bayshore used to be an outdoor mall, and spent lots of money decades ago to enclose it. Did they tell you that before you reversed this?
People here don't like parallel parking or parking garages. They tolerate it downtown, but lots of people avoid downtown because they don't like anything that's not a big suburban parking lot.
Milwaukeeans love cars and suburban sprawl. An urban center where people can walk among apartments, offices, and shops? Maybe if some refugees from Chicago head up this way.
Narrow little streets are bad for pedestrians and drivers. Pedestrians don't like getting hit, and drivers don't like slowing down for pedestrians.
If you are going to build a shopping center around narrow little streets, maybe it would be a good idea to have separate truck entrances so the narrow little streets don't get completely blocked every time a store gets a delivery!

This story from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel illustrates the problem well. The new mall has only been open for a few weeks.

SATURDAY, Nov. 18, 2006, 1:38 p.m.
By Annysa Johnson
Parking lot rage incident reported
Glendale police are investigating a report of parking lot rage today after one woman bumped her car into a pedestrian who refused to move out of a parking stall outside Boston Store at Bayshore Town Center.
Glendale Police spokesman Joel Dhein said the pedestrian was saving the stall for a friend who had yet to arrive at the spot when another driver approached to pull in. The driver asked her to move, but she refused, prompting a standoff that ended when the driver nudged the pedestrian with her car.
Police have yet to make contact with the driver to hear her version of the story, Dhein said, but at this point charges appear unlikely.
"It's a case of poor judgment on both sides," he said.

I am a grammar god

2006-11-03T06:12:00.000Z

As if there was much doubt.

How grammatically correct are you? (Revised with answer key)

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

Congratulations! If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be. You can smell a grammatical inaccuracy from fifty yards. Your speech is revered by the underlings, though some may blaspheme and call you a snob. They're just jealous. Go out there and change the world.
Take this quiz!

Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Thanks, Liza!

Choke on a Pretzel

2006-10-22T03:52:00.000Z

It took a while, but the Choke on a Pretzel song is finally done!

1. In California and in New England
'Round the Great Lakes proud and blue
In the big cities we hear the people
Listen, and you'll hear them, too
The first time wasn't far enough
For someone known for standin' tough
We're waiting for the moment when
Your chance comes 'round again
Chorus:
Choke on a pretzel! Choke on a pretzel!
Bash your head against a chair
Choke on a pretzel! Choke on a pretzel!
'Til your lungs run out of air
It seems our only sure defense
Is hoping for more accidents
Can't happen to a better guy/at a better time
This twisted way to die!
2. Not by a missile or an explosion
Or from some birds with the flu
Not by some water, flooding or poisoned
Or air with too much CO2
The irony would just get lost
And snack food has the lowest cost
The greatest chance of getting through
This wish we have for you

Update: Choke on a Pretzel is now available on iLike!

Bach a teenage virtuoso

2006-09-05T04:46:00.000Z

The music world seems surprised to discover that Johann Sebastian Bach displayed a talent for music even as young as age 15, according to recently discovered manuscripts.

Duh. We know he wasn't spending all day chatting on the cell phone, because that hadn't been invented yet.

And we know he wasn't cramming for his AP calculus exams because AP hadn't been invented yet, either.

And neither had calculus, for that matter!

And don't get me going on all the TV shows Bach didn't watch after school. Watching Happy Days...transcribing Buxtehude...who do you suppose ended up the better musician as an adult?

Remix: Star Trek and The Simpsons

2006-09-03T22:29:00.000Z

Video of a Star Trek and The Simpsons theme song remix.

Pluto demoted!

2006-09-03T22:02:00.000Z

The International Astronomical Union recently stripped Pluto of its planetary status it has enjoyed for over seventy-five years. Proponents of Pluto respond.

Daily Bugle: Spiderman revealed!

2006-09-03T21:52:00.000Z

Perhaps Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is more appropriate.

Drivemocion

2006-09-03T21:47:00.000Z

Drivemocion, an illuminating car message sign "helps you improve communication with other drivers." This widget reflects a recent Kaiser Permanente radio advertisement informing listeners hand gesturing to other drivers is not considered exercise.

Ghost Ride Da Whip

2006-09-03T21:34:00.000Z

Ghost Ride Da Whip, a new method to help you get nominated for the Darwin Awards, involves performing some fancy footwork upon exiting your moving vehicle. Insurance clauses will reflect this new trend.

Infographics - visualizing data

2006-09-03T21:25:00.000Z

The International Networks Archive collects a variety of data to produce a series of infographics showing various aspects of globalization, including the popularity of the bicycle and the dominance of McDonald's over Starbucks.

Guitar tab download controversy

2006-08-27T05:30:00.000Z

It has come to my attention this week that the music industry has started to crack down on websites that post guitar tabs for popular songs. It has also come to my attention that Weird Al Yankovic has a song on Myspace about music downloading.

There is longstanding precedent in copyright law that a chord progression cannot be copyrighted because so many songs share the same chords. To wit, "Don't Download This Song" has almost the same chords as "We Are The World."

So what follows is my exercise of my rights to share my music scholarship with others.

Don't Download This Song intro G C D Bm Am C D / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / verse G Am7 C D7 G Bm/F# |: / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / Em7 Bm Am7 C Dsus4 / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / :| first time chorus G Cmaj7 D G C Dsus4 / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / C G Bm7 C Am D G / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / :| break Eb C Eb C / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / G Em C D E / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / chorus A Dmaj7 E A D Esus4 |: / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / D A C#m7 D Bm7 E / / / / / / / / / / / / :| and fade

The Generator Blog

2006-08-21T18:51:00.000Z

This blog is not about those machines used to change mechanical energy into electrical energy. It's about software that creates software. Software to play around and have fun with.

25 Ways to Die

2006-08-21T04:24:00.000Z

Synopsis: Crazed, college cartoonists collaborated cross-continentally to confer this catastrophic collection of casualties

David Attenborough: The Lyrebird

2006-08-21T04:20:00.000Z

In April 2006, to celebrate naturalist David Attenborough's 80th birthday, the public were asked to vote on their favourite of his television moments. This clip of the lyrebird was voted number one. A Lyrebird is either of two species of ground-dwelling Australian birds, most notable for their extraordinary ability to mimic natural and artificial sounds from their environment.

Review of Chain Reaction Bicycles

2006-08-21T04:16:00.000Z

"I just saw . This explains why put up a link to this page. There are 81,792 characters in the HTML source, which is a fantastic length for search engine bots. Thumbs up. The URL has 28 characters. Just the perfect length. It must have taken a decade to complete the page. Magnificent. The color scheme is influenced by Eastern art. Seeing Chain Reaction Bicycles, I'm simply speechless. Well, I expected the creator to create something superior. The page is standards-compliant. If only my own company would have an awesome page like that. What a great page! The page contains 84 links, a well-calculated amount. Kudos." -- Gunther Young, Hot Site of the Week

How I got bird flu (or salmonella)

2006-05-18T07:07:00.000Z

What's worse: chicken from Southeast Asia, or eating it with a runny egg? What can I say? It's hard to find bibimbap in Milwaukee.

Singapore's latest superhero?

2006-05-18T06:50:00.000Z

It's amazing. You press the button and Green Man appears! Only problem is that Green Man is a flasher.

Save us!

2006-04-28T04:44:00.000Z

Hurry, FEMA, or they will soon be calling it the Katrina of the Great Lakes:

Experts have warned for years that the [Midwest] was overdue for a disaster of this kind, saying that decades of poor grease management and a culture of fried and heavily buttered food created a highly incendiary "grease core" spread across thousands of homes, restaurants, and offices. Landfills overflowing with greasy waxed paper and cardboard only added to the danger.

Expensive pennies and catching up with Japan

2006-04-22T06:01:00.000Z

It almost costs more than a penny to make a penny.

In Japan, people deliberately hoard one yen coins (worth about a penny) to protest sales taxes, because the one yen coins have cost more than one yen to make for quite some time.

I'm just sayin'.

Italian cooking is easy

2006-04-12T03:07:00.000Z

In Brian's new cooking video, you can see how easy it is to make exotic Italian food. The jury is split on whether Brian looks like Alton Brown or not.

The reason for this video was to test out my new camera. I don't know what I was worried about. MySpace is full of examples of how today's digital cameras are so easy to use, even the completely drunk among us can use them to make videos.

iSync, iCal and Address Book are still awful

2006-03-15T04:13:00.000Z

I usually have more than 100 To Do items, and I have 750 contacts, so it was probably a mistake to use toy demo software like the free software Apple provides with OS X.

When I got my iBook this summer, I liked the printouts you could make with iCal. It was buggy, though, especially the To Do items, which are apparently an afterthought. If you use the keyboard shortcut to start the To Do item, you have to press Enter at the end of the text. Otherwise, when you click on the panel where you enter the date, the text disappears. I know this, but still maanged to do it accidentally. This was frustrating a few times--I type in To Do items so the computer can remember them for me. I have finished a list only to find a few items that reverted to "New To Do" instead of what I typed. I completely forgot what it was I was trying to remember.

That was bad enough, but I plodded on, hoping with each new tweak to OS X, Apple might improve the UI for To Dos. I even bought an iPod, which would be my new PDA, containing my calendar, my To Dos, and my contacts. When I discovered that the iPod calendar was useless because the only order you can have it sort on is alphabetical. Can you think of a more useless sort order than alphabetical? Any other possible sort would be an improvement: order I entered it, date due, priority, calendar it's associated with.

I tried writing an AppleScript script to sort the To Dos in an iPod note, but AppleScript doesn't really have date parsing and string handling. I could have used Perl, but I wanted a one-button approach to get my To Dos synchronized.

So I went to paper, printing out my To Do list on a legal size printout every few days. It was a pain to do the data entry on the iBook to keep everything current.

So I am back to a Palm, a Palm TX. It is a great little device. It has WiFi, which I first thought was superfluous, but it lets me check the weather forecast before I'm out of bed, so I like it.

The Palm has exposed even more flaws with iCal and Address Book.

First, iCal. The first time after I synced it with the Palm, iCal crashed when I tried to print, never to recover. So I decided to use Palm Desktop for my Calendar and To Dos, and removed iSync from that loop. iSync doesn't really make it easy to figure out how to do this, but at least I have a degree in Computer Science. I still find it hard to believe that people without CS degrees get more benefit from computers than the time they waste.

I kept iSync in the loop for my contacts, since I liked having the addresses available in mail, and thought it would be useful to use my iPod to look people up in a pinch.

Yesterday, Address Book decided to crash. Upon recovery, I had no contacts. So syncing with the Palm erased all my contacts.

Fortunately, I had a backup, so I've only lost two weeks of phone number updates and about a dozen people from work who I hadn't added yet.

I tried all kinds of methods of tracking my contacts, calendar, and to do, but I am back to the Palm, which is the only thing that I have managed to stick with for more than a month, and I guess I am up to about seven years now with it. It should be fine as soon as I take all the buggy toy demo beta Apple crud out of the loop. It's nice to have my brain back.

Note: All my Apple software is up-to-the-minute: OS X Tiger, my iPod nano update, iSync, everything.

Spring is nearly upon us

2006-03-06T20:26:00.000Z

Now is the time to rid yourself of the clutter in your life—those things posing a hinderance to living. As one Brian suggested to the other, to do lists are not only for determining what things need to be done immediately. They are also helpful in understanding what things time will not allow. Writing it down gets it out of your mind. I discovered this approach was also effective in uncluttering life. Lifehacker posts numerous suggestions on ways to manage your life.

Better late than never-—North American Ferrari driving school

2006-02-27T06:52:00.000Z

$8200 will get you a chance to be one of fifteen drivers at the newly opened Ferrari driving school in Canada. Perhaps Ford should seriously consider a similar school.

Memo: Ohno

2006-02-13T04:00:00.000Z

Don't worry, Apolo. Once upon a time, Lance Armstrong was a brash young racer who wasn't content with second even though second was all he might have needed to advance to finals. (I was worried about you earlier in the race when you attacked to take the lead. Why did you do that? You had plenty of time to get to the front. Didn't you watch the other qualifying rounds? They weren't really races--the favorites (of which you were one) didn't have to fight for the lead when they finally took it.)

Anyway, you're only 24. You still have time to get a life-threatening illness, make a miraculous comeback, dump your girlfriend, get married, have three kids, dump your wife and kids, shack up with a rock star, retire, get dumped by the rock star, and embarrass yourself when you unretire after a winter of eating donuts, motivated by the less noble parts of human nature: proving your exes and the French press wrong.

Not to mention the other skating events this week...Good luck!

F.P.E.S. v0.0

2006-01-24T07:21:00.000Z

Boone tests a prototype of the Feline Protection and Enhancement System.

Hincapie gets fixed

2006-01-12T22:58:00.000Z

George Hincapie's coach said he needed to train on a fixed gear bike. Trek's Advanced Concept Group fabricated a Madone frame with 120 mm track dropouts.

runaway bride

2006-01-05T05:44:00.000Z

Warmer in Wisconsin

2005-11-25T04:52:00.000Z

NOAA says there is a 70% chance that winter in Milwaukee will be warmer than usual this year. Global warming may not be all bad.

chocolate

2005-11-13T19:59:00.000Z

via Make: The National Association of Manufacturers posted a 15 minute video showing the how chocolate is made, from its history of cultivation and consumption to modern processing.

Country divided on whether country is divided

2005-10-26T00:32:00.000Z

That's quite divided! According to a survey commissioned by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted October 6-10, 2005:

Some people think of American society as divided into two groups, the 'haves' and the 'have-nots,' while others think it's incorrect to think of America that way. Do you, yourself, think of America as divided into haves and have-nots, or don't you think of America that way?

Yes, Divided Not Divided Unsure

10/6-10/05 48% 50% 2%

3/17-27/05 38% 59% 3%

I also like the Pew Center's Political Typology analysis.

Ramen with salsa: why didn't I think of that?

2005-10-21T16:12:00.000Z

It's hard to find kim chee around here, but ramen with salsa might be a reasonable substitute.

Asian nations remain the world's top consumers [of instant ramen]. The Chinese alone ate nearly 30.5 billion servings last year. Outside that region, only the United States, Russia and Brazil gobbled more instant ramen than Mexico.

Small world: Photo of Bob

2005-10-21T01:27:00.000Z

Brian thought Brian would be interested in this photo of Bob of the Main Street Coffee Roasting Company. Not only was Main Street Coffee the subject of one of this blog's earliest posts,, but it is one of the first photos I blogged, and one of the first I took with my $20 digital camera (which is now available at Walgreens under the Philips brand name).

But Brian doesn't know that Barak Yedidia, the photographer of Bob, is a classmate of the other Brian. It is entirely possible that one or both Brians have had coffee just a few feet away from Barak and didn't know it.

Barak is concerned about reproducing Bob's photo without permission. Brian is concerned with reproducing Barak's photo of Bob without permission, but Brian would be glad to buy Barak coffee and catch up if Barak manages to track this down!

Got it?

I've never heard of Graffiti-related RSI's

2005-10-21T01:13:00.000Z

Apparently, Blackberry devices can cause repetitive stress injuries.

Blackberry RSI = 16,900 hits on Google.
Blackberry RIM RSI = 1,710 hits on Google.
Graffiti RSI = 20,800 hits on Google.
Graffiti Palm RSI = 843 hits on Google.

I think this clearly demonstrates that graffiti is a more common word than blackberry, at least among web authors.

My numbers are 1-2-3-4-5-6

2005-10-21T00:47:00.000Z

Whenever I tell people that my lottery numbers (which I have never actually played) are 1-2-3-4-5-6, they tell me that those numbers will never come up. But they usually stop objecting when I point out that they are just as likely to come up as any other numbers.

But it does seem very unlikely that a U.S. senator would win money in the Powerball lottery. Since he bought about $20 worth of tickets though and I bought none, I guess his odds were better.

I would have felt sad if 1-2-3-4-5-6 actually came up with $340 million at stake. But I bet other people would be saying that the contest was rigged or something that would make me the object of scorn and ridicule. On May 10, 2003, the numbers were 1-2-6-10-20-38. On June 19, 2002, they were 1-3-4-7-11-23. On September 26, 1998, they were 2-3-5-24-25-8. That's about as close as it gets. I suppose some people would say that since my numbers have never come up, that means they are due to. But I think they are just as likely as this week's numbers repeating.

iRiver U10

2005-10-16T21:29:00.000Z

You can potentially get an iRiver U10 for free. Meet each of the following conditions to get a 10% discount: 1. Born in October 2. Born at 10th day of the month 3. Sum of date of birth is 10 4. Name consisted of 10 alphabets 5. 10cm long finger 6. Wear shoes sized of 10 7. Parent of 10-year-old kid 8. Own 10 pieces of HK$10 note 9. 10 pierces in the earlobes 10. Work/Stay at 10th floor

Biggy (1989-2005), RIP.

2005-10-16T06:11:00.000Z

Screensaver = Fanbreaker + Noisemaker + Batteryuser

2005-10-15T00:41:00.000Z

From the Brian who is not yet disillusioned with his iBook to the one who was actually pretty lucky considering how hard he is on things...

Once upon a time, screensavers actually saved the screen. Back in the days of CRTs, images could get burned into monitors, and so it was useful for the computer to show flying toasters as the classic After Dark screensave did. I used to have a Star Trek: The Next Generation screensaver for my Mac IIsi. If I stepped away from my machine, it would show samples of the green and orange displays that surrounded the bridge and sickbay of the Enterprise.

Today in the world of LCD displays, this is not a problem. Yet people still like their computers amusing them when they feel ignored. So manufacturers still supply screensavers, even on computers like my iBook whose screen does not need that kind of saving.

What needs saving on a laptop is the battery. Unlike my old ThinkPad, the iBook is smart enough to leave its fan off until the temperature of the CPU really becomes almost hot enough to damage it. Then the fan kicks in until it's cool.

This means that if you set the screensaver to something that uses a lot of processing power that will heat up the CPU, the fan can kick in.

In fairness to Apple, I do have custom power usage settings, not the defaults, and my iBook was plugged in when it activated both the screensaver and fan to get my attention after I ignored it for too long. When I'm using the battery, it shuts the display down before the screensaver can kick in.

It's fascinating to me that something that was once useful with a bit of whimsy has become 100% whimsy and then antithetical to its motivation: using software to protect the hardware.

In the really dark old days of DOS, when the operating system was not expected to provide this feature, and even before After Dark provided it system-wide as a utility, I wrote a screensaver feature for some data collection software I wrote that could be used for up to eight hours at a time. Since it was running in a medical research lab, I thought it would be amusing if it displayed graphs of bogus information, with the axes labelled with meaningless buzzwords. The bogus graphs were sometimes linear, sometimes logarithmic, and sometimes scatterplots. I don't know if it ever fooled any visitors into thinking that we really were measuring antimatter containment.

Brian Brain teaser

2005-10-11T01:32:00.000Z

It's October 11th, but just now I killed a spider on October 2nd. How is this possible?

Answer in the comments.

C is for Chinese?

2005-10-05T19:29:00.000Z

In Singapore, it is widely believed that the best food comes from the food stalls with the lowest hygiene rating. But Chinese restauranteurs in Los Angeles haven't yet figured out this marketing angle. They're actually complaining!

According to the article, "county officials point out that 80% of the restaurants in L.A. County carry an A, yet it is difficult to find an authentic Chinese eatery consistently in the top tier of health compliance."

One restaurant owner says, "We're not going to put up with it anymore. I'm tired of C standing for Chinese restaurant."

There is also this handy info:

The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 76 million Americans contract a food-borne illness each year. In the restaurant business, inspectors guard against dangers such as these.
Top factors in food-borne illness outbreaks and percent caused by each. More than one factor is often involved in an outbreak.

Inadequate cooling: 63%
Preparing food ahead of time: 29%
Inadequate hot holding temperatures: 27%
Poor personal hygiene/infected persons: 26%
Inadequate reheating: 25%
Unclean equipment: 9%
Using leftovers: 7%
Cross-contamination of foods: 6%
Inadequate cooking: 5%

Customers: the obstacle to customer service in Singapore

2005-10-05T16:23:00.000Z

It sounds like something out of The Onion, but it's not! Channelnewsasia advises the Singaporean customer, "if you are looking for good service, be a reasonable customer first."

When you ask someone to rate the service standard in Singapore, the answer is almost always a 'poor'.
That is the reason the government is working towards helping to improve the service culture in Singapore.

See, if people just gave better answers to these surveys, the problem would be solved. And if there's any place in the world where the government and media can launch a successful campaign to get people give better answers, it would be Singapore!

It is nice to see Channelnewsasia reporting both sides of this important story.

Lance Armstrong's endurance tested

2005-09-29T17:10:00.000Z

The Onion reports on new challenges to Lance Armstrong's endurance, "a three-hour, 30-song concert presented by his fiancée, pop-folk singer Sheryl Crow."

In the meantime, cycling fans might be tiring of Armstrong and his teasing of us about finally retiring.

060-2-060

2005-09-21T04:23:00.001Z

Wisconsin gives you your old driver license number back when you return to the state. They also say "Welcome back!" They do not make jokes about cheese.

Actually, Wisconsin sort of has to give you your old number again because it is assigned based on your name, sex, and birthday.

Names are encoded using the Soundex algorithm which is supposed to map similar sounding names to the same code.

I thought everybody in Wisconsin knew about this, but the folks working at the DMV today claimed ignorance. I did not have to take even a written test. That's scary, because people moving to Wisconsin from California should know that U-turns at intersections are not legal! Neither is lane-splitting by motorcycles.

California traffic law is all about traffic flow. Wisconsin has no such goals. Every single small town lowers the speed limit to 25 when you pass through on the state highway. They do this in 10 mph increments, often with signs lowering the speed limit 500 meters apart. If you have Wisconsin plates and you don't slow down, you're probably OK if it's not too blatantly in front of the police. But if you have Illinois plates, be careful because this is a major source of revenue. Anyway, this sort of thing is not allowed in California; Caltrans requires some kind of safety reason to lower the speed limit or put up a stop sign or signal on a state highway.

Wisconsin also hasn't gotten around to using symbols for highway signs, so you still see "NO RIGHT TURN" where most everywhere else in the world has the arrow with the NO symbol through it. In many cases, this is because the signs here have been up since before I was born. They were built to last, it appears. Another quirk of traffic in Wisconsin is the "RIGHT TURN NO STOP" intersections where there is a stop sign for traffic that goes straight, but not for traffic that turns right.

It's funny that I find the rules of the road that I learned when I first learned to drive to be quirky.

The best thing about first class on America West

2005-08-12T21:24:00.000Z

I got to fly America West on six flight legs in a week, a round trip between Oakland and Flagstaff and a one way trip from Oakland to Milwaukee. Thanks to my friend Joanne, the Milwaukee trip was first class. It turns out that first class doesn't get there any sooner, and the best thing is the Gourmet Snack Mix from King Nut. (Though King Nut sounds like people who would be going to my my high school class reunion.)

Another nice thing about sitting at the front of the plane is that you can hear the other passengers cussing about how they are never going to fly America West because their last flight was late, as if the flight attendants on their connecting flight can do anything about it. The FAA publishes on-time data for the airlines, and their airlines print the on-time percentage for their flights on your itinerary, so it seems unreasonable to me for anybody to be upset when a flight that is usually late turns out to be late the day they take it.

Not only is everything on America West just late enough to be annoying, but it is the kind of airline that forgets to load the breadsticks. But red wine goes well with brownies. Still it's not quite as good as the chocolate chip cookies on Midwest Express to all passengers, not just those in first class. But I guess Midwest charges for wine now that they're Midwest Airlines. I still think Midwest Express sounds better.

Why America West flights are always late

2005-08-07T05:16:00.000Z

Flying on America West this weekend, I found it remarkable that they could have a bunch of things running ten to 15 minutes late. I actually did make it from Oakland to Flagstaff on time, but our flight leaving Oakland was late because our plane was about 15 minutes late coming from Las Vegas. This meant I had to run through the Phoenix airport to make my connection to Flagstaff. Once on the plane, it sat at the gate until it was 15 minutes past our departure time for no apparently good reason. But thanks to schedule padding and good wind, we arrived on time.

I thought to myself that ten to fifteen minute delays are a result of sloppiness and poor management more than anything else. Sure enough, I found this article in the Arizona Republic to support my hypothesis:

America West Airlines fell far short of its on-time goals in July, but the airline is going to give employees a bonus anyway.
Jeff McClelland, chief operating officer of the Tempe-based carrier, said in a memo to the airline's 14,000 workers Thursday that the $50 payout is a thank-you for their hard work in a summer of packed planes and record heat. The payments will be made next week.

So if it looks like you're working hard, that's more important than results. I hate jobs like that.

The most serious transportation problem on the trip was when BART was shut down for 20 minutes on Thursday morning because someone got onto the track between Bay Fair and San Leandro and BART Police had to chase them away.

Get bitten

2005-07-19T01:08:00.000Z

Welcome Apple's latest member of the iPod family.

Manufactured Landscapes

2005-07-19T01:06:00.000Z

Inhabitat reports on landscape photographer, Edward Burtynsky's, photo retrospective, Manufactured Landscapes, exhibiting at Stanford University's Cantor Art Center until 18 September. A reproduction of one of his Vermont quarry photograph series, Rock of Ages, published in one of the complimentary airline publications, enlightened me on the amazing landscapes we create. Coincidentally, Green River Stone Company encourages reconnecting with your very own piece of history, "collected and prepared in adherence to strict guidelines established by the American Association of Paleontological Suppliers Code of Ethics, State and Federal Laws." I am sure viewing Burtynsky's photographs will have a similar impact as Rothko intended with his color field paintings.

The American diet

2005-07-11T05:32:00.000Z

Things eaten so far: IHOP skillet with lots of Mexican hot sauce, pancakes, coffee, sushi including futomaki, Santa Fe omelette with Mexican chiles, sourdough toast, salad, baked chicken, seasoned rice (definitely non-Asian), brownie a la mode with decaf coffee, carnitas burrito, horchata, veggie pizza, Dr Pepper.

Is there anywhere in the world that's not walking distance from Subway?

Triathlon story in graphical form

2005-07-04T10:13:00.000Z

This is my story of the tri in graphical form. My race is the red line. Time runs from left to right. This is the 35-39 year old men. The winner, Australian George Lawson, is represented by the line that is the leftmost at the top. The line that starts out with a fast swim is Goh Seng Peng, who was reported to have a swim time of 18:09!

Officially, my swim was 43:42. I remember it being 46. Officially, my bike time was 1:09:31, but I thought it was more like 1:04, not counting the transitions. Unfortunately, it looks like the transition I spent stumbling around without my glasses counted against my bike time. (And I think three minutes of my swim is counting against my bike time, too!) My official run time was 1:01:59, which I can't argue with, and the overall time of 2:55:11 seems reasonable since I did not look at my watch while crossing the finish, because there was a camera and attractive young women handing out medals to smile for.

The median time was 2:53:40. So I was 5:05 (13%) slower than average on the swim, 7:54 (10%) faster than average on the bike, and 5:00 (9%) slower than average on the run.

I ranked 88th of the 163 finishers in my category. (I thought there were supposed to be over 200 starters.) Last year, the top American came in at 89th, so I did do better than that, but this year, my fellow Americans William Zee and Bernard Distel came in at 31st and 32nd, and Kenneth Katz still beat me at 58th.

When did Mac and IBM switch colors?

2005-07-04T07:56:00.000Z

When did the colors for the Mac and the PC platforms switch colors? Wasn't there a time when IBM was known as "Big Blue" for its blue logo? Sort of a connection to blue blood as in old money? Isn't a McIntosh a red kind of apple, and isn't that a natural color for an apple anyway? Wasn't the Apple logo red during the dark days of the Gil Amelio era?

This question occured to me before I ran across the StuffIt website. I noticed I was using my red Ethernet cable for my PC and my blue Ethernet cable for my Mac, and this makes sense to me, even though it is the opposite of how I would have assigned the cable colors when those machines were new a few years ago.

Does this have anything to do with Bush vs. Kerry? Are Mac users Democrats and PC users Republicans? Is this another way in which the United States has become more and more polarized lately?

Happy Fourth of July!

Under Three Could

2005-07-03T06:49:00.000Z

To begin at the beginning: It is still almost night when I head out, bike spotless and blue and black, the city streets silent on the way to Andrew's, whence we will head down to the bike track/running track/salty warm swimming sea.

Like me, my teammate Andrew uses his cell phone for an alarm clock. But I guess the sound when he receives an SMS is louder, because it wasn't until he got my message that I was waiting downstairs for him that he woke up.

He got ready quite quickly, and gets bonus points for eating cereal in the elevator. He even drove calmly, unusual among my bike racer friends, who tend to start the race tactics early. We got there at just about the right time. Any later would have been rushed. Any earlier would have meant standing around. Andrew's wife Janice has excellent tri-marker calligraphy.

The announcer was cheery and Australian, but I heard just enough of him. If you have been hired to be the announcer for a triathlon, it would be good to know things like who the sponsors are and the name of the body of water the competitors are swimming in. It's unprofessional to ask the crowd. Not to mention ineffective. Singaporeans are shy and never respond to anything more adventurous than invitations to clap, so it was kind of amusing for his request to fall on deaf ears, even after he repeated it a few times.

My first mistake was not realizing how bad my uncorrected eyesight is. I have no problem in the confines of a pool, but trying to read lane numbers in the transition area was impossible. That was minor compared to finding the buoys and dark blue finish markers and avoiding my competitors. I know the event color is dark blue, but dark blue doesn't really stand out against water and trees. Even people with good eyesight--or prescription goggles--were drifting all over the place with me, and later complained about it. Last year there were lane dividers from what I heard. Anyway, not being able to see very well meant I put my head up a lot.

My goggles started leaking twice in the first 100 meters of the swim, stinging my eyes with salt water. Stopping to adjust them put me in back right away.

It took me 500 meters of swimming to find a rhythm. This was the only part of the event that made me question why I was doing this. There is a reason that half the participants in most triathlons are newbies, I was thinking: extremely high dropout rates from the sport! They need to keep suckering in the newcomers for the entry fees. Then I went back to concentrating on my stroke.

I had a surreal moment during the second and final time around when I thought I had turned the second corner of the triangular course, but then I saw another buoy. I guess it was just wishful thinking that made me think I was about to see the beach.

Getting ready to go out for a bike ride in a hurry is no problem, and I was really looking forward to it after the swim, so the transition was smooth.

It's fun to pass hundreds of people on your bike, and get passed by only one of them, who you know to be a member of the National Team. Not that I would have been able to stay with him, but Junadi was on his second lap and at full speed just as I was getting up to speed at the start of my ride. I never saw him again. But I will try to remember this confidence-building experience for future races.

There are triathlon rules that seem funny to a bike racer, especially one that can do math.

If you have 2,000 participants on a 10 km course, and they need to keep 5 m of distance, then that means you can only enforce a no drafting rule if everybody remains perfectly spaced for the duration of the race. Kind of hard when there are turns.

I was kind of hoping to be disqualified for breaking the "no passing in front of the grandstand" rule, for a story for my track friends. Apparently, there were some crashes the day before which was attributed to racers playing to the crowd. I was yelled at for it, but you can't race track as much as I have and not develop a strong instinct to play for the crowd.

It was hard to feel like I was racing; most of the people I was passing were not in my category, and I didn't know what lap they were on. Since I didn't really memorize how the race numbers were assigned, I couldn't tell you who was in my category. Finally, nobody was successful in passing me in retaliation and making it stick, which would have made it seem more race-like. Certainly that would make it more like other bike races I have entered!

I was passed in the swim, of course, but it became more a matter of survival where I wasn't very competitive. Running was more like going for a jog with a few thousand friends, and so also not very race-like.

Five minutes into the run, I was apparently having problems with the transition from cycling, and my legs cramped up. I walked for a bit. A fellow triathlete yelled out to me to try running backwards. "Good idea!" I said gratefully.

"Oh, sure," he said five minutes later when I caught him. I told him not to worry and that I'd have more cramps, but I didn't. There were folks to spray us with water and offer us water and H-Two-O, a sparkling isotonic drink. That must have helped.

Other than the first cramp, slowing for water, and 20 seconds of walking near the end (like standing on a bike just to do something different), I managed to run--well, jog--the whole thing.

I also tried lengthening my stride, which I guess would make use of my hamstrings. I believe my hamstrings got strong a couple weeks ago when I spent hours on tiptoe painting a friend's ceiling trim. I did not move my bike saddle at all for the triathlon, so it was still 2 mm short of being all the way back. They say tri bikes have the seat forward to save your hamstrings for the run. My hamstrings felt fine. I know my run wasn't very fast, so it's probably not fair to dismiss this as a myth spread by ignorant triathlon coaches based only on the absence of pain in my hamstrings. It may be as simple as it slows you down on the bike so your splits are not as ridiculous as mine.

My bike time was about 1:04, the swim a disappointing 46 minutes, and the run about an hour, for a total of 2:55. Going in, I thought a time to be thrilled about would have been 2:45.

It was a much better experience than my first road race, where nobody said anything to me, except for the cussing guy on the purple Cannondale. This time, I had teammates, and people calling my name as I went by. There are photos and medals and certificates of participation, lest anybody's self-esteem be injured.

Next time, I'll try to get more than two hours of sleep the night before. What would we do without coffee?

Remember the Cluetrain Manifesto?

2005-07-02T14:56:00.000Z

The Cluetrain Manifesto didn't prevent the dot-com crash, and the ticking time bomb of Y2K was defused in time, but it's still a good read. Some highlights:

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
20. Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.
15. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business--the sound of mission statements and brochures--will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court. (Do they know this yet in Singapore?)
68 & 69. The inflated self-important jargon you sling around--in the press, at your conferences--what's that got to do with us? Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressing Wall Street. You're not impressing us.

Probably been reading the instructions for the triathlon, where the race is consistently referred to as "the race proceedings."

Annex 2 to the International Baccalaureate Diploma

2005-07-01T17:59:00.000Z

It's fun finding stuff while packing. Related to my career options are the activities I participated in during high school.

Math Club, President, Secretary; Model United Nations Club; Newspaper; Mock Trial; SHS; ETW; NHS; FPS; Memorial Lutheran Church Handbell Choir; employee of local fast food restaurant

It's signed by my principal, so it must be accurate. The abbreviations were because I didn't want to admit being in the National Honor Society, which I regarded as a snobbish organization. I regarded them thus because they rejected me my junior year. And the initiation involved wearing a suit. SHS = Spanish Honor Society, ETW = Experimental Theatre Workshop, NHS = National Honor Society, FPS = Future Problem Solving. My Model U.N. teammates are now in politics; my newspaper friends work for newspapers; the mock trial participants are lawyers; much of the ETW crowd has made money in performance. Oh, and at least one Spanish Honor Society member lived in Spain for a while. I'm sure my colleagues from the local fast food restaurant have served time in jail and suffered acne.

Milwaukee: heaven for cyclists, freaks, or both?

2005-06-26T13:08:00.000Z

Not only is it host to Superweek, with the Trek factory just 60 miles away, but Milwaukee also has this event going for it.

Says the founder of the event: "Basically the idea was that you can bike all day, but you can't drink beer all day. But if you bike between your beers, you can burn it off."

The article says, "Saturday's ride...started at Wolski's Tavern and progressed through downtown Milwaukee to a parking structure where riders whizzed at high speeds down the ramp's corkscrew exit." The article is unclear if the high speed whizzing was a result of the bicycles or the beers.

Attempting to explain the event, the article quotes Sky Yaeger of Bianchi USA: "Bicycling back in the '70s and '80s was kind of a freak thing. Now it's too mainstream." Yeah, it would be really bad for the bike companies if people other than freaks started riding bikes.

Experiments on human brains

2005-06-23T16:33:00.000Z

I had no idea that scientists could implant 100 electrodes in people's brains and then remove them safely. (They are going to remove them, right? That would be a tough one to explain at the airport.) I used to work in a neuropharmacology lab, and we considered this kind of thing rather destructive to the subject (not human in our case). It was quite difficult and painstaking to find a single firing neuron. I can't imagine how you find 100 of them, since you may have to poke around for a while. I presume that for human subjects they have some kind of precise mapping done beforehand and don't just poke around.

Anyway, thanks to eight epilepsy patients who had the 100 electrodes implanted for the sake of their treatment, scientists have been able to locate the neurons responsible for the Friends cast. It is both surprising and a relief to think that we waste only one neuron for a concept like Jennifer Aniston. Also kind of sad that we may use only one neuron for each grandparent.

Even though it would in some ways be fascinating to be a brain patient (they don't use anesthesia during the surgery so they can give you tests to see when they're messing things up), I nevertheless am sure to wear a helmet whenever I ride my bicycle.

"Too focused or localized, even meaningless"

2005-06-20T04:20:00.000Z

I'm sure it's like when you learn a new word and suddenly it seems everybody uses it. (With the exception of "coup" which inexplicably got a lot of play in the late '80s.) Nobody wants to be a programmer, at least among young graduates making deliberate choices.

Interesting points from the article:

The Economic Policy Institute says the U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that more than 7,000 American information technology industry workers were laid off in the first quarter of 2005.
Gartner Inc. predicts that up to 15 percent of tech workers will drop out of the profession by 2010.
Gartner also forecasts demand for technology developers to shrink by 30 percent.

I still don't understand an economy where everybody is a salesman or consultant.

Training to run: Pain, but not excruciating pain

2005-06-19T13:24:00.000Z

On Wednesday, I got some new running shoes (actually the link goes to the replacement for the discontinued model I got, and ran for 16 whole minutes. It was excruciatingly painful after a few minutes, and the pain lasted through Saturday. I found it hard to believe that people run for fun.

I was reminded of the triathletes who I helped at Chain Reaction who started their bike shopping by telling me how much they hate cycling. (Hint to triathletes: a bicycle shop is not the best place in the world to declare how much you hate the sport of cycling, especially to the staff who are the kind of people who are quite likely to enjoy riding bikes.) What kind of attitude is it to approach running with an attitude of, "I hate this"?

So I thought I would try again today, increasing my time to 24 whole minutes. I even warmed up today, instead of just starting my run at race speed up the hill that leads to the main road. It was not as painful. Certainly not excruciatingly painful, and the pain was limited.

Tonight, I am only in pain when I walk. I bet that's the ibuprofen I took as soon as I got home helping me out. Can you believe they hold triathlons in Singapore and ibuprofen isn't available over the counter?

Career options

2005-06-17T12:02:00.000Z

According to this career quiz at the Princeton Review, I am Green, which means I should consider:

Advertising Executive
Agent
Art Dealer
Attorney
Auctioneer
Bank Officer
Bar/Club Manager
Benefits Administrator
Buyer
Auto Salesperson
Clothing/Jewelry/Cosmetics Generalist
Coach
Diplomat/Attache/Foreign Service Officer
Fundraiser/Institutional Solicitor
Hotel Manager
Insurance Agent/Broker
Investment Banker
Labor Relations Specialist
Lobbyist
Marketing Executive
Music Executive
Performing Arts Administrator
Pharmaceutical Sales Representative
Political Aide
Politician
Promoter
Property Manager
Publicist
Real Estate Agent/Broker
Restauranteur
Retail Salesperson
Service Sales Representative
Stockbroker
Telecommunications Specialist
Television Reporter
Translator
Wedding Consultant
Small Business Owner
Venture Capitalist/ Investor
Consultant

I noticed that Small Business Owner and Consultant also appear when I answer the questions opposite of my true preferences, so they must push that for everybody. It's interesting that none of these jobs involve engineering, a change from the results of such tests when I was younger.

Kill the kilo! Kill it now!

2005-06-13T04:47:00.000Z

Can it really be true? The UCI is considering killing the kilo (and 500 m TT for women). It's a shame that BMX can't be included without killing something, but this is a great choice. They should also get rid of pursuits and replace them with something that is not more boring than watching paint dry! In February, I held the UCI responsible for making cycling the world's most incompetently run sport, but this is a good move. At the same time, I called time trials a "buzz-kill of an Olympic sport."

There is a lot of whining from cyclists, who have forgotten long ago that it's not about them. Olympic events should be exciting to watch in person and on TV and should draw youngsters into the sport. Kilos are so boring and time-consuming for promoters that at Hellyer Park, we held them only when we had to, about once a year.

I am mystified that of all the exciting races you could hold on a velodrome in the Olympics, most track events are mind-numbing time trials. I'm sorry, but no little kid is going to watch a kilo and think it would be cool to train for. Swimming has events of similar duration, but because the swimmers can be seen competing against each other, by virtue of being in the pool at the same time, the thrill of competition is evident. Who doesn't want to swim that fast? It wouldn't look nearly as fast with just one swimmer in an empty pool. It's hard to believe that people think the madison should be eliminated, when it is actually fun to watch and recent rule changes to treat laps as points make it easier to follow.

I know time trials are supposed to be pure, and the ultimate race of truth, just athlete and the clock. The problem is that clocks are boring. The Olympics draw an audience not because we care who has the best VO₂ max or greatest inheritance of fast-twitch muscle fibers, but because we want to see who comes out ahead under all the challenges of competition with other athletes: not just strength, but spirit.

Triathlete?

2005-06-12T13:17:00.000Z

The 2005 OSIM Singapore Triathlon is July 2 and 3, 2005. Wish me luck!

As opposed to?

2005-06-11T09:00:00.000Z

It's always in the 90s in Singapore so nobody cooks. Restaurants, coffeeshops, and hawker stalls do a brisk business. Every stall is rated A, B, C, or D on its hygiene, with A being the best. I think you need running water to get an A. I am happy that my neighborhood hawker center is being renovated so that each stall will have running water. As opposed to what? you may ask. A good question, one that comes up a few times while reading this story from Channelnewsasia.

In Loke Sum Meng's kitchen, everything has its own place.
Using boxes to store ingredients has helped boost the hawker stall's hygiene grade from a B to an A.
Mr Loke said, "The meat we keep in the freezer, the vegetables we keep in the chiller, we put separately. All the way, we control the temperature of the food."

As opposed to?

Well one coffeeshop has come up with cheap, simple but effective solution.

As opposed to an ineffective solution? Anyway the problem they are trying to solve is cleaning off tables:

All it takes is two cloths and a transparent bucket.
The green cloth removes debris, while the white cloth wipes away remaining stains.
Both are rinsed in a transparent bucket so the cleaner can easily see when the water needs to be changed.

As opposed to?

Channelnewsasia assures us that "Such attention to hygiene has improved standards at eateries across Singapore." Because it is not their nature to be skeptical of government claims, the proof of this is a drop in violations. Of course an increase in violations would equally well prove their point that hygiene standards are improving! I feel so much better now!

No wonder Aaron Marcus has no friends

2005-06-10T12:37:00.000Z

I think I finally understand the problem normal people have with user interface people.

Even though it has been done many times before (by Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman), this time Aaron Marcus slums as the hoi polloi to understand their TV watching habits. Because the world doesn't have enough articles about how remote controls are difficult to use and how blockheaded consumer electronics companies are.

The article is a lengthy description of the time he has to spend researching the equipment, and all the people he has to talk to. He doesn't say so explicitly, but apparently, he feels quite strongly that businesses should make it a high priority to reduce the amount of time it will take to install a TV set. So people can get to the wasting time watching TV part faster, I guess.

Early in the article he points out that he himself is too busy to watch much TV. It seems not to occur to him that maybe people who have the money to spend and time to make a home theater system worthwhile probably have a lot of free time. They may be more gregarious than he is, and not find it so objectionable to receive personal service from an in-home technician. Doctors don't make housecalls anymore, so this is probably an unusual experience for a lot of consumers that makes them feel special.

And why do I think he doesn't have any friends? Well, it seems he knows nothing of home theaters until he starts to research them, as if he knows nobody who owns one already. Is that possible in 2005? He relies completely on a magazine and the salespeople to tell him what to get. He seems not to enjoy this human interaction, as if the role of usability people is to establish human-machine interaction as the only interaction humans are allowed. And finally, he seems to miss the whole point: this is not supposed to be an efficient experience. If he had any friends who are home theater geeks, he would understand that playing with the equipment and bragging to your friends about it is at least as entertaining as watching MTV.

He seems to also miss the business point...the stores are charging you for their technicians. Retailers have learned from software companies that make a good chunk of revenue on services to install and fix the thing you wanted in the first place. While this might seem somewhat dishonest or immoral to purists like us, he should have enough sense to realize that this is not bad business by any means.

I wonder if he's invited anybody over to watch it yet...

Easy educational success: Cheat and avoid 4's

2005-06-07T08:41:00.000Z

American students can catch up with their counterparts in Shanghai in furthering their education. The BBC reports how a Shanghai taxi company is keeping taxis with 4's in the license plate off the street so students don't encounter any unnecessary bad luck during this week of exams. You mean avoiding 4's is all Americans have to do? If only I knew this when I was younger!

The BBC also points out that "With more than eight million students sitting [for] the exam, competition is fierce and cheating is extremely common." I wonder what extremely common means. They mention a teacher getting in trouble for selling the answer key last year. Is there also copying from other students? Hacking into the scoring computers? Bribery of proctors?

Craiglist 500 times more efficient than eBay

2005-06-06T13:38:00.000Z

An interesting article from the New York Times about eBay and Craigslist. This was especially interesting:

Data collected by Nielsen/NetRatings show that eBay's page views in April 2005 grew by less than half a percentage point, compared with the previous April. At Craigslist, page views grew 130 percent in the same period. According to the company's data, its traffic is now about a fifth of eBay's. And the operational efficiencies are astounding: Craigslist has 18 employees; eBay has 8,800.

Back in January, I compared eBay and Craigslist as if they were equal from my perspective, a way to get rid of stuff before I moved. In light of the last post about how inefficient modern software is, it does make you wonder why eBay needs 500 times the employees for five times the traffic. I guess they are all showing PowerPoint presentations to each other, and otherwise coordinating. If you have 8,800 people doing work it sould only take 100 people to do, I guess you have a lot of coordinating to do.

Update: Craigslist has stuff like this sentimental letter to Microsoft Word, whereas eBay is mainly about Hello Kitty.

Software: Slow, hard to use, bug-ridden and fatal

2005-06-06T09:51:00.000Z

These "Futurist Programming Notes" remind us how little we expect from software, suggesting the slogan, "Sure today's software is a little slow, but the thing you gotta remember it's hard to use and completely bug ridden."

The authors, Paul Haeberli and Bruce Karsh, ask the pertinent question, "In the last 20 years machines have increased in performance by a factor of 200. Why hasn't software performance improved by a factor of 2?"

This is timely due to today's news of a climber and software engineer dying on Mt. Everest while, in his words, "Giving the IM-PAC software the ultimate field test..." In tribute to the late Robert Milne, few software engineers I know would be willing to put so much trust in software.

bSteve

2005-06-04T07:18:00.000Z

Silica gel: Do not eat

2005-05-30T14:30:00.000Z

It's nice that big, corporate silica gel interests haven't polluted the Internet too much, so that this approachable, Notepad-created site about silica gel can get some attention.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. When I was in high school, I wrote a long (or so it seemed at the time) paper about fumed silica. Fumed silica, silica gel, and sand are all silicon dioxide. Silica gel is the convenient dessicant form. Fumed silica is powder, so tiny that if you inhale too much of it, it gets embedded in your lungs and I guess eventually kills you. It's probably not a good idea to inhale sand, either. My mountain bike definitely doesn't like sand in its headset.

Leaving things the way you found them

2005-05-29T02:10:00.000Z

Ten city workers supervised California Governor Schwarzenegger patch a hole he dug to demonstrate his desire to increase funding for transportation projects.

Applications open through June 5 for fun on August 9

2005-05-28T08:42:00.000Z

It is fitting, I suppose, that one must apply two months in advance to celebrate Singapore's National Day, August 9. You can apply to watch the National Day Parade (known popularly as NDP) in person, but there is also a consolation prize of getting a funpack and watching the ceremonies from an LED video screen in various places around the island.

It is also fitting that there is only one big event like this in a country of 4,000,000 people. Singaporeans love to compete for limited seats, whether it's school admission, bus seats, or NDP tickets. Wisconsin also has a population of about 4,000,000, and I figure there must be well over 100 Fourth of July parades in Wisconsin every year. When my sister was in a pom-pon squad, she and my parents went to several of these; there is definitely not a shortage. I guess there aren't very many marching bands in Singapore, so maybe that's the limiting factor.

It is also fitting that one can apply by SMS. That's two strikes against me. First off, I am not a Singapore citizen, so I am ineligible for fun on that count alone. But pre-paid mobile phone subscribers are also inelgible to apply by SMS. Imagine the chaos that would break loose if foreigners with pre-paid mobile phone plans showed up for National Day!

On Labour Day (May 1), I also had the privilege of paying $1 to be admitted to The Istana, the official residence of the President of Singapore. Citizens and permanent residents were admitted free. Surprisingly, they took everybody's word for it. Ah, Singaporean hospitality!

Good teachers are hard to find

2005-05-24T07:52:00.000Z

I could not help but being struck by the similarities between Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi and my organ teacher from long ago, Peter Sykes. Perhaps a pipe organ is as difficult to operate as a light saber. It has a lot more switches and stuff, that's for sure. Peter has the patience of a Jedi Knight, and the physical coordination, too.

But no, that's not the only thing that was bothering me. Mr. McGregor's bio confirmed it: I am older than Obi-Wan Kenobi. By two years! Mr. Lucas must have been planning this one for 28 years. Since Ewan McGregor was only six years old when the original Star Wars came out, that means that nearly everybody who can remember the wise Obi-Wan Kenobi is now older than him. I feel so ancient.

Roger Ebert captured an odd placelessness to the language used in the film: "The characters talk in what sounds like Basic English, without color, wit or verbal delight, as if they were channeling Berlitz," he writes. I remember being disturbed by use of the word elevator, since this was a clear signal that the characters were supposed to be speaking American English. It was disturbing since it was the only clue as to the place of their accent. Couldn't it have been a turbolift or something like that?

How we're different

2005-05-22T13:37:00.000Z

I was just looking at some other blogs with the NEXT BLOG button up at the top of the page. It occurred to me that Brian2Brian is not like the other blogs in the marketplace of ideas. How are we different?

Full and complete sentences. Usually, anyway.
We usually write in English.
No keyword spam. (Except, of course, for my fixation with teh halia, which I guess also violates the "usually write in English" feature.)
Neither Brian has ever listed his chores for the day.
We show our photos even though we're not celebrities. (But we're looking for work, and at least one of us would consider working as a celebrity.)
At least we know the other Brian will read what we're writing.
Only one Brian rambles aimlessly, so at least some entries are succinct.

What's next? (or boast about your generosity)

2005-05-20T18:39:00.000Z

More cheese, please.

2005-05-20T07:22:00.000Z

Get cheese with your mobile phone. Be sure to not mention body odor.

Transformers!

2005-05-17T03:16:00.000Z

The MINI Cooper robot is making its third round. This time they are available for normal folk. Unfortunately, only its big brother will prevent forest fires.

Penny is cheap, disposable substitute for Shimano TL-FC15

2005-05-14T12:15:00.000Z

Suppose your neighborhood bike shop neglects to tell you that Shimano is the only manufacturer whose crank puller needs a special separately-sold plug (the TL-FC15 special plug tool for ISIS and Octalink cranks to take off your ISIS cranks.

Turns out a penny makes an acceptable, cheap substitute at a much lower cost. Unless you later decide to use it as a unique copper thimble, it's unfortunately also disposable. (A Singapore 20 cent piece is a bit too large, and also a bit too expensive!)

I am happy because my Klein is quiet again. It needed grease in the bottom bracket shell. I guess that happens when you ride in tropical downpours.

Singapore PM takes advice on English language from Aussies

2005-05-13T14:07:00.000Z

Mr Lee said an Australian friend recently told him that his Singapore schoolmates spoke a strange type of English.

He added: "In fact they were speaking Singlish! My friend observed that they did not seem to distinguish between "no" and "not". It took me a little while to think of an example in Singlish, 'Money No Enough'".

This unattributed moralizing appears in the article, too: " But speaking clearly to be understood does not mean adopting an artificial English or American accent.". Doesn't that only leave Australian English for your major accent groups?

If you need to be understood by the one billion other English speakers in the world, then it seems you have to pick an internationally recognized accent to model. There aren't that many choices: standard British (BBC), standard American, or that comical accent Australians do in Hollywood movies. Another less likely option is to develop the Singaporean media industry so that English speakers worldwide will become familiar with a Singaporean accent through Singaporean films and TV shows. (If they exported Singapore's Brainiest Kid to other countries, the bullies would have to travel pretty far to beat up the little nerds.)

One more thing...if Channelnewsasia thinks there is such a thing as a Singaporean accent, how come none of their newscasters has one? They all sound American or British to me, and not at all like what you hear out on the street in Singapore.

Bamboo/carbon mountain bike frame

2005-05-13T04:20:00.000Z

I suppose bamboo fits in with the natural environment for some mountain bike trails.

Shopping cart seat belt use makes kids attractive

2005-05-03T15:32:00.000Z

An interesting report on supermaket shopping cart seat belt use and kids' attractiveness. It seems especially important for fathers to buckle up their kids if they don't want them to be ugly:

When a woman was in charge, 4 percent of the homeliest children were strapped in compared with 13.3 percent of the most attractive children. The difference was even more acute when fathers led the shopping expedition - in those cases, none of the least attractive children were secured with seat belts, while 12.5 percent of the prettiest children were.

If MOS Burger didn't exist, it would have to be invented!

2005-05-03T07:45:00.000Z

Last week, Good Morning Silicon Valley reader Doug Broussard speculated that a Mossberger would be an excellent menu item for a tech-themed cafe.

Since MOS Burger is my favorite fast-food chain, I had to explain that this has already been done:

Well, what do you know. Turns out there is a hamburger chain in Japan where a certain Wall Street Journal tech columnist should be greeted with open arms (see "A quick apology"). Writes Brian Krause, part of Singapore's no doubt vast GMSV constituency: "Mos Burger is already a Japanese fast-food chain. The Unagi Rice Burger (broiled eel between two circular formed patties of just-sticky-enough rice) is my favorite, but people like the Spicy MOS Burger, too, which has jalapenos (and a regular bun). You can also get regular burgers, french fries, onion rings, and Cokes. I think it would be hugely popular in California. For whatever reason, English-speaking Singapore MOS Burger doesn't have a Web site, but if you click on MENU, you can, in a Japanese tradition adapted to the Internet, see photos of the food. Anyway, as the Web site says, "Catch the latest MOS news and charge yourself with joy!"

I guess the Singapore GMSV constituency will be vaster now...

FCC leaks X41

2005-04-26T20:44:00.000Z

Your bak kwa or your pancreas

2005-04-22T07:55:00.000Z

Sadly, bak kwa (a Chinese kind of pork jerky) is bad for your pancreas. On the other hand U.S. customs doesn't allow it to be brought into the U.S. because it's not considered to be processed enough (and there is a 100% chance the customs dogs will smell it), so maybe it's not so bad.

Yellow lines don't mean the same thing in England

2005-04-19T13:08:00.000Z

These wavy yellow lines would be dangerous in the U.S., where yellow is used as the color that divides opposing directions of traffic.

Singapore takes its traffic rules from the British. This means we have roundabouts, or, as they are known in the U.S., death traps. Personally, I would rather have currency with Queen Elizabeth's face on it if we have to be sentimental about something. It also means that lines on the road have more to do with parking rules than separating traffic. Though I recognize that we are shaped by the culture we grow up in and passing judgment on one system of habits over another has its perils, I think this is stupid. But the alternating white and black paint on the curbs makes it seem like you're going really fast, and reminds me of the videogames of my youth.

I think this is what the different lines mean:

Double yellow line at the curb. No parking.
Wavy double yellow line at the curb. No parking and no stopping.
Yellow box with an X. No parking and no stopping.
Single white line in the middle of the road. No parking except in the middle of the night.
Single white line at the curb. I don't think I've seen this, but I wouldn't park there.

You might wonder what the marking is where parking is allowed. I don't think there are such places in Singapore. It's best to look for a parking lot. Or take a bus, train, or taxi.

Your rich, innumerate masses yearning to be free...

2005-04-18T15:04:00.000Z

...of their money.

In possibly the worst-kept secret in Singapore's history, casinos are on their way!

It will be interesting to see how casinos will do in a country known for scoring well on math tests. But just in case math education isn't innoculation enough against gambling, it will cost locals more to enter the casinos, and there will be some kind of test to see if you are on public assistance. It will be fascinating to see what kind of form Singaporeans will need to fill out to gamble.

Incompetent bathroom architecture

2005-04-15T15:25:00.000Z

The photo above is of a new residence being finished in Singapore. The large full-length window is for the bathroom. You can see a shower, a toilet, and a sink. The bathroom has a lovely southwestern exposure, and overlooks the sidewalk and another condo complex across the street. There's nothing wrong with a sunny bathroom, and I really liked the skylight in the bathroom in my last apartment, but this design would challenge my modesty.

The room seems to be rather narrow (maybe five feet), and I am not sure what kind of window treatment would be appropriate for this window. Otherwise, I guess the new residents will be introducing themselves to their neighbors in dramatic fashion.

Water kills!

2005-04-15T15:14:00.000Z

As if the tsunami weren't enough of a reminder that water isn't something to fool around with, we now know that water can also kill you from drinking it.

I suggest strict global controls on water. It should not be allowed to be shipped across international borders, and probably prohibited from domestic flights, too. Since the damage that water could cause in terrorists' hands is unimaginable, people should need licenses to possess it. Though this might be somewhat inconvenient and I'm sure the civil libertarians will get all upset about it, it is a small price to pay for guaranteeing our safety from this increasingly dangerous chemical.

What Team Absolut is famous for

2005-04-15T08:42:00.000Z

Team Absolut, Singapore's toughest riders, [search] likes to practice wheel sucking [search], especially when it comes to the wheel of one big Desaru lawyer [search]. A combination of teh halia [search] and BMX steroid jelly [search] helps them to overcome incidents like the Bukit Timah crash [search], the damn ANZA rider [search], and even a bad luck track bike [search]. You can read about them and other Sting cycling crap [search] at http://www.teamabsolut.net.

See Desaru, Malaysia by ultralight aircraft flight

2005-04-14T17:00:00.000Z

My teammate Carl took us up in his ultralight plane to show us around Desaru in February. I don't think I showed Brian or anybody else the pictures. Other than this one I sent to my aunt. As Carl said, it's how the birds fly. I said it was the ham radio of aviation. I guess Carl is more fun than I am.

Snarky in Singapore?

2005-04-13T09:44:00.000Z

I don't know how I missed this for months, but this sign, which is in all the MRT stations in Singapore, subtly makes fun of Singapore's (now relaxed) chewing gum ban. You can't tell from this photo, and nobody can draw in Singapore, but the item on the left is a pack of chewing gum. (Also, how would a Singaporean sign artist know what chewing gum looks like?) To make up for the lack of artistry, it is labeled "CHEWING GUM."

Other things I noticed:

Chewing gum is not normally subject to "eating" or "drinking"
I thought the fine was different for food and drink vs. chewing gum.
This is obviously biased against clueless westerners; hamburgers are not local food.
For that matter, beverages to go are normally packaged in plastic bags, not cardboard cups like the one depicted.
I need to find other things to do with my brain next time I take the MRT.

Eleven years? That's nothing!

2005-04-12T08:44:00.000Z

Johnny Lechner, 28, an 11th-year senior at the Univeristy of Wisconsin-Whitewater is scheduled to appear tonight's Letterman. Something's unusual about that?

Find non-Starbucks coffee shops (and Starbucks, too)

2005-04-11T14:13:00.000Z

Maybe it's just a plot by Starbucks to capitalize on anti-Starbucks sentiment, but Delocate is a tool to find non-Starbucks coffee shops.

The tragedy of feeling an earthquake

2005-04-10T15:36:00.000Z

Channelnewsasia points out how unusual earthquakes are in Singapore. . .

"I was in the room. My head was basically down on the floor. And I just feel giddy. I thought it was just my blood pressure playing tricks on me. I heard everyone shouting earthquake," said one [negligently unnamed] resident.

The first earthquake I felt was in Massachusetts. Unlike the 700 Singaporeans who called the police, I and my dormmates did what any American would do: we asked the kids from California how to behave. Tip: fainting and tying up the phone when you have no information is not productive. Shouting earthquake?!

Wisconsin captivated by old rock, live jazz

2005-04-10T09:52:00.000Z

A tiny crystal, believed to have been formed at low temperatures during our planet's earliest days has caught the attention of Madison, Wisconsin.

"This is our first glimpse into the earliest history of the Earth. The miraculous thing about the crystal is that we've been able to make such wide-ranging inferences about the early Earth."

So a crystal that is almost too small to be seen with the naked eye has changed our attitudes more than piles of dinosaur bones? Wow.

Australia's biggest entertainment export

2005-04-08T16:31:00.000Z

The Wiggles are Australia's top-grossing "entertainer". Not only are they teaching American kids to have ridiculous (though provably profitable and entertaining) accents, they also teach them to look for traffic on the wrong side of the road, and to value English cooking.

They must be stopped!

Talking to your TV to reach the pizza environment

2005-04-04T12:14:00.000Z

The New York Times asks, "Would the lives of couch potatoes be even easier if they could talk to their television sets?"

Of course not. Don't be preposterous.

The services discussed in the article claim to save TV viewers from the incredibly difficult tasks of dialing the phone to order a pizza and changing the channel by instead having them shout at a microphone installed on a set-top box. I predict an increase in neighbors mistakenly calling in domestic violence suspects, after overhearing shouts of, "Football! Football! I said, 'Football!' Put the d*** football game on!"

Really, speech recognition has its applications, but replacing remote controls is not one of them. Just wait until the cable box and the TV and the VCR are all listening. "Power on! No, not you! The VCR! I didn't say 'volume!' Volume down! Volume down!"

The TV set-top box is not the only effort underway to deprive pizza buyers of their right to talk to a real person. I wonder why these systems take only 20 to 40 percent of orders? If they were so great, wouldn't they be taking 80, 90, or 100 percent of orders? According to the company, "The personality the customer interacts with is non-mechanical, colloquial in manner, and what the customer might 'expect' to be ordering with in a pizza environment." Pizza environment?

And what do Pakistanis think of cycling shorts?

2005-04-03T17:35:00.000Z

Ten people were hurt in a 10k run in eastern Pakistan by protestors objecting to the participation of women.

"They want to undress the entire nation," Riaz Durrani said.
"It is indecent for women to run in the streets. They want the sisters and sisters-in-law of the nation to wear knickers and T-shirts."

While it's fun to pick on the Pakistanis, the Bush administration is working to roll back Title IX, the 1972 law that required equality of opportunity in athletics and education for girls. So perhaps in a few years, American women can be chased out of sports without ever leaving home!

Koizumi's modest proposal

2005-04-03T17:06:00.000Z

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is leaving his suit jacket and tie at home this summer so his office can spend less on air conditioning, and he wants other Japanese offices to do the same. This doesn't go far enough! Plus, some skeptics feel he will not convince people to change longstanding habits. What he needs to do is appeal to Japanese patriotism. Suits and ties are not traditional Japanese dress anyway!

As reported earlier, Japanese teenagers who compete in sumo wrestling are unwilling to wear the traditional mawashi, which they feel is immodest. If the Prime Minister really wants to set an example, and really reduce the need for air conditioning, why not encourage traditional sumo attire across society?

For some reason, the BBC article doesn't mention what the Prime Minister suggests for women office workers. As there are no women sumo wrestlers, they couldn't follow his example. I guess it would be inappropriate for the Prime Minister to suggest that professional women should wear less clothing.

Update: There are indeed women sumo wrestlers, and they seem to wear cycling bibs. (Thanks, Todd!) So Koizumi ought to recommend cycling attire, which would make everybody happy. Then Japanese office workers could ride their bikes to work, which would save more energy even than the reduced air conditioning bills. Plus, lycra probably wicks better than whatever mawashi are made out of.

Missing teeth and other useful information

2005-04-03T13:53:00.000Z

The shearing off of two teeth on the 23T cog of my Klein Attitude reminded me of a useful page about chainring tooth shapes on the Chain Reaction website. There are many pages there which are underrated, in my opinion. (The Attitude's drivetrain is also underspeced with junk from Bontrager and SRAM, but that's another topic. The Klein, Shimano, and Hayes stuff is great.)

Cyclists' water bottles impair brain function?

2005-04-01T05:01:00.001Z

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the plastic used in water bottles may impair brain function. Perhaps this explains cyclists' behavior?

Bisphenol A — the prime chemical in making the polycarbonate plastic popular in durable, clear Nalgene water bottles — has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years from scientists who caution that it's found in thousands of consumer products and has invaded the human body.
. . .. at doses below or at a federal safety guideline, the chemical can disrupt hormone systems of lab animals, affecting the workings of their brains.

Update: The water in the bottles is also dangerous.

The downside of biometrics

2005-03-31T11:41:00.000Z

Why would someone who steals your car have any qualms about cutting off your finger to get it to start? These Malaysian car thieves were comfortable with the idea.

Personally, I would prefer to have my car stolen without giving the thieves any incentives to chop off my finger. Or scoop out my eyes.

Remember when it was called recruiting?

2005-03-31T06:08:00.000Z

Companies seem to be unaware of the impression created by the poor user interfaces of their on-line job search tools. Below is my (presumably unreceived) response to a popular job search tool, and the message that prompted it.

Remember when the hiring process was called recruiting?

Their Message

Thank you, BRIAN ..., for expressing interest in our organization.

We have successfully received your submission to the following position(s):

UI Designer 748BR Senior Usability Engineer 743BR Senior UI Designer 746BR Senior UI Designer 747BR Principal UI Designer 36BR

A system generated Candidate Reference Number has been created for you and may be useful to keep for your records. Your Candidate Reference Number is: 783896.

Thank you.

* Please do not reply to this email.

My Response

Thank you, DONOTREPLY, for automatically acknowledging my interest in your organization with an e-mail I am not supposed to respond to. I have successfully received your automatic acknowledgement(s).

I have manually generated an Employer Reference Number. Actually, it's alphanumeric. I suppose it may be useful to you, but I doubt it. Nevertheless, keep it for your records. Just like you are not interested in hiring employees who cannot keep track of small bits of information, I only want to work with employers who have the human and technological resources to keep track of such things. The number is 3092-002910B-93l4. Note that the second-last character is a lowercase letter L and not the number 1 or an uppercase I. Please refer to it in future correspondence.

By assigning me a number already and converting my name to all uppercase letters for the sake of your ancient and underpowered HR system, you have already made me feel like a part of your impenetrable organization. A tiny part like a cog, perhaps. I am looking forward to working with people who have submitted themselves to your impersonal treatment, and whose qualifications happen to meet the formats expected by your algorithms. Someday, we will look back and marvel that not all great companies were built this way!

Warmly,
Brian ...
a.k.a. 783896

A sale at Chain Reaction?

2005-03-30T16:00:00.000Z

Is it Mike's way of saying "April Fool!"? This looks like the biggest Chain Reaction sale since I've known about Chain Reaction!

	Yes, Divided	Not Divided	Unsure
10/6-10/05	48%	50%	2%
3/17-27/05	38%	59%	3%