Staunchly Technical

Why I hate Apple (and everybody else)

2011-09-10T07:14:00.000-07:00

So, here's our current home gear:
2 Mac laptops running OSX (personal computers) connected via Wifi
1 Linux Intel desktop (also personal, but I like working on a desktop if I'm working from home for the day) connected via Wifi
1 Linux PPC headless server (old G4 under the TV that does a lot of media functions) connected via Ethernet
1 NAS (used to back up all the above) connected via Ethernet
1 G2 (Android, Nate's phone)
1 iPhone 4 (Clau's phone)
1 iPad (for Nate's work, maybe more on that in another post)

1 iPod classic (120GB), which we generally keep in the car

1 iPod touch (8GB), which Clau got from Kraft and would like to use as the "music device" for the kitchen.

1 Altec Lansing sound dock, with an iPod connector. Unfortunately Clau's iPhone can't plug into it because she has a pink case that's ~2mm thick, and the connector just can't get through. The sound dock is very handy for playing music from an iPod / iPhone because it has a water-resistant remote control, and is therefore great for the kitchen while cooking - you don't need to wash your hands just to skip forward or whatever.

Notice that there are no desktops (i.e. permanently powered on) running a mainstream OS and that the one server with a KVM is connected via Wifi.

So, for her birthday, Clau wanted to be able to play music on her computer and her iPhone. A reasonable request to be sure. I've got all my music on the NAS share (which is sharing everything via DLNA) and my own Linux box (which can share the music in pretty much any way I want), so there must be some products that can work with that music available for iOs, right?
Wrong. At least nothing that I was able to find after a lot of poking around.
Part of the problem is that Apple users seem to be totally fine with paying for everything. OK, so everything's cheap - maybe $5, but there don't seem to be trial versions of many things, and I'm sorry but I'm not going to pay $5 just to see if maybe I want to use a DLNA client. The free ones I found were, frankly, not very nice or intuitive. Definitely not what my Apple-happy wife wants.
Another problem is that Apple seems to have kept the masses happy with iTunes. I still for the life of me don't understand why there isn't some massive Apple revolution against iTunes - it's a total piece of crap that needs to go away but just seems to get more and more ubiquitous. It seems that every Apple app _except_ for iTunes is slick, intuitive, and easy to use - I still don't get it.

So, back to my requirement to share my music out - I guess I'll have to find something that works with iTunes (which isn't available for Linux btw). A quick check found that iTunes has a feature called home sharing, which should at least take care of Claudia's computer and iOs devices. My initial solution plan was to create a Windows VM on my desktop that would run iTunes with home sharing, and just have it running all the time. There ended up being a few problems with this:

1) For some reason, the following combination produces serious problems:

Windows VM with bridged network adapter
iTunes installed

This combo results in the _entire_ system (not just the VM, but the whole darn box) instantly crashing whenever a music file is copied to the VM. Obviously that's a dealbreaker. I tried everything I could think of to get around this:

--Use a different virtualization platform:

KVM - doesn't support a bridged interface on a wireless device (theoretically it's possible but I wasn't able to get it to work with an hour or so's worth of poking at it).
VMWare - VMWare server doesn't really work anymore on later Linux distros, and they've pretty blatantly EOL'd it. There are patches floating around out there on the net, but I had trouble just getting a VM up and running, and decided that this wasn't the route I wanted to take.

--Use NAT networking and just port forward the required Home Sharing ports to the VM: this doesn't work because Home Sharing uses mDNS, which is effectively a multicast, serverless method of name resolution - every device is constantly sending UDP packets to a multicast address with its own name and IP info. I think Apple does this in order to make it really difficult to spoof devices, but it makes my life tough. In the case of NAT, the packets will get from the VM to the iOs devices, but they have the internal non-routeable NAT address instead of the gateway address. I briefly considered trying to do some packet mangling to change the internal IP address to the gateway IP, but that creates a whole new difficulty.

--Same idea, but use a host-only VLAN: this requires forwarding multicast packets between the host-only VLAN and my home VLAN. I tried a few packages (smcroute, pimd, even mrouted) and none of them worked - tcpdump analysis showed that they were configured correctly but simply weren't working. The conclusion I came to was that, even though the apps _thought_ that the kernel was compiled with multicast routing support, it wasn't really enabled, and a kernel recompile would be required. There are many reasons that I don't want to recompile my kernel (too many kernel mods that would have to get recompiled, plus I'd be stuck on that kernel forever, plus it might not work!).

Anyway, all this went on for a long time, till I finally decided to just set up the original way, with the limitation that I couldn't copy music files over the network to the VM, lest the entire system go kaboom. I did my initial import of music by creating ISO images of my music and attaching those to the VM, then importing from the "DVDs". I'm still working on how I'm going to get new music up there :)

So, after all that hassle (which admittedly isn't Apple's fault, although if they weren't using that stupid mDNS then I could have easily worked around the VirtualBox issues), I come to find that:

With my collection size (about 13k tracks) the initial connection from the iPhone or iPad is slow as molasses - it takes about 3-4 minutes to connect to the music library and load it all. And, since it load the details of the entire catalog onto the iPhone, the performance for everything is sludgy - start searching through the catalog and you have about a 2 second lag between key presses. Definitely not good, and definitely not the way it should work.
Home Sharing is only supported on new Apple devices. That means that Clau's iPod won't work, despite running the latest version of iOs (and being very sluggish because of it). And, you may recall, her iPhone doesn't fit into the sound dock (which is almost a moot point since the iPhone doesn't handle our collection very well).

I spent about 2 weeks of personal time working on this, and to show for it I have my music sharing working (poorly) on 2 devices, neither one of which is the one Claudia wanted, and neither one of which can be plugged into the sound dock

Which brings me to why I hate Apple. Part of their technological ground rules are:

1) We will make it deliberately difficult, if not impossible, for non-Apple devices to work with Apple programs / devices unless it directly benefits us.

2) We will only enable newer features on newer products, regardless of that product's technological ability to use that feature. This will force consumers to buy a newer version of that product if they want that feature.

3) We will disregard impact of newer versions of firmware on older devices (i.e. iOs 4 on the iPhone 3). (Note: I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt, and not assuming that this was actually an intentional breaking of the iPhone 3 - not everybody feels the same way).

I can understand the first point - Apple isn't in the business of trying to make their product work with other companies' products, especially when those other companies are potential competitors. Furthermore, everybody else (Sony, Samsung, and most notably Microsoft) is doing it too, so it's not like Apple's playing dirtier than everybody else.

Points 2 and 3, however, are unforgivable and (imho) unethical.

Anyway, enough ranting. I suppose I ought to edit this before posting it, but maybe it'll help someone else who is trying to do the same thing. Soon enough I'll post my solution (hint: it's a Squeezebox).

Password classification

2010-12-15T12:27:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about my passwords and security, and am changing everything according to the following scheme:

"Unique" memorized password: Google, Password manager(s), home server (exposed to Internet).

These are "master key" systems - if these are compromised then the hacker effectively has the ability to get my password to anything else. As a result, the password for these is not used on anything else (really, I ought to have a separate pw for each of these, but since they're all so unrelated I've just got one for all 3).

Random stored individual passwords: All things potentially damaging (banks, brokerages, prosper, IRA, etc)

These are randomly generated 10-character passwords - they might get sniffed, but they're not going to get hacked. These get saved in the Firefox password DB and are also in my password manager program (Keepass, for anyone who cares)

Work password: all things work-related

Everything I do at work requires me to change my password every 3 months - since I have trouble with multiple passwords anyway, I just set them all to the same thing. Only one of them can be accessed from outside the intranet anyway, and my VPN is protected by a keyfob.

Easy (but still relatively secure) non-changing password: social networks and anything else that can't cost me money or too much heartache.

Useless password: sites that I really don't care about and/or don't trust.

This bring my list of passwords I'm required to memorize down to 4. I think this is pretty managable - the only thing that I still have to worry about is accessing gmail from any kind of public computer, but I don't see what I can do about that.

An inspired paragraph

2010-10-13T17:18:00.000-07:00

The tenant who is going to replace us is trying to nickel and dime us on the cost of buying our kitchen, which we bought at Ikea; truthfully it's really pissing me off, and I was writing a very long email to him; I ended up eliminating this paragraph, since it didn't fit into the general spirit of the email (i.e. "stop being a dick"). But, I thought it was too good not to share:

Truthfully, it's still by far the best option for everyone if you buy the kitchen; purchasing a new one will cost you a lot of time, money, and inconvenience. I also don't think you realize the depth and pain that was involved in doing it - the weekends lost at Ikea that could have been spent on the slopes or at the Biergarten: the endless hours spent at home using Ikea's software to configure the kitchen just right, only to find out later that a single item has been discontinued and now you need to start over: the soul-crushing lunches spent staring with exhausted, glassy eyes at your lover over a platter of meatballs as you wash down yet another aspirin with generic Swedish cola-flavored soda, too mentally worn out to think about anything except that the day's only half-over, and you've lost count of the number of Saturdays you've wasted in this yellow-blue hell, and you know in your heart of hearts that when you stumble out of those glass doors tonight, looking like a drunkard getting kicked out of a bar after last call, that you STILL won't have purchased a kitchen. THAT is what you are negotiating yourself into.

Of course it's very late, and I've spent the last hour or two writing this email, and the last hour or two before that fuming and trying to calm myself down so I could write the email, and the last many hours before that trying to get all my loose ends tied up for work before we go to EGYPT on Friday (w00t!) for 2 weeks - then it's almost immediately back to NY for an apartment-hunting trip, then we get 2 last weeks in Munich to say good-bye to everyone, then back to NY for good on Nov 22 or so.
Anyway, enough babbling - time to get to bed - our young friend Maike has her Vierteljahrhundertegeburtstag tomorrow, so we're all celebrating, and I don't want to look like too much of an old man.

Poker heartbreak - long explanation of a single hand

2010-10-07T00:24:00.000-07:00

Nothing really interesting here unless you're curious about how I think about poker hands while I'm playing them.
Normally I try to stay away from bad beat stories, but this one stung.

Context: $2 rush rebuy tournament, I bought a rebuy before playing the first hand but never busted, so I've invested $4.20, at this point average stack is about 16k chips, I have 45k chips, there are about 250 players left out of a starting field of roughly 2000, with 200 or so spots paying and top prize of something ludicrous like $3k. I've been kicking ass and taking names with a very TAG game (which works really well in big-field Rush tournaments) and have invested about 2.5 hours into the tourney at this point. If I wanted to, I could walk away from the computer and be virtually guaranteed of a modest payout (like $10 or so) without even playing anymore. Then, this happens:

# my comments are preceded with hash marks and hopefully in blue.

############

Blinds are 250/500 with 50 ante. 9 players:

Button (t26498)
SB (t18929)
Nate (BB) (t45179)
Villian1 (UTG) (t62225)
UTG+1 (t49932)
MP1 (t34285)
MP2 (t34868)
Villian2 (MP3) (t20466)
CO (t73117)

Nate's M: 37.65

# "M" is a term for how many orbits you could survive without playing (just paying the blinds and antes) before you go bust. Above 20 and you're sitting pretty, and you can afford to be a little looser in your play. Between 10-20 and you need to be a bit worried and should be playing pretty tight, below 10 and it's about time to think about "all-in or fold pre-flop" on every hand.

Preflop: Nate is BB with 8, J

Villian1 calls t500, 3 folds, Villian2 calls t500, 2 folds, SB calls t250, Nate checks

# J8s is a decent hand but certainly not great from early position, particularly against 3 other players. If someone had raised I probably would have folded, but I'm happy to see a free flop.

Flop: (t2450) A, 3, 10 (4 players)

# At this point I have a draw to what is likely to be a winning flush. Since nobody raised pre-flop, I'm guessing that someone has probably paired his weak ace or T, maybe someone has hit 2-pair, and at best someone might have flopped a set or 3s or Ts. Since there's a flush draw on the board, if someone flopped a set or 2 pair then they're probably going to make a big bet here to discourage people like me from trying to hit that 3rd spade.

SB checks, Nate checks, Villian1 checks, Villian2 checks

# Cool, another free card. I guess the flop either missed everybody, or possibly someone else has a spade flush draw (unlikely, but possible).

Turn: (t2450) 7 (4 players)

# Sweet! Now I'm really hoping that someone has an Ace, maybe 2-pair, or maybe even a smaller flush than mine. It's also possible that someone has the Q or K of spades along with another non-spade card, which means that a fourth spade would make things dangerous.

#Given that I am pretty darn sure that I have the best hand at the moment, I need to bet this - how much? Not so much that everyone's going to instantly fold, but enough so that it's not worth it for someone with that K or Q to call the bet in hopes of hitting the fourth spade. A bit more than half the pot should do it - pot is about 2500, so we'll bet 1500.

SB checks, Nate bets t1500, Villian1 calls t1500, Villian2 raises to t4500, SB calls t4500,

#Well that didn't work out the way I planned. I thought that at least one player would fold and one or two would call or possibly raise. Didn't see this coming. So, what to do?

# Villian1 just called my bet, so I don't think that turn hit him - I'm guessing he either has a flush draw, 2 pair, or maybe just a relatively weak Ace, something like A9. Keep in mind that this guy limped under the gun.

# Villian2 raising really concerns me, because he's indicating that that turn hit him. Best case, he's got a smaller flush or he's making a semi-bluff with the K or Q of spades. Worst case, he's got a better flush than me. Ditto for SB, especially since for him the odds are actually in favor of calling that bet if he has a big flush draw.

# So, what to do? Stats right now:

# Pot: 14500

# My stack: 44629

# Villian1: 61675

# Villian2 and SB both have about the pot size (15k or so) left in their stacks.

# So, possible actions:

# Fold: not gonna happen. If I'm beat by a better flush, so be it, but I really don't think that's happened.

# Call: If I call, then Villian1 is definitely calling behind me, since he'll be getting roughly 4.5:1 odds on his money; there aren't a lot of hands where he wouldn't call that. The big problem with calling is that it gives everybody one more chance to beat me. If someone has the K or Q of spades it gives them a chance on hitting that last spade, and if someone has 2-pair or a set then it gives them a chance of hitting a full house. In any of those scenarios, my opponent has less than a 20% chance of hitting it, and I need to make it not worth it for those folks to keep playing.

# Raise pot (~15k): probably a good option - for Villian2 and SB that's all-in, which they're probably not willing to risk on a draw, but definitely might be willing to risk with 2-pair or a set (which would be very good for me since I have either of those pretty well crushed). However, if Villian1 calls (which he seems to be prone to doing) and the river card is a 3,7,T,A, or a spade, he'll probably be able to take the pot away from me with an all-in bet. If none of those outs fall on the river, he'll obviously have missed, and I won't get any more money out of him. Keep in mind he's got position on me, so if I'm pretty sure I've won on the river, I need to either bet, or check and hope that he bets (and he seems to be playing pretty passively, which means he probably won't bet, and will probably fold if I bet more on the river).

# Raise all-in: puts max pressure to fold on Villian1, and also vastly increases the pot size if Villian1 comes along. My guess is that he'll fold to a shove bet, or else he'll turn over 2-pair or a set, which I currently have crushed. Although I want him to fold, there's an upside if he calls: if everyone calls, the pot becomes about 60k - however, each of my 3 opponents could have a different draw against me - someone could have a set of 7s, someone could have 2-pair, someone could have a flush draw. If any of those hit, then that player is taking the entire pot. However, if Villian1 calls my shove, then he and I have a side-pot which I am most likely going to win.

# So, obviously I'm raising. Let's recap the "how-much question:

# If I raise pot, then we end up having a pretty big pot (somewhere between 30-60k) - if no outs hit then I'm going to win the pot, but it's extremely unlikely that I'll get any more money out of Villian1, and Villian2 and SB will already be all-in

# If I raise all-in, then hopefully I get Villian1 out of the equation, and even if I don't we have a big side pot. In the likely event that I win the whole thing, it also increases my stack to more than 100k, which would put me pretty close to the chip lead in the tournament.

# Sorted. All-in it is!

Nate raises to t44629 (All-In), Villian1 raises to t61675 (All-In), Villian2 calls t15416 (All-In), 1 fold

# Again, not exactly what I expected! But, since everybody's all in, let's turn over the cards:

Nate turns over 8, J (flush, Ace high) (80.95% to win).

Villian1 turns over A, A (three of a kind, Aces) (16.67% to win).

Villian2 turns over 7, 7 (three of a kind, sevens) (2.38% to win).

#At this point I'm pretty proud of myself, and relieved that nobody turned over a better flush. I am, however, astounded at the donktacular play of Villian1. Limping UTG with AA? Checking after the flop after hitting a set, with 4 players and a flush draw on the board? Really?

#According to my handy odds calculator, I now have an 81% chance of winning this. Any card that pairs the board gives Villian1 a better hand than me, but as you can see the odds are definitely against that. Poor Villian2 is really SOL - the only card that can give him the win is the last 7 in the deck, otherwise he's done.

River: (t116124) 7 (3 players, 3 all-in)

#Ouch.

Total pot: t116124

Results:

Nate had 8, J (flush, Ace high).

Villian1 had A, A (full house, Aces over sevens).

Villian2 had 7, 7 (four of a kind, sevens).

Outcome: Villian1 won t49426, Villian2 won t66698, Nate is out

I started this as a bad-beat story, but then thought that I might as well turn it into a "here's what I was thinking" sort of post. Writing these actually helps me organize my thoughts and analyze my game a little bit, so it's worth it to take the time once in a while. So, a couple of final thoughts:

1) For this one, I'm very happy with the way I played it. If presented with the exact same scenario after the turn, I hope that I would make the exact same all-in raise. If you want to enjoy the game, then you need to be able to say "I made the best play, and if I ended up in the exact same situation again, I'd do it the exact same way. Unfortunately, there is also a big element of luck, and in this case it went against me."

2) WTF is up with fools limping in w/ AA? This is like the 4th or 5th time I've seen this lately. Funnily enough, I've seen the aces get cracked every time except the two times it's been me on the receiving end of the AA limp. Add to that Villian1's lack of post-flop betting / raising, and you realize that you just lost your entire stack and gave the chip lead to a truly awful player. That stings far worse than the bad beat...

Encryption

2010-09-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

This article caught my eye. I could go on about this at length, but I can boil it down to two points:

1) If you create a backdoor for the "good guys" to access something of value, then it's only a matter of time before it's used by some "bad guys". The time it will take for this to be compromised is inversely proportional to the value of the information. Considering how many corporate secrets are on Blackberries, I'd say it wouldn't take very long (although such a breach might not make the news, or even be discovered at all).

2) Anybody with any brains or resources is going to come up with his/her own way to encrypt communication rather than relying on a Blackberry / Skype / etc. One nice thing about modern cryptography is that you don't need to be an expert in it to use it effectively. To put it another way, the people you're hoping to catch here are the subset of criminals who know that they _should_ use encryption, but don't know that the product they're using has a built-in backdoor. Personally I think that's probably a small subset of criminals, but maybe that's just me being naive.

This is completely ignoring the surety that any such backdoor will be abused by the guvmint, of course, but when I start going down that road I sound like I should be wearing a tinfoil hat.

--Nate

More Android fun and frustration

2010-08-24T01:45:00.000-07:00

Ever since I bought a bike, I've been taking rides through the city when the weather is nice: it's a great way to burn off a few beers' worth of calories, while also getting some sun and seeing some parts of the city that I wouldn't otherwise see. Although there are many streets that are a bit dangerous on a bike, Munich is extremely bike-friendly, and there's almost always a pleasant, safe, and scenic route to get just about anywhere.

Android now has an awesome Navigation system that gives turn-by-turn directions. It's theoretically got biking directions (although that's not available here in Munich yet). So, I figure, an obviously great implementation of this tool would be the following:

1) Go to Google Maps and cross-reference it with the Munich bike path map (http://maps.muenchen.de/radlstadtplan_2009/radlstadtplan_2009.html?str=Marienpl.&num=8)

2) Plan out a nice scenic route for the day that utilized bike paths as much as possible, and goes through one or two parks, monuments, or whatever.

3) Export the route in Google Maps via one of the many methods available

4) Pop it into the nav system, pop in one of my headphones, and go!

Instead, there's virtually no integration, which means that I either have to memorize my route (or else keep popping out my phone and double-check my location on the way), or else utilize the default Navigation routes, which always go through the dangerous, ugly, car-priority streets.

Off the top of my head, I can think of many applications for this tie-in:

--When going to your friend's new place, he can send you a route of the best way to get there.

--You're going to a picnic in the park, and you want to send your friends the best route to the closest parking lot.

--You want to publish some of the best walks or bike rides in your favorite cities.

--You found a great shortcut in town and want to share it with all your friends who regularly have to drive through the same area.

Or whatever. What confuses me is that this functionality has got to be really, really easy for Google to build in; the hard part is figuring out the route, and that part's already done! The Nav software only needs to shout out the directions - shouldn't that be easy?

Anybody else find this to be a maddening lack of obvious, simple functionality?

Heading back home

2010-08-04T00:26:00.001-07:00

So, I know I've indicated this is probably happening before, but now it's certain: we're going back home to NYC.

The short backstory: Clau's company purchased another large company. This other large company focuses pretty much on one product and is not nearly as diversified as Clau's company. The product that this other company makes is the same product on which the Munich office focuses. Therefore, the decision was made to consolidate the Munich office with this company's HQ in England. Technically, the Munich office will stay, but it will become a "satellite" office, meaning a very small office that does niche work; definitely not a healthy place for Clau to be in her career.

We thought long and hard about all the possibilities, but it really came down to this; moving here, although personally healthy for us, turned out to be a career killer for me. I've been pretty unhappy in my job, mostly because it's so obvious that it's not going anywhere; I only stayed in it for a couple of reasons that had nothing to do with the work itself; although that worked out for the best, I wouldn't do it again if I had the chance.

So, when Clau found out that she was going to have to move somewhere, she started steering the ship towards New York. She got the official offer last week - timeframe is looking like late October.

I have mixed feelings about it; we've finally made some good friends here, and we actually had a solid month of good weather, which allowed me to appreciate just how beautiful the city is. I'll definitely miss it. I've learned enough German to have a somewhat interesting conversation. I just got my German driver's license. We bought a relatively expensive kitchen, closets, appliances, and television - we really committed to staying here, and now we can't. So, we're sad to be going, but if I have to leave here, then my first choice of destination would be back to NY, so I guess it could be worse.

We have some other stuff to sort out: details of the relocation, Clau's green card, etc. But, at this point, I'd say it's a done deal: we're moving back home!

Android in the enterprise

2010-06-16T09:46:00.001-07:00

One of the main reasons I bought my new phone was that it natively supports Exchange, but the sad thing is that there is not currently a single Android phone on the market that any corporate security department worth their salt would allow.
Corporations don't care about the devices per se - what they care about is the potentially valuable inside information that may be on that device. If a thief / corporate spy / whatever gets access to the phone, the data on it needs to be protected. To that end, the _minimum_ requirements to allow a phone to hold corporate data would be:

1) PIN or password protection that can reasonably expected to not be broken. Logical requirements for that are:

--PIN / password existence and complexity enforcement

--After a predefined number of failed attempts, the device either self-wipes or permanently locks.

2) Ability to remotely issue a remote wipe (in case an employee quits on bad terms / is fired but he doesn't know it yet / whatever)

3) Encryption of all data on the device, so that if it physically falls into the wrong hands, the thief(s) won't be able to access the data, even if given a long time to do so.

The new FroYo build is supposedly able to do all of these, except for the data encryption. If you were in charge of security for your enterprise, would you allow users to use a device with no encryption?

Blackberrys have supported all these for a long, long time. iPhone 3G supports it (although apparently not all that well), pretty much any new Windows Mobile smartphone supports it. There is currently no single Android model that supports it (AFAIK).

I find this really strange. Considering that plenty of enterprises would love to bring Android devices into the fold, it's weird that nobody yet makes a handset with hardware encryption. I still have no idea why this is.

Google feature request

2010-06-11T00:45:00.001-07:00

I really wish there was a way to exclude sites from search results in Google preferences. The site that's been royally pissing me off lately is codeweblog (not gonna post a link here), which (as far as I can tell) is just a site that has indexed a boatload of tech articles and sites and has created "pages" for just about every combination of keywords found on those sites. Let's say, for example, that I'm searching for a scheduling library in Android, and I happen to know that quartz is the most popular scheduler for java. Search for "android quartz classes" in google, and the first hit is...yeah, those guys.
These codeweblog guys aren't the first ones to have this idea, but they've certainly refined it nicely; furthermore, they could claim that their site isn't just a search honeypot (which it is!), and is providing a useful indexing service to the tech community (which it isn't). They would be lying, but the site looks juuust enough like something useful to be in the gray area.
Anyway, why can't I just decide that I never want to see anything from that site? The above situation is only one of many that I can think of off the top of my head why I might want to do this. Sure, I can add in "-site:xxxx" to all my Google searches, but...c'mon.

Anybody see any reason why this is not a good idea?

Eurovision 2010 -> cheese overload

2010-06-03T04:07:00.000-07:00

So Clau and I hosted a little party to watch the Eurovision 2010 contest. About 20 or so people showed up, almost entirely women and gay men - there was one other straight man there and he discretely slipped out about halfway through. The liquor we had purchased for the event was gone in about an hour and we resorted to drinking most everything else in the apartment. Thankfully the ladies weren't into single malt or we might have had a very expensive night indeed.
Before moving here, I had no idea the Eurovision contest existed, but it's apparently quite a big deal, at least amongst women and gays. The voting period (SMS only IIRC) lasts 10 minutes. 10 minutes!!! The way the votes worked was pretty interesting, but too complex to be worth explaining - suffice it to say that they're constantly tweaking the balance between the judges in each country and the general public.
Anyway, Germany won by a landslide, so it was a pretty happy crowd. I woke up with a fierce hangover the next day but it was totally worth it. If possible, I'll be watching this every year from now on.

The obligatory YouTube links - the ones from BBC don't have the full performances but you get the idea, and they're the best sound you'll find on the net.

The winner - this song has been playing non-stop on MTV for the last couple of months, but the Germans don't seem to be sick of it yet. Admittedly it's pretty catchy, but it gets old after 50 or so listens:

Yes, she is in fact imitating a cockney accent. And she is German - from Hannover, which is the German equivalent of Liverpool. I've included the actual music video because the contest performance was pretty crap (although it still won).

"Most awesome mind-blowingly sterotypically Euro" award goes to Moldovia. Epic sax man FTW.

My top picks were Turkey and Romania, which came in at #2 and #3, respectively. I don't feel particularly good about myself for mirroring Europe's choices. I thought Turkey had the best song, plus of course major bonus points for the senseless robo-hottie. Sorry about the disabled embedding but it's by far the best full recording of the thing.

Romania's entry - I actually find this kinda catchy, plus I have a weakness for hot eastern European girls in form-fitting outfits (but really, who doesn't?). The live performance was, sadly, pretty tame; of course that's all relative - from those last 2 clips you can tell that the bar for Euro theatrics was set pretty high.

The "instant gay club hit" songs - Albania and Iceland.

And many others that just sorta sucked. You can see all the live performances at http://www.youtube.com/user/EurovisionESCTV if you want, but trust me these are the highlights.

more iTunes pain

2010-05-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

One unfortunate side-effect of purchasing this phone is that it's made me angry at Apple all over again. At this point we're an Apple-only house (well, not counting the Windows work laptops or the Linux Mac Mini quietly cranking 24/7 in the closet) and so I've been using iTunes for everything. Honestly, I think iTunes is a piece of crap, but there was no other piece of software that was easy to use with our iPods and my wife's iPhone. For a little while, it was possible to forget what a huge racket that whole iPod / iPhone / iTunes proprietary shit is, but throw one unsupported device into the mix and you're reminded that Apply designed everything from day 1 to lock out other devices and software apps. I mean, seriously, think about it. Grrrrr.

Unfortunately, there's no good solution - I tried out doubleTwist (which looked promising) but it turned out to be a memory hog to the point where it's unusable on my lowly Mini with 1G of RAM. I found I was able to drag & drop from iTunes to my phone, but that's not very sexy or easy to use.

The solution I ended up making up was less than optimal, but somewhat functional. I already have an iPod that gets everything synced, and I didn't want to mess with it, so I made a playlist in iTunes called "Android" that contains everything I want on my phone. I wrote a Perl script to parse the iTunes XML file to get the info about songs and playlists, and sync the songs in the Android playlist to the phone, then re-write the other playlists with only the songs that are also in the Android playlists and sync those to the phone as well. Overall, it works pretty well, but the fact that I had to spend a few hours doing it is going to bug me for a while...

New phone!

2010-05-09T01:40:00.000-07:00

So, I've been totally craving an Android phone ever since Google had the first apps contest - after much waiting and lusting, I finally gave in a bought an HTC Desire. The deciding factor was the ability to sync with Exchange, which (after jumping through some corporate hoops, of course) will give me the ability to drop my Blackberry and only carry one mobile device with me. The idea of playing with a (relatively) open platform was incredibly tempting, plus the devices were starting to get to the point where they were about able to compete with the iPhone on sexiness.

After getting it, I'm falling in love with it pretty quickly. The thing is more like a little computer than a phone - the number of apps it's got, the ability to actually multitask and (for example) listen to music while I study flashcards is pretty nice. I really like the multiple workspaces, which fits my Unix geek heritage nicely (the first time I saw CDE in 1998, I thought to myself "why doesn't every computer have multiple workspaces?") - the only problem is that I feel this compulsion to put _something_ in every workspace, so I've been poking around at what's out there and trying to accept the fact that I may not have every workspace filled up.

Other things that I like are the predictive text - I don't think I'll ever be able to type as fast on this thing as I can on my BB, but with the predictive / correcting text I'm getting reasonably close. Maybe when Swype comes out for real, I'll be able to pick up some speed.

Overall my biggest complaint is that now, for at least a while, I'm going to be terrified that my phone will get lost, stolen, or destroyed.

The bad things:

The screen is tough to see in direct sunlight, which was not a problem with my Blackberry. The various widgets, while cool, aren't entirely perfect - for example, there's a "social" widget that combines Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr(?) into one monolithic stream - very cool, except that a lot of the Facebook pieces seem to lose authentication, or for whatever reason just choke - so, for example, I might see that a friend has posted a new photo album, but when I want to look at it, I get the message that there are no photos. Weird.
I think that since this is a new phone, and the shiny newest version of Android, some of the apps in the market don't work right - some have oddball issues, some just flat out don't work. For instance, I got a flashcards program that looked really promising, but couldn't find any of the cards I tried to upload (which made it rather useless). It had many users and not one complaint about that issue, which makes me figure it's a specific problem to my hardware.
I can't find a nice, clean-looking media player - the one that ships with it is craptacular in terms of interface, so I wanted something a little different. Tried Mixzing, which I really liked but for some reason kept playing the same songs over and over (again, I think it's that whole new phone/OS thing), finally settled on Tunewiki, which is pretty good but at the same time not what I want - truth be told, what I really want is something that looks and feels like an iPod.
My biggest gripe - no VOIP apps. Well, there is sipDroid, but that's only useful if you've got similarly geeky friends with SIP phones, or if your Skype friends don't mind accepting calls from unknown users. No Skype app, and no VOIP hooks for Google Voice. Since Google bought Gizmo5, I can only assume that this is in the works, but so far no joy. Man, it would be nice to have a way for folks in the U.S. to reach me without dialing a long-distance number.

Other than that, loving it - this will definitely keep me geeking out for a while.

Travel decisions

2010-04-17T07:52:00.000-07:00

So, as everyone knows, most of Europe is closed to air travel and the ground-based travel options are overflowing trying to compensate. As it happens, my flight is broken into two pieces; Lisbon and Munich. Right now flights to Lisbon are still going, but Lisbon is understandably a zoo since it's one of the few mainland European cities that you can still fly to from the Americas.
So, what to do - take the flight to Lisbon then go through what is sure to be a very unpleasant experience getting from there to Munich? Or just wait it out?
Since I'm in Rio I think I'll be going with the second option. Really, really wish I'd brought my laptop to Brazil with me, though...

Die Ärtzte

2010-03-30T22:39:00.000-07:00

One of the best ways to learn a foreign language is to try to get into local music. Germany doesn't have a ton of great music, but there are some gems. My buddy and countryman Steve gave me the "Bäst of die Ärtzte" CD for my birthday last year and I'm actually really getting into them - lots of fun and really my kind of music, also of course it helps me learn German.
One of my favorites, below, partly because it's one of the first ones I understood (more or less):

Anybody else think these guys looks awfully dour considering the happiness of the song? Then again, that's another reason I like this song so much; it's so out of character for this band.
Another one of my faves, which is more typical of them:

I'm learning German!

Brazil in t-minus...

2010-03-29T01:12:00.000-07:00

So Clau's in Chicago, attending some bigwig corporate thing - she's going to be there at least 3 times this year, including for our anniversary (sniff). She also got to go to NY, which makes me very jealous indeed.
Heading for Brazil on Thurs morn, Clau has a meeting there so we figure it's a chance to see her family for half-price. Plus, some friends are getting married, and hey, while we're down there, may as well. Plus, I finally get to see the south!
Down to 85kg, just in time to pig out on churrasco, caipirinhas, escondidinhos, and whatever specialties they have in the south. Not like I've been working all that hard lately, but I'm totally ready to relax.

Latest public service / safety campaign

2010-03-11T01:52:00.000-08:00

So it seems there's always at least one PSA-type message being pushed in the city at any given time - I mean, in Bavaria there's always some "do you have a drinking problem? Call XXX"-type messages, but then again it's Bavaria, where until pretty recently it was socially acceptable to drink beer with breakfast.
So, the latest? "Know your limit!". My favorite one of these:

For the two kids on the left, it says: Tonight she loses all her inhibitions...and later he posts her naked on the Net.
I like it how that ad would never fly in the U.S., because it would imply that when a drunk girl's naked picture is posted on the Internet, the girl herself might share some of the blame for posing naked for a guy who would post the pictures on the Net. Although, to be fair, the Germans may be interpreting it as "he gets so drunk, he actually posted that girl's naked pictures on the Net!".
The others are more somber, but thankfully this is the one that's posted all around my neighborhood.

Oh, and another one that amused me - this one an ad for a newspaper insert with parenting tips:

(Translation: "What now, dear parents?")
I'm guessing that one might also face some opposition in my home country.
Gots to love Germany....

Stupid Mac Mini

2010-01-17T13:06:00.001-08:00

The hard drive died in my mini this week, I ended up spending almost the entire day Sunday replacing it. The physical replacement took a couple of hours (not particularly difficult, just tedious getting around all the screws and crap), then the process of rebuilding and restoring took even longer than that. I couldn't get a decent rescue disk to boot on the Mini for some reason, so I ended up doing it the hard way: installed Linux fresh on it, then added the dump/restore utilities and moved the latest dumpfiles over to the O.S. disk, then booted on the live Ubuntu disk and did a full restore from there. While I was at it I updated the O.S. since it had been about a year since the last time I did any updates (when you have no KVM you tend to develop a "if it ain't broke..." kind of attitude).
Given the relatively low crunching power of the mini (and the even lower amount of power I require), it's probably
So, kind of a wasted day - after replacing the HD I made some stew. Clau and I have both been fighting various ailments since we got back from Brazil, plus we both packed on some serious pounds over there, so we're going for light soups.

Resolutions

2010-01-03T07:16:00.000-08:00

So, just for the record, NY resolutions this year:
1) Better health. I say this almost every year, but this year I mean it. I've put on about 10 pounds since we move to Germany and I want to get back to my pre-move weight. Ideally, I'd actually get into shape to the point where I'd be happy taking diving photos of myself in my swimsuit, but I'll settle for losing 10 pounds.
2) Practice more German - I haven't formed much of a relationship with my German colleagues, mostly due to the isolation of my office and my inability to speak German. Now that I can speak some more German, I want to make an effort to reach out to them and make some more / better connections at work.

Let's see how it works out...

Enjoying Rio

2010-01-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

So, Clau and I are here for another week or so - it's been really great to actually have some time to just relax as well as see all the family and friends. Brazil, and Rio in particular, is really changing rapidly before our eyes. For one thing, there's an obvious explosive growth in the middle class, and the number of really, really impoverished people is decreasing. Everything is now considerably more expensive, especially considering the exchange rate, and you can just sort of see the place becoming more prosperous. The mayor and governor of Rio seem to be collaborating on cleaning up the city, and they seem to be taking a page out of Giuliani's book, in particular by focusing on some smaller-level crime. There are endless police checkpoints to make sure folks are wearing seatbelts, and checkpoints for drunk driving. The police have lots of shiny new equipment and kevlar. There are a slew of new laws (and old laws which are finally being enforced) regarding the beaches designed to make them more sterile and tourist-friendly (no umbrellas with beer labels, no glass, no dogs, etc etc. It's actually quite nice.

Germans are weird

2009-12-02T02:59:00.000-08:00

Had a friend over for dinner last night, she turned us on to this popular German viral video. I mean, I find it pretty amusing, but she really really seemed to enjoy it (even after having seen it many times). The funny thing is, she's got a pretty good sense of humor, but I think there's some other level of humor that strikes a chord with Germans.

The words are something like:
baby shark, doo doo, doodoo doodoo, baby shark, doo doo...
little shark.....
big shark.....
white shark....
girl swims....
shark sees....
girl sees....
shark attacks....
girl swims....
shark attacks....
girl screams...
shark eats, yum yum....
bad shark!

Yes, my German classes are really paying off.

But lest you think that only lame things come out of Germany, remember that somewhere in this country lives the awesomeness that is the Techno Viking.

The Google Phone

2009-11-30T01:37:00.000-08:00

So, apparently Google is going to come out with their own phone - personally I've seen this coming for a while now, and I've got some ideas as to how it would work.
Actually, I can't say I really predicted Google coming out with their own device - I figured that they would only come out with their own phone if they couldn't get partners to agree to supporting their vision on the Android platform; since Google's building their own device, I'm guessing they couldn't.
So, how will it work? From a user perspective, here's how I think it'll go.
I want to talk to my friend, John Doe, and I'll just dial "John Doe" on my phone. The GPhone will automatically see if he's on Google Chat / Voice, and if so directly connect me to him that way - entirely via IP - if I'm on a wifi point then it'll use that, otherwise it'll use my data carrier. If John isn't on some kind of IP-enabled system, then it'll dial him by regular old phone, but of course doing it in a Skype / Calling-Card kind of way, using VOIP to get to the closest POTS switch and then dialing from there. If I want to dial a phone number directly without going through this username mumbo-jumbo, then I'll just dial it like a normal phone - the difference is that I'll be paying for that, either as a direct payment or by using up minutes in my plan. My guess is that Google will make calls to a persons Google ID free of charge, even if they're really doing some Google Voice mumbo-jumbo behind the scenes.
From a receiving standpoint, the phone will do the same thing - I'll have a Google Voice phone number, which will be tied into my Google ID - when someone calls my number or my ID, that'll get piped to my phone. I don't know if Google will charge for minutes when someone calls my number instead of my ID, but I suspect they might in order to further persuade folks to keep it all within the Google IP universe.
This phone's going to mark yet another change in the way we view communications, one that I think we're ready for. Not that long ago, we had to remember (or write down) people's phone numbers. Once cell phones came along, we slowly adjusted to not needing to remember numbers - I don't know about everyone else, but I haven't memorized a phone number in quite a few years (with the exception of my own or my wife's, and that's just so I can give it to people quickly). Over time, the association of numbers to people has even started to fade; I mean, if I think about it, I know that a person's entry in my phone is tied to a number, but I don't actually _think_ about it - if I send an SMS, I just send it to that person. I think part of Google's vision is to capitalize on this thought trend, and get people to stop caring about phone numbers entirely. If you get a person's phone number, you can call their phone; get their Google ID and you can IM (GTalk), send them email (GMail), see their public calendar (GCal), see where they physically are (Latitude), and, or course, call them on the phone - why would you ever bother to get a phone number again?
The only think that I wonder is where Google will find a carrier who is willing to support this device - after all, voice calls are the bread-and-butter of mobile telecoms, and SMS is the icing on the cake - the Google phone would destroy all of that. In order for this to work, Google needs to partner with a carrier that's willing to give folks a pure data plan that's going to have a _lot_ of bytes shoved through it, for a price that more than competes with a traditional plan - what carrier in the U.S. is going to willingly sign up for that? I'm guessing not Verizon, or else this would already be standard on the Droid (OK, maybe not "standard", but the phone would at least have some apps to replicate the functionality I'm talking about). Or, maybe Google has some plan to shift most of the data burden to something else that they control? Only time will tell, but expect we're going to find out RSN.

yay new meme!

2009-11-20T04:29:00.001-08:00

I don't know why this didn't become an Internet pastime sooner. Start with the self portrait of 18th-Centure painter Joseph Ducreux:

Man that's a pimpin' pose? Why not slap some modern pimpin' lyrics on top, such as "I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one". Or, even better:

Loving it! Check here for the whole shebang.
And, of course, some folks just have to cross the streams, thus creating a delightful meme mashup:

Dumbing down my poker

2009-11-20T02:44:00.000-08:00

I've been on a very bad run of poker lately. It's been impossible to get a read on anybody. Every time I get some playable cards, I encounter raises and re-raises and re-re-raises. Every time I have a monster, everyone folks to my modest raise. My bluffs fail: I go through a lot of trouble to set up a tight image, but then everyone calls my raises, no matter how infrequent they are. Every bet / semi-bluff / bluff I make gets called or raised, despite my telling a beautiful, well-crafted story about exactly what I have. Nobody else's bets make sense; they're folding good hands and pushing all-in with nothing. Add to this a general card-deadness and lack of hitting draws, and you have the recipe for a very bad losing streak.
After about a month of failing, I read this post, which gave me a moment of clarity: I'm thinking too deeply. I'm trying to represent a particular hand or image to folks who aren't even paying attention. When I make that check-call with two hearts on the board, then bet big after the third heart comes in, folks aren't paying attention. Conversely, when I over-bet the pot on a board with two to a flush, folks are calling it with flush draws. Basically, I'm giving everyone too much credit. I mean, in a sense, I knew this already, but it hadn't really registered. So, now I'm back to basics: tight play, sit around and watch the other folks until I get a really good sense of what level they're thinking on. The only problem with this is that the donkeys' money tends to go to other folks who are willing to make questionable calls earlier on in the game. Since making this adjustment, things are going much better. Oddly enough, I now seem to also be getting better cards in better positions - or, maybe now I'm just calling at the right time, after taking the time to carefully analyze how my opponents are playing. At any rate, I'm enjoying it again, and that's what's important. Seriously considering heading down to Salzburg or up to the Spielbanken casino one of these weekends for a session.

The bank / tax debacle

2009-11-20T01:34:00.000-08:00

The problem with not writing for a long time is that after awhile so many things build up that you have no idea where to start. There's life developments, job developments, tech developments, poker developments. I guess I may as well start with the life developments, then see what else happens.
So, let's start with my latest FML moment. A bit of backstory:
After I transferred to Munich, someone forgot to mention to payroll that I was no longer working in the U.S. As a result, I was getting paid in both the U.S. and in Germany. I figured this out pretty quickly and did the appropriate thing: I notified H.R. I pestered H.R. after each U.S. paycheck until they told me (nicely): it's being dealt with, don't worry, now piss off. A month after that, I told my boss, who really set off the alarms and fixed the issue.
Since I'm a responsible person, I figured that my employer would eventually figure out the mistake and ask for the money back. The money had been going into a bank account in California, which had remained our principal bank account even after moving to New York, and had been used to pay all our bills / mortgage / etc in the U.S. After moving to Germany, the bank account never got used, so I kept the money in it (along with some savings that was there before the debacle started), untouched, waiting for my employer to ask for it back. See how responsible I am? I didn't get any indication from them, but then again it's a very large company, and I assumed - no, I KNEW - that someone, eventually, would notice, and I wanted to be able to say I did the right thing and even tell them "just take it right back from the same bank account". Flash forward to 6 months later...
Right before taking our vacation to the U.S., we (Clau and I) realized that there was a potential problem with our ATM cards for our bank in New York. As a backup procedure, I grabbed the ATM card for the California bank and went online to transfer some money from the savings account to the checking account (again, to avoid touching the mistaken payment money). To my horror, I discovered that both the checking and savings accounts were empty. Heart racing, I called up the CA bank and asked what had happened. After quite a few phone transfers, it was determined that the great state of California had seized ALL my money for reasons unknown.
Some phone calls later to the CA FTB (franchise tax board), I was told that I had not filed a CA tax return for 2005, which was the year we sold our house in CA, after a year of renting it out and deciding it wasn't worth it. Apparently, if you sell a house in CA, you are required to file a CA tax return for that year, regardless of your state of residence for the year. Ironically, Clau and I filed our taxes with H&R block that year for that EXACT reason: we didn't know what we were required / supposed to do, and we wanted to make sure there were no screwups.
(Side note: H&R block are a bunch of idiots, set up for people who are too stupid / lazy to fill out a 1040. Don't give them anything more complicated than that or they WILL screw it up. They supposedly offer a warantee that will reimburse you if you get audited and found wanting; I'd be curious to see if that warantee has EVER been successfully used. Also, their "rapid refund" service is just a patently evil scheme designed to further screw folks in need to the wall. In retrospect, I should have just fronted the cash and time and gone to a real accountant. Lesson learned.)
Getting back to the story, apparently someone in cash-strapped California had noticed the house sale from 2005 and decided that CA was entitled to taxes on the SALE PRICE of the house, which of course added up to a boatload of money. So, they took all the money from my bank account (for which the bank charged ME $100, but they were at least kind enough to subtract that from the bank accounts before giving the remainder to the CA FTB).
The folks at the CA FTB were surprisingly nice, and cheerfully told me that all I had to do was file a retroactive tax return for 2005, and they would happily send me a reimbursement to my address (in Germany!) after receiving my return. Needless to say, I filed the return post-haste and sent it certified receipt mail from CA while I was there.
What the CA FTB failed to mention is that they take their sweet time with retroactive returns; I've called once every two weeks and each time the response is "we haven't even opened it yet. Check back in a month." Somehow, I have a feeling that if there had been a check enclosed in the return, they might have gotten to it sooner.
I really don't like this, of course, but then again, the money was just sitting there waiting for my employer to eventually ask for it, so in this case I'll survive. Of course, imagine if that wasn't the case? What if that were still my main bank account, as it was when Clau and I lived in New York? We would be all kinds of screwed - Clau's salary wasn't enough to cover all the bills - we wouldn't have been able to make our mortgage payment (ironically to the same bank that couldn't hand our money to the FTP fast enough). All our family and friends would be receiving candy bars for Christmas gifts. Seriously - how can the CA FTB do that and get away with it? Particularly when everyone agrees that I ultimately should be receiving the money back?
So, that was bad enough: here comes the kicker. A week or so ago I get an email from one of our neighbors in our old apartment building in NY, saying that a FedEx package had come for me. Turns out that my employer had, after all, figured out quite a while ago that they had been paying me twice, and had been sending letters to my OLD address (despite my having updated my address in all applicable areas in my company) asking for the money back. The FedEx envelope contained a "final warning before collections" letter. And now, of course, the money is not there. F.M.L.
For those who might be concerned, it's all gonna work out OK. My company's payroll dept has been really nice about the whole thing, especially after confirming that they had, in fact, been sending the letters to the wrong address. I was also quick to point out that, had they sent the original notices to the correct address, or via email, or given me a phone call (I still have the same extension), they would have received the money. Now, they just have to wait. It has, however, cost me a lot of time, which fortunately I have an abundance of lately. More on that in subsequent posts.

CPAN Module

2009-10-19T00:56:00.000-07:00

You may recall my earlier post complaining that Amazon has not created a Perl module to sign AWS REST queries, so I ended up writing my own. It was a good exercise for many reasons; writing your own module gives you a better overall understanding of how the whole process works, and of course helps much later on if you need to debug something. Also, I'm ashamed to say this, but I was never a big fan of OO programming before - generally if I wrote a module, it was going to export functions, because I was just used to my way of thinking (just write functions, export them, and use them with arguments when required). Since I'm not a trained developer, I saw no reason to force a paradigm shift upon myself. Writing a module, of course, forced me re-write my AWS code in an OO way, and now I see the light, or at least I see how for many things that's a better way to go.
Anyway, I wrote this thing a couple of months ago, and I figured it was only a matter of time until Amazon released an official mod to sign requests, but they never did. When I was in NY, Matt encouraged me to submit it to CPAN - if nothing else, it's a resume-builder, plus I'm so dependent on CPAN for everything, it would be nice to give something back. So, I cleaned it up, added a method to create SOAP signatures (since I figured that at least some people would want that), and submitted it to CPAN. Actually getting that module into CPAN, however, was a lot of work: besides creating an account, I had to submit an official request to have the module added, then I had to make sure it was stable and portable, plus I had to write it the "right" way and have it vetted by the CPAN testers. I had no idea it was so much work! But, at the end of the day, I got it in, and until Amazon decides to write their own, I guess I'm the official owner of the Net::Amazon::AWSSign mod. W00t!

Updates

2009-10-19T00:28:00.000-07:00

First things first - the vacation was awesome, albeit brief. Clau and I spent as much time as we could enjoying New York, I went to California and Nevada and Clau went to Canada to visit Tatiz. Got to see Adrian, Dottie, and Alistair in Berkeley, then Ted and I went to Reno for two debaucherous days - I had a really, really bad day at the poker table, and although a little voice in my head kept saying "Just leave the table, already" I couldn't really let it go, since I only had two days there. So, not a good gambling time, but nonetheless we still had a great time. After that, went back to Oakland, spent a couple of days seeing Dad, Ania, Neil, and Cora, then back to NYC. Sam had a b-day party with a "white" theme - white clothes, white food, white sangria, white russians, white-themed music. Overall I'd say it was a tremendous success, and also an opportunity to see all the lawyers and other awesome folks that Sam and Matt are friends with. After that, saw our old neighbors in Chelsea and wandered around, then on Monday we flew back. Like I said, far too short, but very sweet. Matt and Sam were wonderful hosts, and hopefully it will be less than another year before we see them again.
Since we got back, I've been having some serious jet lag - can't seem to get my body back to Germany time. I haven't been able to get to sleep until 3am most nights, and waking up at 8 is a bit rough. Slept in till noon on Saturday before getting up to run errands, which in retrospect was probably a good thing, since we went out to Bootie Munich that night. We had a fantastic time, but I have to say the DJs and mashups were not as good as I had hoped. The DJs were all German, which meant that there were lots of mashups with bits of popular German songs, which I actually dug, but they seemed to all be keen on playing lots of recent stuff from German mashup artists. As Pete (the guy who turned me on to Bootie Munich) said "I've got nothing against the new stuff, but I also want to hear the good stuff."
On the work front, we recently had a bit of an organizational shake-up, and the new man in charge of my area (who I like and respect a lot) is doing a re-org, but is taking a little while to get a more detailed picture of what everybody does and how some other folks can better work together. So, right now we're in a holding pattern: no new projects, and since we didn't have anything we were currently working on, it means that we're all taking the time to do documentation and close loose ends.
In semi-related news, I authored my first CPAN module. For the sake of separation of tech- and life-related posts, I'll make that a separate post.

Busy week

2009-09-23T06:28:00.001-07:00

One of Clau's friends visited us last weekend, we walked all over the friggin' place showing him Munich, and on Sunday we went to Oktoberfest. Wow, is that a lot of people and stuff, huuuuuge tents crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with drunk smoking Europeans. I can, however, make a few observations about Oktoberfest:

The Dirndl is a remarkably flattering item - seriously, just about every girl looks really good in them.
Oktoberfest beer is really, really tasty and also quite strong.
Extra-salty fried chicken is one of the best drunk foods ever.
Germans have a tremendous amount of songs that they bust out for Wiesn, and never listen to for the rest of the year. Certain songs, like "Country Roads" (yes, the one by John Denver) seem to never go out of style, whilst others may fade over time. The one that I keep hearing over and over is "So a schöener Tag" (a relative newcomer), which is very catchy the first ten or so times you hear it, but loses its charm over the course of the event. As far as I can tell it was a children's song that someone did a more pop-centric remake of, and is now played incessantly - seriously, if you spend more than an hour in a tent, you're going to hear it. Ditto for "Ein Prosit". But at least "Ein Prosit" is short.

Check it out:

You can stop once you hit about 1:45 because it's ALL THE SAME after that.

So anyway, what else this week: I started a German class on Monday - I have class 2x/week, so hopefully I will learn and practice - I still end up in situations where I understand absolutely NOTHING but I can occasionally have basic conversations. My ideal plan is to speak relatively well by the time we decide to leave (or one of our companies makes us an offer we can't refuse to move somewhere else). We'll see how that goes.
Yesterday I went to football match - it's generally fun to see FC Bayern, but they were playing some podunk team in a smaller division, and it was pretty sad. Still, glad I got to go since the FC Bayern games are generally sold out months in advance.
Today, another German lesson.
Tomorrow, TWO Oktoberfest dates - one for my work and one that we bought tickets for ages ago - not sure which one I'm going to go to - or, theoretically, I may end up trying to do both, which would probably be a VERY bad idea. But, knowing me, after a couple of Maß I might decide it's a good idea.
Friday we head to Madrid to see our friends Alexis and Luis, who are there on vacation. Yeah, we're totally busting in on someone else's vacation - that's how we roll.

And, of course, in early October it's off to NYC, Reno, Oakland, NYC, back home! Woohoo! Can't wait.

My life is so often like this...

2009-08-30T13:33:00.001-07:00

Amazon gripe

2009-08-18T04:16:00.001-07:00

OK, let me start by saying that I'm a total Amazon fanboy, or to be more specific I'm a total AWS fanboy. They've got some great services out there (queue manager, SDB, S3, EC2) with excellent documentation, and they also have a _lot_ of functionality in their APIs for their store, along with pretty good documentation - my only complaint about the documentation is that sometimes it's pretty tough to find what you need.
Amongst many, many other APIs, AWS has an API to get info for a particular ASIN. Every item in Amazon has an ASIN, which is a unique identifier for that specific product. You can actually just enter it in the search bar if you want to find something quick and you happen to know its ASIN (like, for example, if you want to see the info for "Wang Dang Doodle" by Livin' Blues, just pop B000008652 into the Amazon search field).
Combine this with Musicbrainz's XML Webservice (which often has the ASIN for an album as part of its metadata) and a lot of elbow grease, and you theoretically have a relatively quick way to look up all those one-hit tracks that you ripped or downloaded 10 years ago, before people were concerned about tagging or filename conventions or any of those nuisances.
There are other uses, too; unless the album is quite rare (or the song was only released as a single, as often happens with older tracks), Amazon will probably have a decent-quality picture of the album art. I use iTunes for everything, and one irritating thing about iTunes for me is that when you use iTunes to rip a CD, then get the album art, the album art is stored in iTunes and not in the files themselves. So, if you migrate those albums somewhere else, or (as I have done once or twice), screw up something to the point where you have to delete your whole iTunes DB and rebuild it, the album art is gone. Unacceptable! I want my album art embedded in my files dammit!
So, anyway, I've written a lot of scripts to search and tag songs / albums based on what's available in Musicbrainz and / or Amazon. I've gotten past all the easy ones, and now I'm onto the really weird, hard stuff like Hoots Mon and am having to manually search Amazon / Wikipedia / whatever for just about everything.
Anyway, I digress (seriously!). The point is that I'm a huge fan of AWS, but I'll get to the gripe. AWS recently added a requirement that all queries to AWS be digitally signed with your AWS account secret. I received warning emails for about 2 months before they made the official switch, so I can't say I wasn't warned, although when I skimmed the emails I thought it was only for advertising calls, which makes sense (to prevent abuse).
Now, the process of signing a REST query isn't very difficult, but it's a really big pain in the ass; you have to deconstruct the query, add a timestamp, sanitize it, re-order it, build a hash from it and your secret, base64 the hash, add the hash to the arguments, and re-order it again. Not rocket science, but it still took me a good 2 hours to write subroutines to do it. Which makes me wonder - why on earth doesn't Amazon distribute modules for the main languages (Perl, PHP, Ruby, Java, maybe Python, and whatever the IIS folks are using nowadays), or at least C source or Java byte code to do this? Pretty much every developer who works against Amazon APIs has had to do the exact same thing that I have, and if Amazon changes the signing process, then all of us are going to need to re-write our code. That's ridiculous!
Anyway, I'm writing my own damn Perl module (already have the subroutines, just need to clean it up and make it OO), and if I end up having sufficient free time I'll submit it to CPAN. Even though my code will be crap, maybe someone will use it as a jumping point to make it better. But, I ask again, why the hell hasn't Amazon done this?

Combo locks

2009-08-14T03:01:00.000-07:00

I had a few old Master combination locks lying around and decided to retrieve the combinations as described here. Being a geek, I wrote a script to help me keep track. Using this I was able to get all combos at less than 10 minutes per lock. Of course, it took me a good 20-30 minutes to write the script, but that was more fun than spinning a combination lock.
Also, this is far from an advanced shell script, but the nice thing about it is that it's quick, dirty, and easy. You can actually do a lot with bash very quickly once you get to know it, and one nice thing about bash vs. Perl is that it's really easy to get a gut feeling when bash isn't going to cut it and Perl is the way to go, for example when you need to parse a huge amount of data or do some really complicated regex work.
Anyway, if this helps you, then great, if not then at least it's documented somewhere...

[Edit: sorry if feed readers got this multiple times, I had to fix a couple of typos...]

##########START#############
#!/bin/bash

# Bash script to print out all likely combos for a master combo lock. Rough and ready but it works
# Written by Nate Aiman-Smith (http://staunchtech.blogspot.com). To be run as-is by a non-priviliged user.

## Variables
# One argument - the last number.
# See http://www.fusor.us/lockpick.html for a simple explanation on how to get it
thirdnum=$1

# File to keep track of tried combos. Replace with your preferred place if required
trackfile="/tmp/triednums_$thirdnum"

# Difference between first and second numbers that we'll print out - more than 24 is, in my very limited experience, unlikely.
# With more practice could probably get a better number.
fastdistance=24

## Functions

verify_nums() {
num=$mod
while [ $num -lt 40 ]
do
if [ $num=$thirdnum ]
then return 0
fi
num=`expr $num '+' 4`
done
return 1
}

print_valid_firstnums() {
num=$mod
while [ $num -lt 40 ]
do
echo -n "$num "
num=`expr $num '+' 4`
done
echo
}

print_combos() {
mod=`expr $firstnum '%' 4`
mod=`expr $mod '+' 2`
mod=`expr $mod '%' 4`
num=$mod
while [ $num -lt 40 ]
do
# Swap the two lines if you want to get the _unlikely_ combos...
if check_distance
#if ! check_distance
then echo "$firstnum $num $thirdnum"
fi
num=`expr $num '+' 4`
done
}

# To facilitate, let's try to stick to second numbers that are
# less than $fastdistance away from the first
check_distance() {
secondnum=$num
# Equal numbers always fail
if [ $secondnum -eq $firstnum ]
then return 1
elif [ $secondnum -lt $firstnum ]
then
secondnum=`expr $secondnum '+' 40`
fi
diff=`expr $secondnum '-' $firstnum`
if [ $diff -gt $fastdistance ]
then
return 1
fi
return 0
}

##Main

if [ ! $thirdnum -lt 40 ]
then
echo "invalid number"
exit 1
fi

if [ -f $trackfile ]
then
echo "Found tracking file $trackfile - hit ctrl-C, delete the file, and start over if you want to start fresh"
fi

mod=`expr $thirdnum '%' 4`
for valid in `print_valid_firstnums`
do
if ! grep "^$valid" $trackfile &> /dev/null
then
echo "Combinations for $valid:"
firstnum=$valid
print_combos
echo "Press return when done, hit ctrl-C if you bail"
read blankline
echo $valid >> $trackfile
fi
done
############END################

Multitracking

2009-07-23T01:12:00.000-07:00

One cool thing about youtube is that it's helping lots of folks push the multitracking envelope - like for example I didn't realize that this was possible:

I mean, that kid is REALLY good on all 4 parts.

Or, another one is this:

And while admittedly there are different folks singing, the (18-year old!) kid playing all the instruments is unreal.

More to come later, just been busy with otehr stuff...

Simply Red

2009-05-30T14:36:00.000-07:00

Forgot to write about this - we just got back from the Simply Red concert. I didn't really want to go but I'm glad I did - it was a good concert.
The lead singer looks pretty old but he was absolutely phenomenal - I don't think I've ever sung that good in my life and I doubt I ever will. Every single note was spot on, and he just sounded amazing.
In other news, Clau and I realized that we live in a fantastic location for going to concerts - 20 minutes on the subway and we're there. Nice.

Vacation!

2009-05-30T14:30:00.000-07:00

Finally taking that vacation - we leave for Thailand tomorrow, two glorious weeks of solitude, beach, tropical fruits, and scuba diving. Really, really looking forward to this...

Poker hand on my mind

2009-05-17T12:53:00.000-07:00

OK, just got back from Salzburg, among many other things I went to the casino last night and played some poker. One hand in particular sticks with me.
The table's a mixed group, 7-handed. Twice have I have watched one fellow get all-in when he had the other opponent absolutely crushed, and the other guy sucked out on him. One time a opponent hit a two-outer on the river after being put all-in on the turn, and the second time the opponent actually hit a runner-runner full-house. I don't even know what you call that, when the opponent needs two specific cards on the turn and river and hits them both. I call it "time to call it a night" but I'm sure there's a more technical term for it.
So anyway, I'm playing 2/4 NLH, the only game available at this swanky place, and I've got maybe 120 in chips in front of me. I look down at AKo (that's Ace-King off-suit) in about 4th position. The aforementioned guy in 1st position limps in for 4 along with the fellow behind him, I raise it to 12, everybody folds, and they both call the 12. Flop comes Jh-4c-Th. I now have two over-cards and a gutshot straight draw. Not particularly great, but not terrible, and even if one of these guys has paired the board I probably have 10 cards that will give me a better hand (any A, K, or Q). Both players check, I c-bet out 30 (about 2/3 of the pot), unlucky bastard smooth calls, the other guy bails out.
Turn is a rag, something like 5d. Unlucky fellow checks. The only thing that really makes a lot of sense here is that he's chasing the flush or less likely a straight of his own. I figure if he's chasing the flush, I'm gonna make it totally unreasonable for him to do so. I bet out 60 this time, which is a bit more than 1/2 the pot (leaving me with only about 35 in front of me), and he...calls. So this doesn't make any sense, unless he's just willing to chase the flush at any price. I mean, I know not everyone thinks about odds and all that, but I saw this guy make spectacular shoves before and get screwed, so I have no idea what he's doing. River card is a very unfortunate Qh, giving me my straight, and most likely giving him the flush. He looks at me and says "I put you all in". At this point it's about 35 more to call, and there's already about 200 in the pot, which means that I kinda have to call, even though I fully expect to get beat. I shove my chips in and patiently wait for him to show his hand. Eventually he turns over two tens, for a flopped set. I guess he misread my immediate facial expression (confusion) for defeat, but I very promptly turned over my AK for the rivered straight. He gets a completely disgusted look on his face and starts going off about folks sucking out on him on the river. I said something like, "sorry man, but I had to make that call".
Here's what really confuses me. Thinking about this from his perspective, what should he have assumed I had?
Pre-flop - I've been playing pretty damn tight at this table, so I gotta have something pretty good to be raising on top of two limpers in middle position here - at minimum a med-high pocket pair (like maybe 99) or else two paint cards like AK, AQ, AJ. When the flop comes with two high-ish cards and two hearts and I c-bet, and he's flopped a set, then by far the best thing for him to do is to raise me. Actually, he probably should have bet out in the first place, but check-call is about the worst play he can possibly do. Best to just bet out or check-raise after the flop and put the pressure on me to decide if it's worth it or not. Maybe I've got a flush draw, in which case I'll either call or fold, maybe I've got two overcards, in which case I'll either call or fold (but more likely fold), maybe I've got JJ and I'll re-raise him, and maybe I've flopped a pair or already had an overpair, in which case I'll come along like a lamb to the slaughter. If he just check-calls he's really got very little idea, particularly when it's a c-bet. But, I'm guessing he wanted to milk it - not a good idea with a textured flop (two connected cards and two hearts). Same goes for after the turn when a completely unconnected card showed up - he should have just put the pressure on and forced me to go all-in or fold right there. Now, admittedly he probably thinks I've got an overpair here, so maybe he's just letting me hang myself with my own rope, but a set's not enough of a powerhouse hand to get away with that, unless you've got a completely unconnected board and you've got top set, and even then you're living a bit dangerously.
The final big screwup is when that last card shows up. Puts three connected hearts on the board, and should definitely be a warning sign. I could realistically have a few hands that just connected, like QQ or AK or even AKh for the royal flush (I didn't, but I could have!). So, at that point, perhaps he should have played it ever so slightly safer and just checked, figuring that he'll call if I push all-in. Or, to put it another way, what could I possibly have that would mean that I would fold to the final all-in bet (nothing that I can think of) vs. what might I reasonably have that would beat him?
So, to summarize, he played that hand terribly. I think he got a lot of sympathy based on what other folks had seen before, but anyone who seriously thought about it would probably also conclude that he did a bad job of it.
Incidentally, the session went really interestingly. I started with 125 in chips, at one point was down to about 60 or 70, mostly from just giving away the blinds when the cards were not coming and from a couple of times where my promising pre-flop hands went nowhere. I lost a quick 20 on AcQc when the flop came down with Kc-xQs-x and two cowboys started getting into a pissing match (but at least I got out of the way quickly, needless to say I would have lost it all if I had stayed in) and was starting to wonder if I wanted to try to use my ATM card in Austria or if I should just call it a night. With about 40 or 50 left in my stack I limped into a pot in 1st position with Ac7c with about 5 other players, the BB popped it up to 12, three players call including me. We see a four-way flop of A-3-7 rainbow, BB checks, I push all-in (less than the size of the pot, but the only thing that would make this a bad call is if someone happens to have 33 or 77, and hopefully someone has Ax and wants to come along for the ride), everybody folds to BB, BB calls me with KK, meaning that there are exactly two cards remaining in the deck that can save him, or to put it another way making him about a 10-to-1 underdog. Amazingly he does not suck out on me (this guy had been on a serious suckout roll and I think everyone was actually expecting a king to show up), and suddenly I'm back to about my starting stack. That and the hand I described earlier put me at about 325 when the casino shut down at 2:30am. I got there at about 12:30am so it was definitely a good session!
I just love playing live - it's so much more fun than playing on the computer. I met a young guy there who lives in Munich, he said he comes down once in a while since it's only about 75 minutes away. I might have to start making Salzburg road trips more often.

Mashups

2009-05-08T07:46:00.000-07:00

I am soooo into mashups. I really need to thank my buddy Matt for starting me on this road. You already saw the youtube mashups, which I still think is one of the most genius things ever. My buddy James shot me a link for this video and it's also brilliant. Here's the youtube version for those of you without facebook (the FB version is much higher quality, though):

Also on the mashup front, I may have mentioned earlier how in love I am with the 2007 Best of Bootie album. Go download it, it's free, and listen to "Funky Goes to Hollywood" or "Tequila Lip Gloss". I am constantly on the lookout for new and awesome mashups though, so send them my way if you have any good ones...

Chillin' - gettin' paid

2009-05-08T07:38:00.001-07:00

After the NDTV project finished, I've been doing probably an average of 3 hours of work per day, and the rest of the time is dedicated to cleaning, errands, catching up on blog posts and TV, etc. It's been grand.
My in-laws are in town for the next few weeks, then Claudia and I are heading to Thailand on vacation. We have booked ourselves into swanky places the whole way though - it's a total red-carpet situation and should be very relaxing.
After we get back from vacation, we have about a week free and then my mom will hopefully be coming to see us. She's never been to the continent before so I think she'll like it.
After that, we'll see. I really, really want to work out a trip back to the states, but that will probably have to wait until late August, since plane fares for June / early August are ludicrously high.
And, of course, at some point there will be another project! Till then, I'm mostly chillin' and gettin' paid...

Cars for po' folks

2009-05-08T05:56:00.001-07:00

While they're not generally my type of folks, I have over the course of my many years become friends with some pretty right-wing people. Of these, a few (maybe 5-10) are people that I am truly happy to call my friends, the rest are folks who I ended up meeting or working with and occasionally keep in touch with for whatever reason.

So, a post from one of them (not one of the close friends) got me thinking - he was referencing this article (which in turn references this article) and he had this to say about it:

Disgusting. The state ought to have no part of this - I have no problem with private charities and enterprises taking up the cause of providing for those who are lacking the resources to get by, but tax dollars that are automatically deducted by payroll cannot and should not be used for this purpose. I'm having a hell of a time paying for the car I have already and saving for a minivan, I'm not about to go buy the poor people in my neighborhood cars!!!Which, sadly, is so often the conservative approach to things.

So, my response to his post (which, due to a fat-finger, I didn't send):

From TFA: "Kehoe defended the program, saying the state breaks even by cutting welfare payments to the family - about $6,000 a year."
So I guess it evens out, although since there's apparantly a 20% recidivism rate (for lack of a better term), it still ends up being about $1200/yr/car, and at the rate of 65 cars/year, that's still a net cost of $78k/year for the program.
Also from TFA: "To get the cars, they must be unable to reach work by public transportation and have a clean driving record. The program is only available to families on welfare with children."
You know, this always bothers me; people come up with ideas like this, and in general I think they're a good idea, but could we PLEASE try to come up with a control group?!? I mean, I'm guessing there are a lot more families that qualify for the program than actually receive a car, so can we try to get some stats on families that qualified but for whatever reason (didn't ask for a car, a car wasn't available, etc) didn't get a car. Take the differences in control group vs. families who got cars, and if the cars statistically cost less than the amount of welfare payments you're _not_ giving to the families who receive them, then it's a good deal. If not, then it's a expense that needs to be seriously examined. Why can't we ever get data on these things?!?

I continued on with some other stuff (before I accidentally erased it), but you get the gist. I often wonder about government programs; I mean, it's impossible to account for all the ramifications of these things when you're talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of people, but at least small program like this, you could try! 65 cars per year, the program's been running since 2006, so let's call it 200 cars so far to make the math easier. Spend 10 minutes following up on each family that received a car, you might come up with something like this:

Out of the 200 families, 40 ended up losing the job within the first year but keeping the car. Out of those, 2 ended up re-employed and are no longer receiving welfare assistance. Out of the remaining 38, we're pretty sure that 15 of them intentionally gamed the program just to get the car. The rest, we don't know.
Out of the remaining 160 families, another 10 lost the job after the 1-year period was up and are back to full-time welfare assistance.
Out of the remaining 150, 100 families have been completely without state assistance since receiving the car. Out of those, 5 have risen to a family income of more than $60,000/year (or whatever middle-class benchmark you want to use), etc. etc.

To get most of that data would be a simple matter of looking up the case files of the folks who received cars - for the rest, you would have to talk to 200 families or case workers to catch the really interesting details (like, for example, that one guy who started his own business using the car and is now a successful entrepreneur, or those 10 families who realize that they were actually better off before they made the deal to get the car, and would gladly go back in time and reverse it if they could). Call it an average of 10 minutes per family / case worker, and you're talking 2000 minutes, or about 30 man-hours to get a decent picture of every single family who participated in the program - throw in another 40 hours (and I'm being pretty generous here - it's probably a lot fewer hours) to run data analysis and write a report on it, and you can have a detailed picture of this government program, what works, what doesn't work, and how it can be tuned to improve. Or, if the data is not at all encouraging, then maybe the program should be scrapped.

I've kinda lost momentum with this post due to being forced to work (gasp!) many times during the writing of it, so I'll stop here. I guess if I had to make a conclusion, it would be this: I expect people to be reasonably good at what they do, particularly when there's theoretically some sort of hurdle or test (like an election) that they need to pass in order to get the job. I would expect that folks who come up with programs like these would have a process and resources in place to determine the program's efficacy, hopefully accounting for some of the factors that can't easily be expressed quantitatively. Maybe everything I've described is already being done, but I'm guessing not...

Simply awesome

2009-04-23T03:20:00.001-07:00

Just about done

2009-04-15T03:13:00.000-07:00

So, we launched at the beginning of this week and it's been surprisingly smooth since then. Some issues have come up, but nothing major and nothing that has anything to do with me. I think I'll actually get a couple of days free before I need to head back home.
Since launch I've gotten three consecutive nights of 6+ hours sleep, and it's been fantastic. I feel like a totally new person - I was so stressed that I was about to bite everyone's head off, and I was letting the pressure of the project get to me. My work actually started to suffer - I made a few rookie mistakes because I just wasn't thinking clearly. But, we pulled it off in the end and everyone's happy - the customer, my boss, his boss, his boss, etc. Overall it was a definitely success.
I definitely have some wrap-up to do, but I'm hoping to focus today solely on the stuff that has to get done while I'm here. If possible, I'll also write up some "buttons" in case of emergencies (like breaking news events) so that I rather than talking folks through the process of changing settings, I can talk them through pushing the button. And, if I get that done, then I can just chill here in Delhi and enjoy myself on Thursday and Friday! W00t!
Oddly enough, I have no desire to see the Taj Mahal. I do, however, want to get a feeling for some local culture other than this office building (although it has been interesting to work in an industrial area, where there is not another blond head ANYWHERE). So, assuming I actually get done today, I will check out Delhi for the next couple of days - or, I might just check out the pool and the television tomorrow and check out Delhi Friday with a coworker. At any rate, it feels good to be done!
And, of course, starting Saturday I have to focus on all the personal life that fell by the wayside for the last few months...

so f'in foreign!

2009-04-05T08:36:00.001-07:00

Wow, things are different here. Little things I hadn't seen in quite some time, like extremely persistent beggars, most of them old women and small children, some of whom are trying the old trick of "you distract him, I'll pick his pocket". Thankfully I'm wearing relatively tight jeans and not carrying much with me, anyway.
Just ordered room service from the hotel, ordered a drink called "Jal Jeera" billed as a "refreshing summer drink". It tasted like spiced saltwater, but I figured "hey, I should see this through - maybe I'll acquire the taste by the time I get to the bottom of it." Needless to say, that didn't happen, and as I finished it I found myself wondering where the water to make it came from. I guess we'll find out tomrorow.
Lots of other interesting things so far; lots of programming, particularly soaps, seems to be in a strange Hindi-English pidgin. Of course there are no subtitles for either language, which makes me wonder; does everyone who watches TV speak both languages?
Tomorrow I start in the office - even though the travel time has sucked, it's actually been pretty good to not be working for a couple of days....

My life lately

2009-03-12T01:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, I have basically dropped off the face of the earth as far as friends and family are concerned. Here's why:

Work - the project I'm currently working on is in full balls-out git 'er done mode. Clau was in England a couple of weeks ago and I literally worked from 7am till about 2am for that week (which, in retrospect, was stupid, because I'm still not fully recovered and there is still much to do). This crazy time started about a month ago and will continue for about another 6 weeks. After which Claudia's parents come to visit for a month. After which Claudia and I will take a well-deserved vacation. The vacation thought keeps me going.
Moving - that week that I worked from 7am-2am? That was the last week in February, and I kinda lied - I only worked Mon-Thu, and on Friday the movers FINALLY came and brought our stuff from NYC to our new apartment. WooHoo!
Settling in. I believe I mentioned this before, but in Germany an apartment is basically just an empty shell - it's up to you to fill it. As of last night, we officially have a full-on Ikea kitchen and closet, which puts us at about 30% done with filling the shell. Couch and sofa are on their way and hopefully will arrive before Claudia's parents. We still need a desk for my office, a linen closet, shelves for the bathroom, etc etc the list goes on and on. All of this, in addition to being outrageously expensive, is absolutely exhausting.

So, once one of these things (work project / moving project) is done, life will be a little less crazy, but right now they're intersecting perfectly. Really sucks to be me at the moment.

If this is really what it looks like...

2009-03-12T01:53:00.000-07:00

Then it's genuis!

Comics times table

2009-03-10T04:33:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I think it's so awesome, but I do...

http://creebobby.com/timestable.html

Brain teasers

2009-02-12T11:27:00.001-08:00

For some reason, I often think of little puzzles in the shower - probably because showering itself isn't terribly exciting. Here's two of them (they're not particularly difficult but they were good for the length of a shower):
1) I have a digital clock that expresses time in 24-hours. Just for fun, let's say you have no colon or spaces in between the digits, so midnight is 000, 9:15am is 915, 12 noon is 1200, 3:35pm is 1535, etc. How many times during a 24-hour day would the number look exactly the same in a mirror as it does on the face? So, for example, 12 midnight (000) would be the first. The answer turned out to be more than I thought as an initial guesstimate.
2) For whatever reason, I have two dice and I want to pick a random month of the year. What's the best way to do it?

Love this video

2009-02-12T06:38:00.001-08:00

Like Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" but better (the video I mean):

Oren Lavie - Her Morning Elegance
Uploaded by IgnitionVM

Two other things

2009-02-11T10:45:00.001-08:00

1) Germans have almost no sense of humor, particularly sarcasm. They have no concept of when you're joking around, and as a result you must be serious with them at all times. It can get a little tiresome.
2) Germans have weird, weird taste in music. Exhibit A:

Tell me that's not fucking weird.

And, of course, for those who still doubt, let's not forget they made this guy a superstar:

I rest my case.

More fun facts about Germany

2009-02-11T09:37:00.000-08:00

More fun facts (well, technically, observations):

German foods border on the decadent. After seeing the size of the lunches that they eat and the fattiness of the food, I'm just completely flummoxed as to how they're not all fatter than Americans. Claudia, incidentally, has lost about 10 pounds since moving here, whereas I have gained about 10 pounds. I have no idea why this is the case. She suggests it's because of the lack of processed food, which maybe my body was immune to. This one still stumps me.
Case in point re: decadent food. I got a frozen pizza and cooked it only to discover that it was not a pizza, but rather a Flammkuchen. Flammkuchen is just like pizza except that it uses creme fraiche instead of tomato sauce. Yeah, you heard that right. Oh yeah, and the classic toppings are onion and bacon. And these people will eat about a 10" one of these, by themselves, for lunch.
The biggest minority here, by far, is Turkish. How this came to be is kinda complicated and is written up very nicely here, but the essense is that lots of Turks came on guest worker programs when Germany was being rebuilt, and they stayed, and they multiplied, and their families came too. Generally, you will see plenty of them around here (although to be honest I can't tell a Turk from an Indian from a Persian, but it's kinda like, in California, if you see a Latino, it's probably safe to guess that he's Mexican). The amount of Turks I see here is roughly the same as Latinos or Blacks in New York; they definitely have a presence, but they're very obviously a minor percentage of the population. Anyway, what really amazes me is how blatantly and unashamedly prejudiced the Germans are about the Turks. When we were looking around for an apartment, we were trying to get a sense of costs relative to neighborhood etc. Our agent told us that it depends, and started going through neighborhoods in terms of quality and price. When she got to the bottom, she said "of course, you could find someplace cheaper, like a Turkish neighborhood, but you wouldn't want to live there." She said this in a way as to suggest that a Turkish neighborhood would be your neighborhood of choice only if there was nothing available directly under the airport runway flight path, or near the sewage treatment plant. Come to think of it, those neighborhoods are probably Turkish.

More stuff coming as I think of it....

Today's games

2009-02-08T15:12:00.001-08:00

So, today was a pretty good day, despite the fact that I probably lost more (theoretical) money today on FTP than any other day. Back in my early days of figuring out what the hell I was doing, I used to occasionally partake in the $6.60 token extravaganzas on FTP. These are actually a pretty good deal on FTP if you're willing to put in the time and have a substantial bankroll (which I don't, and therefore am not messing about in these tourneys anymore - furthermore, if I had the bankroll I probably wouldn't be willing to put in the time), although just like so many other low-limit games on FTP there can be some crazy moves that will drive you nuts. Anyway, from those early days, I had three $26 tournament tokens lying around (hey even the donkeys win sometimes), and I've been determined to use one in a real, non-turbo, preferably deep-stacked multi-table tournament (MTT) while Claudia was in Brazil (since one of these tournaments can easily take 5-6 hours to finish, assuming you get that far).
Anyway, today I woke up early and decided that today would be the day to spend that token - I entered a deep-stack, multi-table tournament with 450 people, and finished 88th - sadly, I still had quite a few spots to go to take the money. Overall I was happy with the way I played except at the end (well, hell, I can almost always say that!) - I simply got frustrated with not playing and watching my stack go from well above average to "all-in or fold" mode; I must have folded 35 hands in a row pre-flop because I was either getting nothing, or a decent hand that wasn't good enough to justfy the two or three raisers in front of me. The couple of times I had something decent with position, I'd raise it up and completely miss on the flop, then have to decide whether to C-bet or leave it be. Every time, I seemed to make the wrong call. I ended up calling a 3-bet with AJ on my BB - the board had nothing noteworthy on it, we checked it down to the river, till I finally pushed all-in for about 3/4 of the pot, and he called me with AK. Ouch.
Still, like I said, I'm happy with it, and it was nice to play in a tournament with a deep stack, slow blind structures, and good players who weren't just shoving all-in all the time. It would be nice to have the money to do that more often.
So, after that, I chatted with Clau some (always one of the highlights of my day), then went with my friend Stefan and his friends to the Munich-Dortmund football match. Jan (Stefan's friend) apparantly had some friends who had business seats, and they were willing to sell them to Jan. I have a feeling that I was invited out of sympathy, but that's cool! It was kick-ass. Muenchen won with a goal in the final minutes of a game that had been tied 1-1 for the entire 2nd half, and man the place was rocking. The stadium holds 69,000 and apparantly it's sold out for the entire season. Crazy. Oh yeah, did I mention that we were center court (slightly on the Muenchen side, naturally) in the EIGHTH ROW?!? The tickets were 65 Euros each but totally worth it. I got lots of snaps on my blackberry, hopefully some of them came out good. The only problem was it was really, really cold - I'm still feeling a bit of the chill. Overall, though, a fantastic experience. Afterwards, Stefan and I grabbed one last beer, then headed back, at which point I started writing this post and got totally sidetracked in that last post about the fool sucking out on me with a gutshot straight. That one's gonna burn for a while.
But, today I watched Muenchen trounce Dortmund along with 68,999 other people and I loved it, so that's the happy thought I'm going to bed with.

The current state of my online poker playing

2009-02-08T12:55:00.000-08:00

At this point, I've got about $200 in my Full Tilt Poker (FTP) account. I generally play low-stakes turbo multi-table tournaments (MTTs) - low-stakes because of my relatively low bankroll ($200), and turbo because I tend not to have a lot of time. And before anyone points it out, I know that $200 is less than the amount of money I budget to lose on gambling in one trip to Nevada, but this is supposed to be a cheap hobby, and I'm determined not to reload on FTP until I've burnt through it all, and to always base my decisions on that bankroll (most of your monetary limits are based on the size of your bankroll, so I won't enroll in a very expensive tournament just because I could afford to top up my account if I wanted to). Anyway, one of my favorite tournaments is the $3.30 90-person KO SNG tournament - it just sells like hotcakes and I _never_ have to wait more than 5 minutes or so for the tournament to fill up, it's at the threshold for my bankroll (theoretically I ought to be capping out at about $3 for a MTT but I cheat since it's limited to 90 players), and it almost never lasts more than 2 hours, even if you take it to the bitter end.
For those unfamiliar with tournament types, a KO tournament is a tournament where you get a bonus for busting a player out of the tournament, typically something like 1/6 of the buying - in the case of the $3.30 tournament each KO gets you 50 cents. A SNG is a sit-n-go tournament, where you always have the tournament ready to run as soon as X number of people sign up for it - in the case of this particular tourney, that number is 90.
The problem with playing so many low-limit turbo MTTs is twofold; first, because it's a turbo tournament, the blinds go up really, really fast - hence the tourney almost never lasting more than 2 hours - by the time you've passed hour 2, you're dealing with huge blinds and antes and even just limping into a pot will probably cost you 5-10% of your stack. The problem with this is that a typical raise might be 2 or three times the BB, and with blinds so high you can easily get pot committed just playing a drawing hand. I mean, there's still some skill involved, but the luck/skill slide meter is way on the luck side towards the end of a turbo tournament.
The second problem is the low stakes - for the last few days I've been running bad from being impatient, and just when I get my shit together again, something happens that totally makes me lose my shit. Here's an example - you can watch it now, then I'll go over what was going through my mind:

This is how I busted out of a MTT - for some historical background, this was a KO tournament for FTP points (frequent player points, which you can use for swag or to enter promotional tournaments) - you put in 50 FTP points and you get 50 points for every player you knock out. I had been doing decently at my first table and was about 1000 dollars up (not actual money, but rather "tournament dollars"), although I hadn't knocked anyone out, and had gotten moved to this table about 2 orbits (18 rounds or so) before. "Player 5" had been using his big chip stack to bully the table for a few rounds at this point, frequently raising and following through with continuation bets that would put most folks all-in. At this point, he's got almost 8k in chips, and I'm a distant 2nd with about 4k. All the other poor bastards have just been caving in to his bullying (the idea is that he can raise with just about any two cards - for example, $400 is only about 5% of his chip stack, whereas it's about 25% of most folks' chip stacks, and if they put in 25% of their chips with anything less than a premium hand then their time in the tournament may very well come to a quick end). On my big blind (one player always has to put in the minimum bet before seeing his cards, and it was my turn) I was dealt two 9s, there was one limper (player 9) ("limping in" is the term for just putting in the minumum amount to be involved in a hand) and the bully raised it from 60 to 270 (a very large raise) when I had the big blind, which is basically his way of saying "give me your chips, unless you feel like risking your survival in this tournament". So, on my big blind, I decided that I would call with my 9s and see what happens (perhaps this is poor strategy on my part, but when I have two cards on the upper side of "marginal" in the BB and someone tries to steal, I tend to just call rather than raise and see what happens on the flop - this is probably because at lower limits folks will often respond to a re-raise with an all-in shove, and I do _not_ want to go all-in with 99 against a raiser - I mean, if he turns over some semi-bluff like queen-ten then it's still a coin-flip!).
After I've made this decision, player 6 decides to come along for the ride, and then player 9 (the original caller) calls as well.
Now, the basic premise with just about any kind of pocket pair is twofold:
1) If it's relatively low, you're hoping to hit three of a kind (aka a "set") on the flop - the odds of this are about 7 to one, and even then it's possible that you'll end up in a shit situation - for example, if I call with a pair of nines, and the flop comes out 7-8-9 of spades, then even though I've flopped my set, there are still plenty of ways I can get screwed. The more players you have coming along for the ride here, the more likely that one of them has got at least one spade or at least one card to complete a straight. So, sets can get you in trouble, but more often than not they're really, really good, because most people don't consider pocket pairs when wondering what you might have.
2) If it's a high pair (like, for example, QQ), you're looking for a flop that doesn't have overcards (i.e. no kings or aces) and isn't too flush-y or straight-y. If you hit that kind of flop, then you tend to press it hard.
99 is kinda in the middle between those two - it's definitely possible for three under-cards to appear on the flop, but really you're hoping to make a set.
Now, where things get really tricky with pocket pairs like 55 or 99 are concerned, is that you also need to consider what you'll do if it works out, and if it's worth it. Here's the simple version: your odds of making the set on the flop are about 7 to one. Let's call the odds of a "safe" set (i.e. something that you'll feel comfortable pressing with) at about 9 to 1. In that case, you need to feel like there's at least 9 times your investment available for the taking if you hit it. So, that means that if you're only going to be up against one other person, both you and him better have at least 9 times the amount of money you've got to call. In this case, in order to make a call of 210 extra chips, I need to have a potential windfall of at least 1700 or so to work with. In this case, everyone seems to fit the bill, so I call. Actually, I would have called anyway, since 99 is a pretty decent pocket pair, I wanted to stand up to the bully, and there were already two callers (which means that someone is likely to come along for the ride if I make my set).
So, before we even see the flop, the pot is up to $1100. This is definitely a dangerous situation and I'm probably bailing at my first opportunity if I don't hit my set (even if there are no overcards).

So, the flop comes out just the way I want it: 8d-Qd-9c. I've made my set, but there are two things to be aware of:
1) There's an overcard there - the queen. I'm not all that frightened of anyone having a pair of queens (giving them a set of queens) for a couple of reasons: the bully could have it, but he's been raising pre-flop constantly lately, and he really could have any two cards of ten or higher, or a pocket pair of his own - him happening to have QQ this one time would just be really shit luck. The other two players, seeing as they're getting a little low in chip stacks, would probably have re-raised with a hand like QQ to to increase their chance of a heads-up with the bully, or else force him to let it go right then and there. Much more likely, though, in the low-limit world, is that either one of these players would have just shoved all-in with QQ (which wouldn't have been a bad move considering the situation). At any rate, if someone (including the bully) shoves all-in on me then I'll revisit it, but for now I really don't think it's a possibility. Potential bad news for me, but in this case I think I'm OK.
2) There's an overcard there - the queen! This means that someone who called with a hand like AQ or KQ is now in deep shit against me, because he/she is going to have what's called "top pair, top kicker" or TPTQ. This is a hand that gets folks in trouble all the time, and can be really tough to walk away from when the board doesn't look dangerous. Good news for me.
3) There are two diamonds on the board. This, more than anything else, concerns me. There's a potential flush draw out there, and with three other players in the pot, one of them just might have A-x of diamonds or a suited connector (like 5d-6d). Flushes are the great set killers, since folks just love to draw to flushes, even when the odds can't justify it.

Since I'm in the BB and the SB folded, I'm first to act after the flop. Whether to bet your set or slow-play it (i.e. get cute, just check, and see if someone else wants to bet in order to extract some more chips out of your opponents) depends on the situation every time. At this point, we've built up a nice pot of about $1100, more than 1/4 of my current stack - I'd be happy to take it right here! Besides which, those diamonds scare me.
The trick with betting out against a potential flush draw is to not give your opponent incentive to draw, or at least to make it a bad idea mathematically. In this case, a bet of about $1000 ought to be enough to scare at least the short stacks away - since it's likely that they won't make their flush on the next card, it would be a bad idea for either one of them to pursue the draw with such a large percentage of their stacks, and even if they do then I'll be firing another bullet if the turn card isn't a diamond, and they know it. If we were all deep-stacked, or if the pot and bet sizes were ten times smaller, then it might be worth it, but that's another conversation.
So, I bet out $1000 with the intention of having everyone fold right there and then - at this point my stack is down to $2805 and the pot's up to $2100. Sure enough, the short stacks fold, but the bully calls.
The call doesn't give me a lot of information - if he had raised me all-in then I might have had to reconsider the QQ possibility (although I very likely would have called - I don't think he's got QQ for the reasons I described above). If he had raised me anything other than all-in then I probably would have put him on some kind of queen, but not a pair of them, and I can change my focus to extracting as many chips as possible from him. At this point, my guess is either he's on a flush draw or he's got either TPTK or two pair. I'm leaning toward the second scenario but I can't discount the first.
Just for reminder here - pot is now at $3100 and my chip stack is slightly less than $2800.
Turn comes, it's a beautiful and non-threating 4h. Now's the time to really fire the cannons - either he's got nothing (and he'll fold), the flush draw (and he'll fold), or some kind of two-pair that he can't let go and he'll call or push me all-in (which would be fine). What I don't want to do here is give him a free card for a flush draw and have him hit it on me. If he wants to see the river card, he'll have to pay for it.
I throw in a bet of $2000, taking my stack down to a dangerous $800. Why didn't I just throw the whole thing in? Well, I'm not really sure, except that generally I don't like pushing all-in - I tend to base stuff on the size of the pot, and I often like to give folks the idea that they're getting pot odds, even if they're not. In the case of a flush draw (which I'm becoming more and more sure is this guy's story), I like to make them think about it - now, having to call $2000 to win $7000 is _not_ good enough to call on a flush draw, _particularly_ when your opponent has only $800 left in his stack. Put it this way: if there are two diamonds in your hand and two diamonds on the board, then there are, as far as you know, 9 cards left in the deck that can give you the flush. With 9 diamonds left, the odds of the next card being a diamond are roughly 1 in 5 (or 4 to 1 if you prefer to think of it that way, which I actually don't but it makes for better storytelling). Therefore, if you're getting more than 4:1 odds on your money, then it's worth it to call. Of course, you always have to think about "what happens if I get it?" If you've got a nutjob who keeps betting, and you think you can extract even _more_ money out of him if you hit that flush, then maybe it's worth it to keep going, even if you're not getting 4:1 odds just from the bet. So, if the pot's $1000 and your opponent bets $500, then you need to call $500 to win an extra $1500, which is 1:3, which is not good enough. On the other hand, if you think that hitting the flush will enable you to extract an extra thousand in the final round of betting, then you're actually talking about betting $500 to win an extra $2500, which is right on the cusp of being worth it. These are known as "pot odds" and "implied pot odds", and nobody (including me) except maybe the pros ever gets it right all the time. At least, that's what I tell myself since I have trouble doing these on the fly while trying to pay attention to everything else.
So anyway, back to this hand: my throwing the $2k in there makes the pot $5110, so the villian needs to bet $2k to win $5k, so he needs roughly a 2:5 chance to win it for it to be mathmatically correct. The odds of getting a diamond on the river are about 1:4, and I've only got $800 left, so there aren't a lot of implied pot odds here. Even just a basic guesstimate will tell a person that it's not worth it to call this on a flush draw, and I expect him to either fold (most likely) or shove all-in. If he puts me all-in, then at this point I absolutely HAVE to call, even if I think he's been toying with me with QQ the whole time - the ratio of the amount of money in the pot ($7900 if he re-raises me all-in) to the amount of money I have left ($800) is simply too big to let go. This is what we call "pot committed" and it's a state that you want to avoid, but I seem to always end up in (hey I'm still an amateur and I don't think quite far ahead enough - I'm getting there).
Instead, he calls. I'm now totally flummoxed and can only imagine that he's chasing the flush draw, or maybe he's been really stupid and he's been calling with A-K this whole time (A-K leaves 6 cards that could potentially give you the winner, which makes you about a 7:1 underdog - definitely not the kind of hand you want to bet $2k to win $5k with). With anything concrete, it would make the most sense to put me all-in - I mean, at this point, what can possibly happen on the river that will make him decide not to bet $800 when the pot's already so huge?
The final card comes - Jc. If he was chasing the flush or the A-K draw, he missed on all counts. So, knowing I've got the best hand, I have two options: check or go all-in.
If I check: either he checks (most likely), sees my set of 9s, and I win, or else he bets my last $800 in a silly bluff attempt (very unlikely, since given the whole pot-committed thing I just described plus the fact that I've been the bet initiator the whole time, there's almost no situation in which I'd fold), I show him my set, and I win.
If I bet: he either folds and I win without showing him (and the rest of the table) what I've been working with (again, unlikely given the ratio of my remaining stack to the pot size, but it's always better to win without showing your cards), or most likely he calls and I take the whole thing.
Obviously betting is the better choice here. So, I bet my last $800, he calls, and shows me his KT of SPADES for a king-high straight.
Knowing what his cards were, let me just replay the action after the turn from his perspective. I called his big raise behind one other caller (so I knew I would be facing at least two opponents on this hand), I put out a healthy bet in first position after the flop, and I put out another bet that pretty much pot-commits me after the turn. I am definitely NOT betting with nothing here. The cards at this point give him King-high, in other words nothing. He has no flush draw, although there is one on the board. The ONLY cards that can give him a likely winning hand are the four jacks in the deck. Let's be generous and say he's put me on a single queen, maybe something like AQ. In that event the three remaining kings could give him a POTENTIALLY winning hand. So, being generous, let's say he's got 7 cards that he thinks could give him the winner (the four jacks plus the three kings). Even so, that translates to about a 15% chance of hitting one of those cards, which is about a 5.5:1 underdog. My chip stack is basically gone - if he calls this bet, he's not going to be able to to extract much more out of me to take advantage of his good fortune. Therefore, putting in $2000 to win $5100 is NOT worth it, not by a logshot. Heck, putting in just $1000 to win that same $5100 wouldn't be worth it, and again that's assuming that I just had the queen (and, of course, no king). And yet he called - and hit. And my time in the tournament was over.
This hand had me practically screaming at the computer. Suckouts happen all the time in FTP - you go all-in with AA vs. 95 offsuit and they beat you with a straight - it happens and you move on, secure in the knowledge that if you had it to do all over again, you would do it the same way. Some of them, like this one, just stick with you.
Of course, for every one of these losses, there's also two losses that I genuinely deserved, either because I made a mistake, I was bored and/or impatient, or someone simply played better than me. I've identified some key leaks in my game, although I've discovered that it's a lot easier to identify a leak in your game than it is to fix it, which is weird - I thought just finding them would be the problem. Maybe I'll get to that in another post, but this one has taken more time and energy than I planned, and even so I haven't written the post I meant to write in the first place when I started this one - that post will be next...

The law

2009-02-07T02:28:00.000-08:00

So, I'm watching the Daily Show (available streaming online, sooooo awesome although I do wonder why on earth Viacom allows it to happen since they can't make any money from it), and there's a big section about the stimulus package and how the Senate's debating it. Which led me to an interesting question - I've always wondered why it's possible and even common for a bill to have a seemingly unrelated rider, and how that comes to be. Although I don't live in the U.S. anymore, I try to somewhat keep up with the news, and as I recall the stimulus package was turned from a 3- or 4-page document from the Fed to a bloated legal behemoth. And now, of course, the thing's got to get debated, but I'm getting distracted - back to the original question:
How are these riders getting through? It seems that both parties in both houses are guilty of this - how do they get away with it? For example, check this story for a Democratic abuse, or just look at how the Real ID act came into existence (although there are maaaany examples to choose from, these just popped up first in Google for me). I also found this gem of an answer where an Irishman asks this question in plain and simple terms, the response to which is a (admittedly pretty good) summary of the two legislative houses and their functions and interactions. Later on, as an update, someone points out "nice explanation, but you didn't answer the question" and the response is "It happens, deal with it". Nice. Thanks for making me read your summary of the legislative branch, asshat.
Anyway, any legal types or those who hang out with legal types or especially those with hard-working friends in Washington, please feel free to let me know how things like the Real ID act (or, if you don't want to pick on Republicans, use this as an example) can make it into seemingly unrelated bills. I don't recall this part of the process being described when I received my early education about law...

Comments about Hulu

2009-02-02T08:46:00.000-08:00

Well, every time there's any sort of article / press release / etc about Hulu, there are always a boatload of people squawking about how they can't watch it in their non-U.S. country and how Hulu is a bunch of evil bastards who don't think that anybody outside of the U.S. even matters and it's all so damn inconsiderate of them to block stuff. Well, if you've read ramblings about distribution contracts and such, then you know that the true reason is that those distribution contracts I talked about only apply to the country in which they're made, and Hulu was created by two media companies who have distribution contracts in the U.S. (and not outside of it). One comment I recently read on one of these bitch sessions:

I love how every article about problems in the USA is flooded by a horde of foreigners claiming how glad they are proud to live in whatever country they are from. But when we have something minor and stupid like hulu they start clamoring about how they have some right to access it.

We have to put up with all the crap here, let us be able to stream old episodes of Airwolf in peace

That having been said, the amount of work required to make Hulu functional outside of the U.S. would not be insurmountable. Without divulging anything that could even be considered proprietary, let me just say that Hulu restricts playback based on the location as determined by your IP address. Some foreigners circumvent that by finding an available U.S.-based proxy and piping Hulu through that, although that sucks up the proxy's bandwidth pretty darn quick. At any rate, the problem isn't so much the technical aspect, but rather that each different country would require:
1) Checking to make sure that the piece of content was licensed to be played in that country
2) Determining who was the licensed distributor for that country (i.e. who gets paid when we roll an ad)
3) Making an ad call specifically for that region (i.e. an ad in the local language etc).

Of course, there are also other problems, such as audio tracks - programming in most countries is dubbed as opposed to subtitled - there are exceptions of course (for example, if memory serves correctly, most content is subtitled in the Netherlands, whereas almost all content is dubbed in Spain), but that means that you have to, at the very least, have a corresponding CC file for the local language, and more likely you need to have an audio track in the local language. This is assuming, of course, that you're determined to use the same video file for all locales, as opposed to just having multiple copies with different languages.
What I'm getting at is that there's more to it than might be apparent at first blush, but it's not impossible. I think that if Hulu wanted to bring their content to a new market (say, for instance, GERMANY), then their best strategy would be to simply create a German version of the site, more or less from scratch. I know it can be done, and probably in a matter of a few months! Of course, that's only addressing the technical hurdles - I think that the business side of it would be the really difficult part.
I'm also completely ignoring the distribution partner aspects (did you know that Hulu content is available on AOL, Yahoo, MSN Video, Fancast, and MySpace video?), which have helped drive traffic to Hulu - even after it seemed like everybody and their brother on the Internet knew about Hulu, I still only had about a 25% success rate when I talked about it in meatspace.
At any rate, speaking as an expat, I didn't really appreciate all of the instant gratification services available for my entertainment on the Internets until they were gone. Hulu truly is fantastic, as is the Netflix instant viewing. I can only hope that markets in other countries start following suit.

TV in Munich

2009-02-02T02:52:00.000-08:00

OK, this is probably the simplest of the topics that have been burning a hole in my brain, and I thought it might be interesting for other folks.
I don't think I need to explain to anyone how TV works in the U.S., but just for kicks, let's establish a few ideas:

Today, TV generally costs money. You pay X dollars for basic cable, with X being a function of local monopoly and economy (i.e. in NYC you get raped by Time Warner, in other areas you have multiple choices of providers for a reasonable amount of money). You can also pay extra for premium channels like HBO, Showtime, every NFL game played that season, whatever. Typically these come in bundles.
Theoretically there are still TV broadcasts coming over the air (OTA). There are a few networks (USA, Comedy Central, CW, Food Network, Lifetime, etc) that have original programming but are not available over the air, but generally the big boys are available, at least in parts of the country, over the standard antenna. However, NOBODY uses this except for the folks on the two ends of the spectrum; folks who are absolutely too poor to have paid cable (and from a lot of books and newspapers I've read, cable / satellite is one of the things that even people in relative poverty find a way to pay for), and the techno-geeks who know that the OTA HD quality is still superior to anything delivered over a wire. OTA is free to the consumer, and is supported by advertising revenue.
There are quite a few players in the making and broadcasting of a TV show. There are, of course, the producers - the folks actually making the shows. They're responsible for the writing, casting, shooting, editing, etc etc. The producers' final product is a tape of an episode of the show, which then goes to the distributor. To give an example, the show "Smallville" is produced by Warner Brothers, and distributed by the CW (generally, when a company owns both a production and distribution company - i.e. NBC/Universal or Fox/20th C - , the two go hand in hand, but that's not the way it always works). The distributor's job is, as the name implies, to get the content into the eyes and ears of the people.
As you can guess, the money for all of this comes from advertisers. The business of securing and delivering advertising for a distribution network is very complex, but effectively it boils down to paying for popularity. If everyone does their job right, the show is properly marketed (which, incidentally, is generally the responsibility of the distributor), it gets a high viewership, the advertisers are happy, the distribution network is able to charge more money for ads the next time around, and the producer is able to sell the next set of episodes to the distributor for a higher amount. Incidentally, note that almost ALL the money comes from the advertisers. There are other revenue channels such as online distribution, iTunes, DVDs and other merchandise, but the vast majority of the revenue comes from the on-air advertising.
The folks responsible for the actual delivery (DirectTV, cable company, or broadcast station) also play a part. Generally, their relationship is a symbiotic one for distributors; more delivery channels means more viewers, and when a popular distribution channel is available on the delivery mechanism (for example, when TNT is available on DirectTV or Time Warner cable), it makes the product more attractive to consumers who are willing to pay to have that TV station delivered to them.

Even with this being a lengthy description, it's still only a big generalization, with a lot of detail left out.
In Germany, the model is very similar, with a couple of big differences; first off, the list of TV stations that are available "for free" is much larger, due to a ubiquitous cable infrastructure. I have NO idea how this came to pass, but for some reason every apartment building has a cable box that's rigged to a central receiver; if you have a TV, you just plug it into the existing cable jack and away you go, with about 30 channels available through the standard receiver. The actual cable infrastructure is maintained by the building, and a small part of your common charges go into that. I'm not sure how it works for houses, because we didn't consider a house when looking to move.
Anyway, this is what Germans refer to as "free" TV. It's all paid for the same way as OTA broadcasts in America, although just for fun, there are also a few public stations similar to the BBC, that are supported by a TV tax. Merely owning a television in Germany makes you subject to the TV tax, which is somewhere around 10 Euros per month. Similarly, merely owning a car radio also makes you subject to a car radio tax (something like 1-2 Euros a month). If, like me, your TV is directly connected to your computer, or your radio is directly connected to your iPod, that doesn't matter - you still have to pay the tax.
The TV tax pays for the government-owned stations, and the rest of the stations are supported by ad revenue. The system still works the same way - producers pitch / auction shows to distributors, and the distributors sell ad time on their stations.
There are also a lot of "pay TV" stations - some of these are HBO-style, but most are stations that cater to a specific crowd, such as sports fans or fans of a particular genre.

Here's where things get strange; I work for a major media company that, as described above, is also merged with a production company. In America, this company is one of the big networks. In Germany, it's a collection of Pay TV stations. Even stranger, the big shows that come out of the production company are shown by the most popular Free TV networks, and the stations from my company primarily syndicate older, genre-specific programs. Since our networks are all Pay TV, the viewership is relatively limited, and we can't make much money from advertisers - the majority of our revenue comes from subscription fees. To make things even weirder, there's one person working here for the production side of the house, and he's effectively in his own little world, because his responsibility is to sell the shows, and our little networks can't even come close to matching the offers of the Free TV stations.

This, to me, seems totally bizarre. Effectively, we're just a small collection of Pay TV stations, and we make enough money to stay afloat but not do anything really ground-breaking. Up until very recently, we also owned a single Free TV network, but we just spun it off. For some reason, management has decided that the best course of action is to focus on our Pay TV properties, but I have no idea why we're doing that. I'd like to stick my nose into this, but right now I'm a little busy with my current project for the U.S./India.

Anyway, I just thought that was interesting. Next time I'll tackle the really big topic of TV distribution and independent production, which is something that's been even more on my mind than the operations of our little station collective in Munich.

Lots of thoughts

2009-02-02T02:21:00.000-08:00

I've had a ton of thoughts spinning through my head lately, so this is a bunch of totally random stuff, each of which could be its own post. However, I just don't have time for all that so here's the outline form:

Not such good luck with the online poker lately - can't seem to get my head into it, and experience has shown that when I'm not into it, it's not a good idea to play. Still, I forced myself somewhat, since Clau is out I don't need to worry about scheduling or anything like that. However, after stinking up the joint, I've decided to take a little break. Of course, maybe making that decision will get me in the mood again. Who knows.
Been thinking a lot about my pathetic lack of ability to be a long-distance friend. I'm soooo terrible about keeping in touch with folks - I still keep in occasional contact with most of my friends in California and Santa Barbara, but by occasional I mean "extremely infrequent". And, now, I feel myself losing touch with the folks in New York. Sometimes I wonder if moving here was really the right thing to do. We moved to Munich because there are a lot of things that it provides that New York simply can't - a decent quality of life, easy access to all of Europe, carreer opportunities for Claudia, an opportunity for me to learn another language and culture, a chance to have a two-bedroom apartment, and the list goes on and on. But, one of the things that makes New York great is that the best of the best go there, in everything, and as a result you have the opportunity to meet a LOT of highly intelligent, motivated, interesting people. Over here, not so much; of course, there are smart and fun people wherever you go; I had a lot of similar friends in Oakland (most of whom moved to New York at one point or another!), and I eventually managed to find some similar folks in Santa Barbara, so I'm not hopeless as far as Munich is concerned, but it's certainly not as easy to find good peeps here.
Actually, reading over that last part, I don't know if it's entirely true; Claudia has managed to find quite a few nice, interesting folks here - even her co-workers are a pretty good crowd. I guess it's more that I haven't felt like we really clicked with anyone yet - for me, the top two classes of friends are folks I like and admire, and am happy to have a beer or conversation with, and there's the top class of folks where there's just that click, and every time you see them it's a blast. We've met plenty of folks from the first category, but none from the second.
My employer in Munich is soooo different from New York. This will have to wait for another post, because there are a lot of complexities and details.
As often happens when Claudia goes on a long trip without me, I have re-discovered Starcraft for the umpteenth time. Nothing, but nothing, can suck me into a temporal black hole like that game; it's mental crack cocaine - I can play for hours and hardly be aware of the time. I spent most of the weekend absorbed in the Terran and Zerg missions (yes, I've finished the game before, but I honestly get just as much pleasure every time I play from the top, at least until the end of the Protoss missions when things get ridiculously hard).
While browsing through Miro, I came across The Hayley Project. What a cool idea - of course, a lot of folks are comparing it to lonelygirl15, although I watched a couple of LG15 episodes (way back in the day, before it broke that it was all staged) and thought "why is this popular again?" As with so many other things, my interest in things like THP is not so much for the thing itself (about 75% of the acting and dialogue is good, the other 25% is pretty amateurish), as much as for the idea. To me, it's the semi-grassroots version of Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, which had some budget and (let's face it) some serious talent behind it. Again, musings on this could fill an entire post (and probably will soon).

So, as you can see, lots going on in my little brain. Actually, now that I've started whetting my appetite, I think I want to tackle one of those "this could be an entire post" topics. Stay tuned.

Clau heading to Brazil

2009-01-27T06:07:00.000-08:00

Clau's heading home to Brazil - her sister just had a baby boy and her grandmother is having a 90th birthday party, both of which are good occasions for heading over there. Unfortunately, since I'm in the middle of a project and thought I was going to have to travel, I'm not going with her, so I get to stay in Munich by myself :( But, truthfully it's probably a good thing I can't go, since I would just be sitting miserable in Brazil working like crazy. Still, I'm awfully envious of her...

Word of the day

2009-01-19T03:17:00.001-08:00

Philips screwdriver = Kreuzschlitzschraubendreher
Unfortunately the Germans are far too fond of making very large words.
Follow-up: upon discussing this with a colleague, it turns out that Schraubendreher is an old fogey word - the actual word is Kreuzschlitzschraubendzieher - not much easier...

Sick - and more German fun

2009-01-19T02:49:00.000-08:00

So, I got the bug that's been going around; seems that everybody here is under the weather, and truthfully I haven't been sick in a while, so I was due. Anyway, as always, I can't get the last bit of sinus action to calm down, so I figured I'd get some aspirin. For anyone who needs to get aspirin in Germany, a few pointers:
1) Anything that could be called a drug (including aspirin, but not including, for example, vitamin C) can only be sold at a pharmacy in Germany. They actually have "drug stores" here, which are just like drug stores in the U.S., minus the actual drugs. If you need to pick up some deodorant and a birthday card, though, that's the place to go.
2) All drugs must be purchased via the pharmacist - everything is behind the counter. I don't really have a problem with this, except that for some reason the pharmacy was packed with sick people, and even though I'm hacking and sneezing just like everyone else, I still don't like people hacking and sneezing in close proximity to me; what if they have a different strain of the cold than I do, and we're just making each other sick?
3) Pharmacies have pretty limited opening hours, just like everything else. Apparently a couple stay open 24 hours and they have some kind of unpredictable schedule, so if you need to find out what pharmacy is open at night or on a Sunday, you need to check the paper for the announcement of what pharmacy is open at night right now. Generally, the central train station is a good bet when you need something at off hours, because it'll probably be there, or else you can try to go to the information folks and ask. If it's like 12am, though, you're SOL - try to get sick during the daytime if you can.
4) "Aspirin" is the brand name for Bayer aspirin. A small package of 20 tablets costs about5-7 Euro. What you want is "Acetylsalicylsaeure", which is the actual ingredient. Thankfully in my case, I was able to ask for "generic Aspirin" and I got what I needed, which cost about €2.50 for 30 tablets (still pricey but cheaper than the name brand)
5) For some reason aspirin comes in 500mg tablets. I was about to take 3 or 4 but checked the intertubes just to be safe first. Caveat emptor!

Moral of the story - when you visit from the U.S., bring lots of aspirin, and leave some at my place.

About time

2009-01-15T13:22:00.001-08:00

I seem to have a knack for coming in 2nd place in the $3 KO battle on full tilt. Finally, I made it.
Yes, admittedly it's small, but I just don't have the time or dedication to get good enough to play with the big boys. For example, this little SNG took just over 2 hours...

Cool article

2009-01-13T08:29:00.000-08:00

Just saw this article on the buffalo beast, some very choice quotes here:
About John McCain: "McCain burned up all the credibility he had stored up...and he still wound up a failed Faust even the Devil didn’t want."
About Sarah Palin: "If you want to know why the rest of the world is scared of Americans, consider the fact that after two terms of disastrous rule by a small-minded ignoramus, 46% of us apparently thought the problem was that he wasn’t quite stupid enough."
On Elliot Spitzer: "Like every paragon of public ethics, he was in private a mere pervert. That he might have been a decent governor for a state that badly needed one is just one more reason to hate him."

Pretty amusing stuff - they also skewer their fair share of liberals, but of course the conservative folks get the top prizes...

My food is too hot

2009-01-13T03:36:00.000-08:00

I accidentally left a bowl of lentils in the microwave too long (everything in this apartment is cheapo - we have a pulse phone! - so no digital microwave, just a timer handle) and now it's ridiculously hot. Lentils, as you probably know, have a remarkably high specific heat, so now I have to wait about 20 minutes to eat them. Which makes me wonder; we've had the microwave oven for about 25 years now - why no inverse device? I mean, I understand that the physics involved in making something colder would be a lot trickier than making them hotter, but seriously - I mean, we put a man on the moon 40 years ago, and I still have to wait for the atmosphere to cool off my lentils?
Not that it takes that long - it's been below freezing for what feels like forever now. It's even too cold to store beer outside! Lat Sunday we went out with about 4 layers, and many parts of me were still freezing. I could really go for some summer right about now...

Basel for the holidays

2008-12-31T03:56:00.000-08:00

We're visiting our friends Fabienne and Miguel for the New Year - right now Basel is rainy and dreary, so there's going to be lots of indoor time.
Overall, Christmas was nice - Clau and I had a very mellow time just cooking, eating, and drinking. I don't think I would want to do it every Christmas - generally I like having people around - but I enjoyed it one time. We read lots of books and generally were incredibly lazy people.
Not sure what we're going to be doing for the next few days, but it should be a nice time. Probably just going to hang around, talk, maybe play some games or cards or whatever, poke around on the Internet, etc. A nice, lazy end of the year to cap off a nice, lazy holiday...

Germans at mealtime

2008-12-18T23:45:00.000-08:00

One other thing I forgot to mention - Germans have what seems to me to be an odd eating schedule. They eat a small breakfast, a GIANT lunch, and a small dinner. When I say a giant lunch, I'm not kidding - I am generally incapable of putting away as much food in one sitting as they consume at lunch. One time we decided to get pizza for lunch, and each person ate an entire pizza - an entire pizza! I ate my pizza along with everyone else, then tried to fight the oncoming coma.
Also, apparently they can drink a lot more than I can, as evidenced by my still lack of ability to function, two days later, after the holiday party. The funny part is, everyone kept talking about how the night ended really early this time (I left at midnight and I was definitely in the first third of people to leave). They blamed it on the poor drinking planning - the party committee kept shoving alcohol down our throats, so that the pattern went: gluehwein, beer, schnapps, beer, champagne, wine, schnapps, beer, stumble home (well, that was my pattern anyway). Simply a recipe for disaster if you ask me (and it would also explain my having the worst hangover I've had in years, from which I am still not recovered). I did, however, have a great time and spent a lot of time talking to one of the facilities guys, who speaks only slightly more English than my German. A lot of time this is the foreign guy version of the one-night-stand; you meet up with him the next day and wonder how on earth you communicated at all; it's not like you regret it or anything, but it's not something you would normally do, and it's a little awkward the next day trying to make small talk. I guess the inhibitions that alcohol removes include shyness about trying to speak another language.

Happy morning

2008-12-16T02:49:00.000-08:00

I am completely mesmerized by this Folger's viral ad campaign. The song and imagery has been stuck in my head for the better part of a week.

Truthfully, I think that web-only ads are a great idea; you can get a little more edgy, you don't have to worry about making it exactly 30 seconds long, and (if done right), you can get a lot of viewership with relatively little investment. Since I work in media, I think about this kind of thing a lot.

More German observations / lessons / stories

2008-12-16T02:05:00.000-08:00

1) Germans are generally very polite in conversations; they wait until a person has finished speaking before saying anything. They also think before they speak - noticably; there may be up to five or ten seconds of dead silence in a conversation while a participant thinks of what he is going to say. This is especially noticeable in English, which makes me wonder if they're thinking the entire sentence through in their heads, finally hitting that final verb, then translating it into English where you actually say what action is taking place before describing its effect and object. Or, maybe that's just me.
At any rate, this is a very difficult pace for me to get into - I work with a bunch of type-A personalities, particularly my boss, and a typical work conference for me has absolutely zero silence in it. In fact, it's extremely rare for someone to finish an entire train of thought in a meeting with my colleagues, because usually folks get cut off. It used to bother me a lot, since I'm more of a "listen to everything, formulate theory, and then share my genius" type of person, which doesn't really work - you sort of have to do run-time compilation, if you get my drift.
Unfortunately, this style of conversation carries over into my personal life, which is considered very rude over here. Just as Jerry Lewis is a genius in France, I'm an asshole in Germany.

2) Renting an apartment is extremely difficult. Of course, I expect that this is just Munich, given the very high population density. At first, Clau and I thought that our relatively high budget would exempt us from the common problems, but it turns out that it doesn't; for one thing, although right now we've got a high DINKS income, neither one of us wants our apartment budget to be based on that - we aimed for a price that would allow one of us to quit working (or be laid off, given the current global economy) and still have a halfway decent life (i.e. no wining and dining, but at least not eating spaghetti with butter and salt every night). This decision was also inspired in part by a realization that great, slightly more expensive apartments are shockingly rare - it turned out that about 80% of the apartments we looked at were the same as the cheaper apartments, but the landlord had simply raised the rent to attract a better class of tenant. Personally, I think that's idiotic, unless the landlord was willing to bring the rent down to market value after having attracted said better class of tenant (and none of them were willing to even budge on the rent).
So, after this realization and decision, Clau and I downgraded ourselves to "normal people" status and started looking at cheaper apartments. We probably visited 15 or 20 apartments, and every single one of them had some problem that was either a complete deal-breaker, or else was bad enough to make us wonder if we could live with it for a while (needless to say, considering the tremendous pain and expense involved in renting an apartment, it's not something you want to do frequently). One apartment was perfect but too dark (Clau needs light or she gets claustraphobic), multiple apartments were on a top floor and had slanted ceilings (I get claustraphobic), two apartments had added a bathtub where a standing shower would have made a lot more sense (one apartment even had the boiler bolted about 3 feet over the bathtub! How would you like to have to shower right next to that every morning?). And so on and so forth; dead neighborhood, 4th floor walk-up, horrible layout, minuscule Manhattan-style kitchen, etc. And, of course, a plethora of apartments that were perfect except that the bedroom was not big enough to accomidate our decidedly un-European California King bed.
Last week, we finally found one that we could live with. It has problems: squeaky original floors, only one bathroom (well, cumulatively - there's no toilet in the bathroom, and the toilet is in a tiny closet on the other side of the apartment), only one bedroom (although the dining room could become an office / guest room), smallish kitchen, no parking. But, all of these were problems we could live with.
So, after telling the broker (oh yeah, did I mention that every apartment has to be rented through a broker, and the TENANT pays the broker's fee?) that we wanted the apartment, we had to fill out an application that stopped just short of a DNA profile, then we had to be interviewed by the owners, then await their decision. The good news is that they picked us (and considering the fact that we both just started two-year, open-ended employment contracts, there really wasn't anything against us other than the fact that we're immigrants), so right now we have a tentative move-in date of Mar 1. We'll talk with the current tenant and see if he's willing to move out earlier, but I suspect we will have to wait until Mar 1. Still, we're pretty psyched.

3) Did I say Germans were polite? Generally they are, but there's an exception: the subway. They have NO concept of efficiency or queuing - it's absolutely ridiculous how they shove past one another in this mad rush to get on and off the train. At least in NYC there's an unwritten rule about that - let people off the train, then go on. In fact, I often take out my aggression on folks breaking this rule - I come out that train like a linebacker. In Munich, they just all go into a mad scrum. And yet, in spite of all this, the subway runs like clockwork.

4) Being employed here is awesome; mandatory (and enforced!) 40-hour work week, subsidized lunches, employment contract, 6 weeks of paid vacation per year, etc. etc. Unfortunately, since I still work with New York, I don't really get the benefit of most of this, but it's good to know that if I go somewhere else, I'll be treated nice.

I'm sure there are more words of wisdom to be shared - I'll post them as they occur to me.

Apartments part deux

2008-12-15T03:08:00.000-08:00

We have looked at quite a few apartments at this point, and unfortunately it seems to be impossible to find what we want. We have, however, found an apartment that's close enough where we can both live with it. Fingers crossed!

Netflix comments

2008-12-03T04:29:00.000-08:00

Obviously, I had to cancel my Netflix membership before leaving. At the end of cancelling your membership, they have a section of "please let us know your reason for leaving", which is all radio buttons. Oddly enough, there's no "I'm moving outside of the coverage area" button, nor is there a text box for "other". There's also no area to put in comments. I wanted to leave a parting remark saying "I absolutely love your service and I'll miss it", but there was no place to do that. Weird.

Apartments

2008-11-24T07:28:00.001-08:00

So, today we go see our first set of apartments - Clau and I are looking toward the upper end of the price range for apartments, and theoretically that means that we won't be fighting the hordes for the space (if you're looking for a cheap studio or 1-bedroom, expect to be competing with a big crowd - 2-bedroom, not so much).
Yeah, that's right - 2 bedrooms! Count 'em - 1, 2. That means that guests (when we eventually have some) will not have to sleep in our living room. If we go really fancy we may even end up w/ two bathrooms, although this is supposedly kinda rare in Munich.

What else - the new office is sweet - I'm determined to take pictures but have no idea where I put the charger for the camera (stupid!). There's an espresso machine (not in my personal office, per se, but at least it's a quick skip from here to the kitchen) and Diet Coke on tap. Unfortunately that means I need to develop caffeine discipline, which is something I never had to worry much about before.

Went out drinking Saturday night - it didn't end particularly well - I ended up drinking way too much beer (still getting the hang of the German brew), and Clau and I ended up almost totally stranded - she was limping along really badly (her knee is still far from healed) and it was seriously freezing outside. So, you had a foreign couple, me leaning on her for stability, her leaning on me for support, hobbling along at about 1mph in the wind and snow - we ended up taking the tram and the subway, then a cab for the last leg home. Total travel time about 1 hour, total distance covered was about 4 miles. The general rule here is that if you're going to be out past 2am, be prepared to shovel out mucho dinero for a cab home (and I'm talking like 30 Euros for a 20-minute cab ride) - if you want to take the subway, better make 1:30 or so your last call. At least, if you're determined, you can still live it up in town after hours - it's not like California where you have to stop drinking because it's the law.

Well, I was close...

2008-11-24T07:26:00.000-08:00

So, although nobody pointed it out to me, I found out in another context that the word for "quarter" is "Viertel" - which, to me, sounds exactly like "vittle" - or "victual" for you educated folks.

Things I am learning in Germany (in no particular order)

2008-11-18T09:51:00.000-08:00

1) I _think_ the German word for "a quarter of a loaf of bread" is "vittel" - I learned it at the bakery, but unfortunately I have a terrible memory for words when I don't see them in writing - in fact the only way for me to really memorize them without seeing them in writing is to imagine the written word over and over in my head. Anyway, after learning this word I tried to verify it online, but cannot find a single instance of it. I shall have to verify it again, but I'm reticent to do so since the woman at the bakery terrifies me - she's large and menacing and has no patience for the local village idiot foreigner.
2) Just like it's not the heat, it's the humidity, it's not the cold - it's the humidity. It's been slightly above freezing here with about 90% humidity, and man is it cold - it's a horrible, pentrating cold that you can't seem to keep out.
3) IP phones ROCK! I have an IP phone that's tied into 30 Rock, so it's like I have a 30 Rock number - I can just dial extensions to talk to folks in 30 Rock, plus I can call the U.S., people can call my 212 number, and (most importantly) I can call 1-800 numbers, which comes up a lot more often than you might think (like, for example, conference calls). I'm going to see if it works in my office here, but I doubt it will, which means I'll have to find another solution for conference calling. You would think that GE would have international conference numbers, but whatever...
4) I missed Clau a lot - at one point she was offered a six-month assignment, and we even considered it, which seems foolish now.
5) Moving to a foreign country is a lot different from visiting it. For example, even though as a tourist you get the idea that everybody speaks English, you find out that it just isn't so when you move here (although thankfully everyone in my office speaks English). Also, things that go wrong in normal life can be a lot more exasperating than things that go wrong when on vacation; what might end up as a fun story from visiting a place ends up being an exasperating experience when you live there.

As an example of #5, Claudia tripped while walking up the stairs to the apartment last night and banged her knee up pretty bad. We thought it would be better by morning, but it was even worse and she was in a lot of pain. I went to the pharmacy in search of some Arnica or Ben-Gay, and it was a pretty frustrating experience. I ended up getting an ointment, but of course it didn't help right away, and she was in no shape to go to work. She called her boss, who told her she should go to the nearby clinic and get the knee checked out. We don't have insurance (yet), and we decided that even though we would have to pay for everything out of pocket, we should still go. Needless to say, going to the urgent care was an adventure, and everybody there was very nice (although there were a lot of folks who didn't speak English). She got X-rays and had an intern check out her leg, who thought it was OK, but wanted to have the chief of medicine look at it just to be sure. We waited for a good hour for the chief, but it was almost worth it; he had a giant flock of students around him watching his every move. I'm guessing that Claudia's condition was an interesting case for them, and they all wanted to see how the boss would determine if there was anything seriously wrong with her knee, or if it was just banged up. He poked at her, made her do a couple of things and kept asking "does that hurt?", to which most times the answer was "no, not especially". Finally, he finished it by saying to his interns (as best I could gather) "if she can do this, this and this, then she's OK and it's just a very bad hit, which will heal over time." He then grabbed her knee and pressed on it to emphasize his point - Claudia screamed "WOW! THAT HURTS!", to which he replied "Yes, I know." Afterwards, he left with his entourage minus the intern who had treated Clau, who then wrapped up her leg in a bandage to immobilize it and told her to keep it on for a day or two.
The point of this story is not to demostrate what a dick the chief was (because he actually was rather nice, although obviously busy), but really what good care Claudia received. And, for those who are curious, the total bill including the X-rays was about 100 Euros. And, to further emphasize the difference in culture, when we first got to the clinic we discovered that Claudia's boss had called the clinic ahead of time to describe what had happened and to let them know that a foreigner would be coming to see them. After we got back home, Claudia called her boss, who told her to take the day off tomorrow to ensure that the leg would heal. That's definitely different from New York!
I'll write about my new office in another post, but suffice it to say it's pretty neat - everyone there is generally a bit younger and relatively relaxed. I found out that I get meal vouchers for lunch (which apparantly is normal, either that or else places will have a subsidized cafeteria) and I actually got a real office, and it's very swanky (I'll post pictures when I get a chance). The office is temporary, though - I'll be moving soon enough, although hopefully I can convince them I'm important enough to warrant a similarly swanky location after we're all done moving around.

--Nate

Almost gone

2008-11-13T10:34:00.000-08:00

Movers came and spent all day yesterday packing all our crap - I watched it go and realized that yes, this is in fact happening.

On another note - why are we not getting more freaked out about this? I mean, I think that if in NYC you started having severed feet just showing up, people might be a little concerned. Especially considering that they're all in shoes, so it's not like these are drowned swimmers. I'm sure there's a CSI episode in there somewhere...

--Nate

I admit it

2008-11-05T05:58:00.001-08:00

I got a little teary last night. We were watching the results and the victory sort of came out of nowhere - I mean, we knew which way it was going, but on NBC news (come on, where else would I be watching it?) Obama went straight from 207 to a lock. I immediately shuffled down the street to NewsCorp HQ and confirmed the news (hey, if Fox News admits it, then it's done!), then went back to Channel 4 (local bar right by 30 Rock) to let them know.
I was so overcome by emotion, and I couldn't place it. After a few minutes, it hit me; I was actually proud of my country. I can't remember the last time I felt that way - it was certainly long enough ago that the emotion was completely foreign to me. It was, in fact, the antithesis of my emotions after the 2004 election, and judging by the (happy) pandemonium in the city, I wasn't the only one feeling that way.
I'm proud that we finally voted for the right guy. I'm proud that we've elected a black president, that we've elected an intelligent president, and that it wasn't even a close contest. When I move to Germany, I won't be ashamed to be American, because at long last it looks like we've seen the error of our ways and will at long last be on the right track.
I proceded to get absolutely smashed at the bar last night. The vibe was perfect, everyone was happy, some people were crying, overcome with the same emotion that I was feeling, and I just wanted it to last forever. I only wish my wife could have been there with me.
I woke up this morning about 10 minutes before my 8am conference call. I have a hell of a hangover, but it was absolutely worth it. If I could live that night over again, I wouldn't change a thing.

Liquid diet (or, fun with Eliana)

2008-11-03T15:54:00.000-08:00

So, the stories of miscommunications and games with the cleaning lady are legendary. She was supposed to come by last Friday, so on Friday morning I did the pre-Eliana-visit routine of straightening up as best as I can, and (more importantly) hiding the essential items that I'll need for the next week; if I don't hide stuff, she will.
Now, one part of the German transition is that I can't take any food with me, so I decided it would be a good idea to start getting rid of stuff; I took stock of the kitchen and decided that, although the freezer and pantry still had a lot of stuff that looked viable and tasty, the refrigerator was about 40% condiments, 20% booze, 15% rotten food, and about 5% non-booze stuff that I actually wanted. I took the liberty of putting all of the stuff to be kept on the top shelf of the fridge, then wrote Eliana a note saying I wanted to start getting rid of my food, and could she please throw out all the food beneath the jar of water?
Later that day, Eliana called me and said she was sick, and would I mind if she came by on Monday? That coincided nicely with an impromptu get-together that I hosted on Saturday, so I thought it was optimal.
On Sunday, I had a particularly nasty (and, I thought, somewhat undeserved) hangover, and cooked myself a massive Mac & Cheese with everything from the pantry that looked like it might go well with Mac & Cheese. The resulting glop was delicious and huge - I ate about half of it, then put the other half in a tupperware, taking care to place it on the top shelf, above the jar of water.
So, you can guess where this is going: I came home today, opened the refrigerator in anticipation of my M&C glop (cuz you know that shit is even better when reheated the second day), and saw this. Horrors!
Now, of course I can point out the obvious - she somehow interpreted "can you please throw away all the food below the water jug in the refrigerator" as "please throw away all food in the apartment". Perhaps my Portuguese is worse than I thought - remind me to NEVER hire a Brazilian exterminator, lest I inadvertently have all the pets on our block executed.
What I find more curious, however, is what she opted to leave behind:

All the booze (which was kind of her)
The jar of water (which, remember, was meant to be used as a reference marker for what should be kept and what should be tossed). Note that the jar of water is in the same place I left it.
Claudia's cold mask (in the freezer, useful for administering or relieving a headache)
A half-eaten pint of Haagen-Dazs acai berry sorbet
A box of durian popsicles. Words cannot describe the foulness that is durian. Many people have their own particularly colorful descriptions - the image it brings forth to my mind is a sweet Maui onion that has been forgotten in a gym locker, in a tropical place, surrounded by sweaty gym socks, and left there for a couple of months. There's definitely a sweetness and a hint that maybe there could have been something good here at one point, but it's overwhelmed by the funk. Anyway, continuing the list...
A package of hot dog rolls. I'm actually unsure as to where these came from - I'm relatively sure it wasn't the refrigerator, but that's where they are now
A small chunk of goiabada (a Brazilian sweet made from guava - it's kind of like a really, really think fruit roll-up). I should note that there was also an unopened package of goiabada in the side shelf of the fridge which is gone. That chunk of goiabada has been in the fridge since (I think) the last time Clau and I went to Brazil, which I believe was for Christmas last year. Apparantly it had been there for so long that Eliana thought it was part of the fridge, or perhaps a particularly colorful accessory.

So, the big question now: what do I order for dinner? I'm thinking burger.

Sooo tired

2008-10-29T11:31:00.001-07:00

Haven't really slept much in the last five days or so - between flying to Oakland, the soon-to-be-legendary trip to Reno, Cora screaming through the night, and the redeye back to NYC, I'm working on an average of 4 hours or so per night. This is one of the things that makes me wonder if I'm cut out to be a parent - I can barely take care of myself with this little sleep, how could I possible take care of someone else?
For me, when I'm working on serious sleep deprivation it's very similar to being sick - my throat hurts, I feel crappy, and my head feels like it's full of syrup. Hopefully I'm just really tired, because I really don't have time to be sick.
To AA's credit, the flight from SFO to JFK was 100% sold out (oversold, in fact), so there was no way a pleb like me was getting an upgrade. All things considered, though, it wasn't that bad; we left on time, arrived on time, and I was so tired that I slept for almost 3 hours of the 5 1/2-hour flight, so to me it felt like a pretty short one. Combined with my PSP and Musicophilia, it was actually relatively painless. Getting through today, on the other hand, is another thing entirely...

Rockbox

2008-10-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

So, I recently bought a new Sansa mp3 player - they're all over woot all the time. Overall not a very good portable - for example, I accidentally crushed my last one after sitting on it - but after seeing that the new version of Rockbox had come out, I just had to get a replacement - so, $40 on buy.com, a small amount of elbow grease, and now I have a cheapo 6GB media player that supports just about every media format I use (and that's good, because I have lots of AAC, OGG, WMA, and FLAC lying around). Seriously sweet.

My new other hero

2008-10-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

Bruce Schneier will of course always have a special place in my geeky heart, but I think I've found another guy to worship: Brock (last name unknown).
Some of the stuff is relatively simple, but a lot of it is very, very elegant. I've already learned a couple of things just perusing this blog, and I know a LOT about bash.
For instance, I'm now terribly ashamed of my previous post about awk and sed, if for no other reason than it shows I was unaware of a lot of these methods.
Of course, in my defense, I've been doing shell scripting for a very long time and I tend not to use a lot of bash-specific features, just because I cut my teeth having to write portable (i.e. bash and ksh) scripts. Really, though, that's not a valid excuse anymore - you'd be hard-pressed to find a Unix distro from the last 3-4 years that doesn't include bash out of the box.
I am totally gonna study this guy's blog......

Frequent flier upgrade

2008-10-06T15:17:00.001-07:00

So, I want to visit my family, I've still got a voucher from Virgin America for a flight we never took, along with a boatload of AA miles. So, I figure I'll use the voucher to get to SFO, then see if I can get a cheapo one-way red-eye on American back to NYC and upgrade it to business. I make the reservation on AA.com and call about an upgrade. Apparently there are no upgrades available until mid-November (when I'll be in Germany) because they are all taken. Just out of curiosity I look at the seating chart for the flight in question, and here's what it looks like:

Are miles even worth anything anymore?

Awk and sed

2008-09-17T06:54:00.000-07:00

For those of you non GNU-junkies, awk and sed are an essential part of any admin's toolbox. They are interpreted languages (meaning there's no compiling involved and your programs just run on the fly) and they've been around for a long long time. It's pretty rare that I write a script of more than 20 lines and don't use at least one of them.

Awk and sed are pretty feature-heavy languages, and in fact there's an entire O'Reilly book just on those two alone. However, I really only use them for one thing each; I use awk to extract a particular field from a string, and I use sed to do quick and dirty substitutions. So, here's the Nate Aiman-Smith quick and dirty howto:

For awk, 99% of the time I use this line:

[command printing out stuff] | awk -F'[field separator]' '{print $[field number]}'

That's it! So, for example, if I had $numbers (or %numbers% for you windows guys) set to "one two three four" and I wanted to get the third word, I would just do:

echo %numbers% | awk '{print $3}'

which would print out "three". Note that the field separator defaults to whitespace. If my string was "one::two::three::four", I could do:

echo %numbers% | awk -F'::' '{print $3}'

For the same result.

For sed, the construction is:

sed 's/[search]/[replace]/' [file]

[command printing out stuff] | sed 's/[search]/[replace]/'

That does the substitution once (the first time the search string is found). You can add '/g' at the end to make it global. So, for example, to change all instances of "Nathan" to "Naton" in my file "recommendation.txt", I could do:

cat (or "type" for you windows folks) recommendation.txt | sed 's/Nathan/Naton/g' > good_recommendation.txt

Which would create a new file, good_recommendation.txt with the substitutions.

Now of course, Perl can do all these things almost as easily, and it can do it a _lot_ faster, but when you're writing the quick and dirty script or one-liner, it's a lot easier just to use one of these. If you're a Unix administrator, you need to know at least these basics of sed and awk, because you're going to see them a lot. It saddens me how many Linux admins don't seem to know these basic tools, but on the other hand it makes me look like some kind of god when I'm able to do a search-and-replace on 1000 files in about 2 minutes with a one-liner.

There are actually precompiled windows binaries available for them if you want to start working on your own script-fu. Or, even better, use Cygwin or a Linux distro (or open a terminal in Mac OS X) to really dig into it.

the 4th amendment

2008-09-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

So, Clau and I were in Boston last weekend, we wanted to go to a particular Italian restaurant that's apparently the most popular Italian restaurant in Boston, on the most popular night for Italian food of the year. We were stuck in a majorly long line and got to conversing with the folks near us (somewhere in their early 50s by the look of them) - turned out they were major Republican types from Naples, FL. I started talking to the husband while Clau got into a conversation with the wife. Of course, us living in NYC, 9/11 comes up (I didn't bring it up!) and the guy starts talking about how quickly we've forgotten about it and started acting like the whole thing never happened, so I had two points for him:
1) Maybe you've forgotten, but in NYC the shadow of that day hangs over the city non-stop like a cloud
2) If by "forgetting" you mean picking ourselves up and getting on with our lives, then yeah, that's pretty much what NYC has done, and maybe the rest of the country should too. The whole point of terrorism isn't to kill a few thousand people; it's to put fear and chaos into the entire nation, and that's exactly what's happened. If you really want to defeat terrorism, refuse to be terrorized.
As an example of how bad it's gotten in NYC, I pointed out that we have random subway searches where I don't think the NYPD has any expectation of actually catching any terrorists (see my earlier post on this for an anecdote), but rather it's for security theater and to catch some other offenders. The way I see it, they're searching people who aren't really aware of their civil rights, and if they find, for example, a gram of cocaine in a woman's purse, they're not going to say "well, this is obviously not a weapon - here's your coke back, have a nice day".
To which the fellow from Florida responded "Well, what's wrong with that? A person shouldn't be walking around with cocaine in the first place - if the cops catch some druggies instead of terrorists, isn't that still a good thing?"
To which I responded: it's the principle of the thing - we have a fundamental right against that exact type of search, and people are giving it up.
To which he again responded: well, what's the point of that? If you have nothing to hide, what's the problem?
And I didn't really have an answer - I mean, I started to answer, but I ended up sounding more and more like a privacy nut. I ended up saying something like "well, it seems that there are two extremes: anarchy and totalitarianism. Most people's ideal falls somewhere between those two extremes, and I guess it's a matter of where you think the line should be drawn. For me, using terrorism as a reason to search people's bags on the subway is too far left of that line. If you don't agree, then I guess that's your prerogative, but you should decide where you would draw that line." Of course, I was flustered so I didn't put it quite that eloquently, but I think I got my point across.
Yet now I find myself wondering: why should reasonable people be opposed to these searches? I mean, I've been objecting on the pure basis that it seems a violation of a fundamental American right, but it seems that the whole point of the amendment was a response to overly generalized warrants, rather than police or government randomly stopping folks in the street and making them empty their pockets. Of course, it seems that the whole system of needing a warrant in the first place was a fundamental part of English law at the time, and the 4th amendment was something of a refinement of warrant requirements and applicability.
For the record, I'm still against NYPD subway search stations, but now I'm having a tougher time rationally explaining it to myself. I guess it comes down to the ability of a government to oppress its citizens, with the underlying idea being that the government will use and abuse any power given to it, rather than using that power to serve the people.

This has been rolling around in the back of my head for a little while - I just wanted to get it down on paper. I'll be sure to have a long talk with my dad about it the next time I see him.

Using a UPS as a transformer

2008-09-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

So, as part of the Munich prep, I've been wondering how I can deal with my various American devices. We've been encouraged to leave behind our glorious TV (which I'm not sure I agree with, but then again our current unit is getting a little long in the tooth), but of course I will still have our wifi router, my Wii, and chargers for various devices.
Everyone seems to say that you need a step-down transformer in order to deal with the 220v power in Germany, but I've been wondering why I can't just use a UPS that can take 220v in and put 110v out. Theoretically, a UPS has two inverters - one leading into the battery and another leading out, so in theory (from my extremely limited knowledge of electronics) I should be able to use this in place of a transformer, with the side benefit of getting power redundancy and conditioning. So, I hit Google just to confirm, and I haven't been able to find one single account of anybody doing this. So now I have to face the choice of spending (and possible throwing away) $150-$200 on a decent dual-voltage UPS, or just dealing with it over there (which will undoubtedly cost more). But what really weirds me out is my inability to find a single account or testimonial of this on Google.

Viral marketing

2008-08-21T13:32:00.001-07:00

I love it when folks come up with cool ideas - I've seen so many of these "unboxing" videos, but this took me by surprise. I totally want that phone now.

Chess

2008-08-15T06:04:00.001-07:00

Played three games of chess last night with Neil, and got my ass handed to me all three times. At my best, I was keeping up; at my worst, I'd make some incredibly boneheaded move and put myself in a position where there was no way I could win. I admittedly conceded all three games, but my logic all three times went something like this:
1) With a level playing field, I can maybe keep up. Let's be generous and give me 50-50 odds.
2) Neil just made an awesome move that made me waste about four moves and ended up with me losing a valuable piece. Therefore, I'm about four moves behind and down in points.
3) Conclusion: with a level playing field, I'm about 50-50. With the chips in Neil's favor, I'm probably more of a 95-5. Therefore, let's just concede rather than playing for another 30 minutes just to arrive at the obvious conclusion.

I remember when I backpacked with Runar, we played a ton of chess, and he beat me almost every time (meaning like 98%). We were discussing rankings, scores, etc, and Runar pointed out something interesting - chess rankings (or scores, or ratings, or whatever the hell it's called) are very specific, and you need to play with someone with practically an identical score to you. I think the points go somewhere from 0 to 2000 or something, and a difference of 100 points means that the player with the better score will almost always win, which isn't really any fun for either player. The Internet has been a a great tool for chess players, not because of social aspects or by eliminating the need to have a chess board, but because you can find someone whose score is close enough to yours to ensure a good, fair game. And (at least according to Runar), the best way to improve is to play someone at more or less your skill level - it's not like basketball or other sports where you want to play with people who are better than you (actually, it kind of is, but a difference of 100 points is the equivalent of migrating from your pickup game to playing with college starters - i.e. it's so far out of your league that you just get shut down and don't really improve).
I'm very impressed - I'm tempted to teach him how to play poker, because I think he could be far better at it than I am. Poker takes analytical skill, which he obviously has, and it also takes an intuitive ability to read people, which I think he also has. Of course, I don't want to be responsible for him getting in trouble or turning to gambling, so maybe I'll hold off on that.

Speaking of poker, Clau and I have decided to go to Massachusetts for the holiday weekend coming up. We're making the balls-out drive to Salem on Friday night, crashing, exploring Salem and migrating to Boston on Saturday, partying in Boston on Saturday, then exploring some more before heading to Foxwoods on Sunday. I'll play poker at Foxwoods (probably until the wee smalls), then on Monday we'll explore Mystic Seaport and head back home. Should be a lot of fun. I've never played in a casino before and I hope I don't get my ass handed to me like last night. But, the way I see it, even if I lose $500 on Sunday night, the proceeds from our apartment the following Wednesday ought to take the sting out of it.

OK, lots to do for work, and if I get a chance I'm going to review some chess materials: if I can at least not do anything really stupid, maybe I'll have a chance.
Choice quote from Neil last night: "Hey, you've been making some pretty good moves; not the one you just made, obviously, but overall pretty decent." My cup runneth over.

FedEx follow-up

2008-08-15T05:54:00.000-07:00

Got an email from my dad giving more clarification:

Read your blog. You don't hate Fed Ex, you hate Fed Ex Ground. It's two different services and Fed Ex Ground verily sucketh a major rock. Fed Ex Ground is a separate service that Fed Ex set up fr the purpose of fucking the drivers. These drivers are not real fed ex employees, they are called "contractors" but they drive a fed ex truck and wear a fed ex uniform and the packages they deliver come in a fed ex box. The services is way cheaper for the shipper but the drivers are getting royally fucked by fed ex. You must have noticed that some fed ex packages (the overnight, the two day) have a nice tracking number and you can re rout and other good stuff, and some seem to be just sitting in limbo and nobody cares about the package or you. That's the difference between the two services. When you ahve to ship fed ex, pay extra for a true fed ex servie like overnight or two day. Thought you might like to know.

I'm not 100% sure that I don't still hate FedEx for doing this - I mean, I don't hate Indian call centers for their poor training as much as I hate the companies that employ them. And of course, this comes back to my gripe with vendors for not saying who is going to ship the packages - I mean, UPS has ground service too and we don't have any problem with it, and the price difference between ground and 2-day tends to be pretty substantial (especially when you're ordering something like a $10 DVD). Still, for big stuff I think it's definitely worth it to opt for 2-day delivery, just in case it's going to be sent FedEx...

I hate FedEx

2008-08-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

I cannot describe how much I hate FedEx. Every time a package gets sent to our apartment via FedEx it turns into a nightmare. Points:
1) They will not leave a package with the super. Every time we ask them to do that, they say "the super wasn't there". Funny how he's always there for UPS.
2) For "home delivery", they don't give a time window - well, that's not completely true - they say "sometime between 8am and 8pm".
3) The delivery time is never consistent, as can be seen from the door tags and the few times I've been home when they deliver. Sometimes they show up at 9am, sometimes 5pm, usually sometimes in-between.
4) They don't deliver on Saturday unless your delivery time just happens to be on Saturday. So, in other words, it's not that they're incapable of it, they just won't do it on request.
5) They "might" deliver to another address, depending on their mood, but they'll charge for it if they have to change to another FedEx facility (so, for example, if you can't be at home in Hoboken and you want it just delivered to your office in NYC, they charge for that).
6) They hold all packages in the bowels of Brooklyn. There was a time when they held stuff in Manhattan (admittedly way on the edge of Manhattan, but Manhattan nonetheless) - now you're just screwed if you don't have a car.

This is just my opinion - a quick scour of the Internet will yield lots of people who have similar but opposite opinions (like "FedEx is just fine, but UPS is awful!"). Personally, my big gripe is with vendors. I think it should be a requirement that all online vendors specify which carrier will be used to transport your order. Actually, what would be best would be a choice - most people would probably go for the cheapest option, but for people like me for whom it makes a difference, it would be nice. The only reason I can think of for this is either:
1) Vendors don't want to have to update their sites when they change carriers
2) Vendors themselves don't know who they'll use until the day they ship it, depending on packages, destinations, weights, etc.
3) Vendors know that people like me are out there, for whom "It'll be shipped FedEx" is a deal-breaker (and like I said, different people have issues with different carriers).

We need government intervention dammit! At the very least, I'm going to start getting picky about this and, when possible, let vendors know that I will only purchase from them if I can know that they're NOT shipping FedEx.

The worst part? I don't even really want this package anyway - it's something I ordered and then realized I don't need. However, I paid 30 bucks for it and I figure I ought to get it. Maybe I'll just let it go back to the vendor and suck up the restocking fee. Grr....

Summer in NYC

2008-08-11T07:45:00.000-07:00

So it's the middle of August, it's about 70 degrees and pouring rain. The worst part is that I left my window open this morning, even after seeing the weather report. I figured "well, worst case scenario is a quick burst of rain, a little bit might get into the apartment, but it'll be OK." I didn't figure for the biblical-proportioned downpour that I'm now seeing outside the window of my office building, complete with thunder, lightening, and lots of hail. I shudder to think of what will be waiting for me when I get home.
On the bright side, it's supposed to be nice for the rest of the week, so at least Neil will be missing it (although he'd probably get a kick out of it - you don't get any proper thunderstorms in the Bay Area).

Dr. Horrible

2008-08-06T05:46:00.000-07:00

I just the story behind this is so cool - Joss Whedon decides to make his little pet musical project and distribute it any way he can, without ever actually putting it on the air. I hope it's doing well.
Here's a link to an interview in Wired magazine about it. And, of course, it's on Hulu (after originally being aired in small segments for literally a few hours, before getting put exclusively on iTunes for the hardcore, and now free to all of you. A DVD can't be far behind.)

Click here to see the whole thing, or check out this tidbit:

Interesting discussion about talking to the police

2008-07-29T11:52:00.001-07:00

This is very cool:
http://www.tuccille.com/blog/2008/07/eight-reasons-even-innocent-shouldnt.html

A law professor gives a very simple piece of advice: don't ever talk to the police if you're a person of interest / suspect / whatever. He offers a police detective the opportunity to comment, and the cop says "That's exactly correct."

This reminds me a lot of a conversation I was having with a lawyer friend last Friday - basically I asked him "if the cops want to talk to me, at what point do I decide I need a lawyer?" Actually I think I asked him something more like "dude, if I ever get arrested, who do I call, and what do I do until the lawyer gets there?" His advice: "Call [list of mutual criminal law friends], and until he shows up you have a one word vocabulary: 'lawyer'." We then proceeded to role-play with me being the police and him being me, and he spent the entire time with his fingers in his ears saying "lawyer! lawyer! lawyer!". Let's hope I remember that advice if I ever need it (in my short time left in the U.S.)

Various crap

2008-07-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

OK, for one thing - for those of you not in the know, Google Reader is about the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's an RSS feed reader which you can use to keep up-to-date on all your favorite stuff, without having to check regularly. Also, it's extremely easy to use - just click "Add Subscription", put in the main URL for what you want to subscribe to, and voila. So, for example, you could just enter http://staunchtech.blogspot.com into the subscription, and you'll have an instant easy dashboard into my musings.
So, what's in my reader? My list is actually pretty small:
slashdot.org - of course
morelightmorelight.com - My friend Matt's genius thoughts
hotdealsclub.com - because sometimes something awesome pops up
thevegasyear.blogspot.com - this guy is really into playing poker and it's fun to read
blog.rocketboom.com - I went and visited these guys a while ago and they're awesome, so now they're on the list
www.xkcd.com - popular web comic that's become so hip it's mainstream
feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video - this keeps me updated on the latest talks from TED
www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf - I've already professed my love for all things Schneier
www.wondermark.com/wondermarkrss.xml - I love me some Wondermark. I highly recommend wondermark.com and spending 2-3 hours reading all of them.

While we were in Grand Cayman I caught a look at Matt's feed list and it totally put mine to shame. On the other hand, I tend to read and be interested in everything that comes up on mine. To each their own.

So what else - well, here's the quick list:

Our neighbor is going to buy our apartment, we just got into contract after hitting some snags and everybody's pretty happy and excited.
The car is in the shop, because whether we take it with us or sell it, we'll want to have it in tip-top shape.
Claudia has been in Central America for the last week training folks, she gets back tonight (happy times!).
I've been going to the doctor a lot. Seems that every time I go to the doctor I end up going over and over again and spending boatloads of money, which is why I tend to avoid going to the doctor. But, it had been a while and I had something that I wanted checked out, so now I'm going for like my third visit next week, plus I have to go to a dermatologist for a once-over etc etc. Like I said, every time I go it snowballs.
Claudia inadvertently paid a credit-card bill, in full, twice. I've used the bill pay for the bank she did it from and I can totally understand how she did it, and I probably would have done the same thing. Nonetheless it's put us many hundreds of dollars in the red for the last 10 days or so (because we didn't even know it had happened until I tried to get cash about 5 days later). After endless calling, hopping from branch to branch, etc I think I've probably gotten the balance to more or less zero. Very very painful, and even though I already convinced them to waive most of the fees, they're still there, which means that I'll have to go through the whole exercise again.

Incidentally, this is a great way for banks to get out of waiving fees - just agree to do it and then don't do it. Why don't they all do this? It's not like they're going to get caught - the worst thing that can happen is that a customer calls again, says "why haven't you waived these fees?" and then the new rep can say "There's no record here of any decision to waive those fees, and you should really be more careful." After which the customer can complain again, maybe you say you'll take the fees off and not really do it, at which point all the customer can do is close the bank account, but after all that time spent they'll probably just say "screw it" and keep the account. After all, they just paid a whole bunch of money for it! It's foolproof!

Of course the whole Munich thing is still weighing heavily on our minds. There's a big list of stuff to be done and we're not in the least bit organized. Soon enough we will have to put our family nose to the grindstone and get to it.
I'm trying to figure out if there's any way I can go to CA for a last hurrah before I go to Munich. I don't know if I can but I will certainly do everything I can.
Speaking of CA, my brother's coming over in August. Hopefully I will have more time to commit to his visit than last time.
Speaking of siblings, Clau's sister is pregnant! Huzzah - the pressure is off! I'm going to be someone's rich foreign uncle! Of course Carina will be making the obligatory visit to NYC to stock up on baby stuff (even before the dollar plummeted, it was cheaper to buy baby stuff in the U.S. than in Brazil, now it's waaay cheaper). We've had our fair share of expectant mothers loading up, but this will be the first direct family member coming for that purpose. Good stuff!
Work! My current employer and I are in discussions as to whether or not I might be able to continue to work for the Company after I move. So far it's looking promising but not by any means guaranteed. In the meantime I've got my (potential) swan song - the EC2 project. I may never be able to discuss it on this blog but it's fun stuff - if it doesn't catch on here, I'll ask my boss if I can release it to the open source community, and maybe someone can do something cool w/ it and give me some cred in the OSS world. Win-win!

There's definitely more but I need to get back to work. More to come (seriously!) soon...

It's official - moving to Munich

2008-07-09T13:48:00.001-07:00

Well, it finally happened - Clau got the transfer. Her first day is Oct 20 and we're madly scrambling to try to get everything ready in time. Life is nuts right now!
Just thought I should share...

Finally - a music service I can dig!

2008-05-28T15:10:00.001-07:00

Check it out! The new LaLa has a model that I actually can agree with - you can "buy" songs in two ways:
$0.10 - Put it on your dashboard and you can listen to it from any computer with the iTunes-esque web interface - haven't tested it on my Mac yet but it smells of Flash, so I'm optimistic. With the 10-cent option, you can listen as much as you want, but you can't put it on a iPod or CD.
$0.89-$0.99 - Get a DRM-free mp3 of it - if you already put it on your dash, then the $0.10 will be credited against it (so you get the mp3 for $0.79 or $0.89 depending on label).
Oh, and you get one "free" listen of any track on the site (so you can decide if it's even worth the $0.10 to put it on the dash) - after that you're limited to a 30-second clip.

This is totally the way to do it, and IMHO combines the best of everything that came before it (iTunes, Yahoo! music, etc). Also, when you sign up you get 50 free credits for the $0.10 option. I checked out Madonna's new album guilt-free, and three songs made it to my dashboard. I'm totally in love w/ this - I just hope that it doesn't get squashed or have the price get jacked up.

Tell your friends - if this takes off then maybe it'll become the new standard model for distribution!

Darth Vader Feels Blue

2008-05-14T12:32:00.001-07:00

Just when you thought that the world had run out of (good) ways to mangle Star Wars snippets, along comes some genius who shows us that the keg has not yet been completely tapped. I've watched this thing like 10 times and it still makes me laugh.

Genius - defacing of us currency

2008-04-30T11:41:00.001-07:00

One of those things that's better than you figure it's going to be...
A collection of currency from a bored guy - link.

--Nate

Babies babies everywhere

2008-04-22T07:48:00.000-07:00

Clau finally got back from Brazil with tons of stories - I went on a quick Bay Area trip while she was gone and it was great - got to see almost everybody. Spent some time getting to know my little sister, which was also cool - she's getting big fast!
The day after Clau got back home, her friends Andre and Roberta came over to spend some time w/ us and they brought their little baby Gabriella along. Clau just absolutely fell in love w/ the baby so that looks good for us!
Other than that, life is progressing at its usual pace - projects, little stuff, returning back to marital bliss. Of course there's a slew of details but right now I don't have the time to get into it - just wanted to let the world know that I'm still here...

--Nate

This is brilliant

2008-03-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

Fictional forum of time travelers in the far future. Exactly what I bet it would look like...

--Nate

My new wallpaper

2008-03-13T11:03:00.001-07:00

I got a wallpaper-sized version of this beautiful oil painting of the Crazy German Kid (search for it on YouTube w/ English subtitles - it's disturbing but funny). I got it from this guy who takes suggestions from readers about what to paint and then paints it - usually some interesting Internet memes. Plus it's a good place to go and make sure that you're up on your Inet culture. For example, I was unaware of the awesomeness that is the Techno Viking until I visited this guys's page - would have been worth the browsing even if I hadn't picked up this nerd-pop-culture-kitsch wallpaper along the way...

Last-minute trip

2008-02-19T09:34:00.000-08:00

As part of my new job, I will sometimes get called to go somewhere at the last minute (although it doesn't happen often). So, tonight I'm jumping on a plane to Hamburg, working Wed-Fri in Hamburg and taking the 6am flight back to NYC on Saturday. Awesome.
I went to Hamburg when I backpacked Europe, and nothing sticks out in my memory. I recall staying for a day or two, thinking "that was lame", and moving on. Maybe this time will be different, although I doubt it.

Anyway, if you're wondering where I am Tues-Saturday, I'm either en route or in Deutchland...

--Nate

Turks and Caicos

2008-02-11T10:07:00.001-08:00

Just a quick couple of links - Clau and I spent last Thanksgiving in Turks and Caicos. Definitely a nice place to go, although I prefer Cozumel, both for the amount of stuff to do and the quality of the diving. However, if you like to dive and you really want to get away from it all, T&C is not a bad choice.

Here's a link of the place we stayed on Google Maps

Here's a link to the photos on Flickr (admittedly not a whole lot of 'em, I'm really bad about that...)

That'll at least give some idea of what it was like...

--Nate

Guests and diet

2008-02-11T10:06:00.001-08:00

Well, we've been very popular folks lately. Attila, Claudia's Hungarian friend from college, came to NYC on a business trip (he works for Morgan Stanley in Hungary), and stayed with us over the weekend. I really like him a lot - he's a guy of few words but obviously brilliant. He invited a couple of his friends from his GE days to come hang out with us, and we all had a really good time. My mom just came and visited us for a couple of days (always a treat!), and it was great to see her. Unfortunately I had a ton of work I had to do, but I managed to get home on Friday at a reasonable hour so we could have a nice dinner of sushi and Yolato, followed by passing out. Mom left on Saturday morning, then we had one of Clau's colleagues from Venezuela come by in the afternoon - we went to a great Venezuelan place in our neighborhood, then headed back to our place for some marathon gaming sessions - I taught Clau how to play hold 'em and she's really good for a beginner.
Yesterday our latest guests showed up - Viviane (another college classmate of Clau's) and Marcel. We really like them a lot and it's great having them here - in fact the only complaint I have is the effect of all these visitors on my waistline. Needless to say, I have not been eating properly for the last couple of months (between Brazil, no time for Clau or I to cook, and all the visitors), and I'm starting to gain my weight back. Gotta put a stop to that.
So, for the next week, we're entertaining. It's ridiculously cold this week - today it's about 15 degrees and just brutal. Next week, Clau and I are going to take some time and just chill out...

Poker and Obama

2008-01-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

I've finally changed my "books" list to reflect stuff I've been reading lately. I got called for jury duty in early November, and since I had just finished the big project I figured it was a good time to serve. It turns out that I was part of a criminal jury pool - in NYC you're pooled together with a whole ton of other people as potential jurors for the week - when a judge wants to select a jury, the judge requests some number of jurors from the pool (probably 2-3 times the required number of jurors), the clerk randomly draws names from the pool, the selected potential jurors go through the voir dire process, some are selected, and the rest are tossed back into the pool.
At the time I showed up, there was a really high-profile murder trial that was going to begin the selection process, so the judge ordered _all_ the pool (about 200 of us) to go to the courtroom. The judge explained that the case would likely take 4-6 weeks, and told us that if we had a reason we couldn't go, we better give it now. Since I already had our vacation planned for later in the month, I told the judge I couldn't serve without losing all my pre-paid items (airfare, hotel deposit, etc), and she let me off the hook. That was the closest I ever got to serving on a jury - the rest of the time I just sat there. So, at lunchtime on the first day, I purchased "The Audacity of Hope" at the nearby college bookstore, powered through it over the next two days, and decided right there and then that I'm voting for that guy.
For our trip (I'll have to write about that in another post), I borrowed "Dreams From My Father" from the library, and again was struck by what a great writer Obama is. I don't believe I had ever read a book by a politician before - I always imagined that they would be dull - but I really enjoyed those books. Incidentally, when I checked the book out of the library in mid-November, there were probably twenty copies sitting on the shelf (it was filed away in the History / Biography section) - keep in mind this was the main branch of the library, but there are probably another 50-100 copies scattered around the NYC library system. Later on, I tried to renew it online (it was raining and I was lazy), I found that there were almost a thousand people on the waiting list for the book! So, it looks like a lot of people are really interested in checking it out.

On a completely different front, I've started learning how to play poker. I've been playing for about 10 days now and I have to say I'm enjoying it - the time I normally play is between 11pm and 1am, after Clau goes to sleep - I usually play in one tournament per night. So far, I'm 10 bucks down, which isn't too bad! I got the book "Bigger Deal" from the library on a whim and I read it while we were in Turks and Caicos. A bit boring and dry, especially if you don't play poker, but it did get me interested - theoretically it's about the author trying to improve his game sufficiently to have a shot at the WSOP (he ultimately wins a satellite to enter, but does poorly in the actual event), but there's a lot of history and fun facts about the game interspersed throughout the book. So, I figured that since I'm something of a dilettante, I would be best suited to borrow some books from the library and see if I can get anything out of them.
After reading a bit about poker, I've discovered that the really interesting thing about it is that it's a game of both math and psychology - on one hand, you need to be able to quickly figure out what you have, what you _might_ end up with and the approximate odds of you ending up with it, as well as what your opponent(s) might have and the approximate odds of _their_ ending up with something better than what you have or might end up with. Sound complicated? It is! But, of course, most people (like me) can only get a general idea of these things, and particularly when you're playing online and the action is fast and furious, you don't have adequate time to really think all these things through - however, the more you can calculate in the short amount of time you have, the better off you'll be.
Now, if it were just a game of math then it would just be math nerds who excelled at the game - but then you throw bluffing into the mix and it gets really interesting. I've never played with actual people before, although some friends have a ongoing game that I'm planning on checking out next week, but even online you've got to build a quick profile of your opponents - do they call a lot of hands, do they raise more often than they should statistically have good cards (i.e. do you think they're bluffing or at least semi-bluffing), do they almost never play and then, once in a blue moon, start throwing all their money into the pot, etc? These styles of play all have different strengths and weaknesses, and it's a lot like paper-scissors-rock: what works against one style can get completely dominated by another, but there's no one style that beats all others (or else everyone would be playing that way!).
Finally, of course, there's dumb luck - sometimes the cards are coming your way and sometimes they're not. I haven't really learned what to do about that yet, although really good players can certainly take those lemons and turn them into lemonade. But, as you can tell, I'm definitely enjoying the learning process, especially since I can play a tournament and get a lot of practice for two bucks. And, truthfully, there's a lot of lessons that can learned from poker and applied to your everyday life - a lot of decisions in life are based on the same criteria: where do I currently stand, what are my potential payoffs, how likely is this to succeed, what's the likelihood of failure, what are the benefits of success vs. the costs of failure. Plug numbers into machine, chug chug chug, and out comes the "correct" answer - then you have to decide what to do with it. Not a bad series of life lessons for 5-10 bucks a week!

Long time no write

2008-01-24T07:41:00.000-08:00

Well lots has happened - as everyone knows we went to Brazil, it was great - my Portuguese has definitely improved since last time, and it was an interesting experience to talk to a lot of Claudia's family for what felt like the first time. We also went to Joao Pessoa, the hometown of our friend Andrea, and stayed with Andrea's family there - they remind me a lot of Claudia's family: they're very close, very warm and wonderful people. Unfortunately Clau and I really wanted some time by ourselves and we didn't get it - normally we take a few days "off" in the middle of the vacation and retreat somewhere by ourselves, but we used that normally reserved time to go to Joao Pessoa. The funny part is, I think we were a bit of a burden on Andrea's family as well, but it was a cultural etiquette problem more than anything else; we didn't want them to think that we were using them as a hotel, and they didn't want to invite us to their city and not be there to guide us every step of the way. But, like I said, if you're going to be stuck with folks in a strange city, Andrea's family are great folks to be stuck with.
Other than that the trip was relatively uneventful - as always there are lots of fun things to gossip about going on in Clau's family, but then again what family isn't like that?
Doing some interesting work lately - I was pretty much twiddling my thumbs for the better part of November and December, but now things are picking up. I can't really get into stuff in progress, but suffice it to say that I have (at least on paper) a very cool job, and things have hit a good level of busy-ness, so that I'm not working my butt off but I'm also not bored. Overall not such a bad deal.
I know this isn't very interesting and I'll cut this off now, just that folks have been asking how life has been for the last few months - truthfully Clau and I have settled into a groove - if it were any city other than New York I'd probably call it a "rut", but since there's always stuff going on, it hasn't gotten boring yet. We both come home from work tired, if we're up to it then one of us cooks, if we're not up to it then we order something (this is one thing we're trying very hard not to do, but we're still at about 50% home cooking at this stage). On Fridays, if we have the energy, we go out with friends, if not then we stay at home and watch TV or a movie, on Saturdays we talk about all the errands we have to get done over the weekend and end up vegging all day, then usually go out on the town for our weekly drinking binge. On Sundays we vow to start taking it easier on Saturdays, or at least to start taking care of our weekend errands on Saturday so we don't need to do them with a hangover on Sunday. On Monday we go back to work and play bocce at night, Tues-Thurs we come home, get changed, and cook/order food.
Like I said, a groove.

I've got some resolutions, I'll write about those separately. One of them, however, is to write more entries to this blog, for my own posterity if for nothing else...

Done done done!

2007-10-31T09:08:00.000-07:00

We finally finished last Friday, and so far everything is working very well (with the exception of an ongoing problem apparently caused by a partner this morning). Everything is working and groovy, and we now have premium content such as Arrested Development available on our partner's web pages. There were some snags but overall it went really well.
For fear of the mighty search engines finding me, I'm still not going to name names, but overall it's been a great experience. Things definitely didn't end up the way I thought they would, but I think everyone got a lot out of the project, and we are all really really happy that it's finally over.

Laying low

2007-10-18T11:24:00.000-07:00

Just waiting to move from one project to the next. To break the ennui, I've started experimenting with a less resource-intensive alternative to Azureus. I finally settled on rtorrent - it's a really neat ncurses-based torrent client, has a very small memory footprint (less than 50M when it's cranking, and that's including shared libs), and can be conveniently run in a screen session (making it easy to check from anywhere). Furthermore it can be almost entirely event-driven so it's really easy to write hooks however you like. As an example, it's easy to define hot-drop folders for torrents, and when a torrent is deleted the program stops dl'ing / seeding. Very very cool.
So, Azureus has a few features that I really need - mainly SafePeer and RSSFeed. To replace SafePeer I've installed MoBlock - it's an extremely lightweight PeerGuardian-esque tool that works as a set of iptables queuing rules. So far it's been working out well for me, the only drawback is that I haven't found a good place to automatically check for updates to the p2p file, but I expect to have that sorted soon.
So, all that was left was RSSFeed. And, believe it or not, nobody seems to have written this yet. There is a Perl GTK client for this, but the whole point is to be light and (preferably) gui-free. And, oddly enough, nobody seems to have written a text-based client for this - what I wanted was something that could be daemonized, because further down the line I would like to have this all as part of the startup scripts for my home server.
I was able to find this script on the Interweb, and I've heavily bastardized it to fit my own needs. At some point I will probably re-write the whole thing entirely (since it now bears little resemblance to the original script), and then maybe release it into the wild. Let me know if you're interested in trying it out (it's still Perl, so theoretically it should work on a Windows box, although I don't know how useful anyone else would find it). It's definitely been a fun little project to work on.